Camping

Well, we were going to have the girl's first outdoor camping experience in the back yard tonight.  It is going to get down to 52 degrees overnight.  I was thinking - "What a perfect night to sleep outside!"  Jason was thinking - "Those girls are going to freeze!"

I was going to have them in their sleeping bags and throw a comforter over top of them.  I figured keeping warm would be incentive to stay in their own sleeping bags rather than coming over to mom & dad's air mattress and attempting to steal some of our covers.

The girls are (somewhat) happily sleeping in my old 2 man tent in the living room.  They really wanted to sleep outside, but Dad vetoed that idea.  We will keep that for another night that doesn't get so chilly.

The plan is: camp for one night in the backyard and then if that goes well, book a weekend at the regional  campground 5 minutes from our house and stay up there while we do all our normal stuff.  If there isn't a meltdown there, maybe we can head somewhere out of easy driving distance from our house - like Bemidji or the North Shore and stay there for a weekend. 

Until then, we will be here in the living room.

Still getting the hang of this...

I'm still trying to get the hang of this mom thing ...

I awoke this morning to hear Jordan wailing in the kitchen because daddy left for work.  Didn't really think that much of it - if the girls wake up in time to catch him leaving they tend to get weepy because they don't want daddy to go.  To be honest, I don't either, but there are those small things like the mortgage, food, electricity, gas - you get my drift.  Anyway, she came back into my room so worked up and sweating  - she had REALLY been crying I didn't really think anything of it.  I knew that no one was going to get back to sleep so we all got up and got some breakfast. 

We had planned to go to the YMCA so I could work out and then we all would go swimming afterward.  I got the girls clothes out, they dressed themselves and Jordan was unusually moody.  She would be happy and laughing and alternately crabby, whining and crying.  We all got in the car and headed to the Y.

So, until today the girls have not had much more than a sniffle.  I was not expecting to be called down from the weight room within five minutes of arrival and told that Jordan had a 101.2 degree fever.  How did I miss this?  They must think I'm a horrid mother dragging the little one out with a fever like that.  Until this morning I didn't own a thermometer.  We went to the store and got some Children's Advil Fever and a thermometer.  As soon as we got home she went to bed for a 3 hour nap. That seemed to do it - the fever was gone, but she was still pretty lethargic.

One day I'll be able to look at my kids and be able to tell that they have a low grade fever or a hangnail or  needs a dose of Vitamin C like my friends can.  Until then I'm still getting the hang of being a mom ...

The girls get a job

I bought the girls piggy banks a couple of months ago and they love putting money into them.  I told them that if they found any coins lying around in any room other than my bedroom they can have it and put it in their piggy banks.  I will occasionally seed the living room or the kitchen with pennies and nickels and watch the excitement as they find what they all quarters.  I have found that any coin is a quarter in their eyes.

They have now decided that they need more money to put in their piggy banks, so I have given them an ongoing job.  I have a bad habit in the garden - I will pull weeds but I won't put them in a bag and dispose of them.  I told them that for every garbage bag of  weeds they fill I will give them a dollar.  I am the final arbiter of how full they need to fill the bags.   They both loved the idea.  We went to Menards and bought them some work gloves with Spongebob on Breonna's and Diego in Jordan's.  I started pulling weeds and piling them up between them. 

Jordan started out strong but lost interest almost immediately.  She went and started playing with some wood chips on the top terrace.  Breonna actually stuck with it until her bag was almost full.  I think she is starting to see some value in patience and perseverance because she just lit up when we gave her that dollar bill.  Jordan was mildly disappointed with her dime, but when she went to put it in her bank she promptly lost it - took her 5 seconds to lose track of it.     

Bunnies

I have been asked about the bunnies in the picture with the girls.  Yes, those are bunnies with harnesses and leashes.  No, those are NOT our bunnies.  Jason's cousin Tammy's kids each have a bunny given to them by their grandmother.  They are very nice bunnies named Flopsy and Mopsy.  I asked, but I do not remember which is which.  We were in Sioux City last weekend to visit Jason's parents and his family. 

Bunnies - I don't think I would choose them for a pet.  Don't get me wrong - they are cute and lovable and I'm sure they are rather intelligent.  I have friends that have a pet bunny and he goes in the litterbox just like a cat.  My problem is rabbits and squirrels make my life miserable in my garden. 

I've described my garden in a previous post.  It is the thing that consumes a lot of my spare time in the summer.  Weeding, pulling weeds and eliminating vegetative infestations take up most of my time.  However, sometimes I also need to save pots that have been turned over by varmints that were digging to bury acorns for the winter.  My garden is pretty much a salad bar for nearby vegetarian creatures.  I also found this spring that the rabbits pulled most of the bark off of one of the larger shrubs in front of my house.  I hope it lives - I kind of like that one. 

If they would take direction I could tell them which shrubs to kill ... like the one on the east side of the garage: EAT THAT ONE!  Or the ones that I have to trim 5 times a summer along my driveway so they don't scrape my car as I pull in and out.  EAT THOSE!!  Leave the ones in the front yard alone.  Please?

Fun day!

This morning we slept in a little bit, ate some breakfast and got ready to go to the Y to swim a little.  The girls always love these days because they get to hang out, meet new friends at the pool and "do" mom's hair.  This involves finding a bucket of some size - anywhere from a cup to a gallon - and take turns pouring water over my head.  If they get hold of one of the smaller containers in the YMCA's toy bucket, it is fine but if they end up with one of the larger ones I am sure to be beaten about the head (because they can't control a loaded down gallon bucket of water) and half drown (because the water ends up going in my face instead on top of my head).

As I grew up with two younger brothers I don't recall having the fixation on hair styling.  Possibly because my brothers never really had much hair for me to style and my mother would never have let me touch her hair. I DO recall many hours of playing Batman (the cheesy 60's Adam West version) or Wonder Woman.  We raced around the backyard and vaulted on and off the propane tank which was either the Batmobile or the invisible airplane depending upon who we were emulating.  As we got older and more sophisticated we would play things like The Boxcar Children, Tom Sawyer, or Huck Finn and disappear through the culvert up the road and pretend that was our own little world.

If I got hurt (and I'm sure my memory is imperfect here) my mom would squirt some Bactine on the injury and send me on my way.  I don't recall a lot of wailing or cuddling after an accident.

I watch these girls and they can play "Mommy" for hours trading the mommy and auntie roles back and forth.  They scrape their knee in the driveway and obsess over it for days until you can't see it anymore - and even then they still often want a band-aid for it.  I need to understand these little souls before they are beyond my understanding - teenagers.

The Garden

So I have this garden in my backyard ... OK, it is really more like a park.  3 levels, a pond with a waterfall, 9 oak trees, hostas and perennials beds, wood chips, stone path.  I wish I could take complete credit for it, but the lady who lived here before us put her heart and soul into building it.  I am making improvements to it as I can.

So I have made rules for the girls:  PLEASE stay on the paths or the wood chips.  Do not go exploring through the foliage.  Stuff like that.  We bought them a play house that I put in the back corner of the garden so they could occupy themselves as mom pulls weeds. 

I had no idea that they had been digging in the dirt themselves - the flowerbox on the playhouse had a gross mixture of rainwater, dandelion stems, and dirt.  The girls who have up until this point been afraid of box elder bugs and gnats have started picking up millipedes and wanting to keep and feed inchworms in the hope that they would become a butterfly. 

Unfortunately they went stomping through the foliage and trampled down about half of my oriental poppys.  I'm rather attached to those poppys and was rather upset that they had met their demise under the feet of young children.  I needed space to process.  On one hand, they ruined some flowers that were going to make great pictures in about a week.  On the other hand, they are my girls and I love them more than any old flower in the garden AND they weren't acting like princesses and being all squeamish about bugs in the garden.  Deep breath ... Get over it Paula. 

So we all had a good day in the garden.  I put down a stone floor in the girl's playhouse so they wouldn't get quite so dirty.  And we cleaned out that disgusting mixture in the flowerbox and planted some impatiens.