You will notice that Sydney wrote her name backwards on this paper, including the letters except for the "y"s. When I asked her about this, she said, "I was mad because they wouldn't let me see my mom and dad, so I wrote my name backwards." How's that for revenge? Five-year-olds can be absolutely diabolical. Despite this incident, Sydney is really enjoying school. She's a much happier girl when I pick her up than I expected. She had her first school lunch last week and told me it was awesome. I still only get tidbits here and there, but I'll take what I can get.

The other benefit of school is that Tansy's sentence structure has improved immensely. I now notice how much Sydney talks for her, even though I swore I wouldn't let that happen. Another parenting absolute down the drain. With all of this reality flushing my good intentions, I may need to keep a plumber on standby.


This isn't a great picture because Zack was eating and not cooperating and it was a day and a half later, but Zack gave himself a black eye. What catastrophe caused this? I don't know. His face was fine when he went to bed Thursday and bruised the next morning. Syd had a bruise in the middle of her forehead and Tansy had a big scratch on the side of her head as well. I know I slept soundly that night, but seriously, kids. What did you do?

This was also the morning of Zack's well child visit. He's still very middle of the road with his height and weight and has a big fat head. We got a referral to a physical therapist since Zack is significantly behind on his gross motor skills. He doesn't roll, crawl, or cruise. He only stands holding on to my fingers but not to any stationary objects. He gets around by throwing his feet out in front of him and scooting up to them. He is actually getting pretty fast. He doesn't go in until September 2.

I played the piano in Primary for the first time today. It went really well. I had a lot of fun and was really grateful to have a Primary calling that has a really low incidence of full-body contact. There are some wild kids in there.

Ben got to go to the Dallas Temple yesterday. He has been wanting to go since he got there. It is a little closer than the St. Louis Temple is to us, and he doesn't have to manage kids. We are planning on getting out to St. Louis when he gets home. It's quite an adjustment to have the temple 3 1/2 hours away now. More like planning a weekend trip than an evening. At least it is accessible, and I am grateful for that.