Friends

The three kids down the street came over Friday right after the school bus came home which is around 3.  They did played a bit and then did art.  It was before five and they were cleaning up so I could send them home when their grandma knocked on the door.  She asked if I could watch the kids while they ran to Radio Shack and picked up some food really quick.  My kids were getting hungry and dinner was almost ready but Radio Shack is only 10 minutes away so I agreed.  We waited and waited and waited.  At 6:30 we went outside and the eldest girl told me that they were probably eating at some restaurant and that they did this sort of thing all of the time.  I was not happy.  I don't know if she was telling the truth but I'll never forget what she said.  She noticed I was getting very antsy and called her grandma.  The grandma was stuck in traffic and would be here in 15 minutes.  It was longer than 15 minutes.  I'll never watch her kids again.

They wanted to come over on Saturday but I sent them away.  They came several times this morning and on the third attempt Nyla and Cora went out to play with them.  Once again they were here for over four hours.  They are pretty good kids but even Nyla was getting tired of company.  After they had been over for 2.5 hours I received a text from another neighbor asking if we wanted to join them on a walk.  Nyla said she didn't want to so I invited her to bring her three kids to play in our yard with everybody else.  I figured at that point I may as well invite another neighbor and her two girls.  So at one point there were 11 kids in the yard.  When Nyla saw another neighbor walking down the street with her adult children and grandchildren she turned to me and asked me how many I had invited.  I hadn't invited them but they did stop to chat.  It was almost funny when another neighbor girl knocked on the door after 6.  She had just come home from her trip to Pennsylvania.  We sent her away.  I don't know how our house became the neighborhood hangout.  In a way it's good because Cora is the youngest and it's easy for her to be part of the group in her own house but at the same time that's a lot of kids. 

I was organizing some of the homeschool stuff this week and came across some of Bohdin's work from 2010 when he was almost six.  I had asked him to name ways to make the number 5.  He listed several including 1+1+1+1+1 and 25-20.  I asked him the question again and he told me he wouldn't answer that because there were infinite ways.  He said by the time he was 98 he would only have named a small fraction. 

Buddy planted a flowering dogwood in the front yard this weekend.  It's Nyla's favorite tree.  It won't get big enough to climb before we leave but hopefully she'll enjoy the pink blooms.  The trees around here are mostly tall and skinny so there aren't really any climbing tree here.  She has adopted a small tree in the backyard but it's too little for climbing.