Look, Mom, No Hands . . .

So I had an epiphany moment today. I was trying to do something, one of the many daily, mundane, no-big-deal things that I do all the time, yet I could feel my temper rising and my frustration mounting. Of course this all became evident when one of the girls asked me a question and I barked back at them that I couldn’t listen right then because I was busy. The very small sane portion of my brain then piped in “What, you can’t listen and work at the same time?” I proceeded to put whichever baby was in arms at the moment down and, in spite of the crying (not mine, I might add), I felt a little bit better. I then and there realized that the world is just a whole lot easier to manage when you are doing things with two hands instead of one. Now, I know this seems fairly obvious, yet with a toddler and a baby sometimes a person can no longer see the obvious.

This further led me to consider something that I had stated long ago, which is that every time a woman gives birth she should also sprout and extra set of arms. I know it sounds strange, but think of the practicality of the system. A pair of arms per child, and the original pair as a spare to get everything else done. Then when you go to the grocery store and, hypothetically speaking of course, two of your kids are screaming and the other two are playing tag around the cart the old woman who passes you would no longer say, “Wow, you really have your hands full.” You would have enough hands to engage each one of the little beasties, so you could smile at her and say, “Oh, I see you had four as well.” Darwin didn’t put a limit on the evolutionary timeline did he?

Rylee's Haircut

This one is for my mom, who has been so diligent in checking to see if Rylee's new haircut has been posted. It's not the best picture of the haircut, it was taken at the end of a very humid day, which, as we all know, means absolute destruction for hair with any curling tendencies. Nevertheless, the girl is still as cute as can be!

Blue and Gold

The girls are starting fall soccer this week. We went to their orientation meeting and they were given their jerseys. They told us that the kids should wear the blue side for home games and the yellow for away games. That seemed fairly easy to remember, since it was just how I was feeling after getting back from our long vacation; home is blue, away is gold.

However, I expressed these sentiments to my SD friend Amy and the resulting conversation led me to believe that I had better work on considering SD home. So here goes my change of attitude (okay, all of you AF folks know that I would be considering SD my SECOND home, because I already planted my roots there in Idaho!). Therefore, for the remainder of the blog I'll attempt to keep my positive, gold attitude (although the blue might occasionally offer a more thorough explanation from within the boundaries of the brackets).

A brief synopsis of the last months, for the few who are dying to know (I know, I flatter myself that there are even that many!). We had a wonderful, whirlwind trip to ID, OR, and WA. In the process we got to visit Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Newport, OR, and pretty much all of Montana, which if you’ve seen one part of it, I think you’ve seen it all. The kids were great travelers (with the exception of the various random bodily eruptions throughout the drive, as a result of an atypical stomach flu); the “beast” was not. Sorry, Emily, you’ve earned all rights and privileges to the name. We loved seeing friends and family again. When we were looking through our pictures from the trip Rylee said “I just can’t STAND looking at them, I want to be there.” I think we all realized how far away we really live when it took us the three very, very, very long days to get home.

Now we’re jumping back into reality, with school biting us on the toes. Morgan goes back to school on Thursday. We’ve decided to home school Rylee this year. Yikes!.?!..! Need I say more? Oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be looking for the gold. . . I guess that’s next week’s blog. :}