Marching On

If Kelli is blogging, that probably means Jim is out of town again. Yep. 

My friend/neighbor Lindsay told me that she and her kids do about two summer activities a day. I adopted the plan into our home and it helps keep us from wasting the summer days, and keeps the house from becoming a war zone. 

Usually the "second activity" is a bike ride down to the Halverson Park (forest) after dinner to spend the final hours before bedtime. The kids get nice and dirty/tired. 

Last night we went back to Padden to mountain bike/check up on our gnomes, and one of them was stolen. 

We left it in a spot that was too out in the open. We somehow thought everyone would find the gnomes so enchanting, they would leave them alone if they found one. 

Fool me once...

But this hiding spot was really good. Gnomey Britain (that's its name) was still in there, deep inside the eve of the root roof. 

One day Jim had an early show.

He forgot his wallet at home.

I awoke around 7 and sleepily turned off airplane mode in case Jim needed to get a hold of me.

My phone immediately started ringing.

"Bring me my wallet."

I scrambled the kids, "Go pee and get in the car. We have to take daddy his wallet."

And we did, and it was fun to see him for a few seconds at work.

**no flights were delayed due to waiting for the pilot's wife to bring him his wallet**

However, when he landed in Vegas, something broke on the airplane, so he had to stay there over night. He's been overnighting so much this month. thumbs down.

On the night he was stuck in Vegas, we went to the park to burn up the last hours of the day. 

A lady came and started playing her bagpipes. It was really pretty. 

Cool things happen in the forest. Such weird growth out of everything. 

Whole trees grow out of stumps, and foliage grows on dead logs. 

**currently there is the loudest fly flying around my room. it's driving me crazy. Jim is usually the fly-taker-carer-of, but he's not here. what do i do? it is so so loud. **

One day at this fun park, Jim walked off the trail to...uh...look for his wallet...and he thinks he brushed his leg against some stinging nettle. So this is him googling stinging nettle. 

For some reason, google is useless at telling me what poisonous plants look like. You would think I could spot them by now, but I have no idea. 

I love 8 year old girls. 

These two always have such grand plans!

They spent days dressing up all their beanie boos, and on Sunday they were finally ready to put on the fashion show. 

It was so detailed and involved (and long!). I think only the moms were left watching by the last beanie boo. 

We are doing swim lessons currently. The kids love their teacher. They have so much fun.

I am going to skim over most of this story because it puts me in a bad mental place,

but a week or so ago, we were playing at Semiahmoo beach and Evan almost drown. I saved him, and after it was all over, I sobbed into my friend Susan's motherly bosom. 

It was so scary and I hate it and I can't think about it.

I marched home and signed them up for lessons. 

It was an awful few days reliving my stupidity of thinking that kind of thing couldn't happen to me. 

An interesting thing about it is, I just really needed forgiveness. 

To stop my brain from reliving and beating myself up, I needed forgiveness from someone. Anyone. 

So I prayed and begged Heavenly Father to forgive me. And that has worked. I have been able to quiet my brain about it. 

Also, an unexpected gift of the horrible experience was that I have got a motherhood-rejuvenation. 

I think I was in a mom slump...begrudging the demands that come with being a mother....

I also begged for forgiveness for those selfish feelings. 

Since then, I have renewed patience and love for all three of them. I hug and I hug and I kiss kiss kiss every two seconds. 

Ok, that's enough of that.  

I noticed this on Jim's bike the other day. Isn't that a lovely juxtaposition? 

How did these delicate weeds make it all the way home from the mountain like this?

How did they get in there?

Yesterday was me and Jim's 14th anniversary. 

We got a babysitter and hit up the Chuckanuts. 

He is doing a mountain bike enduro race at the end of August, 

and I am doing a trail half marathon in November,

so we "practiced" on our respective trails. 

It was peaceful. 

You know how wedding invitations come with that weird white tissue paper square? Did you know that when we were working on our wedding invitations, there was one random tissue square that was red. We put that red one in one of the envelopes and we don't know who the recipient of the lucky red tissue square was. 

If you are reading this, and you got the red square, speak up! 

We may never know. 

Fragrance lake was near the end of my run. I really wanted to jump in. 

**that dumb loud fly is still buzzing around. come home Jim...we need you**

More Summer Days

A few weeks ago, Evan got the pukes. He was so sick. He just lay here on the couch, not moving or talking all day.

Near the evening, I decided to take him outside for fresh air. He rode in the wagon and tried to get out and run around for a minute, but it was too much for his sick little body. He climbed back in the wagon and laid down. 

I like hyper, active, energy bomb Evan better than

lay around sick Evan.

There's so much daylight out there, 

it was a bummer to have to spend it on the couch. 

Remember I was potty training for a second?

I quit. 

He has a total aversion to underwear. 

At first I didn't think this would be a big problem...I just put shorts on him, and took him to the pot every two seconds. 

But then I went on a bike ride and came home to Evan standing on the sink trying to wash off the poop he had stepped in, and poop smeared all over the floor.

Gross, I know. Believe me, I know. 

I was training for the tri at this point, and I still had to go on a run, so me and Jim cleaned up the hazmat situation, then I went out for my run.

It started raining and it was so so refreshing. 

I lifted my arms to the sky in a very Shawshank Redemption moment. 

To sum up: I will continue with diapers until Andrew decides he wants to wear underwear. He has a thousand pairs to choose from. They have every cartoon character ever on them. Some day he will choose underwear over diapers, and I will be ready. 

More Lake Padden.

Are you sick of Padden hikes yet? I'm not. 

Post Padden Fiamma Pizza. 

Downtown Bellingham is so pretty and exciting. 

I like the ambiance. 

Hey do you remember the "gnome roam" at Silver Star? 

I bought these little gnomes and we are going to hide them around Lake Padden next time we go. 

This kind of thing thrills me to the my bones. We have many places that Jim and I have hidden stuff, and return to (or hope to return to some day). 

Probably the most famous is our time capsule we planted in the Fallon piano,

but there is a penny hidden behind the Hog's Head in Harry Potter World,

and a quarter hidden in an elephant looking rock in Red Cliffs UT. 

Those are the only ones I can remember.

Neighborhood bike ride parking. 

Point Whitehorn fort. 

Their sandlot. 

These boys play a lot of baseball. 

In the produce section, there is a little table of fruit for kids to eat while mom shops. 

One day Evan picked a banana and held onto the peel. 

When we got to the checkout, he sneakily put the peel on the conveyor belt, and watched, giggling, for when the checkout guy discovered the peel. 

It was hilarious to watch him pull this silly prank. 

The checkout guy loved it too. He sneakily put the peel in a little paper sack and presented it to Evan as if it were something good. 

When Evan peaked into the bag, they both laughed and laughed. 

Me and Andrew play this game where he points to me and says "Andrew"

and points to himself and says "mommy",

then we both cry, "NOooooo! That's not riiiiiight!"

Soo close to grass. 

Get home, Jim! He should be landing in Bellingham any second. 

While Jim is Away...

Jim is out of town. He had to fly to LAX today, then tomorrow morning he is flying a trip to Tennessee and back. Then Home. Across the whole country and back. 

I just find that fascinating that we humans can do such a thing. 

So here I lay, blogging. I get so chatty on here when he is gone:

I decided that we would be home as little as possible today - less messes made, less fights to break up.

We started the morning with chores and exercise.  Lots of grumbling involved there.

Then we went and picked berries with our favorite friends. 

The berry farm has a playground, so after picking a thousand pounds of delicious, giant blueberries, we let the kids play while Lisa and I talked and talked. 

What a goldmine of a friend she is. We talked about Animal Farm, and John Steinbeck and about seasons, and how the seasons parallel our lives, and how there is a season of dormancy, and we talked about podcasts, and about how to be a mom, and about family and breast feeding and vasectomies... and two hours later we had to pull ourselves away and round up the children. I am itemizing all these topics because I wish to point out how I adore conversating with my friend. She is my favorite. She stretches my brain and my vocabulary. 

Then we realized that her baby had taken her car keys and dropped them down the gutter while we were in our chatosphere. 

I lifted the giant, heavy cage, and she dropped to her belly to fish them out. 

Right as we were leaving the berry farm, our favorite neighbors texted that they were at Semiahmoo playing in the tide pools, 

so off we went to join them.

As the boys were playing in the water, Evan suddenly realized he has a fear of crabs, and he freaked out, wanting me to come pick him up and carry him out of the water. 

I refused. I stood there and talked him down. 

"just walk out of the water, Evan. Save yourself. Walk out of the water."

Scream, cry, freak out.

Repeat.

I refused to "save him" because lately he does not problem solve. Instead, he just screams and freaks.

So my friend Lindsay offered to go get him out of the water, but I stopped her. 

No. He needs to learn to save himself. 

(and by "save", I mean "to walk two feet out of the ankle deep water").

Eventually he walked out of the crab infested water (that everyone else was sitting/crouching in comfortably). 

Deep breath. 

I just don't know. 

This was the holding pond for all the sand dollars the girls found. 

They claim that the live ones are black...but I'm not sure about that. I will have to google it later. 

It looked to be a fact, but who knows. 

Next, we changed into some emergency car shorts and went to dinner at Paso.

Andrew did that ^^ practically the whole time.

There was a boy from Avery's 2nd grade class at the restaurant, so Avery was acting so silly and giggly the whole time. Kinda cute, kinda annoying. 

When we got home, we saddled up and went with the Dicksons for a bike ride out of the neighborhood to a park/forest a few miles away. 

My kids have never ridden their bikes this far, and it was such a blast! 

There were 7 bikes plus Andrew in the trailer. 

These kids play so imaginatively together.

Tonight the scenario du jour was that they were babysitters and they were on an adventure of some kind? (based loosely on the new Disney remake of Adventures in Babysitting. We've been watching that a lot lately).

Of course Evan had to poop somewhere in the middle of this, so we ran down to the bay and luckily there was a portapotty right there! Phew.

When we got home, we had a snack, showered, and then Evan asked, "can I go to bed?" 

YES my darling. That was my plan all along. 

4th of July

Our friends live within walking distance from Birch Bay, and Birch Bay is THE place to be for the 4th. People come from all over because it's the only place in Whatcom County that allows you to light your own fireworks. 

So they come, and they set off fireworks around the bay all night long. 

It's a horseshoe of a display. 

We walked down with the kids before dark to throw rocks and feel the excitement. 

That's 11 kids among our families...

Later, the dads and moms took turns going down without kids to the mayhem.

It was so exciting and amazing! 

Beach fires, wall to wall people, non-stop booms and crackles. 

As the night was rapping up, some teenagers came to the door and "caroled" the Star Spangled Banner. One of the boys is in our ward. It was funny. Good old youth.  

On the 3rd of July, we had a neighborhood display. It worked perfectly because we all went our separate ways for the 4th, so this was a fun neighborhood celebration. 

Kids sharing lawn chairs, dancing in the smoke, scooting chairs back further and further from the launch site. 

This is the crux of summer.