Freakin Blog. I just haven’t had the time. Matthew has been ill and mostly unwilling to stay at daycare. This means that schoolwork must be done with him in my lap or not at all. Schoolwork has been getting more and more overwhelming as the semester goes on (and on and on and on!)

Dad was here at the beginning of the month. He and Gary replaced the main beam of the mud room. We went to see the monster trucks with tickets that Joshua won from the radio station. The people there were unbelievable nice, and the kids LOVED the trucks. Matthew was yelling WOOOOAAAAA! We got to see the “GRAVE DIGGER”! That was thrilling for the older kids.

School let out for the kids and we have been having an amazing summer, enjoying the pool, trampoline, our new super-sized tent, and all the good things about summer, up until yesterday when Joshua broke the radius bone in his forearm and needed to have it surgically reset. Ouch. Poor kid almost passed out from the pain. They didn’t even finish triaging him. The nurse called down to the ER to get a bed ready because she feared that he was going to pass out. They put in an IV and gave him morphine right off, then general anesthesia to reset the bone. Ouch. Poor kid. When the nurse asked him to rate his pain instead of his standard 5 or 6 on the pain scale he said, “Well, I have never had this much pain in my whole life.”

He still isn’t himself today. The orthopedic didn’t put a cast on yet because of possible (likely) swelling. He expects that it will be four weeks before he puts the hard cast on, and we don’t know yet if he’ll be able to give him a fiberglass (waterproof) cast. I had been feeling incredibly guilty because I made some poor time management decisions this week, which lead to us being at the beach on Tuesday and not at the doctor’s appointment that we had waited 3 months to schedule. Part of me thinks that if we didn’t go to the beach he wouldn’t have broken his arm later in the week, but the other part of me is so grateful that the poor kid got one day at the beach before his summer of hell. I had just (about 10 minutes prior) made plans for camping, meeting cousins at an amusement park, and swim lessons, all of which needed to be cancelled.

My neighbor took us all to the store today and bought Crocs for the boys. Gary got black, Joshua dark blue, Noah red, and Matthew got the most adorable lime green Crocs. They remind me of frog shoes. He LOVES them! I am so grateful that she outfitted my entire family with stylish shoes. We do look a bit looney all wearing the same shoes but we know that we’re cool. The Croc family.

Jerry: Ditto