MONDAY NIGHT MUSINGS

- Can someone please invent clothes that don't need to be washed?! I mean, seriously! I've been doing laundry non-stop for two days and I'm only slightly making a dent in the mountain in our room that is our laundry. Oh, how I despise it.

- I confess, I went to the midnight showing of Eclipse. Not because I had to, but because I could, so I did. It was actually Sheila (my mother-in-law), Bryce, and Bryce's cousin's wife, Maria. It was fun. And I actually don't mind the screaming teenagers. It's the annoying teenagers that were sitting in front and behind us that were making crude comments the entire time, at both the movie screen and to each other. Yeah, lots of fun. Anyway, it was good. Not as good as I thought it would be, but good.

- Somehow we've ended up with only two binkies for Mattie. One of them is good, and the other goes flat, so it's the bad one. Well last week we lost Mattie's good binkie, so we're stuck with the bad binkie. It does its job of calming her down, but I think it will be a blessing in disguise and force Mattie to wean herself off the thing. I was just going to go cold turkey or cut her binkie in the next couple months because Bryce and I will not send our kids to nursery still on the bink...so she has until Sept.

- Speaking of Mattie and church, she is IMPOSSIBLE these days! She is so wiggley,it makes it impossible to get through any meeting. 18 months old can't come fast enough!

- We're pretty sure Mattie has started saying "no" in the last couple of days. And so it begins. Time will only tell how quickly her screaming tantrums will turn to screaming "NO!" tantrums (not that she has lots of screaming tantrums :)

- While brushing Mattie's teeth last week I noticed that two of her top molars and one of her bottom have broken through and are almost all the way in! It's her bottom R and upper R and L number 4 teeth, and I'm guessing they probably broke through about two weeks ago. But still only 3 in the middle on the bottom. Weird.

- Mattie has just gone speech-crazy this week! 7/4 - she said 5 words: shoe, hot, bubble, whoa, and ow.

- It was a rainy and depressing Fourth of July here in Seattle and I miss Utah like crazy!

- Melt my heart! Mattie has this fear of inclines and declines. She's still a little unsteady and so she gets unsure and frustrated and just stops and whines when it comes to hills. Well today when she was playing outside with CJ, he was down in the firepit area, and she wanted to be there too (mainly because the balls were there. She was yelling, "baaaallll" over and over the entire time :), but was stuck on the hill down to the pit. So I asked CJ to help her and he very willingly walked up to Mattie, took her hand, and led her down the hill. It was so cute! And it was another moment that I wished I had another appendage that was a camera.

- I just feel like I have no time lately and it's been so frustrating! Anything that I want to do, outside taking care of my kids - run, work, projects, read, scriptures, etc - I have to either stay up late or get up early. And it's not because I'm super busy, but I think it's because we're not in our own home. CJ is an escape artist and loves to leave the house, and Mattie and CJ both are constantly "exploring" and getting into things. We've already broken things, lost things, and pretty much taken over things since we've been here and it's only been a month. So I feel like every moment the kids are awake, I need to be watching them, like a hawk, to try to prevent any more disruption than we've already caused. Needless to say, not much gets done and it's very exhausting. On that note...

Happy Monday!