Life As We Know It

Don't let those exhausted, complaining faces fool you.  These kids were ecstatic to help stain the fence today.  That is, until about 15 minutes had past.  Then it was really hard work.  Boo-hoo.  Cry me a river.  

We've lived here for four years and we've never stained the fence before.  It really needed it.  So I picked up a couple gallons of stain and four cheap, big paint brushes.  I learned that a six foot cedar fence that goes around a very good size back yard will take a lot more than 2 gallons of stain.  

A LOT more.  I thought the stain would be much thinner and spread much more easily than it did.  It was more like paint.  Go figure. 

So it will be more stain, and a lot more time and elbow grease than I anticipated.  

As you can imagine, the kids are thrilled.

I ran over my first bicycle today.  Fortunately there was not a child on it.  I crunched Elinor's bicycle wheel as I was backing out of the garage.  Abe managed to salvage it.  He said he didn't really care so much about the bicycle since it only cost $10 at DI.  But he had tripled the value of the bike by getting the tires fixed so they wouldn't go flat and he didn't want to do that again.  

Abe did something very romantic for me today.  He mowed the front lawn really short.

I suppose I think lawns should be like men's haircuts.  Nice and clean and short.  I know he would rather keep the lawn longer, but he cut it short today because he knows I like it.  If that's not love...

As if that weren't enough, he and I headed out to a movie this evening.  George hasn't been a baby we could take to movies, so we haven't enjoyed a movie together for over a year.  We have seen a couple of shows at the dollar theater, but I can't say we enjoyed them because we didn't get to sit together as we dealt out popcorn to our masses of children and one of us was always standing with George.  

This evening we put George to bed before we left and left the kids with a phone and a request to please leave us in peace unless there was a very good reason to call. 

Fortunately the kids know what that means and they didn't call and we thoroughly enjoyed our movie date tonight.  We saw The Help.  I have read the book and enjoyed it and I thought the movie was fantastic.  But it didn't start until 8:20 and with many previews and being a somewhat lengthy movie, we didn't leave the theater until 11:00.

Moments before the movie ended we get a call from home.  I immediately called them back.  The conversation went like this:

Clark:  Hello?

Mom:  Hi, it's Mom.

Clark:  Are you coming home soon?

Mom:  Yes, the movie just ended and we're leaving the theater.

Clark: Um... it's 11 o'clock... and we haven't heard from you at all. 

Mom:  I'm sorry, we'll be home soon.

I'm pretty sure this exact conversation will be repeated verbatim a few years from now.  Except the roles will be reversed.  I'm not sure I like that.