Hootie

Tonight said goodbye to our kitty, Hootie. Hootie came into our lives as a stray cat who used to live under our deck at our first house. She took up residence there, and soon she had 2 litters of kittens! We caught all of those kittens and found good homes for them. The first time she appeared, we named her "Hootie and the Blowfish" because she was with her 2 babies. Oh, and Hootie was a popular group at the time. :) Well, Hootie was the most elusive of the cats and we had to rent a live trap to catch her and bring her inside to live with us. We couldn't leave her outside to keep reproducing under our deck! So with Hootie in our house, we now had 3 cats (Tara and Chyna were already living with us). Hootie was a calm cat who always just kind of hung around. However, we also found out she was a diabetic cat, after she peed on our carpet repeatedly of our new house and ruined it :( We have been giving her insulin shots for almost 4 years. Even though she wasn 't a playful kitty, she loved to sit on your lap and be brushed. We think she was 15 years old when she passed away. Goodbye dear Hootie.

Our little smartie!!

** caution, Mommy bragging going on here!! **
Yesterday I met with Sydney's kindergarten teacher for the last conference of the year. I can't believe how fast school has gone by. About a month ago the kindergarten class took the Iowa standardized test. Most of the public schools in our area don't take that test in Kindergarten, but since CDC is a private school, they like to take the test to make sure their teaching standards are up to par and to provide solid proof that their program works. Well I am certainly sold on it... Ms Tennille told me that Sydney scored "2.0 " (2nd grade) in Word Analysis and "1.7" (1st grade, 7th month) in Math! That is the 94th percentile for the Word Analysis and 95th percentile for Math! Great job Sydney, we are so proud of you!!!

Happy Mother's Day!

The best part about Mothers Day? Sharing some ice cream treats with the family.

Garage Sale days

It's garage sale time again! The annual neighborhood garage sale was this past weekend. What huge amount of stuff we had. Note that this is not only my stuff, but also my friend Jennifer's stuff. However, we both had an exceptionally large amount of stuff I thought! The garage and driveway were packed. We had some people sneaking around for "preview night" on Thursday, and then Friday was crazy. Saturday was a snoozer - but a good time to eat some donuts and work on my 365 pages with my laptop :)

This is what it looked like on Friday morning...


This is what we were left with at the end of the sale. Note how that old computer monitor didn't sell for $2! What a shame :)

Overall our sale made close to $1,200. Way to go!!