Reasons why I suddenly stink at blogging

It is ridiculous looking back at my old blog posts. I realized that in 2009 I blogged 181 times. 181 TIMES! What in the world? And in September of that year alone I blogged 22 times. And how many times have I blogged this November? Twice. What is going on?

Well my friends, I present to you the reasons I have not been blogging lately. I know after reading this list you will not only understand, but will also agree with my reasons.

Reason #1- Who has two thumbs and hoards all of our pictures? That guy! The tall one. Not the short one.

Meet the number 1 reason I don't blog as much.  The bearded wonder not only takes all of our pictures, but he downloads them on his computer and deletes them off of the camera before I can blink twice. And then he won't give them to me until he has "worked on them." By the time I want to blog about, oh say my children's first day of school, 8 weeks have gone by. Blame J. Robert. Public enemy #1 to all bloggers.

Reason #2- The small creatures in my house actually want me to play with them.

It was lovely when they would sit in an excersaucer or on a play mat and could entertain themselves. Now they actually need me. A lot. And it is usually when I sit in front of my computer. And you know what? These years and fleeting and so I happily oblige. Computers and blogs will always be there. My kids will not.

Here are a few shots of the brave princess riding her valiant dragon off into battle. And please note that I stole the pictures from Public Enemy #1's computer before he could work on them in Photoshop. That's why the colors are off. Oh, well. I care not.

The dragon vows to protect the princess at all costs.

The dragon got bored and wanted to play with the castle.

Then the dragon got sleepy, so King Daddy stepped in to save the day.

Movie nights in their recycled cardboard box train cars are a weekly ritual.

 Reason #3- Couponing. Y'all, I'm obsessed. I love it. I have saved my family SO much money. Which instead of going towards a trip to Disney World has all gone to new tires and a battery for our swagger wagon, but that's besides the point. Look at the pictures below and then think about the fact that I spent only
$25 for everything you see below.

A lot of it I got for free so I am giving it away to friends and also to an abused women's shelter. They are always in need of beauty supplies, so it feels so good to be couponing not only to save money, but to help others. I have also been able to donate a lot of canned goods to local food banks. But it definitely takes time and has hindered my blogging greatly.

Reason #4. Look at my computer. Just look at it.

It was already an old hand me down computer from my brother-in-law and then my son got a hold of it. Notice the missing keys. The tab key, the 'a' key, the underscore key, and a lot of the keys that do work stick now. I don't know what he did, but it does make typing almost too annoying to fool with.

Bennett's family

But we are alive and well. Bennett is a reading and spelling fool. She can spell up to 15 words and reading is really starting to click with her. She also loves to color and draw. She had a fabulous parent/teacher conference and her sweet teachers were very complimentary. One of the things they commented on was her drawing. This picture was drawn a month ago and since then she has really started to draw hair and more facial features, which is apparently a good thing for a 3 year old. I don't know. I just like them. Will has entered the terrible 2's with a vengeance. Well, not terrible, but more like ACTIVE 2's. The kid is non stop. But underneath the energy he is still my sweet and cuddly Will who loves to be held and read to more than anything else. I am already mourning the end of college football season but hopeful about Bama's chances to play for the National Championship. I am not updating you on Rob because he went to New York City without me this week and I am still bitter.

And that's all she wrote. For now.

Halloween 2011- The Halloween that almost wasn't

I will start off by posting our family theme this year. Let me recap first.

2008- The Lion the witch and the wardrobe.

2009- Bees and Beekeepers

2010- Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. Naturally.

2011- Second star to the right and straight on until morning.

Can you tell that we love Halloween? And I have plenty of pictures of me and Rob dressed up at parties before we had kids. I'll dig those out one day. But anyhooo.... back to this year.

We started Halloween a week ago by going to Deanna Rose's children's farmstead with our best friends in Kansas City, the Pullins. It was a fabulous evening where the Neverland crew met the Superhero crew.

 Deanna Rose has an event every Halloween called, "Night of the Living Farm." I highly recommend it if you want to check it out next year. Our kids had a blast and I think the grown ups might have enjoyed it as well.

They had entire pathways lit with glowing pumpkins. Very cool.

And there were hayrides of course. They had a scary hayride for older kids and non scary ones for the younger set. We stupidly did both. Here is a pic of us on the non scary one. You know, the one where idiots dressed up like monsters weren't chasing our kids with chainsaws.

Don't let JM Barie fool you. Hook secretly had a thing for Wendy.

The night before Halloween we took the kids to a little neighborhood Fall Festival. Bennett decided she didn't want to be Tinker Bell anymore. Thank goodness we had already taken our family picture. She insisted that she had to be Ariel. She just had to be. Because Ariel is beautiful, fun, great, and has red hair. Those were Bennett's words. Not mine. And since Bennett wasn't going to be Tinker Bell, Will wanted to be a dragon. We had these costumes in our dress up box. I didn't care. I wanted them to go with it. So we did.

The festival was so much fun. They enjoyed all of the fun games where they got.... wait for it... more candy! Oh, and look at the scenery in the background? Isn't Kansas City so pretty this time of the year? I love it.

And they got to march in a costume parade.

Painting pumpkins was a must.

Me and my little spooks.

Cutest dragon ever!

And so now we come to the sad part of our tale. Even though we had several outings and had enjoyed the Halloween season, it wasn't the big day yet. And I LOVE Halloween. So we decided to have some friends over to celebrate with us. We had several families coming and the plan was to get the kids together, have some appetizers, take pictures, trick or treat around the neighborhood, and then come back to have dinner and watch the Chiefs game on TV. Sounds great, right??

I spent the day decorating and baking. We had spooky graveyard cake, broomstick bags filled with snack mix, spooky hands....

There were cupcakes that Bennett and I decorated together....

And the wicked witch of the East appropriately crashed into our house to greet our guests.

We were ready to Par-Tay!!

And then a very sad thing happened. Will got sick. Very sick. As in throwing up non stop. We took him to the doctor first thing Halloween morning and she said that she thought he would be okay and just to watch him throughout the day. When he was still sick at lunch time, we made the call to cancel our party. So sad. I felt like a girl all dressed up for prom and then her date didn't show. Sigh....

But we rallied. We're Websters after all!!! We watched Will all day and by evening, he felt great. We decided to let him go trick or treating anyway. We were sad that we didn't have our party with our friends, but we made lemonade out of some very stinky and nauseating lemons.

Will's friend Rachel decided to brave the illness and join us. They only came into our house and braved the germs for a few minutes, but we hoped she would be okay out in the open air and safely protected with Buzz Lightyear's germ proof armor. Oh, and Bennett refused to be Tinker Bell again. Oh, well. I just can't compete with the awesomeness that is Ariel.

Trick or Treat.

Love this picture. Love, love, love it!

Our friends may have not been able to come in and have dinner with us, but we were still going to eat those cupcakes! So there, stomach viruses!

So, in the end we did have a great Halloween. I won't really go into the fact that Bennett was up all night Monday night throwing up or how I got 3 hours of sleep because I was washing sheets, pillows, pajamas, and blankets at all hours of the night. I won't talk about the fact that the turn signal on our van quit working and that we found out on Halloween Day that it would cost $700 to fix. I won't tell you that as of Tuesday night Will was still throwing up. 

It looks like we had a whole lot more tricks than treats this year. Oh, well. I will not be deterred. Already looking forward to 2012! Happy Halloween, everyone!