School's Out for Summer!

The twins are seven weeks old and we're still eating every 3 hours. Mama is still pumping about half of what babies need to eat. The weather has been hotter than hot the last few days.

And school is out for the summer.

While the twins are getting the hang of being on the outside, my older two kidlets are just wanting to be outside. Which is great when it's not 90 in the shade. We're blowing through sunscreen like we have stock in Coppertone. And drinking gallons of water. And using gallons of water for the Slip'n'Slide, which is stationed right outside the kitchen window because I'm not sitting outside with wee tiny infants when the heat index is 100 degrees.

So Milo and Violet have been enjoying the kind of summer that I did when I was a kid. you know the one -- where your exasperated and annoyed mother, tired of hearing yet another "But she blah, blah, blah" or "Mom! He blah, blah, blah," sends you outside largely unsupervised to discover the wonders of your own backyard.

Activities my children have discovered:

1. Running around (duh)
2. Driving the battery operated Gator
3. Riding bikes on the corn crib pad
4. Slip'n'Slide
5. Climbing all over the play set
6. Heaping tons of flowering weeds on Mocha's grave
7. Sidewalk chalk
8. Weeding the strawberries
9. Blowing bubbles
10. Flying a kite


They have also done the following:

1. Left every pair of shows they own outside to get rained upon
2. Pulled up flowers I kinda wanted to keep and strewn them on Mocha's grave
3. Semi-washed the van -- now it looks like someone puked road dust on the side of the van away from the hose connection
4. Gotten more invisible scrapes, cuts, and bruises than I could imagine
5. Lost juice pouches to the prairie
6. Left their bikes out all night, thankfully there's been no rain
7. Squashed the carrots and radishes we planted along our sidewalk instead of landscaping with perennials that I would likely kill
8. Left sunscreen-y footprints all over my wood floors
9. Tried to fly said kite under the only power lines on our acre and balked when I sent them away from the power lines
10. Made their dear mother insane during the heat of the last few days by bouncing balls in the house, whining, begging for snacks all day long, changing clothes thirteen times a day, leaving Legos on the floor like landmines, leaving half-drunk cups of water all over, insisting on watching the most inane cartoons on Netflix, fighting constantly over nothing, and hopping up and down in tears any time she asks them to quiet down, put something which they had gotten out away, or wait ten minutes for a meal instead of having a snack.

And school's only been out for a week...