You Can’t Always Get What You Want

The great classic rock song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want is sung often in our home. It is something of a family theme song. The children cringe when we start to sing it to them when they start whining about something that they can’t have. They even sing it to each other–which, as you can imagine, is quite annoying to the one on the receiving end. Tonight, when I was jokingly singing it to Nevin after he sneered at my request for him to take a soiled diaper out, Charis joined in with 2 words, “always get.” I just had to laugh.

Being Profound

Well, I wish I could write something profound; however, it seems like my mind is mostly occupied by the everyday responsibilities and joys of life to think of anything new a profound to share. So, I’ll just have to stick to the plain reporting of happenings in our life.

The most recent child story involves our youngest. At just 13 months, she took a typical toddler tumble, and she ended up stopping her fall with her hand and cracking a bone in her arm enough to require a cast. This happened about 10 days ago, and she has adjusted pretty well. She doesn’t seem to have much pain, and she has also been forced to improve her walking because crawling with a cast on one arm is just not worth the effort. It looks like she’ll have the cast for about another 2 weeks. The doctor will check it then and let us know if any further treatment is needed.

In other children news, Calvin successfully completed his test for his third “stripe” on his white belt and his test for his yellow belt in jui juitsu. He’ll receive the new belt at his class in the coming week, and he also gets a certificate. He is very excited about this reward for his hard work in jui juitsu. Nevin’s tee-ball season ended last week with the winning of a close game. I think they had only 2 losses for the season. So now that his time is not occupied by tee-ball, he has joined Calvin in jui juitsu.

The blow-up pool from Wal-mart has proven to be the worthwhile investment we had hoped it would be. The children get in it every day that the weather permits for at least an hour. This week we had another family with 4 children visit, and the pool provided a good part of the entertainment for the afternoon. Today our little neighbor girl came to join our kids in the pool, too.

For downtime these days, I am re-reading the Starbridge novels by Susan Howatch. I re-read these books periodically because I find the author’s understanding of human nature so fascinating. Every time I read them, I see situations in my life that have been similar to those of the characters.

Finally, for about the last 6 weeks I have been going to exercise classes at the gym we’ve gone to for a while. The classes include light weight-training and aerobics. I’ve found the classes difficult, but helpful. I feel myself getting stronger, and I have noticed some improvement in my posture. Hopefully the benefits will continue.

Perhaps I’ll be able to be profound the next time I write a blog entry . . . but I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.

Another week

Summer is already moving right along. The past week has been fast and furious. We spent the week with Mark’s parents, and the kids attended VBS at their church. They enjoyed their Bible school experience there as well as seeing their grandparents, their aunt & uncle and their cousins. We also were able to celebrate Evangeline’s 5th birthday with extended family. Mark and I enjoyed some free time in the mornings, and a couple of nights out thanks to Mom and Dad!

We rushed back to OK on Friday so we could make it to a variety of activities planned for the weekend. The big news of the weekend is Nevin’s 2nd year t-ball team won their second league tournament trophy in a double-elimination finish. When they won last year, it seemed to be more because of luck than any skills they had. The tournament was at the beginning of the season, and it was before they had learned much. This year, they were really playing as a team. The best thing about the tournament for Nevin is that he now has 2 t-ball trophies. He just thinks the trophies are cool.

We are really thankful for his coach, who is level-headed and doesn’t take things quite as seriously as some of our opposing teams’ coaches. The parents of our team members have gotten a little more hyper, but generally, they control themselves too. At the final game, one of our opposing team’s coaches got so out of hand with his comments to the umpire that he was thrown out of the game–actually out of the ball park.

Blast from the Past

We have resisted buying nintendo or sega or any of the new video games for our boys. They do have Gameboys, but we have tried to limit time on those as well. However, this week I found a deal I couldn’t resist at a yard sale. I bought an old Atari system along with more than 25 games (I haven’t taken the time to count how many there are.) I paid $20 for the whole lot. They are loving playing with all the old games from my pre-teen and teenage years. They are easier than so many of the games available today, so when they play they have a much better chance of doing well enough to make it fun–this is particularly true for the 6-year-old.

All in all, I am quite pleased with this purchase. If they get bored with it in a few months, I should be able to make a profit by selling it on e-bay!