Steven & Ashlee Simons

As if getting influenza during the summer wasn't enough. Now we have pneumonia, well, our dog anyway. Our poor Nifty is extremely sick. I am not a fan of animals in my house, but I welcomed Nifty in after his visit to the vet on Monday . . . after Steven had given him a bath. We knew he was sick. He wasn't eating his food and for being such a happy go lucky dog, Nifty wouldn't even wag his tail all last week. We knew something was the mater. He got in a brawl with a porky-pin the other week and Steven thought that maybe he had swallowed a quill and he probably did because the vet is pretty sure one of his lungs was punctured. But the quill was no where to be found thank goodness. I do draw the line at operating on animals!! Nonetheless he did have a bad case of pneumonia, which is why the vet suggested we needed to keep him inside . . . with a humidifier . . . and well drugged with an industrail size bottle of anti-biotics.

Ben's birthday was actually today, Sunday. Last night Marin and I stayed up and wrapped his presents and set out this train set for him. I bought it on craigs list, so it didn't actually come together as a set and we had to figure out how to make it all connect! It took us and good hour. Marin had a great idea to make a Helipad for Harold the helicopter. We made one on top of the round house with some left over black pool cover (Good thinking Marin!!)

And to follow in last year's foot steps the five sentences that sum up Ben!!

5. Ben please put your cloths back on!

4. No more ketchup Ben.

3. Mommy, where are my shoes??????

2. Oh, sorry mommy, I didn't mean to. (While lifting his hand, shaking his head and having no idea what this sentence means.)

1. Ben please put your trains away!

Tonight we were at the mall and Marin asked me how did Cleopatra died? I told her I didn't know and that I would have to look it up. Well, later I learned she killed herself by placing two aps in her fig basket. I will just tell Marin she died of a snake bite.

Marin came home from school a few weeks ago and told us there was going to me a new girl in her class tomorrow. She told us to guess her name and after many rounds of not guessing correctly Marin pronounced, "Pumpkin!" I said that I didn't think her name was pumpkin and began to rattle off every name that could possibly have something to do with pumpkin. Cinnamon? Sugar? Was her last name Pumpkin? Well, the girl wasn't there for a few days and everyday when Marin would climb in the car I would ask her, was she there today? What is her name? "It's Pumpkin mom! But she wasn't there today." Well on the last day of the week JACK-LIN showed.

A few weeks ago Samantha asked me what I liked to do when I was 35? (I just looked at her.)

The other day in the car Samantha asked me what the last name of her shoe was? I said that shoes don't have last names. She said, "Moooooom, I think they dooooooo, their last names is Tooooooe."

Ben placed our gray cat in the extra fridge in the garage last week. We were having the missionaries for dinner so I went out to the fridge to get some drinks. Imagine my surprise when Grayers jumped out as I opened up the fridge!!

When I was little I hated school. I really do mean hate. I can honestly say without a doubt that I would happily relive my husband being laid off when I was five months pregnant and consequently our housing being taken away because the company owned the house THEN EVER, EVER have to repeat those years at Rock Courageous Elementary School. Swine Flue? Natural child birth? Bring it on. Just please, please don't ever send me back to grade school!

Why? Oh, I could go on and on about being dyslexic, being segregated from my class mates for hours on end because I was so far behind, doing work I knew only I was doing, getting special presents from my teachers because they knew I was an idiot, being called dummy on the play ground and having people tell me to my face all the time I couldn't read, not having help after school with all these issues, but I don't want to give those of you who have children in school nightmares. Let me just tell you that it gets a little old when people baby you for the same "illness" for years and years and years and I do mean many more years of "treatment." Oh good memories. I am sure I have illuminated these feelings of good will toward school as my children now prepare to enter the golden gates of academia that will probably taken them to Hell and back a few times over the next six years.

However, today, hopefully being older and a little wiser I see in retrospective how my life of learning unfolded and I do say I would like to help my children take a less traitorous path then my own; if that being the only lesson I take from those years then so be it. But as God as my witness, I will never let my children fumble around in school as I did. But oh how ironic is the world, or cruel is more like it, when consequently to my horror once again as I drop my young children off at Cactus Valley Elementary School I get to vicariously live my childhood again through their eyes.

Maybe it is just an outward expression of something I have always know deep down inside; that my children might have the same struggles as I did those first few years of school. As horrible as it sounds, or maybe a analogy of own story, but "when I hears that that there child can already read at 5, I just gosh darn" WANT TO THROW UP! No, I am truly happy for those who excel so early (take what you want from those last eleven words) it just brings me back to my own inadequacies of learning written Chines, because it might as well have been Japanese at the time. I laugh because yesterday Marin brought me home a book from the library to read . . . and it's in Spanish. We laughed together.

I realize I should take the higher road on this subject and say in the words of Victor Frankle, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Then again I really don't think that Victor had to go to elementary school in Nazi Germany.