The Duchy of Burgundy Carrots

Why I Don't Insist on First-Time Obedience

2012-01-25T20:31:00.001-08:00

That moment, two and a half years ago, was neither the beginning or the end of the change in my philosophical approach to parenting, but it stands at the apex of the change.

We were still at our old house, where there was a large and lovely park just a block away, but across a busy road. Crossing this road twice was the moment of terror in my daily life. The ducklings were still all under five. Nonetheless, the twins were still in the stroller and the older two stuck close to me, and we generally crossed without incident.

Then came the day when I looked down the road, saw a car coming and then a large clear space after it, and my brain thought, "OK, we can go after this car."

But my brain and my mouth weren't in close gear that day. What came out of my mouth was, "OK, go." And the Duchess went.

The car swerved just in time. Somehow I kept myself mentally together enough to get us along the road and halfway down the block to home. And then I stopped everybody and knelt down with Duchess and Deux and said, "Listen. I know you are generally supposed to obey Mama and Papa and we try to only tell you to do what would be good. But sometimes we mess up. Sometimes we don't know everything. You have to use your own brain, too. And if what we say seems dangerous or doesn't make sense, please, please, stop and ask questions first."

Truth be told, I had never been very good at demanding instant, unquestioning compliance from the children. It's a very linear activity (Do X, Get Y) and my mind is not very linear. But I certainly started out parenting thinking that was what I ought to be doing. When the Duchess and Deux were very small, if they refused an order, we stuck it out, continuing to discipline for however long it would take until they complied.

Only, as we implemented it, it made less and less sense. One of the children simply didn't understand what we were doing--saw no connection between the punishment and the offense. The other, though usually cooperative, seemed to relish punishment as a chance to demonstrate great strength of character under adversity.

Over time, I've come to ask--where did this first time, unquestioning obedience as the ideal of "Biblical parenthood" come from? Did you know the Bible never tells parents to compel their children to obey? It tells the children to obey, yes. But that's a command to the children, not the parents. The command to parents is first of all not to provoke them, and secondly to nurture and admonish them. Nothing about compelling compliance. Or the first time.

I don't want my children obeying me as if I were God. Because I'm not God. I make mistakes. I forget promises I made. I don't know everything. And I am not going to be with them all the days of their life. What I hope for them as they grow up is that they will be self-controlled, make wise decisions, and talk to God for themselves. Obedience to parents at best is a very limited and temporary stage on the way to that.

Now, this is not the same as letting the children walk all over us. They still need guidance and limits. But I give those guidelines not as their divinely-appointed superior, but as a fellow traveler with a bit more experience.

What I work towards is an atmosphere of mutual respect, where they do what's right because it is right, not because I said so, and where they comply with matters of health and safety because they've learned why, and where they comply with regulations for the smooth running of the household because we've worked together to find a way that works for all of us. Yes, there are exceptions where there isn't a time or place to explain, or where they're not ready to understand fully yet. But the 95% or more that is based on working together makes that part more palatable.

I don't, except in a true emergency, expect them to drop everything when I bark out an order. I wouldn't want them to treat me that way. Setting the table can wait until they've come to the end of the chapter. We can pick a mutually agreeable time to finish playing at the park. I want them to start thinking this way because someday I'm not going to be around telling them what to do and when to do it.

Yes, sometimes the discussions get a little long and convoluted. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier if they all just meekly did what I said whenever I said it without asking why or making counter proposals. But our relationship is good and they are growing in maturity and self-control. I see exercises in initiative, good judgment, and self-discipline that are far more meaningful than obedience ever could be.

When there's a behavior issue, I try to stop and look for why first. I've found that their best characteristics are also their worst--defiance is the flip side of natural leadership; hysteria the flip side of a vivid imagination. The challenge is not punishing bad behavior, but helping them learn to direct their strengths in the right way. Usually what I need to do is not deal out consequences, but rebuild the relationship and then provide vision and guidance.

I do realize that some of this is because the children are a little older and more capable of reason and guidance. But at 6 and 7 even Deux and Duchess are still well within the "Because I Said So" range in most people's books. And even with smaller children, I would do it differently. I look back now to the time I spent nearly an hour making the fourteen-month-old Duchess sit down in a chair she wanted to stand up in. Now, I'd just pick her up and move her out of the chair. It's not giving in, but it's also not trying to make a battle out of it. Because I don't need to win; I need to keep her safe and help her grow in understanding.

Note: I am not a parenting expert. Nothing in the post should be construed to constitute parenting advice. This is merely a reflection on personal experiences and philosophy and is not intended to be prescriptive. Results may vary. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Snarky Things I Want to Say on Homeschool Forums

2012-01-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

But never actually do.

Random Commenter: "Im wondring if I should get a spelling cirriculum."

Snarky QOC: Of course! They say it's never too late to learn. Oh . . . did you mean for your kids? (Note that I do not immediately assume the children would be better off in school. I've read worse from school teachers.)

RC: My four-year-old is getting really stressed out over school. He cries and says he doesn't want to do the worksheets. He still doesn't know all his letters even though we've been working on them since he was two. What can I do to help him love learning?"

SQOC: A three-year supply of tranquilizers. Not for him, for you. He actually loves learning and can't figure out why you're making him do squiggles on paper when he could be doing something truly educational like disassembling the dishwasher or turning the living room into a ninja fortress/train station.

RC: I don't think it's worthwhile for my daughter to spend time studying (higher math/ philosophy/ business skills) when we are raising her to be a "keeper at home."

SQOC: Yes, because we all know of God's promise in Hezekiah 3:14 "Thou shalt grant to the woman of virtue a husband of great wealth for all the days of her life," as well as that profound insight in Cappadocians 2:27, "Let thy women be of feeble mind, that they may be more easily duped."

RC: Character is more important than academics. What good will it be for our children to know algebra if they don't know Jesus?

SQOC: So, ten years from now when your child can't get a decent job because they don't have the requisite skills, are you going to keep telling him it's because of Jesus? *That* should keep him in the faith. And since when does slacking off on your work show good character?

RC: It just occurred to me today that instead of just reading the textbook about birds, we could go outside and watch some real birds. Do you think this would be OK? It might mess up our schedule.

SQOC: First you're going to need to fill out a "Request to Deviate from Arbitrary Program" form in triplicate and send it to the publisher, curriculum provider, and randomly-selected educational official. In three months when you get the results back, you can figure out how many weeks of school you'll need to make up in penance for daring to learn something real instead of getting it third-hand.

Winter Wonderland

2012-01-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

We spent the long weekend in the mountains with some friends from DOB's law school days and their assorted increase (though none have increased quite so much as us).

A few days before, our Organizer-In-Chief (who did a fabulous job) sent out an email noting that snow was expected. Well, it was up among the foothills, so this was not surprising. The kids went into raptures and I went into the basement to find snow gear. Much to my surprise, I was able to assemble a complete outfit for each of the kids. This turned out to be a good thing.

Anyway, we had a lovely time in the very elegant setting, and the kids had a great time shrieking and chasing each other around the pillars and up and down the marble staircase. The first day the snow fell elegantly but to little accumulation, but Sunday was definitively snowy, with the fluffy, moist snow that makes ideal snow sculptures, which we proceeded to make and follow up with hot cocoa and everything else necessary for an idyllic snowy day.

That afternoon, conversation turned to the impending departure--we were at the end of a long partly gravel road, and it was downhill all the way to the interstate. Most of our friends are from farther south and were not confident about driving in the snow. DOB volunteered to demonstrate his midwestern snow-driving skills for the benefit of one of the other guys. They headed out. About forty-five minutes later the other guy showed up at the door. Going downhill had worked fine, and DOB had masterly avoided all sliding except as he chose. However, coming back uphill hadn't worked at all. DOB waited in the car for some evening visitors with four-wheel drive and chains.

After supper I decided to make a few more preparations for departure. There were quite a few eggs left, so I thought I would boil some to take for our lunch on the way home. I set them on to boil and went into the next room to chat. Some time--quite some time--later, DOB went into the kitchen to get water and called out, "Is this supposed to be exploding in here?" Sure enough, I had left the eggs merrily boiling until they had boiled dry, and the eggs were beginning to explode. We doused them with water, and then everyone had to come and admire the effect. Apparently most of them did not know you could make eggs explode. (As Atomic Robo would say, "Sooner or later, everything explodes.")

In the morning we parceled our bags out among the other departers, who sledded down to more level ground. We bundled the kids off and hiked down the hill (it had been a seven minute walk for me at a brisk clip earlier in the morning to fetch things) to the car in six inches of snow. DOB assigned them all roles as hobbits and styled himself as Gandalf, facing Mount Caradhras. I could never quite decide whether I should be Legolas or Boromir. Then it was a simple matter of repacking the car, ungearing the kids, and reloading everyone in the heavy snow, before we could proceed slowly, but without further incident, to the freeway.

In short, a good time was had by all, and we have maintained our reputations.

There was a little snow left here when we got home, but not much. Supposedly we're supposed to get a whole lot more tomorrow. We shall see. At least we have enough snow pants.

Assorted Happenings

2012-01-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

* Last Wednesday we went for our weekly informal-homeschool-hiking-day with the only other family brave enough to head out in a complete downpour. Naturally it was the week we decided to go to the big, scary woods and we got quite lost. The twins were in hysterics and even Duchess was pretty upset because she had worn a very long skirt and it had fallen in a few puddles and she was soaked. However, we all got home and dry and this weekend Duchess and I finally made it to the thrift store and found her some pairs of jeans that fit. Tomorrow we can do it again! (It's not supposed to rain tomorrow, though.)

* On Friday we were hoping to have a Christmas play with the cousins, but it had to be cancelled because of sickness. Nothing daunted, the kids staged their own with impromptu costumes. This is the first year the twins have really gotten into acting, and they baaa'd very convincingly from under their white afghans. Duchess was the angel of the Lord in a pink afghan and sword, and Deux was Herod, wearing a pink tiara under protest because no other crown could be found on short notice.

* While we were at the thrift store I found a shirt I really, really loved. The only trouble was it had french cuffs and no cuff linky things to go with them. My grandma reminded me I could make my own out of buttons. So I dug through the old button bin and found two that were close but not the same (because that would be boring!). Then the kids commandeered all my plastic containers to sort out the rest of the buttons, and then made labels for each container, and I had nothing to put up leftovers with and there are buttons hidden in strange places all around the living room and bedroom.

* Then on Sunday I finally went to do some overdue shoe-shopping (chiropractor's orders) and wound up not only replacing my running-around-town-with-the-kids shoes, but also my cute-little-flats shoes and my cool-boot shoes. That's a third of my shoe wardrobe replaced in one fell swoop. However, it's very unusual for me to find shoes that I actually like, and two of the pairs were on clearance. And the shoes I replaced were mostly older than any of the children.

* In other long-overdue-things news, we finally got the electrician in to put lights in the basement! It's like adding on a third of the house! Now I have no excuse for not organizing it. Except that it's organizing. And a basement.

* A few months ago, a judge commented to DOB that he looked like he came from the Midwest. He's been growing his hair out ever since. So for awhile he looked like he came from Berkeley instead, but he has found an added benefit of keeping the back of his neck warm. Yesterday he finally found a hairstyle that keeps his neck warm and looks really good. Really, really good. I think it's time he came back home now.

Notwithstanding

2012-01-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

my aversion to New Year's Resolutions, here are some things I would like to make happen this year:

Organize and upgrade the basement to the point that the kids will play in it.

Tidy and then maintain the landscaping immediately around the house. Add something edible somewhere.

Do at least one art and/or science project with the kids each week, without slacking on the basics.

Create an outline and do background research on the historical fantasy novel I've been wanting to write for years.

Read two books written before 1 A.D. Three books written between 1 A.D. and 1600 A.D. Four books written between 1600 A.D. and 1900 A.D. (Bible doesn't count; books read to kids don't count.)

Find a consistent time and plan for devotions separate from preparing Bible lessons for the kids.

Do enough legal work to keep my business profitable and find a direction and make a long-term plan for it.

Go for a walk three times a week; do a strength workout at least once a week; stretching/alignment exercies every day.

Maintain a monthly calendar so I can actually see what's coming before it hits me.

Serve vegetables or fruits for afternoon snack three days a week.

Lacto-ferment something once a month.

2011 in Review

2012-01-01T21:52:00.000-08:00

Borrowed from me two years ago. Some answers haven't changed. Some have.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?

Started a business. Played in a bell choir. Painted a house. Potty-trained twins.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don't do New Year's resolutions.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth or get pregnant?

My brother and sister-in-law had their fifth. DOB's sister is expecting her first.

4. Did anyone close to you get married?

DOB's sister.

5. Did anyone close to you die?

My weird aunt. DOB's grandfather.

6. Travel?

Very little. Just our get-out-of-the-house-or-bust trip in November.

7. Did you move anywhere?

We moved into our own house in May.

8. What was the best month?

I think August was pretty nice: calm, somewhat settled in, not too hectic. November had its nice points, too.

9. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

Time to concentrate. On something.

10. What date(s) from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

June 14 (day my aunt died).

11. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Working and homeschooling and staying sane--in fact, feeling saner.

12. What was your biggest failure?

Losing a major contract.

13. Did you suffer illness or injury?

There was the stomach flu of eternal doom that afflicted us all for the first few months of the year. That was . . . nasty. DOB sprained an ankle.

14. What was the best thing you bought?

I was going to put "my Nook," and then I thought, what about the house? Well, that wasn't a personal expenditure.

15. Whose behavior merited celebration?

DOB, for persevering through starting a new career, building a business, and still having energy to interact with his family.

16. Whose behavior made you appalled and/or depressed?

Previous occupants of this house, who apparently smoked indoors and drank outdoors (and then smashed the bottles); grew things in the basement; and tossed dead pets with the rest of the garbage into the bushes.

On very rare occasions, the children did something stunning. Like knocking over the Christmas tree. On top of a pile of library books. Not quite appalling, though.

17. Where did most of your money go?

Most of the money I personally earned went to putting large payments on our credit cards. Which are nearing the bottom.

18. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Starting "real" homeschooling. Practicing law.

19. What song will always remind you of 2011?

"I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas"

20. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder?
ii. richer or poorer?

i. Happier, for the most part. We are beginning to fulfill goals. I think I'm finding a bit better balance. Maybe. I can eat things besides chicken broth and yogurt.
ii. And, by the same token, a bit richer. Well, closer to zero.

21. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Organizing the basement. It's a scary, scary place down there.

22. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Taken people potty. And zipped coats. The closer children get to not being helpless, the more annoying their continuing helplessness is.

23. How will you be spending New Year's Eve/Day?

We have already spent them.

24. What was an unexpected surprise?

Everything. I am easily surprised.

25. Did you fall in love in 2011?

Only with new projects.

26. What was the best concert you've been to this year?

I didn't go to any concerts, but we did take the Duchess to The Sound of Music, which was fun.

27. What was your favorite TV program?

LOST. Yes, I'm always five years behind the times.

28. Do you dislike anyone now that you didn't dislike this time last year?

Jack in LOST. Arrogant, reckless, god complex. And still presented as a hero.

29. What was the best book you read?

Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. (They're really just one long book split into two, so I will count both.) Honorable mention to The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. In non-fiction, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. I have not read enough old books this year.

30. What was your greatest musical discovery?

How easy it is to learn cool new folksongs using Youtube videos.

31. What did you want and get?

Children who were potty-trained. A home of our own. Work.

32. What did you want and not get?

Children who are completely self-sufficient. A home with enough rooms. Work.

33. What was your favorite film of this year?

Since my peanut gallery says Neverwhere was a miniseries, not a movie, I will say Serenity. It is one of the most recent, though, so it could have an unfair advantage because of my poor memory.

34. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 33, and I played cards.

35. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Nobody I knew dying.

36. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

Adding classy quirkiness.

37. What kept you sane?

Reading and taking walks for as long as I could. (This is always the answer.)

38. What political issue stirred you the most?

When I thought about it, the Occupy X movement annoyed me. So I tried not to think about it.

39. Who did you miss?

My weird aunt. My mom.

40. Random Memories from 2011?

The flu that would not die. Having the children baptized. Scrubbing walls in between potty runs. Feeling like a real lawyer for the first time. Hiking with the ducklings. Actually organizing a term of school and following through.

Christmas Vigil

2011-12-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

This makes our ninth Christmas, and our fifth disrupted by puking. However, it seems to have been of the fairly mild variety, as only one was seriously affected. It was still enough to make us think we should avoid infants and the elderly, which translated into all church and family gatherings. So we have stayed at home. (I wanted to say "quietly" at home, but that would be absurd.) We followed Santa's flight with NORAD.

DOB is one of those men who saves Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. He is the rare variety who is able to do this and still find astounding deals on just the perfect gifts. Including for himself. (Like Deux, he feels much safer picking out his own presents.) This is a good thing, because once he's bought the thing, twenty-four hours is right at his limit for not spilling the beans.

Personally, I generally come up with one of three kinds of gifts: the kind where I think of the perfect thing in August and forget what it was; the kind where I think of the perfect thing at midnight on Christmas Eve; and the kind where I never think of anything at all. Occasionally I actually buy the perfect thing early and then lose it.

So we were up very late last night wrapping gifts. We had figured out the perfect plan for the morning, especially since we weren't rushing off to family gatherings and church: we had small gifts and trail mix in the kids' stockings, and they could play and snack until we were ready to get up. We told them, "When you get up in the morning, you can take your stockings into your room and play quietly until we get up." This was reinforced with a note from Santa on top the stockings.

Secure in the knowledge of this preparation, we tumbled into bed at midnight.

At three a.m., we heard rustling and giggling in the living room. By the time we had roused to the point of moving, the stockings were back in the room, the contents were unwrapped, and everyone was eagerly digging into the trail mix. We pointed out that it was not anything remotely resembling morning yet, and put them back to bed with a CD playing, hoping they would fall asleep.

At four thirty, we were finally drifting back to sleep when we heard more whispers and giggles in the living room. I went out to find them under the lighted Christmas tree. I sent them back to bed with baleful warnings of what would happen if they moved again before at least seven o'clock. (Specifically, that we wouldn't open the gifts until AFTER breakfast.) That did the trick.

After all that wee-hours rambling, I was especially appreciative to discover DOB had found me a warm new robe. In red, not bland white nor icky pastels.

It's a Wrap

2011-12-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

As I write this, the Duchess is wrapping presents. This is a very good development. She still wants me to cut out the paper, but she'll do the rest. It doesn't look quite as good as I would do it. Probably by next year she will have surpassed me and I am willing to put up with the training period.

We took the kids to the dollar store this afternoon to pick out presents for each other. This has been a tradition since the Duchess was four and picked out the ever-famous Purple Bear for Deux, who has loved it devotedly ever since. You can get some good stuff at the dollar store. Deux took a turn at it next year and this year the twins also made an attempt.

Dash is plainly in the stage where he projects his own desires on others. If it doesn't involve motorcycles or fire engines, why would anyone want it? Deux is more cagey--he realizes not everyone likes what he likes. Therefore, after consulting his pocketbook, he bought himself three things he really wanted as well as gifts for others. Dot simply wandered around happily, eagerly accepted the least suggestion I made, and called it good. Duchess picked out suitable gifts and wrapped them all herself. Except for the cutting. She did express concern that her gifts not break within a week this year, as they did last year.

I gave Dash the chance to wrap his presents, and there were several minutes of tears as he had apparently thought he was going to get to wrap gifts for himself and was devastated to see the same old things he had chosen.

Blackberry Season

2011-12-15T16:41:00.001-08:00

Blackberries are a summer fruit, but taking out blackberries is a winter chore. There's not much else to do. It's easier to trace and disentangle the vines with less foliage about. And it's more pleasant to wear the padded armor suitable to the task.

It's also a job I love. It contains none of those fussy details, fine-motor skills, or decision-making requirements of other manual labor. Nor does it require tremendous brute strength. Just stubbornness and complete indifference to pain. It's vegetarian dragon slaying. Attack and destroy. And it involves sharp implements.

Even better, it's a job that the kids prefer to observe from a respectful distance. When I'm whipping about a forty-foot length of vine with inch-long spikes, I never find myself suddenly tackled at the knees. And since it involves clearing new play places among the underbrush, they are happy to occupy themselves.

And it even seems rather Christmassy. At least, the third verse of Joy to the World sounds appropriate.

Earlier this week I cleared out around the base of a Douglas fir still young enough to have the lower branches to serve as a good climbing tree. They've been playing Boxcar Children there all week. But then they picked up a stack of Magic Treehouse books at the library on Tuesday, and sat down and read them, assembly-line, all afternoon.

So today, Deux was on fire to build a treehouse. I posited that I would take the matter under advisement, but he protested. He didn't want to do it someday, he wanted to do it now. I pointed out that such complex activities required planning. He agreed: we should plan it today and build it tomorrow. I suggested that we didn't have the right materials, such as lumber or nails, or the right kinds of trees. (Douglas fir grow rather spindly branches at weak angles.)

He hunted up a single board that had been discarded in the bushes. I found some nails and a hammer. We put a shelf up in the tree. It's enough of a fort for now. I don't know if it's capable of magical transportation or not.

Waiting for Christmas

2011-12-11T21:28:00.000-08:00

The ducklings are just at the age for full, unrelenting, uninhibited, luxuriant enjoyment of Christmas. They wallow in it. The tree must always be lighted, the music must all be Christmas, every moment is one of calculations of when and how Christmas will arrive or begging me to undertake this or that Christmas activity. Gifts are part of it, yes, but really only a minor part, and a very non-caluclating part. (They were giddy for days over the toothbrushes and wind-up-toys St. Nicholas left in their boots.) They revel in the whole of the season.

I was that child, too. It is part of the fun of being a parent to live through all that over again.

Somewhere on the road to growing up, like most of us, I lost the ability to exuberate like that. For many years Christmas passed tinged with a bit of regret that it never quite measured up to the Christmases of childhood.

Lately, I have come to realize that regret and disappointment had a place, too. And its place is in Advent. Advent is waiting. Not just the impatient, gleeful waiting of children rattling gifts to discover what is inside.

It is the frustrated waiting of the oppressed, who have returned to the Promised Land only to find that they still cannot live in freedom.

It is the fearful waiting of parents for the coming of a child after a stillbirth.

It is the waiting of the sick, the weary, the injured, waiting for justice, for healing, for rest.

It is waiting that knows that waiting is not just about time, but about loss and danger, about all the ways the world has broken its promises, over and over.

Hope is only hope if we do not yet have the thing we hope for. And Advent is the time to know that now is not yet the time. Our redemption is begun, but not complete.

And I have found in accepting the waiting, in not trying to rush myself into jollity, that I have made room for hope again, and so for joy.

All's Well that Ends Well

2011-12-04T14:50:00.000-08:00

Next year, I won't schedule the kids' annual checkups for the first week of December.

I didn't do it this year. Initially, I scheduled them in October (I hate to schedule them while the weather might still be nice. Who wants to mess up a beautiful day with a well-child checkup?) But then the doctor was out of the office and we thought maybe we had chicken pox briefly, so they got rescheduled until now.

It's amazing how much of the week a simple checkup can eat up. (Well, OK, three simple checkups. Duchess is on the off-year.) My hat is off to mothers who must do regular doctor and therapy visits.

It's also amazing how differently different children react. The conversations went like this.

QOC: Deux, we're going to go to the doctor this week. He's just going to check you to see how you are growing. You don't need a shot or anything this time. There's a really fun car rug in the waiting room.

Deux: Nooooo! I don't want to. Do we have to go?

QOC: Dash, we're going to the doctor this week. You're going to get a shot, which means the doctor will poke you with a needle that will help keep you from getting sick. It will hurt.

Dash: Yay! I love getting shot!

However, we all survived. I actually really like taking the kids to the doctor, because I really like their doctor, who is very sensible and similar in philosophy and had four kids of his own (some time ago, I would guess). We swap book and movie recommendations. He always makes the boys laugh. (Dot pulled a princess and refused to be amused.)

Dot continues to insist that she never got her shot, that it has been indefinitely postponed. Perhaps she was disappointed that it did not, as she had hoped, turn her teeth pink.

Anyway, adding to that a dinner party, two playdates, the usual shopping, a couple of extra necessary trips out, and the beginning of Advent, and trying to keep on track to finish school in time for Christmas break, and it has been a very long week. At least this week we don't have to go to the doctor. I hope.

The Middle Ages

2011-11-26T14:10:00.000-08:00

Much to everyone's surprise, my body has survived for nearly a third of a century on this planet (while, as far as anyone can tell, my brain continues to operate on an entirely different one).

This does not make me old yet, but not so young anymore, either. Most of the Epic Life Events are behind me and I hope to hold off on the others for quite awhile. From the tumultuous years of young adulthood, this stretch of life looks rather dull.

Hooray for dull!

Dull means less time spent trying to figure out how to survive and more time looking up that strange bird at the feeder. Less reading books about theories of feeding babies and more reading books about murder and dragons and the periodic table and the search for Troy. It means I finally have time to think again about what I really want to do when I grow up.

It's almost like being a kid again, except now I have a driver's license. I'm sure enough that I'm a grownup that I don't have to worry about acting like one. My joints don't creak yet and I don't need reading glasses.

Better enjoy it while I can.

Same, in pictures

2011-11-16T17:23:00.001-08:00

The story behind these pictures is that on our way out the door, we couldn't find the camera. (I still can't find it.) But the camera had served us well for many years and the buttons had been jamming for awhile, so we decided to replace it with another basic model, which we picked up at the Evil Store of Evil on the way out.

So DOB happily took pictures through the trip, and although things looked bad at one point, we did not use up the charge on the one included pair of batteries (I forgot to buy any extras).

Then we got home. I unpacked everything. No camera cord. I panicked. I distinctly remembered coming across the camera packaging in the hotel room and asking myself, "Should I throw this away?" and thinking, "No, it has all the important camera stuff in it!" Unfortunately, after that, my memory was completely silent on the topic of camera packaging.

I tried our other camera cords (Duchess bought her own small camera, too), but none fit. In a panic, I searched online and discovered the cord cost $15 before shipping and tax and wasn't in stock anywhere. I finally emailed DOB in despair: Had he seen the camera stuff anywhere. Half an hour later, he replied tersely: "It's in the car."

In the car? But I had unloaded all the luggage! How did he know? Was he just saying it to make me feel better? Still, I did feel a little better.

That evening, he arrived home and tossed me the box, whose appearance I had completely forgotten. Oh yeah. That box. The one that was sitting on the dashboard and fell in my lap every time we accelerated.

So, anyway, here are pictures.

The Great Escape

2011-11-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday morning DOB and I were lying in bed, feeling uninspired about getting up and about life in general. That classic motivational question, "What gets you out of bed every morning?" could by us only be answered, "Someone standing outside our door screaming, "I'm WET!"

As we lay there, thinking of all the things we didn't want to do but had to, and all the things we wanted to do, but couldn't, we finally thought--why not just do one of them? So we decided to spend the Veteran's Day weekend at the coast. Now, we knew the chances were in favor of terrible weather. However, terrible weather on a weekend getaway is not so bad. It gives you the chance to go out and say to yourself, "Wow, big waves. Brr, cold wind. I think I'll go back in and read a book."

So we found a $70 suite with a kitchen attached and packed up the kids and the food and went for it. After all, the worst that could happen was that we would have a horrible time, in which case the return to humdrum life would come as a welcome reprieve.

The town we had happened upon was just remote enough not to pull enough money for modernizing into condominiums, but not so little as to become run-down, so instead it had an old-fashioned, One-Morning-in-Maine sort of vacationy feel, and our motel was simple but cozy and beachy with cement block walls stenciled with shells and extra towels labeled "DOG" for use on small furry or non-furry creatures coming off the beach.

The weather was lousy--the only time the wind didn't blow so hard we couldn't see was the unnatural calm that came when we took the kite down to the beach--but we had The Princess Bride to watch and The Phantom Tollbooth to read and plenty of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. (I'm terribly indecisive in cookie making; I tend to just throw it all in.) We found two free museums, one of which gave the kids the sand dollars and shells they didn't have the opportunity to collect. We only had one emergency load of laundry and one nosebleed, which, considering our odds, was pretty good.

We live so close to the Sound that it is easy to think we know all about salt water and forget what a great difference there is between our tame little beaches and tidy little whitecaps disrupted by the passing foot ferries and the roaring Pacific. It was worth the drive just to feel and hear the power of the ocean. Although after reflecting upon it and observing the ubiquitous Tsunami Evacuation Route signs, DOB has scratched "beach house" off the fantasy list and is replacing it with a cabin in the mountains.

On the way back DOB tried rerouting us with his Blackberry (much more exciting than GPS, though we did miss one road that apparently had taken up the wrong name) and we found our way up into the rain forest, which after the beach felt mild and dry, so we had a lovely hike and admired the massive trees that had fallen down when Laura and Mary were little girls. (As far as our kids are concerned, there are three basic eras to history: Bible Times, Robin Hood, and Little House).

The biggest hit of all, of course, was nowhere so far and exotic, but the town about an hour away with a climbing structure built like a castle. We will undoubtedly have to take more trips to it.

I learned a few things to make the next trip smoother: Don't pack the oranges on top of the cookies. Take warmer coats than you think you'll need. Don't serve fish the night before you leave and then forget to take out the garbage. (The house stank when we got back, but I remembered a tip I had read and put cinnamon sticks and cloves in a pan of water on the burner. This worked great, as the smell of whatever it was that had stuck to the burner the last time I cooked quickly overpowered the fish.)

Sure enough, it is nicer to be home now. We'll have to do it again.

Quiz Show

2011-11-09T14:15:00.000-08:00

Usually I drill the older kids on math facts during lunch. (Actually they like this. In fact today Deux melted down because Duchess took "his" problem, therefore he rightly should get to do TWO more before it was her turn.)

So then the twins want to be included. Unfortunately their repertoire of mathematical understanding is somewhat limited, and they quickly tire of "How many fingers am I holding up?" (They're really strong up to five. They haven't quite grasped the concept that you can consider the fingers of both hands in one group, though, so we're stuck at five for now.) So then they want different questions.

"Ask me a car question!" Dash demands.

"Umm . . . what do you put in a car to make it go?"

"Wheels!" he says. I try Dot. "What do you put in a car to make it go?"

"An engine!" she says.

"Well, true," I concede. I turn to the big kids.

"PEOPLE!" they shout.

"Technically," I point out, "You could get the car to run without people in it. Although it would be a bad idea."

I come around to Dash again. "Ask me a tree question!"

"Umm . . . if you cut down a tree, does it fall down or does it fly up in the air?"

Ideals and Reality

2011-11-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

Dot: So Laura and Mary had baked Hubbard squash for supper and it was SOOO delicious. I wish WE could have baked Hubbard squash for supper.

QOC: You didn't eat very much squash when I served it last night.

Dot: I didn't eat ANY squash. I don't like squash.

In Which Things Go From Bad to Worse

2011-11-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

(I've been reading Pinocchio to the kids, and those old-fashioned chapter headings really get to you.)

I'm trying to remember when things seemed to begin going haywire, and it seems like sometime about the beginning of October things had been humming along almost nicely for what seemed like a week or so. Then I got a call letting me know that the main, steady work contract I had was being given to someone with more experience. That was distressing.

Then DOB's work, always very busy, began to get insanely busy as he was without any assistance, and then had to navigate getting his own assistant. He was working eleven and twelve hour days. Meanwhile I was grasping any one-time projects I could find, all of them with short timeframes and a lot more stressful than the one steady project.

Finally DOB got a new assistant hired and went through an initial week of training and catching up. He was all set for things to settle down, when he sprained his ankle. His good ankle, which meant that for the first week, he couldn't even drive.

Now, the good thing about that was that he really did start coming home for supper--and even eating breakfast at home--since he had to ride with an assistant who kept normal 9 to 5 hours. The other nice thing was that he discovered, with the assistant and with a deadline, he really could get most of his work done in that time. The bad thing was, he couldn't exercise or do much of anything else.

Meanwhile, the kids got sick. First the twins had a bad cold. So we stayed home from our few outings that week. They seemed a bit better by the weekend, and we went ahead with our plan for them to stay overnight with Their Majesties (which was fun for them and us), and then we took them swimming so that DOB could get some exercise. We made it to church on Sunday. We were doing almost OK.

However, on Tuesday morning, Deux complained of an itchy back, and I pulled his shirt up to see a scattering of suspicious red spots. We stayed home, in case they turned into chicken pox. They never did. But Dot also complained of itching that evening, only in her case it was a bout of hives, which kept her up till nearly midnight.

Deux got over his rash, but then the next day had an earache. The following day, a headache. Then a fever. So we stayed home some more.

Saturday DOB woke up feeling really cruddy, but he sometimes does, especially when he hasn't exercised regularly. So we tried to work him through it until midday, when we finally decided he was truly sick. Then we all got it. I just made it out to the store for grape juice and we subsisted on that and toast for a couple of days.

In the small hours of Sunday morning, as I was coming down with the stomach complaint, Deux woke up with a croupy cough. Now everybody has that.

Meanwhile my (brand new) computer power cord won't hold into the port anymore, and the only way to keep it in is to tape it, and the tape has to go right over the power button, so every time I try to readjust it I turn the computer off. We're still trying to figure out what to do about getting it repaired or replaced.

And it's beautiful fall weather--and how rare is that around here--and instead of being out and seeing the leaves in all our favorite parks, we are stuck at home.

At least we can sit out on the deck and get some sunshine. And hey, I don't have any work to do.

But, of course, it COULD always be worse. But let's not think about that.

Seasons

2011-10-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when the ducklings start thinking I am mean.

"Go outside and play," I say.

"It's too cold," they whine.

"Put on your coat and boots," I say.

"It's too hard/I can't find them/they hurt my feet/Noooooo!" they whine.

In vain do I point out that the sun is actually shining briefly or at least that it's not pouring down rain. In vain do I warn that stormy days are coming and we will all be crawling the walls with cabin fever. Summer is fresh in their minds and winter is far away. And compared to summer, the weather is lousy.

Dash finally got his boots on and went out one day only to come back in and ask me to fill the wading pool.

"I wanna fish!" he said.

"You can't play in water, it's too cold," I said. "Just pretend and fish in the grass."

"Fish don't live in the grass. Fish live in the water."

"You can't play in water. It's too cold. Pretend you're hunting deer. Deer live in the grass."

"No, I want to fish."

"You can't play in water, it's too cold."

(drastic condensation of conversation to conserve bandwidth)

Finally he wailed, "Why is it so cold every day now?"

I guess it is too much to remember that fall follows summer and winter follows fall when you've only seen it happen three times. And therefore equally hard to remember that spring follows winter. Sometimes it's hard to remember when you've seen it thirty-three times.

But mostly I remember, and I go and put my boots and jacket on and walk in the drizzle, because I know winter is coming.

In Which I Make Things Unnecessarily Complicated

2011-10-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

I was reading a short while ago a discussion in which a lady was quoting priorities from some How To Manage Everything Book and stated that one's priority list should look like this:

1. God
2. Husband
3. Children
4. House
5. Self
6. Outside (work, volunteer, etc.)
(I may have those last two backwards, I'm not sure.)

I've seen a lot of priority lists run pretty much that way. It makes no sense to me. For one thing, if I were to prioritize by people like that, I'd have to put Me at the head of the list. What good am I to my husband or children (or house) if I don't have enough rest, exercise, proper food, and quiet to be a reasonably sane and functional human? None whatever. (Believe me, I have tried.)

It still sounds dreadfully heathen not to put God at the head, but let's be honest: Does God need anything from me? The Maker of the Universe, the Triune Mystery, is he sitting around lonely if I neglect him? No, spiritual activity is for my benefit, not God's. And honestly, most of what God actually asks from us has to do with loving other people, so see everything else on the list.

I can only assume that the people who write priority lists probably don't really mean it about putting yourself last, or they've never been in a position where you needed to write yourself memoranda to take your shoes off and use the bathroom personally. They probably just mean getting a pedicure or something (ewww).

Everything on the list is subject to that economic law of diminishing returns. Some things for your husband may be more important than some things for your children, but if he can't wait for help finding the remote until the baby has eaten, then he's the one with the mixed up priorities.

Furthermore, everything on the list is mixed up. Do I wash the dishes for the sake of the House, for the sake of the Children and Husband who will need another meal soon, or for the sake of Me, who will start flinging them in the backyard if they sit there any longer? And then there is urgency--my children's math lesson probably shouldn't take precedence over someone starving at the door. But then there is frequency--if that happens every day, the math is going to be sorely neglected and I should find some other way to feed the hungry.

If I really, really had to make up a priority list, it would be something more like this:

1. Make sure everyone I'm responsible for has what they need to survive.
2. Tend to everything else in rotating order, or in whatever way seems to make most sense at the moment.

If I were a nicer person, I would put something like, "nurture emotional and spiritual relationships" in the middle. But I'm not.

How not to have a relaxing day

2011-10-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Thursday is usually a quiet day around here. Monday is recover from the weekend and get back into gear day. Tuesday is shopping and library (which has gotten completely out of hand since the kids got their own library card and now we have a collective 200 book limit). Wednesday is nature hike. By Thursday we are ready to just hang around the house.

So when the Duchess wanted to have her girl cousin stop in and play tea party and I was setting things up with her mother a few weeks ago, naturally I said that Thursday would be perfect.

And when a lady at church went on bedrest and I was signing up for meals, I said Thursday would work well for me to bring something over.

And when Wondergirl wanted to bring dessert over and invite Toolboy and his family along, I agreed that Thursday would be fine for me, too.

Then I realized that all these things were on the same Thursday. And also that it was going to be a dry, borderline sunny day, making it the only day I was likely to get the plants and bulbs in the flowerbed that I have been working on preparing for the past three weeks. (I started with a hacksaw.)

Well, I scratched "catch up on school" off the list and we did the minimum. I went out with the Duchess (who doesn't care much for gardening, but is really excited about tulips) and we planted the flowerbed. We finished and I started heating lunch just as their cousin showed up. Fortunately that kept the big kids busy for the rest of the afternoon, and the twins went down for their quietly-listening-to-CDs time. (Naps are rapidly becoming a distant memory, although Dash will still doze off and then wake up cranky.)

So I started in on a work project, which I had promised by the end of the week. (It didn't really need to be done by the end of the week, but I just lost my other contract and was feeling a need to overdeliver.) I finally hit the motherload of information on it and was getting it all put together when I noticed the scorching smell and realized I had burnt the beans for supper.(Fortunately not what I was taking out.) And yes, I work in the kitchen. Smoked beans are kind of my signature recipe.

Anyway, I rushed about, salvaging supper and doing only the bare essential pre-company cleaning. The ducklings said farewell to their cousin and I calculated that if we left everything ready for supper we had just enough time to run the meal over and get back and eat by the time Wondergirl showed up. So we headed out.

I noticed the van was making a new whumbedy whumbedy sound. Interesting, but the van is always making new strange sounds. I would have to mention it to Toolboy tonight and see what he thought. I could call DOB to come take the meal, but he had already emailed that he would be working to eight, and I didn't want to increase that.

So we whumbedy whubedied along, found the house, delivered the meal (whose recipient had just gotten home from all day at the doctor's and looked about ready for it), and headed back, WHUMBEDY WHUMBEDY RATTLE RATTLE SHAKE SHAKE.

"Hey kids," I said, "Remember how I told you the van was about to fall apart? I think this may be it."

"REALLY?" they said, "COOL!"

I decided to pull across the intersection to a better parking spot. When I did, someone pulled up behind me. He came to the window.

"Do you need help with that flat?" he said.

"Flat?" I thought. Rats. I don't know much about cars, but I do know that driving on the flat is a bad thing. And I was supposed to keep an eye on the right rear tire, because it had been running kind of low. And unlike strange engine noises, noticing flat tires is something even people who are not very good with cars are supposed to be able to do.

"No thanks," I said, "I'm calling someone." I called DOB, who said, "I'm on the phone, I'll call you back."

Then I realized that I was right across the street from our church, so I pulled into that parking lot and let the kids run around. And I looked at the tire, which had progressed to the shedding chunks stage. At least it was the left rear tire, so it wasn't the one I was supposed to keep an eye on.

Then I called Wondergirl, who had just passed us and was wondering, "Could that be them? Surely not, the car is too clean! And QOC must be at home, fixing supper!" So she came and gave the kids paper dolls to play with and berry baskets to pick blackberries and DOB called me back and said that his graphic designer friend, who he had been on the phone with, needed an excuse to get out of the house and would be there in a minute.

So he showed up, in a red truck, and Dash watched with fascination and announced, "When I am seven, and you have a flat tire, I will fix the flat tire, and I will have a red truck."

Whereupon Dot said, "And I will have a PINK truck with PINK tools and a PINK hat with a PINK ribbon and I will fix ALL the cars."

They put the spare on and we drove home and we had supper (and I was very thankful I had not followed through on my earlier idea of leaving it simmering while we ran out) and finished just in time for Toolboy and his family to show up for dessert. Which was very good.

Not Ten TV Shows I've Enjoyed

2011-09-30T14:27:00.000-07:00

Because I really can't come up with ten, but thanks to Carrie at Reading to Know, I'm going to give it a whirl with the ones I can.

Truth is, I hate most television shows. I hate knowing ahead of time exactly what's going to happen next. And most TV shows run on predictability. There are shows I really tried to like--Numbers is one--because of the characters, but if I can walk in at any point, watch two minutes and tell you exactly how far along it is, whodunnit, and what's going to happen next, then I'm just not interested.

It's got to have plot, yes it does. I know there are only six plots in the world, but keep me guessing on which one it's going to be and how it's going to get there. And character development--not just characters I like, but characters I am curious about what they're going to turn into. And difficult moral questions. Not "good guys" and "bad guys" but real, honest people who might choose good and who might choose bad.

Or you can get me with a good laugh.

We don't watch much with the kids, but I'll try to include a ratings comment in case you wonder.

1. Lost

This is the one we just finished. And yes, it had it all. Plot that developed mind-blowing new complications in nearly every episode. Characters that you loved to hate and hated to love and couldn't wait to see how they might grow. "Bad" people getting second chances . . . and third chances . . . and "good" people finding out what was under the facade. I loved it.

Suitability for Small Hippos: It's about people's choices. Some of those are really bad ones. Some of those get shown a little more onscreen than probably should happen. It's also really, really scary at times. OK, most of the time.

2. Babylon 5

Another one with fascinating characters, unpredictable plot twists, and difficult moral questions. Plus, this one has exploding spacecraft! Like all sci-fi, it shows its age a little. (We've got intergalactic travel, but no cell phones?) But on the whole, very well thought-out. I also appreciate that it's one of those rare works of science fiction that doesn't treat religion as either irrelevant or malevolent, but still a significant factor in the life of sentients. The series as a whole seems to favor a kind of proactive pantheism, but even the occasional devout Christian gets respectful treatment. The first four seasons are awesome--the fifth one kind of got tacked on, and is comparatively lame, but by that point we were too hooked to stop.
Suitability for Small Hippos: The camera tends to pan out when necessary (except for some in the last season), but because of themes it would need some judicious editing for me to show it to young teens. Plus I don't think anyone younger would enjoy it.

3. Jeeves and Wooster

And now for something completely different . . . OK, so this has no character development and the moral questions come down to, "If Aunt Dahlia says you MUST pinch the cow creamer, then what else can you do?" But Wodehouse is Wodehouse, and if you don't find it hilarious then there is something seriously wrong with you and you should probably seek professional help. Immediately. And then watch it.
Suitability for Small Hippos: Well, we let OUR kids watch it. They haven't started drinking cocktails or pinching cow creamers yet. The Duchess did develop strong opinions on the proper clothing for gentlemen, though.

4. Neverwhere

It had me at the use of the Underground stations. Of course there should be Black Friars at Blackfriars! And an Earl's Court at Earl's Court! It kept me going with great characters, epic adventure, and subtle but deep examination of serious questions. It's only a miniseries, so maybe it doesn't count, and maybe if it does I should lump in all the adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and George Eliot I've enjoyed (and in that case, we WILL make it to ten and then some), but I think in this case the miniseries came before the book so I'll count it.
Suitability for Small Hippos: Very scary and some very creepy characters, but highly recommended for the strong of stomach.

5. Fawlty Towers

We've actually only watched this in little chunks on YouTube, but John Cleese is hilarious at any resolution.
Suitability for Small Hippos: As I recall, the only things there were to get wouldn't be gotten by anyone too young to get them.

6. Poirot

Does this count? I think there are movie-length ones and TV-length ones. OK, so there's complete predictability (Poirot WILL deduce who did it) and no character development (Hastings will always be lovable and dumb). However, at least one is always kept guessing as to who will prove to be the murderer and how Poirot will figure it out. I can't watch in large doses, but every once in a while I enjoy one.
Suitability for Small Hippos: Well, murder is kind of nasty and people usually do it for rather nasty reasons. However, that stuff takes place off screen. There have been a few which I would have preferred not to see for thematic reasons, although I suspect those tend to be the more recent ones. I would watch many of them with youngish teens.

Now We Are Six

2011-09-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

I probably used the same title for the Duchess, but how else can you say it? There's just something about being six. Six year olds are, without a doubt, Big. And clever as clever.

Deux is fond of climbing on things--he just figured out how to use the laurel to climb over the neighbor's fence, although as far as I know he hasn't acted on that knowledge yet. He can build with Legos or train tracks for hours and hours and hours.

He has told me (though it was on a bad day) that he doesn't like to read, it's just that when he sees words he can't help it, but nonetheless one sees him enjoying a Tintin or Calvin and Hobbes book from time to time, or books about wild animals or knights. He can fold a load of towels all by himself, even the big ones, and he's working on learning to vacuum. He loves to watch the waves behind a boat.

The world inside his head is still going strong, and he has invented a language for it and is working on an alphabet. When there's a war going on inside his head, though, he likes to have it quiet on the outside; otherwise the good guys might lose.

Last Saturday he got to make a trip to the Lego store, pick out his own set (two pirate sets) and then come home and build all afternoon. Tonight we will be having a peanut butter cake and he will decorate it to look like a shield.

Real Play, Fake Play

2011-09-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Grownups must periodically rediscover that play is an Important Thing for children to do. This time around, it's being touted for its value in developing "executive function": the ability to plan, exercise self-control, negotiate, and persist. Which is, of course, absolutely correct. All young mammals play at exactly what they need as grown-ups. Young tigers play at pouncing on things, and young cows play at running into things. Young people play at managing small worlds of their own devising.

But the great danger is that as soon as grownups discover that something is important for children, they will ruin it by turning it into something children Have to Do. At which point, if you are under the age of 12, you instantly realize that it's not playing any more.

So I have very mixed feelings when I hear about something like these Tools of the Mind classrooms. Sure, it's better that children be given time to play than herded into one worksheet after another. But by the time you've sat down with a teacher, made an official plan for playing, then been required to stick to that plan for a designated period of time--well, that doesn't sound much like playing anymore. The children aren't the executives any more, they're only the middle managers.

And when I got to the bottom and read in the Q&A, "How much of our 7.5 hour kindergarten day should be devoted to playing?" and saw the answer, "Kindergarteners should play for at least 30 or 40 minutes a day," I gave up. Thirty or forty minutes? Out of 7.5 hours? Five year olds? Now I understand you need time for eating and resting and picking up and an ungodly lot of time for going potty, but still. Thirty or forty minutes of work on letters and numbers and the rest of the time spent playing would be a much better balance, and produce much better results both in literacy and general sanity.

Play is important for children because it's what children are wired to do. It's like real food: we can try to scientifically analyze the different parts and functions, but no one will ever come up with a pill that has the same effect on mind and body as eating a vine-ripe home-grown tomato. And we'll never come up with an activity for children that is as beneficial as real play. But it's only real play if the grownups can keep their grimy mitts off it.

A Day in the Life

2011-09-14T19:48:00.001-07:00

I can't remember when I last did a post like this, but I feel like doing another, and since this is my blog, I will.

I won't blog Monday, though. Monday started at 3 a.m. with Dot stuck under the Duchess' bed and ended at 8:30 p.m. after the beans finally cooked enough to eat. With several intervening crises to liven up the middle.

No, let's stick with today, which wasn't amazing, but pretty good.

I got up sometime 6:30ish and went for a walk. I explored woods in backs of places I probably shouldn't have been and discovered another shortcut through parts of the neighborhood I didn't know were connected. And I managed to sneak out without waking any kids up, which is a major achievement for me.

When I got back, DOB got up and started getting ready for work, the kids got up and I doled out the M&Ms awarded for staying in bed the evening before. (Shameless, but it works.) And some leftover breakfast from the day before, so that Dash wouldn't dissolve completely before the rest of breakfast was ready. Then I fixed breakfast to go for DOB and breakfast to stay for the rest of us.

After breakfast we went through a random and harried process of getting clothes on, starting laundry, clearing the table (I hope at some point they will just *do* this without four minutes of lamentation over having to do it at all, followed by four minutes of lamentation because someone else cleared *their* dishes first) and doing the dishes.

We started school a little before nine. First we have singing time, which at times is randomly-leaping-around-the-kitchen time, but which is meant to cover a variety of memory work. Then I give the twins a lesson (consisting of air-writing "a" and "b" and then looking at pictures of birds--I'm not much on fancy preschool stuff) while the older two do free reading, except today Deux spent most of this time sulking that I never do fun things with just the big kids. He seems to have a bad case of preschool envy, a common complaint of first graders.

Next we do a writing lesson--today we focus on spelling words with "ing" for the big kids. The twins focus on making interesting marks all over their papers and then folding them up like accordions.

Then the Duchess reads some more of "Aladdin and his Magic Lamp" to me while Deux reads some of Mercy Watson Thinks Like a Pig to the twins. This goes well. Reading they like.

Next on the agenda is me reading aloud a chapter of the Burgess Bird Book, a book that tells the basic features and habits of many common birds in a story form. First, though, we have to settle whose crayons are whose, a process of several minutes. We manage to read and discuss the chapter to some extent, plus look at the bird and listen to its song online.

By now it is about ten, time to get ready to go on our nature walk. The Duchess herds everyone out to the car while I assemble one of my signature picnic lunches: unpeeled hardboiled eggs, a bag of chips, and carrot sticks. And the diaper bag, whose absence we sorely regretted on Tuesday, and any other day I decide we really are totally past all that.

We go to nature preserve in a wetlands, and I promptly get two mosquito bites. I dread the future as I have forgotten any kind of repellent, but those turn out to be the only ones of the whole trip. We meet up with some friends and everyone is eager to go explore. I brought the notebooks along for sketching, but no one is interested except Dash, who draws a rose hip you would recognize if you knew he was drawing rose hips. And the Duchess, who wants to record the important event of playing with friends. Mostly, though, we just wander on the trails and test the fuzz on cattails and caterpillars.

We get home about two in the afternoon and after some meandering about I sit down to read to the twins. They both want to pick a poem from A Child's Garden of Verses; they both want to pick a book. I suddenly realize I have had it. I tell them I'll read Dot's poem and Dash's book (Blueberries for Sal), and then I put them hastily to bed, Dot in our room listening to a Little House book on CD, Dash in the kids' room listening to Winnie the Pooh on CD. The big kids start an elaborate game involving a lot of paper dolls and magazine scraps. I do some stretches because my TMJ is acting up, surf on the computer for awhile, then write up our school activities in my notebook.

When I feel up to it, I let Deux have a turn playing Ninjatown on the Nintendo DS while Duchess reserves some books on her brand-new personal library card. I remember that this is supposed to be Clean The Bathroom day on the housekeeping schedule, and decide to do it because I did already take all the towels out to wash them, so it would be a pity to waste it. When Deux's turn is up, Duchess takes a turn and Deux and I sit down to read a story and do some advance play with the twins' next activity. I hope this helps with the preschool envy. Then they go back to playing and I continue on my fruitless quest to get an A on every single level of Ninjatown. And I reserve a bunch of library books for myself. Work has been slow for the past couple weeks, which is actually kind of nice to give me time to get into a good school routine. So I can just be lazy in the afternoons.

Somehow it gets to be awfully close to five o'clock. I put potatoes in the oven to cook and wake up Dash, who is in the just-about-done-with-naps stage where they fall asleep too late and wake up cranky as a bear. Dot is already up the instant her second CD is over--she never sleeps anymore. We take the garbage out to the road and get the mail. The kids fold the laundry--Deux instructs Dash in how to fold towels. I think the big kids have figured out that the faster they teach the twins to do housework, the more they can get out of. Suits me, as I hate teaching how to do housework.

I try to shoo everyone outside to play, but they mostly wander in and out, brandishing sticks. I make broccoli-cheese sauce for the potatoes and carrot salad. Duchess sets the table. I call DOB, but he has two projects to wind up, so we go ahead and eat without him, listening to some Mozart while we are at it.

Everyone wanders off and is playing quietly after supper. I meander around, doing dishes, putting bread in the machine for the morning, and sitting down at the computer. (Having a computer in the kitchen is a feature, not a bug--otherwise I tend to not sit down when I need to and wear myself out.)

Suddenly I realize that it's past bedtime and the quiet of earlier in the evening has departed. I try to get everyone to brush their teeth and settle down. Deux and Dash get into a fight over matchbox cars, and the Dot slams Deux's head with the bathroom door. Poor Deux is not having a very good day.

DOB arrives home, very hungry and tired. We have prayer and then put everyone to bed, which doesn't go so well because all the children have gone through tired to hyper and all the adults have gotten to tired and stayed there. Nonetheless, it happens. Duchess, Deux and Dash settle down in the kids' room listening to The Book of Three (which I sincerely hope is not too scary for them--if they have nightmares about undead warriors it's all my fault--but they've never been prone to nightmares, not since Deux was a toddler and told me one morning, "An alligator came into my room last night, but I ate it.") Dot goes down on her mattress in our room and listens to By the Shores of Silver Lake. (After she falls asleep and all the cds are over we'll drag her back in with the other kids.)

DOB sits down to eat and read files. I sit down to write this. Pretty soon we should go to bed. Maybe we'll play a card game first. We'll definitely have dessert first. We finished the final season of Lost last week and haven't felt like watching anything since.

The Organizer

2011-09-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

I just put the scheduled last load of laundry in the dryer, made sure the planned chili beans were turned on to cook for supper, and reserved the library books for us to pick up next week for the following week of school. In a few minutes I'll set us all onto our list of afternoon chores.

I'm not sure I can handle this level of organization.

For most of the past, my approach to domestic duties has been:
1. Is there food to eat?
2. Is there anything clean to wear, should need arise?
3. Then go to bed, finally!

Over the last couple of years that stage has gradually faded, but with drastic life changes happening every six weeks or so, I've stayed entirely on the defensive. However, I now find myself with a house to run, children old enough to hire, and a lack of any dramatic life-changing events for over a month! It is time to try being organized.

I don't like reading about other people's organizational ideas. I find this advice usually written by two kinds of people:

1. People who are so naturally organized that they have absolutely nothing to say to those of more random inclinations. I remember reading one book prattling about the need for customizing your plan to suit you, "After all, some people think dusting needs to be done every day while others think once a week is sufficient." Um, yes. Or perhaps, once a year, right before putting up the Christmas decorations.

2. People who are somewhat random, but who have forgotten that the main reason they are so much more organized than they were ten years ago is that their children are ten years older than they were ten years ago. The laziest teenager has nothing on the mess-generating capacity of a toddler trying to be helpful.

Thus, people will assure you that if you just do a little bit every day, things will never get out of hand. This may be true for some people. It is not true if you have two three-year-olds. It's definitely not true if you have a tendency to say, "Oh sure, why not?" to children's ideas of what to do and only later realize that you have just officially endorsed the plan to paper the entire house with catalog cut-outs. A house with small children goes from neat to out-of-hand in three minutes flat.

And the trouble is, if I'm following a real housekeeping schedule and *trying*, I actually get annoyed by this. If I'm just waltzing along and cleaning when I feel like it, I don't really care that I never quite get all the way to neat. If I mop for an occasion, then the floor is mopped for that occasion and we can all stay out of the mud puddles until the occasion is over and then mud away. If I mop because it's Mopping Day, then I suddenly turn into a neat freak who wants to duct-tape the children to the ceiling where they won't touch anything.

Which is another reason why I don't follow other people's organizing advice. At least if I make up my own housekeeping schedule, I can have all the fun of designing a schedule. Planning is something I'm good at. Making beautiful charts. Lining everything up. It's innocent fun, and so what if I never follow it? Whereas if I followed someone else's plan, I'd miss out on the only fun part and move straight to feeling guilty.

There really is only one thing that's holding me to a schedule thus far, and that is that it's easier and more fair to get children to help if there's a definite plan for them versus Mother suffering from sporadic bouts of wailing and guilt-tripping, interspersed by letting them run wild.

After considering the different schools of thought on Children and Work and Money, we decided to come up with our own system that would make things as complicated as possible. So they have a baseline allowance that they get just for existing, and they also have jobs (mostly pertaining to meals) that they have to do if they want to continue to exist. Then they have jobs they can do for hire, if they want to make enough money to actually do anything with, things that add to the niceties of life like folded clothes and clean floors. But to keep these jobs available to be done, I have to make sure the prerequisites are in place--that there actually is clean laundry to fold in manageable quantities, and that we can locate precisely where we last left the floor. Which means sticking to the schedule.

Some are born organized, some achieve organization, and some have organization thrust upon them. When the children leave home, I'm going to sweep the floors when I *feel* like sweeping the floor, and not before!

Kids in Tights

2011-08-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

Now that the rest of the country is starting to look for summer to be over, we are finally seeing the first signs of it. It's OK, my desired length of summer is two weeks. I'm ready for fall now.

Nonetheless, we have been enjoying what summer we can: filling and then emptying the wading pool, picking blackberries (the fruits of neglect), and lying around in the shade wishing it was over.

This week the Duchess finally got to see the completion of a project she began last winter: the ducklings and their cousins of sufficient age to brandish sticks put on a production of "Robin Hood." In the picture, Deux as a disguised Robin Hood challenges the Duchess as a disguised Maid Marian, accompanied by her maid and two horses. The cousins were genial about certain casting inequalities, but they have plans for writing their own play next.

In a way, this is the first end of summer for us, as I am at last making plans for really, truly doing formal lessons this year. ("Formal" meaning: You have to do this whether you want to or not.) Not very much, and I expect it all to still be quite fascinating. If I have the audacity to tell children that my ideas are more important than the projects they already have underway, I ought to make it worth their while.

Why I will never be a gym rat

2011-08-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

I got this on my morning ramble. I'd rather have that than abs of steel any day.

Draw the Line

2011-08-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Learning to draw, for the oldest two ducklings, was a massive trauma that overshadowed most of their preschool years. Duchess was the worst. We had approximately 1,375 conversations that went like this:

Duchess: Draw me a girl.
QOC: Why don't you draw a girl? I like to see your drawings.
Duchess: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I don't know HOW to draw a girl.
QOC: The way you learn to draw is by trying to draw. You won't learn if you don't try.
Duchess: (sobs)

Deux was a little more mellow, mostly because he was not as interested in drawing and partly because he could usually talk Duchess into drawing something for him.

In time, though, they both learned to draw close enough approximations to enjoy the drawing process. Indeed, Duchess now draws constantly and Deux fairly often. We just started nature notebooks yesterday to great enthusiasm and they drew some lovely flowers with careful observation.

Now the twins are getting just past the scribbling stage, when they want things to actually look like things. Dash will occasionally melt down when he really, really wants a house and no one will draw one for him. However, he's more content to start drawing, then look at it and decide what it is: "Hey, I drew a banana!"

Dot, however, takes this to a new level. Yesterday I saw her drawing the classic figure of three-year-olds: a head with legs and arms hanging down off it, two big round eyes and a mouth.

She pointed to it with confidence. "This is a jellyfish. It has legs and eyes and a mouth, but no nose, because jellyfish don't have noses."

Well, there was no denying it looked very much like a jellyfish. Why get frustrated that you can't draw good people yet, when you can just enjoy drawing good jellyfish?

7 Quick Takes: Catching Up

2011-08-12T08:37:00.001-07:00

1. DOB's parents were here for two weeks. Toolboy loaned us his fifth wheel for them to stay in, which worked out well for everyone, including Toolboy who has now installed a proper septic hookup for parking the fifth wheel. He does things like that, while I am still trying to figure out how to get my bulletin boards to stay on the wall. The ducklings were very sad when we finished filling back in the dirt piles from the pipes.

We all had a lovely visit, and we went to the zoo and to the park and spent a lot of time just hanging around the house, which still needs a lot of hanging.

2. Our church has done its VBS as a series of Wednesday-night events for everybody in the church and including a potluck supper. This has been pretty fun and it's nice to have the whole church involved (and a big draw for me to only have to fix one dish instead of a whole supper). It has the big disadvantage of people taking vacations right in the middle, so the mix of people doing stuff changes every week.

3. Wondergirl and I started work on the basement this week. I had the babysitter come and watch the kids all day while we burrowed in. It took us until 4:30 in the afternoon to find the shelf supports that we needed to assemble the shelves to start putting stuff away. We were quite emotional over the discovery.

4. I got called up for jury duty this week. I was really hoping to get to serve, as I've always wanted to serve on a jury. (Plus a quiet day sitting while the kids play at Their Majesties'.) And I lucked out and had never even met the judge or the prosecutor. However, the defendant (representing himself) quite definitely did not want any lawyers or police officers on the jury, so I got stricken on the first strike. And had to come home and do the dishes instead of finding out how he was going to defend against the charge of Refusing to Give Name.

I was also very, very lucky as I completely forgot about it until 8:45 Monday morning, but when I called in my group had not been called for that day. I didn't actually get called up until Wednesday.

5. DOB has figured out the feasible solution to our daily morning crisis: snacks. Duh. I'm just not a snack person. Thinking about food three times a day is way more than enough. However, having something for everyone to munch on whenever they happen to awake does make things more mellow until a real breakfast can be served. And provides a convenient way to clean out the fridge.

I still wouldn't say no to the well-staffed country estate, though.

6. I have Three Big Things I want to do before school starts: Organize the basement (hah!); finish painting the trim, and wash the windows. I've given up on starting a fall garden--first I have to figure out what to do about the rabbits. I have made a beautiful, shiny chore schedule and school schedule which I haven't yet given up on.

7. Duchess and Deux are thrilled that I have reached enough terms with the ambient mess levels to tolerate them getting out Clue: Master Detective again. I have no idea what they are doing with it, but I'm pretty sure it bears no resemblance to the actual rules. It may simply be a lengthy game of living-in-a country-estate with lots of murder weapons. It keeps them busy for hours, though.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Dash Tells a Story

2011-08-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

One of the key elements of our homeschooling approach is called narration: basically at the end of every significant reading, the kids are expected to tell back what we just read about. It's not answering questions, it's them organizing in their own mind what just happened and making it part of themselves. It's very simple to implement and amazingly effective. (In fact, I do well to use it more myself.)

Over the summer the only formal reading we do this way has been Bible stories, but the Duchess and Deux have gotten quite good at it, showing good understanding and retention. The twins are not required to narrate, but Dash is such a born storyteller that he occasionally begs for his own turn. This is what comes out. The story was Joseph and his brothers:

Dash: So Jesus went looking for God . . .
(Five minute interruption during which the big kids dissolve in laughter, Dash takes mortal offense and refuses to speak, and QOC tries to shut up the big kids without laughing herself and reassure Dash that we are all ready to listen eagerly.)
Dash: So Jesus went looking for God, and they lived in a big castle. Was it a castle?
QOC: Um . . . I suppose it could be.
Dash: Or maybe a palace. Yeah, it was a palace. So they lived in a big palace, and there were numbers on all the trees.

(I can only guess that it got mixed up with the plot of their Spanish videos, along with the preschool convention that all Bible stories are about Jesus and God.)

Three

2011-08-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

People like to scare the parents of two-year-olds by telling them that three-year-olds are worse.

They're wrong.

However, they feel right. Because a two-year-old has the advantage of still looking like a baby. An amazingly big and mature and capable baby. One that can walk--at least a little ways--and communicate--however basically. When they still act like a baby, you are not surprised. When they act a little more grown-up, you are thrilled.

A three-year-old has longer arms and legs and dirtier feet and firmer lines. A three-year-old looks like a child. A very small and helpless child. And instead of being amazed at how far you have come, you start wondering why you aren't any farther.

You stop being thrilled they went on the potty and start wondering why they can't make it through a church service without three trips (in the case of twins, each). You ditch your strollers and diaper bags and then wish you hadn't. You think you can skip naptime and find out you can't. You forget that you can't actually understand that three-paragraph discourse unless you stop to listen and then you get a why-don't-you-understand-me tantrum.

Three is not so bad, if you don't buy too heavily into your own propaganda that they are big kids now.

Morning Is Broken

2011-07-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

I didn't used to hate mornings.

I mean, I'm not a leap out of bed and greet the dawn with a blithe morning song sort of person, but I don't *mind* mornings. Morning is a good time to slog around, eat something, read something, ponder the possibilities of the day. It's not really a good time to interact with other human beings.

Somebody recently was conversing with DOB and made the comment, "You know how kids get up in the morning and they're just so *happy* with everything?"

To which he replied, "No."

Our kids do not wake up happy. On any given day, two or three of them will wake up like me, ready to slowly meander through life but not really wanting to interact with anyone--a difficult task when you have six people in a five-room house. The remaining ones will wake up as hungry, and grouchy, as bears in the spring, ready to scream at the slightest provocation, up to, and including, being served their favorite breakfast. I guess this is the flip side of that metabolism that makes them eager eaters of everything on their plates.

And, let's face it, the grownups are not much better until they have had their morning dose of protein.

I fantasize about having a smooth morning routine where everyone appears at their places with bright shining faces and fully dressed before breakfast. I haven't figured out how to be in the bedroom helping a child who has forgotten how to get dressed and serving as traffic cop in the bathroom and cooking the large and protein-laden breakfast we all find necessary for survival at the same time, though.

And usually, just when I'm trying to do all three, I forget the toast and set all the smoke detectors off as a finishing touch. Except I think I've put the batteries back in wrong now.

At some point after DOB has been delivered to his car with his breakfast and lunch for the day and the children have eaten enough to be able to distinguish between mortal insults and offers of help and I have eaten enough to identify the children individually, I finally can stop to contemplate the day. By that point, it usually doesn't look so good.

I have figured out the solution, though. All we need is to move to a large English country estate with numerous extremely patient servants where we can all wake up in separate wings and have breakfast in bed before we have to get up and face each other.

Berry Picking

2011-07-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

Their Majesties kindly invited us over to descend upon their berry patches. Somehow a home was found for all the berries (three flats of strawberries and four or five yogurt containers of raspberries). Of course, you can see where most of them went.

Two Recipes I Want to Save

2011-07-20T08:54:00.001-07:00

I'm not going vegan, but I am interested in a cake recipe that doesn't waste eggs and butter on what is basically just a vehicle for berries: Vanilla Eggless and Dairy Free Cake. I used cow milk.

And, still not going vegetarian, why have I never discovered pasta e fagioli before? (Or let's go by the Dean Martin name, Pasta Fazool). It's cheap, it's nutritious, it's really, really easy. The kids called it "spaghetti soup" and devoured it with enthusiasm. (Unfortunately, not with parmesan, because we were out. It's better with, as we discovered on the leftovers.)

QOC and Dot Bake a Cake

2011-07-18T17:24:00.001-07:00

QOC: Oh, I forgot to grease the pan. Details, details. I don't like details.

Dot: I don't like details, either.

QOC: Actually, I think you like details. I think when you are big, you will take care of the details for me.

Dot: Yes, I love details. And I always put them in the cake.

Neighborhood

2011-07-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

Our house lies in a part of town that isn't quite ready to commit to being town yet. Yes, it's within two minutes of two Large Evil Chain Stores, one in the process of becoming Even More Supremely Evil. But it wasn't that long ago that it was out in the country. We have city water, but our own septic tank. (Or at least a septic-handling device of uncertain vintage.)

The town grows, though, and our little pocket is getting smaller. Over the back fence is a brand-new development with moderately-sized houses on tiny lots, with immaculate yards and tidy driveways. It's actually a low-income development built under a sweat equity program, but it's clear that the people who live there have every intention of being just as nice of a suburban development as anywhere else. Sometimes we sneak through a hole in our back fence and go play on their playground, but we almost never see or hear children, though the few we have met assure us there are many more. Even the dirt seems particularly clean.

On our side of the fence, the houses are smaller, sometimes trailers, and the lots are much bigger and often overgrown, except for the occasional yard whose overflowing abundance of flowers proclaims its owner to be retired. Chickens wander in people's yards and wake us up in the morning. Children ride their bikes next to the road, even though the observed speed limit is closer to fifty than thirty. They say hello to strangers and invite them back to admire the poultry. Probably no one thought twice about seeing the Duchess and Deux standing by the side of the road, holding up signs to invite all and sundry for a visit. It would have been unthinkable on the other side of the fence.

We want to put a gate in the back fence, to make it easier to get between the two.

Renaming

2011-07-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

So from the time the Ducklings first began making their appearances, we have operated on a simple numbering system: D1, D2, D3, D4. (This confuses people sometimes--no, no of their real life names start with D.)

This worked for a collection of very small people with as-yet unexpressed personalities, saying assorted random cute things. However, those days are fading, personalities are very much expressed, and it seems like it's time to have real Names. Besides, sooner or later they'll be beyond being called "Ducklings."

But to make it simpler, we'll stick with the letter D. So, presenting the Ducklings:

D1 will now be known as the Duchess, for her commanding presence and royal bearing. And because "Princess" doesn't start with a D.

D2 will be known as Deux, because he is the second born and DOB Jr. (in name and personality)

D3 will be known as Dot, for her reflective and observational qualities.

D4 will be known as Dash, for his speed and energy.

I am, as always the Queen of Carrots, and DOB remains the Duke of Burgundy.

Left to right: Dash, Deux, Dot, Duchess.

Got it?

Unexpected Blessings

2011-07-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this link about Five Things that are Worse than Being in Debt.

I read it. And I don't exactly disagree. It's just that I think so much more could be said.

See, I cut my eyeteeth on the joys of frugality and the virtue of staying out of debt. I squirreled money away like the Long Winter was coming. I knew how to do it, and I was going to do it, too.

We started out married life debt-free, frugal in habits, and determined to work hard.

Then we got hit by a whole bunch of Life. Medical bills upon medical bills. Business failure upon business failure. Unexpected moves. Kids and then more kids. The Long Winter turned out to be a lot longer than anything we could have prepared for.

We missed that whole part where you get into debt having fun and spending frivolously. We got in debt while we were living in small houses, cutting our own hair, hanging cloth diapers up to dry, and eating beans and rice.

And I felt burdened and condemned, because I thought debt was always a punishment or a consequence of foolishness. Every time somebody talked about the virtues of good stewardship or how God had blessed their commitment to staying out of debt, I felt a knife to my heart. I must not have been careful enough, I must not have been good enough, or God must not really care about us.

But I'm starting to realize that I had it all wrong. Debt is no more automatically a sign of God's disfavor or even our mistakes any more than wealth is automatically a sign of God's favor. Debt is like sickness, sometimes the consequence of bad choices, but sometimes just the way things are. And like sickness, it can be a gift from God.

Because, ultimately, God doesn't give a rat's left whisker whether our net worth is $5,000,000 or -$5,000,000. God is after our hearts. And my heart loves money. It loves its own wisdom and self-discipline. It is sick, and it needs to be healed.

So here's a few more things that are worse than being in debt:

It's worse to love money than to be in debt
If you're just substituting getting your satisfaction and security from the size of your bank account instead of from the size of your house, then your commitment to better stewardship hasn't gotten you anywhere spiritually at all. Love of money has many subtle forms, and it's one of the biggest things that gets between us and God. Yes, the Bible talks about debt as servitude. It also says we can serve God even as servants to someone else. God is not limited by our circumstances.

We cannot measure our spiritual status by our net worth. And if voices are telling you that you can, then it's time to turn those voices off. Because they're lying to you.

It's worse to fight over money than to be in debt
I have a contract with a divorce attorney whose clientele consists mostly of well-off professionals. I go through their finances with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything is listed for the division of property. Some of them have managed their money well, some of them haven't. They're in his office just the same.

Yes, debt can be a stress and stress can lead to fighting. But it doesn't have to. And if different perspectives on money are causing stress, if you think less of your spouse because they're not as committed to living within your means as you are, then it's time to drop it. Because nobody gets richer from divorce except lawyers.

It's worse to be proud than to be in debt
I've always been pretty impressed over my own ability to save money. I looked down on those who spent money unnecessarily and lived outside their means. I was surely thankful that I was not such as one of them.

I'm not even going to carry this further, lest I find a new grounds for being proud of myself.

It's worse to say no to the adventure than to be in debt
There were a few choices we could have made differently. We could have waited to have kids until our income was greater and more stable. We could have stayed put two years ago instead of moving and changing careers. We would be in a much better financial position from either of those. But I'm not sorry we did those. I don't think those were foolish choices. Money can be earned later, but time never comes back.

I'm not advocating reckless spending or irresponsibility. I hope to work hard and keep living frugally and maybe this time at last we'll be able to pay things off. But I'm beginning to learn that that's just a personal goal, not a spiritual goal. God is with us and blessing us just as much in debt and loss as in financial stability.

The Birthday Boy

2011-07-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

He's a big boy now, and don't you forget it. He can carry the compost bucket all by himself, and fights for the privilege. He likes things with wheels, and things with dirt (but not in his eyes).
He likes to listen to Uncle Wiggly and Winnie-the-Pooh. His character from The Incredibles is Dash. He likes to help with almost anything. He likes to eat almost anything. He likes to stand on his head.
In fact, about the only thing he doesn't like is sitting still. Unless he's driving a car.

The Birthday Girl

2011-07-09T17:13:00.001-07:00

She's got a lot of opinions. She likes girls, of course. And Papa. And D2 and D4. But not monsters. Except for girl monsters. (She's currently very fond of Edwina, The Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct. Because she's a girl dinosaur.)

She loves listening to Little House on the Prairie and quotes it at length randomly throughout the day. ("It's a long, long way to Indian territory.") She likes to play Baby Carrie while D2 plays Jack, or perhaps Jack-Jack (of The Incredibles--an interesting combination). She liked The Incredibles, too.

Her favorite things are playing dress-up and reading books and helping D1 or Mama (preferably D1). She wanted a princess birthday cake but was perfectly satisfied with a crown. She knows how much three is and she's happy to be there. But she might turn six or seven next.

Every Day

2011-07-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

It is the appropriate thing to whine about the everydayishness of housekeeping tasks, of how you wash the dishes only to have them dirty again a few moments later, of how there's no point making a bed that is only going to be slept in again.

The process of moving has reminded me that there is a great comfort in things that have to be done over and over. There are an infinite number of opportunities to get it right. If dinner was a flop yesterday, I have a chance to do it better today. If the laundry overflowed its boundaries today, I can keep trying to catch up tomorrow.

Rarer tasks lack that opportunity. I will be staring at the drippy paint over the shower for the next ten years. And by the time I get around to painting again, I will have forgotten everything I figured out about it this time and will probably drip away.

After change and turmoil and transition, there's a great comfort in a day of just doing ordinary things. Of seeing the pile of dishes rise and fall like the tide. Of raising the shades (which still won't roll correctly) and letting the morning sunshine in, and lowering them at night.

The Duchess Turns Seven

2011-06-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

See that Hansel-and-Gretel cottage cake? Guess who made it allllmost all by herself?

D1 is growing by leaps and bounds. She has moved on to reading long books with small print, preferably books of fairy tales. She likes to draw, preferably princesses. And she likes to cook, preferably birthday cakes. She can get everybody ready to go, in the car and buckled while I am still trying to remember where I left my purse.

It's great to have a big girl.

This is no fair

2011-06-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

My weird aunt died suddenly last Tuesday. She was the person who taught me music and Shakespeare and baking fabulous cookies, who introduced me to Gilbert and Sullivan and science fiction and Magic: The Gathering and Sandra Boynton and personality analysis. We used to debate and analyze for hours, and more recently we instead stayed up far too late playing strange card games.

I'm glad she's out of pain, but I'm going to miss her terribly.

Style and 5 year old boys

2011-06-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

I hate FDA-approved (or whoever it is that approves it) pajama fabric, all synthetic and treated and ooky feeling. I just don't see that my children are in greater danger of spontaneous combustion while sleeping than while playing. So instead Her Majesty makes them lovely untreated flannel pajamas for winter and for the summer I just pick up a few extra t-shirts and some knit shorts at the thrift store.

This week I got some pieces for D2 and was rather pleased that I managed to coordinate them. I found a pair of orange shorts and a grayish-green shirt with a bright orange tiger printed on it. Then I found some navy shorts and a periwinkle Gap t-shirt with "GAP" in navy.

Tonight D2 wanted to wear his new pajamas. He found the orange shorts, so I dug around and found the tiger shirt.

"That doesn't match!" he complained.

"Yes, it does," I said. "See, there's orange here to match the orange on the shorts."

"But not very *much* orange."

So I tried digging out the other pair. "See, they're both blue."

"But it's not the *same* blue. "

"Well what are you going to wear then?" I asked.

He took the orange shorts and the blue shirt and went and put them on. I don't get it.

Exploring

2011-06-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

Some pictures (courtesy D1, which is why she's in none of them) of the kids in our new yard. I've only had to rescue two boys out of the laurel bushes so far.

Conjugation

2011-05-30T10:47:00.001-07:00

We are moved.
We have been moved. (Thanks to many helpful people.)
We shall be moved. (When we figure out where everything goes.)

Right now it's time to feel like the old sailor. And note that this is a *really* bad time to come down with the stomach flu. But not quite as bad of a time as last week would have been.

Grammar Commando Rides Again

2011-05-19T07:14:00.000-07:00

The Grammar Commando has been lured out of a long hiatus by QOC absent-mindedly posting as her Facebook status, "After spending the whole morning scrubbing, our new house suddenly seems plenty big enough."

"Ha!" says GC. "The house was scrubbing, was it? How lucky of you to get a self-scrubbing house!"

(A more logical construction: "After spending the whole morning scrubbing, I think our new house is plenty big enough." It's QOC that was spending the whole morning scrubbing, and nobody else. Well, except the ducklings for about three minutes. His Majesty is busy taping and wielding tools.)

But, now that GC is out of hiding, she will add an error QOC would never commit.

"Chalk full"

Really? Full of chalk? What on earth is full of chalk except an unopened package of sidewalk chalk?

No, what you're thinking of is "chock full," i.e., full to the point that they had to chock (carefully wedge) in the last bits. Which could apply, metaphorically, to a book being chock full of ideas. But it probably doesn't have chalky ideas in it.

Status Report

2011-05-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

Potty Training: Almost there. They've got the idea. D4 persisted in a triumph of willpower over lack of readiness, but he finally started figuring it out after several days of trauma for all concerned. They still have accidents. D4 still won't use full-sized potty. I spend a lot of time debating under what circumstances they earn chocolate. Still, I packed up all my diaper covers and training pants and sent them to Goodwill yesterday. (I saved the diapers for a lifetime supply of cleaning cloths.) Disposables will actually not be that greatly reduced, since I don't think we're anywhere close to staying dry at night yet.

Packing: Agonizingly slow. I'm trying to retrieve all the little pieces of everything and get them in the same boxes as all the other small pieces of the same category. And make sure we only take our stuff. And clean, and purge, and organize. And not murder anyone who discovers a cool lost toy in a box and drags it back out again.

Moving: We closed on the house on Thursday. Now we need to clean it very thoroughly, then paint and do some minor fixes. We're hoping to move Memorial Day weekend, which we realize is terrible timing because everyone able-bodied in the country will be out camping, but it's when we think we'll be ready. People have started to give me plants, and I'm very excited about that.

Colds: The kids have had them. Now I do. Bleah.

7 Quick Takes: The Potty Training Edition

2011-05-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

1. I had a GREAT plan for potty training the twins. We were going to wait until July. They'd both be three. The weather would be warm and sunny for minimal clothing. Grandma R., a seasoned potty trainer, would be visiting. We'd be all moved and settled in. The floor plan of the house has a large kitchen/dining area with vinyl flooring and a toilet and washing machine right off them. It was going to be great.

2. D3 decided on Sunday that wearing diapers hurts, and just like with sucking her fingers a month ago, that was the end of that. Being a little girl who likes to wear dresses makes it much easier. She doesn't even need reminders anymore.

3. D4 believes anything she can do, he can do better. Only he can't. But he won't believe me. Nor will he accept the idea of wearing diapers again. Or of training pants. "No! I won't wear those round diapers!" I am doing a lot of laundry.

4. Just because I feel it necessary to counterpoint conventional wisdom, I will point out that girls are not necessarily easier to train than boys, since D1 was approximately 23 times harder (counting by months) or 750 times harder (counting by accidents) than D2.

5. And my kids never read the potty training books about never trying to potty train right before a big, stressful event. They have a radar for big, stressful events. Which is why D2 decided to potty train right before the twins were born. On the plus side, this meant that Grandma R. and Wondergirl did all the work, because I couldn't reach the ground.

6. That bit about cloth diapers helping children potty train sooner because they feel wet is hogwash, too, as far as my kids are concerned. They just get used to feeling wet. Maybe I should have changed them more often. Oops.

7. D4 has all the pieces, he's just having trouble putting them together. I think going bottomless for a few days would do the trick. He's not inherently opposed, just finds it too chilly. And he did not welcome the suggestion of wearing D3's dresses. However, Her Majesty has had a brainstorm: she's persuaded him that several grown-up sized old t-shirts (especially with military themes) are in fact knight costumes. Clothed in such manly attire that will keep his legs warm and still allow for airflow, I'm hopeful that it will all click. Soon. 'Cause otherwise I'm going to be doing a lot of laundry for an awfully long time.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

What manly men wear for potty-training. Even though it's Grandma's.

The Opposite of Magic

2011-04-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

In the church I grew up in, the pastors made a special point, it seemed like at each instance of celebrating communion or baptism, of saying, "Now, there's nothing magic about this bread (or water). This is just something we do in obedience."

Something in me always rebelled against that. If there was nothing special about it, why go through it? Why would God order meaningless actions? But, no, I didn't really believe in magic bread or water, so I let it lie.

Over the past couple of years, as we've explored sacramental churches and stepped back and then explored again, I've come to realize that a sacrament is the opposite of magic. Magic is an intangible action--a word, a gesture, a symbol--to generate a physical result. But a sacrament is a physical action to transmit a spiritual reality.

We are physical beings. And we are spiritual beings. In the sacraments, God promises to meet us on both levels. And as we began to acknowledge it as such (and recognize that God had indeed been present to us, in that way, all through the years of being told that there was nothing special but we were going to do it anyways), we've begun to see a whole lot of things differently.

We've begun to see that salvation isn't something that rests on the fervency of our own faith, or the complexity with which we can articulate doctrine. It rests simply on the work of God in Christ. It is not a deal to be signed by those who have reached the age of consent, but a meal to be shared with all who come. And looked at that way, it no longer made any sense to keep from sharing it with our children.

Which is why we celebrated this Easter by having all four of the children baptized and receive first Communion.

Do they understand it all? Neither do we. When was I "saved," after all? Was it the first time I prayed the prayer, hiding in the grass as a toddler? Was it when I was seven and wrote it out in my Bible? Was it when I was baptized at eight because my older siblings were? Was it when I was twelve and the enormity of God dying for me hit for the first time? Was it when I wrestled with and walked through doubts as a teenager and young adult?

Or was it all God the whole time? Did it matter how clearly I understood or simply whether I received? Did Jesus, who commended us over and over to the faith of a little child, really mean to tell us that their faith didn't count?

So today we recognized the gift of faith in them and permitted them to receive God's grace through baptism. The older ducklings can answer catechism questions with the best of them, and the twins know that they belong to Jesus. Will they have doubts? Surely. Will they have a crisis of faith, of wondering if it is really theirs or just something inherited? Very likely. I will probably have a few more crises of my own. But that won't change what God does, nor do I hold back from receiving His grace now because I might not take advantage of it in the future.

In Which I Type Up A Bunch of Stuff

2011-04-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I'm typing with my laptop hanging off the edge of the loveseat, the battery about to die, wishing I'd brought a book instead of a computer. Except I probably would be done with the book by now, too.

I really wish I had my Nook. I've been saving up for it for months and I finally have enough, but no time to go to the store and get it. (Yes, I could order, but I want to look at it and feel it first.) I have thought of a thousand times it would be handy to have. I'll probably break it in three weeks.

The reason I can't move is because there is a small head with closed eyes resting on my other side. D4 interrupted the morning preparations for church by throwing up. I stayed home with him while DOB took the others out to church. So there is no one to send for a book. We watched Bob the Builder and then a video of old family movies. A lot changes in forty years.

DOB had his first trial last week. He got a decent verdict. (It was public defense of a civil commitment--the fellow was undoubtedly crazy, but he got to keep a few key rights rather than having a complete guardianship.) DOB had a wonderful time objecting and cross-examining and then came home and wished he could just die and get it over with. I think he should be over the adrenalin detox in a few days. He's feeling happy to get back to estate planning and other boring stuff.

We have a contract on a house and are moving forward with it. It's a great location and price and a huge lot, but the house is currently pretty small and plain (two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a mysterious toilet in the back entry. Also a basement). We have plans for a massive expansion in a couple of years. But right now we'll just be happy to get moved. And we hope it comes through, because we're putting a bit of money into it in advance of closing so that we don't have to get a construction loan.

Now I'm getting the Low Battery warning. The end is near.

Maybe good, maybe not

2011-04-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

D3 has been a compulsive finger-sucker since she first discovered that she had them. She's not just a situational finger-sucker, either. No, anytime the fingers are not actively employed in handing food in, they are in the mouth. They always look white and shriveled and smell like stale saliva.

So I'd been thinking about when and how to break her of this, and always, when the peaceful sound of focused sucking signaled that naptime had begun, come to the conclusion that now was not the best time.

Sunday, right as the church service was starting, she started whimpering over a cut finger. I had to quickly rummage through the back of the church for the first aid kit (fortunately I knew where it was owing to the events of my first visit to the church). I found a small round bandage and we persuaded her it was enough for now.

Not until we got home did we realize the horror of what had happened: it was one of THE fingers. And not until I tried to get her to take a nap that afternoon did I truly realize the full horror. She had no idea how to go to sleep without them.

"Try sucking your thumb," I suggested "Many people enjoy thumbs. Or what about your left hand?"

"They don't work!" she wailed. Nor would she put the finger in her mouth, with or without a bandaid.

Finally I gave up, being in desperate need of a nap myself, and called in the reinforcements. DOB finally managed to rock her to sleep, at great cost to his own afternoon.

Fortunately by bedtime she was so tired that she fell asleep rather quickly. But the same pattern has repeated all week long: no nap (which usually means she wakes D4 up after 45 minutes, instead of the blissful 3 hours we had been enjoying), then conking out at bedtime. One would think that tiny cut would have healed by now, but she insists that it still hurts.

I would be happy that we have found a way that at least is not my fault to be rid of the habit, except today I realized what is replacing it: she's sucking on her lower lip. Now she's got a red rash all along the underside of her mouth.

There's no winning this one.

I'll have to explain this one later

2011-03-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Last night DOB and I went to a young lawyer's event. It happened to be at a restaurant in the same building where one of the attorneys I work for is. We arrived about 5:45 and DOB started to put his shoes on (he never drives with them on) only to have one of the strings break. Only it didn't break clean--the outer part bunched up and left the tough inner core. He could neither tie his shoes nor pull the lace out to replace with a new one.

Both of us rifled our stuff, but we had nothing sharper than a key, and keys weren't doing it.

Finally I had an idea--I could run upstairs to the attorney's office and borrow scissors. When I got upstairs, the door was locked, but I have a key. So I let myself in. The receptionist had gone, but the legal assistant and the attorney were both in their offices, both on the phone. The legal assistant's desk faced the front desk, so she watched me as I waved, rifled through the receptionist's desk for scissors, and then left.

The shoe string cut, I let myself back in upstairs, where everyone was still on the phone. I put the scissors back and walked out.

D3 Anticipates Adulthood

2011-03-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

QOC: So when you are three, you can go in the big potty.

D3: And wear big underwear. And drive in the car by myself with children in the back. And have brown hair.

D3 Explains Disaster Relief

2011-03-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

D3: The people in Japan had all their stuff washed away by a big wave, so we have to give them their washcloths back. At the store.

'Tis Done

2011-03-08T18:37:00.000-08:00

I am a lawyer.

Despite being admitted to the practice of law somewhere for over a decade now, this is the first time I've really tried to be a *lawyer*. Yes, I went to law school. Yes, I passed all those bar exams. Yes, I convinced the board of governors of my own state that their rules gave me permission to apply when they thought otherwise.

But actually practicing? Well, for many reasons, it's never happened. Until now.

And even so, I don't really feel like I'm practicing law. Mostly I sit at home and read and look up and write things; they just happen to be about law. I get interrupted by requests for snacks and toilet paper. I've only worn my suit three times.

Still, it counts. And it feels good. I like being a lawyer for real this time. I like learning from people who have been doing it for longer than I've been talking in sentences. I like that I can do this work and still have the time and presence to take care of my primary job. I'm grateful that I have the ability to do work I enjoy that makes enough to help out.

It's been a long and sometimes overwhelming path to get here. I've had to come to terms with the possibility that nowhere is it written that a good mother must do it all herself. I've had to admit to myself that this is something I actually want. And I've wanted to give it all up many times when it just seemed too big and scary.

Many thanks to DOB for helping me to be more myself. Many thanks to family for providing support and babysitting. Many thanks to the ducklings for being happy and helpful and flexible. Many thanks to two attorneys for taking a chance on training someone who'd never really done this. Many thanks to God for giving me the courage to try.

I'll try to do a good job.

Small Heresy

2011-03-06T13:28:00.000-08:00

I am teaching the twins' Sunday School class, a choice that is probably ill-advised because:

a) I am pretty lousy with 2 and 3 year olds.
b) the twins are two-thirds of the class, and
c) they spend most of it fighting over my lap.

However, things are getting a little better, and today we actually had a pretty decent lesson about the Trinity. D4 was coloring a paper with a triangle on it, each point with a label of "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit." Then he turned it over and started marking on the back.

"Dis is God da Fadder," he said, pointing to his mark.

"OK," I said, pleased to hear the lesson was taking hold.

He drew another mark: "What's dis?"

"That must be God the Son," I said.

"OK," he said, and drew another mark.

"And there is God the Holy Spirit," I said.

He continued on, making a fourth mark. "What's dat?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Dat is God da Car!" he exclaimed in triumph.

Miscellaneous

2011-02-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

We have lived through February. Well, we've still got a few hours to go, but it looks like we shall survive them. DOB got back from his trip OK, I went on my trip OK, I'm still waiting to hear that I'm an official lawyer and hoping the word comes soon.

~~~~******~~~~~

We had snow last week. Multiple times. This is wrong, wrong, wrong for the end of February. It's crocus and daffodil-shoot time! The ducklings still had a good time in the snow (except for D3, who had a good time coming back inside and curling up under a blanket).

~~~~******~~~~~

We are starting to house-hunt and working on persuading mortgage companies that we are good, steady sort of people despite the gaps in our employment history. This is definitely the wrong time of year to look at bank-owned houses in the dark and the cold.

~~~~******~~~~

It has been brought to my attention that I am posting all the cute kid stuff on Facebook these days. This is not really because I don't like blogging anymore, but because I don't have to think up a title on Facebook. Or feel like I'm making it too short if I only post a two-sentence conversation. Nonetheless, here is an accumulation for those who would like to see it:

D1 & D2: "Hey, we found some full bottles of whiskey!" Me: "Those are *empty* bottles of *sparkling cider*." I think they've been reading too much Tintin.

D1's proposed science experiment: "I think we should all get olives or oranges on our fingers and see who can poke through the fastest."

Today in church I learned that my new square-heeled pumps are exactly the right height to serve as garages for Hot Wheels.

Beauty tip: The day of an important formal dinner is probably not the best time to make multicolored playdough with your kids.

D4: I'm not going to cry at AWANA. Crying is for naptime and bedtime.

D2 Quantifies His Hunger

2011-02-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

D2: "I am hungrier than 100 wolves!"

QOC: "What about 101 wolves?"

D2: "I am as hungry as 101 wolves."

DOB: "What about 102 wolves?"

D2: "They would be hungrier than me."

(I'm thinking if the meal had been potato soup instead of spaghetti he would only have been as hungry as, say, three wolves.)

What a Day Looks Like

2011-02-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

At least, a day like today . . .

6 a.m. DOB's alarm goes off. He hits snooze a couple of times, then gets up. I get up, get dressed and go upstairs to fix his breakfast (two egg sandwiches on rye, to go, plus an orange); pack his lunch (yesterday's leftovers); start the skillet granola for the kids' breakfast; remember that it's my day to fix supper, panic, consider the leftovers, then start a big pot of black beans to go with the eight cups of leftover rice; and start fixing cheese sandwiches for lunch. Wonder why I always wind up trying to cook three meals at once.
6:30 a.m. DOB grabs his breakfast and lunch and leaves. I sneak back to my room and hide out on the computer until
7:30 a.m. when the noise of ducklings playing in the living room becomes too loud to avoid. I get up and change and dress the twins and convince the big kids to make their beds and get dressed. D2 decides to wear a hooded t-shirt--backwards.
8 a.m. We eat breakfast downstairs (The skillet granola didn't turn out very well today--I don't think I should let the oil and honey heat in the skillet before the oats.) Various meltdowns over who gets how many seconds of which items. We have morning prayers and I tell them the story of the Transfiguration.
8:45ish I take the breakfast dishes back upstairs and clean things up. D4 follows me and races his bike all morning. The other three are busy downstairs, doing something that does not involve screaming, so I don't investigate. Hooray for me, I remember to turn the beans off so they don't burn while we're gone.
9:45ish We get socks and shoes and jackets on and get in the van. Wednesday is our running errands day, but we have a short list today, so we're getting a late start.
10:10ish We arrive at the library. I decide to park between the library and the waterfront park (they're a block apart) since we are having a picnic at the park afterwards. We fill our bag with reserves, then head back to the children's section. D1 selects some more fairy tales (as always); D2 decides he wants books about sea creatures and then spots The Lorax and is lost to the world. D3 and D4 play with the puzzles and pull board books off the shelf.
10:50ish I notice that the children's section of the library is starting to smell really bad. I notice that it is coming from D4's direction. I decide it is time to head back to the van.
11:00 We finally make it to the front desk and I check out. The librarian gets her day's amusement watching me try to get the right coat back on the right kid and rouse D2, who is now lying on the floor in the middle of the library reading The Lorax.
11:05 We walk the half-block out to the van, hauling a very full library bag and a couple of extra stacks, only to realize that I left the purse at the counter in the library. I briefly consider leaving the bag by the van (it's a sunny, dry day), consider the awful consequences if someone made off with them, and haul the full bag, two extra stacks, and four kids all back to the library. The smiling librarian hands over my purse.
11:10 We get back to the van and I realize I never brought the diaper bag at all. Fortunately I also never clean out the van, and there's a stray diaper and some paper towels that will serve.
11:20 We finally make it to the park with our lunch and a large bag of stale bread for the birds. We suddenly become the most popular people at the park as birds gather around looking for bread and children gather around looking for bread to give to the birds.
11:50 We eat our lunch. (Toasted cheese, peppers, apples)
12:00 We head back to the car via the beach. D4 is still freaked out by the beach after we nearly got caught by the rising tide last fall. We all take note of bird footprints in the sand.
12:20 We get to the grocery store to pick up the week's supply of milk, plus bananas on general principles and avocados and spinach to go with supper. D4 insists on getting a car cart.
1:00 We pick up the regular babysitter (shall we call her MP, for Mary Poppins?) who comes on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. I am deeply grateful to have someone of sufficient stature to help with hauling everything in.
1:30 The older ducklings are already playing The Adventures of Robin Hood on CD while they cut pictures out of magazines; MP is getting the twins ready for naps. I retire to my room. Over the next three and a half hours, I do two hours of legal work, plus a small amount of napping, reading (A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, not as great as its back represents but has some interesting further reading recommendations), laundry folding, and checking message boards. I consider going for a walk, but figure I have had lots of fresh air and walking today.
5:00 I head upstairs to fix supper. The twins are back up and MP has organized a game of hide and seek.
6:00 We sit down to supper (black beans with rice, hardboiled eggs, steamed spinach, guacamole, orange slices) with Their Majesties; they will take MP back home on their way to visit Her Majesty's parents.
6:45 DOB pulls in as we are clearing the supper dishes. He walks in and settles the crisis that has arisen while he is walking in the door (D2 has knocked down D4's sofa cushion fort); when he heads downstairs D2 and D4 commence to happily building forts together. I bring him his supper downstairs and go back up to do the dishes. D1 gets her pajamas on right after supper since it is her night to have a special play time with DOB. D3 starts coloring, then gets annoyed when her hands get covered with ink and soaks her dress washing it off.
7:20 I finish the dishes and persuade D4 to accompany me downstairs; D1, D2, and D3 are all piled on the loveseat reading new library books. D3 apparently has already memorized Each Peach Pear Plum from someone reading it to her. DOB finishes his supper and he and D1 go off to race cars. I get the other three ready for bed and read to them.
7:50 We have evening prayers and tuck everyone into bed.
8:00 I fix dessert and tea for me and DOB. I start writing this.
9:00 We should have already quit and headed for bed by now.

Faces

2011-02-02T17:25:00.000-08:00

Various Things

2011-02-02T07:05:00.000-08:00

D4 is enraptured with the William Blake poem, "The Tyger." We borrowed a book from the library that included it along with a vivid illustration of a tiger, and now he begs for it, "Tiger tiger burning bright, in da forest of da night!" However, trying to explain poetic imagery to a curious but literal-minded 2 and a half year old is a challenge.

Blake: "Tyger, tyger, burning bright/In the forest of the night."
D4: You said bright! It's not bright!
QOC: Well, it's bright orange.
Blake: "What immortal hand or eye/could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies/burnt the fire of thine eyes?"
D4: You said fire! There's no fire!
QOC: Well, the tiger kind of looks like a fire.
Blake: (continues on to the end of the poem.)
D4: Read it again!

D4 also believes he, personally, owns the Eiffel Tower and has climbed it many times. He talks about it in long, convoluted stories that we can barely follow. If it turns up in a picture in a book (which it does often, because we're studying France right now), he won't let us ever turn the page again.

***************************
Thanks to some good friends, we got some amazing portraits of the ducklings last weekend, which I will post when I get around to it. What amused me was the way the different ducklings reacted to the picture shoot. D1 was cooperative, but stiff. The photographer started asking her about her favorite story (Cinderella) and she immediately became relaxed and animated for some great shots. D2 was somewhat abstracted, and when the photographer started asking him about Robin Hood, he became so abstracted he could hardly look at the camera. D4 was cooperative but clueless. D3 sat down on the stool, tipped her head just so, and smiled her most photogenic smile.

***************************
Sadly, DOB's grandfather died last weekend. He has flown out there for the funeral (and, conveniently, his sister's wedding and the brotherly Super Bowl bash). Well, actually he's flying to Minneapolis this morning and then hoping they start flying planes into Ohio again sometime soon. They keep canceling his flight and moving it later owing to the blizzard. B5 is flying back with him.

***************************
I'm going to be taking a course in Seattle in two weeks that will allow me to get my active law license back. It's an intense two-day course meant to be almost as annoying as retaking the bar exam. With that and the trip to Ohio, DOB and I will be apart nearly as much this month as we have in our previous seven and a half years.

Robin Hood and His Merry Munchkins

2011-01-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

It started innocently enough, with a picture book about Robin Hood D1 found in her ever-beloved folk and fairy tales section of the library. It was quite well done, a story and an illustration on each page. We read through it slowly.

By the end, we thought it was time they saw the old Errol Flynn movie, which they all watched and loved. D3 would quiver and giggle with excitement every time a sword fight broke out.

Then some random box movements unearthed an adult-sized costume of Lincoln green. More ideas took hold. A play! With all the cousins! (Script still unwritten, remaining actors still unrecruited, and perhaps most seriously, none of the main actors can bring themselves to utter a word while performing. But these are all trivialities.)

And then more box movements disclosed the old Howard Pyle version of Robin Hood, so now I have to read all the way through that, even though *I* don't know how to pronounce some of the words. (Trysting?) They found a classic N.C. Wyeth illustration in a book of anthologies, so now we'll be getting that one from the library and copying all the pictures.

And now D2 has found himself a mighty long bow (though no arrows yet) and is posing a threat to all and sundry, mostly of being accidentally whacked with it. D1 alternates between being Maid Marian and Will Scarlet, depending on how much action she is craving. D3 either understudies Maid Marian or plays "the horsie." D4 is the dragon. (OK, I haven't heard about the dragon either. But there he is--you can see him.) And they know how to get more members for their band: just pick a fight, lose, and then they'll be begging to join up. Hey, it works in the book!

On a Brighter Note

2011-01-15T10:43:00.000-08:00

I've been whining a lot lately, so let's try mentioning three happy things. That save money, no less!

1. Last summer the dentist told me I had two (maybe three) cavities and it would cost at least $750 to get them filled. We thought this was a bit steep and procrastinated. Then a dentist in one of DOB's networking groups suggested I come in and he would give me a bid on them. This week I finally went in and had him look at them. And he said . . . I *don't* have cavities. My teeth aren't the rotting kind. So it's not worth it to fill tiny pits. I never knew there could be a difference of opinion about cavities, but since my teeth don't hurt, I'll take his word for it.

2. We sold the van! Not quite for bluebook, but for a good bit more than we owed on it.

3. The camera has been broken for a month or two. Everything worked except the button that actually took the pictures. I kept hoping I would find someone who could safely take it apart and unjam the button. This week I've been starting to really wish for it again to help with school for D2, who tends to work in three dimensions instead of things easy to put in a notebook. Yesterday morning when I woke up to him building towers inspired by the Eiffel tower and French cathedrals, I thought I'd pull it out one more time and see if I could get it to work. And it worked just fine.

Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

2011-01-08T15:16:00.001-08:00

The new year has not begun with any great resolutions, new programs, or grand undertakings. However, it has begun. We are slowly improving, thanks to time, patience, and the power-of-two-gallons-of-yogurt pills prescribed by the naturopath next door to DOB's office. The kids remain in good health and high spirits.

Wondergirl has been over several times with new plastic totes in suitable sizes and new ideas for organizing things, so we have been making slow but genuine headway against The Mess That Ate The House.

We are having a lot of fun getting back into school. Too much fun. I wonder if I'm overlooking some Horrible Thing I should be doing so my kids will whine about school, but I haven't figured out what it is. (They even like handwriting, in moderation.) We are starting to study France--just starting with a few books and a few questions and seeing where it takes us. D4 has developed an obsession with the Eiffel Tower. D1 and D2 are more interested in the world wars. And knights, of course. Timelines may still be a bit fuzzy--although D1 actually has a pretty strong historical sense, as evidenced by her asking, when she saw Errol Flynn as Robin Hood with his hands chained to a collar, "When did they start using handcuffs behind people's backs?" (I can see it now: Report by D1 on "Historical Methods of Criminal Restraints and Pretty Dresses of Corresponding Periods.")

I have my first project in my new second contract, and I had two meetings this week. I'm hoping balancing it all will work, but the next month or two will probably be a little busy as I learn the new stuff, finish up my prerequisites for getting my license activated, and try to recuperate from the last two months.

On the Third Day of Christmas

2010-12-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

I am hiding out in bed, but the ducklings are still pretty occupied with new toys.

It looks like the ducklings finally did get over The Stomach Flu That Never Leaves. Then we got it. The good news was, it wasn't on the Friday that Ron had three court hearings (all of which he won) and I had an interview for a new contract (which I got). The bad news, it hit both of us at once all weekend. Their Majesties took the ducklings out to get a Christmas tree and D1 and D2 decorated it. D1 put all the glass balls in one spot, and D2 decided to add the packing peanuts. But they are happy with it.

We got a little better on Monday, enough to get out of bed and try to face the world. But not a lot better. D1 wrapped most of the presents. There's no tape left in the house, but the presents were good and covered.

Her Majesty did the Christmas baking I had promised to do while I stayed in bed all Christmas Eve, fighting a relapse. We made it up for Christmas, very very late.

DOB points out that we have a lousy Christmas every three years. Three years ago, the twins were on the way. Six years ago, we woke up Christmas morning at 3 a.m. to the infant D1 vomiting all over her pack'n'play. (And that was after driving hours through a blizzard to make it to the airport and then flying standby to get here.) By contrast, this was pretty tame. It's hard to have a really cruddy Christmas when you have kids old enough to participate and young enough to get excited over opening boxes, let alone what's inside.

I really hope it doesn't take us another four weeks to fully recover from this and get back to just being regularly exhausted. Now that I have two ongoing contracts, we are really hoping and praying we can hire someone able-bodied in here to help out soon. Umm, today maybe?

Uphill Both Ways

2010-12-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

So about a month ago we had a little stomach bug run through the kids, not a huge deal although it did seem a bit much coming right on the heels of a big legal-education-project thingy for the grownups.

Then just as everyone was getting better from that and I was all set to get things back to normal, we had a big snowstorm that knocked everything out of commission until Thanksgiving. Then D1 had a regression of the stomach flu. Then we thought she was better.

Then she was suddenly much worse again, and got dehydrated to the point of complete listlessness, which if you know D1 is a shocking sight indeed. But she finally started to improve again, and then it took me several more days to begin to feel human again. Tending to sick children takes out of me all the things I don't have enough to spare of anyway, especially when it's administering tiny doses of fluids around the clock.

So Monday was the first day I started to feel decent, started to work and do school with the kids again. We've had a few social/professional events I've managed to sneak away and attend in all this. I was still pretty tired, but things were beginning to come back together.

Then today D4 started throwing up again. I have NO IDEA what is going on. The doctor we took D1 to thought it might be her system still unbalanced from the former illness and prescribed probiotics. I don't know where it's going to hit next or if that was the end of it. I do know I'm very, very tired of holding one cranky small person while trying to keep the other three fed and occupied.

I don't even want to THINK about how close Christmas is.

The White and Drifted Snow

2010-11-26T15:49:00.000-08:00

I probably shouldn't have chosen "Over the River and Through the Woods" as our folksong to learn this month. Repeatedly singing about the joys of an old New England Thanksgiving seems to have brought the appropriate weather out to the Northwest, where the proper Thanksgiving weather ought to be gray drizzle.

The adventure really started on Sunday after church, when we noticed a few flakes of snow. How charming, we thought. It will soon turn to rain, we thought. Or clear up and get cold. And so Wondergirl and Bookworm and I continued with our plans to take the ducklings to the zoo on Monday, since we had yet to make a second use of the zoo passes Wondergirl got for us back in July, what with car problems and busy grownups and all.

On Monday it looked a bit less promising. There was actual snow on the ground. But surely, it wouldn't stick to the roads, would it? Not the real roads that more than three cars use? Besides, Wondergirl used to live in the Northwoods and knew how to drive in snow. So even though it defied all expectations and kept on snowing, we ventured forth, confident that the roads would improve as we got further into civilization.

The snow kept coming, and the roads did not improve, but we were well bundled up and had lots of food in the car in case of emergencies and made it all the way to the zoo, at which point it seemed silly to give up and go back. So we went in. We were half an hour past opening, and the first people to arrive. We decided to stick with the aquarium, which had the advantage of being interesting AND indoors. It was really quite lovely to be able to browse at leisure without having to constantly worry about losing children in the crowd. According to their preferences, D3 stood and watched the same window for nearly the whole time, while the others ran around three times over. There was only one other family there the entire time.

Which was not a very long time, because a zookeeper came out and informed us they were closing the zoo. But we could take our time and head back out when we were ready. Since I was trying to get home for an online class at one, this gave us about as much time as we had planned on. We emerged from the aquarium to find the snow had progressed from powdered sugar sprinkle to cream cheese icing thick.

The good news about the return trip was that there was no danger of injury, because everyone was traveling so slowly. The bad news was, I was in serious danger of missing my class at one. However, we all remained in good holiday spirits and sang all the verses of all the Thanksgiving songs we know, which is quite a few. And I parceled out lunch in slow sequence so that the children would have something to munch on or at least look forward to for the entire long trip home.

We did arrive in one piece and I raced inside to start my class only to discover it really started at three. Which was a pity, because the snow got thicker and thicker and the wind got higher and higher, and it became evident that a class started at three was probably not going to get finished. But I tried anyway.

DOB was at the office and thought, when things started closing down and they started sending everyone home, that he'd just wait for everyone to get off the road and then proceed home himself. He decided against it, though, and therefore arrived all the way home a short while before the power winked out for good. The next morning he thought he would venture forth and discovered a very large tree across the road, pulling down the power lines. He tried to go up the hill on the other side, but gave up when he went more back than forward. It was just as well, as just over the next crest was another tree down.

So we were marooned. Fortunately Their Majesties are well stocked with wood stoves and flashlights and even a generator (except they'd forgotten to get gas) and it really was only a modest inconvenience. Once the wind had died down we went out and inspected the damage to all our favorite climbing trees and climbed on them horizontally instead.

We figured it was a bad sign when Her Majesty called the power company and in the message about the outage it said, cheerfully, "Did you know that if you are without power for more than 120 hours, you qualify for a $50 rebate?"

By Tuesday afternoon the roads were reasonably clear, but there was no sign of light. We had finally persuaded D4 that the power being out was not the end of the world, and that a man would come in a big truck to fix it, a thought which gave him much consolation although he continues to be afraid of the dark.

On Wednesday Her Majesty and I had the bright idea of doing a Christmas present craft project for the kids, which it was great to have done, and I was reminded that the reason I am not the sort of mom who does elaborate, creative crafts to build warm memories with my children is that the warmth in those memories would derive from the increasing vehemence of my feelings and the creativity would be primarily manifest in the language used to describe this paper backing of lamentable heritage and dubious prospects that won't just come off the recalcitrant fabric already. I think we'll stick to memorizing a lot of holiday songs.

Anyway, the power came back on Thursday afternoon, and since all the baking parts of Thanksgiving were taken care of by people whose power was already on, everything went fine. Except that D1 came down sick and we had to leave early. But still, we had much to be thankful for.

Assorted Craziness

2010-11-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

1. DOB is learning to be a trial lawyer, so he took a class in it for a very intense weekend last month and then this past Saturday they did a mock trial in a real courtroom with a real judge and real objections (though not enough of them). I got to practice my evidence-fabricating skills by making up pictures to go with the fact scenario: D1 and D3 posed for childhood shots of the plaintiff, and I painstakingly modified a picture of "Mugsys Sports Bar" to become "Chuggies Sports Bar." (No apostrophe--what do sports bars know of apostrophes?) I also got to be a witness. We won, slightly. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun and then met up with some good friends for dinner and got home very, very late indeed.

2. The difference between the first and the fourth baby, as observed with our friends--people who have had their first baby find it turns their life upside down and they can't do *anything* for awhile. People who are on number four realize that they can pull extra babysitting and household help credits and take advantage of that quiet, portable newborn to get out for once.

3. Sunday morning after all of that, we were almost ready for church when D3 threw up all over our new carpet scraps. We decided not to go to church.

4. Carpet scraps--it turns out almost all of DOB's extra feet/ankle/knee problems over the past several months, which we thought were *car* related, were actually *floor* related. (The floors around here being tile, a variety with much value as, for instance, when people throw up all over it.) A quick trip to the carpet outlet and his feet are feeling much better and he can drive again. If only, if only . . .
However, it's very good to have him able to function again.

5. The illness has gone around at least with the kids, but the symptoms are so intermittent and mild it's hard to know when it begins or ends.

6. I'm progressing on taking my online courses, but not so fast as I wanted to. They don't always download so well--especially, some theorize, when it's windy. Or something. Anyway, only nine hours to go. I'm also getting to draft a whole motion for summary judgment. (Which is basically a paper explaining to the judge why you shouldn't bother with a trial because the other side couldn't possibly win.)

7. We also had a windstorm, power outage, and earthquake this week. But I didn't feel the earthquake.

Just In Case You Needed It

2010-11-06T15:18:00.001-07:00

Or perhaps I'm the last person on the Interwebs to discover it, but we just found a new way to waste time this week: Wolfram Mathematica Demonstrations. I came across it looking for a way to demonstrate the tides (after we nearly got sloshed by one that was coming in faster than we thought) and we quickly got hooked on all kinds of cool little free doohickeys where you can change This and change That and ooo! See what it does!

And it's got "Mathematics" right there on the top, so it's got to be educational, right?

Synacisms

2010-11-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

For many years I've been subject to a particular variety of slip of the tongue which as far as I know is an as-yet unobserved and unnamed phenomenon.

The situation is this: There are two words that have essentially the same meaning, and so your mind is unable to choose between them. Instead of one or the other, out comes a mishmash that combines half of each, which just happens to be another, quite unrelated word. Awkwardly, you grasp for the correct term--and instead produce a second mishmash with the remaining elements, which turns out to be yet another unrelated word.

The first time it happened was when I was much younger, driving about with my siblings, and observed a heavy-set woman working in front of her house. "There's someone working in her lard," I said, and then on further reflection corrected, "No, no, I mean her yawn!"

When I first studied corporate law, I spent a lot of time pondering what exactly happened when a corporation issued shocks--er, that is, stares.

And recently I was telling DOB about how the children went out in the puddles and got their shoots--that is, their booze--soaping, that is, socking, wet.

So I propose a term for this phenomenon: a synacism. Have you ever met one?

The Final Results

2010-10-28T17:35:00.000-07:00

From left to right: D2 as a dangerous green and yellow dragon, D4 as a cowboy turned workerman at the last minute when the other cowboy hat vanished, D1 as a medieval princess, and D3 as a cowgirl with a lasso. Guess which parts of the costumes I was carrying within five minutes of arriving at the carnival, along with four balloon animals, the water, and DOB's shoes.

A good time was had by all, and the following morning as they sorted out and compared their candy, D3 composed the following song:

"I see mine! It's all mine! It's all mine! I love that it's mine! I can see mine! ..."

Into the Woods

2010-10-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

Fun: Building forts and climbing in the giant maple trees on a sunny fall day.

Not so fun: Clearing out half an acre of nettles in order to get to the trees.

As Long As It's Gray

2010-10-21T07:56:00.001-07:00

So the big kids have been thinking a lot about costumes this week, and about the AWANA carnival coming up next week. Actually they've been thinking about it a lot for the past two months.

D1 has remained unvarying in her choice: a princess. However, she's been designing her own costume, including making a headdress loosely inspired by Griselda in The Court Jester which consists of a piece of purple gingham in an embroidery hoop, with purple butterfly charms sewn onto it. (Yes, she did them herself, with some help threading the needle.) I'm not sure what will wind up being on the rest of her, but you can be sure of one thing: She will not look like she got a Disney Princess costume off the rack.

D2 initially varied between being a robot and being a knight. No problem, I said, and made sure his fall wardrobe included a pair of gray sweatpants and a gray thermal shirt. Robot or knight, we're covered with the base, and he already had the knight accouterments, whereas a robot merely required a cardboard box spray-painted silver.

But "indecision" is D2's middle name. As the time drew near, he started thinking about other things. I got worried. DOB suggested a dog or a wolf. "It's OK," I said, "Dogs are gray. Wolves are gray. All it takes is a pair of ears. I can do that." Other ideas came up. D1 made a long list of possibilities (and an equally long list for herself, all variations on Girls Wearing Fancy Dresses), then asked me to correct the spelling and recopied it twice. Most of them could be done in some variation of gray, if not just regular clothes.

Unfortunately, what he finally seems to have settled on is Dragon, after some concern over whether it would violate the carnival's ban on scary costumes. (I pointed out that some dragons are non-scary, like the one in The Reluctant Dragon.) And what kind of boring dragon is gray?

I did dig up an old but not impossibly small bright yellow hoodie that I can sew felt spikes and a tail on. But I'm still kind of hoping he'll switch back to knight before I do it.

And I have an uneasy feeling that whatever I sew, he'll wish at the last minute he'd picked something else.

Picture from D2's Birthday

2010-10-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Impressed by my glamorous cake? He asked for a house. It was a house. He could help make it. We actually got it made. Someday D1 will be old enough to make fabulous complicated cakes like I used to make before I had kids to make them for.

The State of Things

2010-10-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

After being absent all summer (and spring, and winter), the sun has finally come out. When it gets high enough to shine over the trees. Not entirely coincidentally, I recently decided to scuttle school in the mornings in favor of going outside. I needed more fresh air. The twins needed more activity in the morning, or they failed to fall asleep until 4:30 in the afternoon, and then had to be woken for supper, and it went downhill from there. The hard part has been persuading the big kids (OK, D1 mainly) that the great big world out there is in fact equally if not more interesting than that of books and drawing.

The main culprit in the aversion to outdoors has been the spiders. This has been an unusually good year for spiders, and for most of September one could hardly take a step outside without getting entangled in a web. Cars parked overnight would sport webs in the morning, sparkling over the slug trails.

As a counterbalancing measure, we read Charlotte's Web and Spiders by Seymour Simon and learned to identify and distinguish them, but academic interest could not entirely overcome the icky sensation of an unexpected face full of web. But the spiders are starting to die off with the advancing fall, and there are compensating activities: raiding the last of the raspberries and huckleberries; making stone soup; spotting rare squirrels, heron nests, and gopher snakes giving birth.

At the same time, the Washington Bar rule change finally became effective and I can qualify for active status again if I take 45 hours of continuing education; half of that has to be live. Then another fifteen hour class for good measure. Fortunately webcasts count as live classes for the first requirement, but even so getting it all in over the next two months so I can be active at the beginning of next year will be daunting. It also looks like the legal research I've been doing will be picking up, for another 15-20 hours a month. Which doesn't seem like that many hours on paper, but it does when someone wakes up early from naptime.

And school? Well, they taught themselves to read last year, so we're already ahead of the game. Why rush matters? They have their whole lives to be chained to desks; best to get them out and running while they still can. Besides, I still hold the best and simplest method of education is to leave a child idle in the presence of heaps of books. It worked for C. S. Lewis and Samuel Johnson. And, less illustriously but more practically, for me. Why not the ducklings?

Give me Five

2010-09-29T16:07:00.001-07:00

Someone turned five today, at 8:30 this morning Pacific time, as we discussed in some detail, since it was 11:30 and Eastern time where he was born. Someone likes discussing time zones and looking at maps. And listening to stories. And reading stories. And coloring elaborate abstract designs.

Someone likes to pretend to be a small, cuddly version of a large, ferocious predator. Or dressing up as a hero of old. Someone is so busy inside his own head that it's hard to guess what's really going on in there.

Someone has a whole world that lives inside his stomach. Maybe that's why there's not always room for much dinner. But he still likes cooking meals and eating them. Or at least talking about eating them.

Someone doesn't fit the "typical little boy" profile at all, but is very, very happy being himself. And we're very, very happy to have had him with us for the past five years.

Journey North

2010-09-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

So we've decided to sell our current van to eliminate the car payment. We'll be driving Their Majesty's old van instead. This, although it doesn't sound very simple, is much more complicated than it sounds--first, because DOB now uses hand controls to drive upright vehicles, and second, because a day or two after we decided to do this, I backed into my grandpa's old Dodge truck. (I don't know if the truck was damaged--it was hard to tell. But the van's bumper was done for.)

Step one, then, was taking both vans into the shop to get the hand controls switched. Not just any shop does this, of course--and the place we go to have it done is on the far side of Seattle, an hour and a half north if you're lucky about traffic. We originally chose this particular place--they are all pretty far away--because it is close to some good friends of ours. Unfortunately, their kids were getting over something involving vomiting, and our kids were getting over something involving coughing, sore throats, and mysterious rashes, and an exchange of germs seemed ill-advised. So we missed out on the hoped-for visit.

Wondergirl kindly agreed to help out with the driving, though, and we set out with the ducklings parceled out among us to allow both of us to use the carpool lane. I had hoped that stuffing breakfast in their hands (french toast and dried fruit in little baggies) as I buckled them in would make for a quiet ride up, but D3 decided to scream for the first twenty minutes, "I don't want you to drive!" This is going to be a long day, I thought. But after awhile D4 and I started chatting about the fascinating sights of the interstate and she quieted down to eavesdrop.

After the controls were removed from the first vehicle, we were free to go and found a couple of parks to explore and eat lunch at, which more than satisfied the ducklings as to the value of the expedition. On the way back to the shop, we spotted a pair of thrift stores and at Wondergirl's suggestion I seized the opportunity to take the big kids in to try on tennis shoes without having to occupy the twins at the same time.

I figured to time returning right at nap time. (Wondergirl waited for the second car and returned at her leisure, after braving the germs at our friends' house.) Understand that on our usual 10-minute drives back from town right before or after lunch, it is a heroic undertaking to keep D4 from falling soundly asleep, whereupon he wakes up when we arrive and never takes any more nap. But though I played soft music and spoke to no one, and though everyone else fell soundly asleep, D4 remained alert and chatty all two hours home.

At our usual exit there is an intersection that backs up severely in the late afternoon. I figured to avoid it, as is our usual custom, by getting off at the exit before and going around. Which I did--I got off at the exit, went around the roundabout, and got right back on the highway. It had been a long day.

We got home with everyone tired and cranky and I tried pulling out my latest secret weapon in the maternal arsenal: back rubs. I've been teaching them all how to massage each others' backs, and even the twins like to join in, tiny fists pounding. While it didn't make for perfect harmony (mostly on the question of whose turn it was be rubbed or rub), it was a lot better to have consensual pounding on backs instead of antagonistic pounding on heads.

Yesterday we did the only slightly less onerous undertaking of emptying the car of the landfill's worth of detritus that accumulates after about three minutes of buckling in kids. And we took it to a much closer shop to get the bumper replaced.

Laws of Children's Clothing

2010-09-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

1. If you want the weather to warm back up, just complete the seasonal clothing switch.

2. If you allow a young boy to choose his own clothes, with or without the assistance of his father, the results will be as follows:
a. If the day's plans are staying at home or playing in the mud with his cousins, the clothing selected will be a nice sweater and a pair of corduroy slacks.
b. If the day's plans are church or going to town, the clothing selected will be a pair of ripped jeans and an old hoodie.

Comes Round the Year

2010-09-06T16:48:00.001-07:00

It's one of those times when I get nostalgic and read back through the posts from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago . . . Goodness, there's a lot more history than there used to be. I really should learn how to do a more manageable archive.

Somehow--the revolution of the earth around the sun likely being responsible--the duchy has arrived at seven years of existence. A result that has often been in some doubt, not because we might set off without each other, but because we might just drop dead from exhaustion simultaneously.

Rereading old posts, I wonder how I manage to sound so chipper and sure of myself. I don't have as much momentum as I used to, and I definitely don't know as much as I used to. Sometimes I feel like trolling my old posts. Life's a lot tougher than you think it is, youngster.

And yet . . . it's worth it, too. There's four wonderful people in the world who wouldn't exist apart from us. (It's hard for me to feel like I can take credit for that. . . I mean, it's not like we were really working at it . . . but we've at least done our best with the follow-through.) We've stuck it out through difficulties that have done in many other relationships--and grown closer through them. We still have someone to talk to and laugh with.

Maybe we know less, but maybe it's that less of what isn't so. Maybe we have less starry-eyed optimism, but we have more real experience to count on.

Marriage isn't safe or easy, but it's good.

Conversation

2010-09-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

D4: My neck hurts!

QOC: That's because you have a cold.

D4: Take the cold* off me!

QOC: No, you're sick. Your nose is running, your neck hurts. You are sick.

D4: I'm not six, I'm twelve!

QOC: No, sick is not the same word as six.

D4: Oh. I'm sick.

QOC: Right.

D4: My nose is running. My neck hurts. I am sick. I need a book!

*This is what he calls the ice cubes he gets on him when he bangs his head.

Faint Similarity

2010-08-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

What really cracks me up is I first put in the Not So Simple post and got H. P. Lovecraft. (Not that I've ever read or ever in a million years would want to read H. P. Lovecraft.) Hmmm, I thought, what if I put in a real horror post? So I substituted the You Probably Don't Want to Read This Post and got Douglas Adams, which I can live with. There you go folks: If Douglas Adams had written about potty training, this is what it would read like.

An Equation

2010-08-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

R = kO

Where

R is the time to recover from an organizing project.
O is the time actually spent organizing.
k is a constant factoring in the amount of time it takes the children to turn everything back into chaos.

This is why I can never get ahead.

Many Kinds of Peril

2010-08-09T15:50:00.001-07:00

A month or so ago His Majesty picked up an old pup tent somewhere and set it up in the garden for the kids to play in. Needless to say, it wasn't too long before the older two were begging to be allowed to sleep out overnight in it.

Now, DOB and I have very different feelings about sleeping outside, and not according to gender stereotypes, either. He cannot conceive of why anyone would want to sleep outside, while I grew up in a family where tents were for sissies and where my aunt and uncle have slept outside every night for decades. (Although they live in southern California, so it doesn't quite apply here.)

Anyway, last Friday we finally agreed to let them have a try, and trotted out the requisite amounts of blankets, pillows, stuffed animals and flashlights. Then everyone remembered they hadn't been potty. Then everyone remembered something else they had forgotten.

Then everything got quiet.

Until ten o'clock, when we heard them at the door. D1 was crying because D2 didn't want to sleep outside anymore, and she didn't want to do it alone. So we sat down and discussed why D2 didn't want to sleep outside any more.

Actually, what we discussed, as D2 brought up one thing after another, was the better-known animals of several continents, their level of danger to humans and their likelihood of coming into the tent. Polar bears were perilous, but wouldn't like the heat. Lions couldn't cross the ocean. Bunnies were near at hand, but afraid of humans. So were deer. Slugs were not afraid of humans, but wouldn't like the tent fabric.

Spiders, though . . . there was no denying that spiders might get in. Whereupon D1 began to look relieved that sleeping out was no longer on the agenda.

We put the quilt over the table instead and let them camp out in the living room. As I passed by a few minutes later, I heard a small voice from under the table, "But . . . couldn't we bonk our heads on the table?"

Flowchart

2010-08-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

If you have a 2-year-old daughter who is obsessed with animals,

And if you have a 2-year-old son who is obsessed with trucks,

And if you have a low tolerance for obvious morals and incessant rhyming in children's books,

Then you should definitely not let anyone bring this book home from the library:

Miscellaneous

2010-07-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

I find another week has nearly gone by and I have not posted on the blog. Maybe someday I'll make a bloggish resolution. Or maybe not.

Summer keeps thinking about showing up, but it usually takes it until afternoon to commit. So our mornings are cloudy and gray and I have a hard time shooing everyone outside. Then, in the afternoon, they're asleep. (Well, the twins, anyway.) However, I'll take it any day over a midwestern summer.

Toolboy and his wife just welcomed their first, a little girl, reputedly of a weight truly worthy of our family. Having had children makes me far more appreciative of the advantages of being an aunt. Specifically, that giving birth is not involved and diaper duty is relatively rare.

We went to the dentist this week. The hygienist who worked on D1 was the one who has been there as long as I can remember. Her mere presence makes me feel uncomfortable about my flossing habits, but other than that she's a very nice lady. Anyway, she pulled out my file and showed D1 the picture of me taken when I was six. The hygienist who worked on D2 was also great, and after a thorough introduction to the equipment he was the most cooperative little boy in the history of modern dentistry.

I didn't do so well--I have two and a half cavities. There are so many more interesting things in the world to spend money on than fillings.

I made the mistake of having the dental appointment the day after our usual library and park day outing. I'm still recovering. The decision not to try to do Vacation Bible School anywhere this year was the right one. Someday I hope we have enough energy to have a life again.

Not so simple

2010-07-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, the simple life. Whatever *that* is. Everybody wants it; nobody can define it. Magazines like Real Simple make too easy of a target, providing a better-than-satire example of how our society can even turn anti-commercialism into a commercial goldmine.

The trouble is, simplicity is so hard to define. I once heard a friend (who can be excused from full rationality by being in love) extol the "simple pleasure" of riding ATVs. It always seems to me that the simplest possible human existence would be sitting at a desk all day filling out forms, then coming home to eat frozen pizza and watch sitcoms. Somehow, it never seems that this is what is meant.

It has a bit of an alliance with frugality, in not buying unnecessary stuff, but it would turn up its nose at frugality's hoard of stashed half-worn-out children's clothes. It seems to have a romantic attachment to getting back-to-nature, though anybody who thinks killing chickens and using an outhouse is simple has gotten no closer to nature than Little House on the Prairie reruns.

Simplicity is a luxury item, available primarily to the well-to-do and/or relationally unencumbered. The poor cannot afford the simple life, because they really might need that stuff some day and not have the resources to obtain it again. They could try to reject the various complicated requirements of modern society like safe transportation and clean clothing, but if they have kids, somebody's going to call the cops on them.

Simplicity is an admirable aesthetic ideal. Unfortunately, it often gets pressed into service as a moral code of right living, a task to which it is unequal. Morals all come in balance, but nobody raises a counter-ethic of useful complexity. The decor would be simpler without that tacky Star Wars diorama, but would it be kind? Thanksgiving dinner would be simpler without Crazy Uncle Larry, but would it be just? It makes pretty magazine pictures, but for real life, we need something a bit more well-rounded and accountable to something outside our own prejudices.

You probably don't want to read this post

2010-07-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

It's about potty training.

Well, sort of.

After a traumatic experience early on in motherhood with the intense, boot-camp style of potty training, I decided to go with the more child-led method with subsequent children. I make the potty available, show them what it's for, let them try it at their own pace. I am too cheap to do treats this time around, but the awe and approbation of older siblings seems to be making up for it.

The twins have had a keen and increasing interest in it over the past few days, and I try to be supportive and remind myself that we only have to go through this once, so it's worth disrupting all of life at random moments.

So that is all very well until this afternoon I poked my head outside after cleaning up the kitchen after lunch, leaving some lentils for supper cooking, and noticed D4's pants and diaper on the ground. Not too concerning so far, he can take off his pants and seems to relish it . . . I asked the older siblings and they said, "Oh, he wanted to take off his pants and go in the sand." Not so cool, but perhaps I had arrived in time.

I then spotted D4, who was wearing a longish t-shirt and reiterated going in the sand as a personal goal.

"No," I said, "Let's go to the potty." I lead him inside, only to look behind us and realized he had left a trail of sand. I was too late. I popped him in the bathtub and poked my head outside, only to realize that he had not only gone in the sand, he had then made good use of this new material with his construction toys.

So I got him washed up and set him out while I ran off up the hill to retrieve his pants and spotless diaper. Meanwhile, he went all over the floor. I got him covered and sent him out to play, instructing the older kids to keep him away from the sandpile, and if he ever did anything of the sort again, to summon help immediately.

At this point I remembered that I had left dinner cooking and D3 seated at the counter, ran upstairs and discovered it had stuck to the bottom of the pot. I poured it in a new pot. Fortunately at this juncture Their Majesties returned home, so I shouted hasty instructions about the remainder of dinner, then ran back outside to clean out the sand pile and wash all the trucks and shovels.

As I was getting near the end of this project, I came back inside to see Her Majesty dealing with D3. "She said she needed to go stinky in the potty." Unfortunately, as usual, she had announced this seconds too late, which is, if anything, more messy than not trying at all.

So one has timing issues, and the other has location issues, but they ARE getting the idea. Really. I hope.

Crepuscular

2010-07-19T15:07:00.001-07:00

It sounds like a horrid insult, but it's quite an innocent word that applies to the habits of rabbits, of bobcats and deer, of cats and dogs, of mosquitoes and moths, and to me.

The world, you see, is not limited to morning larks and night owls. There are also many creatures who prefer dawn and dusk, who like to be active first thing in the morning and then again in the early evening. That suits me perfectly. I don't mind getting up early--well, but not TOO early--preferably not before six-thirty (which, I admit, is long after dawn this time of year, but we'll go on averages). But then by mid-day I'm running out of steam and feel it's time to settle down with a book or computer. Then again in the evening I feel inspired to be up and doing, but by nine-thirty all circuits are shutting down again.

Which corresponds to life pretty well, since there's always the huge get-everyone-up-and-dressed-and-fed-and-laundry-started-and-dishes-washed first thing in the morning, and then the huge put-laundry-away-so-you-can-find-the beds-feed-everyone-wash-dishes-change-and-put-to-bed in the evening. It takes the better part of the day to recover from the first, and a solid night's sleep to be ready to tackle it again. And when I miss my midday down time, ugly things happen.

Which is why I'm sitting here watching dragonflies and experimenting to see how long I can tolerate a porch swing instead of doing anything useful during the twins' nap. Conserving energy is useful.

Seven Quick Takes Friday

2010-07-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

1. The other grandparents are visiting, which means we've been running around a little bit more and I've been hiding out in my room a little bit more because other people are interacting with the children.

All the grandparents and the older two took a trip to Mt. Rainier one day, while I stayed home and had a relaxing day with only two two-year-olds to contend with. I always wonder if having only two children would really be that much easier, or if it only seems easier because they are better behaved in novel situations.

2. We also went to the zoo. Wondergirl has gotten a zoo pass for trips for everyone's birthdays, so we only took in a few exhibits and then watched the animal show at lunchtime. The polar bears and walruses were quite popular, as usual, and we all got a kick out of the musk ox who was charging a plastic barrel repeatedly while his compatriots mildly chewed the grass and looked at him as if to say, "Why *are* you rushing about in all this heat?" D3, who loves to stand and watch the rabbits and chipmunks at home, was entranced with all the different animals.

3. Conversation with D3, retrieving a dropped grape: "Watch out for the table!" D3: "Watch out for me coming out from the table with a grape!"

4. Speaking of the twins and eating and rabbits and chipmunks, it is strawberry and raspberry season, which means the rabbits and chipmunks are hard at work finding ways to break into the berry gardens, and so are the twins.

5. Rabbit and chipmunk mothers are lucky they never have to try to get strawberry juice and ground-in sand out of their babies' fur.

6. Another thing D1 is taking advantage of with Grandma R. here is learning to sew--she is nearly finished with her first project, a sleeping bag for one of her stuffed animals.

7. D2, however, is obsessed with being a large predator. Except the small, cuddly version of the large predator. So our conversations go like this:

D2: "Hey, Mama, I'm a little bobcat. What's for lunch, Mama Bobcat?"

QOC (if necessary, dashing off to Wikipedia): "Hmm, how about some nice young rabbits, little bobcat?"

D2: "Oooh, yes, I love rabbits."

D2: "Actually, I think I want to eat giraffes. Is that a tiger?"

QOC: "No, tigers don't live where giraffes do. Lions might eat giraffes."

D2: "OK, then I'm a lion."

And thus we discovered that cold mac and cheese with bread crumbs does look kind of like giraffe hide.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Two by Two

2010-07-09T15:55:00.001-07:00

Believe it or not, I mixed up the twins while we were still in the hospital, before they put the color-coded hats on them for easy distinguishment. There's no confusing them now, though, even when they are covered with identical layers of impenetrable dirt. D3 is the one whose hair persists in fluffing despite the weight of sand on it, who sits and pours sand with endless fascination, who sucks on her fingers and watches everything around her with rapt attention. D4 is the one racing down the hill on his bike while wielding a sword and laughing maniacally. They both are fully equipped to speak for themselves, if only they can get a quiet moment so that someone will listen. They love to listen to stories, though D4 thinks cars should always be involved. They love playing with the big kids and playing with each other. We've all survived two years together and we should be able to keep it going.

Reunion

2010-07-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Fourth of July is not a time, nor an event, it is a place.

Specifically, it is on Whidbey Island, between a low green house and a shallow green lagoon. It consists of a mammoth sand pile, a collection of more-or-less leaky rowboats, an assortment of chairs and picnic tables, a fire pit (essential this year), and a whole lot of salmon dip.

And, of course, a crowd of dimly-remembered relatives.

Most family reunions fall down on the problem of being either expensive or terminally boring for everyone under sixty. This reunion has been going strong since the current over-sixty generation were toddlers (although it was held on a beach back then), and despite cold and clammy weather, scored one of its highest attendances.

I have only been once since I was married, and I haven't seen many of the cousins my age since well before that. But I noticed them trickling back in. They have toddlers, too, now, and they remember playing on that sand pile and splashing in the lagoon (though only the Polar Bear Club was in for it this year) and exploring uncharted waters in the rowboats and the year Craig lit the grass on fire with the bottle rockets. And they remember me and I remember them . . . a little . . . and in a world where everything else comes and goes and people have died that we didn't think would die so soon it matters more to be here, every year, just like it always was and has been.

The older ducklings have been before, when they were too young to remember much, but they remembered this year, all right. The ride on the ferry. The rowboats. The sand pile. The unlimited food. The pool table. They both agreed that the Fourth of July was the best possible day of the year, with Christmas earning an honorable mention.

I suppose change must come some day, but if the reunion can continue long enough, someday they'll be bringing their kids, too.

License to Grill

2010-07-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last November we thought we should be good citizens and go get our licenses changed to Washington. The first time we tried, the computers were down. We later managed to find an operating office to get it done at, and we managed to scrounge up the half-dozen pieces of identification required, only to discover we couldn't get licenses because we couldn't prove we lived within the state, having no mortgage or rental agreement. The only way to do it would be to have one of Their Majesties come and swear to our existence. We finally decided if they made it that difficult we would just wait until we really had come to reside here.

So this week DOB decided that, since he had a real job and all, we were really residents and should make the effort. His Majesty and I drove up to meet him at the nearest Department of Licensing. Well, we were supposed to, but first of all I had to find all the necessary pieces of identification, several of which had been placed into a now-unknown safe place since the last attempt. Eventually the right combination of documents appeared and we set off. DOB beat us there, only to discover the power was out at that Department and seventy or so people were ahead of us once the power came back on. Having gotten so far, it seemed a pity to waste it, so we decided to head on to the next town.

That office was by no means overcrowded, and the lights were on, but a sign was posted that the computers were down state-wide and so no services could be provided. He also supplied the cheery news that the last time this had happened they stayed down for two days. However, he did note that when the computers were now back up, they had a new system that enabled them to check out claimed addresses, and thus His Majesty's presence was no longer required. Having come even farther than ever, however, we determined that waiting was the best course.

So we went to the library down the road and came back with a stack of books to fortify us for yet another hour or two of waiting on plastic chairs. As we came in, they were still turning everyone away, but they did manage to help one fellow finish up a license process started before the computers went down. This seemed a promising sign, so we waited. After a while, they announced that the other office (the one with the power outage and seventy people) had managed to get two computers online. And then, at last, they said they could take us.

We came to the counter with our stack of papers, but the attendant never asked for them. He took our old licenses, asked for our social security numbers, and moved on. Apparently the stringent requirements we encountered last fall were the result of a federal audit into the state's free hand with federal dollars towards illegal immigrants. A couple of weeks ago the state decided the feds were no longer watching and relaxed all the requirements again, although the website still lists them just in case someone is looking, I suppose.

Anyway, now that we have proper local licenses I suppose our gypsy stage is over.

Doorwalker

2010-07-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday we were visiting a new church. DOB had already taken the ducklings out to the playground (it won all of their votes on the basis of its superior playground, which included an obstacle course in the woods). I was making my exit from the ladies' room when I miscalculated the intersection between my path and the path of the door and rammed it straight into my right eyebrow.

Fortunately a lady was standing in the foyer watching and asked if I needed ice, or I probably would have just wandered off in dazed oblivion with my hand plastered to my forehead for reasons I only vaguely recalled. With the injury drawn to my attention, I agreed that ice would probably be a good idea. We headed to the kitchen where I pulled my hand down for the application of ice and realized that I was also dripping blood.

At this point the lady thought it would be best to summon the pastor, who it turned out had a prior career as an ER nurse. Unfortunately, he was only the interim pastor, and didn't know where the first aid kit was. Fortunately, it was right there in the kitchen and labeled in large red letters, and deep in the depths he fished out a butterfly bandage and taped me up, so that was alright except for hurting most of the rest of the week.

Anyway, yesterday DOB got a restaurant gift card from grateful clients and his parents arrived the day before to expand the babysitting pool, so we went out to supper. I entered the ladies' room and tried to shut the stall door only to discover it was sagging on its hinges such that the latch didn't meet. Perhaps a yank on the bottom of the door would readjust it. I yanked. The entire door came off in my hands.

"Uh-oh," I said.

An employee had been in tidying up. "Did you break it?" she asked.

"Um, yes, I think so," I said.

She came and looked. "Oh, you did!"

With her balancing the top, I managed to slide the door back on to its hinges, whereupon I checked the latch, and sure enough, it now lined up properly. That will teach it.

So I guess the score between me and bathroom doors is even for now.

One Year Ago Today

2010-06-29T15:34:00.001-07:00

Things were finally settling down a bit. We'd nearly survived the first year with twins. (And, as I kept telling them, they should have already been one! Someday I will forgive them for making their due date.) They were starting to utter their first words and thinking about taking their first steps.

I was making plans to start some simple schoolwork with D1 and enjoying living in a house that was finally painted and arranged the way I wanted it. Well, mostly. DOB was grateful to have a steady job with people he liked being around. We'd just taken D1 out on a birthday trip and she'd vowed she wanted to do the exact same thing next year. We spent a lot of time at our neighborhood park. We'd finally gotten the lawn mowed and ordered a reel mower so I could keep up with it myself.

And then the next evening, DOB came home and asked if I'd like to go out to dinner. Cicero was there to watch the kids, supper was long since fixed (I'd learned very early on that we wouldn't eat unless I did all the cooking as early in the day as possible). After a day like every day, who would say no?

We went to our favorite sandwich shop and he asked, "What do you think of moving to Washington?"

What did I think? I couldn't think of that--I'd never allowed myself to think of it.

By the end of the evening we'd decided to move sometime in the next year; by the end of the week we'd decided to leave that fall. It was impossible and absurd and imprudent, but having thought of it we had to try.

We fixed up our house, and sold it. DOB gave notice at his work, and found a replacement. We got rained on, learned to do things we couldn't do, and accomplished the impossible task of showing a house in immaculate condition while living in it with four preschoolers.

One day, the time had come, and we packed up the last of what was left and headed west. Our trip out felt like an epic adventure. We were free of everything, committed to nothing yet, following the pioneers only with better plumbing. We drove as far as we wanted to, stopped when we felt like it, and saw the country one mile at a time.

Then, we got here. After a few weeks of settling in and networking, all that energy we'd had for moving and adventuring came to a crashing end. We slept for ten or more hours every night and barely dragged ourselves through the day. We came down with one sickness after another. Our idea that we might find work while waiting for the bar exam turned out to be wrong; not that either of us had energy to work anyway.

There was nothing to do but wait. Wait and try not to think about the fact that we were unemployed and living in our parents' basement, which is not where anyone wants to be at thirty.* Especially not with four kids.

Then came a rush of studying for the bar exam, the thrill of DOB actually *taking* the bar exam and then . . . more waiting. Winter ended and spring began and it rained a lot and we stepped on each other's toes and the children screamed pretty often and there was nothing to do and nowhere to go and the bills kept adding up and we had probably done something incredibly stupid, but it didn't bear thinking about now.

And then . . . things began to pick up, a little. In one networking meeting in November we'd met with a Seattle attorney who knew a half-dozen lawyers in our area. We'd met with several of them before we collapsed in December. One of them, in the nicest possible way, ripped our presentation to shreds and made us rethink everything we were looking for and everything about how we were presenting ourselves. One of them was congenial but didn't know of anything.

In March, the latter one called me up and asked if I'd like to do a free-lance research project. In April, the former one looked at DOB's many-times-revised resume and said he'd finally got it and he should talk to X firm as they always had more work than they could handle. When DOB finally managed to speak to someone there, they gave him a contract project--and then another, and another. And finally the results from the bar came in, and DOB could be a real lawyer in the state he lived in for the first time.

Through all this, DOB's knee had been acting up due to the driving position of a minivan, but he'd tried to tough it out before spending money on a second car. The day after he got sworn in, a week after he'd started working on a contract basis, the strain in his knee became too much and he broke his foot. His good foot, which meant a wheelchair and therapy and no driving at all.

Somehow he kept working and we kept going even though it all felt like a cruel joke at times. Earlier this month, after sufficiently demonstrating his skill at negotiating for other people, he negotiated himself a full-time position. I got a second research project, and it may work into something intermittent but regular that I can do from home.

In short, we did it. We moved, we changed careers, we're going to settle where we've always wanted to live. DOB loves negotiating and advocating and I love researching and am starting to get back in touch with the self I left behind in Washington without losing the people I love. Our children are best friends with their cousins and have the run of the farm where I grew up. We are back on track towards being able to pay our own way.

There's still a long way to go. It still looks like it will be awhile before we have a home of our own again. DOB is starting over from the beginning in a difficult career, and the learning curve is steep. Health issues still crop up periodically and caring for four only-slightly-older children is still exhausting. In some ways it seems like we traded a lot of work for an overwhelming amount of work. We've asked a lot from those around us and we wish we had more to give back.

But we're very thankful for where we have been, for what we have been able to do, for where we are now, and for where we can go next.

*Not that the basement isn't a very nice place, in fact larger and airier than either of our apartments. And with much better grounds. The difficulties were psychological rather than physical.

Now We Are Six

2010-06-23T21:06:00.002-07:00

And now birthday season is upon us, and (discounting grownups who of course don't count) D1 kicks it off by turning 6!

D1 is growing fast and eats plenty to keep up with it. She loves princesses, mostly for the fancy dresses. She was really interested in getting married because of the fancy dress, but after DOB pointed out the importance of all the rest of your life after the wedding, she's a little more cautious. When she grows up she wants to be a cook--actually, she already is one.

She loves to read and write stories and lists. She always has a game of pretending going. She likes to be the one in charge. DOB occasionally calls her the "cult leader" as the other children follow eagerly behind with whatever new idea she has. Fortunately most of them are good ones. We count on her a lot, and she bears it graciously.

Life, Death, and Chipmunks

2010-06-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I have an unsympathetic little lot of children. Over the past two days we have repeatedly seen an injured chipmunk wandering heedlessly around the driveway and flowerbeds, collapsing in exhaustion in unsafe places. I asked B6 to put it in the bushes once, but it crawled back out again. It had a large gash in it side.

This afternoon it finally died and I buried it.

Now, my understanding is that at this point one's tender-hearted small children are supposed to be tearing up, mourning the chipmunk, demanding full application of last rites and a proper burial.

Not mine. They weren't gleeful, just curious. "How can you tell whether it's breathing?" "Where are you going to bury it?" "Why not bury it in the flower bed?" "You shouldn't bury people in the woods, right?" (Not under most circumstances . . . ) "Do people live longer than animals?" "Can I ride the shovel back?"

I could hold out hope that the twins will prove more sympathetic in their day, but since I caught D3 wandering around the yard, wielding a sword and muttering, "Where da slugs? I dunna till dem!" the other day, it would be faint hope indeed.

The good side of this is that it leaves our entertainment options a bit broader. Neither death nor danger are off-limits, within reason. So we let the older ducklings watch The Princess Bride as their first full-length movie. D1 took it all in stride; D2 got big-eyed at the scarier parts, but was eager to go on once we had paused the movie and reassured him that we had seen the end and it all came out all right. He also seemed to derive great comfort from passing moral judgments on the movie characters: if someone did something bad, then to label it as bad made it significantly less threatening.

I've never subscribed to the theory that we should shield children altogether from the existence of evil and sorrow, but sometimes I have a twinge that such neat, fairytale plotlines are far too simplistic: the "bad guys" get punished, the "good guys" live happily ever after, and it all comes out OK in the end. Is it fair to tell that to children when such things often don't happen in this world?

Then again, I also believe that this world is not the end of the story, and that the reason we thirst so much for the happy ending is because we are creatures made to see it. That Judgment Day is not just a threat, but a promise of all wrongs righted and all evils undone. That Someone has seen the whole thing and is whispering to us that it all comes out right in the end. The fairy tale is not wrong; we're just still waiting to storm the castle.

Miscellaneous

2010-06-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

I performed an act of great bravery this week: I took the kids out in the car *all by myself*. I know, that doesn't sound too exciting, but it's the first time I have ever done it, except to places where I would have help on the receiving end. But we went to the library and the grocery store and the park and had no trouble at any of them, except that D3 was not too eager to have an older sibling hold her hand.

I don't know how I'm ever going to buy a full load of groceries with all the kids along, though, being as the cheaper stores don't have those extra-big carts. The twins find grocery shopping a novel and exciting experience. D4 was upset when we put the eggs on the belt the first time. But I can only fit a couple of gallons of milk in amongst them when they're sitting in the body of the cart, and I really don't think I want two two-year-olds walking about the store on their own.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The local library has crayons and coloring papers in the children's section. I think this exceptionally brave, if not foolhardy, of them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thoughts by D2, on eating the world:

You could not eat the world, because you could not be outside the world to eat the world.
Besides, you could not find a big enough plate to fit the whole world on.
Even if you could find a big enough plate, you definitely could not eat the whole world in one bite.
Maybe you could go around the world eating it.
Maybe you could go in a rocket to Mars and stay there for a day and come back and eat more.

(Note: He always gets on topics like this on days when he only touches two bites of his supper.)

Flag Day Parade

2010-06-15T14:53:00.001-07:00

Seven Quick Takes Friday

2010-06-04T15:16:00.001-07:00

1. I'm not sure I have seven quick takes, but I can feel through the interwebs the longing and pleading to please get that slug picture off the top of the page. The older ducklings and I are reading with considerable interest a book about slugs, although I was grateful that they were somewhat distracted by how long their nap time would be when we got to the bit about reproduction. (Slugs are hermaphrodites--try explaining that to a 4-year-old. I did have an explanation worked out, in case they asked, but they admired the eggs and moved on.)

2. We got hand controls installed in the van last Thursday. And then panicked briefly when the combination of driving by hand and pushing himself in a wheelchair put DOB's shoulders out. However, he's decided to upgrade himself to a walker to give the shoulders a break and is now getting around pretty much on his own, much to everyone's relief. What the doctor would think about the risk to his knee and foot we don't know, as we haven't yet found a doctor whose opinion seems worth consulting.

3. This makes no sense with my life right now, but it is so geekishly cool I wish it did: Chore Buster. You put in all your people (with how much they get to do), chores (with how hard they are and how often they are) and it randomly and equitably assigns the chores. DOB thinks it would take all the fun out of it. I guess what would really be cool would be writing the system myself. Still, it's a fun thought.

4. Today we had a minor crisis at naptime when Doll-Doll could not be found. I scoured the house, inside and out, upstairs and down. I was finally trying to sing to D3 and persuade her that we would find Doll-Doll after naps, when Her Majesty came into the room carrying a Honeycomb box. She had been about to take out the recycling and discovered Doll-Doll stashed inside. It's a good thing she has a rattle.

5. D1 and D2 are greatly anticipating the Borders summer reading program. You have to read ten books. In case you need help planning this feat, they have calculated that you can do that by reading two books for five days, or five books on two days, or four books for two days and then two books on the third day. I'm guessing whichever approach they take, they will be done before the library program starts in the middle of June.

6. D2 was drawing a picture for a birthday card. He told me it was a slide with a ladder. He came back a few minutes later, having drawn in the rungs on the ladder, but given his limited understanding of perspective, the rungs went straight down and looked more like legs. "See what it looks like now?" he said. "Oh yes," I said encouragingly, "You drew all the rungs in so it really looks like a ladder." "No it doesn't," he laughed, "It looks more like a pig!" I guess kind lies aren't going to work with this kid.

7. See, I told you I didn't really have seven things.

More Quick Takes at Conversion Diary.

The Duchy of Burgundy Carrots

Why I Don't Insist on First-Time Obedience

Snarky Things I Want to Say on Homeschool Forums

Winter Wonderland

Assorted Happenings

Notwithstanding

2011 in Review

Christmas Vigil

It's a Wrap

Blackberry Season

Waiting for Christmas

All's Well that Ends Well

The Middle Ages

Same, in pictures

The Great Escape

Quiz Show

Ideals and Reality

In Which Things Go From Bad to Worse

Seasons

In Which I Make Things Unnecessarily Complicated

How not to have a relaxing day

Not Ten TV Shows I've Enjoyed

Now *We* Are Six

Real Play, Fake Play

A Day in the Life

The Organizer

Kids in Tights

Why I will never be a gym rat

Draw the Line

7 Quick Takes: Catching Up

Dash Tells a Story

Three

Morning Is Broken

Berry Picking

Two Recipes I Want to Save

QOC and Dot Bake a Cake

Neighborhood

Renaming

Unexpected Blessings

The Birthday Boy

The Birthday Girl

Every Day

The Duchess Turns Seven

This is no fair

Style and 5 year old boys

Exploring

Conjugation

Grammar Commando Rides Again

Status Report

7 Quick Takes: The Potty Training Edition

The Opposite of Magic

In Which I Type Up A Bunch of Stuff

Maybe good, maybe not

I'll have to explain this one later

D3 Anticipates Adulthood

D3 Explains Disaster Relief

'Tis Done

Small Heresy

Miscellaneous

D2 Quantifies His Hunger

What a Day Looks Like

Faces

Various Things

Robin Hood and His Merry Munchkins

On a Brighter Note

Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

On the Third Day of Christmas

Uphill Both Ways

The White and Drifted Snow

Assorted Craziness

Just In Case You Needed It

Synacisms

The Final Results

"I see mine! It's all mine! It's all mine! I love that it's mine! I can see mine! ..."

Into the Woods

As Long As It's Gray

Picture from D2's Birthday

The State of Things

Give me Five

Journey North

Now We Are Six