Britany’s Blog

This week, Brad traveled to Alabama yet again.  I spent my week dealing with these scenarios, just to name a few:

* Matthew throwing a heavy plastic gun down the stairs and striking Samuel in the head.

* Matthew slamming so many doors, he has now cleaned every potty in the house as a consequence.

* Matthew locking his bathroom door.

* Samuel locking his bathroom door.

* Many searches for the one key our builder left us for unlocking the bathroom doors.

* Peter holding Matthew’s head underwater in the blow-up pool.  (That was scary.)

* Samuel writing on the van with white sidewalk chalk.  (Who knew sidewalk chalk would scratch the paint on a car?)

* Samuel writing on the tan wall with blue marker.  (And not with a washable marker.)

* Samuel writing on the wall with sun screen.  (Who knew sunscreen would leave a permanent mark on the paint?)

* Samuel biting me.  And scratching me.  And running away from me while screaming.

* Samuel stealing various toys from his brothers and hiding them in his room.

It goes on and on from there.  Those are the ones I can remember at the moment, the highlights, if you will.  Needless to say, I’m tired.  My throat hurts from yelling and I am having to restrain myself from using a sarcastic tone when telling the boys they have, yet again, lost 2 hours of screen time for hitting, pushing, scratching or otherwise harming one of their brothers.

I keep looking at the calendar, but anyway you slice it, there’s still a lot of summer left.

My dad just sent me this picture of the temperature gauge that is in his office.  The actual thermometer is just outside his office window.  Check out the temperature in the lower right hand corner of the picture.  He said it had DROPPED 2 degrees from the high of the day:

126 degrees

Here are some of my last pics taken in Pearsall.  On Tuesday, we left for Austin, via Sea World in San Antonio.

Sunset, from my parents' front yard

Moon from my parents' yard

The next morning, we packed up and headed for Sea World, where we met up with my sister and her kids.  Here are the boys with their cousins:

Inside the front gate at Sea World

Highlights from the shark aquarium:

Man cleaning the tank from the inside

Jellyfish!

"Fish are friends, not food!"

Piranha!

After watching the feeding of the dolphins and touring the shark aquarium, we stopped to eat lunch then made our way to see Shamu!

Shamu!

Shamu

And, of course, Shamu

After all the excitement of the show, the masses of people and million degree heat, we decided to call it a day.  Here is a good visual of why we knew it was time to leave:

Hot, tired boys

There was, however, one boy who wasn’t ready to leave…

Ready for the next show!

Dog Traps

Today is Thursday and we are back home.  We pulled into the garage at almost the exact same time (within 10 minutes) as we left one week ago.  It occurs to me that even though today is Thursday, I am still blogging about last weekend.  I’m going to have to hurry up before I forget it all!

So, above you can see the picture of my parents’ dog pens – which Samuel referred to as “dog traps”.  Who knew we had an animal rights activist in our family?

Our tomato lover!

Peter continues to surprise us with his love of tomatoes.  Other than myself, he is the only one who will eat them.

On Monday morning, my dad graciously agreed to take the boys fishing at the Leona River.  I use the term “river” loosely because it is mostly dry.  But there are some deep spots and we even saw a couple of nice-sized catfish.  But we saw them from a distance because these are apparently worm-snob catfish.  My dad thought they might have liked something called “stink bait” better but I still hold to the theory that the boys throwing rocks at them had the catfish – and all other wildlife – more concerned about living through the experience than eating.

It didn’t help matters that the boys were not terribly thrilled about going.  I think we got off to a bad start when Daisy jumped into my dad’s truck and took up most of the backseat.  That left the boys pushing and shoving and generally unhappy about the situation.  Here’s my little video I took from the comfort of the front seat on the way down:

When we got there, this is what the boys did:

Throwing rocks

Poppy & Peter fishing

Matthew helping Poppy

Waiting patiently to leave (with the worms).

Watching the Gar swim

And despite all the misery…

Samuel {hearts} Daisy!

A little boy and his...

...kite!

We had a birthday party, complete with cake (this is Matthew trying out his new camera):

Birthday cake for Brad/Peter/Samuel

We stayed up late doing this:

Grammy's story time

and playing with these:

Glow sticks

During the day, Samuel in particular had a blast with Daisy.  He even thanked her for the birthday presents mom and dad gave him.  Oh, and tried to help her clean herself with his tongue, but thankfully, I saw what was about to happen and intervened in time.

Sweet Daisy

The boys had a blast swimming, and daddy had fun blasting them with the water gun.

Swimming

Protecting themselves from the water gun

Then, on Sunday, daddy had to head home.  Many tears and sadness followed, but I think Brad was fine by the time he hit Waco (ha ha).  No, seriously, the boys were very sad when he had to leave but probably nobody felt it more than I did.  I just don’t feel like a whole person without him around.  As I write this, we are only 24 hours away from being back home and I’m ready.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  There is still more fun about which to post…stay tuned!

Britany

So I wrote yesterday about how we decided to cream corn on the first Saturday of summer vacation, the day that was also Brad & Peter’s birthday.  We originally thought we would just make a small batch.  But I think our eyes were bigger than our biceps.  Here’s a picture of the back of dad’s pick-up filled with corn:

Corn in my Dad's truck

Here are me and Dad, standing in the assembly line.  What started with seven of us (four adults and three children) ended with just the adults.  The boys dropped like flies and were never so glad to see air conditioning when lunch time arrived.  I think they even headed up for naps without being told it was nap time.

The processing line

It actually was fun, although really hot

Dad creaming the corn

After the corn gets to the stage pictured above, we carry it inside where my mom would cook it, put it in containers, then eventually freeze it.  It is a tremendous amount of work, but we just kept telling the boys how wonderful it tasted and how it was all so worth it.

Unfortunately, they were not nearly as impressed with it as we were.  Especially since their favorite way to eat corn is this way:

Matthew loves corn - on the cob!

I don’t know why we bother!!!

Day One:

Summer Vacation officially started at 3pm on Thursday, June 4th.  We departed the Metroplex promptly at 3:50pm – exactly 40 minutes late thanks to some missing orange crocks and 8 pull-ups – all of which we had to return home and find before really leaving.

We drove for approximately 2.5 hours before Brad finally was able to leave work.  The original plan was for him to meet up with us and caravan the whole way down.  Unfortunately, men with a higher pay grade prevailed and so we were stuck traveling down separately.  I think between the two of us we had gotten 8 hours sleep the night before.  My E.T.A. was 10:20pm; Brad’s was closer to 1am.  By the time I hit Georgetown, I knew I wasn’t going to make it.  I called Brad and we agreed it was best to cut our losses and spend the night in Austin.

Day Two:

Here are a few pics I took in our room the next morning:

Watching TV at the Springhill Suites Hotel

Mini Kitchen and Roll-away bed

The kids were so fascinated with that mini kitchen.  You would have thought they had never seen a microwave before.  Or a sink.  Or a mini fridge.  And yet, we have all said appliances in our home.

Anyway, we left the hotel in separate cars – Samuel rode with his daddy and the other two rode with me – and got as far as Natural Bridge Caverns when Brad got a hankering for something vacation-y and decided to pull off the highway and spelunk.  I have only one picture of that adventure, but it’s not digital so I will have to scan it in as soon as I figure out how to scan.  So, probably never.

We finally got to Pearsall and enjoyed a nice day with my parents.

Day Three:

Saturday was Brad’s & Peter’s birthdays.  So we decided to celebrate by…creaming corn!

Children of the corn (fields)

Here is Peter’s take on the adventure:

On the way to pick corn, we stopped to watch Black Gold process the chipping potatoes they are currently harvesting on my parents’ land.  Black Gold sells primarily to Frito Lay and these particular potatoes are really only good when sliced and fried up as potato chips (hence the name “chipping potatoes”).  Here’s a picture of the shed where they were culling out the bad ones before cooling them and loading them on a truck:

Black Gold

Next, on to the corn field to pick corn:

Samuel

Peter

I will write more tomorrow.  Naptime is almost over which means I’m about to be on duty.

Britany

I saw a post about this on another blog.  I read the story and really thought it made some good points.  Here’s an excerpt:

We evangelicals tend to be easily impressed. We cheered on Jon and Kate’s decision to carry all six babies to term but rarely considered the prior question: Was it right for them to undergo risky fertility treatments in the first place? They had been married only a matter of months when Kate, who was in her mid-20s at the time, took fertility medication to stimulate her ovaries for intrauterine insemination and became pregnant with their twins, Cara and Mady.

Only a few years later, Kate’s ovaries were stimulated once again, but this time they were hyper-stimulated. Warned by their doctor during an ultrasound examination that the fertility medication had worked a little too well and that four mature follicles were present, Jon and Kate nonetheless went ahead with the insemination. Apparently their doctor had miscounted on that fateful day, because Kate soon discovered that she was pregnant with seven embryos (one of which miscarried a short time later). Six babies were growing in a space designed for one, posing great risks to the life of each baby as well as to the life of their mother. Faced with this unintended but preventable situation, Jon and Kate were right to carry all of the babies to term. But this decision is not enough to warrant their status as models of Christian faithfulness. That most evangelicals were satisfied to celebrate the end—six miraculous lives—rather than assess the morality of the means whereby those lives were created, betrays the thinness of evangelical reflection on reproductive ethics. Too often our ethics have focused so singularly on the question of abortion that we have given comparatively little attention to the morally-significant issues surrounding infertility, reproductive technology, childbirth, and parenting. As such, we have a hard time challenging the assumptions of our consumerist culture or those who, like Jon and Kate, seem to be beholden to it.

It’s really worth reading.  Click here for the rest of the story.

Here’s the latest coloring on the “boo boo”.

Day after hitting his head.

Day 2 after hitting his head.

It’s still not really showing up that well in the pictures.  The dark color is seeping down into the corner of his eye – really is a sight!  Of course, he’s wearing it like a badge of honor, which means he is telling everyone with great drama how he fell and hit his head and had to rush to see the “head doctor” (really our pediatrician)…so he’s milking it for all it’s worth!