Hey thar all you foul smellin’, scurvy ridden, rum swillin’ mateys. This be t’ one and only Talk Like a Pirate Day.  I’ve been tryin’ t’ pursway our landlubbin’ officials t’ recognize this monumental day o’ t’ year as an official government holiday but they decline t’ acquiesce t’ me request, so instead o’ bein’ celebrated we’ll just take this day t’ drink and be pirates.

Have a lively day, try t’ stay out o’ trouble and go easy on the plunderin’, and maybe pull into a good port t’ find yer sea legs and t’ grab some tasty grub and a round o’ frothy beverages.

Drink up me hearties, yo ho.
Tis a pirate’s life for me.

I’ve got to be the best pirate you’ve ever seen.

Filed under: Funny • Uncategorized

My family has been quite sick, except Lucy. It was an odd illness, segregating us by age and then stomping us to pieces in different ways. The younger kids had fevers and sleepiness. The middles had fevers, persistent coughs, and sleepiness. And the older kids and myself got pneumonia.  The diagnosis started when I took Kait to the doctor because, while remaining as cheerful as ever, she had seemed so tired and had no appetite for 2 months. At first I figured it was just a part of a teenage growth spurt or something, but then it dawned on me that she likely had mono or lupus or lukemia because WebMD is never wrong.
Kait didn’t want to go to the doctor because she has a fear of being pricked with sharp objects, and her fears were fulfilled because prick her they did. With needles. Sharp needles. She was not amused when the guy who took her blood said, now that didn’t hurt, did it?, because apparently it felt like she was shot at close range with a 22.  Her chest x-ray looked bad and they decided on pneumonia but made her get tested for tuberculosis as well, which meant another needle.  The TB test came back negative thank The Good Lord.  Then within a week more of us ended up at the doctor.

And now we’re all on the mend. Still some coughs keeping us up at night, but we’re doing better.

And now onto other news…

Lucy is still in underwear and I’m still in disbelief.  She tells me when she has to go potty now, too, and most days she doesn’t have any accidents.  I haven’t been without a kid in diapers since the morning of April 5th, 1998.  That’s more than 14 straight years of diapering.  I’m not counting that Lu still wears diapers to bed though.

Today I gave her a cracker and she sat down at her little table and shared it with a few ponies.  And a bunny.

I’m buying an actual digital camera, people. I think Samsung makes a point and shoot for camera-dummies. Either that or I’m going to change the name of my blog to The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe Who Couldn’t Take a Decent Picture to Save Her Own Life.
Dot com.

Filed under: Friends & Family

My friend Lauren has been asking me to post more pictures of Lucy so I am doing it because I try to be a good friend like that.

All of these pictures were taken with my phone and were taken by me. This is a potentially volatile combination which  produces less-than-attractive results.  However, Lucy is so super cute that they turned out pretty okay anyway in my opinion.

The bow in Lucy’s hair was made for her by Lauren, too.  Lauren has 4 boys and no girls so she appreciates the girliness that Lucy has brought to the table and she has made Lucy a plethora of hair bows.

And it works for me because I just love doing her hair.

She always sits so still for me.  Sometimes she’ll bring me a brush and rub her hair and say, Nice?, which is her way of asking me to do her hair for her.  It’s very sweet.

She loves the water and is absolutely fearless around it. She’ll jump right into a pool without thinking twice which means we have to be extra vigilant with her when we’re around water.  Matthew would take her down this water slide and all she wanted to do was slide again and again until she drove us all mad.

She stole cookies off the top of the table. Not just one, but the entire package of Chips Ahoy. She was so stinking proud of herself that when she got busted, instead of giving me her ever so popular guilty look, she just held one up and talked a lot of excited gibberish.

She’s also more interested in the workings of the camera than having her picture taken which makes it close to impossible to get a decent photograph of her. She just won’t stay still for anything.

Here is one of her in the throws of her new favorite hobby. Light Switching.

So there you have it. A bunch of pictures of the Bean. You can thank Lauren in the comments.  She always reads her fan mail and she never lets it go to her head.

Filed under: Friends & Family

Lucy.

She’s such a good thing.

I started potty training her 3 days ago because I’m a glutton for punishment.  Rabbit is gone until March and I’m not pregnant and I’m almost done nursing and I just want to be done with diapers for a bit.

I really didn’t expect much out of trying to train her early, she’s only a year and a half old.  I just wanted to see….

And today we had a major break through.  Now, when she has a potty accident on the floor, she points to it and hollers PEE and dramatically grabs the closest thing to a towel she can reach and wipes it up herself.

And my job is done.

Right. As if. Actually though, she’s doing pretty well with it all.  She doesn’t want the diapers anymore AT ALL, and she’s figured out how to go on command, which is pretty much everything when it comes to toilet training.

Here is a picture of her from last week that has nothing to do with pee or the toilet and everything to do with Lucy being a stubborn little monkey.

I call it Busted.

Or On Top Of The World. 

Captions anybody?

I very much like her red hair.

Filed under: Friends & Family • Funny

My project for today was to complete part of our chore organization system.  I’ve got about one more week to get everything together and ready for the start of the school year.  I incorporate chores into the school schedule because I feel that being able to clean out a toilet is one of the most important parts of growing into a adult.

Our chore system is basically the same as it has always been, I’ve just tweaked it a little because as the kids grow, situations can change a bit. Plus, we tend to get bored around here and a new system always seems to get us back on track for a little while.

I have our chores separated into two main categories.  Daily chores and weekly chores.

Daily chores are done without pay. This is important because throughout life there will always be jobs my kids will have to do without any sort of reward.  They have to learn that some jobs simply need to get done and nobody is going to pay them to do their own laundry.  Well, nobody I’ve ever met before anyway.  Wait…  Will somebody pay me to wash my own laundry? Are their people who do that? Cause that would be a pretty sweet deal for sure.

Our weekly chores are assigned a monetary value.  It is important for my children to learn how to work for a wage, how to keep their money in a safe place, and how to spend money responsibly.  I want them to feel what it’s like to receive a paycheck for a job well done.
It is also very important to me that my children learn from a young age that money is not a toy.  For some reason all of my children, when they hit the age of 6 or 7, want to start playing with their money as if it’s a toy.

Today I just worked on the weekly chore cards.

I made them on the computer, printed them, cut them out, then laminated them with my super sweet laminator.  I cut them out again and rounded the sharp, pointy corners with a little corner rounder gadget my sister gave me a long time ago.

I think I’m going to put magnets on the back of them and have them hanging in our chore center.  When a child takes one and does a job I’ll mark their initials on it with a grease marker so the other kids know it’s been done, and so I’ll know who to pay at the end of the week.  On Monday, when the chores are reset, I’ll wipe off the names and hang them back up so we can start over.  Not all of the weekly chores really need to be done each week so I’ll only put up the chores that need to be done.

Now that that’s done I’m going to try to come up with a daily chore schedule that I’ll laminate and keep posted in our chore center. If it turns out awesome I’ll post about that one too.

Filed under: I tried to do a project

The other day I told you all about the ABC rocks I made for Jesse.  He’s been playing with them pretty steadily for 4 days now. They’re a big hit. He definitely needed a sack to keep them in so on Tuesday I sewed him the little stuff bag that I mentioned in the rocks post.  It is a super easy bag to make and requires no pattern at all.

Jesse is super happy and carries the bag everywhere.  Even into the bathroom sometimes.

Do you like how I made the picture antique-looking so you wouldn’t notice the blurriness?  It didn’t work.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I made it worse.

How ’bout we just not talk about it, okay?

I let Jesse pickout the fabric he wanted from my stash. Lucky for him I have an abundance of fabric with cars and trucks and trains. He picked the one with work trucks. He’s very into Bob The Builder Right now.

The bag was so easy to make - I just followed Delia’s directions here. I liked it so much that I decided to sew a second one for myself out of some cute canvas owl fabric I’ve had for a while. I didn’t know what to do with it because it’s just a yard so this bag was perfect.

The bags aren’t as blurry as they appear in the pictures. I’m going to change the title of this blog to, The Blogger Who Can’t Take a Good Picture To Save Her Life.

But really, it’s not my fault my camera is crappy. Besides, as my daughter likes to say, It’s not the person behind the camera that makes a great photograph, it’s the equipment the photographer is using.

No. Not really. Kait doesn’t really say that. Ever. In fact, she’s probably going to be mad at me for writing that she says that. She may be divorcing me as her mother now.

Filed under: I tried to do a project

One of my older children had to write a paper and used the word “till” in one of his sentences. This was the following conversation he had with his older sister when she was helping him in his writing process.

Kait: Brother, you can’t use the word “till” in a paper like this. It’s not a real word.

Brother: Oh yeah…

Kait: Yeah.

…

Brother: So what word would I use there?

[Crickets...Crickets]

Clearly I have missed the mark somewhere. To the spelling lists we go.

But not until the day after Labor Day because I’m still on Summer vacation.

Filed under: Um...

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

I sat there with Sally.
We sat there, we two.
And I said, “How I wish
We had something to do!”

Too wet to go out
And too cold to play ball.
So we sat in the house.
We did nothing at all.

Ummm…
No.

Not my kids. Or most of the neighbor kids.
To them rain means one thing.

4-square.

To these kids, playing in the rain is as natural as Krispy Kreme Donuts.

Those are pretty natural and wholesome, right?

Filed under: Friends & Family • reasons to homeschool

I found myself on Pinterest the other night by accident after not logging in for the last couple of months. I was looking for a picture of a metal glider porch chair and one of the pictures that I clicked took me to Pinterest so I pinned it and then saw another picture of this little stuff bag so I clicked the link to see how hard it was to make and there was another link to an ABC rocks tutorial so I clicked that link and loved what I saw and decided I was going to get some rocks and some paint and make some for Jesse, who is 3 and has already taken quite a bit of interest in letters.

And that is exactly what I did.

Kait and I went to The Dollar Tree this morning and I found these bags of large rocks for, you guessed it, a dollar. I picked up three bags because I knew I would need the rocks I painted to be on the flat side.

Then I walked next door to Joann Fabrics and picked up some Mod Podge and some different colored paints and paint brushes. All in all the project cost me about $20. It would have been much less if I didn’t need to buy Mod Podge because that stuff is like $10, but I need the Mod Podge for a bunch of other projects anyway so it’s a win.

I gathered up 37 of the flattest rocks in the bunch and painted the alphabet and numbers 0 to 10, in 5 different colors. I painted mine free hand while Jesse sat and watched excitedly the entire time, asking me over and over again if this was a present for him.

I let them dry for a bit and then went over the letters one more time and let them dry for an hour. Then I Mod Podged over the paint to seal it and make the top of the rock nice and shiny.

They turned out so perfect and Jesse has already gotten busy stacking them and lining them up.  There is something about little boys and rocks.  Although I have a feeling Lucy is going to enjoy them too when she gets past her eat everything that isn’t edible stage and I can let her within 6 yards of a small object.

And because I’m pretty much the coolest mom ever, I gave my 9, 7, 5, and 3 year old guys the left over paint I had poured onto a paper plate, and the rest of the rocks and sent them outside to paint rocks. They thought this was an amazing idea and painted away until it started to rain.

Sam worked some painting magic and managed to sell one of his rocks to Joe(14) for $.50.

Does anybody else want to buy a rock? I’ll paint you up a nice one. I’ll even put a smily face on it for you. Or a number. I’m good at painting the number 5.

Anybody?
Anybody?

Filed under: Uncategorized

I have a few things to post now. I’ll be updating over the next few days. The first thing I’m going to tell you all about was this simple little pizza party I threw for my kids and their friends in our garage on Friday night. It was just pizza and breadsticks. No planned activities, no prizes. Yet, as it turned out, it was pretty much the best party ever.

We had 18 kids chowing down in our garage. They ate and laughed. Oh did they laugh. I can’t even tell you what they were laughing about because everybody was talking at once and they still all managed to hear whatever everybody else was saying.

Some of the neighborhood kids brought over brownies and soda and the kids pretty much devoured everything.

After they’d had enough pizza and soda and sweets they took themselves out to the driveway to play four square and kickball and tag. It was noisy and sounded like a baseball game in the ninth inning.

I didn’t get any pictures of the games going on because I forgot. Also, I take pretty cruddy pictures when everybody is being still. When they’re all moving around my one photo taking skill really gets out of hand.

Check back because I have some other posts ready to go up. I’m spacing them out over the next few days to try to get myself back into the regular writing groove because somthing’s got to give.

Filed under: Uncategorized