March

I love my kids, but sometimes they make me flip my lid. Like when I go downstairs to fold a load of laundry, leaving Nate and Gwen in my bedroom watching a TV show for 5 minutes and come back to find this:

The floor was covered with water and the entire bathroom was splattered with black and magenta fingernail polish. Here are the two partners in crime, who have been aptly renamed Butch and Sundance by their grandparents, attempting to clean up the mess. Between them, 3 bottles of nail polish remover, 4 additional children and mostly myself, it came off in a total of about 2 hours of hard scraping and scrubbing. Except for the master closet carpet, which is unsalvageable. You can't see very well here, but Gwen's face was also covered in polish. She told me the next day that she was making her "kitty cat face". She got lots of funny looks around town for a couple of days until we were able to get it all off.

Given that this was our second nail polish fiasco in a couple months' time, every bottle in our house has been thrown out.

Moving on to other events this month, Brenna was old enough to compete in the school track meet this year. Here she is in the softball toss. She had three good throws but I never heard the final results from this one.

She also competed in the 100 meter. To my surprise, she was part of a 3-way tie for first. I'm only surprised because 1) she's my daughter. I'm not so much with the fast. 2) I've never seen her run much of anywhere. She has a run/skip/gallop thing she usually does, even when stealing bases in softball (although this is no longer the case as this season has gone on). She qualified to compete in the district track meet. More to come about that later.

I had the privilege of accompanying Brenna's GATE class on their field trip to the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A. I was the personal chaperone to Brenna and her friend Vanessa as we stepped around black ooze spots in the ground and learned more about mastodons, dire wolves, and other animals of the Pleistocene Era.

Brenna loves paleontology and still has a great interest in animals past and present so this was a really fun trip for her.

After a lovely picnic we walked down the street to the Peterson automobile museum. I don't have much to say about that except that Brenna and I both managed to stay conscious, which is a minor miracle! The only thing that kept her even remotely interested was the knowledge that her cousin Jonathan and uncle David would have loved the place. So thank you, Jonathan and David, for keeping us awake!