Gavin and some of his friends
Is it considered child abuse when you send your son to football practice and he continually comes home with blue-ribbon bruises?
Allie and Smokey taken right after soccer practice. She was trying to get a profile photo she liked for her new Facebook account.
This is the only picture I got of "Halloween" and it has nothing to do with the holiday. It was wacky wear day at school and this is what the kids came up with. Slippers on Gavin and Moose socks on Allie. I think they are the ugliest socks I've ever seen and I can't figure out how they ended up in her closet.
I love this time of year, minus the Halloween part. (I know, I know...what a party-pooper I am). This year the kids had friends over for night games and then we had our annual Dinner party with the Graves. We had different kinds of pasta with salad and a fabulous dessert. The kids love this tradition and this year it was made so much simpler. We didn't dress up until after they had ordered their mystery food and then while the parents prepared the meal, the kids went downstairs and dressed for dinner. With make-up and three boxes of dress-ups to choose from, it was fun to see what they came up with. Allie ended up in a hoop skirt complete with a fancy dress and every ounce of her face caked in make-up. Meanwhile, Gavin put a cloak with a hood on and called it good. If only I had thought of taking the camera...
Gavin got stung this weekend while we were in Logan fishing at the Shaws. He's just like his sister and dad and blows up like a balloon when he gets stung. Poor kid!
Gavin has been drawing up Go-Cart designs for the past month. He and his buddy have it all worked out and they got started last week. Here's what they have done so far.
Step 1: Show your mother the drawings so she will smile and think you are a cute and silly kid, but not really expect anything to come of that nice sketch of a go-cart.
Step 2: Wait a few weeks until mom has almost forgotten about the go-cart plan and call her from a strange friend's cell phone to let her know you are not coming home from school. You have very important business to attend to at Ole' Widower Honey's house (okay, his name is just Brother Honey), but he's expecting them to arrive for their scheduled time.
Step 3: Make an appointment to go back to Honey's house and go through his collection of old metal junk in his shop out back. At the same time, have your other friends contacting their father who owns a mechanic shop and see if you can spend some time down there before the week is out.
Step 4: After you have found the perfect project for scrap metal, realize that you don't want to hurt Bro. Honey's feelings and instead of scrapping the old motor bike you found in his garage, you decide to "practice" on this one before you get into the actual building of the go-carts.
Step 5: First try to talk your father into letting you store the soon-to-be-fabulous-addition-to-the-garage-toys in your back yard. That will fail miserably. Try tactic two: Call your friend who has nothing to do with this plan. Invite him to join the team of mechanics and share the glory of triumph when it runs and moves at the same time. Oh, and if he says he's interested be sure to have him store the junk at his house.
Step 6: Go pick up Yamaha and bring back to the garage. You know your dad has tools you can use. Once it's cleaned up, you can move it the newest member's house.
Step 7: The bike must be cleaned. You'll need four shirts of various sizes out of Gavin's closet to cover your good clothes with his good clothes. He doesn't mind sharing, he knows his mom would never care about grease on good shirts. She's real good and turning things into rags!
Step 8: Tell your sister you'd like her to make some lemonade for the gang. They're getting pretty thirsty with all this work.
Step 9: Gather the tools and start scraping decades of dirt from the frame of the bike. Be sure to use mom's butter knives on the real hard to get grunge. And go ahead with using her favorite food container (you know, the one that gets used whenever there's a meal to be brought to someone else or a treat brought to a function) as a bucket for greasy, grimy, used to be white rags.
Step 10: Be proud. You are on your way to freedom from oppression and on a journey to independence. This project is the gateway between boyhood and manliness. And hopefully as a man, you won't think your mother's butter knife will be your best tool option next time!
GRUNDLE: A fine word used when one wants to indicate an excessive amount. It gives the listener or reader a beautiful depiction of what "a lot" might look like. In a sentence: Wow, you have a grundle of cards in your hand. That grundle looks as if it might win you the game. Oh, my. You won. If it weren't for that grundle, you'd have lost for sure.
Use it in a sentence...go ahead...do it. You know you want to.
I had to say a few words in Sacrament Meeting today. (I say "few" because I was the last speaker of 8 women. Do you think I had any time left to speak? I had about -4 minutes when it was my turn which was perfectly okay with me). The couselor in our bishopric asked all the former RS presidents of the 4th ward to talk about service and then wanted to end with the current pres. The first speaker shared a story I thought was cute and I figured since it's Mother's Day I'd share it with you.
When her daughter was about five, she came to her and asked if they could go to Grandma's house. Her mother said, "no, they had ironing to do." The five year old asked her mother if she would pretend to be the grandma and they could talk and play as if they were at grandma's house.
So, they did and after a while of talking back and forth, the child started to get a little silly. Pretty soon the mother stopped her daughter and told her to quit the silliness. With her hands on her hips, the five year old looked her mother straight in the eyes and said, "Now Grandma, you're startin' to talk like a Mamma!"
Her message to all of us today was to remember to be "grandma's" more often and not too much "mamma" all the time.
