The Saturday 7

1. I was in a weird mood all week. I did almost no housework, cooked one meal, and felt desperate to get out of the house every day. So we went to the park, the library, the video store, Kelly's house, Goodwill, and KFC. And yesterday, we had friends over to swim all day. Lucy loves it when I get in these moods. Haha.

2. On Wednesday I went to yoga all by myself because Kelly couldn't make it. And I did my best headstand ever! Usually the instructor has to hold me in place so I don't tip over, but this time she got me steadied, then I held it by myself for a long time. Go me! 

3. Lena has been an absolute grump all week. Both of her top eye teeth popped through in one day, so I figured that was most of the problem. But she still had a fever all day after her teeth came in. That night, she woke up coughing and I knew she had a cold. The poor kid gets the most horrendous cough - it's like she loses her voice and does this scary barking cough. Last night I was up with her 4 times and at one point she sounded like she was majorly wheezing. But then she had a coughing fit and the "wheezing" went away, so I think it must have just been gunk rattling around in her chest. Yuck. Stupid summer colds.

4. I got my Usborne books order in the mail today. Such a fun package!! I pulled out 4 books for Lucy and 3 for Lena. The rest will be saved for Christmas. Lucy gasped with delight when she saw the Wedding Sticker Book and spent the next hour and a half doing every single page. Lena has very little interest in books, which breaks my heart, but she has read her books with me a few times this week. I will make her a reader!!

5. I have been tormenting myself about where Lucy's going to go to school next fall. (2015) My number one choice is still for her to go to Algoma, but the more I look at our finances, the more I'm realizing we're just not going to be able to afford it. I haven't applied for aid yet, so there's still hope that we'd qualify for a lot of help, but I'm not planning on it. So the other options are public or homeschooling. One of the reasons I love Algoma is that Kindergarten is 3 full days. I can't imagine Lucy going from being home with me 24/7 to going to school all day every day (at public school). She cries when I drop her off to her one hour class at church every week! So I feel like I need to know now if she's going to go to public school, so we can do some kind of transitional preschool or something before then. But I don't really want her to go to preschool this year. And I really really don't think I would like homeschooling. I'm going to try it for a year for preschool. Maybe I'll surprise myself and totally love it, but I'm not counting on that. Oy. Decisions.

6. We had small group last Saturday. We've been meeting with this same group of people from high school for 7 years, I think. It's so fun to see how much our lives have changed. When we started meeting, not everyone was married yet. And no one had kids. Now we're all married and everyone except my sister has kids . Almost everyone made it to small group this time and brought their kids.

Jackson and Harper

Lucy and Presley

Lisa pulling the gang.

Once all the kids got put to bed/sent to the babysitter, the adults had some fun:

Bob and Kris

Braden and Libby

We played a game where one spouse was blindfolded, and the other had to direct them to pour a cup of water into a container. It was harder and more hilarious than we expected. Haha. The point, of course, was the importance of listening and communicating, and we were given the challenge of spending 30 minutes with our spouse this week talking about something other than the logistics of our day to day lives. This is something Justin and I really struggle with. He gets up at 4:30 every day for work, so he's in bed by 9:30. Lucy doesn't fall asleep until at least 10, and Lena still sleeps in our room (because of Lucy's night owl tendencies). I rejoice in the alone time I get after the girls are in bed, so I really don't want to go to bed at 9:30, hence Justin and I don't spend a ton of quality time together. He has Fridays off, though, so we made it a point to go sit outside away from technology Thursday night this week. Missy gave us a list of questions to ask each other as kind of a starting point/check-in for our marriage that was really helpful. And we ended up talking for over an hour. Yay for quality time!

7. I'm going to end on a depressing note, but I want some audience participation in this one. News came out this week about a popular Christian radio host getting arrested for some horrible, disgusting criminal activity. It became kind of a talking point among my friends about how we have to protect our kids and can't really trust anyone. At small group on Saturday, we got to talking about sleepovers, and a few people suggested that they're not sure they'll allow their kids to ever go to sleepovers. I was a little baffled at first, but am starting to wonder if there's some validity to their concerns. On Tuesday, we had a play date with a friend and talked even more about it. That afternoon, these two links popped up in my twitter feed: What to Do About Sleepovers  and Should You Allow Your Children to Go to Sleepovers? Both articles were against sleepovers. The latter seemed a little extreme to me, citing incidents where kids were kidnapped from sleepovers never to be seen again. I'm sorry, but my kids could be kidnapped from their bedrooms at home. But both articles made me wonder if the childhood fun is worth risking incidents with brothers or dads or uncles who are in the house. I hate having to worry about that kind of thing and I like to think that the parents of Lucy's friends - who I know and love - are totally above reproach. But this Christian DJ thing makes you realize more than ever, that people are capable of hiding horrible secrets. Ugh. What do you think? Will you let your kids go to sleepovers?