Unfortunately I don't have a picture with the birthday girl herself, but I did force all of the cousins together for a picture!
When Ben wasn't busy playing sports, he was entertaining everyone by dancing to his favorite dance song, "We Will Rock You." I know there is a video of it somewhere. He put on quite the show and I am pretty sure my grandma was in heaven having everyone there with her. Happy birthday, (great) grandma! We love you!!
After music class on Saturday, my mom, Ben, and I headed to my friend's baby shower so Andy could work on stuff for school. I'm actually the only one who went to the shower, Ben and my (super, awesome, generous) mom went to the park and then went shopping. (Side note, it was horrible planning on my part. I didn't realize the shower was 2 hours away and we left much later than we should have. I was an hour late for the shower and I didn't get to spend much time with my mom and Ben, which was one of the goals of the day. Sigh…I feel like I can't keep up with anything these days!) The shower was beautiful and it was great to see my friends, as always. The group picture was on someone else's phone, so this is the best I can do for shower pictures. :)
I did get in a little shopping time with my turkey. Ben is equally as excited about these fall holidays as I am.
Ben's new phrase is "want to…" "Want to be silly." "Want to eat candy." "Want to lick momma." (Because if Rosco licks, why can't he?) Typically this is in response to being told to stop doing something. In this case, the response was, "want to climb the ladder!"
I try to focus on fun and happy things in my blog, but I want to mention our crazy Saturday night activities. It was about 10:00PM and Andy and I had just settled in to relax and watch our favorite show that we had DVRed…Dateline! We had the windows opened, we had some honey crisp apples nicely cut, and obviously the fall scents were going strong. All of a sudden, we smelled something horrific. I know I have a sensitive pregnancy nose, but even Andy (and Rosco) were wondering what was going on. We didn't know where it was coming from, and as we walked around the house, we could still smell it, but it was definitely strongest in our room. Of course I was worried that there was a natural gas leak, so I called the electric company who told us to open all the windows and not turn anything in the house on/off. I also googled what natural gas smells like and the description definitely matched what we were smelling. About 10 minutes later, someone from the electric company showed up. By this time, the smell was getting stronger and stronger and I was pretty sure our house was about to explode. We had already scooped up Ben and were sitting outside, waiting for the electric company to arrive. The first thing he said when he got out of his van was that it smells like a skunk when you turn on to our street. A skunk? What? This was worse than any skunk I had ever smelled. He goes into the house with his little gas meter tester and confirms that it smells rancid inside. By now, my mom and John had shown up (yep, my mom coming to the rescue for the one millionth time this week) and we were all getting nauseous from the smell. Amazingly, both the natural gas reader and the carbon monoxide reader were indicating ZERO levels of gas in the house. Although I knew this was a good thing, it did not explain the stench that was invading our house. The electrician ultimately said that it must have been a skunk who sprayed into our window!! And so began the googling of how to get rid of the skunk odor. I am not exaggerating when I say that you could see a fog like stench in the house. Although we were going to go sleep elsewhere, since the upstairs was good, we decided to stay home and work on detoxing our house. I read that it can take years, YEARS for the odor to go away. It definitely seemed better the next, but I am not sure if that was because it was actually better or we were just used to it. GROSS. I know it isn't the worst thing in the world, but it is pretty darn bad when your house and everything in your house, including the people, smell like a SKUNK.
ANYWAY, we woke up Sunday morning determined to get out of the house and have some FUN. It was a beautiful day so we decided to go to the apple orchard. We expected that it would be busy, so we went right when it opened. It was a mad house! The orchard had such a busy weekend that they were almost out of apples. They actually had giant bins of apples from another orchard that you could buy--talk about a popular place! That didn't stop the fun though. Our cousins and Auntie Anna came along, so Ben is always happy when they are around!
Ben was eating apples like it was his job.
He had fun telling people where the apples were. There were so few apples that you really had to climb if you wanted some!
I stuck with Ben's routine of eating while others did the dirty work.
We were totally overdressed for the 60's that were predicted and it was more like 80's, which is too hot for apple picking, in my opinion. We got our apples and an apple pie though, so I wasn't going to complain. Oh, and we had great company! ;)
For the record, I thought we were all clean and fresh smelling before leaving for the orchard, but Auntie Anna informed us otherwise. "Oh, yeah, I thought that Ben had a dirty diaper. I guess you guys are kind of skunky smelling." And thus I went home and continued cleaning and de-skunking the house. My closet still smelled toxic this morning, so I hung everything outside in the sun for the day, because apparently the fresh air and sun get the smell out better than the washer/dryer. Fear not, their next stop is a nice hot wash and dry!
I am still confused as to how and why a skunk decided to spray its stink right outside our window, but I suppose I will never know what exactly happened. Or if it was even a skunk, for that matter. Maybe I just needed a little more motivation to clean the house! Happy Monday!!
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