Catching Up in a Nutshell

It always pleasantly surprises me when I have been absent from blogging and people notice. I get emails from dear, sweet bloggers who have noticed my lack of updates, or I run into someone in real life who has been wondering what we've been up to.

In the last few weeks, to tell you the truth, I've kind of retreated into myself for a bit. When my husband's grandmother passed away, it really shook us up. It's been taking us, and more specifically, me, a while to get back into the swing of things.

• I've been waking up around 5 o'clock in the morning for the last month or so. No alarm, just some restlessness. You would think I would be getting so much done, but really it just means I've reactivated my Warcraft account.
• I walk/ran for 24 minutes the other day. And by "slash-ran" I mean my legs moved in a running fashion while the top half of my body ached, bounced and cried. Oh and you know that soft, pooch of a mama belly that reminds you of just how enormously large your body can be? Yeah, do they make some kind of supportive garment that would keep it from reminding me quite so intensely?
• I thought that maybe I could try and walk/run by myself sometime before my husband leaves for work in the morning. I should have thought of this back when the sun was coming up before 7, which is, um, after my husband leaves.
• Jack is potty trained. Completely. All done. It only cost me an estimated $4 in prizes per successful number two for the last month, several future carpet cleaning bills and many, many tolls on my sanity.
• It was supposed to rain today and then turn into fall. Instead it's close to 90 degrees and I think I smell a little.
• I have new curtains, the first curtains I have ever bought. They are delightfully grown-up and elegant. They will soon have baby face print smears on them because Sarah finds them a hilarious place to hide.
• I have no Halloween costumes for the kids yet. I need ideas! Leave comments!

Flickr. Sigh. After reading Zoot's post I have decided to change the way I use Flickr. It seems that since it is such a large, public place for photos that there's a lot of picture stealing. I have read about several bloggers who have had problems with pictures of their children being used for other websites. Nothing completely creepy (that I've heard of), but enough to make me want to change things around. I like taking photos and sharing them on Flickr and on my blog(s), but I am going to change all pictures of my kids so that only family and friends can see them. I wouldn't like it if someone stole a pictures of a flower from my Flickr, but it would not. be. okay. if someone took a picture of my kids.

If you are a blogging/virtual friend: I would like you to be a "friend" in Flickr. Contact me either in Flickr, in my comments, or I will try and find you in Flickr.

If you are a real-life friend: Please sign in to Flickr and I will make you "family." I know it's another login/password thing to register, but I will feel better about knowing who can see pictures of my babies. (I think you can use your yahoo user name and password). Also, you will get to see the best pictures (shh, don't tell the blog friends).

Link to my Flickr; I am MotherBunny if you search for me.

(The links on pictures in my archives are going to be messed up for a while till I get the Flickr permissions straightened out, so, if you actually go back and read them, I'll fix them soon, or maybe never if it doesn't seem like a problem.)