Of Mice & Men

As you know, we had some guests this past weekend.

Mosey and Cheesecake, Sarah's class pet rats were really quite easy guests, though they did rustle around at night a lot. I can't really blame them, being that they're nocturnal and all, but I am also glad to say they are gone! Sarah's pretty excited today, though, because our friends and neighbors have agreed to adopt the rats when her class is finished with their experiments this week. That means Sarah and Ed can go visit the rats any time they want. I hope they take the other girls with them so I can take a nap while they're gone. ;)

Becca's been fighting a cough, cold, and fever on and off for the last few days, so she's been doing a lot of this:

She only coughs at night if we forget to give her medicine. And today she was fine all day until dinner time when suddenly her fever spiked again. :(

And unfortunately for Ed & I, Elise has not been doing much of this:

I know, I know, she's precious when she's sleeping, but let me tell you, she has not been precious enough! She's been having night terrors, the poor thing. She wakes up 3 or 4 times a night between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., usually screaming and rather inconsolable at least one of those times. I feel badly for her, but this lack of sleep is seriously wearing on me!

And just to be fair, here are pictures of my other two sleeping beauties:

Let's see...what else...

On Sunday we had my parents and grandma over for lunch and we celebrated Valentine's Day with them. The girls made Valentines for them and my parents always have some cute books, candy, and fun stuffed toy from the thrift store as a Valentine's present. Elise loved her "webkinz" and gave Grandma a kiss to say thank you!

Becca loves her princess Minnie and is jumping on Grandpa to give a thank you hug!

My parents seemed to really like the accordian picture Valentine card the girls & I made for them this year.

Here's my grandma holding hers. I won't make these pictures bigger because there are some grandparents reading this blog who haven't received theirs in the mail yet...so just you wait! ;)

Monday night was perhaps the most fun GEMS we have ever had. Each counselor took a group of four girls around town to visit some of the widows from our church. It was such a blessing to us and hopefully to them!

As promised, here's my friend Dee at our scrapbooking get-together today. She nicely posed for me while I tried to figure out how to get the right color and light on an indoor photo. I'm having some trouble with that on my new camera yet because I prefer not to use the flash if I can avoid it. I ended up doing a little editing in Picasa to get this one a tad better.

Funny story to end this long blog post: you may remember that Dee's son Sam and Becca are pretty good friends; in fact, they are currently planning to get married and Dee & I gleefully take pictures of them together to use in their reception video someday. With that background, listen to this. Sam's dad John recently shaved off his beard, at the request of Dee. She was the only one who didn't like it, so he obliged her and shaved it off. John later asked Sam if he would like to grow a beard someday. Sam thought about it and said, ever-so-matter-of-factly, "I'll have to ask Becca."