I don't get it.

I absolutely love being a mom of boys. I respect men and think they are God's gift to women.

Some things, however, I just don't get.

For as long as we've had kids the rule is if you want your window down, no problem. I don't even care if the heat is on and it's freezing outside. I don't care if the air conditioner is on and it's boiling outside. If you want your window down, have it down. Now, notice that I changed the pronoun to I.............Perry, doesn't feel the same way. But, we've agreed to disagree on this so if the kids and I want the window down, he attempts to not say anything or roll his eyes or something equally wonderful like that.

The part that I don't get.............Little Miss is 5. Oh, back to the rule. The rule is that when we are pulling into a parking lot or a place where we are going to be getting out of the car, PUSH THE BUTTON THAT ROLLS THE WINDOW UP. Simple, huh? Well, apparently, not so much.

Back to Little Miss......who, did I mention is 5!!!?! For over a year now, as soon as we pull into a parking lot she will, without being told, roll up her window. So that when we stop and turn off the car her window is already up. When we pull into our driveway, she will, yes, without being told, roll up the window. When we are pulling into Perry's work, yep, roll up the window. And, she is like me and rolls it down every chance she gets so it's not like the boys have it down and she doesn't.

The boys...............when we pull into a parking lot, we shut off the car, turn around and, yep, the window is still down. Almost every single time. They have had more years to learn this important lesson and yet......................

I just don't get it. Some things I've decided will be saved for them when they are parents and Perry and I will laugh our rear ends off!!!

Providential

Some days are....................strange.

We decided to hike from our house, walk about 1 mile up the mountain and connect with a trail that would lead us to Little Si. Kind of reversing what we normally do.

We started out at a slow, but steady pace because it's quite steep.

Within 5 minutes J was complaining because this stoopid bee would not leave him alone. He, being especially paranoid about getting stung due to his allergy, was doing everything he could think of to get this/these bee/bees to leave him alone. Finally I told him to walk back to Perry and let the bee circle Perry. This worked.

For all of 30 seconds anyway. Pretty soon all of us had a bee or bees circling us. There seemed to be nothing we could do to get rid of them. We would kill one, then 30 seconds later another would appear to start the whole stoopid circling again. We turned S's shirt inside out, just in case the flowers on her shirt were attracting them.

We sprayed our bodies with bug spray just in case it was our scent they were attracted to. We closed up any water bottles in case it was the water.

We were really close to where we would turn off onto the Little Si trail but at this point we were all paranoid of getting stung because of the stoopid bees.

Perry and I decided to head back down the mountain instead of connecting and continuing on because of the bees.

It took us about 30 minutes to walk back down the mountain. When we were close to the bottom E stopped us and remarked about the lack of bees. It then occurred to all of us that we had not had one single bee circle any of us once we had turned around and headed back down the mountain. Not a single, stoopid bee.

Thank you Lord for your, obvious, protection. I pray that we always listen to You. We may never know why we were turned around, but turned around we certainly were.

Providential indeed!!!

Homeless

I'm sure everyone drives by people, standing at intersections, holding signs lamenting lack of work, lack of home and/or lack of food. We have our fair share of this and go through phases where we stop and help. Today, was one of those days. It's always awkward knowing we have so much, but there is always the overriding thought that Perry works hard for our family.

E and I were driving away from Costco. We were each getting ready to take a bite of pizza when we saw this thin, twenty-something man holding a sign that said, "Homeless. Out of work. Anything is helpful. Starving."

Neither of us could take that bite of pizza. We had both lost our appetites. The light turned green. Off we went. I looked at E. E looked at me. "Want to go back and give him the pizza that's left in the box," I said. E was relieved.

We circled around, pulled back into Costco's parking lot. E asked if he could also give him some bottled water. "Of course," I replied. He took the 6-7 remaining pieces of pizza and a bottle of water, ran across the intersection and handed them to the extremely grateful looking man.

My heart broke as he dropped to the lawn, opened that bottle of water and chugged half of it. When we pulled back up to the intersection, ready to go home, he yelled, "Thank you so much."

One more memory for E and I. We've talked about this off and on today. It's often hard to know what is the right thing to do. This, felt right, but still weighs heavy on our hearts.

Sometimes It's Better Not To Look

Oh. My. Word.

I sent the 3 younger kids outside to play. I'm watching out the window and see Serena get the trapeze bar swinging by grabbing ahold of the rings hanging below it, swing her legs up and over the bar, still swinging. She then hooks her knees over the bar and lets go, still swinging. She grabs ahold again, swings her body at an odd angle and flips off the trapeze swing. The momentum sending her into a run. Either that or fall flat on her face.

It is completely different when her brothers do it. Their hands either reach or come really close to reaching the ground when they hang upside down. She's a good 18 inches from the ground.

The only comment I made to her, even though I really wanted to tell her to just s.t.o.p., was she couldn't be in a full swing when she does this.

Whatever happened to sitting on the floor coloring? Isn't that what girls are supposed to do?

The Fourth

It has been really nice to have Perry home a little more often. His job is a demanding job. He's good at what he does. This weekend he was needed at work, but due to the wonderful technology that is life he was able to do the same work from home. It was interesting watching him work and always gives better insight to what a demanding job he has.

Today, we went for a bike ride. We haven't been on a long bike ride in forever and boy oh boy did I feel every one of S's 40 pounds. We all struggled, but finally reached our destination where the kiddos swam for awhile.

The ride back totally rocks because it's all downhill. We made awesome time. We then ate hamburgers and lit fireworks. We had watered our woods and lawn because when we did fireworks earlier in the day we started a small grass fire at our neighbor's. Thankfully, there were no fires from our night fireworks.

The only remarkable, besides being exhausting, occurrence from our bike ride was when a medium size dog came running at us, viciously snarling, lunging towards our legs. Perry, being the ever fearless man he is, managed to plant himself between the dog and the rest of us. This is not an easy feat when there's 6 of us, but we were all happy to get behind him. He courageously kept the dog away from us while we quietly and slowly got on our bikes and kept going.

I asked him later if he was ever scared. Because, let's be real here, I sure was. I really thought one of us was going to have a dog's jaw wrapped around a leg. He said, "No, I wasn't scared that I would get hurt, but I was afraid for the rest of you because it had to come by you before I could get to you." My knight in shining armor. I love you, hon. I'm sure glad you're with me.