(no subject)

My birthday was actually a lot more pleasant than I expected. My back continued to hurt, but I'd only pulled muscles, so it was getting better rather than worse. (I'm always terrified when I injure myself or have part of my body just start to hurt without obvious cause. When I was still working, I had relatively frequent-- three to five a year-- injuries and localized flare-ups that would take weeks to heal. Those have been much, much rarer since I stopped working, and I tend to recover faster because, apart from Delia's needs, I'm in a better position to alter my activities.)

Several people visited on my birthday. evalerie visited with both of her kids, and anderyn came by with two of her friends and their daughter. The kids had a grand time out in the backyard in spite of the light rain. The two older kids showed Delia how to burrow into the bushes in the back of the yard to find a place where adults couldn't (entirely) see. It's a bit of a jungle back there because we haven't done anything to prune the bushes since we moved here, ten years ago.

Somebody must have planned the yard, though, because we have flowers all summer on one bush or another. We start with forsythia then go on to lilacs. Right now, there's a white flower blooming on one of the bushes. I don't know its name, but it reminds me of honeysuckle (apart from the whole not growing on a vine thing). Later on, we'll have roses of Sharon. We also have poppies (done now), dame's rocket, violets, black raspberries, chives and wild garlic. I've put in some mint (it was the only thing I could think of that might compete with the bindweed. The two are currently managing a draw with each other).

evalerie brought gluten free zucchini brownies, and anderyn and her friends brought a Black Forest cake. Both were excellent. The kids went more for the brownies, so that made the bigger mess. I've no idea how evaleric managed to cut the brownies into such large pieces without having them break because they were rather crumbly. Delia's first one had both ends fall off when she picked it up.

(By the way, evalerie, do you want your container back? I washed it after we finished the brownies and could return it next time we see you. You'll probably want to wash it again before using it, if you do take it back, since we're not gluten free and almost certainly have contaminants in the air in the kitchen where it's currently stored.)

The day after my birthday was mainly long. It wasn't unpleasant, particularly. I was just tired and not in the mood for the large family party that Scott's family had. We were celebrating five birthdays, Scott's father's (16 May), Delia's (17 May), Scott's mother's (21 May), mine (26 May) and Scott's brother's (14 June).

The four kids ran around like crazy and generally had a blast. It was warm enough for them to be outside without being too warm for the adults to want to go with them.

Scott's brother, his wife and daughter spent Sunday night at our house. The two girls kept each other up fairly late (about 2:30) then got up at 7:30, so none of the adults got much sleep except my sister-in-law who has practice at sleeping through anything (she's working a fellowship in vascular surgery and so has years of experience at grabbing sleep whenever she can) and who slept through the girls erupting into activity in the morning.

We did have one parenting style conflict over the night time sleeping arrangements-- Delia has a bedside lamp. We let her turn it off or keep it on all night as she chooses. Doing that seems to decrease her nightmares. Most nights, she turns it off when she's ready to sleep, but some nights she leaves it on all night. My sister-in-law was adamant that having the light on would mean that her daughter would never sleep and seemed to feel that having it under Delia's control was a bad thing (not so much a bad thing generically as a bad thing specifically when her daughter was there). I thought about saying that I didn't think it really mattered whether the light was on or not-- the girls were likely to keep each other up regardless-- but I didn't say it.

Of course, I was also inclined to shut them in the bedroom, admonish them to stay there, and go to bed while letting them do whatever they wanted to. I was kind of too tired to care as long as they let me sleep.