Scene -
The kids have walked down to the park near our house with some friends.  It’s a sunny day, around 80 degrees.  Birds chirping, kids laughing, yadda yadda yadda… 

Gabe’s friend Matt: Hey, I think this is poison Ivy, guys.
Gabe: No.
Joe:  Yeah, I’m pretty positive that’s poison Ivy.

Joe takes one for the team and touches it with his index finger tip.

Joe: No, it isn’t stinging me. I don’t think it’s poison ivy.
Gabe:  IT ISN’T POISON IVY!  I’LL PROVE IT.

Gabe proceeds to rub a bunch of it all over his arms to make his point.

SEE!

Kait wanders over to see what the commotion is all about:  Um, guys, that’s poison Ivy.  GABE, WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING?!?!  YOU’RE AN IDIOT!
Gabe:  Oh. Crap.

So Kait sent him home, along with 8 year old Ben who also touched it.  I had them wash well with dish soap and hopefully they both managed to remove all the poison oils from their skin.

I asked Gabe if he minded me putting this story on the blog and he said, No.  It’s funny.  I’m going to be famous.

So I’m sitting here on the couch minding my own business when suddenly my oldest child is stuck in a box in front of me because she’s turning into a cat or something apparently.

While Kait was trapped, Joe ran up and drew a face on the box and Kait hollered that she was finally Lionel Richie.

The resemblance…
Astounding.

Basically the best pose ever in the history of the world.

I have so much to tell you, people, and I’m so irritated with myself that I have failed to blog for the last week or two. Halloween happened and that was pretty much pandemonium mixed with high fructose corn syrup and red dye number 3.  Also, what the heck is wrong with my potted plants? They’re just dying and I have no idea why. I suppose it could be lack of water. Do potted plants get thirsty?

I have one that looks completely dead but is now growing a bell pepper. I don’t even know what’s going on there. Maybe it’s undead. Can plants be undead?

My giant peace lilly, which I named Jessica (I always name my plants after my frends) was quite happy indoors but Lucy likes to such on her blooms for some reason, and it just so happens that lilly blooms are poisonous to adorable little girls. And all other people.
So I had to move my giant peace lilly to the out of doors and while it’s not so much dying, it’s definitely unhappy with me for choosing my year and a half old daughter over her.

Marty, my ponytail palm, is doing well. That thing can be ignored for 8 months and still truck through and look deep green and beautiful, but Lucy likes to pull my other palm, Lauren, apart. And, while Lauren is not dead, she sure looks as though she’s been living in the middle of a Kindercare center for the last year.

By now you must be wondering what the heck I’m blogging about my plants for. I am wondering the same thing and I’m blaming it on the time change.

I have a picture of myself for you today. It’s me in costume.

And I’ll be your best friend if you know who I am in the picture.

If you’re looking for me I can be found at the medical clinic on base here in Mayport trying not to catch Monkey Aids or some equally disturbing virus.  I’m in the physical therapy waiting area, which also happens to be the unbelievably crowded pharmacy waiting area filled with people who got their flu shots so they wouldn’t get the flu that they got anyway.

[Some time passes while I use the little girls room]

And now I’m sitting on a bench outside because when I came out of the bathroom every single seat was taken and there were a bunch of germs try get on me.

[Fast forwarding until now]

I didn’t finish this post yesterday because it’s just who I am lately.
Sorry.

Since this post isn’t really about anything I’ll give you a bonus portrait Sam(5) drew of Jesse(3) on my tablet and then he took a screen shot and saved it in my gallery. I just got this thing yesterday, people, and my 5 year old knows better how to use it than I do.

I found the picture in my Gallery and asked Sam if he drew it and he said, Yes.  It’s Jesse using all the magic spells he has in his hands and feet.

I don’t know anything about that though.  I just work here.

My house has apparently taken it upon itself to dress all fancy-like. 

Sort of. 

It’s a clip-on-tie so that’s like saying, I’m 3. Which is actually the age of my house so I guess it fits.

I don’t really have much to blog about except that I cleaned my room and while I cleaned I opened up my windows, which have stickers on them that help our military housing people strictly enforce the no-unlocked-or-open-upstairs-windows-ever rule.  I’m like an unmanageable teenager, yall.

I can’t think of much else that’s happened so I’ll just tell you what Sam said.

At the museum last week, Sam, my 5 year old, picked out one of those dinosaur eggs things that you put in water and it hatches and then you have a little dinosaur.  He was so excited that his egg would hatch and he would finally have a pet dinosaur, which apparently is all he’s ever wanted.

He was telling me all about it and I asked him what he was going to name it.  He answered, I’m naming him Brick.  I asked, Brick? Not Fido, or Rover, or spot?  He said, No.  His name will be Brick.

Two days later I found his hatched dino sitting on the coffee table and I took it to him and we had the following conversation.

Me: Sam, you left Brick on the table. Pets are not allowed on the table.

Sam: That’s not Brick.

Me: Isn’t this your dinosaur?

Sam: Yes.

Me: You told me his name is Brick.

Sam: Yeah, I did, but he’s not Brick, he’s Rubber.

Then a couple days later Sam was calling him Brick and I asked, I thought you said he was rubber now.  Sam replied, as if I were missing something completely obvious, Yes, he’s rubber, but he is Brick.

The end.

P.S. Sam (5) and Jesse (3) stopped whining and became awesome the instant I said smile.

One of my older children had to write a paper and used the word “till” in one of his sentences. This was the following conversation he had with his older sister when she was helping him in his writing process.

Kait: Brother, you can’t use the word “till” in a paper like this. It’s not a real word.

Brother: Oh yeah…

Kait: Yeah.

…

Brother: So what word would I use there?

[Crickets...Crickets]

Clearly I have missed the mark somewhere. To the spelling lists we go.

But not until the day after Labor Day because I’m still on Summer vacation.

We went to the grocery store this past Thursday. Lucy is very happy to be at the grocery store for about 2 isles and then proceeds to inform me that she is no longer happy to be at the grocery store.  During one exchange where I was trying to convince Lucy that the grocery store is a fun place and not a place to dislike, an older lady stopped to talk to her and see if she could convince Lucy that the canned soup isle is exciting. Lucy played shy but then smiled all cute like and the lady responded by oohing and aahing over her and telling me how precious she is and asking me if she’s my granddaughter.

And I thought, So, it has come to this.

[sigh]

I told her, No, she’s my youngest child, and the lady then gave me one of those high eyebrow looks of surprise, said Oh my!, then made on her way.

And as we continued down the isle I asked my 17 year old daughter:  Kait, did you get the pasta?

Kait’s response: Yes, Granny.

Dear person who keeps asking Google if I’m “Blessed Arrow” on Facebook…

I’m not even ON Facebook.

You’re welcome.

Update:
Thanks to our friendly neighborhood troll, Trailer, for creating this visual:

So Kait’s friend unintentionally broke my pinkie toe. By unintentionally I mean he was trying to lift his foot out of the way as I walked by while I was lifting my foot to step over his. It was a collision of feet like you never knew and I actually heard the soft pop of my sweet baby toe snapping out of it’s proper place.

A cringe is warranted here.

And now it’s been two weeks and I can finally walk normally again but at the end of the day the whole left half of the front part of my left foot aches like nobody’s business.

And, yes, I am being a complete baby about this because number one, it freaking hurts, and number two, the whole toe breaking event happened the exact day I had decided I would start back running again after the alleged panda attack of 2011. And now I have to not run for a full 6 weeks. I hate it when I have something to do and then I break my toe.

This isn’t the first time this has happened.

The last time I broke a toe I ignored it by squeezing my swollen, broken toe into my motorcycle boots because Rabbit was taking me out. Surprisingly it didn’t hurt after about 10 minutes and all was fine until we got home and I took my boots off and holy cheese doodles did my entire foot come alive with pain and I ended up at the e-clinic because I thought I was surely dying of a broken toe.

So I’m nursing it well this time. I don’t like pain. Which isn’t working for me right now because my feet get stepped on numerous times a day by my boys and I have had to be very proactive about making sure they stay at least three feet away from my left foot at all times. And even still, Joe, my teenage son, managed to heartily smash my poor, purple, broken toe.  Poor kid. Joe is my most arduous protector and it broke his heart that he had re-broken my toe.

Annndddd…

That’s all for this post.