Candy Fest 2006

Sadly, the vast majority of the candy at our house tonight is from the bowl full we were unable to hand out to our scarce trick-or-treaters. We did get a few groups of children, but our doorbell rang no more than 6 or 7 times. It's not surprising, given how few houses in our neighborhood had their porch lights lit. If I were a trick-or-treater, I probably wouldn't waste my time on this block either.

That's not to say that Marianne and Ruth didn't have a fabulous time on their brief jaunt around the block begging for candy. By the fourth or fifth house, Marianne even worked up the nerve to utter the words, "Trick or treat". Once she was back home, she was all but chanting "Happy Halloween!" as she packed her mouth full of every piece of non-chocolate candy she could lay her hands on.

I know, I know. "Get on with it," you're thinking. Let's see the costumes! Here they are... the dragon and the princess:

Ruth looked lovely, if not exactly original, in the princess dress I made for Marianne last Halloween. She's maybe half an inch shorter than Marianne was, which was enough to prove challenging when waking down the sidewalk or climbing stairs, but given the age difference it was a remarkably good fit. Ruth was much bolder than Marianne at the same time last year, as well. I suppose having a big sister to follow to the door makes each step a little easier to take.

Marianne's costume is a little number I like to call "experiments in felt-work". It took me forever to find a green hooded sweatsuit (really, shouldn't every Walmart and Target offer a line of hooded sweatsuits in every imaginable color at this time of year?). Once I did, though, I was off to a good start. Throw in a bag full of felt, a lot of Elmer's glue, some double sticky tape and some green thread on a needle... ta-da! One green dragon costume. Okay, it was pretty lame. Marianne loved it, though, and that's what matters. She growled and chased her sister and ate candy like a pro. And now she has one ridiculously green hooded sweatsuit that she can wear all winter. Lucky, lucky girl.

Happy Halloween!

Naptime gone wrong

We set back our clocks in the wee hours of Sunday morning and I looked ahead happily to that extra hour of sleep. It did not escape my attention that Marianne and Ruth are too young to appreciate this opportunity, though, so I wasn't entirely shocked when I heard their first squirmings around 6:00am. Usually they're up by 7:15am, so this wasn't a big difference, apart from the clocks having been adjusted. The girls were remarkably kind and, though they were awake shortly after 6:00am, they played in their room and didn't request us to join in the fun till about 6:45am. Still too early for a Sunday morning in my eyes, but it could have been much worse.

We managed, despite rising early, to leave late for church. And of course, by the end of church, the girls were thoroughly exhausted and nap-ready, since their little internal clocks were getting very confused. By the time we arrived home and fed them, Nathaniel and I were convinced they'd be down quickly for a nice long nap.

These things never work out how we plan.

Here's a short video of Ruth about 45 minutes after we initially put the girls to bed.



Heaven only knows how the kid could keep her feet! Every time I left the room, she and Marianne would throw all the blankets and bears and pillows out of their beds and jump and dance until either Nathaniel or I came back in. I spent a decent chunk of time prior to this video sitting in the room in an attempt to make Marianne stay in bed, preferably lying down, but there's little you can do to pin down a one year old in her crib, so Ruth continued to dance.

(If you can't make out the commentary, after you hear me prompt Ruth to stop waving at the camera and dance, Marianne chimes in with "Is that a picture of me and Ruth jumping? Mom, what's that picture? Can I see?")

For the record, they did eventually take a nap. Approximately an hour and forty minutes after we put them down for naptime, they crashed.

Snow days

I've decided that my goal is to never have to assist my children in building snowmen. Playing in the snow is not an adventure that I love. Last spring I got lucky and our one big snow came when Grandma Sherri and Aunt Ellen were spending a week with us. This year, we had our first big storm while Uncle George was in town, so I was able to shirk my duties again! I took the photos and made the hot chocolate, so I feel like I pulled my weight.


*****

Last night, Nathaniel and I had dinner with his thesis advisor from his PhD and his advisor's wife. George was still at our place, so he babysat, and we had a lovely evening out at a restaurant that would clearly not have welcomed children, L'Atelier (sometimes that's not a nice thing to say about a restaurant, but this time it was meant as a compliment). It was excellent, and I'm proud to say I tried several dishes that I had never previously eaten and probably would have guessed that I didn't like. For instance, tuna sashimi. Yes, raw tuna. It was amazingly tasty with a spicy red onion garnish. I'm also officially a fan of the bowl of mussels in a chardonnay-butter sauce. I'd never eaten anything straight from the shell like that, but it was excellent. French food is tasty - who knew? It just goes to show that enough butter, garlic and wine (both in the sauce and in the glass) can make anything taste great.

As if the excellent food wasn't enough, I got to eat it while it was hot, and while having grown up conversation. Not once did I have to break to fill a milk cup or to coax a child into eating her meat. Tonight Nathaniel's staying late at work (for pizza and movie, not for real work) so I'll be handling dinner time on my own. That'll bring me back to reality quickly enough.

A state of chaos

My kitchen is clean and I just put away the folded laundry and returned the basket to the laundry room. Ahhhhh. It feels good.

Okay, it helps that my brother-in-law, George, decided to come out for a visit unexpectedly this week, and he's doing a lot of the dishes. And Nathaniel made a valiant effort at helping with the laundry last night, but the sad result was that several of my most important whites didn't end up getting washed (they were on top the hamper, in case I needed them again before the laundry went in, so he bypassed them).

I had a fabulous weekend visiting Ginny. The ND vs. UCLA game was a good one to be able to say I was at. The first fifteen minutes were alright. The next 44 minutes were painful. The final minute was a triumphant event that will go down in ND history. Ginny gave up by the start of the 4th quarter (sorry, Ginny, but it's true), but she can attest that I did not. Thankfully the team backed me up and we came out winners. I feel for UCLA, though. That's a rough way to go down.

Apart from the football game, and the roadtrip on either side of it, the weekend was filled with relaxation, yummy food, and lots of time to chat with a wonderful friend. I can't think of a better little vacation.

Now that I'm home, I'm settling into what I think will be a steady state of chaos. This week is filled with fun since George in here. Nathaniel has been working half days so he can spend more time with us. We went out to dinner on Tuesday. Nathaniel took George hiking Wednesday while I was at work. And this morning we were hoping to go to the zoo. If you've heard any national weather, though, you'll know that didn't happen. We got a heap of snow last night and this morning, so we cancelled the outdoor plans. Instead we made a trip to the Butterfly Pavilion. It's not far from us, so it was an easy drive despite the weather. On the downside, the chilly weather meant the butterflies were mostly sleeping in the trees. On the upside, there was almost nobody there, and the spiders and cockroaches were as lively as ever. Yeehaw! I actually think the mostly-dormant butterflies were a good way to introduce Marianne to the place. The few that flew past her made her squeal, so anymore might have overwhelmed her. We purchased an annual pass, since the tickets for our group almost cost the same as the pass, so we'll have to go back on a warmer day for the full experience. It was very cool, though. After years of saying we should check it out, I'm happy we finally did!

I've given up on things ever really settling down. After this week, we have friends coming to visit us for the ND vs. USAF game, we have the approaching holidays, we have prep-work on the house so we can list it for sale in the new year, and we have the job hunt for Nathaniel in addition to his normal workload. I think sleep may officially be a thing of the past. Thank heavens I got to sleep in till almost 10:00am (!) last weekend. It was the first time in years, and it'll probably have been the last for at least as many years to come.

Follow through

That's my new mantra. "Follow through". After visiting my family a week ago and spending time with my nieces and nephew at my aunt's home, it struck me that I'm going to need to be seriously on top of things if I'm going to maintain a home to my standards with that many kids, at those ages, running around in it.

As an illustration, let's take a look at my typical handling of laundry in the past, with just the two adults and two kids currently residing in our home. Approximately every other day, I'll put a load of laundry in the washer. In almost every case, I remember to transfer that laundry to the dryer the same day. Under the best of circumstances, that night, after the girls are in bed, I'll remove the laundry from the dryer to a basket, take it with me to the family room, and fold the laundry while watching a movie or reruns of "That 70s Show". More often, the laundry will reside in the dryer for a couple days until I put a new load into the washer, then attempt to transfer it to the dryer only to discover where that pair of jeans had disappeared to. In this situation, I'll move the older load to a basket, dry the new load, and hopefully find time that night to sit in front of the television to fold it all. If not, this will all be repeated a couple days later when load number three goes into the wash.

The problem with my follow through doesn't end with the laundry getting folded. In a typical scenario, I finish folding the three or four loads of clean clothes by the end of the second episode of "Pride and Prejudice", but at that point I'm exhausted. So I head to bed, leaving the clothes neatly folded in stacks on the futon, the coffee table and end the table of the family room. Or, on a good day, I put all the folded laundry into baskets and get it to the top of the stairs. The folded clothes could then live in the baskets anywhere from one day to a week or more, depending on whether we have company that necessitates tidying the place up. And lastly, once the clothes actually do make the move to the drawers and closets in which they belong, the baskets often become toys for the girls' for another day or two before I have a dire enough need for them to hold dried-but-not-folded laundry that I carry them back downstairs.

Just imagine how this problem will multiply when we nearly double the size of our family!

So, in an effort to organize and simplify my life, I'm committing myself to following through on the tasks I begin. This week, when I did laundry, I folded it the same night it was done (along with four loads of laundry that had been washed last week but never folded). Despite the late hour, I carried the laundry all upstairs, put it away in it's appropriate home (except for the girls' clothes, which I did first thing the next morning - my new mantra is not worth the risk of waking sleeping babies). I then immediately returned the laundry baskets to their rightful place by the dryer. As corny as I'm sure it sounds, if felt GOOD to have the project completed.

In addition to the laundry, I'm practicing this "follow through" mentality in the kitchen and dining room. We're terrible about clearing the dinner dishes to the kitchen then leaving them for "later". The intention, of course, is to play with the girls while they're up, and do everything else after they're in bed. That's failed us more times than not, though. This week I decided to let Nathaniel have playtime with the girls while I went directly from dinner to cleaning the kitchen and wiping down the dining room table. There are few things more frustrating to me than getting up in the morning and having to scrub down the highchair and table before I can sit the girls down for breakfast. And you don't want me to get started on the way those disposable tupperware containers pile up in the sink from our lunches, because they're the last thing we try to fit in the dishwasher, and we so seldom opt to hand-wash them the same day. This week, though, I cleaned the kitchen completely every evening. Including hand-washing any tupperware, pots, sippy cup insert thingys, etc. It felt awesome to get up in the morning with a fresh start. A friend once told me that her mother had a personal motto of "Never go to bed with a dirty kitchen", and I can understand why.

I make no guarantees that this new motivation will last beyond a week or two, but at least I'm off to a good start. Now if I can convince myself to put my work clothes back on hangers at the end of the day rather than throwing them over the footboard of the bed, with the result that they're so wrinkled they have to laundered... that would definitely be another step in the right direction.

*****

I'm off tonight to Ohio one of my best college girlfriends! I'll be at the ND vs. UCLA game tomorrow and I can't wait! I'm leaving the camera for Nathaniel, so he can capture any extra-cuteness on the part of the girls for me, so I'll just have to paint you the picture with words when I return.

Tea Party!

This Sunday we celebrated Marianne's third birthday. As noted the other day, it was a tea party, for which Marianne and Ruth have been practicing regularly. I was out of town visiting my family until Saturday evening, but Nathaniel handled the shopping with the girls in tow, and some very dear friends of ours came over Saturday and cleaned my house. I haven't seen my stove shine like that since moving into the house! All that was left for me to do was the cooking, decorating and gift-wrapping.

The kids all seemed to enjoy the tea party itself. We served finger sandwiches - PB&J, ham and cheese with cherry tomatoes, and egg salad - assorted tea cookies, scones with clotted cream and jam, and for cake we had little rose shaped gingerbread cakes. Tea was served to the kids, heavily diluted with milk, but most of them opted to drink lemonade after copious amounts of sugar failed to make the tea palatable. Marianne, on the other hand, polished off two pots of milk-tea on her own.

After the kids' tea, they played happily for a while longer while the adults enjoyed our own high tea. Hooray! Then it was on to presents. Among other great gifts from her friends, Marianne received a dollhouse from us. This gift was not an idea Nathaniel loved, but since I had a coupon and there was a sale... I won the argument in the end.

I'm glad I did, because Marianne LOVES her new toy. This picture was taken while a room full of people sang "Happy Birthday" to Marianne. She was completely oblivious to the noise and fire, and turned around only long enough to blow out the candle then was back to her games. We had to bribe her to put it away long enough to go outside and play with the rest of her guests a short time later.

Here's Marianne later Sunday evening, playing for "just a tiny minute more" before bed.

If you're wondering where Ruth was throughout the party, we had the good fortune of her napping during most of the event. She never would have been happy if she'd been left out of the tea party, but she's too young yet to trust with a breakable teacup of her own without constant supervision. Ruth woke up shortly after the gift opening for her own cup of tea and snacks, and she didn't realize she missed a thing. She was thrilled, however, by all the new toys that had magically appeared while she slept.

Marianne's actual birthday is this weekend, but I'll be out of town enjoying a fun weekend of football and relaxation. I'm hoping to celebrate with her a day late on Monday, if her dad can hold off that long on letting her open the rest of her gifts.

Update

I’ve left you all hanging for long enough. I can’t thank you enough for your prayers and good thoughts. I feel like Nathaniel and I have been walking around in a state of grace for the past few days, because we’re much calmer than one might expect given the circumstances.

For those of you who don’t live here, so likely don’t know what’s been going on, here’s a brief, though intentionally vague at times, synopsis:

My sister has gotten herself into some trouble. She has three kids, and barring some miracle that I can’t even begin to imagine, those kids are in need of a new home permanently. I have some wonderful family living near my sister who have taken the kids in on a temporary basis, but Nathaniel and I are the long term solution. All three are my Godchildren and Nathaniel is their Godfather for all practical purposes, though technically he’s only on the paperwork for the youngest. We love them and we know we can offer them a stable, faith-filled home environment, which is something that they’ve not truly had in the past. My aunt and uncle, with whom the kids are living now, will most likely keep them through the end of the school year in an effort to minimize the transitional confusion for the kids. In the meantime, Nathaniel and I are working to determine how to make a life with five children a reality.

Our best idea at this point involves moving back to the Midwest to be nearer our families and to find a lower cost of living. The hope is that Nathaniel can find a good job in Lincoln, NE, where we can get twice as much house for what we’re paying in CO. We know the school systems there, and we’d be surrounded by friends and family to whom we could turn for support, both moral and physical. I’m planning to stay home once we move, because it’s the best way to offer all five kids what they need in a family and because it’s what I’ve wanted to do for the past three years anyway.

In a lot of ways, this situation with my sister’s children couldn’t have come at a better time in our lives. Nathaniel would have been considering a career change come spring, anyway. It could have been so much worse if I’d been expecting another baby or if Nathaniel had still been working on his PhD. As it is, we’ll obviously have a lot to work through with the kids, but I think it’s a blessing that, if it was going to happen at all, it happened now.

Once we get a better understanding of how and when things will be happening, we’ll start looking into more specifics. Like, “What 7-8 seat vehicle should we purchase?” and, “Where should we look for some additional chairs for our dining room table set?” That sort of thing. Jumping from a family of four to a family of seven is going to be a wild ride, to say the least.

For your records, the new additions to the cast of characters on my blog will be: Sara (almost 12); Jacob (10); and Elizabeth (3½).

Note: Okay, so that maybe doesn't qualify as "brief".

Mice

"Stop chasing the mice inside your skull." - Munich

We're all alive and in good health. I have lots of family drama going on right now, so my blog is low on my priority list. The quote above, from the movie "Munich," was mentioned to me by a coworker last week. I've never seen the movie, so I may be taking it entirely out of context, but given the way it was explained to me by my friend, it rings very true to me on a daily basis and for the past week especially. I can't seem to contain all the thoughts that are flying around inside my head any more than I could catch a herd of mice. Every now and then I get one by the tail, but before I manage to form a coherent sentence around the thought, it slips away from me again.

With that said, I'll quit wasting my limited brain power here and try to put it to better use on more urgent matters. If any of my regular readers who've not heard from me personally would care to add me to their prayers lists, I'd be very grateful. I can use all the help available right now, as can my family. Many thanks to the prayers already flowing. I truly believe that we've been blanketed by God's grace over the past few days and it's allowed Nathaniel and myself to keep reasonably clear heads as we work through some issues. Sorry to be vague, but I can't think how to say more on such a public forum.

Everyday extravagances

You know how some days, you pull out the graham crackers for your kids for an afternoon snack, but you're thinking that doesn't sound like a very great snack. Then you're getting the milk out of the fridge, and you see a couple Hershey bars, and it all comes together.


Specially ordered without chocolate for Marianne
We didn't roast marshmallows over an open fire or anything. The broiler served nicely. The girls would likely have been content with just the graham crackers, but I needed more. It shouldn't come as a surprise. I've been known to talk Marianne out of bran flakes for breakfast (Raisin Bran from which she's removed all the raisins before allowing us to add milk) because I'm in the mood for pancakes.

Under construction

Please forgive my dust (a.k.a. poorly aligned bullet points and words that run off the bottom of the sidebar). I'm toying around with the code for my site trying to make it something more to my liking. Seeing as how I know nothing about html code, it's taking some trial and error.

But hey, at least it's not quite so GREEN anymore, right?

Practicing

Marianne and Ruth, practicing for the big third birthday tea party event. We have a tea party every day that we have pancakes for breakfast, which is a fairly frequent event, given that my love of bisquick pancakes exceeds even my children's. I've still never put real liquid in the teapot, not even water, and Marianne has never asked me to. But leftover pancakes make a great mid-morning snack when shared between sisters and teddy bears.

Don't worry. My menu for the birthday tea party is slightly more refined.

Reasons to celebrate

I remember my mother telling me, when I registered for china, that I'd never use it enough to make it worthwhile. "You want china? Take mine," she said, "I don't use it." But I wanted my own and I swore that I would find reasons to keep it from getting too dusty on the shelves. I'm sure there are a million reasons to use china regularly.

1. Birthdays
2. Anniversaries
3. Mother's Day
4. Father's Day
5. Columbus Day (that one's coming up - mark your calendars!)
6. Thanksgiving
7. Christmas (like we're ever at our own home on Christmas...)
8. New Year's Eve
9. Dinner Parties (we've served everything from gourmet to homeade pizza on china for our guests)
10....

Okay, I'm running out of things. But tonight I came up with a new reason. So here it is. Reason #10 to use your china:

10. Your everyday dishes and/or flatware are all dirty.

It was one of those days. We discovered a severe shortage of forks at breakfast, and it only got worse from there. We'd cleared the dishwasher of it's clean items part way through lunch, but didn't have time to do more in the afternoon, so by dinnertime things were getting desperate. That's when I remembered the buffet full of china and silver.


Marianne got to be very grown up with a silver fork of her own and a real, breakable glass. (To be specific, one of my "milk glasses" from our Minnesota vacation, of which I have two but wish I'd bought more - isn't it sweet?)

Ruthie, while eating on and drinking from plastic due to a strong tendency to fling her dishes from the highchair, did get to use her daddy's heirloom silver spoon. She may not have been born with one in her mouth, but that doesn't mean she can't use one once in a while. Unfortunately she kept trying to spear her chicken with the spoon and became increasingly frustrated until I found her a kid's fork to use.

Dinner was lovely and reasonably well behaved on the part of the kids. Marianne definitely has a healthy respect for any occasion at which she's allowed to use the fancy plates. I'd say reason #10 is as good a reason as any to pull out the china.

*****

One of the main reasons I didn't have time for dishes this afternoon was that we finally settled on a plan for Marianne's birthday and I had to get that ball rolling. In an odd twist of things, I really am going to be out of town on Marianne's birthday (as opposed to Ruth's, when I panicked that I might be out of town but it was all just wasted anxiety). This time it's for a fun trip for me to visit a girlfriend. I'm embarrassed to say that, similar to the situation with Ruth, the date simply didn't register during the initial phase of plans-making. As a matter of fact, it didn't strike me at all until a friend pointed out my bad motherliness. So apparently, of all the reasons I'll never be "Mother of the Year", number one is that I cannot for the life of me remember my kids' birthdays. I mean, if you ask me the date, I can tell you. But if we look at a calendar and you ask me whether I'm available on a certain date, the birthdays won't even cross my mind. I'm going to have to work on that one in future years.

For this year, though, we're going to pretend Marianne is turning three a week earlier than she really is. Marianne had decided that she wants to have a tea party for her birthday, and I think that's a fabulous idea. As it happens, I've been wanting to host an afternoon tea for awhile anyway (and perhaps planted the tea party idea in her head, but we won't dwell on the details). There are a lot of upsides to the tea party theme, not the least of which is that we're necessarily limited to a short guest list, and of a certain age that is able to drink from open cups. Ruth isn't even on the official invite list; it's just four friends that Marianne selected. The lucky chosen ones will be receiving their invitations in the mail very soon, as we dropped them in the mailbox today (I intended to include a picture here, but apparently blogger had decided the china pictures are all it'll give me tonight. You'll have to wait to see them, and maybe Morgan can be surprised this time by what's in her mail.)

We included boys and girls, since Nathaniel thought it was a little young to start teaching sexist stereotypes. Hopefully the couple of boys included won't be too offended by the coral-pink invites. The envelopes are blue.

Although the kids close in age to Marianne were technically the ones invited, they're encouraged to bring their parents and siblings along as well. The grown ups and babies will actually be partaking of slightly more exciting food than the kids. More scones, fewer PB&J finger sandwiches. We'll see, though. I haven't finalized the menu.

Backyard fun

It has been a lovely weekend in Colorado. Low 80s, with cool nights and mornings. We had one more chance for the girls to wear their summer dresses to church today. And we've had time to get good use our of our swing set.

Ruth is now more than big enough to climb onto the fort unassisted, and go down the slide sitting up (as opposed to my usual recommendation to her to go feet first on her tummy). I say she's "more than big enough" meaning that, while it terrifies me still, she's been doing it for a month now so I've come to accept it as a necessary evil of letting the girls play in the backyard. Plus, it allows me a little personal time, sometimes even with a book in a patio chair, while they entertain themselves on the swingset and in the sandbox.
Marianne has learned a new trick recently as well. My guess is that she picked it up from one of the neighbor kids that frequently beg admittance to our backyard for the use of the swings. She lies on the swing on her tummy, runs circles till the chains twist tight, lifts her feet, and lets herself spin. That was one of favorite ways to "swing" when I was little, and I love watching Marianne enjoy the game as well.
I'm looking forward to a fun week as well. It's my first business trip in ages. (You might recall my anxiety attack over this trip when we first began discussing it in April. It's only just finally taking place!) I don't generally look forward to traveling for work, but this is a two day "team building" meeting in Las Vegas. We'll be in the office the first day doing some work and some "Go Team" morale boosting activities, then the second day my boss is taking our all-female team to a spa for the morning before we fly home. That's the kind of business trip about which I simply can't complain.