Tears and Valentines

 Um, so yeah.  I can do it aaaaalllll.  I can cook (weenie-beanie XEIO soup, last night), I can clean (I think if you swept my floor right now, you could roll the contents of the dust pan in a little Elmer's glue and get a puppy), I can homeschool (Did you know there was a solar storm this week?), and I can, uh, um... I can... what was I saying?

So, it looks like keeping up with posting about my life, returning phone calls and, apparently, shaving my legs, have all taken a serious back seat in my life, as in last-bench-in-the-mini-van back seat. These are a few high-lights and low-lights of the week:

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Tessa begs to say the prayer every night, every meal.  This week she sweetly asked God to bless "all da people in all da hostibles (hospitals) and all da people who are homeless, for that the people in hostibles will get houses an the homeless people will get better."

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Ethan: "Do I have to take Spanish?"

Me: "It's a graduation requirement."

Ethan: "Why?  I'm pretty happy with English.
It's gotten me where I've wanted to go."

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Sweet Adam wept in my arms this week when he realized that his female lizard, Dr. Jekyl, was sicker than we thought.  She died when I was away shopping, and he didn't tell a soul.  He just took her outside in a box he made at camp and through his tears he dug a little grave for her.  Two nights ago, he came out of his room at midnight.  When I asked what was wrong, he simply said, "I can't stop thinking about her."  I held my big boy on my lap while he grieved his first loss.  I talked about cycle-of-life-stuff.
It wasn't helping.
So then I just held him.

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Ethan thought it would be a terrific idea to feed a pinkie to his bearded dragon.
A pinkie is a baby mouse.
A live baby mouse.
He did it in front of Ellie.
And Tessa.
And a four year old neighbor girl.
I spent the next hour explaining more life-cycle-stuff to two sobbing little girls.  It turns out that it does not, in fact, help to include in your explanation that we eat chicken.  Now, I am also actually a murderer.
Yup.  I kill chickens.  And if Tessa is ever put in charge, lions and tigers will eat salad.

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I took the girls to the movies tonight.  I had a ball explaining The Muppets to them.  I sang along.  They thought I was weird and a little bit cool (I already knew the songs, so how cool was I?)  And Ellie excitedly said "This is prob'ly the first time I 'ever been to a movie on time!" (Sadly, she is not only right, she didn't realize we were actually late and we missed the little cartoon feature at the beginning).

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My sweetheart gave away about four of his nine lives this week
helping Ethan with school work.

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I gave away many, many tears that my son will never appreciate.

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I made valentines.  

And it's not even February.