California Day 6

Six-twenty! That's how late the children slept in today! That's almost so normal that I won't feel obliged to describe their sleep patterns on the blog anymore.

I laugh at how often I am saying, "Mary, climb down from there!" in this household. I have to laugh or I'd cry because I am a broken record. But I didn't tell her to stop climbing when she decided to climb up Mom's hospital bed to see her. You can almost see Mary's triumphant look of joy in the above photo.

Mary knows how to sign GRANDMA, so she points to my mom, signs GRANDMA, then waves while saying, "Hi!"

This morning I left John with Grampa Neil (and they had a great trip to the park) while Mary and I went to breakfast with my lovely friend Tish. Our visits are always too infrequent and short. Afterward I got to shop at Tish's Catholic bookstore (I think it is the best one in the world). I bought at least eight people's Christmas gifts, so you can see how the whole shopping trip was, in fact, quite virtuous of me.

After the children took mid-day naps, we met my dad for a walk along Putah Creek.

John noticed that there was quite a bit of trash in the creek at that spot and he said to me, "Somebody threw a bottle in there. That wasn't very kind of them."

John and Grandpa played soccer with oak galls.

Then we played at the playground where we had parked our cars to meet. I was impressed when I saw that John could (read: was willing to try to) climb the above ladder. Then I wasn't as surprised when Little Sister just trooped right behind him, in her dress, doing just fine and making it to the top! (And later John climbed the same shape ladder at the big kids' playground, twice as high.)

John's courage to go on tall slides is growing all the time! He had a blast out there today.

Every time he slid down the tallest slide, he'd come rushing over to me and say, "I came down from my castle. I ran so fast. I thought you needed rescuing."

In the evening, I was reading in the back yard while the children played and I heard John announce that he'd found a worm under a log. I encourage children to play with and touch worms, so I said distractedly that finding a worm was great and I'd love to see it. John walked over to me and thrust what had to have been a six-inch long, positively muscular worm inches from my face while it wiggled wildly in the air like it was a snake! I leapt out of my chair, threw my book, and screamed. That caused startled John to leap backward and the worm to fly into the air. Truly, I've never seen a worm so large in person. (It was so large that I could actually see its mouth orifice with my naked eye.) John picked up the worm and I snapped a photo of it as we studied it on the table.

We figured out how to use the web cameras to talk over the computer, so had a face-to-face chat with Daddy tonight. It was particularly cute to see Mary keep shrieking "Daddy" and pointing at the screen. We miss him.

Catholic Mama Moment: We had a rough end to our day with John behaving badly and Mama failing to react with perfect parenting. My stepfather was a witness to both of our failures! Anyway, I put the children to bed early to end all of our misery and, twice while I was puttering around the bedroom getting ready to tuck them in, I discovered John quietly praying to God--about what, he declined to tell me. It was private between him and God. But he was praying and it wasn't because I asked him to apologize to God or to pray to God for help to behave better or because we were doing our family's night time prayers. He had initiated it on his own. Three-and-a-half years old and he's starting to forge his own relationship with God. Makes me all teary to think about!