Catching Up on Life

Ruby is running around naked, back and forth from my room to the big girls' room showing me the latest toy she's playing with.  She's at that age and stage where she likes and feels very important playing in the same place as the big girls' without still quite knowing how to pretend along with them.  She calls Lydia, "Yeeh-ya", while referring to Kyra as "Dear-wa".  Both names are two syllables. 

Jeremy and I are expecting baby #4 this fall.  This time God decided to shake things up and give us a boy!  What to do with a boy?!  My first thought, and comment, when the ultrasound didn't show three lines but a protrusion instead was, "Nooo!  We don't make those!"  Now to come up with a name....

Three children in and we've never once agreed on a boys name. 

The girls are angling for us to call him Turkey Boy St Nicholas.  Of all the names Jeremy and I have tossed into the ring so far, we're still referring to him as Turkey Boy.

We're still living amongst the moose and other flannel wearing natives.  We still really, really like the area.  Our housing situation, on the other had, we completely despise.  The houses are all smacked together with nothing more than a 4x4 square of yard for the girls to play.  And although our neighbors no longer bang on Ruby's wall when she wakes up 30 times throughout the night screaming, we still feel a great deal of resentment towards them.  Turns out Ruby was suffering from a case of reflux.  For more than a month, now, she's been sleeping soundly and through the night. 

I'm pretty sure with Turkey Boy's arrival, I'm just going to ask for a two year supply of Zantac.  Just to save us all from having to play the all too familiar game of, "Who wants to guess why that baby's screaming for no reason, again?" 

Kyra and Lydia are spending their summer alternating between school work and riding their bikes outside with the neighborhood kids. 

Lydia's become the one all the kids her size flock to when she whips out her bug hotel contraption.  It's a series of bubbles and tubes all connecting that the kids all dump dirt and leaves into each afternoon and then run around looking for various, tiny life forms to torture by trapping then in the bug hotel.  Each night I require they release all the wildlife back into the bushes and grasses to find their way homes again. 

Kyra is trying to find her way, socially, around the neighborhood.  There was a period of a month or so where, right behind our house, there was a vacant house.  Kyra and several girls her age decided to make this their princess club where they, essentially, colored with chalk all over the brick walls and cement driveway while giggling incessantly.  When new people moved in, all the girls Kyra's age ran off to various other hidey-holes around the neighborhood.  Kyra, the poor child, is regulated to stay out of the road, on the sidewalk and within my sight while the other girls get free range to run three blocks in any direction at any time.  And so they do.  And Kyra watches with yearning eyes, hoping they might come back to play with her. 

This is the part in parenting where I continuously ask myself if I'm doing the right thing, keeping her within a boundary line where she can run free for a block but, past that, out of sight is out of bounds. 

Everyone here is still here.  A little older.  A little busier.  But we're here, as a family.  Some of us run around naked {yea for habits picked up during potty training!}, several of us collect and torture bugs in the name of learning, and others of us work and feed the masses.

All my love to all of you.