Pink Hearts and Pink Eyes

We had a very full week off of school.

Monday afternoon, the boys all of a sudden wanted to do extra chores.  Josiah said that he wanted to be the janitor of our house and be in charge.  Then he said he wanted to be the chief janitor and have lower janitors under him, namely Henry.  He followed that up by asking if he could get paid.  I saw where he was going with it, so I told him he could get paid to do extra chores.  He could not get paid to be in management.  So, he started sweeping all the rooms.  Henry swept some as well and cleaned the baseboards in lots of rooms.  It was great.  Then they went outside and swept the front entrance and the back porch area.  They're also big enough now to get the trashcans from the curb and bring them back to the house.  This getting older thing is working out right now.  Especially since they're so eager.  I'm sure the eagerness will fade, but we'll go with it for now.


Tuesday was Valentine's Day.  It's not a big deal for Todd and I, but all holidays are a big deal for the eldest.  I'm not sure what the kids were expecting, but they were all up before 6:00 a.m.  We took the boys to pick out a doughnut each.

And we got Caroline some hash browns.

We had CC that day, and maybe it was the doughnut, maybe it was getting up super early, but Henry was a bit on the disruptive side.  We ended up coming home for lunch, which wasn't that big of a deal since it was a rainy day and we couldn't play outside anyway.  Henry almost immediately fell asleep in the car, with Caroline not too far behind him.

It was a good thing we had even made it to CC that morning.  I knew we were having big thunderstorms, but I didn't really pay much attention to the "tornado watch."  They have those a lot with big thunderstorms, so I noted it, but that was about it.  Well, we drove to CC (and it wasn't bad out), but when we got there the mom who opened the door for us said they had just gotten out of the bathroom after hiding in there for 20 minutes.  Oh.  Somehow I missed that alert on my phone telling us to take shelter.  Only much later did I see the damage on the internet.  Our part of the city was fine, but another section actually had a F2 tornado touch down.  We have kept this knowledge secret from Henry who won't go to bed at night without us first reassuring him that there will be no floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, mudslides, earthquakes, or any other major weather system hitting us.

By the middle of the week we went to the local children's museum with some friends.  They had a ton of fun.  Caroline spent a lot of time testing a crash test car.

She cemented her friendship with little Rebekah who thought Caroline was quite funny.

The pulleys are always a draw.


The older kids spent a lot of time in the "Fort Bend Herald" shop and printed off many, many advertisements.  I was surprised at how many  they were capable of printing.

Henry, aka "Stephen Cooper/Copper"

Henry sells himself for $2.

We spent a long time there which exhausted the littles.  On the way to karate, Henry and Caroline could no longer hold on and were totally passed out.  Henry slept through almost his whole class and was not happy to wake up realizing he missed it.  After a 10-minute hug and watching a police traffic stop right in front of us, he got over it.  He helped to set up our mobile dinner station for everyone so they could eat on our drive to WAM.


It was two days later that we discovered what else we got from the Children's Museum.  Pink eye.  Henry woke up Friday with a very pink and crusty eye.  We went to the doctor that morning to get him some drops as soon as possible.  We learned that little Rebekah got pink eye as well.  Unfortunately, that made the rest of the week and the weekend a little rough.  Henry is a very tactile person.  He loves to hug, snuggle, and touch everything.  He cannot walk anywhere without having his hands on the walls, the furniture, whatever may be in his path.  Usually this isn't that big of a problem, except when he has a very contagious eye infection and I don't want him to touch anything.  I was a bit on edge.  It was good Todd was here to shoo me away or calm me down from the germs I could just see invading the other two kids.  As of right now it hasn't spread, but his pediatrician gave a prescription for enough eye drops to handle the whole family if need be (which was very nice).  As of right now we've seen improvement in his eyes and are just hoping he's all better by his birthday next week.

And just to be reminded that a few germs are not the end of the world, on the way home from church, Caroline and I witnessed a helicopter landing right in front of us due to an accident.  It put things in perspective, at least for a time, that we can handle a few, very contagious germs.  (Of course, we got home and Henry was rolling and bouncing all over the couch and putting me on high alert again....)

We are back to homeschool next week to begin again.  Henry is very much looking forward to his birthday week.