Sometimes Zack and Tansy just can't take any more of the busyness of their lives. That's when Tyler gets to finally be in charge. The kids had been watching Netflix on the Wii. Tyler knows that he is not supposed to touch the remote. Do you love the look of glee as he finally gets a chance to watch his choice? Tyler has also discovered that when he is in trouble, he can smile very sweetly at me and it totally works. I hate that it works. On Friday, I had had enough. When he ripped a book I had told him to put down, I was upset. He tried the smile again, but I held firm and told him he was going to time out. Being the fourth child, he knows what this means. Here he is in his very first time out. He looks a little less upset than he did most of the time because he was interested in the camera. He looked appropriately remorseful and did sit there the entire time.

Yesterday was beautiful weather in the 80s. Once we finished what we had planned, we were going to pull out the swimming pool. However, the air pump is missing in action. We looked everywhere except, of course, in the one place it is. While we were looking, we discovered a bag of water balloons we had purchased last year. After thirty minutes of water balloon prep, it was all over in about two and a half minutes. Zack started chucking them two at a time once he got the hang of it.

Fortunately, our neighbor across the street had a sprinkler on so the kids got good and wet after all.

Ben is working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week right now. Not terribly fun, and even more frustrating with the government shutdown talk. Congress has managed a bill that lasts until April 15, so we SHOULD get paid. I'm not holding out a lot of hope that a budget that was supposed to be finished six months ago is going to magically be finished in a week. We will see.