Ruth's Rambles...: A Flash From the Past: Week 10 Home

Below is a post that I wrote on August 20, 2011, marking the tenth week that we five had been home together from Ethiopia as a family. I'm not quite sure why I stopped doing these weekly summaries after nine weeks, but for some reason I never posted this one.

The kids look soo tiny to me when I look back at them from a year ago...and Lizzie's hair is so short. They've come a long way!!

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Aug.20'11
I realized this past week (our 10th at home as a complete family) that my kids spend a lot of time half-dressed! We really do get dressed in the mornings, I promise, but either the kids peel off their shirts, and sometimes their pants, too, or they decide urgently that they want to run/cycle through water outside and they simply cannot (cannot) take that extra thirty seconds to run inside for a bathing suit. Either way, they end up half dressed or in their underwear a good chunk of every week, it seems. As a result, you don't get to see a few of my best pictures of Seth this week, because he's in his underwear in all of my favourite shots...and I don't typically post full frontal view body shots when they're just in underwear.

There was a lot of good stuff that happened this week:

Seth learned to ride his bike on Sunday, without training wheels. I've already posted a separate blog about this, so I won't go into detail here.

On Sunday afternoon, Geoff and I went to a movie...by ourselves...for the first time since Seth and Lizzie came home! We never thought that we'd be able to get out (without kids) this early on, but it just happened, rather spontaneously. Geoff was about to head out to go to a movie. I sighed, and expressed the wish that we could go together, rather than taking our breaks separately. We looked at each other silently for a moment, and then Geoff got on the phone with my Mom & Dad and asked if they might possibly, just maybe, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top be willing to look after all three kids for a couple of hours. Lovely people that they are, they said yes! These are the only people we'd have left the kids with at this point, because my Dad was with us in Ethiopia and because the kids feel very comfortable with them. Now, you need to know that it was 2:40pm and the movie started at 3:20pm and the kids were running around (in their underwear) in the sprinkler (ie. they were soaking wet and having lots of fun, and would probably be difficult to get into the car). Oh, and it's a 18-22 minute drive to my parents. Well, drill sargent (and wise mama) that I sometimes am, I yelled to the kids that we were going to grandpa's and grandma's and that we needed to get ready to get into the car. I yelled at Geoff to dry them off and get them onto the toilets - I beelined upstairs to find clothes for all three. To make a long story short, six minutes later, we were pulling out of the driveway: the kids dry; clothed; toiletted; with water bottles in hand. I'm still not sure how we pulled that off, but we raced to my parents' house, said good-bye-and-we'll-be-back-soon and raced off to the movie theatre. We got there with about two minute to spare! Oh, and we saw The Help, and we both thought it was excellent; I thought it really was an excellent reflection of the book, too. We went back for the kids as soon as the movie was done and the kids were fine; and it was awesome to get out together for the first time. Yay!

The kids spent a lot of time outside in the spectacular weather we've been enjoying - that has made our first number of weeks home much easier than if it had been rainy. All three of them love being outside and so we've simply hung out in the yard, and gone for walks.

Anyway, we have survived out tenth week at home and I'm so glad.

(below)

Geoff helping Seth with his bike-riding.