7 Quick Takes about Seeing Beavers and Rich People, Reclaiming Saturday, and Cute Baby Overload

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

I was patting myself on the back for remembering to put out some Halloween decorations this year.

Only a few days ago did I remember that when you put up seasonal decorations, you also have to take them back down at some point.

So I went to take down the festive blocks spelling out "Happy Halloween" in our front entryway and realized how perfectly appropriate it is that not only is it November, but my sign is also missing a letter and was at some point rearranged by a child to say "__ HPY P  HALLOWEEN."

Typical.

—2—

My kids had Tuesday off from school because the school gym is used for elections, so we had a full day on our hands.

I pulled up a map of conservation land for the town next to us and chose a trail we'd never been on, and it turned out to be awesome. Not only were all 6 of the kids together (kind of a rarity now that the 15-year-old has so many after-school activities,) but part of the trail went along a beautiful pond with an apparently vibrant beaver community.

We saw several trees that had been chewed (or were in the process of being chewed) by beavers, and two beaver dams. My 2nd grader just read about beavers in school so she immediately flipped into tour guide mode and was telling us all about them.

Skipping rocks.

We took the wrong fork in the trail on the way back, which at first seemed like a disappointment but turned out to be great. Instead of going through the woods to get back to the car, we walked through a really hoity-toity neighborhood and gawked at all the fancy houses.

I enjoyed myself when I wasn't hissing at the kids, "Stay off the rich peoples' grass!!"

—3—

Soccer is over for the season! 

I'm not sure why I continue to pay the activity fees when most of the time I'm desperately doing rain dances in the backyard to get every practice and game cancelled.

All I know is that when the ref blows the whistle at the end of the last game of the season, it makes me involuntarily do this:

And this:

And I think I even do this:

BECAUSE WE HAVE OUR SATURDAYS BACK AGAIN! I know soccer is great exercise and the kids get to learn the reward of hard work and practice and they enjoy running around on a team with their friends... but do you know what's better than that?

This.

Really looking forward to this Saturday.

—4—

My 5-year-old is really into dinosaurs right now. I admit to engineering his newfound passion, because we may or may not have recently acquired a big box of plastic dinosaur toys that will make a great Christmas gift for someone who's very interested in dinosaurs by December.

I'm sort of a gift opportunist.

We check out a big stack of dinosaur books from the library every week, and he loves them. In fact, I read them to him while he's eating to trick him into staying at the table. I don't know why, but that kid eats like a bird and wanders away after two bites, even if he's actually hungry.

—5—

While we were stocking up on dinosaur books at the library, I also checked out Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to introduce it to my 3-year-old. He calls it Chicken Chicken Boom Boom and I'm sorry, but I'm just not correcting that.

Coincidentally, this week my 8th grader came home incensed over a "new" version of the alphabet song (it's actually 7 years old from an ESL learning site but apparently it just went viral, the Internet is weird.)


As a side note, I'm writing this with my 3-year-old sitting on my lap who is now laughing hysterically because "they're doing it wrong!"

—6—

I've been going through our old pictures and making a slideshow for our 8-year-old's upcoming baptism.

In our church, we don't baptize babies. We wait until they're older because (1) we want them to understand what they're doing, and (2) we believe in baptism by immersion (a.k.a: the full-body dunk.)

Anyway, we need to fill the time when she's getting dried off and changed after going under the water, so I'm making a slideshow of her from birth to present day to play in the interim.

Going through 8 years of pictures might be torture for some people, but it means I get to go look at cute pictures like this, so I really can't say I mind.

I'm so tired in this picture I probably don't even know my own name.

I started by scrolling chronologically through our entire photo library, but learned halfway through that Amazon photo storage has amazing facial recognition capabilities that made the process a million times easier.

It could identify my daughter's face from the time she was a few weeks old, which boggles my mind, considering I usually can't tell which newborn I'm holding without looking at the date stamp.

—7—

Speaking of babies in the house, we watched a friend's kids for a few hours on Wednesday. My  middle schoolers happened to have an early release day so they had fun holding and playing with her 6-month-old, who is probably the happiest baby I've ever met.

As he grinned wide-eyed and drooling at my 13-year-old, she commented, "He kind of looks like a crazy person who is also really adorable."

Yep, that's a baby. Insane, super-cute, and with a disproportionately huge head. Is it any wonder we love them?

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