Laws

Benton:  I know one law.  It's thou shalt not kill.  But I know one way that it is okay to kill somebody: if they're trying to kill you.  Then it's okay to kill them back.

Songwriters

Brita and Benton wrote this song at least two years ago, probably more.  It's still going strong.

It's a classic.

Featuring Brita, Benton, Mima and Irene as the choir; with a cameo of Elias as himself.

The world could use a few more Bentons

So tonight before bed, I sent Benton up to sit on his bed a little early because of something that happened.  He was crying and wailing when I went up to talk to him so I helped him calm down and he explained that events might have been taken out of context and he hadn't really deserved to go up there.  I felt a little bad about it.  Then he handed the piece of paper that he had been working on before I had sent him up.  It was a card.  For me.

For those of you who might not read Bentonese, it says, "To Mom" on the outside and "Mom, I love you. You are nice" on the inside.

Then I felt very guilty.  At least he thinks I'm nice sometimes, right?  He's a good kid.

The mini-meet

Brita and Benton are at a mini swim meet right now.  I'm waiting for Mima and Irene to wake up so we can go join them.  I hope they're having fun.  They've been loving swim lessons.  They've had them every week day for the last five weeks.  Except one day that was cancelled for weather.  That was like a vacation to me.  I loved it.  Brita can swim by herself for a ways and Benton can tread water for a little bit and back float.  They get ready by themselves everyday and take care of their towels and swim suits by themselves.  We only forgot towels one day and had to share goggles a couple days when Benton's broke.  The people at swim lessons are really nice.  We met some other homeschoolers and hung out a bunch with the Loveridges.

In other news, here's a few things that have made me laugh lately:

Mima looking at the shapes in a game: There are triangles, polka dots, and squares.
Irene later confirmed that they were triangles, polka dots, and squares when she played the game.

Brita: The Philistines are big and so are the Bahamas.
(She was talking about the size of islands.  I LOVE her readers vocabulary.)

Irene at dinner: I'm having thirds!  And then I'm going to have seconds.

Irene: Mommy!  Something--something turned my ice into water!!

Our old house

So this is us at our old house.  We moved on my birthday.  It's the second time that's happened in my life.  The last time was when I moved from Mesa when I turned fifteen.  Anyways, here's us in front of our house the day we moved.

 It was such a good house.

 Just look at that yellow lawn.  You don't see lawns like that in Virginia..  We even wrote a song about our yellow lawn one day.  Brita figured out the tune on the piano and wrote it down.  It was called "Yellow Pie."

We don't see green mustangs in front of our house now either.  Sad times.  We miss Monica.  And our fabulous neighbors.

I hear they planted more trees out front and moved the swing set.  Way to be way more motivated than we ever were, new people.  I hope they love the house like we did.

Blogging

So I've been reading through my blog the last couple days and it made me remember all sorts of things I'd forgotten.  I used to be funny.  And the kids did awesome things.

So I decided to blog again.  So to sum up from the last time I blogged: we're all still alive and living in Virginia.

Now that you're all up to speed I can continue to tell you all the mundane things in my life one post at a time.
You're welcome.

Him or her

Mima was just telling a story from Sunbeams today:

Today a boy or girl in my class today threw away his or her cup but he or she wanted more and so Brother Weber, who was teaching, gave him or her a new cup.  I know it was a boy or girl in my class.

It's a baby!

Elias Lee McNabb was born at 12:15 this morning.  He weighed 8 pounds 10 ounces (of course that was after pooping three times) and was 21 3/4 inches long. 

He is really cute.  See?

I finally had a successful home birth.  He was born about 35 minutes before the midwife got here.  Peter caught the baby. 

We're all doing awesome.

Benton's birthday

 Yesterday was Benton's birthday.  He's been pretty excited about it coming for about a year now.  He wanted a big party with some of his friends coming over and presents and he made a list of about 12 activities he wanted to do, complete with illustrations.

I'm pretty opposed to parties for my kids.  Mostly the presents part of them.  If there could be a party where you just got together with your friends and played and celebrated being born and didn't have to have people give you things to make you feel special, that'd be perfectly fine.  I feel the same way about baby showers. Whatever.  Yes, I know I'm weird, but still.

Anyways, Benton asked and asked enough that I finally gave in and said we could have some people come over for dinner and to eat cake and ice cream with us.  In the words of Peter, "It sure looked like a party to me."  I told people not to bring anything, but I guess I should have been a little more explicit about presents.  We had dinner and the kids played and then we had cake and ice cream and the kids played and then Benton opened presents and the kids played.  I think people had fun.  We had four families, so I think there were 14 kids and 9 adults total.  We had Hawaiian haystacks, which I thought were really, really good.  Monica came over earlier and helped the kids decorate the house.  She brought all sorts of fun things.

We made the cake the night before.  I had a the brilliant idea to make an angry birds/minion/minecraft cake.  We ended up not adding the diamond pick, though, so it turned out to be just an angry minion.  I thought it was pretty amazing.  And even more amazing is that we couldn't find many pictures of an angry bird minion on the internet.  I mostly mixed colors for the cake and Monica and Peter did most of the actual frosting.  My favorite part of birthdays is still coming up with a cake to make and making it.

 Here's Benton opening his presents.  (Just kidding, it's him after he blew out the candles on his cake.)  I tried to take him aside before he opened them to make sure he was grateful and said thank you to the people who gave him the presents.  Peter stopped me and told me he had already talked to him about it.  The result was Benton grabbing a gift, thanking the nearest person profusely and then grabbing the next one and opening it.  He kind of forgot about looking and seeing what he got.  It was pretty funny.  People helped him get everything out of the packaging afterward and he did like and appreciate everything he got, but the opening was a little funny.

 After everyone left we played glow-in-the-dark ring toss and blew up the glow-in-the-dark balloons.  the kids were crazy tired, but they had fun.  All in all I think it was a good birthday.

And can I just say that I'm so glad Benton's part of our family.  He pushes lots of buttons, but he's so kind-hearted, generous and helpful and forgiving.  The other day a guy from our ward came over for something.  I asked how his wife was doing and we talked about her for a little bit.  After he left Benton went out to the garden and picked a bunch of flowers, put them in a glass with some water and said that he wanted to take them to Sister Call (the lady we'd been talking about).  I asked if he even knew who that was and he (very indignantly) said yes, she was the music lady.  So we went and gave her the flowers.  He's always thinking of nice things to do for people.  It's pretty cool.

Here's one for you

I knew we had a recent picture somewhere...