Sunday

Today was pretty awfully fun except for our early morning donut quest. We had to drive 30 minutes to get a donut (and don't even get me started on the fact that there are no breakfast tacos--we're living like animals here!).

When we got home, the children caught a rat and scared the bejeezus out of it, as you can see here.

(We found out later it's actually a nutria.) I was making lunch when Samantha ran in to notify me they had caught the rat! that had been spotted swimming in our pond. I ran out to investigate and found them surrounding the thing with opened umbrellas and it was on its back looking up at them trying to figure out how this day had just gone so wrong. While I ran back to the house to grab my camera (rat paparazzo!) he apparently got away, but he didn't get far because he was just.so.completely.freaked.out. When I got back to the site of capture, the girls were standing about three feet away from it, twirling their umbrellas and chatting and the rat was on its back trying to calm down. It eventually managed to get back on its feet, eat some bread the girls threw at it and move to Albuquerque because the neighborhood has definitely gone downhill.

Over lunch we played 20 (ish!) questions and the kids were super funny. Luckily, Claudia went easy on us and didn't make us guess things like "dentures in a glass" this time. Jordan and Samantha teamed up and were "it" together so every time we would guess and they would say "yes" or "no" there would be a lot of laughing and shouting of "JINX YOU OWE ME A COKE!!". Interestingly, one of the things they had us try to guess was "9-11". Unfortunately (or fortunately? they're only 8 after all) they didn't really have a firm grasp of what that means. The hints they gave us were 1. it was a bad thing that happened; 2. it didn't happen in their, or our lifetime; and 3. lots of people died. So in other words, they were an unstoppable winning machine.