Tour de La France- June.

Miss Kerri, our neighbor, is super creative and super active with her two boys, James and Andy. She makes us feel pretty lazy 90% of the time. She's also really into the Tour de France. So she decided to host a race of her own- the Tour De La France- at a nearby elementary school of the same name. (She has admitted that she did it solely for the blog post.)
There were 6 participants on the day of the race.

And they're off! Henry had the advantage of being the only one in his age group (the Masters) pointing in the right direction. Which worked out well for him, because he really wanted to win, and James and John are pretty fast. This heat went to him. In the Novice age group, Maddie won with flying colors as she was the only one who would go without someone pushing her.
Miss Kerri was so excited about the race, she even brought ribbons for everyone's bike. Of course, their were yellow ribbons for the winners, but most everyone coveted the pink polka dot ribbons instead.
Miss Juliet also scored big by bringing ice pops. And did we need them, because Friday was the start of a 3 day record breaking heat wave. It broke 100 degrees every day and heat indexes hovered around 110 degrees. To give you an idea of how miserable it was, the overnight lows only reached about 79 degrees.

Mama loves this picture of me and James because of my smile in the background. For some reason, it reminds her very much of our Ohio friend Cole Meyer's earnest smiles.

Check out this sweaty kid. Too bad all the moms are sticklers for safety and required us all to wear our helmets.
John might win the sweatiest head ribbon.
Poor Maddie lost half her ice pop on the hot sidewalk.
I took the "suck the juice approach" so I wouldn't suffer the same fate.
Each kid got two pops, then we were forced to suck on ice cubes if we were still in need of frozen refreshment. Andy didn't let it get in the way of his super hero crime solving.
Lined up for another race. And James is FAST on flat ground. Henry takes a while to get his confidence up when he's riding, but he's steady on the uphill, just like Lance.
Unfortunately, John wiped out on the downhill and had to sit the remainder of Stage 2 out.

After the races, we rode for a little while longer. That's when Henry really got into his groove. As it got hotter and the tiny bit of shade mama was sitting in disappeared, everyone started talking about heading home. And it took a lot of convincing to get Henry to agree to get off his bike. Eventually, the promise of James and Andy coming over to play in our kiddie pool and eat lunch in the backyard convinced him.
We didn't get any pictures of the pool party, but it was a great time. Mama did get this shot of me scooting in my bathing suit. This might be her new favorite picture. Thanks for planning an awesome morning, Miss Kerri!

Try your luck at a game of chance!

Back by popular demand, we set up a baby pool so everyone can make a guess at our new baby's birthday, weight and gender.

Just so you know, the winner gets all three kids for a week.

Craft time- June.

Due to the fact that mama keeps turning the thermostat lower and lower (and doesn't feel bad because we live in a wonderful, well-insulated shady brick house!), we've been forced to spend the summer keeping ourselves busy inside. And the closer we get to having this baby, the grumpier mama gets (see the Taller Girls blog for the Grumpy Gertie story). So we need to find quiet entertainment for fear of getting thrown out a window.

Henry gets to stay up an hour later than me at nap time, on the condition he play quietly and mostly leave the grump alone. To help out with this, papa found an old MP3 player and loaded it up with Henry's favorite songs. One day, he kept himself happy doing a whole book of dot-to-dots while listening to a playlist consisting of the Beatles, Johnny Cash, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks.

Mama found a website that had graphing coloring pages. One page is a graph and the key tells you what color to color which square. Mama LOVED these when she was a kid and has many fond memories of doing these in 6th grade while Mrs. VonDeylon read books to the class after lunch.

Here's two finished projects. Henry also likes doing these and now mama needs to find more on the interwebs, which is proving to be difficult, because she doesn't know what they are called. Any help would be appreciated, all you teachers that read the blog!

I don't have an attention span like Henry's, but I did settle down for a little while to color my horsie book. Mostly, I just like moving all the crayons and markers from one container to another.

Have we told you about the CSA we joined? Miss Kerri found a farm that sells weekly shares for $10. And this isn't like the share we used to get in Wisconsin, that mostly consisted of bizarre, obscure vegetables, like ramps, sorrel, parsnips, and black radishes. This share is the bread and butter of CSAs and for each of the first two weeks, we've gotten no less than 20 pounds of tomatoes, a bag of sweet peppers, a bag of hot peppers, three cucumbers, and a big muskmelon. (Side note: no one calls them muskmelons down here. It's a cantaloupe, or else you get a crazy look.) So we've had to find something to do with all of this produce.

The tomatoes have been our first job. Not only do we have the 20 pounds from the share, we also get another 5 pounds or so a week from the three plants out back. We eat a ton and then mama tries to preserve the rest. The first week she dried a bunch on the food dehydrator and ended up with a little bag of "sun"-dried tomatoes. The next week she cut up all 20 pounds and made spaghetti sauce. She actually wasn't paying attention to the recipes she had pulled up on the computer and got halfway through a salsa recipe before it dawned on her that she was adding a lot of peppers and why were they calling for lime juice and cumin in spaghetti sauce? Luckily, she came to her senses in time and managed to salvage the sauce. Amazingly, the 20 pounds she blanched, peeled, cored, seeded and boiled cooked down to only about 8 pounds of sauce. Aunt Jenni says this is why pioneers had big gardens.

The real adventure has been the hot peppers. Miss Kerri mentioned to mama that she's dried them and ground them up for a super spicy pepper blend. Mama thought she'd give it a try and quickly poo-pooed all of the advice she saw on the interwebs about how hot a habanero pepper really was. So she sliced them all up, threw them on the dehydrator and was fine. About 15 minutes later, she moved the dehydrator outside because it was spreading some serious fumes around the house. Hours later she made the mistake of touching her eye with her hand and got a stinging surprise. But not too bad. the big shock came hours later when she went outside to move all of the dried peppers off the trays. I don't know what she touched, but she spent the rest of the night alternating rubbing her hands with baking soda and socking them in ice water. Never again will she turn her nose up at a hot pepper. They are now in a bag in the freezer and mama is too afraid to try anything with them.

Update: she did cut up a few more chili peppers for the sauce and found that Solarcaine aloe vera burn gel works well to counteract the juice. She's also sworn to never touch a habanero pepper again.

Bunk beds- Henry.

Big news in the Turner house! After months of watching Craigslist, mama finally scored us some bunkbeds that were under $100 and within an hour of our house.

For only $50, we got this very sturdy bunk bed. Granted, it looks like it was built for a college dorm room, was moved to a fraternity house, then thrown off a roof while it was on fire. But it is very sturdy and perfect for a bunch of kids who will probably trash it anyway.

It came with boards to put under the mattresses, but we had some plywood cut to put over the boards, just to fortify it. And papa drilled some new holes to move the rail up a few inches. I've already moved into the top bunk. It's awesome. June is really excited to sleep in the bottom bunk, but we haven't gotten her a mattress yet. And frankly, mama isn't really that excited about June moving out of her crib. We'd like to keep her in there as long as we can.

Mama and papa didn't just buy the bunk beds for us to share. They also bought them so eventually the new baby can sleep in the crib. And that leads to their really ambitious master plan- to put all three kids in one room.

It's all very complex. We have two bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs. Mama refuses to sleep downstairs for fear that zombies and serial killers might get here through the ground floor windows. I'm the next logical choice, but I refuse to sleep without June. And there's no way they'll let June roam the downstairs alone.

So until it becomes very clear that this is a bad idea, mama and papa are going to try and get us all into one room. Frankly, I think this has more to do with papa not wanting to give up his office and mama not wanting to give up her craft room/guest bedroom.

The beach!- June.

Since we moved to South Carolina, mama has been making a joke about the criteria we have for new friends. You have to have at least one of the following:

1. A pool.

2. a boat.

3. A beach house on the ocean that you're willing to let us use free of charge.

Number three is kind of hard to come by unless you're independently wealthy and much, much older than us, so we haven't had much luck with that one. But we got really lucky when we met Miss Kerri. Not only does she have a pool (and has graciously let us use it all summer long), her parents own a house on the lake complete with a dock and a boat!

Last week, they invited us to take a ride to a little island in the middle of the lake that is good for swimming.

Henry swam a little, but spent more time as the safety police. He tried to lift Andy off the boat before someone came to help out.

As usual, James and John were eager to jump right into the water.

Even Christopher had a good time, probably due to the fact that the water was so warm it was like taking a bath. It was a cool day- only in the high 80s. Miss Kerri commented that she thought it might be a little cool to swim. That's her Texas blood talking. By the time we finished lunch, it was climbing into the 90s and mama was getting much too hot to be outside in the bath water.

Initially, I just played on the beach and refused to get in the water. But mama picked me up and took me to swim for a while. In no time, I was back to being a water baby. I really like beaches because no one had to hold me.

And once I got into it, there was no stopping me. Someone did have to stay close to me though, because I'd start fake falling (whoa, whoa whoa!) or floating on my belly and a big wave would come in and I'd go under and have to be stood up.


You can imagine how much sand was inside my suit when mama peeled it off.

James and Andy's grandpa's boat was awesome. It even had a table on it, so we could eat lunch on it. After lunch, everyone got back in the water, but Henry stayed on the boat. He was worried that someone might start walking backward and accidentally fall off the front of the boat. So he stayed on to make sure everyone was safe.
And for probably the first time in 10 months we've known them, Andy and I actually noticed each other! We played a fun splash game, which worked out well, because neither of us are very good at splashing or hitting our opponents.
Now this is what I call a perfect morning. James' grandpa let us each take a turn steering the boat. And when we got back to the dock, we each took turns jumping into the water. Well, we all jumped in except Henry. He climbed down the ladder.

Thanks so much for the great morning, Miss Kerri and Mr. and Mrs. Worthy!

VBS- June.

You might notice that mama is really starting to catch up on her blogging. Miss Juliet told her that you can schedule blog posts, so count on a new post every night at midnight this week. Hopefully this will catch us up before the baby gets here.

Last week, Henry had a new Vacation Bible School to attend. This time, it was the Presbyterians. (He's now at the Lutherans' Tuesday/Thursday program for 4 weeks).The Presbyterians put on a good VBS, made double great by the fact that our friend Miss Kerri was helping teach all week and picked up Henry every morning. Plus, they really know how to move an afternoon pick-up line. Take some notes, Methodists.
At the end of the week, they had a program to show off all they'd learned. It's easy to pick out Henry in the crowd. Since he registered late, they didn't have time to order his shirt.

Here's the kids showing off their moves! This week's theme was "Baobob Blast," and had an African animal theme. Henry did a great job with all the moves, but was clearly distracted because he kept watching us to make sure we were watching him.

This may be one of the most bizarre things we've ever seen. A story of the crucifixion of Jesus set to "We Will Rock You." We're not sure if "We Will Praise Him! Whaaaa?" is what Queen had in mind when they wrote the song, but kids really liked it.
Henry was in the 5 and 6 year old class and brought home some great artwork. Here's his Baobob tree. There was another Henry in his class, so he became Henry T. (Remember when everyone though Henry was an old-fashioned name that no one would ever name a baby?)
And here's a picture that Henry drew of himself driving a dump truck. We were really impressed.

One surprising thing that came out of this week was that Henry has never really had the chance to hang out with 5 and 6 year old before. So he came home saying things like "I'm going to punch you in the face, June!" and spent most of the program's after party chasing and wrestling the other Henry. They said they were trying to put each other in jail. This is very un-Henry- like behavior. But we've also been assured that this is what 5 and 6 year-olds do. Not that the punching comment didn't land him an instant time-out.

My first sewing project- Henry.

Mama's been using her nesting energy and insomnia to her advantage and has been sewing like crazy lately. And I have been desperate to try out the sewing machine myself.

And check out mama's new machine. She got it from Grams and PawPaw for Christmas. This has been a little bit of a sore spot for mama and papa. Mama previously used a sewing machine that papa got her when they were dating (he even got up at 5am on Black Friday to buy it for her). Papa's a little hurt that mama got rid of it, but mama assured him that she used that machine to its full capacity and it is now completely used up. So much that she hasn't sewn hardly anything since we left Wisconsin. So it is nice to have a machine that works again.

I bugged her so much about helping her sew that she finally caved in and said we could do a project together. I closely examined all the fancy stitches and picked out the perfect one.

And this is what we made! It's a dinosaur pillowcase for June's tiny pillow.

While mama held the fabric, it was my job to push the pedal to control the stitching. I didn't want to use my foot, so I put it on the table and used my hands instead. You can tell when I had fun playing with the speed of the stitching, but overall mama thought I did very well. And June likes her new pillow too. She refuses to sleep on it, but mama does find her baby doll propped up on it and covered with a blanket every morning.

Spoiled rotten- Henry.

Mama is worried lately that perhaps June is receiving special treatment. As the first child, it was all rules, all the time with me. But June has the perfect set of circumstances- first, she's a girl and super adorable; second, she's the second child and mama and papa have mostly given up; third, the new baby is almost here and mama is just too tired to care anymore. That's how June gets away with stuff like this:

Yup, she's eating cereal at 10:30 in the morning while watching episodes of Dora on the computer while wearing her Precious. This never would have happened to me. Next, they'll let her eat crackers on the couch.
The Precious has become a real problem lately. June insists on wearing it every day. This is all new to mama, as I've never cared one way or another about clothes (except costumes, which I hate). Everyone assures mama that it's totally normal for a kid June's age. So mama tried to go along with it and said June could wear whatever she want. So June picked the Precious 4 days in a row. It's absolutely beautiful, but not really the most practical dress for going out in. It's enormous (and hangs down to her belly button) and mama doesn't want it getting super filthy. So after 4 days, mama shoved it in the laundry bin and told June to pick out something else. June picked out a vintage 28-year-old mama dress complete with long sleeves and lace collar. But mama let her wear it. Now mama has cleaned out the closet of all impractical and out of season clothes, so she doesn't have to fight June anymore.

Mama doesn't feel much like cooking anymore, which means we get to eat out more! Last week, papa brought home roast beef sandwiches, which we both loved! And mama and papa feel much better feeding us roast beef than McDonald's chicken nuggets, so they only feel moderately guilty about how bad our diet has gotten.
One night, in an effort to pry the Precious off June, mama found an Evie hand-me-down in the closet- a Dora nightgown!
June was pretty stoked and now requests her "Dora Precious" every night. This works out nicely for June, because it is a rare day that June is up before 10am. She must have mama's night-owl gene in her, because it always takes her at least an hour to calm down after she goes to bed- no matter what time she goes down. And this results in the late mornings. But it works out well for the Turner summers. Mama is also not sleeping well (thanks, baby Gus). She usually is up til past 2am, then tosses and turns (slowly) until around 6 or 7, then finally falls asleep for a few hours. Papa has been great and gets up and spends a quiet morning with me while the girls sleep. We are all going to have a very rude awakening come September while school starts back up.

One morning when I was at Vacation Bible School, June wore her Dora nightgown all morning and sorted beads into little bowls. She accessorized the outfit with two mismatched rainboots. She had been wearing her old rainboots, but they are now painfully small, so mama had to dig out her new boots for this fall.

Here's an old video we forgot to post from when we were home in Marion. June is getting very good at sound effects and even came in and fired a squirt gun at mama complete with Star Wars blaster sound effects. Where does she learn this stuff? I still don't even understand that guns shoot anything but water.

This movie is only 3 seconds long, but has a very brief payoff at the end. And this was probably June's only smile all week. It was a rough one in the Turner house. June was in a terrible mood. She didn't want to get out of bed. She didn't want to wear what anyone picked out. She didn't want to eat what we gave her. And all of that was sandwiched between major whining and temper tantrums. Not our normal Gugger.

Though she can't really communicate to tell us how she's feeling, mama and papa think two things are at work. First, June likes routine. We had a nice schedule going all year. They dropped me off at school, headed to the gym (or just "Donna" as June calls everything gym related, in honor of the wonderful woman who runs the day care). Then they came home and Junie got to watch a little Dora while mama took a shower. It was fun and predictable. But this summer, there is no schedule, so June is all out of sorts.

Second, and we could be wrong, but we think June knows something is going on. Although we don't think she understands that a new baby is coming, she senses things are rapidly changing and she is NOT okay with that. In an effort to curb her anxiety, mama and papa have been trying to give June more special one-on-one time. This seems to be working and she's been much more pleasant in the last few days.