Quote of the Day

I have three or four different posts started and unfinished this month. Hopefully I will get to return to some of them eventually and give a thorough update on the start of our school year, etc. But for now, I just have a quickie, with some wise words that Meg uttered this morning--not three minutes ago, in fact.

"You know what? While you were praying, I imagined that I was a woman, and I felt it hard to believe that I was ever a kid. Because, when you're a woman, it's hard to believe you were ever a kid."

An M & C Day

That's not Mac 'n' Cheese, by the way, that's our little friends M and C. They've been hanging out with us again recently while their mom and dad are at work, and we love having them! Even Matthew, who is positively drowning in femininity when they're here, looks forward to hanging out.

Our camera is finally dead--like, dead-dead--so we took a few pictures via my computer camera today. Here we are looking normal(ish).

Now silly faces:

More silly!

Aaaaand still more silly.

An attempt at looking sad (with widely varying degrees of success):

"Angry."

Surprised!

Sleepy.

Really sleepy.

Happy.

And that's pretty much how we feel about our M and C days. Happy.

Where Ya Been?

Right here at home, pretty much, since my last post!

However, it's that time of year, that school-year-planning time of year, and I've been working hard to make sure that I'm ready to teach first grade, kindergarden and some variation of preschool on August 21st. We get to do a Nalle-family beach trip in September, so the goal is to have a full month of school under our belts before we take that two-week break. So I've been reading, researching, buying, organizing, scanning, planning, downloading, printing, collating, clipping, copying... and we're going to be ready. I think. Maybe just.

Meanwhile, time does not stand still. Graham hit the 7-month mark last weekend. He is just as cute as a button, and between the five of us older Wilcoxes, we probably tell him so 30 times a day. He is still entirely breastfed at this point but is probably starting to be ready for some baby food. He just finished cutting his first tooth (Finally! Good grief, what a drawn-out process!) and is a much happier boy as a result. His eczema has backed off a little in the last couple of weeks, so we are super-thankful for that. He rolls all over the place and can also do a pretty good scootch--it's not quite an army crawl--more legs pushing than arms pulling. He's also sitting up pretty well and loving the view.

I wish that I had a camera implanted in my eyeballs so that I could take pictures and videos of him in all the fleeting moments when he is being so sweet and wonderful and babyish... I wish I wasn't going to forget what his smile looks like at this stage and have to look back at pictures to recall it. I wish I could always keep his precious, beautiful baby love for myself, corked in a jar like smelling salts, so I could open them up and take a reviving whiff when my heart feels faint. If you are not someone who enjoys the baby stage, then maybe this all sounds really nutso, but... I just wish I could make it last forever. (In some ways. I could do with a lot more sleep.)

I had planned to write more and touch on what the other kids are up to as well, but this is already getting kind of long. Hopefully I can post again soon. I need to leave you with just one picture of Graham... it's an old, blurryish one, and it totally misrepresents his hair, which usually sticks up and out all over the place. But it captured a smile...