California Day 4

Five thirty is how late we got to sleep in today! That is an improvement. We started the day early with a "bang." When we emerged from our bedroom at 6:30, I paused to help my mother with something for all of 30 seconds and let the kids run out of my sight. Mary promptly pulled over a floor lamp, so the glass shade and scary call-the-HazMat-team light bulb smashed on the floor. The children were not hurt, so then I confined them to the sofa while I cleaned things up. Mary spent the rest of the day passing by the scene of the accident saying, "I broke! Sorry!" (Also today, I noticed that Mary said her first sentence with a transitive verb: "I caught ball.")

We went to Mass at my beloved home parish. It was not so easy for me to manage two squirrelly kiddos alone at Mass. Mary slept on my back in the Ergo for the first half of Mass, so that helped and we stood at the back the whole time. John was being quite a rascal, so much of the time I ended up holding him, making him put his head on my shoulder, meaning I was holding 59 combined pounds of children.

Before Mass, John had received what might have been his first money ever (not counting checks he doesn't know about from relatives, checks that would have gone into a bank account). Grampa Neil gave John His First Quarter. And you can imagine how I felt when John admired it, then promptly explained, "I want to put this in the poor box. The priest uses his key and opens the little door and takes out the money. Then he gives it to poor people who don't have money for clothes and toys." We got to Mass and John dug out his quarter, asking me to find the poor box. I said we'd do it after Mass. As soon as Mass was over, he asked me to find the poor box. We asked around and learned that St. Stephen's lacks a physical poor box, but we found the person in charge of receiving money for their "poor box" (St. Bernadette fund). Innocent child--he is still clueless that money can be hoarded or saved or used to buy oneself a toy.

After all of that, we went to breakfast with Amy, my maid of honor, which was a lot of fun. Poor John was tired and fell asleep just as we were pulling into the restaurant parking lot, which was a harbinger of his tough day to come. He was pretty hyper from being overtired while we ate.

John slept on the 20-minute drive home, but that was all. Mary fell asleep right before we got home and I successfully transferred her into bed, but then she was accidentally woken up within minutes, so she also got no further napping today. This was not good.

We spent more time playing in the back yard, but I could see that John particularly was increasingly hyper, not so kind to his sister, and directly disobedient to me. The rest of the day was spent in the difficult mommy's juggling act of knowing why the child is being Beastly, knowing it is essentially my fault (I'm dragging him to and fro, out of his time zone, off his nap routine), being unable to outright tolerate directly terrible behavior, but wanting to cut him some slack for being so exhausted that he's not controlling himself. Not the most fun. I brought the kids inside to watch their "Our Lady at Fatima" cartoon to try to zone out, then Grampa Neil sat with them while I cooked their dinner.

Dinner with the children did not go well for John, who was spiralling into a frenzy of hyperactivity and bad behavior. He then said he wanted to go to sleep--at 5:15. Frankly, I let him. I hoped maybe he'd take a nap, then I'd keep him up really late, then he'd sleep till a more decent time tomorrow. As it was, it didn't work, he didn't fall asleep, so Neil and I took the kids on a walk out of desperation. I figured that John would be distracted out of doors and there would be many fewer rules he had to follow there. There is a wonderful greenway behind my mom's home, so we walked along it to a huge grass field where the kids could run.

After noting privately to ourselves how bold Mary is about walking far away from me and not worrying, we did an experiment with John who likes to stick close to Mama. Neil asked him how far away he could run, so John ran as far away as the above photo (estimated 20-25 yards). When asked if he could go farther, he replied earnestly, "NO! Not too far!" My sweet boy!

The children climbed the beautiful olive trees. John called this "balancing."

Neil set him up on this branch, which made John feel like a Big Boy.

And in Mary news, it is becoming apparent that she has decided that being on vacation and buzzing around out-and-about all day is just the perfect time to do her potty training. Her trend continues and today she stayed dry all day. I am positively giddy.