You're About to be Redirected to the New Home of Ground Control to Major Mom: How John Deere Brought My Sons Closer Together....

I've quite a queue of potential blog posts in my mind...mainly things that have been happening in our lives, and every once in a while something happens about which I think "That would be a fun/funny/silly/insightful blog post." I think I'll be improving in the next week or so, as the boys' soccer seasons wrap up for the fall, and I have my week of 12-hour shifts at my new AF Reserve job behind me.

So here's one of our lives' vignettes from this fall...

Lately my sons haven't been getting along so well. Jacob is in this smug phase, where he feels his lot in life is to constantly correct his little brother about everything!

Timmy: "Mommy, may I have shredded wheat for breakfast?"

Jacob: "Timmy, we don't have shredded wheat! We have frosted shredded wheat!"

Timmy: "That's a lie!"

Jacob: "Fine...don't believe me...go check the pantry yourself...you'll then see that I'm right. I'm always right!"

I'd love nothing more than to ignore these little jabs, but it's also happening at school too so I want to continue to work this one out of his system. That's for another blog...for another day when I can look back on this and laugh...

Anyway, even though my boys aren't the friendliest towards each other these days, there is something that bonds them like nothing else: tales of death, maiming and destruction! Moms of boys, I'm sure you understand completely! They're all giggles, truly enjoying each other's company! It's hilarious, even though there's a part of me that wishes they'd be happy with each other over butterflies and puppies instead of how they can kill flies slowly and pour salt over slugs (which Timmy recently learned about).

So here's a photo gallery from our day at the Nebraska State Fair back over Labor Day weekend. I've been wanting to share this and tell the story of how seeing these caution labels on the John Deere equipment was our boys' favorite part of the State Fair. They begged me to take pictures of their favorite labels, then wanted me to print out the pictures. I talked them out of printing the pictures, thankfully. I didn't want to have to explain that one at school...

So here are my boys in front of one of the HUGE pieces of John Deere equipment at the farm equipment "museum" at the fair:

From 2009 09 04 NE State Fair

The boys scoured every square foot of this equipment that they could, as if on a scavenger hunt for caution labels such as these. They'd run around frantically, and one of them found one, you'd hear "I FOUND ONE! OVER HERE!" You'd have thought they found the Holy Grail, they were so excited!