Hangin’ with Matthew

Matthew is always a source of entertainment around here, with his funny sayings, quick wit and pesky character.

He’s a social butterfly, quite happy to say good-bye to mom and go off and live somewhere else for a while, but yet he’s a mommy boy who comes up to me throughout the day and plunks a kiss on my cheek or gives me a hug and tells me he loves me.  He can never get enough of socializing and if I ask him if he missed me while he was gone he’s quite honestly say “No”,  Or as he said one time “Yes” then he paused and said “Well actually I didn’t!”

Matthew loves to hang out with his friends.  Here he is with Reuben and Kurtis having popsicle time

Sometime Vivian would be down at the same time as Kurtis and Reuben.  At first this caused some division but eventually they all learned to either play together or play in pairs and it worked really nicely, actually being a good thing as it evened out the “threes a crowd” problem.

I watched the kids from the window as Kurtis tried and tried to figure out a way to get the big to pull the wagon.  I have to admire his determination!

Trampoline games … don’t ask me how the game works … they seem to understand it … or make it up as they go.

Found a snake … Reuben was the bravest one, willing to pick it up and stuff it in a water bottle and then put a lid on it to save it for when Rob got home so he could kill it.  Matthew won’t touch a snack.

We were overrun by snakes this spring/summer.  Previously we’ve had plenty of snakes on our property but this year was excessively bad.  We also get them in our house.  I used to be able to say “we also get them in our basement”, something we managed to keep secret from the kids until this spring for we knew of their fear of them.  But this spring we had the unwelcomed surprise of finding one in Matthew’s bedroom, which happens to be on the second floor.  How it got there is beyond us, none of the kids would have put it there because all of our kids are scared of them (petrified would be a better word for Rebecca).  I’m just glad Rob happened to be home to take care of it (I was actually sick in bed that day) because I have a pretty big phobia of them as well.  After that we no longer brought them down to the creek when we found them in the house.  Any and all snakes we seen (or should I say Rob seen) were promptly treated to shovel treatment, until thoroughly chopped and dead.

While Matthew loves his friends and socializing and acting all tough it’s wasn’t an uncommon sights for him to be sleeping on the floor in our room come morning time.  Mommy was always the comfort after he would wake in the night, sometimes from a nightmare, sometimes just because.  He much rather sleep on the floor near mom then go back up to his room.  We figured eventually he would outgrow this habit and since he wasn’t in our bed (a big no-no in our house), disturbing our sleep it didn’t matter all that much.  He didn’t really outgrow this habit, he was forced out of it when our room shrank and there was no longer space on the floor for him … after thefirst couple nights of not having room for him he hasn’t reappeared or even come to say he has nightmares