Growing Tummy

I often stand at the door, greeting my students as they file into the classroom each day. As my pregnant tummy's grown larger, the kids will sometimes comment on it, pat my tummy, or talk to the baby as they come in. It's a little strange, but my tummy really is at their eye-level so it's hard to avoid.

I've gotten some winner comments. But last Thursday's took the cake. First, let me tell you that I spent Wednesday night in tears because I'm reaching the stage where my stomach is so large and so uncomfortable that I really can't stand it (and I'm sure hormones are helping with my little meltdowns). But as I greeted the students coming in on Thursday, one little boy exclaimed,

"WHOA! You are WAY fatter than you were yesterday!"

And he decided to follow it up with another winning comment on Friday:  "You just keep getting fatter and fatter every day!"

Kids are brutally honest. But luckily, what they say is usually so hilarious that you're too busy laughing to ever feel offended. Plus, it's the truth-- so there's no sense in fighting it.

Thirty

Not sure if Brian's going to be mad at me for posting his age or not. But it is a pretty big deal. Last week, he turned 30! He's still trying to cope with the whole entering-a-new-decade thing, but I think it's pretty exciting. We didn't do too much to celebrate on the big day. He had class all day long and church meetings all night. But when he got home (around 10:00pm), we celebrated with a cheesecake dessert and a "Happy Birthday" song before going to bed.

Sadly, these are the birthday gifts he requested I pick up before he came home that night:

 Poor guy.

But the next day, I got a substitute for my class and we spent the whole day together as a family. We ate out for breakfast, spent the day at the dinosaur museum, came home to take naps (all of us!), then we got a babysitter and met his parents for a nice dinner in Salt Lake. All in all, a much better way to celebrate.

Strawberries

I'm happy to say that we have a camera again! Brian found a replacement part online for $10 and a local camera shop who charged us $12 for labor. Seriously! And all along I thought we were going to have to spend hundreds to replace the lens. This was a very happy blessing.

So now you can enjoy pictures of our everyday life . . . like Porter eating strawberries. He calls them pah-pies. And he likes to eat them frozen. Sometimes his words for things make complete sense to us and we don't realize how obscure it is until other people give him clueless looks. When my little sister was babysitting him, he kept going to the freezer and asking for pah-pies (strawberries, of course). But, unfortunately, it sounded a lot more like pot-pies to her.

And yesterday, when I picked Porter up from the babysitter's, I told him to tell her 'thank you' as we walked out the door. Being the well-mannered little boy he is, he complied with 'goo-goos' (which means thank you . . . of course). But the babysitter laughed and repeated 'crackers' instead. I never realized his thank you sounds like 'crackers.' It makes me laugh to think how many other people might think he's telling them 'crackers' every time they do something nice for him.

Oh well. Someday he'll be able to communicate with the rest of the world. But for the time being, I'll just enjoy the fact that we have our own secret language amongst ourselves. And really, I'm just grateful that we can finally communicate!