Category Archive

These two rugrats are coming tomorrow, for the weekend! We can’t wait.

This rugrat is equally excited:

I’m only about 20% of the way there in editing photos from  yesterday. I took almost three hundred (!!!) but they’re fun.

I look at these and just think they look so old!

Got back from my sister’s. It was so fun. We had such a good night, just talking, chatting, and then playing games. The boys kicked our butts at Scene It, Squabble, but we were proud to make it through the first half and not get skunked.

Caleb’s birthday party today was so fun. It was a very special little group of kids, who were just the cutest ever. There were a few I would have taken home with me, if only I could have fit them into my camera bag.

Ellie, Shannon and I played maybe 100 games of Uno Attack. I joked on Friday night after the kids went to bed if anyone was up for a game, and we all kind of laughed. After playing though, I kind of loved it and want my own!

Pictures to come. Hopefully before, I don’t know, March?

After work tonight we’re on our way to New Jersey, to go to Caleb’s birthday party tomorrow.

On Monday, he turned nine. Nine?? Is that even possible?

I think not. But there we are, anyways. Nine years of knowing and loving the most sweet and most stubborn kid you will ever know and love. Just when you’re sure that you can’t take another second of the stubborn, he kisses your hand and tells you that you are his friend, or he gets all excited because you wore something similar and, “We match!” It’s just not possible that he’s nine, and then it is.

He’s ok, and that’s all that matters.

He wasn’t feeling well, and at 3:30 am he woke up again. He didn’t sound good (first moment of the “I’m not liking this” feeling), and I called my sister. She asked to talk to him, and after that tod me to bring him to the ED at the hospital she works at. I literally had one full second of full-blown panic, which I then reigned in to a very focused do-what-I-need-to-do mode. Which I did. I did what I needed to do and got him there.

He’s ok.

He had croup. He got a shot and some breathing treatments. I took Ellie home and we went back to bed, and later in the morning Shannon and Caleb came home.

And then I could take full breaths again.

He is ok, that’s all that matters.

That kind of has a nice ring to it, a nice symmetry.

I think the thing that I love most is just the playing. It’s Caleb and Ellie, to be sure. As we read the book Howard and the Purple Crayon tonight, Caleb got an imaginary purple crayon and drew all the things Howard (Harold?) did. After we read Fancy Nancy, Ellie told me that she’s not too interested in being fancy. She doesn’t know all the words, she said.

They love me for who I am, as they do everyone they meet. They don’t care what you look like, only that you treat them well. They don’t care if you have the right shirt on, only that you love them unconditionally. Patience is rewarded with smiles and with gems of sentences that come out of their brains. Not taking every moment seriously is rewarded with the joy of seeing what comes spontaneously from them.

Tonight we also read the book Caleb and Noah’s Ark (or something, I don’t feel like getting these books to check the titles. Sorry.) Caleb the Caterpillar brings his mate (who Ellie told me is named Kassidy in the book, although she is unnamed in the book) onto the ark. I asked Caleb who he would bring and he started giggling and told me Elizabeth. Apparently Elizabeth is a girl in his class and he told me, “Elizabeth is my wife”. Ellie then told me she is going to marry Harry from her class. I asked her if Harry likes her, too, and she told me he gives her funny looks and then she just smiles at him.

It’s all so uncomplicated and simple when you are eight and five. And wonderful.