Drowned rats

We had another day of rain (we broke the record with rainfall in June), thankfully it started in the afternoon, because this morning Emma and I rode our bikes to the library for Preschool Storytime. She was excited about the adventure. I had a big bag of books hanging from my neck and shoulders to return to the library, so I was very glad when we finally made it there! It went much smoother than I thought! I was a little worried, but Emma did great. She was actually a little cocky when we got there, singing and dancing around because we rode all the way to the library! It's mostly downhill all the way to the library, but there was one hill that she had a little trouble getting up, but she's been practicing standing up to get a little more weight behind her pedaling and with Mom's encouragement "You can do it Emma......pump those pedals...........harder.............harder............you can do it.............you're almost there............I know you can do it..............keep going...............keep going..............you're almost to the top...........YOU MADE IT!" She was very proud of herself. Then going down was much more fun. I told her, "Yeah Emma, that's one good thing about a hill, if you have to go up, you know you'll always have to come back down!" (She wasn't thinking about our ride home; however!)
We left right after storytime, around 11:10a, because I wasn't sure how long it was going to take us to get home and we had to be at school to get Gage at 12:00. It took us much longer to get back home than it did to get there and I heard nothing but COMPLAINING the whole way home. "My legs are tired........................I can't go anymore....................Can we stop and rest?" At one point, when she was trying to get back on her bike after walking our bikes across a street, she fell on the sidewalk right onto her knees and then she started crying and I thought I was going to end up having to carry her, her bike, my bag that we reloaded with books AND walk my own bike! Thank goodness we finally made it to Gage's school, with about 30 minutes to spare. It was quite amazing at how quickly those tired legs made it down to the playground!
It started raining around 1pm I think, and boy did it come down hard. It has rained intermittently the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Of course we had a baseball game tonight, and of course it wasn't enough rain for them to cancel the game. It started raining hard soon after we started playing, so we took a break and most of the kids huddled under umbrellas, but me, who doesn't even own an umbrella (I think we've owned a few kids umbrellas, but those don't last long when they are in the possession of kids!) stood under the pine trees to get out of the rain. It did finally stop, and then restarted a couple of more times during the game. The other coach didn't want to stop the first time it started raining, he said, "Let's wait it out about 10 minutes." Then, after we're all already soaked and feeling like drowned rats, he suggested we just play 4 innings, which I said was fine, then he returned after they batted of course (we were the home team so we should have batted one more time) asking if we could just call it. I just agreed to whatever he wanted to do; however, I was willing to stand out there and finish the inning. Heck, we were soaked the way it was, what's a little more water going to hurt? The kids' shoes were covered in mud and their uniforms were very muddy. I was glad to finally get home, get the kids bathed and in their nice warm beds. Now, I need to go warm myself up as well!