Up in the middle of the night

Jake woke me up when he got up to pee (and he may or may not have already peeded a little in his bed...I'll check when it is light outside). In the meantime he is sleeping like a baby on my floor and I am wide awake...ugh!

Madi won a 40 lb pumpkin at AWANA last night for the costume contest. She was a pack of lifesavers. She'd changed her mind about her costume three times. First she had decided months ago that she was going to be a 1920s flapper and wear the dress she wore in Thoroughly Modern Millie and the hat, gloves and purse that belonged to my Great-grandmother, Gramma Kitty. Then she borrowed a costume from friends and was going to be a queen/ Renaissance Lady (which she can still wear to the Ren Faire we are going to next week {if this BLAZING HEAT goes away}), but then a better (read...more complicated) idea came to her. We met "Nana" in Orlando on Sunday because she had been at a conference there. We got to hang out with her at a great resort hotel with a lazy river. We ended up with four brightly colored inner tubes for the kids and Nana to use in the lazy river (Mike and I sat in the lazy shade). By the end of the evening Madi was putting on all four innertubes, and thus the costume was born! How do I know the pumpking weighed 40 lbs you ask, because the kids and I had to struggle to get it to the car (along with the innertubes) when I picked them up last night. When we got home I asked my muscular husband to please bring it in the house for us. I asked him how much he thought it weighed, his guess was "oh about 15 lbs." FIFTEEN?!! I thought it was more like a HUNDRED POUNDS, so then I had to proove myself, I weighed myself and then weighed myself holding the monstrosity...40 lbs!! Incidently Jake weighs 52 lbs, but is much easier to carry than this thing!

Jonathan is going to hit some golf balls with a friend this morning (right now it is 4:36 am). They have a standing golf date on Thursday mornings which began last week. This is great for him since golf is his sport. I'm not sure how he feels about this, but I've been planning on him joining (trying out?) for the local high school golf team next year...we'll see.

Speaking of trying out...are you familiar with that email that circulates from time to time about how people born between the 30s and the 70s turned out OK in spite of the way we were raised?! Does this bother anyone else besides me? You know the whole "my mother smoked and I'm OK", "we didn't have helmets and seat belts and I'm OK" "not everyone made the little league team and we're better for it". This email really drives me crazy!! What about all the cancer, what about the millions (billion?) of dollars people spend on medication {not to mention drugs, alcohol, and all kinds of "therapies"?!) Did we not learn anything?! Do people really agree with this email?! A local little boy died recently when the van his mother was driving flipped over on the highway...he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Yes, my car often looks like a clown car when we pull up somewhere and sometimes 7 kids climb out of it (we have an extra third row seat)...you can be assured every kid was properly buckled in their own seat belt. The email goes on to say that the last 50 years produced some of the greatest risk takers, problem solvers, and innovators of all time (ALL TIME? that's debatable I'd say), but even so for every great innovator of our time how many more disfunctional people are there? (I'm pretty sure the word disfunctional wasn't used 100 years ago!) Now don't get me wrong there are plenty of things wrong with how kids are raised today, and I'm doing everything in my power to counteract that kind of stuff with my own kids. Kids are overscheduled, have too much screen time, get almost everything they want (except for often not enough family time), most kids today in this country are being raised by someone besides their parents, and some kids aren't even allowed to go play in their own backyards. Only in the years between the 30s and the 70s was breastfeeding not the norm for babies, only in these years did doctors and mothers decided the mother shouldn't have to feel anything when delivering a baby. It was in these years that high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, meat with hormones and antibiotics made it into people's diets. I can limit my kids screen time, my kids can play outside (even during (gasp) school hours),but they are going to need sunscreen if they are out in the Florida sun too long though because, as I child of the 70s, I've had skin cancer three times and I'm not even 40 years old! I often get defensive when people talk about the "good old days" because I believe we can still capture most of the positive things from those times, in fact I believe I am doing just that. My kids get to tromp all over the woods...even to the point of getting stuck in quicksand remember? I was not standing right there hovering, but thank God I was close enough to get him out before it passed his waist. What would've happened to the 50s child that was in the woods alone not expected home until supper? (his friends couldn't have helped him...Jonathan and a grown man couldn't get Jake out...it took his MOTHER!!) It is possible to get back to the good old days in some areas without having to go backwards in everything you don't have to let your kid stand up in the front seat of the car or lay on the back dash to have a good childhood. All summer my big kids walked to Theatre (they even had to cut through people's yards like Wally and the Beaver used to do), but you know what, they had a cell phone in case they got into trouble and needed me! Hug your kids, hold them tight...but not too tight!!