This afternoon



Antonio came home with a mountain of homework, we took breaks but it still took forever.
Julia insists on doing Omwurk with her brother. As he counts and does math, she parrots him, he cuts out things, she wants to too. I am so worried about her lopping off a pigtail, so before I offered scissors (& nervously hovered nearby) I made sure her hair was all up and out of her sight. She was too busy to even think about that (this time).

What is it about an upright tire that attracts children so much?
Never mind the enormous park surrounding them, with trails and fields and beaches and even a big toy play structure.
It's all about that tire, stuck in the dirt and surrounded by nice, safe, fluffy gravel.



We did bring bikes, a scooter and packed a lunch.
But between the bike/scooter riding,




throwing rocks in the ocean and digging in the sand,



and kite flying, the kids were on that tire.

Julia finally stuck in bed tonight, stocked up with plenty of books and a cup of sleepytime tea.
After a long enough stretch of time with quiet, I snuck in to check on her (because she's fooled me before) to find this.



She was sound asleep under it.

This weekend we went on a long walk with Grandma and Grandpa and Antonio rode his bike.
We came across this bike track and Antonio was stoked to try it out. He did great and even caught some air of one of the jumps.



He did great and even caught some air of one of the jumps.

Julia has been having a hard time getting to sleep lately. The past few nights she's finally settled down between 10 and 11.
She has no problem helping others to sleep though...

Antonio lost a tooth today!
He said he was going to wait to pull it after his dad got home, but seeing that he just left today for his big deployment, he changed his mind and yanked it out.

This evening, tooth carefully placed in a tooth fairy approved box beneath his pillow, he snuggled down for a good night's sleep, eagerly anticipating the loot she would trade his tooth for.

Once certain the boy was asleep, the tooth fairy checked for the carefully placed box only to find that it had fallen off the edge of the mattress and wedged itself between it and the headboard. Trying to be careful and quiet, she crawled under the boy's bed to see if it had fallen on the floor.

It hadn't.

She crawled up on the bed, trying to not wake the sleeping boy, and stuck her hand wayyy down between the headboard and the mattress to see if she could grab it. When she couldn't feel it, she tried to take her arm out, only to find her hand was stuck! Frantically wondering what the eff she was going to do, stuck like a bandit hovering just inches from the boy's head, she was finally, after a few freaked out seconds, free her hand.

Once again, the tooth fairy army crawled under the bed, with the ever so stealthy roaring dinosaur flashlight and found that the tooth box had finally fell to the ground.
Under the cover of darkness, because tooth fairies need to be sneaky, you know, she traded the tooth out for a few dollars and carefully tucked it beneath the still (who knows how) sleeping boy and with a twitch of her wand, she floated off to the next house.

Let the countdown begin.
This morning The Man's ship left on it's scheduled deployment.
We hope to see him sometime in August.

To celebrate, it snowed so much that the schools were closed and I was unable to drive down my hill and get to work. The kids and I played out side in the snow, okay the kids did, but we all watched plenty of cartoons and missed Dad.