Mud Fights, Budding Photographer, & Field Trip... Doug , ever loving a flashy costume, was delighted when I bought him a dark blue dress shirt and a bright orange checked clip on tie just prior to Easter. (He chose the set he wanted…I tried to talk him into a more restrained combination without success.) Anyway, he has begged to wear that shirt and tie to school every day since then. I have let him wear it once a week and have been amazed that his attire comes home clean, though somewhat disheveled (after all, some of his other shirts come home looking like he was run over by a mud-encrusted tractor). Guess that was my error yesterday…I pulled him OUT of his dress shirt and tie before letting he and Rayna go outside to play. Minutes later I discovered they were having a mud fight…happily slinging fistfuls of very wet mud at each other. Both kids were covered with such abundant clumps of mud that it shed off them with each new step they took across my carpet en route to the shower. It was even in their hair! AAARRGG!!!!

Not long after Doug had joined our family, he managed to bathe in the ash-pile outside. Like the mud of this week, the ashes tracked all the way from his entrance into the house to the upstairs shower where I was soon busily restoring his hair from gray back to black again! Since that day, I have always prefaced my giving permission to either of the littler one to go outside with the stern admonishment, “Do NOT get DIRTY!!!” It works once in a while!

This past Thursday was “take your child to work day”. Darcy dressed up quite professionally and accompanied her dad to work. This year, though, she shadowed the company photographer instead of her dad. Of course she came prepared with her own digital camera. The staff photographer took 40 photos that day. Our daughter took 667 photos. She subscribes to her mother’s philosophy of “If you take LOTS of photos you are bound to have a few exceptional ones in the batch!”…law of averages. Therefore, you can NEVER take “too many” photos!!! Darcy understands this truth amazingly well. That is why she made sure she was armed with a one gigabyte card in her camera before setting out that morning! (What does she want for Christmas?…a two gigabyte card!)

Doug’s class took their second field trip last Tuesday. I was able to go along with them. We went to see a play about “Junie B. Jones”. It took me the better part of the hour to reconcile my mind with the fact that the overweight, heavily endowed, forty-some-year old woman on the stage was supposed to be the skinny, precocious first grader, Junie B. Jones! The kids were all just happy as could be to be getting out of school for the day. They had a delightful time. And Doug hung out with me more on this field trip than he did at the first one earlier this year. Maybe his attachment has deepened.  ¶ 4/29/2006 06:37:00 PM 2 comments

  Test-phones... A few nights ago Rayna was telling Darcy all about how Jesus had healed a blind man. Darcy replied, “Oh, is that the time Jesus spit on the ground and then put the mud from His spit and the dirt in the man’s eyes?” Thoroughly taken aback, Rayna declared, “NO! Jesus doesn’t SPIT…He has a BRAIN!!!”

Earlier this week, the dogs were savoring raccoon remains. Asking WHAT they were eating, Darcy explained to Rayna that it was “intestines”. Rayna likes to re-use all newly heard words again as soon as possible. Later that afternoon she was telling her daddy all about the “test-phones” the dogs had been chewing on...leaving her daddy totally baffled. He might never have figured out what test-phones were if Darcy hadn’t been around to translate!



About six weeks ago, we found two abandoned puppies by the side of a seldom traveled dirt road. They were pretty wild and tangle of burrs. They cleaned up nicely, though, and tamed down over just a matter of a few days. We found a home for the one that looked like an oversized Border Collie (a fuzzy Panda-bear-of-a-dog) with Doug’s first grade teacher. (She lives way out in the country, has four children, and her husband has cows.) We had named the little guy “Rohan”…Mrs. Yanhig’s children re-named him “Napoleon” (in honor of Napoleon Dynamite). Meanwhile, we kept the little girl…the solid black pup. Her name is “Rivendell”. The vet says she probably has quite a lot of Australian Shepherd in her. She weighs 20 pounds and we are guessing that she is probably 14-16 weeks old.

One last tidbit to mention…Rayna spotted a huge, wild turkey strutting across our front yard this morning. She thought it was a “goose” and begged me to go catch it so she could “keep it”! She could not be convinced that a wild turkey wouldn’t make a great pet! And she was absolutely certain that her mother could surely catch that turkey for her, if she would just TRY!!!  ¶ 4/28/2006 06:25:00 PM 0 comments