Image: Flickr/Victoria Nevland

Not much has been happening in the Runkel household these past few days. The kids are back at school and Hal and I are slowly but surely digging our way out of a mound of email. We have yet to break down and buy the new washing machine that we know we need. Yes, you heard me right. I am blatantly taunting the laundry gods by knowingly using a machine with a cracked tub. I laugh in the face of the Maytag Man, and I am fully aware that somehow this will catch up to me and it won’t be pretty.

All in all, it’s been pretty quiet. Well, all except for Sunday’s baseball game when Brandon caught a grounder with his face. He popped right up, but his lip decided to stay embedded in his braces. Yes folks, if you’re keeping score, that’s metal 1…lip 0. Thankfully, an elder in our church is an orthodontist and was kind enough to meet Hal and Brandon halfway between our house and his to perform a wee bit of roadside surgery. He’s fine now. His lip is still roughly the size and color of a racquetball, but other than that, you can’t tell that anything happened.

In the middle of this small issue, Hannah had an actual crisis. I’m talking an end all be all smack down crisis. What, you’re wondering, could it be? A lost friendship? The traumatic start of her journey into womanhood? No, my friends, it was much worse than any of that…

She finished reading the last of the Twilight books.

I, for one, was glad to see this come to pass. Maybe now she would stop asking to visit Forks, Washington for summer vacation. Perhaps now she would stop telling us how vampires really act – how beautiful and intelligent they are. Again, friends, this was not meant to be. For instead of moving on to another tween dream series…she started reading the first one all over again this morning.

Oh, to be 12 again….or not.