The following is a true story, although I wish it wasn't....

Yesterday, I got in the car and I needed to get my spare house keys out to get into the house. And they weren't there. And they are always there. And since some one recently broke into my car, and since I had them the day before, and since my car was open for a long stretch of time when I was unloading everything from our all day pool trip, and since I suffer from an occasional case of what I consider to be healthy paranoia, I had a vision of the girls being kidnapped and sold into white slavery as I slept, so I decided to change the locks. I called my neighbor to do it, he came over, took them off, I dashed to lowes to get new ones, but before I did, I let the chickens out.

I tried to be super cool about it to Annabelle, but the house was open and I was envisioning it being raided as we tried to find the right locks. Annabelle said, " why are we hurrying, mama?" So we can go home and have fun.

Yeah, right. If fun involves my neighbor trying to change the locks while almost being eaten by my lab, who turns into an attack dog when she is around someone she doesn't know, that is what we had. So I let the dog out.

The thing is, the dog turns into a chicken eating shark when the chickens are out and I realized that about 2 minutes after she had been out. So I ran to get her, but it was too late, one chicken was dead and in the dog's hiding place, the rest were hiding in the coop.

I put the dog inside, and am feeling absolutely horrible when my other neighbor stopped by. She brought me a Starbucks and her daughter and son ran upstairs to play with Annabelle.

So to recap, inside I have a crazed chicken eating barking dog who is trying to eat one neighbor who is fixing my locks. My fairy godmother neighbor whose house is always clean and whose life is always perfect who has stopped for a visit and three kids upstairs. (T was mercifully at school) and a dead chicken in the yard. And this was the time when the little girls decided to crack open the science kit and make potions, and not read the instructions, because one, they can't and two, if they could they would have seen that the toy required "adult supervision." I hear "mom, it's overflowing!!!" I run upstairs to find that test tubes are over flowing with purple foamy water and a very bad
smell.

And I feel like I might be raped murdered by a possible bmv person.

This was the time I felt I should tell h everything that was going on. Calf rope. I was done.

Now text or call? How about both? During lunch. His busy time.

Awesome. Day.

Where kinder left us, kick off to the summer of fun 2014

We just finished our first week of summer. We went to the beach. We went to the art museum. We stayed home. We did things around the house. We decompressed.

Kindergarten had left our entire house exhausted. Especially it's victim. I sent them in the beginning of the year, a happy go lucky child, excited about school, and along about December, I stated to get complaints about going to school, by the second to the last say she was screaming," I can't go, not even one more day! ". Part of this, was probably my fault. She was in a lot of extra stuff this spring, but in my defense, the extra stuff is so much more fun than learning fractions, nouns and verbs and synonyms. Every night we were encouraged but not required to read an ar book, do I-station and dreambox, practice our spelling words, work on math facts, and do our homework. Things I didn't learn about in kindergarten and a workload I didn't have until high school. Now ask me if she can add? No, not really, but that didn't stop them. I don't really blame her teacher, I think it is just the culture of the school, which is well regarded in Houston. We are not zoned to it, but it is a school for gifted and talented kids, and i nought she would do better there than the Montessori magnet by out house. I think on the whole, she thrived there, she didn't really care about what they were learning. She could keep up just fine and she loved her teacher and her friends.

But by the end of the year her tantrums outnumbered her little sister's. I think h summed it up best when he said, "she has gone to twice as much school as we did at this age, but she is at the same maturity level we were." And it it crazy. They talk about the "race to nowhere" but clearly, they want us to go somewhere. And then there are all the parties and field day and teacher appreciation and recitals and then to top it offTallulah crashed into the coffee table and we had ER drama.

We were all just done.

So now we are doing our fun things. And a thing she complains about but is freakishly good at (swim team).

We will have more beach trips

We are looking forward to visiting our aunt in michigan.

And we are going to chill. I explained to her what camps are--which is what upper middlish people do to their kids in the summer, all in the name of enrichment. "No mama, I just want to be with you every day."

Yes, I am that lucky.

No bucket list to check off this year. We are just going to enjoy every day.