October catch-up

It seems like all my posts are some kind of "update" or "catch-up" but that's what happens when you have four kids I guess.  We are having a speedy fall season.  Our backyard football games are over already and it's playoff time (and our school didn't make it), the pumpkins are harvested and we just got about 8 inches of snow!  Hahahahaheheehahaaha (insane laughter no it's not a joke).

Here is a heaping trailer filled with pumpkins.  We have given away many many loads of these and decorated our own house and still we have piles.  I wanted to sell them for a fundraiser but then the previously mentioned snow happened and no one is really in the mood to sell produce on a trailer in a big puddle of slush and mud.  We did some other decorating around the house with gourds and pumpkins including these five top of the line pumpkins from the patch:

and this scraggly corn arrangement I put together.  Eeek.

We also got the second generation of the Christmas projector I'm sure I mentioned last year and the new one has slides for all different holidays.  

Notice the still green grass in this photo because that very night while we slept this happened! 

Yeah. Really.  It was actually the second snow. We had another smaller one last week.  It is very annoying.  It's beautiful and magical and the kids love it but it's also slushy, muddy and wet and shoveling it is, in the words of my dad a few years ago when he was describing another snow to a friend, "it feels exactly like lifting a shovel of grain.  Brings back nightmares...hahaha..." The temperature is barely freezing so the gutters on the streets are clogged with slush and leaves. Also, there are fields full of beans and corns waiting for a combine which would instantly be buried in the mud if the snow wasn't there.  Oh well...what can you do.  Warmer weather ahead next week apparently.

Also passing us by is Milo's 3rd birthday on the 7th.  I will never forget that strange evening of October 6 when I started realizing I was in labor.  Yes, he was my third child but I'd never gone into labor on my own before.  I had a vegetable platter ready to bring to a MOPS meeting the next morning, we were preparing my house for my mom to come and stay with the kids when I got induced on the 8th and an hour before I had been outside giving my neighbors pumpkins.  I almost didn't want to believe it was really happening.  I am still relieved my neighbors were able to take the kids and his birth went so well.  If it hadn't been that way I probably wouldn't have had a fourth kid (sorry Calvin! But you were still meant to be!)

Now he's a threenager complete with screaming "Nnnnnoooo!", stealing pacifiers every chance he gets and pestering his siblings constantly.

We made his birthday pumpkin themed (of course!) with a pumpkin cake and some carved letter pumpkins.

I'm so proud of these.  It was also nice to get an early batch of pumpkin seeds to roast and eat.

Calvin's Baptism

I don't know about you, but when I hear about Baptism strains of "Borning Cry" swell up in my brain.  We finally had Calvin baptized on the 16th.  Two days after he turned 9 MONTHS OLD.  Don't tell my great grandparents.  They wouldn't be happy to hear about an almost toddler not being baptized yet.  But it's "Nowadays" and no one really thought anything of it.  We got it done before he could walk and he also was able to fit into my old baptismal gown that my grandma made in 1983 which has been worn by a lot of kids at their baptism.  I was 6 weeks old when I wore it.  Good thing it is very voluminous.

In the grand tradition of anything dealing with a 4th kid, we were a big mess the week before the big event.  We had a plumber here for about four hours a few days before because I discovered water coming out of the floor drain in the basement and it turned out the sewer pipe was plugged with tree roots.  So in addition to preparing for Baptism and trying to get the house looking presentable for guests I got to clean that up.  It did not get to the carpet in the living room but on Saturday night I discovered it did seep under the wall in Ben and Milo's closet and everything on the floor of the closet was wet.  Also, I hardly paid attention to how the kids looked before we left the house and it appears Ben had his shoes on the wrong feet. And Tessa covered her shirt in stickers during church.  Whatever.  Then we tried to take a picture in front of the name banner that has been in use since the 90's and I was standing in front of the name.  Nice. 

Calvin was a very nice baby in church.  He was alert but agreeable during the baptism and fell asleep after for the rest of the service.  

Then we changed him into his after party outfit and had a lovely lunch!  It was a nice but very hot day and the church air conditioning barely cut it.  I tried to enjoy the last time I will feel 90 degree air for quite awhile.  

Here is his cake!  Nice work with the writing...don't they have a ruler or something they could use? It tasted good at least. 

Ben was also baptized at this church but there was a different minister and the time and currently the babies who are baptized here get a handmade trunk and a quilt.  The trunk is so nice and lovely keepsake.  And a nice convenient place for me to stash his cards, photos and mementos until it is packed to the top.  

The builder of the trunk told me after church that he would burn Calvin's name and the date into the trunk if we wanted him to.  I delivered it on Tuesday afternoon and he had it back to me two hours later!  What a nice gift!

"Let the Children Come to Me"

School has been rolling along and going fine.  I'm still waking up with a grin on my face knowing it is in session.  Ben got a 10/10 on his first spelling test and has been getting 5/5 and 10/10 on his reading comprehension and math sheets.  Yee haw.  Tessa has been eating all the food in her lunch box at preschool with is a big deal to me.  On Sunday, a second first day of school occurred for them-the first day of Sunday School!

I have felt bad that Ben hasn't been in Sunday School yet since most churches start it at age 3 or 4.  We were always travelling on weekends and he would have missed at least half of the days and maybe more.  But, the time is now for us to get involved in church like the adults we were raised by and it's not a bad thing.  They need to learn the verses (For God so loved the world...) and Apostles Creed and the Lord's Prayer. So, off they went.

For the first day, the elementary and preschool age classes did not split up and instead met together and designed special book bags to bring every week before the music portion of the morning.  Since it was the first day, the kids paraded in at the start of church and performed a song.  After church, we went to collect their bags.  I smiled at the sight of bags lined up on the table decorated with drawings of crosses, churches and other religious themes.  I did spot a few football designs.  One of the teachers informed me that Ben's appeared to be a shark.  I laughed at how he needed to spend more time in Sunday school.

Upon closer inspection, I thought this was more than a shark although it does look like a shark fin.  He explained it:  It is two T-Rex dinosaurs (the orange things).  There are two volcanoes spewing lava on either side an the rain is falling and cooling the lava which formed the cave and the land around the cave were the T-Rex is hiding.  Wow.  OK.  

Fortunately, our church is modern and can acknowledge that the proof of the existence of dinosaurs is quite obvious and the people who wrote the Bible didn't have the knowledge to understand fossils so that's why they aren't mentioned but that doesn't mean they never existed. Tessa decorated both sides of her bag.  One side had her particular style of princesses wearing dresses and the other side had this:

Is it a blimp? A cat shaped like a Ty Beanie Boo?  No...she informed me it is a fish.  OK, I can see it now...the dorsal fin, the tail...yeah...make us fishers of men keep me seeking...keep me seeking till the break of dayyyyy...Anyone know that classic church school song?

Milo is not old enough for Sunday School yet.  They have to be 4.  Sigh, two more years.  

In Calvin related news, I walked in to get him out of his crib on Friday and found him standing up.  This is a big moment in a baby's life.  Once they figure this out they never stop.  It is the coolest stunt there is.  It is even more fun that rolling.  

He will be 9 months old in a few days.  Ben did this when he was 6 months old.  He was such a wiry little monster.  

We went to a high school football game on Friday night.  In true September fashion, the night started out hot and turned cold real quick.  Good thing we live about 100 yards from the football field!  At half time I got Calvin all bundled up in this classic baby garment:

Where's the baby?

More excitement:  we got a new faucet!  I noticed the old one had water seeping out around the base and told Justin and he went bought a new one after work and installed it on Saturday.  Isn't it cool?

It's almost like I am in a professional kitchen!  I guess the cooking will have to get better now.  Haha sure.  

I Made It!

Yee Haw.  Hopefully you faithful readers of mine (Hello Mom, Ashley, Kris and Mary! And maybe Dad, Barb...I think that's probably it...Haha.) will be hearing from me on a more regular basis because...Ben and Tessa are back to school! And so are all their buddies who tempt them into the park and make their way into my basement and bathroom!  Ben started last week and Tessa started yesterday.  Before we get into the back to school pictures, here is a quick update from the last few weeks of summer.

Allan has shown a lot of interest in getting outside this summer.  He's been indoors his whole life except for a few forays on a leash where he laid on the ground and rolled around the whole time.  I fear losing him so I never liked letting him outside.  But a two weekends ago on a Saturday morning he snuck outside when a visting kid was standing in the doorway with the door wide open so I closed our gates and let him roam around the yard with me supervising closely.  I think he's too wide to fit through the spaces in the rickety old fence (you can see one in the picture below) but I know he could clear it if he wanted to and I also think he might like to climb a tree and maybe couldn't get himself down.

He really enjoyed himself and went on the prowl like a tiger.  Now I don't worry so much if he gets out back there as long as the gates are closed.  You can see from the picture that we've spend the whole summer here without trying to get our yard in shape.  This was before it rained later that week and it was on about a month without any water which makes it look even worse. 

What else...during the last week of the pool being opened I brought the GoPro and we took some fun underwater pictures.  

It was a fun summer of swimming but I can't say I was sad to finally put this pile of beach towels in the closet for awhile instead of having them constantly in the laundry, hanging on the deck rail and piled up by the door with the beach bag.

See you next year towels!  I will take you off the shelf and inhale your chlorine/sunscreen scent soon enough!  I wish could make some wax melts or air fresheners to replicate the smell of my beach towels.  

There is also very big news.  I will spare you the photos but Milo is now potty trained!  This isn't a bragging announcement.  He is, after all, going to be 3 in about 1.5 months.  It is more a celebration.  He has even been dry at night since the first day.  It will be really nice to have only one kid in diapers and changing a large toddler's size 6 full of poop as he uses his rapidly expanding vocabulary to describe the condition of the diaper is not something any parent is nostalgic about.  

Now, the fun part.  The first day of school!  Oh, was I a happy lady.  Unlike last year, I had no anxiety at all.  Ben did start at a new school but, as I mentioned before, it is the school where I attended starting in 2nd grade and ending when I graduated.  There is a group of new young teachers, construction is underway for a new addition and the mood is upbeat. Ben was excited to hear that his teacher is a military veteran and he already knew most of his classmates from summer activities.  And, the best part for me and for him-he can ride his bike to school!  

It's a two block ride and I can stand at the corner and see him arrive safely and it takes about 30 seconds.  It is a great arrangement for now.  Once snow falls we will have to come up with a new routine so hopefully it doesn't fall for a few months. 

Ready to go in!  Back in the archives of my mom's photo drawer there is a picture of me pretty close to this very spot but I'm standing in front of a big old tree.  There were many trees lining the street in front of the school and they all died of elm disease in the 90's.  They have been replanted but it's hard to overcome those losses.  

This was a very quick photo where he sat down for about ten seconds before racing out to the playground.  Well, OK then.  See you after school I guess...I didn't mind because I had my own fun planned.  I had a friend in Bismarck who hosted a back to school get together complete with mimosas for the moms to celebrate the return of routine.  I always thought it would be fun so after inviting a friend over and being met with an enthusiastic yes, I decided to make it a party and invited about 20 more people.  I wasn't sure how it would turn out since I knew people had varying schedules for work but many had taken the morning off already or have flexible schedules and I ended up with ten guests and we partied the morning away until lunchtime while the toddler crowd ransacked the basement and the kids' bedrooms and Calvin pulverized a muffin and spread crumbs all over the floor but it was totally worth it!

Time for the moms to get it poppin'!

Success!

Yesterday Tessa started preschool!  We went shopping a few weeks ago and she chose a tunic with a sequined dinosaur on it.  Okayyyyy.  Then she had a bow in her hair and I hoped she would forget but she remembered also add her sequined headband!  

And, lucky for her it was a cool first morning of school and not a standard August sauna morning so she got to wear her kitten boots!  

It was fun to have her start at this preschool.  My great aunt used to run this place until she retired in the 90's but I was already in elementary school when we moved here so only my brother attended.  It used to only be in the basement of the building which was a Masonic Lodge upstairs but now the Masons in town have mostly, ahem, moved on to their reward so the preschool has a nicely renovated upstairs as well.  It's a well regarded program with real educated teachers with advanced degrees and people from other towns bring their kids here and there is a waiting list and everything (Milo didn't get in this year waaaaaah) and I'm really glad we have something like this in this small town. 

What else has happened in August?  I am pretty sad about John McCain dying.  Usually politicians come and go and you can't get too worked up about it but I am going to miss the stability he brought to the government.  Like whenever everything was going to h3ll and he would be interviewed on TV I always thought, "well at least that guy is there." I am confident he knew what he was doing and I think it made everyone feel grounded.  Now...who knows anymore.  It's a lot of pressure for one guy in his 80's to keep America calm. John Kerry is still there at least.  

VBS to the Rescue!

Well, here I am and it's only been four days since my last post!  The reason is...Ben and Tessa are at full day Vacation Bible School this morning! It's a preview of the school year!  I dropped them (and the six dozen cookies I volunteered to make like a clown) and then went grocery shopping with only two kids!  I loved me some VBS when I was a kid.  It used to be in the evening for five days in a row and was taught by moms and other involved adults who were assisted by teenagers.  Now they have a travelling Bible camp staff that makes the round every year and they run it with their snazzy and appealing programming. I'm not even sure what the theme is this year.  Usually it has something to do with the ocean, treasure hunting or fishing. 

Just for the heck of it, I just looked up some themes on the Internet and found these themes for 2018...I see boats, water and rivers.  I was pretty close.  

The only annoying thing about full day bible school is we have to send a packed lunch.  I'm guessing they will eat the chips and nothing else.  

We are heading into a heat wave where the color coded heat map showed us having white hot heat (the next level after red) over the next week.  It's already heating up out there.  I am so over sunscreen and wet towels and swimwear being strewn all over the place but I must endure for a few more weeks.  We've been swimming a lot this summer.  Calvin has even started enjoying the pool.  

This was from a few weeks ago but we took him last night and he loved it.  The water has really heated up from the sun and it felt like a bath tub.  

More swimming pics:

I took this picture to remember Tessa's crazy swimsuit mix-n-matching but I am putting it hear because of the bag.  That bag has gone everywhere with me this summer and when we were watching the kids' swimming lessons a few days ago it became infested with ants because I left a half eaten box of raisins in there for two weeks. That's an indication of my patience with summer.  

Swimming lessons is done.  Neither kid passed.  But they still got a certificate! And Swedish fish!  Which I had to restrain myself from eating!

Well, I'm off to enjoy my 1/2 as crazy morning with 1/2 of my kids.

August Check In

Sigh, it's August.  I knew I had been away from the blog for awhile but I didn't realize my last post was in June.  Summer has taken it's toll on my quiet computer time.  Milo doesn't nap anymore and there are no peaceful school hours.  Between 9 or 10 each morning the neighborhood kid takeover begins unless we are going somewhere like swimming lessons.  Soon it is lunch time and then it is pool time in the afternoon.  Then comes more chaos of kids running in and out, the torturous task of throwing together some kind of evening meal ( I would rather do almost ANYTHING else during summer) and the rest of the nights have been spent unpacking, sorting and churning more junk than anyone would believe between storage units, our garage and different floors of the house while the kids undo our progress.  I've had many moments where I have looked longingly at my laptop, folded, quiet and unopened for days at a time as it sits wedged various places.  I don't have a designated safe spot to leave it out in this house like I did before so I find myself defaulting to using my phone for the Internet more often than ever before.

There have been many occasions that would have made amusing blog posts.  A few weeks ago I ordered a rug for the master bedroom.  I knew I needed a big one so I just ordered the biggest one they had (from Wayfair, the flash sale site) and it turned out to be more like wall to wall carpet (because I didn't measure the room).  So it had to be returned. That was embarrassing. Who doesn't measure the room? Or there was the incident where Justin hung a tiny rack of hooks for keys at the back of a cute little built in grotto (formerly for the land line phone with a little shelf protruding from the wall) and the screws popped out of the living room wall and no one noticed until the next day.  More patching, more painting.  We had a final trip to Bismarck to clear out our storage unit and we had an impromptu block party with our neighbors on the old cul de sac.  It wasn't easy to drive away after that.  It was especially sad when Milo got excited and said "We go home Mama?" as we were driving on our old familiar route.

The new house is slowly coming together but moving has been so much work this time around.  I have been tossing cardboard boxes out the back door for months now and we have unloaded endless trailer loads. The neighbors probably think we have some sort of deep underground storage area buried beneath the house.

Calvin has been progressing as expected.  He's very close to crawling and he has five teeth.  He's a popular baby with the elementary school aged girls in town.  I reached a big milestone also.  I wrapped up nursing and pumping!  We had many bags of milk in the freezer and when the last one was gone I had the strangest feeling...and it was not a longing for another baby I can tell you that.

Here are a few pictures or Mr. 7 Month Old himself.

Notice the nice new rug behind him...which fits nicely in the room.  

Calvin has more hair that any of the other babies.  Tessa didn't have this much hair when she was two years old.  

Allan is established in the new house.  He used to like to lay in the sink at our first house right after we adopted him and he's started doing it again.  

He does this on  a daily basis.  It's so weird.  

School will be starting in 19 days (not that I'm counting) and the sports field across the park from my house has already been prepared for football with the lines mowed into the grass.  Soon the clink of baseball bats will be replaced by football sounds and hopefully I will be able to write a blog post more than once a month.  

I'm Baaaaaack

Hello out there!  Is anyone left to read?  I had to look at my archives to see what my last post was.  It was June 1st, and I said I would be getting the Internet on June 7 at the new house.  Indeed we did but life has been nothing but chaos since then and until two days ago I wasn't even sure where my computer was.  Yes, true story.  It was in my backpack against the wall behind this:

Yes, I know.  It's terrible. The bad news is there are areas like this in almost every room of the house!  And we've been here a month!  It's so overwhelming that each day I think I am going to just pick one thing to deal with and I often just can't face it.  It's a clothes, toys, crap overload and yes, I know, someone is going to say "just get rid of everything" but that's just not how I roll and I've already stripped it down as much as I could.  I finally put my clothes in the closet yesterday.  There have been multiple conundrums and setbacks (furniture wouldn't fit through the door, the boys' bunk beds were too tall for their bedroom and we had to have them welded shorter, we lost the combination for Justin's gun safe and had to have a locksmith call the company so he could open it and replace the guns which were in our closet so we couldn't fit the clothes in, Tessa's and Calvin's dressers full of clothes fit in the opposite rooms...you know, typical moving problems...not).  

So, here is a very quick update post. Maybe I will elaborate on things later, maybe not. 

Moving...was horrible.  I am still upset about how bad it was.  We packed all of our heavy furniture ourselves until we were on our long couch and our neighbors saw us struggling with it stuck in the front door and insisted on helping.  The house was absolutely trashed and dirty with dust, scum and wreckage from the kids everywhere.  I think I covered in my posts from May how Calvin was constantly crying from ear problems and I wasn't able to do anything above the bare minimum for the last month we were in there.  We left it there planning to return the next weekend before the closing to finish.  Our neighbor/realtor/buyer's father entered the house during that week to turn on our lawn sprinklers and I think he walked around and saw it all and he was shocked to see we had cleaned it up in time.  They were afraid to enter for the walk-through.  It was bad and beyond embarrassing.  We were practically shoveling crap into bags and boxes at the end.  And then the worst part-unpacking it all.  Lord have mercy it has been bad.  If there is a time it is useful to be organized it is during a move.  And I am not.  And I still have no time during the day to do anything because the four kids in the house did not just disappear.  They are still here.  

Here is a funny picture of the kids in a giant box which we filled with toys and it ended up dumped on the basement floor of the new house where most of them still are scattered. 

Allan had a bit of an adjustment period.  Justin drove him because I couldn't face the trip with him "mrrreeeeooooow"-ing for three hours.  Well, Justin let him out of the kennel and he was just fine.  

He snuggled up in a jacket in the passenger seat and slept.  I couldn't believe it.  When they arrived he immediately ran and hid under the couch (the living room had some furniture already because Justin had been living there for a month already).  He stayed there for a long time and I lured him out to show him where his litter box and food was in the basement.  There is an obsolete fuel oil tank in the basement and he ran under it and hid in the corner where no one could reach him and he didn't come out for 24 hours.  Justin even went to the store and bought wet cat food and he wouldn't come out.  I finally came (I was staying at the farm with the kids until we could get their beds set up) and got him to come to me with deli turkey.  I brought him upstairs and we petted him for awhile until he felt more comfortable and after that he started exploring.  Now he owns the place and is doing fine.  

Here a picture of the old living room and eating area after we got it clean.  I don't like to see it.  It makes me sad.  It was a good house on a good street.  

What else has been going on...

We planted our pumpkin patch.  This is me sitting in a loader bucket after Justin raised me up and trapped me there as a joke. Haha.  

Ben played t-ball through the month of June.  It was a good season.  He loved it and got to know the other kids.  He even got to have "batting practice" in the cage at the big diamond on Fridays.  Finally he can move on to actual pitching next year at age 7. 

I got a bike trailer for Mother's Day.  This caused me to verify that I can still, indeed, ride a bike. 

Here are the blasted bunk beds that were too tall for the room.

This is after they returned from the welding shop.  

We've been going swimming a lot.  A family season pass costs barely anything at $75 for the family.  Admission daily is $2 per person so it's definitely a steal. 

This is the water slide they got when they had to remove the diving board in order to get approved for a pool improvement grant a few years ago.  It's not the same but at least they have something.  

More baseball.  

More swimming. 

I went to California last week.  It was my birthday present.  

The trip deserves it's own post.  I'm still in re-entry mode and the first day was a bit rough.  

Just today, I donated blood for the first time.  I tried once back in college and got turned down after I told them I had a cold the week before.  When I was doing to pre-donation interview it turned out they still had my dorm phone number and my parent's old Rural Route address on file.  From 17 years ago!  I used to be afraid to donate but since having kids a needle in the vein doesn't really phase me anymore.  I'm following my dad's example.  They keep track of your donations and he's donated sixty something times!  His goal is to make it to 80.  

No low iron and no passing out=success!

Stand Bye

In case anyone has been checking in, we are in the process of moving and I won't have Internet until June 7!  You will have to amuse yourselves elsewhere... now look at my cat.