Tadpoles: Day 16 (...I think)

The kids are outside playing in a fort they made on the deck. I am inside doing my best to pretend they don't exist for a minute. Let's just say that we've had a rough morning.

I don't know what I was expecting.

Andrew's home now so, that's nice. I didn't even get up with Rachel this morning. But the other two have just been at each other's throats all morning. There has been so much screaming that I can hardly stand it.

Andrew's home and while that's nice, sometimes his trips are timed rather poorly. He left Thursday morning last week, which is fine, except that Thursdays are basically my favourite day of the week because Thursday's docket is usually quite empty for Andrew. He has no where to be, which means that sometimes he'll actually be at home.

Wednesdays are a late night, Tuesdays are late every other week, Mondays are hectic with Andrew walking in the door ten minutes before Rachel has to leave for soccer practice. And so it's really Thursday that I look forward to. Weekends aren't half bad, either.

But this week Andrew was gone Thursday through the weekend. He got home just in time for his crazy school days which means that I won't see him until Wednesday when he comes home from picking up his mom from the airport (his evening class on Wednesday was cancelled this week).

Anyway, I'm just feeling worn down from running full-steam ahead for a week, I think.

All whining aside, I'm going to talk about frogs now instead of my children because right now these frogs are far less annoying. Far. Less. Annoying. Because in the time it took me to write that the kid have decided to come inside and are now drumming on the washer and dryer, which incidentally is far less annoying than all the screaming they were doing previously.

The tadpoles had begun hanging around the top of the water lately, which means that they're running out of usable oxygen and it's time for a water change so after hanging out a load of laundry to dry we took the frogs outside for some fresh water.

Not in Toronto, Day 3

When I planned Trading Tables for the last Saturday in March it was because it was the only Saturday the church was available. I just assumed that Andrew would be around. I completely forgot about his conference!

I sent out an email to our Relief Society begging for assistance. People are usually pretty good at sticking around to help but I wanted to have specific people I could depend on on being there rather than having to recruit while I was there. My volunteers were wonderful!

We set up 10–12 round tables (I can't quite remember) and five rectangle ones, taped signs to the tables, denoting what went where, and were all ready when people started coming to sort out their unwanteds to the designated tables and sift through to find treasures to take home.

Not in Toronto, Day 2

I had to be the tooth fairy last night! Me!

Andrew's way more enthusiastic about this whole tooth business. I think he tried to yank out Rachel's tooth every single night last week. I'm more of an it'll-fall-out-when-it's-ready kind of person, myself. I think Rachel is, too.

We had a movie night last night; we watched Frozen and had leftover pizza from earlier in the week. Rachel took one bite of pizza and started screaming.

"Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!" she screamed.

"What?" I asked.

"My toof jus' feh outta my mouf!" she mumbled.

"Go take care of it," I instructed, noticing blood/saliva starting to dribble down her chin.

"Pause duh mofie," she said.

Not in Toronto, day 1

From 7:00–8:00 AM I had three children.
From 8:00–11:00 AM I had two children.
From 11:00 AM–2:00 PM I had four children.
From 2:00–2:15 PM I had one child.
From 2:15–3:30 PM I had thirty children.
From 3:30–4:00 PM I had three children.
From 4:00–6:30 PM I had four children.
From 6:30–9:00 PM I had three children.

I'm completely worn out! Andrew left for the airport around 5:30 this morning. Benjamin got me up a little before 7:00 and then we got Rachel up. We got her off to the school bus and then it was just Benjamin, Miriam, and me for most of the morning.

Miriam's little friends Alden and Marcella came over to play while my friend Marian took Baby Jay to a doctor appointment. Those three play so nicely together, though they don't like Benjamin to butt in, which makes him a little sad. When Marian came to pick up the kids they were all so happy that we let them keep running around in the backyard while we chatted and Baby Jay napped.

Benjamin was so excited when Baby Jay woke up. He still doesn't say much but he can say, "BABY JAY!" as clear as a bell.

Unfortunately, with Baby Jay once again awake Marian wanted to take off to get things done at home. Marian's kids were terribly upset by this and came up with the plan that Miriam should come home with them, so that's what we did. Benjamin was completely convinced he was going to tag along as well so that he could continue admiring Baby Jay. He climbed into Marian's van and nestled in between Miriam's and Alden's carseats in the very back.

Random Tidbits

Benjamin has found a new favourite book series to read: The Magic School Bus.



"Bus! Bus! Bus! Bus! Bus! Bus! Bus!" is about all he has to say about it. Buses are just about his favourite thing in the entire world.

Soccer Girl

Soccer practice was cancelled last Monday due to the storm system we had. In fact, all practices were cancelled through Thursday—the field was "too muddy" to play on and they didn't want to risk ruining the grass. It's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around it being "too muddy to play soccer" and also that playing soccer could ruin the grass. I mean, it's a soccer field, right? Plant some hardier grass or whatever.

They're rather protective of their field, really. It's in this secluded neighbourhood surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire curling around the top. When we first saw it I turned to Andrew and said, "What is this—Egypt?"

It wasn't unusual to see playgrounds surrounded by a brick wall with shards of glass imbedded on the top to keep out unwanted patrons in Cairo. I understand that vandalism is a problem but I also think that barbed wire protecting a field of grass and glass shards protecting a swing set is a little over the top. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, Rachel got to have a make-up practice on Friday, which was good because she had her first game on Saturday and her coach was hoping to at least tell the girls some of the rules of the game before pitting them against a rival team.

Here's Rachel before practice on Friday:

Tadpoles, day 7

On Saturday morning I looked in on our little frog spawn and saw that a couple of the tadpoles had hatched out of their eggs. The most robust-looking one was clinging to the side of the container. The others were pitifully lying on their sides on the bottom. I thought they were dead but apparently they were only resting.

Reading comprehension

This afternoon as we were driving home from "The Great Day of Service" Rachel asked us what I consider to be a remarkable question about the Harry Potter series: "If Harry was a horcrux the whole time, why didn't the basalisk venom kill the horcrux inside hime when he got bitten in the second book?"

Neither Andrew or I had ever bothered to think about that but we talked about it for a while and decided that because Harry was saved from the precipice of death by Fawkes that the horcrux was never fully destroyed either.

This is just one example of the questions Rachel asks about books. She's a deep thinker.

I wasn't sure about letting her loose on the Harry Potter series—she is, after all, six years old and that's a tender age—but she was sure about wanting to read them. Some (a lot) of the subject matter gets a bit deep but so does a swimming pool so we decided we could let Rachel jump in.

One of the benefits of literature is that you only have to dive in as deep as you are ready to go. You can tread water near the surface or you can scuba dive. Now that I'm rereading my childhood favourites as an adult I've found that I was a water-treader when I was younger. Like Rachel and Miriam, I soaked up the storyline of The Little House on the Prairie series as a child and even learned a few life lessons (like that it's okay to have brown hair) but rereading it as an adult is when the story was impactful for me.

Museum Day

We met up with Emily and her kids at the Museum of Life and Science today. Her son E. is an ambitious builder and wanted to make a truck with some of the blocks. I don't consider myself a great architect or engineer or anything like that but with all of us working together we managed to cobble together what turned out to be an ice cream truck.



Benjamin's quite funny about the camera and will hardly stand still long enough for me to take a picture because he always wants to see it, sometimes before it's even been taken. "I unna see!" he'll say as he runs to take a look.

A Harry Potter Life

The morning after Rachel was born Andrew left us at the hospital so that he could take a shower and change his clothes and things like that. He returned to the hospital carrying a brand-spanking-new copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He carefully lifted Rachel out of her little bassinet and settled on the couch (where he'd spent the night) with two of his newest loves announcing, "This is happiness." I took a nap.