Brave

I took all three of them to Wal-Mart today and nobody cried.

Not even me.

Yeah, that's a win.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Grower

Last week I kept having the thought that I needed to check on our garden. I'm afraid it's been severely neglected this year. On Saturday I stole away for what I thought would be ten minutes to see if we had any more tomatoes that were ripe.

I ended up being gone longer.

As I've said before, ours is one plot of many in a community garden. They're not locked up or closed off from the public. Anyone can walk through them that wants to. Sadly, someone walked through ours sometime in the last two weeks. Actually, they did more than walk.

First I noticed was that one of our Sugar Pumpkins was smashed. Then I saw that our tomato plants had been knocked over. The next thing I realized was that we were missing pumpkins. Nine pumpkins, all of them from Peter's miniature pumpkin vine that he had chosen to plant. In fact, none of his pumpkins were left. I spent a good deal of time searching through the vines making sure that I hadn't overlooked any of the small yellow squashes. I hadn't. It was only as I was leaving the garden that I realized my watermelon was missing too.

While I was bummed about my watermelon, I was much sadder about Peter's pumpkins. He's been watching them grow all summer, excited each time he discovered another one. As I stood in the garden, surveying the damage, I could picture Peter's reaction to his missing plants. I was sure there would be tears. I quickly picked all the tomatoes that could be saved, pulled all of our onions out of the ground, and steeled myself to tell Peter about the vandalism.

When I got home I told Bryan first. He agreed that we needed to tell Peter right away, so I called him out of his room and sat down on one of our dining room chairs so we were eye to eye. I took both of his hands in mine and I told him that someone had hurt our garden and that all of his pumpkins were gone.

At first he just looked at me with his big brown eyes. Then he asked a question I had no real answer for. "Why?" I told him I didn't know. He wanted to know if I had asked them why they had done it. He suggested telling them that we had been planning on making a pie. I said I hadn't seen the people that had done it, that I didn't know who it was, and that I had no way to ask why they had done that to our garden.

This is when I expected the tears to start flowing. But Peter is full of surprises. He was okay. He was sad, yes, but he wasn't heartbroken. And when I mentioned that maybe we could go to a pumpkin patch as a family to replace his pumpkins he got really excited. There were no tears, no consoling needed.

I think he set me a very good example.

Doting Big Brothers

Human Again

We have sick people at our house, hence the late-in-the-day posting. I'm the least sick and Bryan's the sickest. The three small people are all somewhere in the middle. Luckily, other than being mildly sniffly, Phoebe has been basically symptom-free.

One positive thing about Bryan being home sick is that I got to shower in the middle of the day and I now feel human again.

That's always a good thing.

False Advertising

Peter: (looking at the ads that came with Sunday's paper) Why are they selling kids?

Me: (in the next room and unable to see what he's looking at) What?! Wait...what?

Peter: In this ad. Why are they selling kids?

Me: Are you looking at the Toy R' Us ad?

Peter: Yeah.

Me: They're not selling kids. They're showing the kids using the toys. The toys are for sale.

Peter: No, right here, they're selling this kid.

And that is one reason Peter could never be a child model. He may be pretty enough, but he'd probably think we were trying to sell him.

Gotta Dance

Me: (watching as Cooper dances in his bedroom) What are you doing Cooper?

Cooper: Peter knocked over my toys, and so now I am dancing.

Well of course...

Miniture Golf by a Miniture Man

It worked! I'm pleased that the movie showed up on yesterday's post. Forgive me, but I'm going to try another one. This is a movie that Bryan took with his pho
ne way back in July. I had trouble getting this particular clip onto the blog before, so I'm going to try again. And besides, haven't you always wondered how Cooper played golf?



P.S. I have no idea why there's no sound.

Test

I haven't been able to post a movie on here for the last three months. This is a test post to see if anything shows up from the movie I took of Cooper.

Drawing a Blank

I sat at the computer for at least twenty minutes on Monday night, just staring. I had no idea what to write about. I spent time trying to find a funny clip to post from YouTube. Nothing.

I tried to access something from the far reaches of my brain that I've been pondering. Nothing.

I tried to think of something funny the boys had said recently.

Any guesses what I came up with?

That's right. Nothing.

I think I can officially state that I have a severe case of Mommy Brain. Mommy Brain is an off-shoot of Exhaustion-Induced Brain Fog. It hits hardest towards the end of the first month with a new baby. You still feel the euphoria of having that beautiful little person in your arms, but not enough to feel bright-eyed at 1am. And 4am. And 7am.

No, we haven't had another six hour stretch of sleep since Friday night. How could you tell?

It just occurred to me that this blog was started as a way to combat my last case of Mommy Brain. Cooper was almost two months old when I wrote my first post about needing to exercise my brain.

I am still committed to posting something every week day. But I can't make any promises that anything I write will make much sense between now and, oh, I don't know, January? March maybe?

Aren't you glad you read my blog?

The Can-Can

Yesterday my Grandma and I canned five quarts of peaches (in addition to the dozen we did last week). And we made and canned ten pints of applesauce (after Isaac cored the apples). And I made three dozen muffins.

Paige and Isaac took turns playing with the boys and I carried Phoebe in the Bjorn.

And now I'm really tired.

But our food storage is looking better.