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I Don't Want to Forget Any of This


 I was feeling pretty dumpy the last week or so.  Too much real life all at once.  Being an adult is fun, except for when it's not.  We've recalibrated now and are once again focused on what's True and what's good, and also our kids are hilarious, so that helps.

Sawyer got a note from a girl at school this week.  "Dear Sawyer, do you want to be friends? Yes or no."  Ross asked him what he was going to reply.  Sawyer gave him a what are you talking about look. 

 "Dad, we already are friends," he replied, annoyed by the redundancy.   

"But she signed it with a heart..."

"Daaaaad." Sawyer's eyeroll was almost audible.  

As I'm looking into my crystal ball, I see that Sawyer's future wife will need to be very direct.

Carter's future spouse will also need to be a strong character.  She has a personality twice her size and is into more mischief than both her brothers combined.  One minute she is spinning circles in the living room until she can't stand, and the next minute she's on the top rung of the wrong side of a ladder.  

A couple of days ago I busted her using a pencil to sneak butter from the, otherwise out of reach, butter dish.  "Carter!  Don't eat the butter!"

"Why?"

"That's gross."  

She stopped eating the butter because she found a straw and an open jar of mayonnaise on the table...  

Emerson gets into her own mischief, but is a little more stealth.  Her kryptonite is milk.  If somebody leaves an unguarded cup for more than a minute she will sniff it out.  She spotted a cup on the table tonight and didn't know I was watching.  I saw her look around for the owner - her sister - and grin when Carter walked out of view.  Emerson hit the floor.  Crawled to the end of the table where the cup was sitting, and from her crouched position on the floor, slowly reached a hand up feeling for the cup.  She missed.  After a moment she slowly started to creep upward until her eyes were just above the surface of the table.  She spotted me watching and dropped back down with a guilty grin.  Carter, I knew, was done with the cup, so I gave Emerson a covert thumbs up.  She snatched the cup, sat back down, and promptly drained it before running innocently back into the living room to join her siblings.  We will be installing hidden cameras promptly.  The teenager years will be interesting with that one.  God bless older brothers...

In other news, the boys are digging again.  We have gotten enough rain now that the ground is finally soft enough.  Have I mentioned that our property looks like it's a burial ground?  They dig massive pits, and then we make them fill them in.  Then they dig new massive pits and fill them in.  Over and over and over.  

On the way home from picking Sawyer up from school this week, Fischer told me his stomach hurt.  

"Do you need to go to the bathroom?  Because we're almost home."

"No, it's excited stomach hurt."

"Oh, yeah?  What are you excited about?"

"Digging."

One more quick one because I don't want to forget it.  I put Emerson in play clothes after church today.  She wanted to go outside but didn't want to take off her pretty outfit.  She fought me, but I managed to wrestle her out of her dress clothes.  As soon as I slipped her brother's old camo long sleeve over her head she stopped fighting.  

"This my favorite," she told me.

"What?" I asked.

"This my favorite," she said again patting her shirt.

I smiled.  Of course that's her favorite.  I love these kids.  

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