the 10 commandments, by gretchen

gretchen: (holding up a piece of paper) "mom, pretend this is the 10 commandments."

me: "okay"

gretchen: (reading from the paper) "if you be bad, you get dirty. if you get baptized, you get clean.......and grapes are healthy."

me: "wow."

gretchen: walks off with a satisfied smile.

one more thing

you might laugh, but my own personal accomplishment for the 4th of july weekend was playing the "Star Spangled Banner" on the organ with no (noticeable) mistakes. becca, you'll understand.

4th of July

get ready for a lot of pictures. what can i say, i love the red, white, and blue look on my kids. i am trying to convince those in charge (loren) that we should celebrate the coordinating outfits by taking a family picture. hmmm. we'll see.

anyway, we had a great weekend. i have to say i still missed the leesburg (virginia) parade--nothing can quite compete with those dancers (and that's probably a very good thing).

we went to the beach on friday and had a great time, as usual. pace is getting braver and likes to kick his little legs to get his tube up over the waves (which, admittedly, are not real waves, but still......).

friday night we had a little party in our backyard and set off lots of fireworks. you'll notice in the pictures that some of the kids had mixed feelings about this. gretchen spent a good portion of the night inside the house with her nose pressed against the window so she could enjoy the view without the noise.

saturday night a group of us watched the fireworks from the "hill" by our house (a landfill that was converted into a park--it's the only hill in all of south florida--i'm told we are very privileged to live right by it). it was very fun. (is it bad that my favorite part was being able to get home quickly with no traffic?)

so, here are the pictures of all the festivities. happy 4th of july!

pace's haircut

as long as i'm shirking duties, i might as well shirk them good and do two posts at once.  this is pace's new haircut.  he's very pleased with it.  he was way too sweaty with his other hair-do.  i love my little man.

turtle rescue

i am not a huge fan of wildlife (except for maybe dolphins from a distance and the cute owls i saw every day on the way to gretchy's preschool), but florida (i mean, south florida) is doing its best to give me a more loving and caring heart.  i did take pity on this turtle that had wandered out of our canal behind our house and was searching for its home again.  it was walking around in the street, and since i'm not fond of running/biking/walking past squished dead things, i decided i'd better help it find its way back to safety.  i was not brave enough to actually pick it up (it could have been a deadly snapping turtle, right?  even though i let pace touch it.....) so we put our pool net into action and plopped it into the wagon for the ride back to the canal.  i think it should count as having a pet.  don't you think?  

(as usual, the pictures showed up all in the wrong order--the top picture is actually the climax of the story, where the turtle gets back to his canal, and the bottom picture is the first one, where we found the turtle, but oh well......)

lesson learned

today i learned (again) that sleeping in on a saturday is not worth it when it means that when you go running at 8:15 in the morning (instead of the usual 6:00 a.m. time) the temperature will be 84 degrees and the humidity will be 88%.  we'll see if i can remember this lesson next saturday.  it's funny how a nice, soft bed can trick me into forgetting.

Pace's Phobia

(As always, the pictures are not cooperating with the text.  The swim pictures are just because I thought you might have missed seeing pictures of my kids in the pool and at the beach.  I know you probably got used to your daily dose of them and have been going through withdrawals.......)

(This post's capitalization is dedicated to Annette and Ellie.  Thanks for still being my friends even though I am capital-deficient.)

Okay, so, somehow I did not equate summer vacation with no time to blog, but it seems that with all 5 kids home all day, I have lost that little spot in the day that was reserved for my blogging time.  I am working on getting it back.  Negotiations with the children are pending.  I just sent them all away (not even nicely:  "Go do something.  I am going to blog.").  We'll see how long it lasts.  (Note to Annette and Ellie--I just had to go back and re-do the capitalization because I forgot about it.  I hope you are appreciating all this hard work and dedication.)

Besides having all the kids home from school, I have also been very, very, very busy (happily) doing online scrapbooking.  I have finally found my scrapbooking ideal.  When I realized I was really, really, really behind with all my scrapbooks (stuck in 2004), I decided I needed a realistic option to turn to.  Long story short--three weeks after starting an online book for Gwyneth, I have caught her up to when school ended this year.  Not bad, eh?  I don't mind patting myself on the back for that one.  Hope you don't mind.   I'm getting ready to start Liesel's book now.  I'm very excited about the prospect of having all 5 children's books all done.  Hooray for Blurb!!!  (Thanks Liza for coming out to get me started.)

Also, we have been busy little bees getting all our "hurricane preparedness" things ready.  This is a big deal here.  I guess we'll see how good we were at it when the first hurricane hits!  I have to admit, though, that I really do enjoy doing 72-hour kits.  All those little trial-sized tubes of things really appeal to me.

Okay, enough about all that.  Onto Pace's Phobia.

We discovered recently that Pace is frightened of battery-operated things that move.  The biggest offender is a large dump truck that can drive by itself.  Pace hates it.  We had to take it outside and leave it there.  He checks out the window all the time to make sure it's staying put.  I didn't know he was so scared of it until I noticed that he would never walk past it--one day he got trapped in the playroom because it was in the entryway just outside the room.  He kept calling me to come "hold you" and I kept telling him I was right in the kitchen and he could come to me and then I would hold him.  Finally I went into the playroom to see what was going on, and he was peeking around the corner--I could tell he was gauging whether or not he could make it past the dump truck.  The sad thing is, he loved playing with this truck (he got it from a neighbor for his birthday) until he discovered it moved on its own.

He's also terrified of this little fake-pet gerbil we have that has wheels and a battery so it can "run" around in a gerbil ball.  I had to put it up on the fridge, out of sight, before Pace would let me put him down.  

Apparently we didn't introduce him to battery-powered toys at a young enough age.  I think he doesn't understand why they suddenly start moving.  We all think it's funny.  Until he won't let me put him down.  Then I think that he'd better hurry and grow out of this stage.