Florida summer for us is all beaches and books (and setting up the house still but that kills the alliteration--and you don't really want to hear about assembling bookshelves and falling curtain rods, anyway). Here's the thing about taking five kids to the beach: it takes a solid half an hour just to get everyone's sunscreen on.

I find myself wanting to apologize for it being over a full month since the last time I wrote, and then I realize: no, I have five kids and the amount of stuff we've managed to squeeze in over the last month and nine days is pretty impressive.

April was the month of the military child, and I planned to put up a post about my military kids at some point, but suddenly it’s May. And we're in the middle of another move.

We've lived in south Texas for three springs now. The first spring we were settling in, and I thought: next year we should definitely get family pictures taken with bluebonnets, because have you really lived in TX if you haven't taken bluebonnet pictures?

It might be move month if…

Dear driver who nearly ran over me but did apologize,

I'm sorry I yelled at you.

It's Friday night, and while there is a whole dryer full of clothes I could fold and a whole bowl full of cookie dough I could eat, I am choosing to stay in the healthy middle ground and watch The Great British Baking Show on Netflix while working on a blurb blog.

This week I wrote over on our church's blog after we wrapped up the birthday celebration of our Bonus No-Longer-A-Baby. You're welcome to go read about the paradox of rest and hardship over there, but over here I'm going to share a few pictures from Twinkle's birthday...because I can.

The Man is squeezing in a post-bedtime workout, and the kids are off to dream about coughing and football and getting to wear much beloved Halloween costumes to preschool tomorrow (I guess this is the autumnal equivalent of visions of sugar plum dancing in their heads).

I'm only blogging right now because I'm trying to keep myself from buying book two in the trilogy I'm reading. My library doesn't have it yet and the immediacy of kindle is so tempting... Evidently, my ability to embrace delayed gratification has died an early death this week.

Having five kids is kind of like waking up on a Monday morning and discovering that you have just enough milk to make a double batch of pancakes (if you partially substitute with the buttermilk that expired a month and a half ago).