Last week. Well, the memorable parts of it anyway :)

We’ve had some interesting times lately.  Wednesday we went to Paradise Cove with friends and swam with the turtles.  The kids explored, and the baby sat in a sort of stunned/comatose state as he warily watched the water and sand around him.  Demetri got a little careless and jumped from rock to rock instead of slowly climbing them, resulting in a pretty good fall.  I thought for sure it was another trip to the ER as an adult helped him get back to me.  His foot was covered in blood.  But after it was cleaned up, we saw it was just a shallow cut.  It didn’t stop him from screaming into a towel for the next 20 minutes, but I guess that’s just part of his dramatic personality. 

Friday we had “friend homeschool,” as a couple friends like to join us most Fridays.  We wrote beach stories for our books, and now I need to print the pictures of the turtle for them.  Then we played math computer games.  More neighborhood children wandered in and listened to Pandora while I cleaned.  A pillow fight eventually developed, and I had to stop cleaning to make some ground rules. 

1.      Anyone who hits the fan, tv, etc is out till the next round. 

2.      You can’t hit anyone who doesn’t have a pillow. 

3.      If you drop your pillow or sit down on the couch you’re out until the next round. 

4.      If you’re too hard on the little kids and they get hurt you’re out. 

5.      The baby is a bomb.  Anyone who touches him is out.

They had a blast!  We had to stop for a mandatory water break because I could see the sweat dripping from the older boys.  All in all, I think we had 12 children and a whole lot of pillows in the living room.  They did a great job at following the rules!  While they were waiting for Uncle Shawn to get home (because I told them he could whip them all in a pillow fight) we ended up doing karaoke to Disney songs on Youtube.  And the Hokey Pokey.  You should have seen the “too-cool-for-you” 8-12-year-old boys doing the Hokey Pokey.  It was all for Xander.  Sweet kids :).

Saturday one of our (8 yr old) friends came over and made bread with me.  Then we all made personal pizzas.  During lunch he exclaimed, “This is like my second home!”  And my kids told him he was welcome to live here forever and be a brother. Hmm...do I have a say in this? Haha.

Thankful for knowledge of the gospel today.

It’s been a sad day.  A friend of the family was killed in a car accident.  It’s hard to imagine a person suddenly being gone who has always been there.

We finished remodeling the living room…not that I did much of it.  The internet has been disconnected for several days.  I missed a lot of homework, but can’t bring myself to care much about it. 

I’m being grateful for my kids, my husband (who, despite being far away, is still on the phone with his wife quite a lot), and for family. 

Some weeks I have more to say than others

I'm home...an hour and a half after cub scouts is over. I did stay and talk, mostly about cub scout things. But I was also pulled over on the way home, and sat there for 20 minutes. I know because I was watching the clock. I was also watching the policemen behind me, who waited for a backup car, walked around my car to see if anything else could possibly be wrong aside from my headlight being out, looked in every window, and purposely shined a flashlight in my rear view mirror every time I tried to look at them in it (that was actually kind of hilarious). I'm not sure if there were slow computers or if they were standing out there just talking about good times, but eventually two came back and gave me some sort of a strange citation...a reversible citation? Anyway, I go get it fixed and show up at the police department so they can make sure I did it. Not a problem...different...but much more sensible than just giving people tickets for things they didn't know were wrong with their car. Demetri was terrified...we spent the 20 minutes going over why we weren't going to jail, what exactly was wrong with the car, why that was a problem, whether policemen can pull people over "for fun," how they can tell things from looking up license plates and looking at a driver's license, etc, etc.

On to life. I'm 8 weeks pregnant. I can eat potatoes and ice cream. Rice makes me instantly sick...even the smell. So do eggs, but I love eggs so much that I eat them once in a while anyway, and pay for it the rest of the day. I lay on the couch more than I should, but usually still manage to get dinner on the table and the laundry done. Evenings are the worst, so I'm slowly going back to the crockpot.

Demetri starts his charter school on the 15th, and for the most part he's excited. I'm trying to put together a curriculum (which I have ample time for as I lay on my couch) as well as a halfway organized cub scout plan. I'm learning a lot. I'm very excited about a website called scouttrack.com; it will eliminate soooo much work if we can actually use it!

Shawn and I are both nursery leaders now. It's much easier than an older class because I can walk or sit and because Shawn's so awesome with the little kids. I'm glad he's having fun...I need to take a video camera.

Shawn is going to China for several weeks. And I think I'm going to cook tv dinners the whole time he's gone. Yep, good plan. He helped a lot with the house over his vacation. Maybe not his idea of a vacation...but, well, he is getting paid to go study (and SIGHTSEE) in China, and I get to stay home with the kids, and I really wasn't feeling that well. I'm very grateful that my husband loves me.

Several of my good friends are moving in the next couple of months (or have moved recently), and I'm depressed. Happy for them...but depressed all the same. It's been so hard to explain to the children why they can't visit with their friends anymore. Well, not hard to explain, just hard for them to understand. The hardest to take is Alyissa moving. It's probably rare to be so close to your next door neighbor, but the kids thought of it as a second home, and walked in as they pleased (even though they still got in trouble for that!). Our kids played together almost every day. Mine have been asking me why strange men are in her house (the management people getting it ready to rent again) and if we're going to eat dinner with her family.

I had to go over child abuse prevention with Demetri as a cub scout requirement. One of the warnings was not to accept gifts from adults without your parents' permission. This evening he asked me if a Bear scout could be a child molester. I, being slightly alarmed, replied that it's possible...another scout had given him a "gift"--an origami dragon he'd made. I chuckled and explained that it was okay to accept the gift, and thanks for telling me about it. He might be a tad bit paranoid after that prevention stuff but better safe than sorry, eh.

I've actually been keeping more busy than I'd like to be, but it'll slow down in a few days, and even more as my friends continue to move :(. I went to a friend's house today and she showed us how to make Hungarian pastries. I can't wait for her to translate the recipes and e-mail them to me. They were so yummy, and I even kept them down. Hooray for friends who are great cooks! But mostly, hooray for friends in general :).