"Toes....Where are you?"

It's 8:36 at night and the girls are in bed. Jenna is obviously not asleep as I just heard her yell "Toes....where are you?" Good thing Dani has learned to put herself to sleep amid all the yelling. I don't know how she does it, but thank goodness she does. Jenna always falls asleep eventually, but usually not until she's talked - er, yelled - for a solid 10 minutes. Then I think she just wears herself out. I know it wears me out!!

After I got them in bed I came down the stairs and this is what I encountered.

Too bad this is nothing unusual. But please tell me I'm not the only one out there who faces a daily tornado. The crazy thing is I swear I just cleaned this room an hour ago.

It's Friday night and Ben is upstairs doing homework. Our weekends are quite boring lately and I fear they are not going to get any better over the next year and a half. Oh well. He had his fourth day of clinicals today and the guy is already frustrated because they won't just hand the whole surgery over to him. I had to remind him that he's just getting started and has a whole lot to learn so just slow down. I think it's just that he really loves what he's doing and is so eager to get going. But his time will come. Starting September he is in surgery 5 days a week until he graduates. I, too, need to slow down because I often find myself checking out jobs and researching places we might want to live. It's hard not to get ahead of ourselves. But at the same time, he's getting job notices in the mail weekly and was told by some recruiters at a conference he went to that it's not too early to start sending out resumes. He still insists he wants to do heart surgeries but I think I've convinced him into at least looking into pediatrics. I think Ben is going to be very good at what he does and if my child needed surgery, I would want only the best people knockin' her out. He'll be mad at me for saying all this, but I really don't care. I'm proud of him.

I took a pilates class this week. I don't know, there's just something about rolling around on a huge ball, trying to keep your balance, all the while staring into a huge mirror and trying not to laugh at yourself. Afterwards the teacher came up and told me I did a good job for my first time. She said, "You're obviously in very good shape." Oh, the poor fool. Or maybe she was just being nice...

We haven't done much of anything else lately except go to the pool. That's the only outside activity that I'm willing to take part of these days. The beach is fun, but much harder, so we do pools much more often. Each day Jenna gets a little bit braver and today she insisted on not swimming with her noodle, but doing it "by myself!" She wasn't going very far - just between my friend Melica and I - but at least she was doing it and enjoying it.

Last night she got into the bow drawer and put one of her old baby bows on her head. She was so proud of it and that thing stayed on for the whole evening. She also put one on Dani, but I didn't get a picture of it. She's a funny kid.