Biff

An afternoon with playmates turned a little sad for poor Burke.  His tricycle wheel collided with the wagon wheel as they were both rounding the corner of the driveway on the down slope.  Not much this small boy could do to prevent his face from scraping along the asphalt driveway.  It got really swollen and black.  He really did not like that.  He kept asking me to take the band-aid off of his eye.  There was nothing on his eye it was just swollen pretty good.  This shows a few days of recovery and to date it is nearly gone.  Thank goodness for healing healthy bodies.

Bright eyed Blakelyn

The bright eyed princess on her throne chomping on cheerios while drooling at breakfast time.

Not invited

We do not do this to all uninvited individuals.  This poor snake was mistaken for a baby rattle snake by our neighbor boy, who was mowing our lawn.  I did some very expert research and have decided that he is a Bull snake.  We might have liked to have this guy around to eat some of our Ground Squirrels.  We would much prefer that over having those pests get stuck in our wall, die, and smell really really really horrible for two weeks.  Do I act as if I have experience?  Unfortunately, yes.  We are just getting over it.  I thought about blogging about that horrible experience but what would I take a photo of?  The walls which trapped the pesky animal to death.  Not too exciting and the smell really cannot be appreciated through a blog post.  Maybe this unfortunate snake has a brother wandering around our yard.  I sure hope he's hungry because there is a lot of eating to do around here. 

Heavy Load

Charlie is learning to read. He is still in the very slow stage but making progress. A few nights ago while trying to read a verse of scripture by himself he read the word "doctrine". We all clapped and cheered. We were very impressed at his ability to read that big long word.

Today I asked Charlie to read to me while I was getting ready. He started reading an "I Can Read" book that had three words on each page with an alphabet theme. There were a few tricky words like "America" and "infant" and"elephant" but most of the words were as simple as "bike" and "car". By the time he reached the "L" page he had stopped. When I told him to keep reading he said, "Do I have to. I'm too stressed out?"

Burke on parenting

Tonight our scripture reading was less than celestial. It was the kind David Bednar talks about having when his boys were young where one boys is complaining about the other breathing his air. There was way too much noise, moving around and pestering and far too little listening. It ended in us yelling at the boys and then sending them to bed barely able to help them say their prayers. Then a few minutes after leaving them behind in their room, Burke, in typical three year old fashion, yelled out that he needed to go to the bathroom. Rolling our eyes we granted permission and boy it was a good thing because he really gave us some pretty good parenting advice..."If you guys were better parents you wouldn't yell." Good thing we have him around or things would really be in bad shape around here.