There, now you're up to speed again. I have also been on a very uncharacteristic organization mission. Every kitchen cupboard has been emptied, cleaned and organized. Every closet is clean. Our trash barrels are overflowing and the nice workers at Goodwill know me on a first-name basis by now. I hope this doesn't mean I'm about to die or something. You know...how they say people do stuff out of the blue before they die that doesn't make any sense, like clean up life's messes so that nobody else has to deal with them? Yeah, I hope that's not why I'm cleaning. But if that's what happens, you read it here first. And if I die, tell Kenny to look inside of the blue treasure chest. There is actually no blue treasure chest to be found, but it will give him something to do instead of sitting around being sad.
A photo that my sister showed me last week brought back one of my favorite childhood memories. She took a picture of tadpoles swimming in a ...creek? Pond? Something like that. It reminded me of how we used to catch a whole slew of tadpoles each summer. We'd put them in a fish tank in our room and watch them morph into toads. It was really the coolest thing to witness. Like watching a child grow in fast-forward. So, a couple days later, when Kenny and I took the kids to the river and he said, "Look, tadpoles!" I just couldn't pass up the opportunity.
Except catching them wasn't as easy as I remember. I had no net and the small pool of water that held the tadpoles was surrounded by mud. Kenny started picking up large rocks and throwing them in the mud to make a path. When the path was completed, he stepped onto the first rock and went sliding down the mud hill on his back. Best entertainment ever, he is. But to be completely honest, by the end of the day, Kyler was the only one who hadn't fallen in the mud.
After I carefully slid down the mud hill in my bare feet, I used a plastic Wal Mart bag (it's all I could find!) to gently sweep up the water. The first fifteen tries produced three minnows and a snail. I finally decided that I must have scared the tadpoles to the other side of the pool, so I trotted around with my now bigfoot-looking mud-sopped feet. (This is where I fell victim to the mud myself and Kenny made sure that I heard him laughing). I said out loud, "This is my LAST try", because I was becoming frustrated and Kenny was still laughing at me. And what do you know?
I caught some! The funny part is that in the mucky water, we counted two. When we got home and dumped them into clearer water, as you can very well see, there are more than two. The kids are loving watching them and feeding them, but I am sitting in front of the cage most often. They are just so interesting. Or maybe I'm just so dull. Either way, I'm happy. And they get to live, which they wouldn't have if they'd been left in the puddle by the river that was quickly drying out.
Moving on (though I'll be sure to upload pictures of our morphing little friends)...
On the morning of the first day of school, it seemed like the perfect start. The kids dressed in their new clothes and ate breakfast and talked excitedly about what the day would hold. Kenny even walked with us to the end of the lane to see them off. I waited impatiently all day for them to get home so I could hear about their day. When they finally entered the front door, I asked, "How was school?" Kyler said, "Good." and Mae said, "Worst. Day. EVER. I HATE school." I asked why and she said, "Because it's stupid and boring!" Apparently, she set her first-day standards too high and it did not meet her expectations. She was not at all happy to find that they would be reviewing rules and stuff they learned last year. She wanted to learn new stuff. I told her that maybe not everybody remembers everything from last year and she said, "Well, maybe they should just go back to second grade then and quit wasting my time!" Oh. Good. She has her dad's patience. The rest of the week went much better. Thank goodness.
And now we embark on week two of school. Week fourteen of running. Week five hundred nineteen of marriage. Week one-thousand five-hundred seventy-five of life. I clearly have too much time on my hands now that the kids are gone all day.
You're not going to die. It's just not allowed. :)
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