The first piece of evidence.

Yup, that's a snakeskin. Where? In the floorboard of the truck. In the floorboard of the truck that I am driving with all three kids in it. Here's the story from the begining: It was a normal thursday morning. Everybody was getting ready for school. We pile in the truck and go drop Tanner off. He gets out of the truck, picks up his backpack, and the attendent at the school says "oh my gosh! Did you find that on your property?" What? As I look down to see what she was talking about. Hmmm. Maybe. So I call CJ, Hey, where did you get this snake skin? What snake skin? The one that is on the passengerside front floorboard of your truck. Honey, I just cleaned out the truck last night so you could use it and it wasn't there then. (to his crew: "Hey did you pick up a snake skin yesterday while we were working? - Apparently not.) I'm sorry Baby, but I don't have any idea what you're talking about. We drive back home, I get out of the truck, walk around and get the snake skin out and hold it up and the tail is touching the ground and the head is at my chest. I promptly relay this information to CJ. Surely there's no way there's a snake hiding somewhere in your truck, is there? Nah.
For the rest of the day I'm 10 kinds of paranoid. Checking under every seat and in every crevice I can find making sure there's not a snake napping somewhere because if he decides to come visit while I'm driving me and kids will surely die because I will wreck the truck. The day goes without incident. CJ comes home that night, pulls the carseats looks everywhere in and around the truck - no snake. Still kind of freaky but OK. That's just weird.
Friday morning comes, I check the truck again, but no signs of the snake. I drop Tanner off at school. Come home. Work around the house a little. It's starting to get a little warm so I go to open the front door to let the air in and there on the threshold all curled up is the snake. Aaaaahhhhh! Slam the door back as fast as I can. Call CJ - I can barely breathe. What's the matter? I found the snake. What? I FOUND THE SNAKE AND IT'S ALMOST IN THE HOUSE! I explain to him what happened and that it is between the front storm door and the screen door and he says Catch it! I wanna see it! WHAT?!?! So, being the good sport that I am, I lock the storm door, run around to the front of the house gently push the screen door shut (it doesn't close all the way unless you really pull on it which is how the snake came to be there) and use a big rock to hold it in place. I carefully and emphaticly explain to the kids why they cannot open the front door until Daddy gets home and they are so excited they can hardly contain themselves. CJ gets home and we go around to the front door to see it. He's shining a flashlight down there and I tell him I don't think he'll be able to see it because Tanner has been trying to see it all day. Well I can see the threshold and I'm thinking it's gone. When I look up to tell CJ I think it's gone somehow I see it. Resting on the bottom trim of the window in our door! How in the world did it get up there?! Anyway, Clinton is coming down and CJ decides to wait on Clinton to open the door and catch it. When it's time the snake is now here:

He eventually falls to the ground and we open the door to get a good look at him:
CJ has a stick (a stick that I think is entirely too short mind you) that he is trying to move him around so he can catch him. WHAT?! Just pick him up with the stick, put him in the bucket and take him away. Nope. He wants to catch him. The snake is M-A-D mad! He's hissing and attacking the stick. I mean mad! The snake finally chills out a little and CJ gets a hold of him. Truly it was everything I could do to keep the kids back at what I felt was a safe distance while all of this is going on and now they want to pet it.


So we let the kids torture the snake for a little while and CJ decides to take it over to the woods and let it go. Can't we drive that thing about 20 miles away and let it go in a woods somewhere else. You don't think it will come back if it's only 50 yards from our house? To which Clinton says "I'm pretty sure after his experience at the Thompson house he'll not be coming back." HAHAHAHAHA!

Oh and friday CJ caught 4 lizards at work and brought them home for the kids.
Welcome to my jungle.

The washing machine died yesterday.

Trying to decide if I should laugh or cry.

Boring is good.

I guess. That's why I haven't blogged lately. Seems like it's just the same ol' same ol'. Tanner is doing well in school. We had to address some behavior issues last week but really just typical 6 year old boy stuff. He does very well on his school work and he's starting to read much better. I'm very proud of him.

I went to pick Grace up from pre-school yesterday and was greeted with the funniest sight - Grace CRASHED OUT in the middle of the floor. Lights on, kids playing, adults stepping over her CRASHED. hahahaha I walked in and said "is she sleeping?" The teacher said, "yeah, she's really crashed and I didn't have the heart to wake her up." So, I did. When she opened her eyes she gave me a big hug and explained to me she was not sleeping she was taking a rest. hehe.

Morgan is gaining words by the day I think: drink, milk, nose, dada mow (my favorite as he points to anyone mowing the grass), cereal, shower, fish (goldfish - the snack), outside, bye bye, ear, shoe, eat - I'm sure there's more but those pop into my head right off the bat. He loves to go outside. He is a little stinker though. He has definately learned to fend for himself. I guess that's to be expected.

We got the company truck back yesterday and I got to pay for all the repairs for both trucks - all $7,000 worth. Yeah, I know. The sad thing is that's NOT ONE DOLLAR in labor. Yup, that's all parts. Thank goodness the mechanic is our friend and now we owe him BIG. Hope nothing else goes wrong because the company credit card is about maxed out and we've only been in business for 7 weeks. Who woulda saw that coming?

That's all for now. Have a good week!

A lazy day.

Yep, you heard it right. We've got nothing planned for today. I really want it to be a totally lazy day but at some point I'm sure I'm going to have to clean at least part of the house or do some laundry or something. We're awaiting Ike and the rain that I hope comes with it. Since we've moved to Texas I've learned that relaxing rainy days are to be cherished because they are so few and far between.

I'm finally getting a grip on the business and it doesn't consume every minute of my day. That's nice. I'm still very frustrated with Quickbooks - the actual bookkeeping/expense part of it. Oh well. I'm getting ready to give up and do my bookkeeping the old fashioned way.

My niece Lily turned 5 last weekend. HAPPY BIRTHDAY LILY! The batteries in my camera died before I could get any really good shots of her (sorry). They had the party at the jump place in Weatherford. I made a princess Barbie cake for her. I bought a tiara from the dress up section and put it on the cake but I forgot to take a picture after I got the tiara on. Ooops. Anyway, fun was had by all. Honestly I don't know who had more fun the big kids or the little kids. CJ and Brian played hard in the dodgeball arena!! It was a great time. I was happy CJ got to let off some steam - he needed it!






That's all for now! Have a wonderful weekend!

Grace goes to Pre-school!

Tuesday was Grace's first day of pre-school and she was SO excited. When I woke her up to get ready I said "Grace, do you know what you get to do today?" To which she replied, "I get to go to pre-school and I'm going to have sooooo much fun!" Yes, you are baby. And she did. She was so excited! She told me all about her day and all the fun things she did. She even saw her gymnastics instructor there. Every tuesday morning GymKats comes to preschool - cool! She has been waiting on this for a year. She was ready to do something last year but we just couldn't swing it. One of the things she was most excited about was that she got to stay the same amount of time as Tanner. She thinks she's pretty big now. I agree. She's getting too big too fast.

HAPPY LABOR DAY!

Hope all of you are enjoying your holiday weekend. I would be more if CJ was at home but he's working. I told him he could stay home and give the guys a day off. His response was "the grass is still growing, if I don't work today it's going to be mandatory work on saturday and we're probably going to get rained out a couple of days this week because of Gustof." Yeah, Yeah.

Well, it's been a rocky start to the business. I told you we bought a new (used) truck right? Well, when we bought it we took it straight to Clinton's shop. He looked it over changed all the fluids, whatever else and had the hood fixed (hail damage). Last thursday night he went to get the new truck and drop off the red one because it has a hole in the exhaust and something else. Well, as it turns out it is needing more repairs than we expected. We really strained some stuff on it pulling that monster trailer full of equipment for the last 3 weeks and the repairs are going to be pretty hefty. Then friday afternoon CJ calls me and tells me he's on his way to Brandon's shop to get his truck because the new on is blowing up. WHAT?!?! Yeah. The first day. Barely half way through the first day. No there's no warranty. I told you we bought it used. Yes we're screwed. As it turns out, we THINK it fixable and we don't have to replace the engine - yet. Clinton came down friday night and drove it from Brandon's shop to our house. CJ followed him. They put close to 10 gallons of water in it for the drive (about 1 hr). He said it's good news because it's only burning water and not oil. Whatever. All I know is - we bought a company (major debt - did I mention that before this we had been debt free for almost a year?), then we bought a new truck for the company, and now BOTH of our trucks are broke down and we haven't seen any money coming IN yet. Can I cry? I do still see the big picture. I try to remember that starting a business takes money and we're probably going to be in the red for a while. But...