Talia's monologue

This morning I was scooping out grapefruit chunks for the kids, Talia keeping up her constant stream of chatter next to me. Thinking she was basically talking to herself, I wasn't paying much attention to what she was saying. "Mama, can you put that [grapefruit] on my napkin?" (Don't ask me why she wanted it on a napkin.) ...[long pause in which I didn't answer]... "No? Ok." That girl cracks me up!

Dissertation Update

Last night Seth came to an important and exciting milestone in his dissertation process: he officially finished his initial draft! This means he now has something on paper for each topic he intends to discuss. He will now turn his attention to revisions based on his advisor's first review of the material. On September 2nd he will need to turn in a defense draft to his advisor and the style reader. Based on their input he will have 3 weeks to make any final revisions and submit the final defense draft to his committee. I believe he will defend sometime in early November.

Please pray for Seth to continue to find the strength to keep up his grueling schedule (he's not getting much sleep these days) and make good progress toward the end of this monumental project.

Funnies

I don't know what it is lately, but Benjamin has been hysterical! Here are a few of my favorite stories:

One Sunday after church we got into the car and Benj asked (as he often does), "Can we go to a restaurant?" Seth and I hadn't gotten to discuss lunch plans yet so Seth told him, "Hang on, we need to talk about it." Seth asked me if we had anything at home, which required some thinking on my part. After a few quiet seconds Benj piped up from the backseat, "I don't hear you talking!"
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Benj trying to draw the moral from the A.A. Milne story In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place: "If we have holes someone will eat something and get bigger and get stuck." (So I guess the moral of the story is: don't have holes?)
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I was changing Talia's stinky diaper this morning and Benj, sitting a few feet away, looked over and remarked in disgust, "I don't want to watch you because that is nasty in my nose."

Summer!

Summer slideshow. Enjoy!

"Guys"

To Benjamin any object is a potential "guy." Plastic animals talk and play with matchbox cars. Yesterday the cordless phone became a "really big guy" who, I was informed, could walk and talk and also had a thing like a boat (the antenna.) Benj was constantly muttering a complicated dialog between the "really big guy" and a matchbox-sized airplane. As far as I could tell the phone was saying goodbye to the passengers on the airplane...although later the "guy" was stomping on the airplane like King Kong so I'm not sure about the finer points of the storyline.

Not only is the world populated with stuff that can be instantly promoted to the status of "guy," it is also inhabited by two groups of said guys: "bad guys" and "good guys." We are forever dividing into these two categories. The discussion surrounding any video always includes Benj trying to educate Talia on which characters fit into which category. Talia demonstrated her confusion on the subject the other day when she asked me, "Mama, you a good guy or a bad guy?" Well, that's just the question isn't it? :)

I love that every car has a personality, every animal has a friend. I love asking Benjamin to repeat something I didn't catch and hearing him reply, "Oh! That was just Bear talking to Giraffe." I love how his imagination makes every day magical!

Busted!

Well, the time has come to 'fess up. The Rodriquez children have been busy bumping and bruising themselves this summer. (We have also occassionally managed to have a great time.)

Benjamin has taken to racing toy dump trucks at break-neck (hopefully not literally!) speed down our sloping driveway in his flip flops. It makes me nervous, but hey, he's a boy. He should be a little reckless, right? He must have been tired the day he created this beauty; he had fallen several times resulting in some minor scrapes and bruises, but he finally really and truly wiped out. I think one of his top teeth cut the outside of his lip and one of the bottom teeth got the inside. Thankfully he didn't bite through. At any rate, he had a pretty good fat lip for a day or two but he didn't let it get him down. :)

This colorful assortment happened this past Saturday while we were out for a little family fun known as yard-saleing. We were at our final sale of the morning and it was a good one! Having found Talia a little purple toy minivan and leaving her happily pushing it along the driveway, I turned to examine a promising table. No one really saw what happened, exactly, but we think the car hit a gap in the concrete and stopped. Talia, however, did not stop. She took a nose dive right into the driveway (quite literally, as you can see). The knot on her head is currently a fashionable shade of green while the layer of skin missing from her nose seems to be healing nicely.

Fortunately there are no injuries to report regarding Leila. She spends most of her days securely wrapped in swaddling clothes. ... But we know her day will come too!

P.S. Sorry for the picture quality on this last one. Not sure what's wrong with our camera.

Celebrating in Red, White & Blue