Ladies of Hunters Green

Right before labor day weekend, Tom found a flyer stuck to our mailbox which advertised creating a ladies group and listed the events going on for the coming year. I decided to join them for dinner last night and see what it was all about. I had hesitations as I guessed most were stay at home moms and I wasn't sure how well I would fit in with them. At the same time, I was intrigued by the idea of getting know more of my neighbors and seeing if any would have kids around Owen's age. It turned out to be quite a fun night. It was nice to meet new people from a range of ages and some who do have kids relatively close to Owen's age. It was still difficult to be one of the 2-3 people there that worked for any amount of time outside the home and my world doesn't revolve around the kids and looking forward to when Tom came home to give me relief. I found out that I probably had more in common with their husbands - as they seem ALL to work at P&G; I guess that's how they can stay home. I think I'll go back out with these ladies and give them another try next month before I decide whether or not I'll commit to joining the group.

Mad about Cleaning Products

Our weekend was full of good food, hot weather, and crazily shopping for cleaning products. At work, we are trying to place a test to understand what people think about our product versus that of our leading competitor. As you can imagine it is easy to obtain our own product because we can either make some or call up the warehouse and ask them to send us some. Normally, we can go to one of the stores we always work with and place a large order of the competitive products we need

But as it turns out this product is quite new and is replacing an old product so it is hard to find...not only that we need hundreds of them so I've spent my weekend trying to locate as many of these products as I can, amazing race styel. If you can imagine, I park, run in and make a bee line for the cleaning aisle and rustling the shelf for the exact product - exact size and scent. If it is there, I hoard all there is on the shelf and make a crazy women, mad dash to the checkout line - I prefer the self-checkout at times like these. Otherwise, you deal with curious checkout people asking so what are you going to do with 17 of the ?

Then I hurry back out to my car and throw them in the backseat along with the other plastic bags full of the exact same product hoping that there aren't any nosy customers near me (probably thinking I have OCD) and make my way to the next store...

Among hoarding of cleaning products, we did have time to have dinner with the Cetti's. They all came over afterwards and Julia was playing with Owen's toys as normal and actuall using his mower as it was intended. I think Owen finally realized how it was to be used and as soon as he had a chance to steal it away from Julia he took it cruising. I've uploaded a video of it.

Happy Birthday Owen

We celebrated Owen's first birthday a little early ... but I guess that's fitting as he did arrive early too. He loved his cake and actually ate his entire piece. (check out pictures for proof) We had invited a few people over to grill out and at one point there were 6 kids under the age of 4 in our house, utter chaos and great birth control too. Owen did get a couple gifts (even though we said no gifts) but as anyone could predict the shiny bow and crinkly tissue paper were his favorite items.

Harry Potter, the Deathly Hallows

I finally finished Book 7. If you haven't read it yet, I wouldn't continue reading on - itll have spoilers.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good book - action right from the very first page with minimal amounts of slow spots. I did guess correctly that Harry was one of the Horcruxes and so that he would have to die if Voldermort is to die. I just found it a bit disturbing that we needed that happy ending of Harry not really dying at all and to return to the living so he is able to kill off Voldermort.

I think I also had an issue with the epilogue - I don't know if it needed to be in there. Then again, I guess it is really a children's book.

Anyways, all-in-all a good read.

Safety First

I know we all want to be good parents and make sure our kids are safe at all times but this a little much for me. I was browsing through the catalogue of kids stuff when I came across this. I must say even in my half awake state (was reading while eating breakfast), I laughed. The picture reminded me of an 80's movie where some boys were wearing bras on their heads.

Odd Inventions...

I was on the web looking for car seat covers so that we minimize the amount of Rocky we leave in the car on our trip to Wisconsin this weekend. We know we treat Rocky like he is our child and I believe he thinks he is human. But as I was scrolling through the websites, I realize that we are quite normal indeed.

Doggy Booster Seat...designed to give dog unobstructed view out the window.

Doggy Stroller so you can exercize without straining your poor dog. And I will say that there is someone in our neighborhood who actually has one...

The Big Red Beast

We have finally succumb to a family mobile. We've been looking for a while and realize that we needed something that has 3 rows of seating and that the second row is captain chair seating so that Rocky has somewhere to sit without feeling the need to sit in someone's lap. The lead runner was the dreaded minivan, Honda Odessey, until we test drove the Acadia. We then knew it was it - our answer to the minivan! We picked it up on Saturday and had an inaugural ride to Lowes & Biggs!