Friday

It's been a good enough week, a few trips to the pool, a little time with friends, a little softball, lots of sunny days.

Here we met up with b.g. and his other grandma at the pool again. He lights up when he sees the kids. It's fun that he obviously recognizes them even in an unexpected place.


This is Lydia at bat. She looks serious. She seems to like softball, though she's abnormally quiet around her peers, does a lot of observing. She's not the sassy little character we deal with at home.


Yesterday we bought a fan with a stand to put in front of the air conditioner in the family room because the blower on the a/c doesn't really project air very far. The fan stand had to be assembled, so Little Jay and James took care of it.

The directions were confusing--the diagram didn't make sense, mostly because they'd packed it with smaller parts inside larger parts, but didn't mention that.

Anyway, while Little Jay was immersed in this project, Tim and Julia were there close beside him, arguing over the box and packing material. "Blah, blah, blah, I want that piece of styrofoam!" "No I had it first!"

Jay finally said, "Do you have to stand right beside me and fight over GARBAGE? Really?"

Whee.

When we were kids my dad once said to my sister and me, "If there were only one dog turd, you kids would fight over it."

Well, I never.

At the time it seemed like a unnecessarily huffy thing to say, but now it makes me snicker knowing fully well how very aggravated he must have been.

After Little Jay said that about fighting over garbage, the kids went to the other end of the table and made this little puppet stage out of the box, and gave us a show with the stuffed animals. They did another show tonight, and b.g. stormed the stage, tried to take off with the characters, which had Julia laughing her outrageous squealy laugh. I like it. It's an excellent use of garbage.


So now it's the end of the evening, an evening spent eating Big Jay's homemade pizza, and playing with b.g. and rocking him in the swing on the patio. Lydia had a friend here for the evening. He's a good man, him and his meerkat, and Maria has a cousin sleeping over. She's sweet to have around, big brown eyes and polite manners.

One night she was sleeping over when Sam killed a mouse. It came out of the front closet and Sam snatched it and shook it, and the story is all the kids were standing on the living room furniture screaming. (Except Heidi's Joe. He doesn't stand on furniture and shriek. He was not overly alarmed by a dog catching a mouse.) Who knew Sam had any killer instinct in her? I didn't know she could even move that fast. Anyway, we were gone at a party that night, so we missed the whole show.

Another night this niece slept over and we were also gone part of the evening at a party--the neighbors' wedding anniversary--and the power went out after a storm. Tim remembers this and said to her, in his extra deep Timothy voice with the extra round vowels: "Oh, you're here. Maybe we'll have a black out." (Let's hope not.)


Onward then. We'll see what tomorrow brings. love, Val