Today on the way home from school Little Missy exclaimed, “LACY!  Now I know where Lacy lives!”  Glee burst from her little body and smacked me in the back of the head.  I had no choice but to inquire.

Me: “How do you know where Lacy lives?”

Little Missy: “CUZ I JUST SAW HER COMING OUT OF HER HOUSE!!!”

Excitement, I tell you.

Once we got home, Little Missy immediately made a note with hearts across the top and it said something like this:

Dear Lacy,

I know where you live.

I love you.

Your secret admirer.

If she were a few years older that note would be totally creepy.  But now it’s just so stinking cute and funny.

THEN she made an envelope and sealed up the letter.  Here’s what the envelope says:

Hi-Lacy

theis is [this is]

your secict [your secret]

admire [admirer]

I love who Lacy. [I love you, Lacy]

She makes such a cute little stalker.

But you know, she comes by the stalker naturally.  The day before my first date with Hubby, my mom, sister and I went to the mall to pick out a cute new outfit for me.  Since Mr. Fox worked at B. Dalton, my mom and sister strolled through the store to spy on him.

The next night (maybe? I can’t remember exactly) I laughed and told him that my mom and sister had spied on him the night before.  But he totally knew.  Because my sister could not be discreet and stared at him around the corners of the bookshelves with her big ol’ eyes.

I’m guessing Little Missy’s attempt at Secret Admirer (Stalker) will not turn out too secret-y, either.

Auntie Leelee and Little Missy, after a girls' night two years ago.

This theme of body image, and more specifically  how society forces its malformed version of the Perfect Woman on girls and women, keeps popping up in my blog because I have two daughters that I want to protect from its insidious perversion; I have a son who I want to protect from believing the Perfect Woman is the one with the perfect hair and skin but who also lacks love and wit and a relationship with the Most High.

And so I’m grateful for my sister, who is funny and witty and wise, who wears pretty clothes without allowing her appearance to become what defines her, who will jump to listen to either of my daughters (or my son, undoubtedly) whenever this world is dragging one of them down.  And I’m grateful that she already has a plan in place for when they come to her.  And when Hayley tells my sweet child to “not take their shit,” I will turn my head and giggle, because sometimes cursing is totally appropriate.  And in that situation it will be.

I love to tease my husband about this, especially when he is sitting right behind me as I type BECAUSE HE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT, but he does not want me to take the kids out of school.  He says that because I skipped a few classes the second semester of my senior year in high school there is a possibility I do not believe in the necessity of our children daily attending school, that I might willy-nilly pull them out of school just for the fun of it.

So you can imagine my hesitation in telling him about that morning in December.  But they were to school by 8:35!  The teachers barely noticed the kids’ absences.

Yesterday, though, we mutually decided to take the kids out of school so that we as a family could attend the free admission day at the zoo.  Third year in a row of attending, and it’s awesome every time.

I have to say, in all my years of going to the Sedgwick County Zoo, this was the best trip ever.  Those animals were so active.  The grizzly bears strolled right in front of us; a gorilla ate, then laid down, then puked, then ate his green puke right in front of us; a hippo bellowed right up at my husband and kids; the tigers playfully wrestled with each other and then nuzzled right below my kids; the male lion climbed up on a rock and roared, ROARED YOU GUYS, right in front of us.  It was amazing.  I mean, I’ve seen the gorillas in their exhibit, but the bears and the lions are always hard to find.  For the former to just meander in front of us and the latter to ROAR WHILE WE WERE WATCHING… amazing.  Oh!  And some very naughty attendees tore branches from a tree in the rhinoceros habitat to feed to the giraffes, so we got to see the giraffes climb down an embankment and eat leaves until the zookeeper chased away those rule-breakers.

Here are some pictures:

Pretty girl.

G, always ready to protect his family.

Yes, that's my finger in the corner, but it was the only picture of all three kids.

Post-roar. You just know he's thinking, "I've said my piece, now I'm going to lie in the sun."

This is the baby and the daddy giraffe. The daddy had just walked back up the embankment to share a large branch with the mommy giraffe.

Then we came home and were all very tired, but Little Missy had dance and G had Boy Scouts.  But it was fun.  Perfect weather, no sunburns, active animals.  I dare say we should take them out of school again next year!

Little Baby Chickadee is sleeping, which gives me time to post pics from Spring Break and Easter.  I’m working on posting more pictures to this here blog.  Here goes.

And, we did more on Spring Break than just go to Botanica.  But sweet Baby Chickadee deleted most of those pictures when I wasn’t looking.  I think she liked the slurping sound my phone made each time she clicked “delete.”  But I do have these:

Painting at Botanica.

Making friends with the instructor at Botanica.

Gathering clues at Botanica.

Though surrounded by nature, G did not let that affect his choice of subject; no, he drew Transformers.

The last one at Botanica. I promise.

Our unsuccessful geocaching attempt.

My family makes me happy.

• Why not start things off with my column from two weeks ago, wherein I discuss the competition between me and my daughter.
• And then follow up with my nearly-stopped-wavering on the More Kids issue.  Because I think there is this spectrum, with Individual Attention for Each Kid at one end and My Alone Time/My Alone Time With My Husband at the other.  With each additional child something has to give.  You’re either going to take time away from one of your existing kids or you’re going to take time away from you and your spouse.  For our family, I think we’ve just about hit the right spot on the spectrum.
• I never dug her bits about beauty creams or fashion at the end of each Lucky issue, but I really like her bits now in blog form.  Makes no sense to me, either.  Anyway, one of my new favorite blogs.
• Bet you didn’t think of all these as you raise your kids.  Especially #3, to which my husband is a testament.  That boy is not oogied out by germs.  One time he told me that as a kid when his grandparents would make him wash up for dinner he’d think, Why?  Because, as his youngest brother pointed out on a different occasion, he’s pretty sure he rolled down hills of cow-poo as a kid and had the best time.  Hubby’s grandparents knew their farm held germs, and said germs should be washed away before dinner.  But Hubby didn’t adhere to that kind of pesky germs-cause-problems hoolabaloo.  AND my husband never gets sick.  Which is only a bit of hyperbole.  Because really, he does not get the flu or colds.  Maybe he’s sick once every couple of years?  Anyway, long paragraph to say that #3 in the above-linked Cracked column rings true with my husband.
• Finally, read this.  Then put away your computer/iPad/iPhone and take Heidi’s challenge to write some handwritten notes.

Because usually I don’t.  But today Mia was home from school and she made sure Daphne stayed out of the street while I buckled in Baby W.  Such a happy day for a walk!

The littles don't show it, but they really are happy to be outside. I think they're just shocked at this point.

And… Mia is out of school.  Again.  Yes, Spring Break was just last week but she is out today and tomorrow due to Kindergarten Round-Up.  Then next Friday she and Gideon will be out of school for Good Friday, then the next Monday for a Teacher Development day.

I love my kids and I look forward to when they’ll be out of school.  But why don’t we just officially change Augusta schools to four-day weeks?  A friend at Bible study joked that’s what they’d already done but decided to quietly take out random days of the week so nobody would notice.

At Bible study I hurriedly counted up the weeks and I was incorrect.  The actual number is SIX, not EIGHT.  But in the six weeks stretching from Monday, March 5th to Friday, April 13th, Mia will have been in school a full five days for only ONE of those weeks.  That means the week of April 16th is going to be cruel.  Oh so very cruel.

I have to say, this year we owned spring break.  We rocked that week.

My friend Abbie posted on her Facebook wall that she was excited to not have any plans, to just spend time with her kids and craft with them and let them play baseball outside for hours whenever the mood struck.  But I am not such a disciplined mommy.  If I don’t have something planned for us then pretty soon it’s the end of the day and we’ve watched TV all morning before I finally shoved them outside in the afternoon, with the bonus of bickering all day.  Plus with the forecast for rain all week, I knew we had to plan something.

So Saturday afternoon I sat down with them and we made a list of what we were going to do that week.  Monday: Exploration Place.  Tuesday: home.  Wednesday: Geo-caching.  Thursday: home.  Friday: Nana was in town.

Monday we went to EP and it was so much more a pleasant experience than it has been in years past.  Now Gideon and Mia aren’t running in two different directions.  They’re big enough to play by themselves as I corral Daphne.  They played at the water table with friends from school who happened to be there at the same time, they all played in the vet clinic, we watched model trains over and over and over again, then the big kids played in the Castle while I watched Daphne in the toddler area.

Tuesday was a little rough.  With the rain and all there was some bickering.  But Daddy took them and cousin Gabe for ice cream that night, then they all came back to our house and watched Hugo.

Wednesday we planned on geo-caching but it was too muddy from the rain.  We went to lunch with Nana, Auntie Leelee, Uncle Todd and his co-worker Kenton, then hung out at Uncle Todd’s office for a while, then went on a scavenger hunt.  Daddy sent us a list of things to find and we drove around town and took pictures in front of them.

Thursday was another home day, so Daddy sent them another scavenger hunt of stuff to find on our street.  Gideon and Mia took the camera outside and found everything on the list.  At first they were hesitant about going in people’s yards to take pictures, something about respecting people’s property, but they eventually made it far enough into their yards to hurriedly take the pictures before scurrying off.

Friday Nana was at our house and stayed with the kids while Hubby and I watched The Hunger Games.  Woot.

Saturday morning the kids and I went to Botanica.  They painted, made thumbprint artwork (courtesy of Paint the Towne), and completed a tulip scavenger hunt.  It was so much fun.  The day was sunny and gorgeous and I took beautiful pictures of my kids.  Then we went to lunch, met up with Daddy and tried our hand at geo-caching.  You guys, it was a big dud for us.  I think we need tips on how to locate the items.  Plus it didn’t help that at the first place we were looking next to a busy Wichita street and at the next place we looked very suspicious inspecting the bottom of a foot bridge.  My friend Mrs. Y said her husband and two of their boys found stuff in Augusta the first time they tried.  Maybe we’ll try something around here next.

And now my kids are back in school.  Boo.  Monday I really mourned the loss of spring break.  But Mia will be home with me the next two days because of kindergarten round-up, then the next week they’re off for Good Friday, then the next week they’re off for a teacher development day, and I really love that Augusta schools have a RIDICULOUS amount of days off.

I’ll try to post pictures soon, because blogs with pictures are always better than the ones without.

Yesterday three of us got showered before school and the other child took a long bath immediately after returning from dropping her big brother and big sister at school.  I unloaded the dishwasher, made breakfast for four of us, lunches for two, wrote checks for school pictures, played on the floor with Daphne, wrote a blog post and completed one load of laundry.

I did not load the dishwasher, make the beds or put away any clothes.  Not making the beds is one of my triggers to a bad day.  But the biggest trigger, I’ve realized, is stressing about getting a certain amount done around the house and then trying to work around my kids to get that stuff done.

This is in my head a lot–A LOT a lot–trying to find the balance between taking care of my children and my husband and myself and my house, and because it is in my head a lot I also blog about it and a lot and I’ve columned about it at least once before.  But I wrote about it last week and the week before because I sort of feel like I’m just now getting a good handle on maintaining a clean home while being sweet to my kids.

So: Shifting my focus and then taking my own advice.

• Each day after school the kids and I have Treat Time, a chance for me to eat sweets and sit and look at my children who’ve been gone all day.  Tuesday I asked Mia if she wanted the store-bought pudding she and Gideon had been begging for or a chocolate chip cookie I’d made the prior afternoon.  She pulled on her lip, looked down and said, “Um… a cookie, I guess.”  I told her that she could eat the pudding if that’s what she’d rather have, but her tiny voice said, “I don’t want to spoil your fun, though, if you want me to eat the cookies you made.”  I convinced her that my feelings would not be hurt in the slightest if she ate the pudding, and so she happily did.
• Every time I send a lunch to school with the kids I write on their napkins.  Mia allows me to write her notes about how much I love her while Gideon barely lets me put the note into his lunchbox.  But that’s a whole other story.  Anyway, Mia always brings her napkins home until I throw them away when she’s not looking.  The other day she told me that her hands were messy at lunch.  When I asked why she didn’t just use her napkin she said, “I don’t want to write on the napkin you gave me, Mama.”  So the next morning I cut her napkin in two: on one I wrote my love note and the other I left blank.  She smiled and nodded her approval.

Gideon was still playing with age-appropriate trains and toddler toys when we took a walk around the neighborhood and he pointed his “boom stick”–a tiny curved tree limb, barely in the shape of a gun–at objects and made the sound of them exploding as his arm jolted upward from the imaginary recoil.  I’m still not sure where he got the idea for that.  The most violence he’d seen up to that point on TV was when Thomas the Tank Engine ran through the buffers and oil splattered everywhere as his eyes spun in circles from the surprise.  Obviously this was well before his love for Spider-Man and Transformers..

Friday afternoon Neighbor Boy called and said he had a surprise for Gideon.  We stopped at Neighbor Boy’s grandparents’ house on our walk and Gideon was gifted with a very nice, homemade pretend gun carved from wood, made by Neighbor’s Boy’s grandpa.  It even came with a holster.  Then Neighbor Boy and Gideon fought off the bad guys in the neighborhood with their matching guns to protect Mia’s heart.  Very cute.

Saturday morning Neighbor Boy ran to our house and brought another very nice homemade pretend gun carved from wood, this time for Mia.  So Sunday afternoon I asked them to make thank you cards for Neighbor Boy’s Grandpa.  They made the sweetest cards, told him he’s “awesome,” with people at the bottom of the page, smiling as they point guns at each other.

I don’t think they understand guns yet.