nine on the ninth

>> Cate dressed up this princess piggy to bring to preschool on her first day. It looks so sad. I love having a little girl who does silly stuff like this. She left piggy princess in the car while she was in school but brought it with us when we went to pick up Danny from kindergarten.

>> I stick my phone in the bike trailer when we ride to the school to get Danny. Cate usually finds it and takes pictures. Most of the pictures feature my bum. I delete those right away (or share them with you, depending on how wide I look). After 2 weeks of school pick up and drop off I have a few feelings I'd like to share. I was really excited to be able to ride my bike to take Danny to school. I figured it would be good exercise (even though it's only 6 blocks away...or something like that). Cate enjoys riding in the bike trailer so I knew that would be easy. Plus, I'm getting some good use out of it after not using it very much this summer. I've gotten to know the crossing guard. Come to find out, his mom was my grandma's really good friend (his mom is Evelyn, in case you're reading this, mom).

One day this week I drove to pick up Danny instead of riding the bike (because I was tending the nephews and had left the big ones at home alone and I was trying to hurry). Big mistake. I was sitting in the carpool line losing my mind. When I ride the bike, I coast down the sidewalk, he sees me and off we go. When you drive there, you have to wait until all the other cars in front of you have picked up their kids and then you can pull up to the spot where kids are allowed to get in the car. When I finally reached him and he got in, he told me I was late and was not very happy. I was not very happy either. It would have been faster for me to drive home, get on the bike, ride home and then drive back to the nephews' house. I would have been back at their house faster than I had gotten to the pick up spot. As long as it is in my power to do so and the elements don't conspire against me, I will be riding the bike.

Only problem with riding the bike is that I feel like a big weirdo. Know how many other moms I've seen riding bikes with bike trailers to the school? ONE. That's it. I don't enjoy sticking out. I like to blend in with the crowd. My bright orange bike probably doesn't help me blend in either but whatever. I'm going to keep on riding though because I'd rather be that old lady on a bike than freaking out of my mind in that carpool line. I wish I'd realized how good we had it all those years nobody had to go to school and we sat around in our jammies all day. Dang it and the end.

>> It's a good thing I ride the bike actually because I made these cookies three times last week. THREE! I might even make them again this week for a church activity. They're yummy but the best batch I made was at Aunt Judy's house with her brown sugar that was so hard I had to dig it out of the glass container with a sharp knife. You can tell she's not a baker. Maybe stale old brown sugar is the way to go with these cookies. I don't know. They're yummy though.

>> When I was a kid my dad used to ask me two questions every day after school. How was school today? What did you learn? My answers were always the same. Fine. Nothing. Wasn't I a sweet kid? I decided to ask Danny those same questions every day after school too. I thought it might be fun to carry on the tradition. I've been keeping track of his responses. So far school has been good every day except Friday. That one was thumb sideways. He's learned I don't know, nothing and the gingerbread man. Dan and I told him that we might have to look into switching teachers since Mrs. Caldwell isn't teaching him anything. We were kidding of course. I was excited to hear that he actually learned something on Friday. I did overhear him singing a new song the other day as he played in his room so that's good. He says he does not have a girlfriend. I like to ask that one since it makes him smile. He told Dan that he doesn't make a peep at school. I guess that's a good thing but I'd really like his teacher to know that he does talk and he knows stuff. It'll happen right? At least he's not getting in trouble.

>> I've got a cool new app on my phone that lets me take pictures of stuff and then it tells you what color paint it is at Sherwin Williams. Pretty cool since I have plans to paint things around here. Not cool because it just reminds me that I have no time to do anything I want to do, like paint things around here. I've pretty much got four hours a week to myself. That's not a lot. And you'd think my kids are old enough to keep themselves happy while I tackle a little project that I really really want to do and that I know will make me happy. Nope. I'm doing something wrong here. I just know it. But until I can figure out how to get things done, I just go ahead and clean stuff and fold stuff and push kids in the swings. I can't bring myself to actually write a to-do list of all the stuff I'd like to do because I think I'd just be wasting paper and it would sit in a drawer and never have anything crossed off. It'll be old, brown crinkled paper by the time I get time to do anything. So until then, I just take pictures and color match things on my phone and dream.

>> Another cool app on my phone. Artkive. You take pictures of your kids' artwork and then it keeps track of it for you. You can even make books of the collections. I love it for Cate's chalkboard drawings. That way I can erase them but still remember how cute the cowgirl was that she drew, complete with her name on the hat. Now I can take pictures of the art they bring home and throw the rest away! Just kidding. We'll keep a few of the best but there's no need to fill the attic with it right?

>> A picture of Cate smiling on her first day of school (since the ones I posted the other day all looked kind of strange).

>> I took the kids to the library yesterday afternoon (even though I was sick as a dog and would have rather been napping...cate even told me I had boogies coming out of my nose). Cate was wandering around looking for sparkly books about princesses. I hadn't seen Danny for a while. I looked up and down the aisles. No luck. I knew he couldn't have gone to the car because his books would have set off the alarm. I was getting pretty close to worried when I spied him. He was stretched out on the couch reading his Star Wars book. I'm not sure why but I really love this picture.

>> I pulled out all my flowers a few days ago. Gone. They were stringy and done growing and September means pull out your flowers. So I did. There were oodles and oodles of snails left behind. Yuck. I can't remember seeing so many snails in my flowers before. Maybe it has something to do with no rain this summer? Or no snow last winter? Or all the cat poop that gets deposited there before the flowers grow big enough for the cats to stop using the dirt as a litter box? The snails in the picture above are not from my flower beds. They're from my neighbor's. We did some weeding for her a few weeks ago. And that is the hand of a teenager, not mine. You won't ever find me holding an escargatoire of snails. Yuck. (I found that fancy name here. I guess you can also call it a rout of snails or a walk of snails. I like escargatoire better though).

That's all.

Exciting stuff.

I know.

That's my life.

Plus, I'm sick and just doing the best I can.

the end