The Story of Snail: Chapter Three

BRAEBURN:
"Look where your shouting and yelling and screaming got us" Horn whispered angrily to Snail. "Skip the long talk and give it to Spike" said Snail. "He was the one who screamed in the first place." "Because he screamed I could scream all I want and the humans would still hear Spike." "Yeah, I guess your right." said Horn. "But you told us you knew a house when you saw one." suddenly the voices outside stopped. "Were the snails inside that box talking?" the boy said. "Maybe they need food." "What'll they eat?" asked the girl. "Hey!" shouted Spike. Snails heart stopped beating. What in the world was Spike doing? Spike continued. "We want rose petals to eat!" "What are you doing?!" Horn wispered to Spike. "Telling them what we want to eat so we don't starve, of course" said Spike, not bothering to keep his voice down. "HEY!" shouted the boy. "THEY DO TALK!" And before anyone could do anything, he opened the door, got rose petals, came back in and opened the lid. "HI!" he said.

The Story of Snail: Chapter Two

BRAEBURN: Chapter Two
Spike screamed. "Look what you've done!", shouted Snail. "The humans have heard us and the last thing we'll hear is them saying 'lets kill the snails'! HERE THEY COME!" Sure enough, humans had heard Spike's scream and Snail's shouting. "Look Dad!" a little boy shouted. "There are three snails on the wall! " "Well what do you know" the grownup that was the dad said. "We'll leave them alone, OK?" "OK Dad" the little boy said. They went away while the little boy said, " I thought they might have been the ones shouting, but snails can't talk... Soon the little boy came back with an older girl. "Look" he said. "Three snails. Let's keep them." "All right." the girl said. "Here's a box" said the boy. They took the snail trio and put them in the box, which had holes in the top for breathing. They put the lid on and Horn, Spike and Snail were in the light spotted darkness.

The Story of Snail: Chapter One

BRAEBURN: Chapter One

The snail was a traveling fellow, always on the move. He had few friends, because he moved before he could make any friends. His two friends Horn and Spike, traveled with him. Horn had a horn mark on his shell and Spike had a spike mark on his shell. The snail had a snail mark on his shell and thus was named Snail. This is the way with snails. Snail was the leader of them all, showing them the way out of human reach. Thus they went on with their usual business until one day they came upon a gigantic something. "Would you please move out of the way?" asked Spike. It didn't budge. "It might not be alive" said Horn. "I'll go and see." He went up to touch it. "It's hard and woody" he said. "We should climb over it." "Hard and woody" said Snail to himsef. "Iv'e heard that description before. Well, lets go" They climbed till they got to a sippery, clear, hard substance. Snail gasped. "This is a window" he said. "What's a window?" asked Horn. "A window" whispered Snail " is part of a house, a human house.

TimezAttack

BRAEBURN: I really like timezattack. It's a fun computer game to memorize your times tables. I have finished the 11's and and am working on the 12's. It's like this: you are in an underground dungeon and kill monsters with things like 5x6 and 4x2 that are written on themselves. When you kill the biggest monster for the, say the 7's, you go on to the 8's. The thing is, if you get one wrong, it hits you with a bullet from its half club, half gun. If you get hit enough times, you die. Once at my grandma's house something went wrong, and the noise the monster makes when it dies went over and over again. I was so scared, I ran down the stairs as fast as my legs would carry me. I was still shaking when my mom and I went to fix it. Well, I have to leave to do my piano practice to go to cub scouts.

Please, no girls.

BRAEBURN: I think I could do with 2 girl free days. See, I have 5 sisters and obviously you would think that I would be tired of them. Well, I don't like girls at all. In fact, once I was at this home school PE group I was trying to tell Mrs. Tree why I didn't want to be there, she told me I invited one of the girls in my Sunday school class to my birthday party once. I'm still mad at myself because of that. I'm actually thinking of setting up an anti girl club. I wont even sit next to a girl ( if I don't have to) till I'm say, 25. Once I almost sat next to a girl in church. She sat down next to me and she would've sat next to me if I hadn't jumped up 1 second later. The battle between my sisters and I goes on and I am losing, I think. Oh well.

Home Sellers?

We have decided to try to sell our house. Not a good time, I've been told. Well, I've also been told it's a GREAT time to buy, which is really what our aim is here. It's not that there's anything wrong with our house. In fact, for the last 8 years it has held up quite well under the hugely destructive forces of children. We also live in a cul-de-sac and have a HOA park and pool at the corner about 100 yards down the road. Why would anyone want to move from this idyllic location? But of course, having 6 kids, 5 of them girls, in a 3 bedroom house kinda leaves 5 girls in one room. It's not functioning that way right now - Braeburn is living with his twin sisters. But I really don't want it to stay that way. So the girls can either be in a small room or in the master bedroom. We actually tried switching with them for a while and had 4 girls in the master and us in the small, and to be honest, we parents didn't like it. We do have room to add on, but Mr. Tree doesn't really do adding on, you know?

I am wondering, how does any family with 8 people at home ALL THE TIME (well, really 7 - someone has to go to work to pay for all the yogurt we end up wasting) sell a house? No, that's not really the question, is it? The question is: how does any family with 8 people at home most of the time ever keep the house clean, especially for an extended period such as a home selling? I try to use Flylady as a mentor, but I still find that unless I am specifically concentrating on keeping it clean constantly, the 3 year olds and the 6 year can mess things up faster than I can keep up with them. At least the baby is semi-clean. The worst she does is writing on herself with pens and markers or ruining perfectly good library books. Today the 8 year old dripped blue food coloring out on the garage floor and inside the car. Why did she have the blue food coloring, you ask? I asked, too. She doesn't know.

SimplyAudiobooks

I decided to do a trial of Simply Audiobooks because the kids love to listen to audio books from the library. Unfortunately I have not been impressed with their selection. They haven't even had a small fraction of what I've searched for. You have to have between 10-15 books in your rental list just so they can find one to send. So my free trial is almost over and it took me a long time just to find some books that they would be able to send. However, I did get my first book today - C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce and the Abolition of Man. I've already read the Great Divorce, but it is interesting to listen to it again. C.S. Lewis is so fascinating to read. He really makes so much sense and I often have to focus my brain to get the full meaning of his words. I like that feeling. Gotta remember to cancel the account before I get charged!

Library fines and soccer times

So I went to the library and decided today is the day I should pay all my fines, including the freakin' fines on those black hole books. But they insisted that I shouldn't pay it today, that they would just renew them again for me. I told the librarian that I WANTED to pay for the books, but she pooh-poohed that idea and said that they would now be due in November. It's nice, but I really just want to get it over with, you know? It's like when I was a kid and did something wrong - a lot of times, just waiting for the punishment was worse than the actual punishment.
Oh, I thought I was going to be able to blog a bit, but it looks like soccer mom needs to save the day and take a kid to practice. I have a real love/hate relationship with the soccer season. And then the 10 y.o. says he wants to play winter league... we'll see.

Black Holes

I think there is a black hole in my house somewhere. Or maybe outside. I watched a friend's toddler today. She brought a very cute little TinkerBell bag that had her diapers/wipes/extra clothes etc. I KNOW we had it, because I changed her diaper once while she was here. But where is it now? In the black hole. Gone. I've searched everywhere! I even pulled out everything from the linen closet (at least it's clean now). The kids were out playing in the playhouse, and I made them clean that too, but no bag. It's too big to fit under the couch, it's not under the beds, it's not in the shed, it's not in the kitchen cabinets, and it isn't on the side of the house. The sad part is that this is not the first thing to go into the black hole. There are also 2 library books in there. I've been renewing them for the last 5 months because I just know I'm going to find them. The sad part is that they were my library books, not the kids. They probably went to the black hole because they aren't classics. Just a dumb book about Ebay and another one about Clutter. Maybe I sold them - clutter, ebay, they sound like a bargain for someone. I'll bet they're in the Tinker Bell bag waiting for me to find them.