The kids are doing well.  Lydia finally learned how to crawl up the stairs now.  She is nowhere near as fast as Anna or Jonathan, but she does good.  We've been trying to teach them to say bye-bye for a while now with little success.  So we started trying to teach them to say "Hi".  They are not saying it all the time when we ask yet, but sometimes they will say it.

Anna has transformed from the little girl that would steal and hoard all the toys to where she now regularly gives one of her toys to Lydia or Jonathan.

Jonathan is back to seemed frustrated later in the day.  But we think it's because he needs a change of environment after being in their playroom all day.  As soon as we open the gate and let them roam the rest of the first floor he instantly gets happy again.  We used to let them roam after their naps in their swings.  But since they outgrew the swings, we've been taking them to their cribs for naps.  Since we cannot leave them unattended while we retrieve the siblings from upstairs, they now go straight back to their playroom after nappy-time.

So the car inspection of the Grand Prix ended up costing more than we expected two weeks ago.  We knew it needed brakes, but didn't count on replacing the full exhaust too.  So we thought we were good.  Well, the other night Mommy tried to take it to go to work.  It just shut off going down Board Road.  It would try to turn over again, but would not stay started.  At one point we thought it would run, but after trying to limp the car back home it only made it a half-block from where it first shut off.  When Mommy called Daddy to say what was happening, Daddy quickly found a neighbor to watch the kids for a few minutes.  We pushed the car into the parking lot of a business and came home.  Then Mommy turned around and headed into work with the Explorer.  The car is at the dealership, but they didn't have time to even start looking at it yet.

Also this week Harley (black cat) got sick again.  The usual not being able to pass stool.  But after giving her an enema at home (which worked before), she was still having problems.  She did pass a fair amount, but remained lethargic and kept hiding.  So we took her to the vet's office this morning (8/25), and given the recurring nature of her problems and her condition we didn't think there was much more to do for her.  So we decided to let her go to sleep forever.  There is a new page on the site for Harley giving a brief history of her life with us.  It's almost 2:00 a.m., so there are no pictures of her on the page right now.  But sometime tomorrow pictures of her will be added.

On top of that, Grandma Johnson went out to Wal-Mart tonight and a storm came through.  When she tried to go home, her neighbors very large tree was laying right across the entry-way to her driveway.  And she could see some of the trees in her back yard fell down too!  A gentleman that cut her grass last year happened to be driving by and saw her prediciment.  Since her neighbors did not seem to be doing anything about removing the tree, he offered to come tomorrow to at least cut up the portion that was blocking her driveway and toss the chunks he cuts up into the neighbors yard.  She asked what he wanted for doing that.  The man said he didn't want anything.  He knew she could not do anything about this herself, and he just wants to help.  So hopefully he comes through for her so she is not trapped.

After this week, we can only hope next week gets better.  At least the kids are good and nothing is wrong with them.  But everything else seems so out of whack it's rediculous.