2017–week 35

sunday: gotta love it when the easiest way to clean up your yard work mess is this.

tuesday: micah has been all about collecting as much freebie mariners paraphernalia as he can get his hands on (via grandpa). this time he brought him a beard hat. so funny!

also tuesday: our own special “balloon alarm” dog. aside from the barking and howling to alert us, he’ll sit right there and stare at it as it sails peacefully by in the distance and is safely out of sight.

friday: we’ve been working our way through some home movies in the evenings. we happened upon one of shane playing soccer his first year with the original dynamite team. it was long and boring, but dave loved it!

saturday: all the bikes. looks like most of the neighborhood is at our house.

also saturday: more excessive blackberry picking.turning all those blackberries into desserts to take to church on sunday. and also chocolate chip cookies. because why not?

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first day of school

so, we started school today. this is a big deal because it is OUR first day of official homeschooling. you know, here. at home. most everyone reading this is already aware of the fact that shane has been homeschooled since first grade, but that he has spent the majority of that ‘school’ time, with my mother as his ‘teacher’. this was a fine arrangement, she was willing and more than qualified, and he was learning. but for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being my mother’s current cancer issues, it had become clear that it was time for me to take over. AND,with layla being 4 now, i really wanted to do a little bit more preschool stuff with her. being a little bit of a chicken flake, i (with much urging from my loving husband) decided the best route to go would be with a packaged curriculum. i figured it would be the most time-effective way to cover what we needed to cover, and be somewhat dummy-proof, but at the same time, having the option to supplement with as much

project life–week 18

the three amigos… this trio of the neighbors’ poultry is always in my parents’ yard. and spark way too many “why did the chicken cross the road” jokes. these are the two lilacs I gave my mom for mother’s day two years ago. last year, only one bloomed. looks like this year, both will have some nice flowers! when I get to the bottom of a bag of chips and they’re too small to effectively scoop up salsa, I just dump them in a bowl, pour salsa over them, and eat the whole delicious mess with a spoon. not ashamed. dave got himself a new set of bike tools. everyone had to check it out. first grade music concert. micah had a solo! saturday baseball fun. pitching, homerun derby, bouncy houses, dunk the coach… and of course, eating kettle corn and horsing around.

how to make a bad situation worse:

around 7:30 on thursday evening, we had a situation like this: not a good scenario. about 2 hours later, we were in this situation: awesome, right? so how do we get from point A to point B? like this: see the awesome metal ‘edge of death’ on that bowl? yeah. that’s the weapon. in my effort to speedily get the bowl under layla’s face, I actually HIT her in the face with it, and the edge SLICED her upper lip open. yup. right open. it was NOT awesome. I freaked out, of course. she’s still in the middle of feeling terrible. dave was not home yet from a meeting. yeah. mom is majorly freaking out. fortunately, dave walked in the door just as I was sending the “GET HOME NOW!” text. it wasn’t really bleeding a ton, but it was obvious that this was not a band-aid situation. so I called my dad to come and stay with the boys while we took her in to the ER. it’s very nice to have an older kid, so we didn’t have to wait for him to get there before we could leave. but not knowing how long it

Micah’s Birthday

This kid had the audacity to turn 13 yesterday… As was expected, I was a bit of a hot mess about the whole affair. Here’s his “last day to be 12” photo. He ran out of fingers a couple years ago, so taking a page out of Shane’s book, he borrowed a couple of feet from the cat to make 12. But, not too old to choose Lucky Charms for his birthday breakfast. He got his happy birthday facetime call first thing and got to open his gift from Gramma and Skip while they watched… He’s had a boom box on his list this year. You might remember that 2 years ago, it was a Walkman. The obsession with 80s audio continues. Gramma found this one and it seems to fit the bill. Looks totally retro, plays and records tapes but also has radio AND a USB port so he could use some modern tech with it, as well. So, he spent the morning taking advantage of the birthday allowances of not having to do his weekend chores and lifted time limits on video games… all while listening to the radio or one

my vacuum cleaner sucks!

no pun intended… i’ve had this vacuum cleaner for almost 6 years. i’ve been ready to be done with it for about 5. i have the dirt devil ‘jaguar’ bagless vacuum. we only paid about $75 for it at target, which, in vacuumcleanerland, is not very much. still, it’s $75. i tried to find a picture of it on the dirt devil website, but apparently, they no longer sell it, which is probably a good thing. so i had to take my own picture, which is probably better anyway. if you think it looks a bit ‘off’, that’s not just the perspective of the picture. it is a bit off. about a year after getting this vacuum, the latch that keeps it standing upright broke. so, any time you want to NOT be holding onto it (as in, any time it’s not in use) it has to lean against something or it will fall over. ANNOYING! but livable. and then, more recently, THIS happened: that’s a picture of the bottom of it,from the back. note the missing wheel. yup. a wheel broke off. so now, when using the vacuum, if you wan

rachel's continued ramblings

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