Not for the Faint of Heart

I earned it today, y'all. I am so tired.

Not as tired as BJ and Brandon. They stayed up until some ungodly hour of the a.m. finishing the tile (it looks amazing, thanks Brandon! Thanks BJ!), and then BJ got up at zero-dark-thirty to go to the 500. Poor guy. Works hard, plays hard. I don't remember him coming to bed or getting up and leaving. To be honest, I don't remember anyone coming to bed last night, even though I woke up with MG and C, and Claire can't get out of the crib on her own. I hate when I don't remember getting her. I worry that I'm going to sleepwalk downstairs with her and put her in the fridge or something, and then wake up in bed with a ham sandwich.

I guess there are worse things.

I got the girls up and fed (without a kitchen, because the kitchen is in timeout until tomorrow morning, thinking about what it did), and then when Grandpa Bob woke up I went outside to mow the lawn.

I'm an indoor girl, so this was no small feat. I put on a tank top, and some SPF 50 over my sunburn, in an effort to "even out." It seemed like a good idea, but I am still not at all even. Actually I am striped. I think it will be all the rage this season, when people get a load of it. I'm like a one-woman Benneton ad.

So, I mowed. The lawn was so long that it kept clogging up the mower when I forgot to pop wheelies, and I had to take a stick and clear it out. I was sure I was going to lose an arm. I dumped fuel all over our yard, once, doing that. I also dumped gas all over when I had to refill the mower (twice. Once after it ran out, once after I poured it out). I was sure I was going to set myself on fire. I didn't, but I wouldn't smoke in our yard for a while if I were you.

I couldn't get all the long stuff around the trees, the patio, and the house, so I thought, "Oh, I'll just weed whack those. How hard can it be?" Ha. Mary Grace thinks the phrase "weed whack" is hilarious, by the way.

The first hint that this was a Very Bad Idea should have been the fact that I couldn't start the stupid thing. Dad came out and started it for me (he also opens jars and kills bugs. Quite handy), and I commenced with the whacking. Before I perfected my technique, I cut down a wire that was coming into the house (phone?), put some cuts in the fence, scuffed up the Tyvek house wrap on the east side of our house, and scalped one of the neighbor kids. Finally I decided that the lawn had, in fact, won, and I came inside, muttering about how I'd always kind of liked weeds, anyway.

The difference between weeds and plants, by the way, is that weeds grow.

After I finally got inside and cleaned up, the kids, Dad, and I headed to Best Buy to get a new power cord for my laptop. The old one only worked sometimes, and I was getting mighty aggravated. Boy, do they charge a lot for those universal power adapters. Sheesh. I could've rigged something up with an extension cord, some duct tape, and a weed whacker if I'd known. But I had a coupon, so I went ahead and got one.

Then we went to the carnival.

My big girl was so brave. She loved every single ride, and we did almost all of them. Even when she rode the race cars, and they took off like a shot and I thought she was going to come flying out of them. I was on the phone with BJ at the time and I said, "Oh my God, this carnie is trying to kill Mary Grace, I'll call you back!" thinking that I was going to have to leap onto the ride and save her. But she was awesome. So brave.



That's her version of a thumbs up. Or she's hitchhiking. I don't know, she was going too fast for me to ask her.

She and I had a blast on the Tilt-a-Whirl. So expensive, though, geez! The tickets were $1.25 each, and most of the rides cost 3 tickets! $3 for a corn dog, for crying out loud.

I think she's ready for Disney World!

Oh, and I know I'm not a grown up yet. She played the game where you flip over a duck (3 ducks for 5 bucks) and you get a prize that corresponds to the letter on the duck. She turned over three "M's" for "medium" and so she got to pick either 3 medium prizes, or one large prize. She got a purple ball, an ice cream cone that shoots the foam "ice cream" when you hit the button, and a plastic inflatable dolphin.

So she beaned Claire with the dolphin, and instead of thinking (or saying), "Hey, knock it off, don't hit your sister!" the first thing that popped into my head was, "You must cut down the largest Claire in the forest with..... a herring."