Pictures to Come.

We had a little get-together with friends for E's birthday last Saturday, which I will document pictorially soon. There was cake and presents, presents and cake, and lots of sweet friends.

In other great news, Katie came Monday to stay the week with us, which has been more than wonderful. We've shopped, played, eaten, slept, and watched hours of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Picked up lamps for the sofa-table-turned-buffett and a rug and painting for E's room during our five-hour outing yesterday, during which the kids behaved themselves quite admirably. I was glad to be reminded that the world does exist outside my house in the middle of the day. I hadn't seen it in a while, so I had forgotten.

And lastly, Jude was introduced (passive voice, sorry) to rice cereal this morning. My camera battery kept dying, but with a little finagling we managed to get a few pictures of his awesome faces of disgust and confusion. Hooray for solid foods!

Grab Some Popcorn.

Note: Sorry this cuts off right before she opens her present--my memory card is always full. It was Mary Poppins.

The Shack.

A summer reading list update was woefully overdue, so I obliged. As you can see, I'm reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. (Not sure what "Wm." is. William? A title of some sort? Can anyone help me on this?) I was cynical at best about it at first, but both my parents read it and loved it and have been on me to read it ever since. So I am.

Before I finish it though I thought I'd see what you had to say. Anyone read it? Anyone like it? Anyone hate it? I'll reserve my opinion until I actually finish it.

And the other book, the C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church one? That's another parent (in-law) suggestion, and a whole other story/blog post. It's interesting and provoking and convicting, as most things are that are connected to C.S. Lewis.

While we're on the subject, let me just say this: I've tried not to have favorite authors. I've tried to be broadly-read. I've tried to give other people a chance. But I just can't help it. I love him and I love everything he writes. He's the favorite I've tried hard not to have.

Sterotype me at will.

"Have All the Animals Gone Mad?!"

If you are not up on your Finding Nemo dialogue, then you won't recognize that tonight's title is a direct quote. If you are not up on your Doxology Mine, then you won't remember from the last post that E got Nemo for her birthday and has watched it an embarrassing number of times since.

Anyway, that whole first paragraph is completely irrelevant to the story I want to tell you tonight, except that "Have the animals all gone mad?!" was all I could think upon returning home from church.

And by "animals" I mean insects. Read on.

So la-dee-dah, I get home before Tony around 9:30 p.m. and have to do the Single Parent Struggle of how to transfer each kid from car to house. I take E in first, and plop her screaming on the couch. "MOM-MYYY!" Like I'm turning my back on her and leaving her there forever abandoned, instead of what I'm actually doing, which is walking the three feet back to the car to haul Judah--and his 200-lb. carseat--in. So I go get Buddy Man and bring him in and put him on the ground and proceed to close the blinds. I get to the third one and feel a searing burn on my shoulder. Ok, maybe not searing, but I've never been stung before, and I was getting s-t-u-n-g. So I flail about for a bit (determinedly keeping my mouth shut and my screams silent for the sake of my impressionable children--I know, I'm such a good mom), and hear some disconcertingly angry buzzing. The burning gets a little worse and then out of my sleeve falls a wasp. I then use the only thing handy to smush it, which also happens to be the worst possible thing to smush wasps. A rubber ball. I rolled it over that thing a million times and it still pitifully struggled to survive. I then started to feel sorry for it, because it only stung me because it felt trapped and it wasn't being "mean" and stinging is the defense mechanism God gave it and all it got it was killed, blah blah blah. So then I have to justify the wasp-murder in my mind. It could have, would have stung my kids. I had to kill it. For the sake of my innocent children, the wasp had to die.

Go ahead and shake your heads. Just telling you the whole story. I know it's just a wasp. Whatever.

So anyway, I sit down to feed Judah and periodically make sure I can still raise my arm above my head and that my esophagus isn't closing up. Like I said, I've never been stung before. I didn't want Tony coming home to a comatose wife. I don't think his heart could recover from such a sight. He would never forget that night. Not for the rest of his life. He'd never be right.

Ok, I think I'm finished. Sorry.

Needless to say, I am alive or I wouldn't be writing this. But that was not the only time our lives were threatened in this house tonight! Shall I tell on?

So Tony gets home and is getting around to giving kids baths and I'm sitting in our room on the computer. Elizabeth runs in laughing like she does when she's a little excited/scared. I hear Tony say, "Rach, come look at this scorpion-looking bug!" So I go in there to find...noooo, it's not a bug, it's a scorpion. An actual, real-life, I-thought-scorpions-were-deadly-poisonous-manflesheaters-only-found-in-the-desert scorpion. WHAT?! What is a scorpion doing in my house? UPSTAIRS! In my son's room! Have all the animals/insects gone mad?

The answer is apparently yes. They must be crazy if they think they can enter this house and live. Because they can't. And they didn't.

And I must say, scorpions have a lot more guts to squish in a carpet when you smash them to tiny atoms than regular earwigs or spindly spiders. Oh yeah, and they're also A LOT MORE TERRIFYING.

Since then, I have googled "scorpions in Georgia" (that's right, folks, I live in Georgia, not Mexico, not the Sahara, not any of the places I thought scorpions were limited to), and found that the Little Southern Devil scorpion (rightly named, I thought) is actually fairly common in this state. So add that to the list of things I didn't need to know.

It's 11:32 now and the hullabaloo has died down and everyone is asleep and hopefully dreaming scorpion-less dreams. I'm still awake and praying everyone has scorpion-less beds.

It's an eventful night when animals go mad and it's downright deadly when insects go mad. Even when they're not poisonous in the slightest.