Our own downfall

We are not precisely early risers over here. 

I mean, sure—Rachel and Miriam attend early morning seminary, so they get up early, but they ride with Grandpa (who is one of their seminary teachers), and thus the rest of us—thankfully—do not have to get up early. I know I spend a lot of time fussing about my poor sleepers because...I've had a lot of those. My children simply take a long time to wind down and fall asleep at night, and then also wake up several times throughout the night, but they've also never (or at least have rarely) been the type of children to want to start the day at 5:00 in the morning. 

All this is to say that we were relieved on Tuesday evening to realize that we didn't have to wake up early to meet the construction crew on Wednesday. Full disclosure: Andrew had been waking up to meet them while Phoebe and I slept. So Andrew was particularly excited for Wednesday morning. 

"Hey! I don't have to wake up early!" he said.

And so he stayed up late working. And when Andrew stays up late working, he really stays up late working. He's a night owl and is often most productive at night. As an eccentric professor, this is his...priveledge.

So it was particularly disappointing when, shortly before 7:30 in the morning, we were roughly awakened by the sound of gas-powered motors roaring to life, seemingly right outside our window. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep for a few precious moments more (I even put my earplugs in), but then another motor started up, and another, and another. 

And then there was a rather big thud.

"The neighbours must be having some trees removed," I thought to myself. "But...why start this early?!"

Tree-cutting crews don't normally begin work that early for...obvious reasons. 

Oddly, the thudding continued. 

"It sounds like someone is walking around on our roof!" I mused aloud.

My tired brain slowly came to the realization that someone was walking around the roof. Our gutter/roof cleaning company must have been paying us a visit!

"Aren't they supposed to give us advanced notice?" I moaned.

"Technically they texted me at 6:00 this morning," Andrew said, putting his phone down. 

So thus it was that our day began a little earlier than expected yesterday morning, after staying up a little too late the night before. But I suppose it was the staying up late that was our own downfall.

*****

When we were flying home from Canada, our flight our of Calgary was delayed by about 5 hours, which wasn't a terrible thing in and of itself, but waiting for that flight would have caused us to also miss our connecting flight home. I called the airline and worked things out, but it meant that our departing flight was an hour earlier than originally scheduled (resulting in a bit of a race to get to the airport in time) and our flight back into Atlanta would be a little later than originally scheduled.

So, here we are snarfing some Tim Hortons for breakfast in the Calgary airport (surprisingly inexpensive airport food):

And here's an exhausted Phoebe, up past her bedtime, playing on a window ledge (that she would trip on/near and bash her face into a few moments later) in the twilight of the setting sun:

Here's Zoë showing off her foxes (that Miriam drew for her) while we were still just waiting, waiting, waiting in the Toronto airport. I did not realize that we would pass through customs in Toronto and be placed in a tiny US annex with few ammenities. We should have stayed in the main airport a little longer because there was no Tim Horton's on the US side. We had to go to stinky, expensive Starbucks for dinner. I think the girls were still technically eating, which is why their masks are off (you can see Phoebe is holding a snack container):

Here we are boarding our tiny, wee plane in the dark of the night (Zoë is carrying Phoebe for whatever reason). We had to walk across the runway (or tarmac or whatever) to get to the plane, which was a new experience for some of us:

And here are the girls, having retrieved their suitcases, ready to collapse into their beds:

It was a long day of traveling. Telling you all of this has a point because now you know how tired we were when we got home. Unfortunately, there were not beds available for all of us to fall into. 

Remember how the basement had flooded the night before we got home? That put us down a bedroom.

So she went to bed on the couch in the living room (with Rachel, who was also asleep on a couch in the living room) while I put the little girls to bed in their own spaces. 

And thus it happened that Miriam dragged herself off the couch a few hours later to get ready for early morning seminary. Rachel, who had picked out her outfit the night before got dressed and as soon as Grandpa arrived to pick them up, was out the door to grab shotgun before Miriam had even finished getting dressed. Miriam hurriedly got ready and hopped into the backseat of the car. They drove to seminary. They got out of the vehicle. They looked at each other and noticed...

...they were wearing matching t-shirts!

It was very embarrassing (more so for Rachel than for Miriam, because Rachel allows herself to be bugged by such things, while Miriam is more happy to annoy on this point).

These pictures weren't taken until the evening when the girls were getting ready to leave for Grandpa's house. They couldn't really stay in the basement while we had fans all over the place (it was far too noisy), so they were at his place until we had the fans hauled away and put their bed back in place.

*****

They've been staying in his house this week, too, since their room was basically demolished  in order to waterproof the basement. Construction finished on Tuesday and Grandpa came over for dinner (homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches—fancy, fancy stuff...haha), but things are still torn apart down there and we still need to, like, put walls back up and stuff like that, so they're still living at Grandpa's house.

After dinner they were packing up some more things to take over and Miriam brought a shirt into the dining room to show Rachel. 

"I'm packing this shirt," she told Rachel (it's another shirt that they each have). "So don't pack yours, okay?"

"What if I want to pack mine?" Rachel asked. 

"Then I guess you can," Miriam said as she left the room. "But it would be your own downfall."

Only she inflected downfall strangely, putting the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the first: "downFALL" rather than "DOWNfall."

Those of us sitting around the table all stared at each other with wide eyes and then we all started laughing as we tried to parse out what she had said. Because, you see, "your own downfall," when inflected the way Miriam did, sounds a whole lot like, "your own dang* fault," which also would have been true had Rachel packed the shirt. 

"What? NO!" Miriam shrieked with embarrassment when she came back into the dining room to see why we were all laughing (at her). "I said 'your own downfall!' Downfall! It's not my fault I sometimes say things with a funny em-PHA-sis!"

*Not really "dang," either, but surely you catch my drift.