A meandering post

After two days of fierce wind, it is now 90 degrees F outside.  Un-un-un-un.  I put on a dress this morning (a thrifted number I wore while pregnant with Baby Truen) and it felt so amazingly good to not be in pants.  I love skirts and dresses, I really do.  They're the best.  So much cooler and more interesting.

I'm at 38.5 weeks.  I'm starting to feel more uncomfortable, particularly on such a hot day.  But just in general, I'm feeling plenty of squeezing contractions and feel weighted down, unable to move very fast.  Moving fast has dire consequences; specifically, groin spasms that stop me in my tracks.  I literally fell on my knees during one episode, which feels so pathetic.  But there is something about the baby's position that triggers my right groin to seize up when I'm moving around a lot, particularly when I'm tired, but also when the baby is awake and moving.

Oh well.

I'm enjoying the last few weeks of Three, soon-to-be Four.  I marvel at how sweet my fellas are and how well they play together.  Not all the time, of course.  But they really are a crew.  Lately, they've been pretty obsessed with She-Ra (of all things).  We got a Smart TV this spring in order to access Netflix and that has opened the flood-gates of vintage episodes of He-Man, She-Ra, and Heathcliff.  Blaine loves to watch it with them in the evenings.  He particularly enjoys the color and kitsch of He-Man, though She-Ra is basically the same/diff.

Just as long as I don't have to watch it.  Our house rules for television watching is that we "watch TV at night, with Dada".  They don't even ask me to turn it on during the day, which is so nice.  I love the freedom from harassment.  Likewise, Diego gets to play video games (Blaine's old Nintendo NES) for a half-hour or so after Blaine gets home.  Having set expectations is key in living a pester-free existence.  It really is.

Anyway, back to the boys playing together . . .

Jamie is always She-Ra, Truen is his crab-claw sidekick, and Diego is "all the bad guys".  This usually involves a lot of running and yelling and rolling around.  Diego is always on the attack while Jamie swirls around bravado-style kicking and hacking, saying, "Ya! Ya! Ya!" and "She-Ra!" and Truen rolls around on the crowd clacking his imaginary crab-claws.  It is hilarious.

I tried to capture it on video yesterday, but it disintegrated into chaos that ended up with Truen and Jamie screaming and crying.  Also pretty standard.  Diego is twice the size of each of them and tends to be quite impulsive, so there are typically a lot of injuries on the little fellas.

In other news, we have a garter snake den on our acreage (under a mysterious rectangle-shaped strip of concrete that was here when we moved in).  The boys caught literally 8-10 snakes at the end of last week and used our handy-dandy thrifted 5 gallon terrariums with mesh-lids (we have two of them) to keep them as "pets".  Diego swore passionately that he wanted to keep the snakes for the rest of his life and that all other pets were boooooooring, but he was already ready to let them go today.  We've been feeding them earthworms and bugs, but it was time to let them move freely again.

Truen made a "Snake Chore" list in his special notebook.  I wrote it down as he dictated it to me.  Amongst the chores of making sure they had food, water, and plenty of grass, one of his daily tasks was to "bask with the snakes in the afternoon".  Bask with the snakes.  And he honestly has been doing that.  He'll sit in the sandbox in the afternoon sun, holding a snake quietly and gently.  For 10-15 minutes or more.  He does that with the goslings too.  He is un-un-un-un.

Jamie has been lugging the snakes around as well and is amazingly gentle with them, for the most part.  I have to keep my eye on him because he likes to pick at their scales with his fingernail (out of curiosity vs. maliciousness, the little rascal).  But overall he does very well.

And I'm not sure if I've taken a single picture of any of it.  Dah, I'm getting really bad.