Hey there honey…look at me!  I’m actually posting.  Sometimes it just takes a very important occasion to get me off my butt to do it.

I would say your birthday is just such an occasion.  Definitely worthwhile making an effort to post.  And with that, I am here to say….

Happy Birthday Baby!

Here is a tribute to the many faces of Court we’ve all seen in about the last 10 years or so…Enjoy!

Love ya baby,

Nik

Well now that Harvey has a taste for the digital, I seems we need to be a little more careful. Nikki asked him if he wanted a treat, and he definitely did. You can tell he prefers the fingers….

Well yesterday was Cael’s first day of junior kindergarten, after an excruciatingly long wait (for him at least) for the “staggered start” business to be done with.  It went off just fine, although with a typical Cael twist.  First off, as you can see here, he is absolutely humungous.  It looks like he has at least 3 inches on every one of his classmates.

Secondly, as he casually mentioned to Nikki and I in passing while eating his lunch after he got home, he apparently had “a time out” on the very first day of school.  Yes, it seems that he was doing a little too much running when he shouldn’t have been and had to be spoken to.  Now keep in mind there were about 6 students in the class at the time, they are still staggering the starts.  What kind of mischief do you think will happen once he has a whole class of cohorts?

In any case, he goes back for good on Tuesday, so time will tell.

Well I must say that Harvey and Sully got a little out of hand last night and things got a little crazy. As a result I am blogging with one hand on the iPhone and am hoping that the platelets will show up any time soon….

Nikki is the sole Laundry Technician at our household.  For some strange reason, I am not allowed to operate the actual washing machine or the dryer.  Something about not doing it right, shrinking clothes, etc.  This arrangement has placed a considerable burden on Nikki though, since 5 humans can generate a truly stupendous amount of laundry in the course of a day.  Well, actually the laundry creation is rather skewed towards a certain demographic, I won’t elaborate, but let’s just say that frequent wardrobe changes in the course of a single day aren’t uncommon, sometimes even during commercial breaks on Hannah Montana.  There, that should leave just enough doubt to protect the names of those involved….

Anyway, laundry generation aside, Nikki has been doing her part to reduce our considerable electricity bill by hanging the laundry outside to dry.  This makes a lot of sense for the environment too, something we do our best to pay attention to.

The environment doesn’t always appreciate these efforts however, and often seems to take perverse delight in making this undertaking very very hard some days.  For instance, why would Mother Nature seemingly rain only at the very moment Nikki is thinking of going to get the now dry clothing from the backyard?  Or the unexpected gusts of wind on calm days that are just hard enough to blow the racks of clothes over?  Let’s not mention that all sorts of insect life is seemingly drawn to the smell of freshly washed clothing and practically stampedes over to take up residence in our skivvies as soon as Nikki goes back inside.

There’s one other perk for Nikki that for her is the main reason to hang the clothes outside: the smell of the outdoors.  She loves the smell of clothes that have been hanging outside so much, I’m thinking it’s become an addiction.  She can’t fold a t-shirt without pressing it to her face and toking from it, sweaters and towels are snorted up before they get folded neatly.  She loves it, and is almost annoyed by my complete ambivalence to the smell of our clothes.  Each basket of freshly aired clothes is presented to me with the demand;

“Smell that!  Just smell it!  Oh, man that smells good, doesn’t it?  Don’t you just love that smell?  Did you smell it?  Smells good eh?”

It’s gotten to the point that I have started to feign interest, or she won’t let me go.

“Oh it smells really great, hon.”

“You don’t care do you?  DO you?”

“NO! I mean, no honey, I love it just as much as you do, really….”

The only other downside to hanging the clothes outside is the more Nikki sniffs and snorts, the more ragweed she ingests deep into her sinuses.  This all comes to a head each morning, by which time her nose is clogged and she is sneezing her head off.  Usually a shower is enough to clear her head of the allergy attack, but just like any other junkie, she can’t stop sniffing and huffing the laundry.  I really can’t talk to her about her addiction, she gets rather aggressive, I can only hope she will stop using in the winter when the clothes will be frozen stiff as a board, and maybe this habit will end.  For a time.

Yesterday Quinn finally mastered the art of biwheeled pedal propulsion. Cael and I were cheering him on in the park as he decided that it was high time he mastered this bike thing and took off without any trouble at all.

Now I know for sure that both boys will need new bikes in the spring, since Quinn’s knees are practically up around his ears on this old bike of Dylan’s.

So now it’s just time to convince Cael to let go of the training wheels and we will be a fully bi-wheeled family.  I’m predicting it won’t take long now as he watches his older brother wheel around.