Liberty was struggling yesterday with trying to figure out which way to twist the salt grinder to be counter clockwise. She was feeling foolish, and this story came to mind. It made her feel better instantly.

Blaine and I had been dating a short time. I was 18, he was 24. I was already feeling rather out of my league, mostly as far as age and life experiences go. I’d been living “on my own” as a live-in nanny on Long Island for just a few months, and Blaine had spent a year in France, traveled to England with friends, graduated with his bachelor’s degree, and was working full time and renting his grandmother’s house. (She’d moved into a retirement home.)

I drove to spend one Sunday with him in New Jersey, and we were on the way home from the evening service at church. Since I was driving my boss’ car, Blaine wasn’t allowed to drive it. That left me, completely turned around in a different state, taking directions from Blaine in the passenger seat.

I’d always had a problem with right and left. I found myself turning north to face the direction my class had been facing way back in first grade in public school, when my teacher taught right and left. Problem: driving doesn’t allow you this privilege. Problem: I didn’t even know which way was north on the curvy hilly roads of northern New Jersey.

Blaine gave instruction for my to make a right up ahead. I turned left.

Left turned out to be down some perfect stranger’s really, really, steep driveway, full of cars, with no place to turn around.

Here’s where I should insert a major issue: my boss’ car, that I was driving, was old. Really old. Beat up. Really beat up. Ornery. Specifically, it didn’t like to go into reverse. It was a try, try, try again method to get it to drop into reverse. I avoided the issue by parking in pull through spots.

So there I was, in some stranger’s yard, trying to get the car to drop into reverse so I could back out onto a pretty busy road and head back up the hill the other way.

Somewhere in all of this, mortification set in. My dear now-husband was laughing at my predicament, and I just wanted to shrivel up and die of embarrassment.

Eventually, the car cooperated, I got out of the driveway, didn’t kill us backing out into the busy road, and headed up the other way. I’ve yet to live that one down, though.

Somewhere along the way, in the nearly 12 years since, right and left has sunk in properly and I can give and take directions without messing them up. And now my dear daughters are a bit less mortified about struggling with clockwise and counter clockwise directions.

So glad I could be of service.

My work is not done.

Pierce still wears a diaper to bed. All of his sisters except Charlotte regularly pitch in and put his (cloth) diaper on. Tonight, Sterling offered to help Pierce get ready for bed. Sterling headed to the place that I keep pull-ups reserved specifically for co-op. He grabbed one. I reminded Sterling that those are NOT what Pierce wears to bed. He asked me what Pierce wears, then. I stared at him.

Really? Same routine for all of Pierce's life, at the very least, the same thing we've done for the eight months since Pierce stopped wearing diapers during the day. I pointed him to the diaper shelf... in another room entirely.

He came back with a newborn diaper. Uh... no. Try again. He came back with just a diaper cover. Still, no. Charlotte headed to tell him which diapers Pierce wears to bed. Let's be fair here, though: 80% of the diapers on the shelf are the ones he wears. Sterling was totally set up for success. And yet. His three year old sister had to show him.

When I told Sterling he really ought to pay more attention, he told me it wasn't his fault. "The girls play with dolls and stuff. They know how to do this because of that." Yeah, sure.

I have a lot more work to do before his future wife thanks me for teaching him how to be helpful with the baby. He's been sharing under the radar, it would seem.

After he put the correct diaper on Pierce, with an extra liner for whatever reason, he headed to brush his teeth... and I tightened the snaps on the diaper that failed to cover Pierce's hiney and was headed for his knees instead.

Nope, my work is not done.

Another woman.

I took Blaine's van to Bible study the other night. It gets better has mileage than my big van, so whenever I head out alone, I take that instead. Shortly after getting in, I smelled perfume. Strange.

I didn't think about it too much at first, but I kept smelling it. Littered with jumper cables, car seats, random photography paraphernalia, cereal bar wrappers, and the like, smelling foreign perfume is odd. The thought of my husband going out to lunch and given a co-worker a ride crossed my mind, but he always packs a lunch. I kept smelling it, all the while wondering why it was bothering me so much. I've never had a moment's worry regarding the man I married. He drives a fifteen year old small minivan we outgrew two kids ago that leaks oil like it thinks it's doing the lawn a favor, dripping fast enough to leave a puddle everywhere it sits.

This man of mine goes to work faithfully, teaches our children as he works, slowing him down but certainly worthwhile. Father of nearly seven. Faithful. So why on earth is the perfume smell sending my mind in all sorts of circles?

I decided I was being absolutely ridiculous.

I proved myself correct when I took my hair down when I got home, late in the evening in a sleeping house. The scent of my new conditioner hit my nostrils and I nearly choked on my stupidity. Somebody, please. Save me from myself. I. Need. More. Sleep.

All in a day: my Monday.

We made snow ice cream yesterday. Ruby decided we should never buy regular ice cream again. I reminded her of the abundance of snow in July. Liberty thinks we ought to fill up the freezer with snow to solve the problem. I’m skeptical. Charlotte loved the ice cream, but asked if I could get her something to warm up her tongue. Pierce shook and shook from the cold and finally gave up. The problem with snow ice cream: snowy weather and ice cream just don’t go together.

Liberty proclaimed she’s going to pour a can of sweetened condensed milk and a bag of chocolate chips together in a bowl and eat it when she’s a grown up. High ambitions.

Sterling walked past me rubbing his mouth, muttering, “My lips still hurt!” I questioned him about it… and laughed. “I zipped up my mouth in my coat zipper.” Well then.

Sterling’s new to Spelling in school this year. He’s doing quite well, and has grown accustomed to his 100% tests. I test on Thursday, and a 100% earns no test on Friday. Any wrong means another test on Friday. Sterling got two wrong on his last test: learn and pearl. Frustrated, he wrote the words a bunch of times. And then rewrote learn because he’d written it wrong all those times. As he numbered his paper for his Friday test that was moved to Monday due to our short school week last week, he muttered “ea… ea… ea” over and over. Then, he came up with a request. “Can you give me learn and pearl first so I can write them down before I forget how to spell them?” Umm… no. How does that prove you’ve learned anything?! He got 100% on the test, in spite of those words coming towards the end of his test.

I’m a big fan of letting my kids make mistakes – and then figure out how to fix them, hopefully learning something in the process. I set one dear daughter to making syrup for our pancakes. “Put two cups of water and four cups of sugar in a pan. Bring them to a boil.” This particular child struggles with following through, so I opted to put the maple flavoring in myself, later, to keep my instructions ultra simple. She came back moments later, wanting me to repeat instructions. I refused, knowing a lesson might actually be learned in this. You know, that lesson about paying attention. A few minutes later, she returned, announcing there were four cups of water and two of sugar in the pan. Um… no. Too much water, not enough sugar. Now we have to compensate, and instead of making a double batch, we’ve got the makings of a quadruple batch. She figured it out, we have three quarts of syrup in the fridge… and yesterday, we ran out of sugar. Something about putting eight cups into the syrup might have something to do with that. I’m not certain any lessons were learned – but we have syrup made up for a month or two.

I made deer stew last night for supper. Charlotte protested, saying she likes deer on her plate but not in her bowl. I’m assuming this means she liked the breaded/fried deer I made this summer… but not so much the stew I’ve been making lately. She fought me on eating it, but in the end, ate enough to satisfy me. When I went to scrape her bowl, I found all veggies and no meat. Turns out, the deer in her bowl isn’t the problem. It’s the broth and vegetables that come with it.

That would have been embarrassing… but now it’s just funny.

My new Kindle has Swype. I’ve had fun playing with this “draw the line from one letter to the next for the word you want” technology.

Sometimes, however, technology fails.

I was Swyping away trying to send an email to a friend, and when I Swyped her husband’s name, it automatically corrected it to “Sexy.” Of course, I was busy Swyping and not looking at what was in the email and as my finger hovered over send, the word jumped out to me like it was on fire. Hello, mortification. I jerked my hand back with amazing speed and edited my email… and proofread the rest. And then I laughed. And my kids tried to figure out what was so funny. How do you explain that?!

Proofreading. Proofreading is important.

It snowed again. The high temp for one day next week is hovering just above 0 degrees F. It’s starting to feel like home… but really, I didn’t miss the ridiculously low temps. Wood heat is a wonderful thing. I think we’ll hibernate.

Up for today: Wrapping up our short school week, making some orange cranberry bread, folding and putting away the five loads of laundry I washed and dried but didn’t fold yet, and putting Pierce’s car seat back together after having washed it. It was overdue… but have you tried to take one of those things apart lately?! Awful, I tell you. Putting it back together will likely be worse. I lose skin over these things.

Angus and the… small mouthed peanut jar.

One dear kitten has apparently lost a few brain cells in the booting-out-of-the-house process it insists on completing multiple times a day. The kids were cleaning out the van, throwing garbage out in a pile, and Angus decided to check things out.

 

She’s stuck. She didn’t even seem to mind. She just kept cleaning out the peanut jar.

She’s also fine. No kittens were harmed in the taking of these photos. She got herself stuck. Liberty got her unstuck. After I took a photo. Priorities, after all.

Dreams, projects, and the messes they can make.

I woke up with a start at 3:00 am with a dream. My dear son, having been potty training since June, still has a LOT of moments. In my dream, I was sitting on the floor folding laundry and he decided to relieve me of my chore, relieve himself on the laundry, and save me the steps of folding and putting away.

It actually made me jump.

While Mr. P has had accidents in a multitude of places, on clean laundry, thankfully, has not been one of them. But I couldn’t help but laugh. I got a three hour nap yesterday, went to bed at 9pm, so a total of 13 hours of sleep later, mostly uninterrupted, I was finally sleeping hard enough – and long enough – to dream. (Uninterrupted until 7:18 am when Pierce hit me in the face with a cheese stick and asked if he could have it. Hello, morning.) But what do I dream about?

This motherhood thing is getting to me.

We’ve had sick kids this weekend. It started Friday afternoon with Liberty, Eden started complaining Saturday, and today, they’re asking if co-op is still on for tomorrow. We shall see. From the sounds in the kitchen, Liberty’s eating real food again. Hooray for the small things. Eden never did get it very bad – I’m still not sure if she got it or she just wanted the opportunity to read all day. When I dictated it would be only toast and no books during her illness, she felt better quite quickly. Amazing recovery.

I spent Saturday sewing. I’ve decided that’s my spend-little-to-no-money method of not shopping when stressed. Of course, looking around the house and seeing my sewing mess and the mess made by many small children while I didn’t pay them 100% attention is enough to send my stress levels back up to where they were. But, for a little while… I sewed a maternity dress that turned out a little less fabulous than the photo in the pattern. I’m trying that again, a little differently. I shocked and amazed my children at my ability to twist fabric strips into rosettes. Sew for hours and make slings and dresses and blankets and doll panties? No big deal? Make a flower with a strip of fabric in 32 seconds? Now that’s amazing.

After that, I sewed doll clothes for another review. Liberty’s doll got two new items. Liberty joked her doll hadn’t gotten two new things in one day since the day I sewed a heart on her behind to patch the hole and sewed a patch nearby to patch an even larger hole. I love it – my daughter has quite the sense of humor developing these days.

Then… I looked at my house and had the brief thought that it might be easier to just move than to clean up the mess that had taken over every inch of my home. But, after an hour in the kitchen trying to find my tile floor under the dirt, and an hour in the living room, putting things away and cleaning that floor, it started to look manageable again. And then Pierce woke up from his nap. It was nice while it lasted.

Liberty's making pancakes - from a mix. She's over an hour in and I just heard the first oil spray hit the pan. I can teach them how to cook… but how on earth do you teach them speed?!

Sterling asked me how big a yard was. My reply was, “3 feet. 36 inches. A yard stick. You know, that’s why we call it a YARD stick.”

My son just snorted at me. In that brief second, he realized he’d asked a very stupid question. I love it. (If you saw how they play with yard sticks around here, you’d understand better. We have about 10 of them, from the farm show and from Blaine’s parents’ hardware store. They frequently become swords, roads, and, with the help of bread twist ties, bridges. Yard sticks are something he knows VERY well.)

Yesterday Sterling learned about nickels. We sorted out 2 quarters, 10 nickels, 5 dimes, and 50 pennies into four piles to make a point on the value of each coin. What Sterling got out of our piles? “We have $2 here!” I’m not the least bit math minded. My son is scaring me.

Pierce is back to his normal self. Temper tantrums, requiring lots of correction, and eating everything in sight normal Pierce. Thankful. Even for the exhausting job of the constant need to correct him. Funny: I dropped a butter knife onto the tile floor with a crash that sounded worse that it really was. Pierce took the opportunity to correct me back. “Momma! No no!”

Ruby was told that today at co-op she has PE and needs to wear jeans. She came back with five jean skirts for me to choose from, insisting that a jean skirt with leggings is really easy to run in. She just can’t stand it.

Eden is the first child I’ve ever had to tell to write out her math answers using numbers, not words. She had an entire lesson that she wrote answers like “five hundred twenty six thousand nine hundred fifty two” – in cursive. I’m sorry. I’m glad you know place value and how a number reads in words. But my brain does not want to convert that to numbers, so you’ll have to indulge me and use numbers next time.

Charlotte insists she’s three now, so she’s big. Until last night. When asked why she wasn’t helping to clean up supper, she informed me she’s not that big. It went into a several-minute dissertation on why three years old is pretty big, but she’s not quite big enough to do work, because she’s still pretty short. With the ability to have a discussion like that, she’s being recruited into service. She’s a fabulous “Crawl under the table for any runaway cups, silverware, napkins, or large pieces of food picker-upper”.

The pancakes were worth the wait. If you have the chance, the pecan-glazed mix from Aldi is pretty darn fabulous. And a ten year old can make them. If they have an hour and a half.

Underthings proclamation and other short stories.

I was in a dressing room, trying on a purple maternity dress. Charlotte tagged along.

“Mom! That dress matches your glasses!”

Yes. Yes it does.

“It matches your…” she searched for the next purple item she could name. “PANTIES, TOO!”

Could you say that a little louder, dear? I’m not quite sure the cashier at the front of the store heard you. From the chuckles outside the dressing room, the other ladies shopping nearby certainly did.

One dear boy helped his big sister lick out her birthday cake batter bowl. I’m pretty sure he got some in his mouth. Wouldn’t know it by looking at him though. I’m going to take heart between the two faces, and remind myself at the difference a year makes.

Today: Three grocery stores, six children and I, 1.5 hours, a week and a half worth of groceries, tp, and cat food, $200. That might be a new record for time. Between that, and Pierce actually holding onto the cart the entire time he was instructed without failing to obey (down to almost walking away to get in the van and remembering, saying “Oops!” and heading back to his post) it was a day for record-breaking. Maybe that’s why we got done so quickly, come to think of it!

One of my dear children, to remain nameless, was questioned this morning regarding MIA daily 100-problem math timed tests that had been assigned. Turns out, this dear child opted not to do them, pulling the perfectionist card out of the repertoire of bad excuses. “I can get a good score, so I didn’t want to do them. So I didn’t.” How didn’t? 14 lessons didn’t. Between those, the extra lesson that had been assigned but not completed, and the four chapter tests also mysteriously opted out of, one dear child has roughly 1,400 math problems to make up. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Today: half done. I’m scared to correct them, for fear said child’s brain opted out of complete operation after all that. Sometimes being the parent and the teacher just stinks. It’s stinking hard to leave the frustrations of our school day during school hours and move on in the evening.

Liberty was conjugating verbs. “Have boughtended?” The sad part was, she looked at me, waiting for my nod of approval instead of realizing her error. She realized it shortly after, however - when I snorted.

I told Sterling to grab his math book today. “Why?” he questioned.

“To do your lesson,” I replied.

“I already did it,” I was told.

“Yeah, fine, but we need to do your lesson. You’re learning about measuring today.”

“That math book is weird, Mom. I already know how to measure. They want to teach me things I already know. I did that page too. Why are the people that wrote that book so weird? That stuff is so easy.” And he had done it. All of it. To perfection.

Tomorrow, we work on humility.

A sight.

There’s a sight I never did want to see.

Ruby’s math papers, tea-drenched. She’s heartbroken to have to wait to finish her math until the papers dry, to be sure.

Happy Friday. I hope yours is going better than mine!

You know you’re a mother when…

You know you’re a mother when…

…you hide with the phone the moment it starts ringing.

…you regularly move little shoes to the right feet.

…you don’t wear white, not for fear of your own spills, but for fear of little hands.

…conversations about poop and pee are totally common in everyday life.

…you wipe the seat before you use the toilet.

…you find buying clothes for your children far more fun than anything for yourself.

…you go to dry your hands and decide the towel has more germs than you had before you washed.

…your dive to save baby’s head has improved with each child.

…You’d trip and end up breaking a leg during naptime before you bump the wrong toy that makes noise.

…you sneak a snack, unwilling to share.

…you’ve cringed in a bathroom stall while a child discussed whatever embarrasses you most.

…you’ve hid in a bathroom stall until you are quite certain any audience of above mentioned discourse has vacated the facilities.

…you’ve found yourself cutting up your food or the food of your spouse far smaller than necessary.

…you’ve cleaned up vomit, made your own mess, then cleaned up both messes.

…you’ve disciplined and went searching for which child was missing a found chunk of hair, all the while praying it’s fixable and not too hideous.

…you’ve rocked a baby and found yourself praying they would hurry up and go to sleep – so that you can too.

…you find yourself scanning the lawn as you mow for one tiny croc shoe, fearful the mower will find it before you do.

…you totally understand when another mother mentions the awful hour before supper.

…you tell your husband you need a raise in pay. He offers a 100% raise. And then you both laugh, because you both know you cannot handle 14 children.

False Advertising.

Our garden is producing well for us these days. I have piles of squash and green beans to do something with – soon. Tonight, Blaine came in with a pepper. He handed Ruby a bite. She begged for more. I told him he should have given her a spicy pepper. He had.

We aren’t spicy people. I’ve never bought cayenne in my life. One year we made green tomato salsa and Blaine insisted we should use at least some of the jalapeño the recipe called for. Last year, we made more salsa. We left the jalapeño out.

This year, we bought peppers. Green ones, red ones, yellow ones, orange ones. When we got home, we had two hot ones. Perfect. “Mildly hot” they were labeled. Yeah, we’ll see. I know someone who loves hot anything, so the peppers, if need be, become a donation.

Turns out, two more pepper plants were mislabeled completely. Those are anything but mild. So now we have four hot pepper plants. Perfect.

Tonight, he’d brought in one of the mild ones. Ruby’s first bite went well, so he sliced it up and all the kids except for Charlotte grabbed a piece.

Um… yeah. Mild, not so much. I had five kids crying and whining and drinking milk and crying some more. Poor Pierce was licking my dress and trying to wipe off his tongue. Even Blaine was making horrible faces. Thank goodness, he refrained from whining.

Either my kids are really, really wimpy – which, when it comes to spicy is probably true – or those pepper labels lie. Judging from the red clown mouth Pierce still has an hour later, I’m going to say it’s the latter.

I didn’t try it.

Hello, welcome, yes, and excuse me while I find some clothes.

The flag keeps falling off of our mailbox. In trying to fix it without making a sharp edge (ie. using wire) I used two bread plastic bag clips, clipped onto the peg of the flag that sticks inside. I haven't decided if it was clever or trashy - but it worked. Hello Mrs. Mail Lady. We're the people at the house with the giant white van, children who love to get the mail before you’ve even pulled away from the mailbox, and the bread clips inside our mailbox. Aren't you glad to know us?

I finally got Pierce to answer with an actual affirmative answer. For the longest time he grunted. It was anybody’s guess whether each grunt was a ‘yes’ grunt or a ‘no’ grunt. Now, he answers “NO!” quite clearly and “mmm hmmm” for yes. It’s just about cute. (Okay, not the “NO!” part. But neither was the screaming when we responded contrary to his desires. Getting a word – and a warning – is a good thing. It’s one step closer to getting the boy to conform. I think.)

The AT&T truck pulled into my yard this morning sometime in the 8am hour. They weren’t supposed to come until Friday. I wasn’t dressed. I was sitting at the computer, working on a blog post in my pj’s with less than appropriate underclothing in which to meet strange men at the door. I haven’t gotten dressed that fast EVER. I didn’t even know what I put on until after I looked in the mirror later. It took ten minutes AFTER I was dressed for my heart rate to slow down. After all that, they never came to the door. Instead, they opted to climb the pole in the yard. Whew. Talk about an adrenalin rush. Not nice.

I’m sitting at #3 in the Circle of Moms contest for Top 25 Big Family Blogs. I’d be honored if you’d click over here and vote for me. There’s been a lot of talk (ahem, me, begging for votes) on Facebook, but I know a lot of you aren’t on there. You can vote every 24 hours. I’d love to maintain my spot!

I found out yesterday, when I took Pierce in to see the pediatrician for a bug bite gone wild that there’s such a thing as “Chigger Weed”. Turns out, chiggers live in the stuff. Not being a native to the state, I had no idea. My children have been picking the flowers of the stinking thing and putting them in cups all around the house. It’s like we hung out a big welcome sign, inviting the bugs in to make themselves at home, and offered our bodies up as breakfast, lunch and supper. Perfect.

If you don’t know what a chigger is, thank the good Lord and pray you never find out.

Holiday surprise.

They must think that without coffee, we’re incapacitated.

I wonder where they got that idea.

Murphy’s Law?

We burn wood for heat. Come about now, when the heat is enough to make Sterling question why on earth we’re cutting wood for heat, we start cutting for next winter. So when Blaine read a CraigsList ad from a family who had a bunch of trees that need to come down, we started on our quest. Saturday, Blaine cut the first tree down, changed a flat trailer tire, and we brought a trailer load of wood home. He fixed the tire when we got home.

Tonight, we were headed back to get the rest of the tree. With the new to us (but most definitely not new-new) trailer behind my big van and Blaine in the pickup, with plans to get the rest of the tree, we headed out. I made it less that 1/4 of a mile before the other (not recently fixed) trailer tire made a tell-tale hiss that spoke volumes about it’s incapability to serve. Shredded. Sighing at the inevitable hiccups a new apparatus is bound to have, Blaine dragged the trailer home and we went with Plan B. Or Plan ZR257, or whichever plan we’re currently trying out.

I took the van, he took the pickup, and we figured that at least I can help load the truck so he’d be done sooner. He still had the whole tree trunk to cut up, so this was a long process.

He made it all the way to town before his pickup’s tailpipe fell off the pickup at both ends, attached only by the wire he’d put on it when he’d noticed it’s low status on Saturday.

Oh yes. Did I mention his tailpipe fell off? Liberty was laughing at the irony of his pickup bumper sticker, “I have a Leatherman. I can help.” I thought it might be good to get one that says something to the uses of duct tape on the other side of the bumper.

Blaine removed the tailpipe in the Pizza Inn parking lot, and we headed out again. The pickup was loaded to weight capacity and all but groaning at the weight of it in the pickup’s old age. When I realized we were six tree trunk logs away from getting the whole tree, I cringed.

“Fine. Put them in my van.”

And so, my trusty 1-ton 12 passenger van hauled a good portion of a tree and seven passengers home tonight. Tomorrow, it’s getting a good vacuum and scrub job. Poor thing.

Stink.

Yesterday during the worship service at church Charlie thrust her little finger in the air and said, “THAT came out of MY NOSE!”

Watch me sink into the pew just a bit and pretend that didn’t just happen.

Pierce is fully pee-trained. It’s going fabulously. (Well, except for when Daddy gave him chocolate milk and didn’t provide ample opportunity to dispose of said chocolate milk. But two accidents after a week of none makes me think it’s Daddy’s fault. That’s my story, anyhow.)

Pierce isn’t poop-trained. How to get that under control? If he happens to be on the potty, it lands there. If he isn’t, it lands wherever he is. He’s still wearing a diaper when we leave the house for fear of another episode similar to the one at the eye doctor’s. He’s the first kid of mine that doesn’t take the diaper as a free pass. He still uses the toilet and not the diaper. Unless he poops. Anyone?

Poison ivy. Oh. My. Word. Me. Eden. LIBERTY. It’s bad. So, so bad.

Something died in the woods. I can’t find it. But oh my, I can smell it. I told the kids I’d pay cash for whoever located the source of the “something died in the woods” smell so that I could dispose of it away from my bedroom window. It’s still MIA, but I picked a lot of ticks off children after the investigation. Blaine laughed at my dead-animal finding technique, enlisting the kids’ help, but they were driven by money. At one point, I heard, “Bring clothespins!” I told you it stunk.

I kept smelling the dead something in the kitchen, but after thorough investigation, I found someone had spilled milk inside each and every one of my thirteen metal mixing bowls. After a few days of 90+ degrees, curdled milk smells a bit like death. That after a gallon of expired milk I’d planned – but neglected to follow through with – to make pancakes with exploded in the garage fridge.

Between Pierce’s inability to inform me he needs to use the toilet, the dead animal in the woods, and rotten milk, I’m not sure my stomach can handle it. It’s been a week.

Today, we’re back to school for our on-week. Sterling found out and said, “I thought we got a week off?” Uh yeah, I know dude. That week went really fast.

From the mouths of…

Last night, as I walked the halls of the church where the kids have been attending VBS, I overheard the following conversation:

Older gentleman: “How are you?”

Five(ish) little girl: “Em-barr-assed.” 

Older gentleman: “Aww, why?”

Five(ish) little girl: “I passed gas.”

Older gentleman, after a moment of silence during which I can only assume, not seeing his face, he was attempting to gather his wits and not laugh:

“Well, at least we’re walking away. I bet no one noticed.”

Five(ish little girl: “They noticed.”

I was trying not to laugh as I followed them down the hall. I have to give it to the guy, he didn’t ever act like anything was out of the ordinary during the conversation. I couldn’t help but wish I could meet this little girl. Any child so concerned with propriety has to be one funny little girl. The man wasn’t her father, because I saw her call someone else “Daddy” later, but I suppose he could have been her grandfather. At any rate, it gave me my ab workout for the day – trying to be quiet while I cried laughing.

It’s a zoo.

Since the friends we went to the zoo with here in South Dakota are far more on the ball than I am (While I took pictures, my camera still holds them captive.) I’m going to steal her photos and share them all with you. Thanks, LC.

My kids love the head boards. Or whatever you call these things.

I just want to know what was going through Eden’s mind when she made this face. Close up, for good measure:

Oh, dear girl, you make me laugh.

Pierce really enjoyed the zoo. He took in most of it from this position:

Yep. Thrilling.

Once I get my camera back into my parent’s house from the van and our most recent trip to North Dakota for camping, rain bathing, and mosquito blood donation, I’ll share a few more. In the meantime, half a dozen loads of laundry a bit of calamine might be in order.

Seeing things.

You know the moment when, after spending over an hour up in the middle of the night with a small child, you finally get them tucked in, and you’re walking towards the bedroom? When you know that, while the house is mostly clean, there’s still a good chance of a lego or doll or toy that talks to be directly in your path and you must walk carefully? That moment when you’re seeing spots, you squint, blink, trying to get your sleepy eyes (that aren’t wearing prescription correction, of course) to adjust and the spots the clear? You blink, squint, and realize that’s just making the spots bigger. And then, half a second before the spot is going to hit you in the face, you realize it’s a floating balloon?

Yeah, that’s never happened to me, either.

Babe, you’re old.

Liberty was asking what she ought to do about her history project for co-op. She’s supposed to ask an “older relative” about how the streams, rivers, terrain, etc. were back when they were young. She was confused on who she ought to talk to.

Eden told her to talk to Daddy.

Blaine was oh so thrilled when I told him.