Sara is Smiling

A funny interaction.

An older polish lady with limited English cleans for me once a week. Today I was in my office. She knocked and came in:
Her: (searching for the right word) da..da...da...toilet kleenex. Sada, pleeeeeeease. Da toilet kleenex, please.
Me: *blink* *blink* You need...toilet paper? There should be some in there.
Her: Noo! Toilet kleenex? uhh..(she starts miming that she's scrubbing the toilet.)
Me: You mean the toilet brush?
Her: Yes!! I clean da toilets!
I tell her where it is. She can't find it. I tell her to skip the toilets then, I'll do them later.
15 minutes later she literally comes running down the stairs and into my office clutching a can of Comet bathroom cleaner.
Her: Oh sweet Jesus! Oh sweet Jesus! OOOOOHHHHHH sweet JESUS! Da toilet kleenex! Da toilet kleenex! Jeeeesus! Saaaaada! Da toilet kleenex!! (she embraces it)
Me: Looky there, you found it :-)

She's so sweet. I love her. Sometimes we struggle to communicate, though. :-)

Monkey

She's been practicing and practicing since last summer and hasn't been able to go across the monkey bars.
Until now!



Yay, Charlie! You can do the monkey bars! but more importantly you accomplished a goal!

As an aside, these are the last images captured on my big camera :-(
I was watching the kids play. Quinn kept crawling up the slide. I guess I put the camera down to actually do some parenting.
A few days later I was looking for it, and guess where I found it? Outside on the deck. It had been rained on for 2 straight days. I let it dry out for 2 weeks, but it didn't work. My camera is dead. Don't tell Q.
That's why the last few posts have been taken on my phone camera and purse camera. We're going away  and I don't have my good camera!! What am I going to do?? I'm going through withdrawls already!!

(all the double punctuations are for you, Jenny!!! I know you looooove it)

This kid can sleep.

If sleeping were an olympic event, Eloise would be Michael Phelps.
It was Elly's perfect sleeping that deluded me to thinking that a 4th child was a good idea.
She loves to sleep. She begs for naps. She can and will sleep anywhere.

Let me refresh your memory:

in the exersaucer

on the hardwood

in her highchair

in the mudroom while in timeout

passed out mid-play

I don't even know how to caption this one.

There's more, but I'll skip right to the most recent.

on the CONCRETE at the legislature fountains.

And the worst part about her sleeping is that although she's one of the sweetest, mild-mannered little girls I've ever known, when she wakes up from a nap she cries and yells and kicks and is the most miserable human being on the planet for anywhere from 10-30 minutes.
We've all learned not to interfere. Just back off and let her shake it off.
Ahhh, we love ya, Elly!

But you should see the other baby.

This is the combination of a clogged tear duck and a mosquito bite gone horribly wrong. (and a baby too preoccupied with going up and down the stairs to hold still for a photo..and the poor quality of a cell phone camera.)
I was embarassed to take her out for fear that someone would report me!

Date Night

One of Quincey's father's day presents was tickets to Seinfeld last night.
SUCH a good time!
I found a clip on youtube from this tour which I'm sharing with you :-)
Close to 15 years and this was our first show together. We picked a good one, though!
(this clip cuts in in the middle of a sentence, so to get you up to speed - he's talking about Blackberries and people who use them.)

Blog or don't blog.

I couldn't care less. Well, that's not 100% true. I like it when my sisters and mom blog because I'm interested in reading about what they're doing and seeing all their pictures.
But I don't care if you blog or not, and I don't care if nobody (excepting my mother) gives a fig about what I'm writing about. I write for me.
Aside from my family of course, my blog is my number one prized possession.
It used to be said if your house is burning what do you grab? Your photo albums, right?
That's out of date, though, now that everything is digital or online.
My hard drive recently failed. (ok..not so much failed as got knocked on the floor by rioting kids).
EVERYTHING was on it. Every picture I've ever taken of my kids. I was devastated.
It was unclear if we'd be able to recover any or all of the data.
Quincey was mad at me and lectured me about backups and such which reminded me of the time my sister and I were both excitedly opening a taped up box. When I was unsuccessful with my fingernail she came at it with a knife slicing my fingers open. I was bleeding and screaming while my mother lectured me on safety.
Excuse me, Mom/Quincey?? I'm hurting here!!
Of course, I totally understand that reaction now that I'm a mom. When the kids get hurt I immediately react with anger. And for the record, so you don't think less of them - my mother did indeed take care of me, and Quincey paid over a thousand dollars to fix the hard drive (though it was in the shop for months. Two agonizingly long months. Possibly longer, I lost track.)

I love my blog because at any point I can look back and see what we were up to a year, two, three ago. Not what we generally looked like, or the vacation we took (although I have those too), but I can read a little story about a regular old nothing day and what happened. I can see what silly thing they said that day, how they made me laugh or cry. How frustrated or deliriously happy I was at any given time.
Is that necessary? Nope. But I consider it a gift I give myself, and I hope someday that my kids will consider it a gift I give them.
I heard a story today about a woman with cancer who was also a blogger. She blogged right through her treatment and everything. Then suddenly she stopped posting, and a few days later her sister came on and posted that she had passed away. The blog was printed out and passed out to everyone who attended her funeral. What an amazing thing to have.
We have a handful - literally - of pictures of our grandparents and great grandparents and beyond. We know so little about them. How much could we learn from reading about my grandmother and the things she went through as a young mother? How much could I learn from that? How much comfort could I have in knowing that she had the same experiences?
My grandmother is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's. Those memories are gone. They don't exist anymore except for a few stories I remember her telling me and those that she told others.
I've always been a journal writer. I have journals that date back to 5 years old right through the teen and young adult years.


I guess I've always really believed in the importance of record keeping and more importantly the catharsis of thinking/writing through things. I always feel better about something if I've sorted through it enough to be able to write about it coherently.
I guess blogging is my therapy. :-)
It's also my modern day photo albums.
My children's baby books.
My journal.
It's all my memories.
It's the story of my life.
It's the story of my kid's lives while they're too little to do it themselves.

Call it trendy. Call it foolish. Call it narcissistic.
It doesn't bother me.
I smile every time I read back through old entries, and I can't imagine stopping anytime soon.

You don't blog? I don't care. But I think you're missing out, and I just wanted to share.

Well Hello, Summer!

Sunshine, popsicles, backyard sprinklers and naked babies. Summer is officially here!






Welcome to Elly's new picture face.

This has been going on for months and shows no sign of improvement.
The mud is from the water from the waterslide pooling under the swings.

When she had a bath later on it looked like she was bathing in an oil slick. We had to empty and refill half way through :/

It was a nice day, but not all fun and games. I washed the kitchen floor tile by tile on my hands and knees, mowed, weed whipped, and other miscellaneous chores. Waiting right now for Quincey to bring me some DQ...mmmm...then Monday back to starvation!