Sting, Crash, Splash!

Would you look at this adorable bee clinging to our mountain mint?

The mountain mint has been especially popular with the bees lately. They sleep under its leaves overnight. Here are several gathering as the sun is beginning to set:

And there's out there all day long as well, buzzing about.

The bees are fine. Bees I can handle. Bees are very mindful, very demure. Bees don't fly into a mindless rage if you get too close to them with the hedge trimmers...

While Andrew was out grocery shopping this morning, I tackled some yard work. I mowed the lawn, transplanted a volunteer crape myrtle to a better area, did some edging, roped the kids (including some neighbour kids) into helping me yank out a bunch of obnoxious horse nettle, and convinced Rachel to do some weed whacking. 

When Andrew came home I started putting some groceries away and then noticed the wild state of Phoebe's hair—and to think he'd taken her out shopping looking like that!—so we went upstairs to fix her hair and evidently Andrew decided to tackle some of the landscaping items on his to-do list. 

It's "fake fall" right now, so our windows have been wide open, which meant that Andrew's screams were able to rush straight through our open windows. I pushed Phoebe off my lap and ran to look out the window. 

Andrew was standing in the middle of the driveway, the hedge trimmer had been tossed aside in the lawn, and he was clutching his arm...clearly in an extreme amount of pain. Rachel—still holding the weed whacker—was prancing about screaming, "What happened? What happened? There's blood! There's blood!" and things like that. 

It was...not a pretty sight. 

So I ran downstairs and flew out the front door. 

"Careful!" Andrew yelled to me. "Wasps!"

Oh! So he hadn't chopped his arm off (Rachel's mind immediately went to Out, Out by Robert Frost, in which a boy chops off his arm with a chain saw) or been blinded by the weed whacker or anything like that (which is where my mind went because I hadn't even realized he was out there with the hedge trimmer). 

Only a wasp sting? That was honestly a relief....for me. 

Still, the stings he received were rather intense. Look at the size of that thing—it really was bleeding and everything! That wasp was angry!

Andrew had trimmed a branch a little too close to their secretive little house (in the bush/tree/shrubbery right by our front door), which was fairly bustling with activity:

And so ended Andrew's yard work contributions for the day. He's still suffering quite a bit from that bite (though admittedly Benjamin still holds the title of Wasp Sting Champion).

Rachel and I worked for a while longer, removing this little guy from our poor trampoline, for example:

In the afternoon, Andrew took Miriam out to play the Flentrop organ at the Rivercliff Lutheran church (because her organ teacher will be substituting for that congregation's regular organist tomorrow and thus had the keys to practice...so invited Miriam to take the organ for a spin). It has a mechanical connection between the keys and the stops (rather than electric, which is typical nowadays), and as you can perhaps see below, the black and white keys are switched:

Miriam had a wonderful time! 

Andrew texted me around 4:40 to say they were leaving and their ETA was 5:01.

This was important information because we had a birthday party to go to at 6:30. The whole family was invited! To a local waterpark! It was a big thing! 

Anyway, Andrew texted:

"Leaving now. Home at 5:01."

And then a few minutes later:

"jk we just got rear ended"

Traffic was backed up, as traffic tends to get around here. The wait in the left turn lane was...long. Some impatient person figured they could bypass this by getting into the beautiful open lane next to the left turn lane (also known as the wrong side of the road) and cutting around everyone. 

Unfortunately for everyone, Andrew was trying to drive in that lane (which was his rightful lane) but then had to slam on his breaks to avoid a head-on collision with Impatient Guy (who was in the wrong lane) and the car behind Andrew was following a little too closely and was unprepared to stop so suddenly and ended up running into him. 

Impatient Guy—to no one's surprise (and a few kind witnesses stopped to make sure everyone was alright and were all really mad at Impatient Guy)—sped away. 

The other driver was a young girl, about Rachel's age. She was inconsolable. She had to hand the phone to Andrew so that he could talk to her mom because she could hardly get any words out.

Andrew and Miriam were both fine. Our car has the tiniest little scratch on the back bumper (which is nothing compared to what that poor car has been through—it's been stabbed (for some reason), it's been pounded with rocks (for, you know, other reasons), someone hit it in a parking lot (and left a note saying "sorry" on the windshield)...it's seen things). Andrew wasn't too worried about that at all. 

The other car was far more messed up. Their bumper was dented and so forth (repairs that would take real skill and/or some money to fix). 

I told Andrew to exchange information just in case, but he decided to just let them deal with their car on their own (since everyone agreed—including that poor, sweet, young driver—that it was all that poor, sweet, young driver's fault...well, except for Impatient Guy, who had really caused the accident, but he was long gone). So that's what we're doing.

All of that happened relatively quickly, though, because the next thing I know, Andrew's texting me again:

"Leaving now. ETA 5:11 now."

And they got home precisely at 5:11...but didn't really feel like going to the birthday party. They were both feeling a little shaken up. And Andrew's arm hurt. And Miriam was still coughing. 

So I took all the rest of the kids over to the water park (which is embarrassingly close to our house, but (a) keeps weird hours and (b) is kind of expensive, so we've never gone because we just stick to our pool). It was really fun! Our friends had rented it out so there weren't too many people there. It was a little chilly after the sun went down, but really quite fun!

Phoebe's favourite feature was this rainbow archway:

She spotted it when we were walking up and squealed, "They have a rainbow!"

We spent a lot of time playing at the rainbow. When I asked her if she wanted a picture of the rainbow she said yes, and so I asked her to come through the rainbow and she said, "Watch me be a mermaid!" and insisted on crawling through it with her face submerged. So it wasn't the picture-perfect picture I had imagined. 

But she popped up at the end:

When we left she waved goodbye to the rainbow and said, "Bye, Rainbow! See you later!"

The bigger kids enjoyed the waterslides (Alexander was disappointed that he wasn't tall enough to go on them), and everyone enjoyed the lazy river. The boys enjoyed the big bucket-dumper, water-spraying play zone and took our neighbour John up on that to play a lot. 

Phoebe didn't like the noise of it all, so she stuck with her rainbow mist. 

It was an eventful day, to be sure!