Nathan at Almost 10

Well I never thought I would see the day, but this year -- ten years in -- is the year I finally had to ask myself a few times, trying to remember which was Nathan's due date. (The 22nd. It was the 22nd!)

It's also the year everything went completely bananas and I stopped even pretending to blog, but I have to leave this space here anyway, my own little corner of the internet, because I need a home for memories and milestones and that kind of thing, even if the day-to-day captures have moved to other online homes.

As this is posting, our family is floating northward on America's highways, en route to Wisconsin Dells, because a day of giant waterparks is what Nathan requested for his 10th birthday, and we do love a reason for a road trip. (And a waterpark.) (And a celebration.) It's funny how tween and preteen birthday requests have moved away from toys and Thomas and Friend Cars, and are now all about devices and bikes and projects and trips. COME BACK TO ME, FRIEND CARS. (Cars 3 is out this summer and I won't lie, I'm dying to see it just so I can cry some nostalgia tears remembering the baby and toddler years.)

So yeah, Nathan is about to turn ten. We've known him for a decade. We've been parents for a decade. I am so freaking full of Feelings my head has been spinning for weeks.

Nathan has had a really good year -- dare I say it was even better than when he was five? (#fiveforever!) He is kind and responsible and funny, and while he remains a true introvert, he is ever more out of his shell. He likes public speaking, and he is proud anytime he can be in a leader role.

He is doing pretty well in school, working hard enough to make decent grades, but not so hard he sacrifices precious Pokemon chatter time. He loves science and math, and loves reading history and biography books. It's taken me years to convince him that novels (or any fiction) are also a delight, but finally FINALLY he is very super crazy into Harry Potter, is partway through the 7th book, and talks about almost nothing else these days. In classic Nathan fashion, he spends hours in internet rabbit holes about fan theories and movie castings and behind the scenes info, and lost in Pottermore fandom, and he thinks it's very important that I tell you here that he's a proud Hufflepuff who thinks fairness, justice, loyalty, and inclusion are the most important things (this is actually delightfully accurate about him).

These days he says he'd like to be an architect when he grows up; he spends lots of his time building and designing all manner of things with his legos and sketching and any boxes or tubes or bottles or other crap he pulls from the recycling bin. (He might or might not have a tiny hoarding problem in his room.)

He also loves watching Master Chef, Jr, and has been harboring some serious cooking desires recently. He wants to try new foods and learn to make them, and we don't even know what happened to our little baby who only ever wanted to eat bagels, and now requests lunch dates so he can have some grilled salmon which we never really fix at home. He delights me in surprising quirky ways, and I love seeing him become more and more himself.

He has become surprisingly (to us! we didn't see it coming!) athletic in the last year, thriving at soccer, making a good effort at basketball, and swimming and running faster than many kids his age, despite his small size (he's still the tiniest kid in his grade). He had two bad scooter spills this year resulting in a few (minor) fractures and injuries in his wrist, elbow, knee and hip -- and spent most of his spring in a leg cast, wrist brace and sling. He was discouraged at the time, but has recovered with no problems and is back to normal now.

He's still playing his cello, and has buckled down and really worked hard at this year; we are officially impressed by what he can do. And! He can now match a pitch, singing! We also never thought we'd see that day. :) He loves choir at church, partly because he's suddenly a great singing leader, and partly because as one of the older kids, he has lots of chances for speaking parts and reading at the front of the church, which he loves.

He and Anneliese are still chummy with each other above all others, but are learning to branch out and be social with their own peer groups and also with Charlotte. They've had a few moments of pain together this year that were hard to watch, but also good to see them grow and learn.

Nathan is still the tiny adult in our family, classic oldest child: doing a funny dance between needing to be a baby with snuggles and back scratching and coddling -- and acting as grown up as possible, bossing his sisters and generally trying to manage everyone and everything around him (I seriously have NO IDEA WHERE HE GETS THIS *ahem*). He's helpful, sometimes to a fault, but we love about him that  he always takes initiative and looks to see what others might need or want. His toddlerhood excellence at empathy is manifesting in new and caring ways, and we are so proud.

Happy almost-ten to our wonderful, serious, funny, loving, bright baby boy. Watching you grow for a decade has been the greatest joy of our lives.

Holding Pillows

Okay so amongst a handful of other more... typical eight-year-old presents, like lego sets and minecraft shirts and and a toy robot kit and space stickers for his ceiling, he also got a long-awaited... holding pillow.

This is a thing I didn't even know was a thing until the past few years.

They're just those slinky squishy pillows you see in various places, apparently Brookstone has the best ones - fom pillows, they call them - but they're all over. Anyway Another Nathan has had one for years, calls it a holding pillow, doesn't like to sleep without it (whoops I just told the internet about that) (seriously though he even travels with it). So when he moved, and needed to fly back with limited suitcase space, he asked if he could have a holding pillow here, in the guest house, so he didn't have to pack one when he visits. WELL OF COURSE. Easiest thing ever, to make our favorite guest comfy.

Anyway, long story short, we got one, it's kind of cool, and now everybody in my house wants a piece of that thing. I used it in the guest house to prop my book arm up when I would go over there to read. Then it made its way to my bed for leaning purposes, or head propping while watching TV. Then the kids started fighting over who got to hug it and sleep with it. 

Y'ALL. I mean it's fun and soft and I like it too, but... it's just a pillow. Not even a pillow. A pillow-thing.

So in April, one of Anneliese's friend's big sisters gave her this one as a hand-me-down. She was thinking Anneliese would like it just because it's a silly rainbow thing but she had no idea the pure joy of her having her very own holding pillow. (!!!) (?)

Can I say it again? It's just a pillow. JUST A PILLOW. It costs $15. We can own as many of these as we want!

So when Nathan wanted his own too (SHOCKING), which he has "casually" mentioned for months now, I took Anneliese to the mall to pick one out for him. She chose a bright blue one, and I swear it was the happiest thing he opened on his birthday.

And thus ends today's episdoe of You Can Never Predict The Random Things Kids Will Go Nuts For.

Nathan at Almost 8

Happy July 22nd! It's Nathan's due date! Again! (No, I have not let go of due dates yet. Hush.)

I am full of feelings today, like every year, remembering eight years ago in the final days of being pregnant, before I was officially a mom. This year for the first time, it feels far away, a long time ago, a previous lifetime. Even just last year I would have said it felt like just yesterday, and now in some ways it does, but mostly it feels now like... a memory.

Pregnancy and babies seem far from my life now, suddenly. It's good and bad. Post for another day. Anyway! *brisk clap*

Sweet Nathan will be eight years old this weekend, y'all. EIGHT.

At almost eight he is still into ships, and dinosaurs, and reading anything non-fiction unless I pull teeth to talk him into a novel. Actually, speaking of teeth, he still hasn't lost any since waaaay last May, over a year ago, and one the Christmas before that. I suspect this time next year he will have a mouth full of holes, or maybe even a mouth full of grownup teeth, so this might be the last of his birthday pictures where he looks like a... little kid. *sob*

He is indeed still little; he actually hasn't gotten any taller since last year, and only one pound heavier, which hopefully doesn't mean anything other than 1- he has Mark's tiny tween genes for being the class shrimp, and 2- he is due for a growth spurt any moment now. He is strong though, and can run fast for a long time, and swim for hours, so his skinny little ribs must have some muscle around them.

He is still a tiny pedant, holding people to their time estimates down to the minute, and correcting anything he perceives as a mistake (I sent him a weather channel video of the biggest ship in the world, and was informed that the biggest ship in the world is actually in a different class and company, and *sigh*) (we are working on politeness). We have no idea where he got that know-it-all gene I MEAN REALLY NO IDEA.

He takes himself and others very seriously, but he also has a playful side when he wants to be silly (and then suddenly acts much younger than his age). He is starting to ask to be into The Things of Older Kids - movies he hears about from friends, and video games, and such. We had one painfully awkward but necessary conversation about birds and bees and the ways life is made, after he learned some wrong things on the playground. (Already!) (I KNOW.) (Recording here for posterity's sake: his notion of all of this came thirdhand via friends about Jack and Rose in the engine room on the Titanic YES REALLY.)

Some days it feels like we are on the brink of a new world, one I am in no rush to get to, yet one I know we can't and shouldn't keep him from.

He is a hard worker and gladly does chores and homework and helps his sisters. He remains one of the most generally compliant kids I have ever known. He loves one on one attention and outings, and is crabby when he feels unseen, and would get lost in internet videos about minecraft, and ship histories, and drawing classes, for hours if we'd let him.

He the moodiest person in our house and also probably the kindest. He is cautious and needs to observe things before he tries them, but once he tries something he keeps pushing until he can do it well; he is driven. He tells funny jokes and horrible ones, is ever better at the cello and ever more tone deaf when he sings, and he writes beautifully.

He is a tiny hoarder of all things sentimental: scraps of paper and drawings and postcards and things other people would consider trash are worth keeping, for him. They get pinned to his bulletin board or stuck in boxes and notebooks, or folded and taped and made into new creations, meshed together with legos and stuffed animals for some world he has dreamed up and decided to build. He is an introvert in the truest sense of the definition: only talks about things important to him, not good at surface level conversation, wants and needs lots of time alone to play and re-charge, and will play happily in his room for long windows of time before emerging to show us what he's been building or working on.

He is a night owl like me, and to wind down in the evenings we usually lie in my bed to read by ourselves together. He is also somehow an early riser, motivated more by the promise of having the house to himself, quiet for breakfast and his favorite youtube channels, than by extra sleep. (He is nothing like me in that way.)

He likes yogurt and candy and hot chocolate and coffee and cheese and crackers and oatmeal and mashed potatoes with gravy. He loves snuggling. He adores his sisters. He texts people the most precious and lovely parts of his heart, things he could or would never say out loud.

He is a wonderful little human, and it's an honor to be his mom, the one who made me a mom, almost eight years ago. Amazing.

Esotonia 2, Ship Design By Nathan

Nathan has been on a ship kick these days. Not just ships but ships of history. Like every little kid goes through a Titanic stage, except he takes it one step farther and gets a wee bit obsessed about all the ships, all the sister ships, all the sinkings, all the survivals, all the war usage, all the drydock construction, all the measurements, all the facts, OBSESSED (so unlike him, I know) (hahahahahaaaaaa *wipes tear*).

So anyway, almost every day he has a newly constructed ship to show us. The Titanic, the Olympic, the Britannic (those are officially the only three I can name, so I am stopping now). He builds them from Legos, or from paper, or from whatever he can find in the recycling bin.

(You think I am kidding, but I am absolutely not.)

He has taken to jotting down his ship design ideas on scraps of paper, and putting them in a shoe box for safe keeping. He has labeled said box "ship designs" and

OKAY WAIT CAN I JUST STOP RIGHT HERE AND SAY I CANNOT WITH THIS KID. Picture a million laugh-cry emojis in a row. He delights me. There is no one else like him.

There are pieces of paper like this literally all over our house. 

Anyway. Okay so his box of ship design ideas started to seem a little risky, and he wanted to put his ideas down somewhere where they would be safe from baby sisters and baby cousins, so he asked me to open up his files where he wrote his blogs before, and some school reports and such (google drive), so I showed him how and he typed up his ideas, and he would like them to be a blog post too.

(I think he thinks he has a blog. Um no. But I told him I would make it a blog post here.)

So I present, without further comment, Nathan's ship design of the Esotonia 2.

Please ask me no questions, I know nothing.

Wait that's not true. I do know that when I am invited to sail on this completed ship, I'm for sure going in third class because I want the wings.

If you have five minutes of your life that you don't mind never getting back, he also fancies himself a rising YouTube star (I don't even know, y'all) and you can hear him talk about a boat he made of legos. It is exactly what it sounds like. Except with a dropped camera and a broken lego and instructions to look at something else while he fixes it. He's basically a professional, is what I'm saying.


(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch on YouTube.)

"Bye, boat lovaaaaaahs."

And Then March Happened, Apparently

That thing where you are months behind so you just post a lot of random thoughts, because people like that better than carefully crafted themed posts anyway right? Hi, welcome to the March (waaaaaay later than March) edition of I Don't Even Know What This Post is About.

Okay so the most important thing is that my sister had a baby! After a pregnancy lasting forty weeks plus four months (she is a dolphin, you didn't know?) (ask me how I know about gestation length of dolphins anyway *side eye*Nathan*) she delivered her third son (yes THIRD) (yes, her oldest is Charlotte's age) (yes, she would accept any of your prayers for sanity) and anyway, meet my newest nephew Everett! He is perfect.

Also! Ali turned one! ONE! I can't believe it's been a year. I love her so much.

The weather got warm and the girls had been asking Mark to plant something, so he took them to pick out flowers and some veggie seeds, and he pulled some dying shrubs out of an area near the pool, and they turned that space into a little garden.

The girls are totally taken with it. (Nathan too, although mostly he is too cool to act like it.)

Oh! Speaking of cool ("cool") Nathan also did a weather project where he needed to write a report including a media/visual component about some weather phenomenon. He chose monsoons. He did a good job researching and writing the paper, and then he made a little video to show why monsoons can damage houses even if you put plastic on your roof, like some people in monsoon-prone areas have to do.

I'm not sure this video actually proves anything, other than he likes to build with legos (and make videos), but it still tickles me. You know you want to see it. Right?



Another random Nathan thing, from the grocery store one night: "Hey this is the same kind of bread Jesus ate! You can tell by the shape!"

(Pretty good endorsement for Kroger, yes? JESUS HIMSELF ETC ETC.)

Hmmmm I... have no idea what else happened in March. Let's look at some pictures.

Anneliese, wearing a lot of colors, and not one but two headbands, including one with a donut on it, because obviously:

Me with all the kids, taking a walk on the greenway, proving once again that it is difficult to get very many people to look at the camera at once:

Charlotte, looking half teenager and half baby:

Perfectly reasonable outfits for a Target run:

And! Marky made me a brownie in a skillet one night when I had a random hankering, and he sort of made it up from a boxed mix, and then he throw ice cream on top, and it was delicious. You know how some things are just exactly what you had a taste for, except even a little bit better? He wins everything.

We ate it on the couch in front of Netflix, because we are good at being grownups.

December Chaos

Heeeeeeey want to know what December has looked like? Me too! Good thing I took gobs of pictures of the chaos!

Nathan and Anneliese both got random fevers on the one (ONE!) day we were all home and had time to go pick out a tree together. So Charlotte and I went alone, and it should have been fine but it felt oddly sad. Tree day melancholy or something. (She didn't care in the least, she loves doing stuff with a parent all to herself.)

I cleaned out Nathan's desk (he is a baby hoarder, it was quite a project) and I had this whole funny list planned of all the funny and quirky and Nathan-y things I found, but then I found this, and it trumps them all, so here you go. Baby's first boob picture.

Yes, he assures me that is a belly button.

Another Nathan flew into town the first weekend of December and we all drove to Greensboro for our friend Meghan's wedding, which was really fun. So lovely to be back together with all these friends for a night.

Mark got suuuuper fever sick at the reception, but he hung in there long enough to be hella excited when the Clemson tiger (THE Clemson tiger) made an appearance. So, yeah.

Also, I got to shop with Another Nathan at Crabtree mall, which is our favorite thing, and we should have bought lots more (this was before the month got away from us and Christmas Panic set in) but it was still fun and lovely to just wander and brainstorm on our gift lists, like old times.

Monday is the new Black Friday! Or something.

Before he flew home, we also went back to our favorite post-choir beer place, for the first time since this summer. And half of it was boarded up and closed down. We couldn't even tell if it was open, and when we got inside it turns out that half of it (our half!) has been permanently shut down and rented out to a bakery, and it was all very sad and weird and It's A Wonderful Life, like Nathan moved and that whole special place for us is gone now. Weird. So weird. We did not take any pictures because... weird. (At least it protects those memories? It was a moment in time, those Draft House years.)

I took Anneliese to see Frozen on Ice with Andrea and her daughter, and y'all, it was delightful. Not even sarcastic. I don't know what I was expecting (more annoying? more cheesy?) but it was professional and fun and the sets were cool and the skating was amazing and it was full of Disney magic. I don't know why I was surprised. Disney... does things well. It was really fun. I would go again, in a hot minute.

Also, Anneliese wants to take ice skating lessons now. Raise your hand if you never could have seen that coming.

We did our annual Santa's Cookie Worshop™ and made a million cookies in one day, which is always fun and chaotic.

Charlotte colored all over herself with markers, and then didn't seem to understand she was in trouble, and DEAR SELF WHEN WILL YOU EVER LEARN WITH THE MARKERS FTLOG.

Ali wore pink overalls and looked supremely cute in them.

Anneliese wore alllll the colors. All of them. Some days she legitimately cries in the morning if she isn't wearing enough colors. This was not one of those days.

This worksheet about the Polar Express came home in one of Nathan's folders last week. SO LITERAL, THAT CHILD. *sigh*

Things That Annoy Me About November

I am back from Minnesota and it was fun and it was cold and I will have updates and pictures later but for now I need to RANT. Because I should like November (it's my birthday month, and isn't everyone always a little bit partial to favoriting their own birthday month?) but I'm starting to like it a whole lot less than I used to. It used to be full of lovely changing leaves and some sense of calm before the holidays. But now, it's... eh. I don't know. 

Basically everything is pissing me off.

1.) At the top of the list is the Christmasification of November. I haaaaaaaate it. I know I sound like a get-off-my-lawn old person by saying it didn't used to be like this, but... IT DIDN'T USED TO BE LIKE THIS. Not that that in itself is a reason to resist a cultural shift, of course. But this is a shift that I'm scared will make me exhausted of Christmas before it even gets here, and Christmas is special! I want it to feeeeeel special. I am feeling protective.

I'm not one of those people who will go so far as to avoid Christmas music during Advent, or get cranky about putting up the tree or decorating -- for me, the excitement of those things IS part of the mental and emotional preparation for Christmas, and it doesn't feel in conflict with Advent -- BUT I will be cranky if we do it before Thanksgiving-ish. I just will. If Christmas has become a thing that takes TWO FULL MONTHS, then it's too much. That's more than 15% of the year! Just no.

Actually, wait. That's not fair. I take part of that back, a little. Everyone can be excited on their own timelines, of course. Just don't push me into it too.

It's more than just not liking it. All of the decorations and jungle bells and songs starting up on my birthday (or earlier!) makes me feel legitimately rushed and panicked and anxious.

Let me bottom-line this before anyone calls me Scrooge: Don't. My resistance to earlier-every-year Christmas is not because I hate the cheer but because I love it, the music and the food and the shopping and the bustling malls and the chill in the air and the holiday beverages. All of it. I don't want to get sick of it or numb to it before it's even here.

In related news, I bought a package of coffee today with a snowflake on it and then I got home and hated myself. Not facetiously. Yes really. :(

Okay, moving on.

2.) Movember. I don't even understand this. Mustaches? Perfectly normal men looking like scruffy porn stars? Is this a fundraiser or something? I am good at the internet, and yet! This irritates/confounds me every year. Is it even cool anymore? Can we just stop?

3.) Faux-gratitude all over Facebook. I'm all for people being thankful. But these normal-status-updates-masquerading-as-thankfulness really grind my gears. They're SO OFTEN just smug or passive-aggressive or even passive agressive. (I'm thankful my x person did x thing and doesn't do y thing like other people. Oh shut it.)

I would like to start a movement where people directly email/text/call/write people they're thankful for, or SHARE some possession or abundance they have, if they're thankful for it (instead of just being smug about having it), and anyone who humblebrags under the guise of thankfulness comes before a jury of peers. Post something about thankfulness when you MEAN it. If that just so happens to be every single day during November and zero single days in the rest of the year, fine, I will try to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I am also giving you some shady side-eye.

(It can be for another day, but we also need to have a discussion about how "blessed" is not the same as "grateful" and there is a place for both words, but if you use them interchangeably, you're very likely putting people off -- read: hurting them -- by implying you have something they don't because God loves you in a way God must not love them. Gross, right? Let's please stop that too.)

4.) NaNoWriMo NaBloPoMo (etc) I have no idea what all those acronyms actually are, but they all drive me nuts, and I cringe to even admit this because I legitimately don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but y'all, that is TOO MUCH TO READ. I love that people write! And every day! But can we each pick a DIFFERENT month to do it all? Like, hey, everyone pick a month in the season you were born, if you want to do a write-every-day project. Because if EVERYONE does it in November, it means there are TOO many posts to read, and I get overwhelmed with my feedly and I don't even try, and LOOK AT MY SAD FACE NOW. (Actually, I take that partly back too. The people working on a novel every day for a month, you keep on keeping on. That, I'm okay with. Full steam ahead, aspiring novelists. It's only the daily blogging that overwhelms me.)

5.) It's dark. Not that I dislike an extra hour of sleep in the morning, or moving the clocks back an hour closer towards what my own internal night-owl clock would like, but dang it sucks that it's so dark within an hour of Nathan getting off the bus. I know, I know, it balances out, whatever. But for the first few weeks when darkness creeps in early, it sucks.

Here is a picture of Nathan and some leaves at the bus stop, because all complainy things aside, November is still pretty gorgeous, even on wet mornings.

Wow, that's a crabby post. Sometimes I just need to be crabby, folks.

Rainbow Reading Levels

Nathan made me a few bookmarks a couple of weeks ago, color-coding reading levels according to a rainbow system. Want to hear all the levels? Of course you do.

Red - books a grownup reads to you
Orange - picture books you can read with help
Yellow - picture books you can read yourself
Green - chapter books with pictures
Blue - chapter books with no pictures
Purple - Harry Potter books

Well. I mean. There you go.

(As you can see, I am on purple level, because I kick ass at reading. As long as I do it quietly, apparently.) (?)

(The child loves a good System, what can we say?)

Seven, No Ten Quick Takes

1.) Anneliese picked out a new winter hat with some Amazon birthday money. Raise your hand if you never could have guessed she'd pick one like this:

2.) I took Nathan on a date to the symphony last weekend. It was a super crappy day and a really lovely break from the super crappy day. He was cellodorable, admiring all the instruments.

3.) I read the Astronaut Wives Club this weekend and it's far from brilliant writing -- mostly a series of vignettes about the first astronaut families in the sixties -- but I didn't need it to be a great novel, I was totally captivated anyway. I am now craving anything about the space race, I kinda want to watch Apollo 13 tonight, and I can't stop wikipedia-ing all the folks for a dose of Where Are They Now. Also I want to go back to the space center at Cape Canaveral (Mark and I visited in 2010 and it was great, but I think it would be even more great for me this week). 

So yeah, I'm hoping they make this into a tv show as has been promised (then delayed, but we'll see). The stories might actually tell better as a series instead of a book.

4.) Anneliese and Ali and I went for a fall walk a few days ago, just as the leaves were starting to change. You would not believe all the things a five-year-old has to tell her infant cousin about leaves changing, but it's a lot.

5.) We closed the pool last week and I miss it already.

6.) Nathan just read the "junior novel" version of the Lego movie and he seems to have internalized its message differently in print than on the screen. He now considers himself a Master Builder and keeps building things and telling us how he VISUALIZED them and that's how he designed them and oh man it cracks us up. (In a good way! He is sweet and smart. I'd hire him for all my aeronautical engineering needs, and no I'm not kidding.)

PS I got a haircut and highlights, as per my pre-birthday usual.

7.) After the slowest loudest construction project in the history of history, and many early-morning and late-night trips in my PJs to fuss at workers causing a ruckus outside of approved times ("I know you're just doing your job, but WE LIVE HERE" = me, sick of hearing myself talk), the house across the street is finally done! It was featured in a Parade of Homes thing, so we went to check it out, and it was nice in the way that fancy houses are always nice, but not our taste at all: some odd mashup of clean/modern and also totally dowdy. It's hard to explain. But anyway, if you want to live directly across the street, the house has a million dollar view!

Yes really.

8.) A few weekends ago when I was in Charlotte, I stopped at Ikea for some new cubes/shelving, which are lovely. (I got a teal cube system! TEAL! For my bathroom! Which I am now 99% sure won't fit but whatever, it's TEAL.) While I was there I also got Anneliese a new duvet, which I have been wanting for her since we rearranged all the bedroom furniture in our house A YEAR AGO, but the one I coveted for years before that has been discontinued, and anyway I never could find one that I liked AND she liked, and then this happened at Ikea, and now she has a very Anneliese bed.

Here is a thing I absolutely did not need but absolutely wanted, and I didn't buy it, but I'm pretty sure I might. It's a neon yellow stool! I mean, I need that, right? Someone talk me into it. Where should I put it?

9.) I have a new-ish phone case, and I love it. This is called a Loopy Case. It is just a case, with a loop in the back, which you can adjust to fit whatever finger you want. It is so simple and SO GENIUS.

It helps me hold my phone much steadier (I was a two-hand typer on my bigger android, and the smaller iphone is still an adjustment - slightly too small for two hands, but slightly too big for one -- and this makes it totally doable). It also means I never drop my phone on my face in bed anymore YES THAT IS A REAL THING. It also means I can knuckle it on the back of my hand and also carry a kid/purse/car seat, which keeps me from sticking my phone in my pocket instead, and that's always a good thing.

PS with the loop on the back you can stand it up for such purposes as alarm clocking. Or facetime dates. Or everyone trying to watch a video at the same time.

Anyway I love it, and I get asked about it all the time, so I am blogging about it. (My first one cracked, and I emailed them and they sent a new one -- with the loop holes now slightly offset, in their updated version, which I think will prevent that stress fracture from happening again -- and anyway with the recplacement they sent me an EXTRA. It's black, and I have a pink and a purple and a gray loop for it, so if you have a 5c and you want it, tell me and it's yours.)

10.) This post barely mentions Charlotte, but she's still the best Booler ever, so here, enjoy a delightful picture Mark took of her swinging out back.

Yes, she is wearing a sundress and some shorts and a tutu. Why, what do YOU wear to go swinging?

Some Other September Things

Here are some other things we did in September (alternate title: let's take a journey through my phone's camera roll) --

One Friday night when Marky was working, the kids and I made popcorn and turned the lights off and snuggled on the couch and watched a movie together. We had never seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It was delightful.

I snuggled with Ali a lot. Because she is also delightful. She's turned into a super happy baby recently. I'll take it.

We took a lot of pictures at the bus stop. Some days, even in non-yellow shorts.

(Anneliese now has a carpool ride two days a week --
they pick her up from N's bus stop!)

Anneliese learned to brush her own hair and suddenly she's a teenager.

Charlotte did her first round of swim lessons. She can't swim on her own yet but she also didn't poop in her swimsuit at all, so that's a hearty win.

Nathan got a bad case of swimmer's ear (seven years! three kids! our first ear infection!) and we barely slept for several nights and he was generally miserable and in pain but it's over now.

I did some more preschool homework FTLOG.

Another Nathan came for a weekend to visit, he and Mark shucked some corn fresh from Minnesota and grilled dinner and we played with the kids and ran errands and it was all right and normal and good, and then we waved bye til next time.

Anneliese and I painted our toes yellow.

We set up Mark's old phone with Nathan's email so he has a way to text/call us (through google hangouts) and we can leave him home alone for an hour or so when we need to. One night he was home doing his homework and practicing, while I hopped over to church for a few minutes for preschool orientation, and Mark had the girls at dance. This is what texting with a seven-year-old looks like:

Anneliese's cutie friend Beatrice has been with us for a few afternoons, and as always, we love having her around. (Especially when she can pull some cheerfulness out of Anneliese these days.) We decided these two are competing for the best-dressed award at the weekday school.

Charlotte got in the habit of wearing a cape to go poop. Like you do.

Nathan graduated out of his first cello (from this eighth-size to a quarter-size, coming soon). He's very excited but I am mostly sad. His first cello! Aw. I will miss this tiny sweet thing.