Caroline (when Madison first started smiling): “She’s not a MADison. She’s a HAPPYison!”
***
Me: “Did your schoolteacher read you Charlotte’s Web?”
Brooke: “Huh? No. I’ve never heard of Charlotte’s website.”
***
Spencer (singing to himself): “If you’re happy and you know it then you’re so dumb.”
***
Caroline (giving me no context whatsoever): “Can you guess what I’m thinking of?”
Me: “Uh…no…”
Caroline (flourishing a paper on which she drew a huge dollar sign across it and saying greedily): “MONEY!”
***
Enter Caroline screaming.
Caroline: “I wanted the camera and Brooke threw it at my head!”
Enter Brooke.
Brooke (innocently): “Caroline was crying because she wanted the camera.”
Me: “Yeah. And you threw it at her.”
Brooke on her way to time out (mumbling to herself a little too proudly considering the situation): “Yes and I had good aim. It bounced off her head just like I wanted it to.”
Kindness and compassion. We’re working on it.
***
Me: “Tomorrow we have to move the clocks back.”
Brooke without missing a beat: “Okay. We’ll move Dad’s clock to my room, the kitchen clock to Spencer’s room, and the downstairs clock back up here.”
Me: “We don’t actually move the clocks. I mean we have to move the time.” I commence trying to explain the concept of Daylight Saving.
Brooke: *blink* *blink* “That really makes no sense.”
A couple of weeks ago Caroline got sick. On a Sunday she got a fever which came on fast and hard and then left just as suddenly. I kept her home from school on Monday to prevent spreading whatever she had even though she felt fine. I learned you can take the girl out of the school but you can’t take the school out of the girl. After saying good-bye to Brooke, Caroline got right to work setting up school for the day for her one pupil – Spencer.
Spencer was a good sport about being the student for a while. After a good 45 minutes of playing I noticed him trying to inch toward his cars. Teacher Caroline put a quick stop to that and Spencer was stuck playing for another mere two hours until he was saved by lunchtime. Does it count as an absence if Caroline played school longer than she would have actually been in school had she been well?
I’ve gotten a bit behind in my documenting so let’s revisit August for a moment. Spencer went under the knife. We discovered he had a hernia and so he had to get it repaired. Excuse the blurry photo but I had to include it. I thought he looked so adorable in his hospital gown:
Getting ready to be wheeled into the operating room:
Surgery went fast and before we knew it he was recovering with some pain meds and a root beer slushie. The nurse asked him to point to where it hurt. He groggily lifted his hand and pointed to a tiny scratch on his knee that he had gotten the day before. She thought that was funny.
The recovery was pretty easy. They gave us some pain medicine which we gave him. After a couple of doses we noticed he was asking for the medicine more and more often. It was then I realized we had a burgeoning addict on our hands. When he’d request medicine we’d ask him where it hurt and he’d point everywhere except his surgery site all the while searching our faces to see what the right answer was. We resorted to hiding the good stuff and only giving him Tylenol and were then able to taper off of that pretty easily.
I was surprised that he didn’t sleep at all the rest of his surgery day. Finally, two days later, the trauma caught up with him and he succumbed to a midday nap:
Oh my goodness, folks. I have done a horrible job documenting what we’ve done this summer. Blame the blog book; it sucked up all my time. Let’s do a quick catch-up post.
Madison celebrated her first Fourth of July in style complete with a glow stick crown and patriotic outfit:
We all had fun watching the city fireworks show:
I enrolled Brooke and Caroline in a craft class through the city to keep us busy for a couple of weeks during the summer. They loved it.
This little guy’s head was full of grass seeds. We watered him and watched his hair grow. Then Brooke got to give him haircuts:
Brooke did this one on her own at home:
We thought her little Perler bead people were so cute:
Spencer was proud of his Perler bead creation:
We went to a parade. I have a great idea! How about if we take a family picture with no kids looking at the camera? Done.
Grandma joined us for the parade:
Good thing, too! She got Madison to sleep:
We went to a Real Salt Lake game. The kids looked so cute waiting for Dallas to catch up to us after parking the car:
Our team lost.
But we got ice cream after, so we’ll count that as a win:
We had a family dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house. The chickens were as entertaining as ever:
My cousins from out of state were visiting and Brooke and Caroline had the best time playing with them:
Madison started doing this funny thing where she’d pucker up and poke her tongue out of her mouth. Shortly after this we noticed a little white spot on her gums. Teeth! Then we waited a month for the “teeth” to emerge and they never did and the white spot is now gone.
Madison started doing this other funny thing where she’d grab her foot, pull it close to her mouth, and suck on her toes:
What’s that you say? It’s not unusual for babies to suck on their toes? All of your babies did that? Well, excuse me. I’ve never had a baby do this. It seems my and Dallas’s extreme inflexibility has rubbed off on most of our offspring and they were never able to get their feet anywhere near their mouths.
Our neighborhood had its annual summer barbecue and fireworks show. Dallas exiled our children to the outer regions of the park when the sparklers came out. He’s permanently scarred (literally and figuratively) from when his sister jammed a sparkler into his hand and now forbids the children from getting near them. I think they were secretly happy to have an excuse not to participate. They are a little nervous around those things anyway.
A family in our neighborhood organizes a bike ride/breakfast that we love to participate in every year:
And that is a basic summary of what we have done the past couple of months. It’s hard to believe the summer is almost over and fall is just around the corner!
