David wants to play Star Wars. Hans Solo is piloting the millennium falcon through the meteor field when Mommy need to grapple with the weeds by the carrots. It's Princess Leah in cloud city while Mommy takes on the lettuce plants. And you don't even want to who shows up (big base dum dum de dum dum dad dum) as Mommy yanks yet another dandelion, roots and all.


Block party night! Block party night! It's get a permit from the city, put up barricades and let the kids ride their bikes up and down the street night. We finally have the logistics of this down. We moved the barricades closer, so we don't block the apartment building on the corner and people who turn into our street have room to turn around. No more scary car vs. kid on a bike moments. Joah brought out her bugle. David brought his watergun, all very relaxing.

My mom has an outdoor pool half a block from her house. We spend a lot of time at Mom's in the summer. Last year Rose decided not to take her swim test and was relegated to hanging out with an adult the whole summer. This year, as regular readers know, she's been taking a swim class that has her doing test level work multiple times over. We did not anticipate a problem. She and Miriam immediately did a length of crawl and a length of backstroke. When I think of how terrified she was of swim classes (not swimming but the classes themselves) I am so grateful and thrilled to see where she is now.

David thought the pool was a might bit cold, but he got in the groove. We worked on back float push offs. He is still so scared of lessons that I might be doing it all this summer. Still, the water was sparkling, the sun was shining.

For various reasons, I was taking care of eight kids eight and under yesterday. I volunteered. We started by having snack in the backyard. Then a couple of them commented on the deplorable state of my garden. Would they care to weed it? Yes indeed they would. I wish I had before and after pictures. They weeded, cut, dug, raked, whacked the flowers with sticks (ok that was the four and five year old boys and I told them which flowers it was ok to whack), and sprayed the hose hither and yon. My garden looks so great. I'm so glad our park plan got pushed to next time.