09-09-09

I forgot to mark 09-09-09! And now it's after midnight, so it's 09-10-09. Oh well. I did think about it, but not at 09:09:09 on 09/09/09. What a silly thing!
Oh, I'm getting sooooo behind with my photos! I haven't processed a single one for more than a month, and there have been several big events (trip to CA, the boys' birthday and baptism, Benjamin's visit, my birthday, and this last weekend with family in town). When will I have time?! Maybe I'll have to go back to how I used to do things and share (gasp!) *unedited* photos. Can I do it? Um, maybe not quite yet.
But since I am resolved to document my life a little better, photographs or no, here goes.
Last Friday some friends in my ward threw me a birthday party. It was so fun, and the first time I've had a party like that since I was a little kid. I got some nice presents and enjoyed feeling special for the night. There are lots of really good people here.
The past few days have been busy! My two brothers-in-law (Tyler and Ted, Ben's brothers) and my oldest nephew (9 months older than Brigham and Joseph) came for the weekend. We packed in the fun!
Saturday morning we left bright and early for San Antonio. We first went to the Wildlife Safari park just north of San Antonio, which was great fun. You drive in your car through this park that has wild animals roaming around. We saw giraffes, zebras, rhinoceroses, ostriches, a whole bunch of different kinds of antelope-type animals, buffalo, etc. You get bags of food when you go into the park to feed the animals, so the animals are trained to come right up to the car. It was really cool to see the animals up so close, and even more fun watching the boys interact with them. Joseph was the most fearless. Max (the boys' cousin) was a little more timid, and kept saying that Joseph was "Either really brave or really stupid!" :-) The scariest and most aggressive of the animals was this Emu (I think it was an emu, it looked like a brown ostrich). It was SO aggressive. We rolled up the windows and it kept pecking at the window-- hard! He would have stuck his whole head and neck in the car if he could have! At one point Ben used Mosey's paper airplane (which he had me make for him and then carefully decorated himself and had been playing with it for the last few days) to put some food in and reach out the window to feed the emu. When Ben tried to bring his hand back in the car, he dropped the plane. And there was NO way we were going to open the door to get it, not with that crazy emu right there! So there were many tears. Finally the emu went away and we were going to back up to retrieve the plane, and just then, a park ranger came by in his golf cart, and picked it up. Oh dear! More tears. At the end we got out of the car to go into a little petting zoo filled with miniature goats. The goats were obsessed with my wheelchair. It was pretty cute. They kept coming up and rubbing their horns on the wheels, and hiding underneath. The boys tried to feed them the rest of their bags of food, but the goats seemed more interested in the paper bags than the food... Anyway, while we were there, Ben saw the ranger that picked up Mosey's plane, and after talking to him, he managed to track down where it had been deposited and gave it back to Mosey! So all was well. I'm telling you, one of the most difficult things for me to deal with as a parent is my child's disappointment. I feel compelled to do nearly anything to assuage those feelings. I know it's not good, every child *needs* to experience disappointment, and especially how to work through it when things can't be fixed. But it is so painful for me. There's enough inevitable disappointment in life, isn't there? Isn't it ok to fix what I can?
After the safari, we went to the San Antonio River Walk (which is not particularly wheelchair accessible!), and to the Alamo. It had been a couple of years since we had been there before, which is a long time for these little kids, so it was pretty fun to go again. Then we went to the Tower of the Americas (San Antonio's space needle-- actually taller than the one in Seattle) where the boys scared me to death by leaning on the elevator doors while waiting for the ride back down. The elevator door opens up to the outside (it is an outside-facing elevator) about 60 stories up! Yikes! I'm sure it was safe, but still, creepy to think about.
On the way home Ben kept checking the stats on the BYU game with his Blackberry, and when we got back home we found the game online and he and his brothers watched the last half of the game which, as we know, was extremely exciting for everyone.
Sunday after church we had dinner (I made Texas sheet cake for the first time-- yum!) and then toured around Austin a little (went to the lake--what's left of it anyway, and drove through Steiner Ranch), climbed Mt. Bonnel and then to see the bats. The bats didn't come out until after 8:00, and it was nearly dark, so we didn't stay too long, but Max still said it was "the coolest thing he ever saw," so mission accomplished!
Monday we went to the Texas State History Museum, which is a small natural history museum on the UT campus. It was perfect for the amount of time we had, and it was free. The boys all liked the dinosaurs and the dinosaur footprints. We dropped Ty and Max off at the airport and then headed back home to clean up after the weekend.
The playroom was a giant mess, and I had to really urge the boys on to get it organized again. Mosey was so funny, he kept finding toys he liked and saying, "I'm going to put this one in a special place so that if any crazy babies come to our house, they won't find it!" He kept going on and on about the "crazy babies." What crazy babies?! I sure wish I would have been able to give him a baby sister or brother to drive him crazy for real!
And speaking of crazy babies, Mosey was a very bad boy on Sunday night. He was wound up and didn't want to go to sleep, so he kept kicking Joseph and Brigham and turning off the light and basically causing havoc upstairs. So I told Joseph and Brigham to go sleep in another room and lock it so Mosey couldn't go in. They did this and Mosey went back to sleep in the other room. Well, the next day Brigham discovered the poster I had made for him when he was student of the week all torn up. :-( It's not totally unsalvageable, the pictures are not torn up, just torn off the poster. But it will require some hours to get it put back together. I was extremely sad and upset about that. Where is this attitude coming from my mellow Mosey?
The rest of the week we have attempted to get some lessons done. I have my next Enrichment activity tomorrow night (well, tonight), so that has occupied some of my time. Tomorrow we probably won't get too much schoolwork done.
Mosey has really gotten into the Magic Treehouse books the past couple of days. He's read parts of them before, but between yesterday and today, he has read 3 in a row! He's been such a good reader for a long time, but still hasn't been *that* into reading, at least not for long periods of time. I guess his attention span is now long enough to hold him to a book for 30-40 minutes at a time. It was fun to see him on the couch today, totally absorbed.
OK, time for bed. Way too late (as usual).