You Might Be A Pastor's Wife If, Part 1...

... You pull up to a large group of cows, and your oldest child starts shouting, "Hey look, Mom! The cows are having a meeting!"...

Followed by your daughter's interpretation, "No, I think they're having Illuminate!"

Lisa

Summer Adventures...

... Are Wearing Me Out!

I'm behind... again... as far as blogging goes. Seems that I never stop running long enough to sit down and write about it here lately!

Last week, Phil, Seth, and Grace went off to camp, so Caleb, Ian, and I decided we needed an adventure of our own. On Monday our plans were kind of thrown for a loop, and we ended up just hanging around home most of the day and then goin' to "The Rat Place" (AKA Chuck-E-Cheese) in the evening. We spent tons of tokens, earned relatively few tickets, and came home with lots of prizes, because the girls working the prize counter thought the boys were super cute!

On Tuesday we headed to the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, which we enjoyed a lot. Ordinarily, I do not "splurge" on rides when we visit the zoo. However, since there were only three of us it made the prices a little more reasonable, so we rode everything! It was on the "Sky Safari" that it occurred to me that although I have never been afraid of heights, I do have a pretty huge fear of falling from high places... particularly while holding on to two small, wiggly children! Caleb actually did a pretty job sitting still once I explained to him exactly how I expected him to position himself and not to move. Ian... well, that's another story... Unfortunately, I have almost no pictures of the animals (except the ones that live at my house). I had a pretty good pic. of Caleb with the lion, but when I downloaded it must have gotten lost in the process. Thinking everything had transferred alright, I erased all of the images from the camera... ugh! I do have some nice pics. of us on the rides and exploring the zoo:

After the other half of our family returned home, we spent a couple of days cleaning up from camp and then took a trip to Cedar Point!

It was definitely a fun trip, but not "classic" Cedar Point by any stretch of the imagination. This can most accurately be understood by the list of things we did not ride... calypso, turnpike cars, antique cars, cedar downs, raptor, thunder canyon, wave swinger, matterhorn, super himalaya, scrambler, even the carousel (for crying out loud)... not among the things we rode this time around...

However, Seth and Grace hit the 52" mark this year, so they got to experience a whole lot of new things including MaxAir, Wicked Twister, Skyhawk, Power Tower Up and Down, and Magnum for Grace (Seth took his first spin on Magnum last summer). Ian also rode his first coaster (well, unless we count Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, seven months before he was born). His assessment of Woodstock Express was, "I don't wike this wide"... Below are pics. of first time coaster experiences:

Amazingly enough, we actually didn't take a whole lot of pictures while we were there. I guess I've been dropping the ball all summer long in this regard. We did pretty much ride till we dropped, though, and arrived home at 3:15am! My quote of the trip comes from our friend Avalyn, "Lisa... I like that ride... It makes me sick!" How's that for making a new generation of adrenaline junkies...

I can never quite understand why I look so forward to the end of the school year but as we turn the corner into August I am ready for it all to begin again... Not that we are starting in August... NO WAY!!! One of the nice advantages of homeschooling is that we can run a normal school schedule Labor Day to Memorial Day, get all of the work in, ace the placement tests, and enjoy life a little bit! However, I am starting to look forward to the structure that comes along with Fall...

Until then...

Lisa

Circus City U.S.A.

... Who would've thought...

I mean, seriously... When I was a kid I never said anything to myself like, "When I grow up I hope I live in a town in which everything in life revolves around clowns and organ music... and for a full week every year, no one functions except to eat cotton candy and tenderloins... and to spend twice as much as a day at Cedar Point on a handful of carnival rides..."

In just a little while, here, I am going to pack Caleb and Ian into the wagon, and then I am going to walk downtown to purchase tickets for tonight's show. And I don't really mind going to the show. We have a couple of teens who participate in circus, and I rather enjoy seeing their acts, if nothing else. What the kids do is impressive. But the overall pervasiveness scares me more than just a little bit...

People who cannot pay their basic utilities, rent, or mortgage throw cash around like it grows on trees during circus week. People completely forget about their responsibilities, and they don't even bother to call. Heck, half the town forgets what day of the week it is! In fact, I forgot what day of the week it was yesterday...

The other day I stopped and wondered if Frank Peretti was walking through the streets of our town during Circus week when he penned the first chapter of "This Present Darkness"... If he wasn't, he could've been...

Time to eat an elephant ear...

Lisa

Can't Kick It...

... I feel as if I have been fighting a battle of near epic proportions for the past few months. It has become so much a part of my daily life that I honestly can't even remember what side of it I'm supposed to be on. It is spiritual... But it is causing me great pain in other realms of being... particularly physical (stress eating, lack of sleep)... and emotional...

I do not know what to do to fix this, because every time I think I have the solution, it get worse...

Pray...

Lisa

Slumber Party Life Lessons...

Well... first let me say that I am sort of ashamed that my entire virtual existence has been confined to facebook updates here lately. Part of that is due to the fact that facebook is just so addictive! The other part of that is due to the fact that I get more comments (and therefore more actual interaction) from one line posts at facebook than from bearing my soul on this blog! But still... I would like to remember all of the funny little things that happen in our lives, so even if no one is reading, I need to keep this up as a personal journal, if nothing else!

Anyhow...

Grace and Caleb both had friends spend the night last night. It started out that Grace was going to have her best friend, Lexi, come over, because she spent the night with Lexi a couple of months back, and it was our turn to host the sleepover. However, Lexi has brothers who are 5 and 2 (Caleb and Ian's ages), and Nate (age 5) decided that it was terribly unfair that Lexi got to come play at out house and he didn't. The more I thought about it, I realized that he was right, so I extended the invitation to him, as well. Caleb, of course, thought this was the coolest thing in the world!

But ya know... nothing is ever simple... life lesson... I have this popularity complex or something. I don't want to believe that I need positive reinforcement for everything I do, but I am always trying to be the best at everything. Perhaps this is because I never really am (and before hundreds of people leave comments to tell me how cool I am, please... it doesn't mean as much when I have solicited it... oh, wait... back to point one... almost no one reads this...)

At any rate... Grace and I picked up ice cream sundae supplies (and lots of them). I thought that would be pretty... well... cool. And it was... but probably not as cool as the Disney cookbook that showed up at our house (the girls conspired to check this out of the library together yesterday morning) and the request that we go to the store and buy the ingredients for several different recipes (which I nixed... definitely dropping my cool status a notch or two...)

I had some grandiose plans which included fixing hair and painting nails, and we still might get to all of that, but when kids have experienced the thrill of fairy god-mothers in training makin' them up at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique in Cinderella's castle, come on... I'm just not going to cut it. I don't even do my own hair 1/2 the time (thank goodness for hats)... and I do not own a magic, glitter filled wand...

We watched a movie (Aladdin, which... of course... everyone had already seen multiple times... as a note, kids don't seem to see the replay value in movies that I do), and then I announced to the boys that it was time to go to bed, at which point the girls announced that they were going to get to stay up and play (which was true, but was not supposed to be announced), and everything was pretty much unfair again (which was also true, but I was getting too tired to deal with five little people (Ian had gone to sleep) so I explained that since this was the girls' special sleepover night that they were going to get to stay up a little longer, but everyone else was still going to bed). Seth was totally not impressed by this revelation, but Caleb and Nate were nearly asleep before their little heads hit the pillows!

A little after 10:00 I found the girls reading in bed and let them know that "lights out" was going to be at 10:30, which was... again... very unpopular, but I did notice that they turned the lights out when they were supposed to. That's not to say that they didn't talk late into the night... I'm sure they did... but that was fine with me. They didn't disturb anybody, that's for sure, and I remember a whole lot of sleepovers like that...

They did, however, inform me that they would be waking me up at 6:30 to make chocolate chip waffles and bacon. I told them that I had all of the ingredients for those things, but to make it 7:00, to which they agreed. Then they told me that breakfast was a secret, and I was not to tell anybody... even Daddy... to which I zipped my lips saying, "my lips are sealed" and watched both of their little jaws drop, because they had no idea where I had "learned" that, as it is part of their secret club. I reminded them that I, too, was once a little girl, and even though they looked at me in disbelief, that was apparently a good enough answer...

Somewhere in the midst of all of this... while nobody else was watching... I rescued the whipped cream canister from the fridge and squirted some right into my mouth, remembering the simple things that made sleepovers fun for me and my friends...

Grace woke me at 5:30 to ask what she and Lexi should do until 7:00. Since I had interrupted their reading time the night before, I mumbled... "read"... which they did until exactly 7:00, when I heard another knock at my door and figured I wasn't going to be able to persuade them to go back to bed! I got up... threw another hat on... and proceeded to make chocolate chip waffles and bacon (served with chocolate milk that I had to explain was "not Daddy's" before Grace would pour it... hehehe...)

And now several hours later I am getting ready to put Darkwing Duck in the PS3 in an attempt to buy myself some time in which to make all of these little people look presentable...

I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never throw the coolest slumber party ever... but at least we didn't have any shaving cream fights or frozen underwear!

Lisa