September's end

There really is not a lot to report from this week.

The kids went to school. Dan worked. I taught my online class from home and wrote. Oliver made messes. So, pretty much life as usual.

I did enjoy the women's conference last night: I came away feeling hopeful and at peace. Here's hoping I can keep that feeling!

This past week or so, we've been fighting fruit flies. I assumed they came in with the garden produce, and though I scoured the kitchen, I couldn't figure out where they were reproducing. So we set out vinegar traps, poured boiling water down the drain, and put out more traps.

Then Friday night, I went to see if we had a boy present in the "dirt room" (Evelyn had a birthday party yesterday). I opened the door--and two things were immediately apparent. 1) I could hear buzzing. 2) The whole storage area (we hadn't been in for a while, obviously) smelled like our vinegar traps.

Uh oh.

And then I found it: a box of plums that had somehow been overlooked from our summer harvest. We might have forgotten it, but the flies certainly hadn't. It was crawling with them. And the bottom was covered with eggs.

Needless to say, that box went out into the rainstorm immediately. Now we just have to get rid of the already spawned fruit flies.

In other news: the kids brought home their school pictures. Andrew's is okay (by okay, I mean I would have him retake it but he likes it and it's not horrible enough to protest). But Evelyn's . . . and apparently she's not the only one. My visiting teacher (Evelyn's former kindergarten teacher) said she's never seen so many bad pictures. I took a picture of hers, since I will be sending her to get this retaken.

What do you think?

Just so you don't think our week was *all* struggle: today, when I tucked Oliver in for his nap and whispered, "I love you," he said, "I love you too, Mama."

That was the first time I've *known* he said he loved me. He's said stuff that sounded close before, but never quite intelligible.