My Blog

• These images were captured last Friday after an afternoon of beautiful snow falling swiftly from the sky.  I snuggled up on the couch with a blanket while the little kidlets were napping.  When the big kidlets came home from school, we started a few projects, and right at golden hour, the clouds disappeared and the most beautiful warm light filled the yard and bounced up off the snow.  I looked out the window and promptly abandoned all of my offspring, threw on my boots and zipped right out into the yard with my camera.
• Had I been prepared and on top of things and not procrastinating until the very last minute, I would have realized that I had run out of some very key office supplies needed to put together the folders for tomorrow’s music class, the first of this session.  However, thankfully, I have an amazing, patient and wonderful husband who just looked at me in my distress and headed out the door to the retail district to pick up what I needed.  I owe him big time.
• Mr. SP has discovered the joys of silent reading.  I love walking into a room and seeing him curled up with one of his chapter books.  I am particularly excited because this means he can read some of the A-Z Mystery books himself.  He loves the A-Z mystery books.  They are, well, not so exciting for me, and I keep wondering how many there could possibly be left that we haven’t already read.  He keeps coming up with a stack of them each time we go to the library.  But I’m a good Mama, and when he asks, I read every other page of whichever A-Z mystery we are working on out loud.  He trades off the pages with me.  He usually has one book he’s working on by himself, and another one we are working on together when Mr. Trouble on Two Feet is not throwing snow boots at our heads.
• The Banana is OH so excited to have finished her first set of piano books and to move to a new color of books.
• Mr. Trouble on Feet is having a sign language explosion.  It’s so fun to communicate with him, especially since his verbal communication is limited to a series of grunts with different inflections, and the words:  ball, uh-oh and wow.  I’m not in the least worried about his hearing, however.  He can pick up on a tweeting bird indoors with all the windows closed, and goes bananas about airplanes that he can hear flying outside, sounds I would never even notice.  I think he just sees no real need to talk, because this grunting business is working out just fine  . . . all the big kidlets understand just what he means.

He loves balls.  He loves balloons.  He loves wearing socks and shoes and is adamant about having them on his feet at all times, and then rushes over to the shoe basket and puts on a few pairs of progressively bigger shoes on each of his feet as well.  He loves spinning in circles while The Banana dances like a ballerina.  He adores the corner of his flannel blanket, and he likes to snuggle and read his favorite board books.  If you are not reading one of his favorite board books, he chucks it across the room. (Hopefully his taste in literature will gain a broader scope soon).  He loves looking out the window for animals, like birds, squirrels and puppies, and is more than thrilled when it is snowing so he can watch the flakes falling from the sky.  He loves sticking his arms into puppets and pretending to “eat” his siblings’ appendages.  He gets a big kick out of using his own utensils to eat a bowl of yogurt or applesauce.  He likes peekaboo, and cooks soup with pretend food at the play kitchen.  Additionally, he happens to love light sabers, especially if they glow and make irritating noise.  As always, he truly enjoys a commotion of any kind.

YaYa created this yesterday afternoon.  The background and wings are watercolor, and the fairy face and body are color pencil.  I love that she combined techniques, and the dimensional effect is really neat (and maybe easier to see in person).  It’s one of my favorite pieces she’s made.

It’s that time of day, late in the afternoon, as evening begins, that time of day when it’s not quite time to start cooking a simple, quick, supper, and not quite time to have people start cleaning up the colossal mess they’ve created in the chaos of the afternoon over the past two hours since nap has ended.  It’s that time of the day when most of the homework is well on its way to being finished, and people are beginning to express their cooped up feelings in crazy ways.  You know it would be good to throw them out the door, regardless of the temperature.  There are enough layers of outerwear around, probably strewn on the living room floor, to keep everyone nicely toasty outdoors.  But it would just be so much work to fight it out and get them out the door.  And by the time everyone was bundled up, it would nearly be time for them to come in and eat whatever you’re making for supper, even though you are not really a responsible parent and don’t know what it is that you are actually planning on cooking in the next half hour.

You’ve read aloud to the masses for more than an hour.  Your toddler has thrown board books and blocks at you to try to prevent you from successfully reciting the written sentences of chapter books he deems as boring.  Even boots and shoes, and sippy cups have clobbered your head.  Your voice is tired.  Your eyes are watering.  All sources of natural light are rapidly dimming.

To drown out the squabbling, the whining about the regular chores that must take place each and every night, the complaining about excessive quantities of homework that may or may not really be excessive, you turn on Minnesota Public Radio.  The volume is medium.  Your children turn it up even louder.

One is dressed like a princess.  Another is wearing her pajamas and a double fleece lined sweatshirt.  The third is dressed for success in his regular clothes that are speckled with breakfast, lunch and snack.  The fourth has disappeared from the fray altogether, hoping to avoid the tasks at hand (out of sight, out of mind).

You glance into the kitchen, at the only piece of floor free from debris in the house, and there is standing the princess.  She has grabbed a chapter book from the library and is wailing with the orchestra in the radio, using her best opera voice.  The toddler runs mad circles around her.  Before you know it, the opera has turned into a tumultuous ballet.  Whirling, twirling, spinning and leaping ensue.  The biggest sister enters the scene and you aren’t certain about the choreography of what  soon appears to be a wrestling match.  To distract everyone you give people directions to throw away some of the trash, but the prima ballerina is a bit pesky, and the frenzy of dancing escalates.  Bodies are flying around the kitchen.  You know this will not end well.  There are tumbles.  People are set back onto their feet, and the frenzy worsens.  The music is turned up even louder.  You wish you were napping.

Soon punches are thrown and the (possibly joyous?) dance has transformed into a  violent fervor, ending in all participants being sent to various corners of the house for a bit of alone time.  You open the fridge again and consider your culinary choices for the rapidly upcoming meal.  You still have no plan.

This hugglepod has turned out to be a hit, a perfect single Christmas present for all the kids to use.  Every single one of them loves snuggling in this cozy swing that hangs from the ceiling (I should really post a full picture of it.)  Even the cat loves the hugglepod.  It’s the perfect place to curl up with a book or an audiobook with headphones during nap.  Brutus and Mr. Sneaky Pants were so cute snuggling together in the afternoon last weekend.  Brutus is seriously giving Mr. SP a fuzzy hug.  I wish I fit in the hugglepod.

On Saturday evening I asked Mr. Sneaky Pants if he would be interested in going on a date with me to the symphony, since Dr. Peds was on call.  At first Mr. SP was quite skeptical.  He did not like the idea of having to wear “church clothes” for a non-church event.  However, Dr. Peds and I talked him into it and probably because of the promise of going to get a special snack before the concert, by evening time, he was very excited to embark on the adventure.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know how the evening would go.  The symphony happens late at night.  The symphony involves a lot of quiet sitting.  I was prepared for grouching at some point.

We stopped at a coffee house to purchase a little treat.  I am always forgetting how much fun this child is when he’s by himself.  He is so chatty and so funny!  He’s spent so much of his life being stuck in the middle of the family and bothering other people and being bothered by other people and overreacting to most scenarios that happen to our family, but really, he’s such a fun kid.  And all the terrific aspects of his personality just shine when he’s away from his siblings.  We had so much fun sitting in the coffee house talking about school and his friends at school and teachers at school and all sorts of interesting things that I never get to hear about.

As we sat down in our seats at the symphony, I explained all about the pieces we were going to hear.  We talked about how there were going to be two parts to the concert with an intermission in between.  We talked all about the instruments we could see onstage, how they tuned, and about the conductor.  Mr. SP had a chatty conversation with the person next to him, whose son plays viola in the symphony and whose granddaughter, just one year older than Mr. SP, has the job of carrying the flowers out onstage for the guest soloist at each concert.  We talked about how the lights would get darker and that was the signal to be quiet.  I told him that if he got sleepy he could snuggle next to my shoulder, and I joked that no snoring was allowed.  I told him I’d have to poke him if he snored.

The lights dimmed.  My boy zipped his lips and listened enraptured to the first piece, which was the Lord of the Rings Symphony.  Perfect!  He loved it.  During the second piece, a series of dances, he yawned several times, and then drifted off to sleep.  The third piece was a concerto for classical guitar.  It was quiet, delicate, graceful, and relaxing.  The music was mesmerizing.  The audience was hushed, trying to quiet their coughs and wiggles.  By this time, Mr. SP was dead asleep.  He was deep, deep in slumber.

During the second, slow, careful movement of the concerto, he started to snore quietly.  I poked him.  I wiggled him.  I jiggled him.  I pulled his ear.  I pulled his nose.  I brushed his lips.  I lifted his head up and let drop to one side.  And the other.  I shook him.  Nothing could seem to wake him up!  Thankfully the snoring was rather quiet and delicate snoring.  I kept moving his head to open up his airways better so the snoring wouldn’t get louder.  Have you ever noticed that acoustic guitars are not very loud?  They are especially not very loud in a big auditorium.  Goodness!  I was praying that everyone around us could not hear the snoring.

The piece finished, and the audience gave the soloist a long standing ovation.  I thought he’d wake up during the exuberant applause around him, but he snored right through that too.  And then the soloist played two beautiful (quiet) encores.  Mr. SP snored on.

There was more applause.  He continued to sleep.  People climbed over him to get out of our row to go to the restroom during intermission.  He did not wake, even when his head violently dropped off of my shoulder as I stood up to let the people through. All of the people sitting near us were so entertained about how he could sleep so deeply in the middle of all the ruckus.  The second half of the concert began.  More snoring from my boy, but at least this time the orchestra was playing a Dvorak symphony that had more loud, passionate moments than quiet parts.

When the final applause surrounded us, I lifted Mr. Sneaky Pants on his feet.  He looked around, disoriented, and when people started to leave their seats he asked, “Is this the break, that intermission thing?”  I informed him that he had actually slept through the whole concert.  He said, “Well that’s too bad.  I was actually looking forward to hearing that music.”

I zipped his coat and drove him home and tucked him into bed.  It was a hoot.

The kidlets did not have school on Friday because it was the end of the grading quarter.  Because the temperatures are very cold, and there isn’t much snow to play in anyway, this made for a VERY long weekend full of squabbling and grouching and very rambunctious people cooped up in a house together.  However, if there was one success for the weekend, it was breakfast.

It all started because I got up  late on Friday morning, since Mr. Trouble on Feet sleeps until sunrise and no one else needed to get on a school bus.  By the time I got downstairs, it was already nine o’clock, and the big kidlets were finishing playing with the iPad.  They have figured out that I am very liable to say yes to the iPad when they tiptoe into my room at an unbelievably early hour and I really just want to keep sleeping.  I am pretty much guaranteed a substantial block of time that is squabble-free if the iPad is involved.  Anyway, I gave Mr. Trouble on Feet a sippy cup of milk , some peanut butter toast and fruit, and ate some toast myself.

By the time the big kidlets came down, I was busy reading on the couch and playing with Mr. Trouble on Feet.  The last thing I really wanted to do get up and cook an elaborate breakfast.  So I told them they could just make their own.  I figured they would grouch around about not getting to eat pancakes or something special and yummy, but instead I was met with overjoyed jumping and galloping around the kitchen.  They were THRILLED to be in charge of their own breakfast.

There was still some squabbling about who used what utensils, about how much food each person should  be allowed to consume, about whether chocolate chips were allowed and who had hid the chocolate chips under the healthy food in their breakfast so I wouldn’t notice.  But, they were so excited to leash some creativity in the kitchen.

YaYa perfected the art of scrambling eggs, something she’s been working on with Dr. Peds.  She has a wee bit of a fear for using the stove.

The Banana had SOOOOO much fun carefully using a sharp knife to cut her banana into slices for her yogurt and granola.  I’m pretty sure she threw in a lot of chocolate chips I didn’t know about at the time.

Mr. SP made an outrageous concoction that involved yogurt, granola, frozen raspberries, bananas, orange juice, chocolate chips, clementines, raisins, nuts, and I’m not sure what else all mixed together in one bowl.  He licked every last drop out of the bowl.

They even did a good job cleaning up.  The event was so popular that we revisited it on Saturday, and it was much requested for Sunday morning as well, but I had to say no because kidlets making their own breakfast in the kitchen takes a lot of time, and we were on a regimented schedule to arrive at church on time.

Why wear just one hat when you can wear three or four, even indoors?  When it was bedtime, his head was sweaty, and he was hopping mad that we had to take all the hats off.  By that time he had procured a couple more, actually.  A small tantrum ensued.