Summer's end: Catch up

I'm totally sure it didn't pass anyone up that I sluffed on Friday and didn't post. Whatever. :)

Here's why: at 10 am the baby was fed and down for a nap and the kids were watching a Lego movie peaceably on the DVR. I saw a nap opportunity and seized it sleeping without interruption for the next 1 hour and 45 minutes. After lunch the kids were supposed to clean their rooms so I could vacuum... That idea consumed most of the day... And then the power went out and they were too distracted with panic that they didn't clean. Power was out for 4 hours and since I was busy cleaning up stuff and the AC wasn't going 79+ degrees in a humid stuffy house was getting down right miserable. I ended up re-upholstering a chair that I had taken apart to clean by coleman lantern light. By then Gary was home and the power was on so we had glorious leftovers at 8:30 pm.
I took a nap! It was awesome! Moving on...

MONDAY
Today we took an outing. We piled a lot of stuff in one trip and the kids did very well it probably helped that they got to participate in a lot of it. Bread store where Olea timed me. Then we visited the Sculpture that is on the way to the library. Nev always points at it and screeches something unintelligible as we drive by. I have always wanted to go look and see if it had any artist credits. So we did that today. It is funky weird and the kids had a great time using words like triangle crotch and round butt to describe what they saw. Olea, who said it was stupid when I said we were going to get out and look at it, really took advantage of her verbal freedom while describing what was different or interesting about the sculpture.


It's name is FLAMP.
Then library, no pictures, I am spread too thin trying to help with books without a shelf being emptied.

Then post office (the big one this time) where they got to help work one of the postage machines.


Those are Nev and Zurich helping work the touch screen, Olea's photography story telling is lacking on these ones. Then Zurich hung on the lever with all his weight and Olea picked Nev up to put the letters in the drop box.

While there we were subject to an embarrassing display between a child and his parents. I mean loud and uncomfortable. The parents were way over reacting and in their attempt to keep their kid in line, made quite the display themselves. When we got in the van Olea made some observations: we had four kids they just had 1, there were three adults to the one child, and we were being pretty good, and daddy wasn't here with us, they were really loud and scary. Olea said, "I am glad that when we make sad choices in a big place like that that you talk to us quiet and if we are bad you just take us away and not be mean and noisy." (I am feeling happy about this observation.) So we got to talk about being good kids and parents so we don't embarrass ourselves or our families. Then we stopped off at a doctors office to get a refund... Which we won't be going to again, it's been a horrible hassle and they still owe me $. Then to the bank.

The kids had some money that they needed to put in the bank. Olea helped me fill out the deposit slips.

And they got to each give their money to the teller. We ended up with almost all the tellers at our attention because they were oohing and ahhing over my adorable babies, their names and their pretty eyes. One said, "she's a beautiful baby!" to my dressed in blue Giddy. The other teller corrected her, "it's a boy." "are you sure? She's so beautiful!" One asked if Nev and Zurich were twins. We get that fairly often here with them. "they all yours?!" and "you've got your hands full!" were other comments. After getting our transactions squared away the kids picked out a sucker and sat peaceably in the lounge chairs waiting for me. What a pleasure it is to have good kids. For the record they are kids, running around screeching and whatnot but they kept it all within tolerances.

Since the kids think it's great (because we rarely do it) and because they had coupons from the reading program we went to McDonalds for happy meals.

I feel awesome. We survived, the kids were so good and Giddy smiled through it all but when we got home he sure was hungry and tired.

TUESDAY
We cleaned the house so we could have some friends over for pool play and dinner. No pictures. The End.