Wait a Minute, How many Children Do I Have?

This week, we are spending time in Tucson visiting Grandpa (Pop). We have all kinds of activities planned while we are here. Today after church, we decided to go on a family outing to the cemetery to visit my mom's grave site. We spent 5 minutes repeatedly telling children to get their shoes on. The older children ran outside to get in the car. I collected Katy and took her outside. Pop made his way out and we locked up the house. I buckled Katy into her carseat, and we finally backed out of the driveway and went on our way. It's always quite a production to get 7 people moving in the same direction.

Well, ten minutes later someone (I think it was Matthew) said, "Where's Andrew?"

"What!?!?" I turned around to look at the empty carseat at the back of the van. Then I looked again. Sure enough, Andrew was not anywhere in the car.

Needless to say, Kevin turned the car around and raced back to Pop's house. On the way back, we called a neighbor and asked him to go over to check on Andrew and to calm him down. I was pretty upset thinking how terrified he must be getting left behind like that.

When we finally got back to the house, Andrew was in good spirits chattering away to the neighbor. While I had been trying to herd everyone else out the front door, he'd gone to change his clothes. He'd unlocked the front door, saw that we had gone, and then went back inside to see if he could get on the laptop and play computer games. He said he started to get "a little bit sad, but not too much."


Silly Boy. At least he wasn't scared, even if the rest of us were.

And hey, we made it through 9 years of parenthood without ever forgetting one of our children. That's not so bad, right?

ER Visit

Well, Katy had her first ER visit today. Nobody knows how it happened, but she was playing outside with all the other kids, and she managed to dislocate her elbow. The ER doctor popped it back into place and gave her a sling. It's about 5 sizes too big.


We were pretty surprised with how well she kept that sling on. Her elbow must have been really hurting. She wouldn't move her arm at all--not even to bring her thumb to her mouth. And if you've spent any time at all around this girl, you would know that her thumb is always in her mouth. Poor girl. Hopefully it will be back to normal in the morning.