Camping Out

It's going to rain tonight. I could have told you that even without looking at the forecast, because James and I are going to camp out in the backyard. But I looked at the forecast too, and my weather app says it's going to rain. J says camping out isn't a great idea.

Actually, my weather app says there's a 40% chance of rain. I'm willing to take that bet, so we're going to set up the tent once we get back tonight. If Pax were coming over, then the rain would be a sure thing. I saw Abby today briefly and she was in the throes of cutting teeth, so he might actually prefer sleeping out in the rain with James and me to getting up with a fevery one year old all night.

I'm sure George and Steven will be coming, and I told James that we were each going to bring an enormous stack of books out to the tent. I told him that we'd set up the lantern, and then we would stay up late reading together. I'm hoping that this means he'll read his books and I'll read mine, but I'd guess that there's a greater than 40% chance that he's interpreting that promise to mean, "Daddy will read my books out loud to me while George and Steven sit on his pile of books."

I've felt sort of trapped indoors for the past few days, because our neighbors moved out and the owner of the house has been gutting the place ever since. They've hauled away countless loads of scrap, two dumpsters worth of trash, and a dump truck worth of brush and bushes. It's nearly been enough to persuade me never to attempt landlording.

It will be good for James and I to spend the night out in the tent. I think he's a little less happy, overall, when I'm home for extended periods of time. I don't exactly know why, but there's something about having both parents in the house that bothers him.

It doesn't bother Owen at all. Owen laughs uproariously whenever anyone looks at him, so two adults means twice the fun. He's working on some teeth as well, but mostly he's just being sweet and trying to outgrow the perfect age. (The perfect age is when the baby is big enough to sit up safely on their own, but not big enough to crawl away and get into trouble.)

J is also doing well, aside from experiencing foreboding that her husband and three-year old are going to come trudging into the house cold and soaked at one in the morning. (Really, there's only a 40% chance of this.) She just bought some new summery clothes, so every time she comes around a corner she lights up the room in a new, completely unfaded, summery color. We're in the middle of a heated battle about taking her passport photo, and it's hard to stay angry at her when she looks so nice. I've had our passport applications completed for over two weeks, and all that remains to do is to take a photo of her according to the government guidelines (here, if you were curious) and to print out a 2X2. I put "photoshoot" on my to-do list two weeks ago, and she declined every time I offered to take her picture with my super-expensive, high-priced iPhone camera. Then I planned a whole evening around the theme of a photoshoot, which she brushed off. Then I started downright nagging her. Recently we've started giving James some daily chores in the form of post it notes on a chart that reads "James' Jobs." Today one of James' Jobs was to bug Mommy about getting her photo taken. She still got off to work before I was able to snap her picture. I'll get it eventually though. Well, maybe.

I'd say I have at least a 40% chance.