Tales from the Love Shaque: Happy Thanksgiving Weekend!

Hey, at least I didn't wait until the first day of winter for this post!

How's it all going? I have lots to catch up on!

First - the most exciting news...

grandbaby #2

Kennedy Rose aka "BabyGirl"

was born on October 18 at 2:28am

8lb 3oz, 20 inches long

so much for the doctor & midwives being concerned about her being small!

I took Spawn to the hospital shortly before midnight and less than 3 hours later, BAM.

She came out, pooped on the scale and demanded to be fed.

She's gonna rule the world!

BabyBoy's first impression.

He's a blur because he just looked for a second and was turning so I could pick him up.

He's better now. He calls her Bean.

Super adorable doll baby!

Of course, Halloween is a big thing around here.

BabyBoy was excited to check out the Spirit Halloween store.

I don't know if he picked up on Spawn's anti-clown vibes, but he wasn't a fan of the clowns, but he liked the jumping spider and other monsters. And thanks to me & my little skeleton Chuck, he loves the skeletons!

When I went to get my critter skeletons out of the little loft in the shed, I found a squirrel's nest in with them! I didn't realize at first what it was until I moved a skeleton and 2 little faces popped out of the mess of coco fiber flower pot liner stuff. Something leaped out at me and I *thought* it was gray, but this little guy who fell out of the loft clearly isn't gray! He was on the ground under the lawn mower for several hours, so I scooped him up, took a quick pic and tucked him back into the nest.

He's such a good helper. He had a toy hammer, helping drive rebar into the ground for the fence.

Safety first! He put on my gardening gloves to help me screw this floodlight (with a toy screwdriver) into the wood support.

I haven't made the "official" video yet, but here's the daytime walkthru

and at the end of trick or treating with the township sirens going off.

In mid-October, my search & rescue team (affiliated with the Sherriff's department) were invited to ride on the Polly Ann Trail Ride Fundraiser they have every year.

Some other riders had a good laugh because they saw Chris & I (with our matching 'painted ponies' and orange shirts) but never saw us with the Sgt. until we came back to the parking lot. They thought we "found" him!

After the ride, I met up with the rest of the family to go to the Fire Department Open House.

BabyBoy is totally going to be the next fire chief!

I love this picture of him with all the turn-out gear - and the ones he tried to grab were the chief's! And when we went in their classroom to get hotdogs and snacks, BabyBoy picked the chief's office to go into and tried to steal a pen off his desk! And of course he was caught - by the Chief!

Another event I went to was called "Fantasy Forest" - basically all these businesses and groups set up booths along the trail in a park and kids went along and trick or treated!

They had us on the ball field, since in the past we've taken horses to give pony rides. Well, none of the equines currently on the team are small enough to give pony rides! I'm 5'8" and can just barely see over Kisses' back and the other 2 are just as tall, if not taller! It had rained all night up until time to set up, so I'm sure the park people were glad we didn't have horses out there anyway - that would have destroyed their infield! So they had to make due to with another of my skeleton K9 units. I have 2 skeletons that Sarah and I put SAR gear on, 3 dog skeletons and Chuck sitting in the stokes basket, buried in candy.

By lunchtime on November 1.

I feel that's part of the magic. My cemetery is out for all of October, but the day after Halloween, it's gone!

Just don't look in the back yard. All the skeletons are still out. We didn't get them put away before he left for Arkansas and hanging them all back up in the rafters is at least a 2 person job! My knees can't handle stepping up and down on a chair 20 times!

I'm thinking of taking the life-sized horse and putting him out in the front yard with garland and a skeleton wearing a Santa hat.....

So the second weekend in November, I went to Halloween Camp again. This is a half-fun / half-learning event put on by another local SAR team. This one had a carnival theme. We got to play some midway type games. We were in 3 teams and did an obstacle course (with K9s!) which was pretty hilarious for those of us who didn't have dogs. We did a "board walk" where each team had 2 boards with ropes tied on them and we had to walk as a team with right feet on one board and left feet on the other, while holding onto those ropes. And we probably walked 100 yards or more, with 2 - 90 degree turns! Once we got to the end of the race course (my team won!!) we had an area search in the woods looking for ghosts (suckers wrapped in black, white or orange tissue paper - that was tough!!) We played Jeopardy and the topics were things like first aid, incident command and navigation. Then we had a scenario where one of the carnies grabbed some kids at the carnival. So we did a night search for missing kids. It was a training to see what the dogs would do with a set of twins.

Then we did a relay race / building search of the carnie's "house". It was filled with smoke and strobe lights so we had to use red lights to see. We were given a list of 8 items, and one person from each team went in to find an item, bring it out and the next person went in and had to find something different from the list. That's my favorite event!

I haven't seen any of the pictures from Camp yet - they need to get on the ball and post them! Supposedly tonight.

It was a 2 day event, so Sunday morning, we had to leave the camp by 8 and not come back until 10, so a bunch of us went out to breakfast. It was funny, I went in the bathroom and this little old lady came up and put her hand on my arm (from behind so it startled me!) She saw my SAR shirt and asked if there was something going on? She was relived to find out it was just a "training" exercise. She told me she'd followed me down the road and wanted to come say hi. I was confused, since my car isn't anything unusual, other than a small team sticker on the back window. Then she said something about the big truck.... then it clicked that one of the guys I was sitting with has an RV that he decked out to be a mobile command unit and it has "search & rescue" really big on the side. She must have been following him!

So anyway, once we got back to the camp, we had another set of twins to search for and also the missing carnie. A lot of the dogs there are HRD (Human Remains Detection) so the carnie was actually a dummy hanging up in a tower and the dogs had to pinpoint where it was (it had "source" in it, or an HR sample). So it was a lot of fun, but also really cool learning and working with different SAR teams.

We haven't had any real call-outs, thankfully. But we did get called to assist in another county. I got the team text at 6am one Sunday, and when I saw where it was.... 3 hours away.... I opted to *not* go.

My helpers. Hope they're taking good notes!

So last weekend, I spent the entire weekend taking my ICS300 course online. Literally 4+ hours Friday night and 8 hours both Saturday & Sunday. It's "intermediate incident command for expanding incidents" and insanely boring like you'd expect any course made by the government (FEMA) to be. We were put into groups here & there so that was pretty cool, working with people from all over the country, in different lines of work.

Ugh, next I have to do ICS 400 - advanced incident command for complex incidents. The only reason I have to take these courses is because I'm a team lead on the SAR team. We will *never* be first on a scene, so it seems kind of pointless. We get called out by the sheriff's department so at least they will be there before us!

Then was Thanksgiving. We went to my sister's house on Wednesday, stayed the night, then did the dinner thing Thursday. We all contribute to dinner (and breakfast) so it doesn't stress just one person out.

So that's about all of the excitement here. I still don't have my Christmas & winter blowmolds out of the shed. I meant to do that yesterday, but the winter weather advisory we got changed my mind. I did go out & shovel the driveway today and actually worked up a sweat! We really only got about 2-3 inches but it was wet & heavy and I wanted to get rid of it before we drove on it.

The Spouse has been in Arkansas since the 19th and I know he's not going to be excited to see snow!