The Zany Zukowski Weblog

We are 5 days from Freddy’s birthday, 7 days from Stephen’s birthday and a mere 4 days from their joint birthday party with friends! Couple that with the fact that Thanksgiving is 8 days away and Christmas is right around the corner, and you have two overly excited boys, one frazzeld mom and a baby brother trying to keep up with the chaos, by jumping out of his crib at 4 am. So far today there is no more candy for the boys, they’ve lost that privledge and they are currently outside running around in sunshine and snow, and hopefully burning off their exuberance! I am so grateful my boys are healthy and well, I just wish they’d share their energy with me!

Crazy and Chaotic are the best words to describe our household. Just when I think I have all the tasks completed, something pops up. For example all the children are playing, not acting their age and hitting, not squabbling over whose turn, but actually playing and I hear a crash in the kitchen the dog has decided to create some excitement, by pulling in a kitchen towel, that had dishes drying on it! Or if he feels he needs some attention he’ll grab a toy or a shoe or a kitchen towel and prance by, for no other reason than to get our attention. If the dog is behaving then Theo has learned to climb the stairs, and is teetering at the top. Theo is napping, the dog is snoozing, Freddy and Stephen commence to playing a convoluted game of keep away that involves screaming, laughing uproariously, and wrestling.

Mr. Sniffer is making lots of progress, he rarely surfs the counter for food, it just drops from the table of children to him. He’s getting better at not attacking our guests, and sits for a while before sniffing them over. And he has discovered snow. The first and smaller of our snow storms, he wasn’t sure what all this cold stuff was, but refused to venture outside. We had to take him on a leash to get him outside. He’s got the idea now and actually plays in the snow, chasing snowballs, digging in the powder, and eating the white stuff.

1 storm trooper

1 power ranger

1 un happy Eeyore

1 Mom pinned into her Cinderella costume

1 great Halloween!

We are so fortunate to have such a large and generous family! It’s complicated but stay with me, my dad’s stepbrother owns a home in Aspen and generously shared it with us for the weekend! Leaving late Thursday evening, we made the long drive to Aspen. We arrived late to beautiful weather and gorgeous fall colors. Bedtime was late for the boys, but they went to dreamland quickly. Fog, dew, and golden leaves awoke us on Friday morning! The fog and scenery were straight out of a town and country pictorial. Fish were biting and weather was better in Aspen than Denver! (For my out of state friends, this is very unusual, Aspen gets more weather that Denver, but we were blessed with the perfect Fall getaway weekend!) The guys tried fishing in the stream, but it was a bit of a hike for a mountain goat, and the stream moves fast, for such young boys. A pond, a pond just for fishing, is exactly what we found. Freddy ‘caught’ the first fish, sort of. He got the first bite, felt the tug on the line, and got so excited that he’d ‘caught a fish, he yelled and called and did not reel it in ; ( We still counted it. Stephen went on to catch 3 fish and actually reel them in! Theo was not the best sleeper in an unfamiliar bed. In fact he didn’t sleep much at all on Friday night so neither did I! Michael got some sleep, and when he got up I went back to bed. I re-awoke two hours later to the smell of breakfast cooking! Yea!

More fishing, jumping on the trampoline, and some baseball in the yard! Good sleep on Saturday night (finally) but sad to wake up to our last day of the get away! We lunched in Aspen and headed home!

What happened to October? Oh yeah, we went to Aspen and had the best time, prepared for Halloween and had lots of unseasonal snow! Well, in our Halloween preparations we carved pumpkins, Freddy proudly exclaimed that his pumpkin was all cleaned out! Check out the picture below, I finished cleaning it out! Freddy wanted to carve a cat into his pumpkin, and we handed him a kid safe pumpkins carver, but of course he got the thickest pumpkin of the lot, and I ended up finishing the carving. (well I really did most of it, he just poked a few holes for me) Delightfully he set to cutting up discarded pumpkin chunks, and thought this was a fantastic way to carve pumpkins. I carved another pumpkin, old school, and Michael also carved several pumpkins. For the first time ever, Stephen diligently carved away for a full 40 minutes and completed the carving of his very own pumpkin! Of course we toasted some pumpkins seeds, and being Colorado we even had a snow pumpkin, snow Jack-o-lantern, and snow people with Jack o lantern heads! The snow was unseasonably early, but this is Colorado and really what is unseasonable? (oh and that last picture is of my own personal snow plows hard at work! )

Honeycrisp are a type of apple that are only available now. IF you haven’t tried one, run and grab the last few at the store now, before they are gone for the season. They are my favorite apple of all time. Pink Ladies are a close second, sweet and mellow, and more available throughout the the year. Stephen has the same love for Honeycrisps as I do, and he very politely asked for the apples with the honey in them for snack. Yep they are that wonderful!