Growing

I'm officially registered for fall classes! The next English class, next math class, developmental psychology, and sociology. It's 13 credit hours again, but none of them are online and I've arranged them to be only two days a week. I've got child care all lined up for Pebbles and some great prospects for Freida. She's only going to be watched for 10 hours a week, and there are a lot of child care givers who work from home on post.

A friend of ours, known on the interwebs as Sammy Sasquatch, told us that the movie trailer over which we were drooling, The Last Airbender, is based on a cartoon series called Avatar: The Last Airbender. Guess what we've been doing with our summer vacation? That's right. We've just finished the second season while folding Mt. Washmore.

Man's progress continues to be slow. He is occasionally taking sleeping pills when his pain gets so bad that he ends up with four hours of tortured rest at night, but half of one pill had him flat on his back for 14 hours last night. He's going to be moving to something called the Warrior Transition Unit, a unit that allows him to get some work done, but also to have the flexibility to get to all of the many appointments he has to go to. He just started weekly acupuncture which helped only slightly the first time, but is expected to help more as he continues to go.

My therapy seems to be going well. My therapist is very good at keeping me on task and validating my small but significant successes. For some reason it's been difficult to work up any projects around the house except for purging possessions and keeping bedrooms even remotely clean. All I've done is acquire some new pizza screens (here's an example of one) to make pizza and other bread items that would really like to have a crispy lower crust. The pizza stone is nice for any bread product, really, but sometimes bread with a large lower surface area has difficulty crisping before the top is overdone. It works pretty well, even on the grill. It makes grilling the pizza a lot easier to manage since lack of direct contact with the grill slows cooking time from 1 minute to 3-4 minutes, giving us time to actually melt the cheese and grill pepperoni or veggies as toppings. During the hot summer, there's nothing like grilled pizza to fill young bellies while keeping the house cool.

Princess is on the seventh Harry Potter book, Deathly Hallows. She had a rough start since she doesn't like learning all of those crazy long names (Dumbledore, MacGonagal, Hermione) and even now has some funny ways of seeing things. The Triwizard tournament became the Twizzard tournament, and Hermione is Hermain as far as she says it, but that doesn't get in the way of her story comprehension. Now I just need to think of what to get for her next. Her drawings are still amazing to me.

Tag plays with friends like no tomorrow. He loves the Avatar cartoon but goes out as often as possible to make friends and play, especially now that one of his friends has a trampoline. He surprises me all the time with how well he reads, too, but he just doesn't like to do it for extended periods of time. His greatest ambition is to collect enough money to buy an ice cream from the ice cream truck.

Pebbles' personality is taking a very goofy turn. Her hands have become her "hand spiders" who talk in a rather high pitched voice about tickling people. When her hand gets hurt she says "awww, the hand spider got squished!" She has taken to building forts out of any materials at hand, including a rather clever arrangement of pillows and blankets on the couch.

Freida is potty training. I kept thinking "well, the rest of them trained at about 2.5 years old, so I've got time." And then I realized that she was already 2.5 and had no inclination to train. A few weeks later, we're pretty close. The next step is to be able to wear pants again without wetting them, followed by having dry nights. She does swimmingly well (haha) with a bare bottom throughout the day, even cleaning her little potty seat herself.

Our summer has been a pretty decent break. We've been home bound for most of it but it has been very nice to spend time with the kids. I'm surprised all over again how interesting it can be to have a conversation with them about any random topic. Sometimes I feel like a great teacher, explaining and showing. Other times I can't believe my total ignorance on a topic. They sure do keep me on my toes.