Our flight out to LA was long. Five straight, non-stop hours with three children who refused to just go to sleep already! I don’t know how it happened, but our carefully laid out plans landed us at the departure gate just 5 minutes before boarding began. We were more than a little stressed and Bip was quite put out with me for some reason related to me making him ride in the stroller and not letting him wander aimlessly and so he wanted only Daddy. That meant I got to sit with Frick and Frack Boo and Pumpkin Girl for the entire trip. They were fairly easy to travel with, especially after letting them watch movies on the DVD player. Except for Boo who guzzled his soda after I told him not to and had to go to the bathroom twice in 20 minutes. And then proceeded to keep a running dialog with himself for the entire last hour of the flight while Pumpkin Girl and I pointedly ignored him.

Meanwhile Philip kept the 2 year old entertained. Ha!

So we arrived at LAX, no worse for the wear and collected our luggage. After the baggage claim area cleared of mostly everyone, we accepted the fact that our car seat and booster seats were not arriving. I knew they wouldn’t. Back in DC when we handed over our car seats to be checked on to the plane, we were directed to a different counter. Our seats were bagged and tagged and then we were instructed to leave them “over there.” “Over there” turned out to be a spot on the floor next to the roped off queue. Ok then. We left our seats “over there” and hoped for the best. We did hear the ticketing person call for a car seat pick up, but we didn’t have a whole lot of warm fuzzies over this.

So of course the seats didn’t arrive and there we were with no ability to go anywhere without the car seats. Philip went off to file a claim and demand that someone go out to the local StuffMart for appropriate seats. The airlines however, lose carseats frequently enough to actually have loaner seats available. So, 2 hours after landing, loaner seats in hand, and we set out to find my parents’ car they had left for us in the parking lot.

Don’t ask.

Tired and crabby and very much on East Coast time, we wrangled the car seats and luggage into my parents’ car. We plugged in our GPS and while it tried to calculate the route from our last known location in DC to our hotel in LA, I told Philip that we needed to take the 405 S to the 110 S. I don’t know why, perhaps because it felt like 10 PM to us (see “East Coast time” above), but he kept asking me which freeway we were taking. I kept telling him the 405. South. to the 110. South. Very patiently. Through gritted teeth. He offered to let me drive. In my head, I offered to let him live.

Meanwhile, those people who insisted on coming with us and needing special seats because they are so small were sitting in the back seat, not going to sleep already and making comments about which freeway we needed to be taking. The front seat however, was quite silent.

So the 405 S led us to the 101 S and after turning the wrong direction off the freeway, we found our hotel.

All went exceedingly smooth for the rest of the trip. No, really, it did.

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Boo and Philip are off at Cub Scout Camp this week so  I’m also left with a week of no school and creative dinners.  We don’t really have room for all the food my neighbors left when they moved, so we’ve been working our way through it while the men folk are away.  Last night it was whole wheat pancakes from a mix, before that it was TV dinners and earlier, frozen taquitos and fish sticks.  Not our normal fare at all, but a fun diversion.  Plus, we parked ourselves in front of the TV during dinner time and watched Disney movies.

Hey, that reminds of a time in junior high school when my dad was teaching in San Francisco for awhile.  Every night my mom and I would eat dinner in the living room in front of the TV and watch reruns of CHiPs.  Funny.

It’s amazing the kind of time I have on my hands right now. We’ve been filling it in all sorts of different ways. Monday we went to Build-A-Bear for our end of the year Brownie blow out.  Somehow I came home with a bear, a dinosaur and a WebKinz mouse.  Funny how that happens.   My friend Tami came over and started weeding my front garden which resulted in us (ok, HER) pulling out two dead bushes and showing me how to tie up the foliage from the long gone daffodils.  We rearranged some of my potted plants and now my front yard looks Yard of the Month worthy.  Too bad they don’t actually do that on this base.  I was then inspired to re-pot all of my houseplants and they look so much happier now.  Then this morning I was sitting in the shade of the carport and I noticed how much junk was lying around, so I cleaned up around there, too.

I’ve got a couple of other projects I need to tackle before the boys return  tomorrow evening.

As for the title of this post?  Both Pumpkin Girl and Bip are sleeping in my bed for the week. I just wish they weren’t both such early risers.

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Maybe I should move to Alaska.  I hear they have short summers.  I don’t know why I don’t care for summer much.  Maybe it’s the sun sensitivity I’ve developed, the mosquitoes, the heat, the humidity, the lack of snow.  I’ll be OK, though.  The Good Lord saw fit to provide me with free air conditioning, so I’ll stay inside and drink copious amounts of ice tea.  It could be worse.

With the start of the summer comes the time honored tradition of torturing our children with swimming lessons.  They both like the concept of learning to swim and love being in the pool, but the actual swimming lessons - forget it.  This year they are offering lessons free at our base pool.  Boo’s class starts a 8 am, so I got Phil to take him on his way to work and to stick around for a bit until I can get it together enough to bring the other children along.  Pumpkin Girl’s class starts at 9 and we’re all back by 10.

The irony of the whole thing is that a week ago it was so dang hot that the pool opened on one of it’s normally closed day.  I’m sure the cooling waters of the pool were a welcome relief to the near 100 degrees we hit that week.  Sadly for the swimmers (not so much for me), the highs this week were in the 80’s, making it only about 70 degrees at class time.  My children were so cold that they asked for hot chocolate on the way home.  Poor kids! Ha.  Let the torture continue.

Fortunately for me, Bip is happy to sit on a poolside lounge chair and play with his Boba Fetts.  That gives me lots of good knitting time while watching my children shivering in the pool.  Their instructors are equally unsympathetic to the cold, telling their class to do more flutter kicks to stay warm.  I just smile and keep on knitting.

In other summer related news, I’ve given my blog a new patriotic summer look.  If you’re reading through email or a feed, be sure to stop by and check out the new look.  Which reminds me, did you know you can subscribe to my blog through email?  There’s a link at the very bottom of my sidebar.

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Yesterday morning Bip was up at 7:15. He got himself out of bed and disappeared. I had a momentary thought that maybe I should get up, too, but I got over it. Thirty minutes later, though, I decided to get up and see what mischief he had gotten himself into. I checked the upstairs rooms and didn’t find him, so I called for him from the top of the stairs.

“Me-a down downstairs!” he called. That’s “down-downstairs” as opposed to “up-downstairs.”

I walked down to the landing and saw him sitting on the bottom step. “Come upstairs and we’ll get you changed so you can have breakfast.”

“NO! Me-a waiting Boo, Pumpkin!”

Apparently I told him that Daddy, Boo and Pumpkin Girl would be coming home from camping in the morning. So upon waking, he went down to wait patiently for their return. He needed quite a bit of convincing to come upstairs and get dressed, with the promise that he wouldn’t miss the arrival of his beloved family.

In French, the literal translation of “to miss” means “to lack.” To lack means to need something that is absent. I guess Bip was very much lacking his brother and sister. Il les manque.

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About those Mother’s Day cards.  The ones I bought early and had all ready to go out in the mail?

Right.

Well, first, there was Monday’s All Day Headache.  And Tuesday’s fever, followed by Wednesday’s fever and discovery of the staph infected knee.  And Thursday’s excursion to the doctor for confirmation of another round of scarlet fever.  And Friday’s (that’s today) search for my favorite yarn catalog which also yielded the aforementioned cards, safely tucked under my desk calendar.

They’re not really going to make it to California before Sunday.

Did I mention my daughter, lying pitifully on the couch for 2 days?  The Boo’s needing twice daily applications of ointment on his knee?  And the chart on the white board so I don’t forget everyone’s antibiotics?  And a husband who has been at some meeting or another every night this week?

Because I really did mean to get those cards in the mail on Monday.  You know, before the migraine, staph-knee and scarlet fever.

Somehow I think I’m in the dog house anyway.

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Number 4!

Nachos for lunch!  The other kids were at least 3 before they got nachos!

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