groundspeed

Can't Decide...

Should I be bragging on or making fun of Kevin for this:

It's a storage bin I keep between the driver and passenger side seats of my van. I.e. it's my car junk drawer. On Saturday Kevin cleaned it out and MADE a divider to organize it. 

This was all part of a 4+ hour intense car cleaning session. The plus after the four is for things like a Home Depot run to buy better/stronger attachments for his shop vac.

Two HOURS per car.

And now he tells me I'm not allowed to go to the beach because one of those hours was devoted to cleaning the layer of sand coating the floor of the van. I told him I'd give it a week off, but that was the best I could promise. 

I'm surprised he didn't say anything about my main mess-makers, my passengers. I mean, it's only 6 miles to school. They could hoof that, right? Especially if it's for the greater good of keeping the van clean.

FREE Book

I bought this book because of the Fragile X plot line but haven't read it yet, so I can't recommend exactly but THE PRICE IS RIGHT.  

The author, Maureen Lang, just sent this message to a Fragile X listserv I'm part of:

I wanted to let everyone know that for the next few weeks (until Sept 24th), The Oak Leaves will be a free download for anyone with a Kindle, Nook or electronic reader (or you can download it to your computer or phone if you have an app to read Kindle books, I believe).

For those new to the list, this 2007 novel is about a woman who discovers her Victorian grandmother's journal and references to the "feeblemindedness" in her family - just as the modern day woman begins seeing signs of developmental delay in her toddler. It's a fictional story about a family just learning about Fragile X in their genes and told from two generations, one modern and the other Victorian.

I'm so glad my publisher is doing this promotion - right now The Oak Leaves is No. 1 on the Free Kindle download list (yippee!) so maybe it's attracting new readers who will learn about Fragile X as they're (hopefully) being entertained.

Just in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the book from a Christian perspective, although it's more a story of how people with a Christian worldview handle the diagnosis rather than a story preaching Christianity.

So if you have a Kindle or Nook, the price is right to take a peek at this book. :-)

Here are the links:

Kindle (Amazon)

Nook (Barnes and Noble) 

Ahhh. Florida Living.

After a 6pm family photo shoot yesterday we stopped in at nearby seafood place for dinner.  We sat inside but walked out and enjoyed this view while we waited on our food. The boys fed catfish and watched manatees swim while listening to live reggae. Blue and I even went on the dance floor for a song and he high-fived the keyboardist.

Moments like that make this Florida native thrilled to be back in her home state. Add one mango daiquiri to the scene and yup, it was a perfect evening. 

Equinosaurus

There was a day in car line last week where Toby had had enough with the waiting. Kaden or no Kaden, he was ready to GO. Any toy I handed him in my attempt to avoid total meltdown got slammed to the ground in disgust. But then I had the idea to stick this plastic finger toy horse head onto the dinosaur and giggles abounded.

Thank goodness for a kid with a sense of humor.

Doofus Hair

After getting out of the tub last night Blue announced that he had doofus hair.

I asked him why it was called doofus hair. "Because the girls said." I knew right away who "the girls" were - teens that go to my in-laws church and hung out with the boys a lot while we were in Montana. Teen GIRLS have given his crazy, sticks-up-all-the-time, hair a name.

He is VERY proud of his doofus hair.

Crittery Beach Day

And unfortunately not just because Michelle and I brought our little critters.

Stupid jellyfish. They were everywhere.

At least everywhere on the beach. I didn't get the impression there were many left in the water. I certainly didn't see any in the water. Problem is, our little guys like to run around on the beach.

I've been meaning to check out the beach at Fort Pierce Inlet State Park and Michelle wanted another beach day before she heads back to her landlocked Virginia town, so straight from dropping off Kaden and Blue at school we were off. In spite of the jellyfish, it was a beautiful morning, and since no one got stung we'll still consider it a good beach day. The moms may have been on stressful alert but the kids hardly noticed.

Assuming the jellyfish aren't always there, this is a great beach. It costs $6 per vehicle so I'd guess that even on the weekends it's less crowded than Jensen Beach or whatever Ft. Pierce beach is to the north.

Is summer over? Not for me!

First Day Back

Kevin had to be at work at 6am so he wasn't around for the first day hooplah. With Michelle here and the fact that after I dropped off Kaden and Blue we were heading straight to Speech/OT and from there straight to the beach I wanted to be as prepared as possible.  I packed lunches the night before. I got our beach stuff together and in the car the night before as well. I got up a little after 6am and had breakfast on the table for my three guys. I woke up Kaden and Blue at 6:40... It was all running smoothly. Plenty of time for picture taking. Plenty of time to leave early to allow for the first-day masses. Until I couldn't find my keys. All that prep and togetherness and then I couldn't find my keys. Typical.

I'd locked them in the van with our beach stuff the night before.  

It's a good thing we keep an extra clicker in our junk drawer.  It took me a minute to find it through said junk, but crisis averted.

Kaden on the first day of second grade:

Blue on the first day of VPK:

And then Toby at the beach!

Simon Says, Be Happy!

Toby surprised me today.

My friend Michelle is in town from Virginia. (That's her boy behind Toby looking grumps about our little picture taking session.)  Since she's in town and Kevin's in Tampa (for a Fantasy Football Draft) with Kaden and Blue we decided, instead of going to my church, we'd visit my old youth pastor (who she knows too) at Family Church in Jupiter.

I was a little nervous about bringing Toby to a new place. I'd come close to asking my mom to watch him instead, but Michelle's boy would be in a new place too, and that can be hard for any little kid not just FXers, so I figured they should have each other.

Drop off was no problem. There was a rug scattered with books and wood puzzles and Toby ran to it and never looked back. So much for my new place/transition worries. Michelle's boy, on the other hand, was fussy and in the teacher's arms when we left, so she went and peeked in on them just before the sermon started. Bravo to their teachers, they were attempting a lesson with two-year-olds, but apparently both our boys looked happy.

After church when I went back to pick him up there they were, about eight two-year olds, standing in front of a teacher playing a rousing game of Simon Says. Now, Toby wasn't doing a thing that Simon-teacher said, but he was standing in the middle of the group - not off to the side, not bent over in his old, head-in-the-sand pose, just in the midst looking as pleased as can be.

That one little moment of seeing Toby having fun in the middle of a pack of his exact-age peers really made his momma proud.

Final Summer Days

Busy week! Still had a few back-to-school errands to run.  Shoes for Kaden and Blue. Backpack for Kaden. Dentist for Kaden and Blue.  Meet the teacher at Kaden's school. Plus the usual appointments for Toby. Plus wanting to make their last week fun.  Plus our anniversary.  Plus my friend and her son coming into town. Plus my mom's birthday.

Whew.

I'm tired. (It hasn't helped that Toby got me up at 5:30 one morning this week. And 6am on the dot another.)

When we were in the shoe store Kaden told the man he wanted the fastest pair.  That made me smile.

They look like fast shoes though, right?

Sometimes the boys will wake up on beautifully sunny days and ask if they can play in the rain that day. Uh, guys. I'm good, but I cannot make it rain. When it does look like rain I have to stipulate that they can't play in it if there's lightening. They insist that they are faster than lighting but I insist that they are wrong. I'm the mom. I win. Somehow there ended up being a day this week where all the conditions were right and they got to play in the rain.

I cannot come close to explaining how happy they were.

In other fun we finally checked out Calypso Bay a small water park in Royal Palm Beach.  Small, but still plenty of fun for the boys.

Oh look. My arm is freakishly long.

Ok yes, there's that, but what I really want to point out was how well Toby did just sitting on me as we floated on the lazy river.  It's upping my interest in planning an Ichetucknee trip next month.  

Then my friend Michelle and her son Joseph came in Thursday night from Virginia. Thursday was also our anniversary and my mom's birthday so we held off celebrating till tonight. 9 adults. 6 kids. I made paella and a lemon raspberry trifle for dessert. I also had a master plan to have the kids spray my mom with silly string after we sang Happy Birthday.





My mom is such the crazy German. She didn't even know what silly string was.

But it was a hit. (It's the little things.)

We survived the summer! The boys went to VBS. Blue had three weeks of camp at his preschool. Kaden went to four different camps, five if you count "Gran and Papa Camp" while we were in Montana. 

There was no boredom for my crew

I like it that way.

And the fall is looking to be more of the same.  

Here we go...

Final Hike - Quinnebaugh Meadows

We got up at 6 am so we could be out of the cabin by 6:30 in an attempt to be the first on the trail. Ryan said the area where we'd be hiking had a lot of moose and we were hoping to catch some in the early morning.  The drive to the trailhead was the shortest yet, we drove through Red Lodge and turned in the direction of the ski resort.  I'd say we were on the trail by 7am.  

But for all those efforts we never saw a moose on the trail.

Lots of butterflies.  One happy lab with his camping crew.  Three horses on a trail ride.

Moose are cooler.

Still a beautiful hike. There had been a bad burn in the area in 2008. (We saw a ranger and asked about it.) So the first part of the hike looked a lot like this:

But there was still beauty in the shiny black of those trees.

And there was plenty of life around them.

(I started to think of it as the butterfly hike.)

Sometimes the trail brought us close to water.

And sometimes back to the trees

And here are more pictures of Kevin (apparently I was the camera holder on this hike.)

And finally, after 5 miles, we reached the meadow.

This is a popular place to camp and use as a base camp for other day hikes and we ran into a bunch of campers here, but for us it was a lunch and (for Ryan and Kevin) a quick nap destination. It's also the only place we took a picture of all four of us.

A few more taken in this area:

(Ryan climbed up this rock. The rest of us passed.)

And then we hiked the five miles out, got in our car, and after going about five minutes down the road, I said, "Stop! There's a moose."

As it turns out there were two moose.

Perfect.