Deceptively sneaky still waters hide HUGE problems

First day of school!  First day of school!!  Did you hear that?  Aug 1st is the first day of school!!  Well I am excited if no one else is.  Actually I think they are all pretty excited to be be starting school.  You can only lounge around for so many hours in the day before that too gets to be boring.  HA!

6th grade, 3rd grade and 5th grade

Wesley, on the other hand, is sad to see his playmates leaving every day.  Don't worry boy, we will find something to do to pass the time.  Soon it won't be 100 degrees and we can actually GO OUTSIDE without fear of melting.

I am not really a fan of the color brown.  Let me clarify that statement.  It isn't my favorite color.  Right now I live in a brown house, sleep in a brown room with a brown bathroom and have a brown closet.  Outside my windows is a brown wall that separates my yard from a brown field and off in the distance is a brown mountain.  Paint your room you say?  Yes, I thought of that.  I even picked out the perfect grey.  Then the reality of textured sheetrock hit me when I painted Ben's pink room to blue.  HUGE PAIN!!  I just can't psych myself up enough to do it.  Sigh, the brown will remain.  Don't feel too bad for me, we are only have 2 years left.  I can live with the brown.  What I can't live with anymore is the 3 1/2' of closet space that I can't use effectively.  Since we aren't painting, let's do some building!!

Before shot of Ben's closet

What a difference a week makes!!  Now all three bedroom closets have new shelves to make it more efficient! Yahoo!!  I am so excited!  It is kind-of sad how excited it makes me.  I need to get out more.

While I am basking in the glory of my new closets, we are suddenly brought back down to earth by discovering a lump on Lilly's inner thigh.  Sitting in church, I rest my hand on her thigh and feel a silly-putty egg sized lump.  When I ask her about it, she tells me it is her bone.  Ahh, no it is not a bone.  Fast forward a couple of days and we are off to the doctor.  We don't know how long it has been there and she says it doesn't hurt unless you grab it which of course I have been doing basically non-stop since I found it.  Lab work was ordered, it shows normal levels so now she needs an ultrasound.  

As if we don't have enough going on, Lucy gets braces on the front upper teeth. She will eventually have them all over, but for the time being she is sporting half a grill.

Since our return from the east coast, Wesley has been spending lots of time in our off-limits-to-him-because-Oscar-lives-in-there bedroom.  Gee, I wonder why that is.  When questioned, husband denies allowing access, hmmm.

Since Wesley has invited himself into the room, I decide that it is just the thing to get Oscar to finally accept the situation and begin to "let it go".  This picture kind of gives you a great indication of how that is going.

Tragedy strikes!!  I go into the closet and the floor is wet.  Has someone spilled water - no, is this an accident from Wesley? - no there is too much water for that.  I start feeling the walls beneath my newly constructed shelves.  They are cold and wet.  Dang!  Don't jump to conclusions yet, let's go look on the other side of that wall.  Maybe something is up in the garage.  I find water on the floor around the water softener tank.  Hoping against hope, I call the company to see if they can come take a look.  Sure enough, the machine is fine.  The technician just so happens to be married to a guy whose family does water extraction.  Quick phone call later and my new best friend Stan is telling me I've got a leak.  Great. In the wall.  AWESOME.  Not to worry, he knows a contractor that can help me out.  Sure enough, one partially cut into garage wall later, I have a piece of pipe with a nail in it.  Seems our closet revamp nicked a pipe. The shelf along that wall was over 12 feet.  The pipe is about an 1 1/2" thick.  It was just dumb luck that the pipe was hit.  Not so much dumb luck as much as just my luck.  A weekend of fans blowing 24 hours a day dry out the wall and before you know it the sheetrock is back up and painted and the carpet is put back down and you would never know there was a leak!  So if you need a water extraction guy, or a contractor let me know!  There are no pictures of any of that.  I mean I took some, but I won't bore you with them.

I have started calling Lilly Jane Goodall.  I know she dealt with gorillas and Lilly primarily with birds but I can't think of a good bird ornithologist and we don't have gorillas here in Yuma.  But you get the idea. This is her latest project -- baby doves who made the mistake of nesting in our gutter.

WTI starts on Labor Day so we get to have fake Labor Day the weekend before. The kids have a swim meet on Saturday and afterwards Lilly is going to a sleep-over birthday party.  The kids rocked their events.  There are so close to qualifying for Regionals in a few events.  I am not even sure exactly what that means, but the coaches are excited and so therefore we are excited!  

What a sweet picture, wonder why they are being nice to each other?

Oh. Ok, and suddenly the world makes sense again

After we dropped Lilly off for her party, the rest of us hit the road to Palm Springs.  We had been wanting to explore it a bit more and even though we only had one night and wouldn't even make a dent in the "things to do there" list, we went anyway! It was strange to only have two kids in tow.  Quieter.  Felt wrong. But definitely quieter.  Lucy and Ben have decided we can all go back as a family.  So I guess we will show Lilly what she missed.

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire!

Everyone made it back from Camp in one piece.  I tried to not take offense when my children all said "NO, we don't want to leave!" I felt the same way when I was their age.  I didn't know how to break it to them that I wasn't ready for them to come home yet either.  Hmmm, maybe it is time to look into two weeks. 

Of course they were excited to get back in time for the Annual Lemonade and Popsicle stand.  Cousins Wells and Tyson were able to join us this year and as in years previous, the boys were the first to be "bought out."  Wells and Lucy lasted a bit longer then last year before throwing in the towel.

Lilly on the other hand was all about sticking it out until the bitter end.  Here she is with all her earnings for the day. 

Lilly making it rain with her Lemonade $$

Daddy was not able to join us for the Fourth again this year.  Something we have heard lots and lots of grief about.  Despite his absence, we managed to have a great time and the fireworks this year were very IMPRESSIVE!

A HUGE event that everyone had been looking forward to since basically last July was the Monclova's coming into town for their annual Emerald Isle visit.  We were able to get them to come visit us at the Marina and squeeze in a trip on the boat and look for some shark teeth.  Everyone was extremely excited to see each other.  Especially Christine and I!!

Those are REAL smiles people

Besties for Life

Reunited!

No fights!!!

The kids have been dying to get to the Water Boggan, especially Ben.  Almost daily he asked if today was the day we were going to go.  Finally I was able to give them the answer they had craved.   Stephanie and her kids and nephews were able to join us for a fun filled morning at the Boggan.

MH wasn't so sure about this plan

Another thing we had been talking about doing was going over to a friends house to check out their pygmy goats.  They also had some free range chickens.  The 3 goats were very funny and kept trying to butt each other out of the way to get to the food.  The kids were in HEAVEN! The chickens were less then thrilled.  

Every year since basically we have been married, Jim and I have almost the same conversation regarding a little cabin over on a private island.  He wants to spend at least one night whereas I am good with just spending an afternoon over there.  Not that we really get a say, because usually it is rented and therefore unavailable.  Well this year he got his dream shot!  There were two nights in the schedule when it was available and he was actually going to be in town.  Secluded cabin, unobstructed views, salt marsh, wildlife, kayaking, canoeing, what is not to love right?  Air Conditioning.  Or lack thereof.  It is July. In North Carolina.  AC is kind of a necessity for life.  I agreed to spend one night. The kids were just as excited as he was.  Don't get me wrong, I was happy ... but excited?  Not so much.  

All day we played around in the water, swam, tormented the millions of sand fiddler crabs in the marsh and kayaked until it was time to go to bed.  I will admit, it was fun.  Bucket list item - check!

Our time RAPIDLY came to a close.  We were able to squeeze in another dinner with the Whiteheads at the pool!  The kids were miserable - HA HA HA.  

Another pretty cool thing was a surprise visit from even more cousins!  I am not sure the older two were excited, but the rest of us were.  I think that is one of the very best things about going home, seeing family and just hanging out enjoying each other's company.  Our family gets so little of this during the year, so we really try to make it happen when we can.

July means Lucy's birthday!  This year she hit double digits!  WOW! I can't believe she is 10!  Seems like just yesterday we were down in Alabama waiting for her to make her appearance.  We have covered quite a bit of terrain since then.  
Sunday was another great day to visit with our Swansboro buds, but there aren't any pictures.  Well that isn't really true.  I don't have any pictures. Maybe one day I will get them, but it doesn't really matter.  We met up with Cindy and Jill/Michael and the kids for one last boat ride/shark tooth/swim.  It was glorious!

Having a little cake before hitting the Swansboro music scene downtown

Another Swansboro tradition is going to Mac Daddy's to celebrate Lucy's birthday with local friends.  Sure her birthday is the reason we go, but really it is a win for everyone.  Well, not everyone.  Jim is not a fan.  This year he "lucked out" and had a flight our last night so we chose to do it when he was unavailable.  Maybe it was a win for everyone.  

Last night of hosting Wellons crew

Lucy and MH racing

Forrest and Ben dueling it out

Ward challenged Lucy to some Skeeball

Birthday buds squaring off

Brother against brother

Show NO MERCY Mella!!!

Happy Birthday Sweet Lucy!!

The very last thing that I needed to do before flying back to AZ was to fix the Marina's Christmas sign.  Daddy and I had made one way back before I left home in 2003 and it was in dire need of an upgrade.  So much so that we basically started from scratch.  Earlier in the week he started working on the frame and I ordered some LED Christmas lights from Amazon so all we needed was to put the two together.  As always Gregg was up for the challenge!  We were doing fine until WT started burning our fingers with the hot screw driver poking holes in the filter cloth!  We were glad when he got called away to put some boats in the water!  For the record, only when he was making the holes did we have injuries. 

That is burn #3!

WT doesn't care

He left us alone with a blow torch!!!

All Done!!! 

We made it back home safe and sound.  The pets were plenty happy to see us, especially Wesley.  He had been staying at a friends house all week but way he acted you would have thought we had tied him up in the yard.  Oscar apparently was so lonely that he had shed enough fur to create another cat.  MY WORD there was white fur all over my room!! 
A week later and everything was back to normal.  Our 13th wedding anniversary was a rather quiet affair with just dinner at a local restaurant.  Lucy was kind enough to paint me a picture.  I love it!  We need to build an addition to display all the artwork they have created since our return!

Now we have just three short weeks until school starts.  What to do with the time?  Swimming in the mornings, followed by even more swimming in the afternoons and evenings.  It is just too hot for anything else.