Birthday Girls

We celebrated a couple of birthdays recently.  My lovely little Lu turned five and she is so excited because as far as she’s concerned kindergarten is right around the corner.  At dinner on her birthday she asked me if she was officially five yet.  I told her yes, she had been five for about twenty minutes.  She  pushed back her chair looked down at her outstretched legs and exclaimed, “Wow! It worked! My legs really are longer!”  We could not stop laughing!

The things that girl says!  Today Elle had a little accident with Erik and started crying.  Alyx very sternly told us, “That is why we should not keep babies in the house.”  We never know what is going to come out of that mouth.  She definitely keeps us on our toes.

Elle had a nice little birthday party and woke up the next morning wanting to spend the day like this:

My poor little lady was sick for the next few days, along with Erik (still sick), and Sean.  It’s been quite the house to be in this past week. 

But there are always moments that make up for the ick.  After church all my girls wanted to snuggle with Daddy.  Oh, my lucky ladybugs.  What a gift to have sisters!  What a gift to have daughters.  Happy birthday to all my spring babies!

Roman Training Camp

Djeryd is obsessed with all things Roman at the moment.  When I say obsessed I mean obsessed.  Observe the backyard:

Yes, that is my son, dressed in a tunic, with a hatchet, making sticks pointy.  And yes, he’s doing this of his own volition in his precious free time.  Why does he need pointy sticks?  See below:

This is a small-scale version of a rather effective barricade that would be erected around a Roman battle camp.  So naturally it is erected in my backyard.  The shield on the ground is one of many  Djeryd has constructed for Erik so they can actually try to kill each other when they sword fight, but still be protected.

Djeryd’s newest shield is the classic humongous Roman body shield.  He free-handed patterns, then meticulously copied them onto the shield.  Why did he bother with the patterns, you ask?  Because he has plans to outfit the entire family with such shields, and he’s thinking ahead. 

These carefully crafted shields come in handy during sword fighting training.  Djeryd teaches Erik and Anna, and then Anna teaches Alyx.  A continuous cycle of violence in my very own backyard.  It warms a mother’s heart to see her innocent little daughters going at each other with sharpened chunks of wood.  Oh, and yes, with the baby looking on.

What’s ahead for our resident Roman encampment?  I don’t know, but this is what Djeryd came home with Saturday morning:

Yes, those are more sticks.  Sticks that he literally carried across town on his back.  Sticks that he is going to make pointy.  Who says a kid has to grow up on a chunk of property to do all this crazy stuff?  Three cheers for obsessions!

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things . . .

Coming home from running errands and walking in the door to find my entire family cleaning the floors as fast as they can to surprise me (they also cleaned up the whole house while I was out).

Lu’s lovely paintings

Elle’s first venture out on the actual lawn, of course after the initial touch of grass captured in this photo, she refused to go near it.  It sure makes watching her outside easy.

The weather has been gorgeous! And I have made the most of it getting outside everyday by forgoing my daily nap.  I have been digging up weeds, digging up beds, sowing seeds (two pea sprouts and three spinach leaves are up as of tonight!) and smelling the heavenly perfume of this evergreen clematis. 

And my little gardeners-in-training. 

Life is good.  ;>

Preschool: Ladybug Walk

We went on a field trip for preschool a few weeks ago; a Ladybug Walk.

It’s a program the city puts on to get kids excited about nature.

Basically they give each kid a little ladybug backpack full of exploring tools.

Things like spoons for digging and magnifying glasses for inspecting things in greater detail.

The girls, however, thought the magnifying glasses were for pretending they were little old English men with monocles.

They explored tree bark and flowers and dug up worms and peeped through sewer grates and looked for nests in the tops of trees and followed bushy tailed squirrels.

They even picked up a new little friend.

After a very quick hour they turned in their backpacks and earned a ladybug sticker.

We were at a park so that led to wild and crazy fun for a while.

They enjoyed snacks.

And all their baby siblings.

It was definitely a grand day out.

My Gorgeous Girl

While going through pictures for an upcoming post, I found this lucky shot of my lovely little Lu. 

I love that girl!

The Little Things

Life is really about the little things.  The teeny, seemingly insignificant moments of everyday.  But when you put them all together they make up who we are so much more than the “big”things.  I was actually good about pulling out my camera last week and caught quite a bit of the details of our lives – much more than I’ve been recording lately.  I like to see these little details – the moments that would be so easily forgotten and yet, day by day, layer upon layer, build our family into who and what we are.

Elle somehow managed to wriggle under the stool and then couldn’t figure out how to get out.  I was waiting for her to stand up inside it because I thought that would be quite an accomplishment and a very cute picture, but Elle wasn’t having any of that. Sigh.  Free the crying baby.  Cuddle.  Mmmm.  Forget all about that silly picture that she wasn’t going to let me take.

We are not terribly original people.  I think this is the fourth year we have given away lollipops with lips and mustachios for Valentine’s Day.  They are just so stinkin’ cute.  And I have one of those electric cutter machines that makes it all so easy (the first year I cut out EVERYTHING by hand – it took days (three kids had parties that year)).  Last year my pregnant brain was not functioning at top speed and I miscalculated, cutting out far more lips and mustachios than my children needed.  I wisely preserved them in a ziploc and, behold!, we had the easiest year ever for prepping Valentines.  Note to self: Must screw up next year and make an enormous amount of extras to save me some time in 2017. (I think Erik may have entered the it’s-not-cool-to-smile stage.)

My Annabelle is amazing me almost daily right now.  She is just an amazing girl.  She is smart and kind and creative and good and so very determined.  Last fall she decided she wanted to participate in Battle of the Books.  She asked if I would coach her team.  I said yes.  Erik asked if I would coach his team.  I said yes.  As soon as the reality of my situation sunk in I started backpedaling.  Coaching entails meeting with the team once or twice a week every week for a few months.  Managing that with Alyx and the baby in tow for two separate teams was more than I could handle.  I told the kids I would not be able to do it.  Apparently Anna did not get the memo.  No matter how many times or how many ways I told her I could not pull that off, she just kept plugging away, reading the books to her friends at recess and encouraging them to read on their own.  About a week before her battles she finally realized I was not going to coach her team. She fell apart and I felt like a horrible mother.  I patched up what I could, but my attempts felt pretty pathetic.  So when she asked me on the morning of her battle if I would whip up a good-luck skirt for her I couldn’t refuse.  She had picked out the fabric and cut it to length on Saturday, so I just had to sew one seam and put in a hem and waist band.  I know it was a pretty sad excuse for a team coach, but it was my best for this year.  We’ll try again next year because I know she will stick with it to the bitter end – against all odds.

On Presidents’ Day the kids built a castle in the living room.  It kept them busy for hours and they loved making it.  They drew bricks and flowers and rainbows around the outside then filled the inside with “a baby corner and a stuffed animal corner and a resting corner and a fireplace.”  One of the water-filled milk jugs leaked (pretty ingenious idea for steadying the walls, no?) and we had to air out the rug and pray the swelling would go down on the wood floor (dah!!).  Needless to say, jugs of water are no longer allowed in the living room.

The floor and rug survived.  And Elle found her first piece of chocolate in the meantime.  A rogue Hershey’s kiss found its way to the floor and Elle found her way to the chocolate.  Who can blame her?

And last, but not least, we have a family dance session in progress.  We listen to music while we clean up after dinner.  Most of the time we listen, we clean, we turn it off, we have scriptures and prayer and we put kids to bed.  But on this special little night a dance party broke out.  “Twist and Shout” with Daddy and his girls.  Do the little things in life get any better than that?

Oh, how I love my little things.

Preschool N

This will be a quick little post, but I had to make sure we got in our pre-school fun.  This month we hosted the letter N.  The girls started out making Noodle Necklaces (with tomato and carrot based pasta so they were a pretty orangey-red color).

Next we glued various spices onto some paper and smelled them with our marvelous Noses.

We had Nuts mixed with raisins and m&m’s for snack (yum!).

We painted Nails with Nail polish.  The girls all wanted to be the same.

And last we planted Nasturtiums.  I pushed the seeds right up next to the side of the cup so we have been watching the roots and shoots spread down and up and sprout those beautiful round little leaves.

I won’t even tell you what the reject words for N were.  All I can say is there are a lot of awful (or should I say Nasty, or maybe Naughty?) words that start with the letter N.  I am not going to embarrass myself by publishing them.  Until Next time . . .

February Fire

I came across a recipe for foil dinners last week and remembered with fondness the foil dinners of my youth.  It sounded like a fun dinner and I was planning on popping the little packets in the oven.  But Mother Nature gave us a little gift today: sun and warmth and gorgeous clear skies.  So we decided to make the most of it.

The kids clamored outside to start a fire in the little fire pit Erik has been constructing over the past few weeks.  I prepped food in the kitchen, and by the time I was ready for the food to go in the fire, Sean arrived to actually get the fire going.  The boys had tried, but could not seem to keep it going, and certainly not at the temperature they needed to develop good coals. 

We were all pretty giddy with our fun little adventure.  We gobbled up our foil dinners, ate some s’mores, and had our Family Night out under the stars.  It was magical.  The kids loved it.  And Djeryd kept saying, “We’ve gotta do this again!  We’ve got to go camping this summer!”

I don’t dare hope that this marks the beginning of fire pit season, but I’m grateful we got this little surprise, this little gift.

One Step at a Time

This little lady is growing by leaps and bounds.  I have many pictures of her taken the day she was born hanging on the wall by my bed.  I stare at them.  I am mesmerized by them.  I do not understand how she could have been so very small.  I see her entire fist wrapped around the top of Sean’s thumb. I am honored to witness her life.

Her latest trick is walking.  She is by far my earliest walker and is quite happy with herself about it all.

We’re not talking about random step here and there.  Oh, no.  This is full out, start on one side of the room and walk to the other kind of walking.  I think that makes her officially a toddler.

She’s had a whole slew of examples, but really very little coaching or even encouraging.  She was just bound and determined to walk.  I am impressed by her spirit.  Toddling comes with such a mess of scrapes and bonks and boo-boos, not to mention falling down over and over and over.  I think it is a marvelous commentary on the human spirit to witness a child learning to walk.

And now that she’s checked “learning to walk” off her list, perhaps she’ll start taking the guitar more seriously.