Sundays

Sundays are hard with 1-4 pm church. I think the nursery leaders that serve during 1-4 church earn themselves a special place in Heaven.

Here is how many Sundays go:

E goes down at 11:30 for nappy-nap
We wake E up at 12:25 from nappy-nap

(Yes that is a pink blanket he's sleeping with. It's actually MY blanket but he likes it. I'm not worried though because pink blanket is always accompanied by trains and cars and manly things.)

He's usually not ready by then since he's been napping for about 3 hours every afternoon...

Then we scurry around, get his church clothes on, convince him that his tie is handsome like daddy's (sometimes we have to do that by making Beah wear a tie too), shovel lunch down his throat (or let him eat it in the car with his bib on) and try to be out the door by 12:45. Then we do the whole meeting thang, and pick up E from nursery where he has inevitably burst into tears the last 5 minutes because he was worried we weren't coming to get him. You know, we're always just leaving him places.

Then, we come home, have a little feeding frenzy, and break out the Wii before dinner.

I love me a good day of rest.

Prayers

Emerson has really gotten into saying prayers recently. He doesn't really care about bedtime prayers, just mealtime ones. He's been getting upset with us if we try to say it without his help, then he'll start crying and we'll try to figure out what's wrong and he'll sob, "blessing food!" so we'll have to give him a turn. And he's just like every other kid when all he says in the last line is AMEN! with all the gusto he can muster. Then sometimes he'll add a "Good boy!" to compliment himself afterward.

This morning he wanted to help with the prayer over breakfast, so we began our simple, vainly repetitious prayer and he threw in "happy dreams" all by himself because that's what we say at bedtime and we finished the prayer. Then this is the conversation that ensued:

"Mommy, blessings."

"That's right, we say thank you for our blessings."

"Uh uh uh blessings."

"Right, we say thank you when we talk to Heavenly Father, don't we?"

"No, uh-Mike!"

"We talk to Heavenly Father when we're saying our prayers, huh?"

"NO, MIKE!"

Apparently Emerson thinks we've been praying to Mike (Richards). He's a great guy and is the father of E's two favorite people, but I'm not sure where the praying-to-him thing came from. There's just no reasoning with a 2-year-old. But I guess Mike should feel good that Emerson looks up to him that much. Maybe we'll start emphasizing the "Dear Heavenly Father" part even more now.

Awkward Duck

So we have this group of 4 mallards that like to come chill by our garage. I have no idea why. We don't feed them, and there aren't any female ducks hanging out. It could be that both of our neighbors have bird feeders by their garages, but we don't. Dumb ducks. They kind of move in a coordinated pattern, swinging their heads the same way at the same time and it got me thinking about the movie, The Birds. For some reason I don't think it would've been as menacing had ducks been cast instead of those creepy crows/blackbirds.

The other day we looked out our back window and saw one of these said mallards on top of our garage. It didn't look like the cool cardinals and other small birds that usually grace the garage, so I just thought it looked awkward. And it looked like it felt awkward, too. Kind of like it had landed there by accident but wasn't going to tell anybody that.
I hope some girl-duck will see past your awkwardness and be your mate someday, big fella.

Park of Roses

We made a little trip out to the Park of Roses again, but our timing wasn't perfect for the full blossom effect. I think we're going to try to go back in a couple weeks. That didn't stop E from having a good time though. I don't think we passed one color of rose that he didn't stop and smell (without any prompting from us, might I add.)