you know one of those days when the hubs is working a 14-hour day and so it’s all on you to get the kids up, and changed, and dressed, and fed, and lunch made, and hustled out the door, and got to school on time, and gas bought cuz it’s on empty and oh my why is it $4.55 a gallon now?!, and back home to clean up breakfast dishes, and change the baby’s poopy diaper (and it doesn’t make the task any cuter to call it “poopy”),  and put the baby down for nap, and vacuum the endlessly shedding rug, and then homeschool the second grader, and get so…

of a former elementary school teacher-turned-parent: my very least favorite homework assignment to do with the kids is their daily reading aloud practice.  HATE IT.  and it is expected to be done EVERY SINGLE DAY.  now, i know the value of daily reading practice for fluency, for comprehension, yeah yeah yeah.  but no one ever says how brain-numbingly boring it is for the parent who must sit through the excruciating 15-20 minutes of a child’s monotone voice stumbling over words nicknamed “rule breakers” and therefore are not sound-out-able and so require said parent to actually be paying attention enough to help with those pesky words.  unfortunately for me, listening to…

this is one of the images i posted yesterday. and this is how i’d like to remember our day at the beach.  we are very blessed. the end. just kidding. we are indeed very blessed.  but not so blessed as to own a private beach.  and to go to that private beach on labor day and expect to find no one else there.  nope, not that blessed. and while i find it exceedingly hard to believe that anyone would think life is perfect here in the tsai house, any amount of time spent with me, or my kids, or my husband, or any combination of us, in real life would…

we had a long run of very hot days last month.  which meant we went looking for some relief… beachside!  this is the one and only shot i got of this boy… before he did this. he didn’t care a bit about sand potentially getting in to his eye and proceeded about his business.  so while the others scampered off to splash in the ocean, here he squatted with his blue shovel and his sisters’ pink buckets. completely ignoring those pink buckets but being endlessly fascinated by the sand.  and blue shovel. pink buckets, you say?  when did these get here? see this big huge rock?  prepare… to be… amazed! …

lauren [after dinner] pulls up her shirt, pats her tummy and says, “check this puppy out”. lauren [while watching the lorax]: that’s all you can go, fat bear?