Yes, I’m always on the prowl for good stuff to read, particularly if it has half a dozen books in a series (that way I don’t have to try to think up something new to read too quickly), doesn’t put me to sleep, and isn’t a romance novel (’cause, um, yuck).

Of course, I haven’t had much reading time lately with holiday and all that yap, but the slow days of winter fast approach and I need something to curl up on with on the couch that doesn’t start climbing on me and kicking me in the head within three minutes.

George found a great list of sci-fi books that non-sci-fi people will love so that’s going to be my new reading list. Well actually I’ve read a bunch of the stuff on the list, but there’s a bunch more to go through. Yay! If you are a sci-fi or good book enthusiast, here’s the link: 10 Sci-Fi Books That Even Non-Geeks Would Love. Actually, that whole website is full of fun stuff too. Ciao!

Rachel

P.S. My 6am wakeup is going well. Managed Friday, Saturday, and today (Monday) at 6. George asked me to set the alarm for 7 on Sunday. Day of rest and all that.

I hate getting up early. This likely is directly proportional to my enduring love for staying up late. However, with the whole six kids thing and all, it has been increasingly apparent to me that my time is really not my own. When they’re up, it’s theirs. Sure, I got a desk off Craigslist a few months back  (awesome red one) and can now work upstairs in our bedroom where I am at least not in the direct line of traffic, but this still has a couple of disadvantages mainly relating to the fact that children are such children.

What usually happens is one of two things: I close my door and work upstairs for a little bit and they open it right back up and waltz in with dollies, bionicles, Cheerios and whatever else they have managed to pick up for their daily household item relocation project at that moment. Then they sit on my bed or eighteen inches away from me at the floor to play or talk or fight. This entirely defeats the purpose of having a desk away from the main floor.

So eventually I shoo them back out and tell them to go clean their rooms or something. This works for a few minutes and then either Kyra takes something or Georgie starts bossing people around or Faith won’t eat her breakfast and they all start yelling at one another. Or they’re all quiet for a lovely amount of time and when I go downstairs I find that they have taken out every single toy they own and built a city where the kitchen floor used to be or trucked out every stitch of bedding to build an impassible wall in the hallway. Then the noise comes from me!

None of these solutions are great. After long days of re-cleaning messes in places that were cleaned half an hour before; laundering clothing for a houseful of people; fighting with my checkbook; kissing fingers with small, nearly invisible owies on them; and hugging and smooching several charming children and one husband, I tend to want to decompress at the end of the day and not spend the evening working. The only place to add more hours to my day was in the morning.

Alarm clocks are stupid, loud, and I have a really terrible habit of slapping them until they shut up and then promptly rolling back over to sleep for just a couple more hour-length minutes. If I’m going to get up early, I have to figure out how to fix this. Last week I found this article about How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Clock Goes Off. The guy who writes the blog is one strange, anti-religious duck; however, he does seem to have a plausible solution to my alarm aversion.

Last night I set my alarm for 6am (my first thought was 5, but then I decided I didn’t want to give myself a total heart attack and it was 12:30am already). After running through in my head a few times how the alarm would sound, how I would sit straight up, turn off the alarm, take a deep breathe and stretch, and then pop right up and go take a shower, I zonked out.

Six o’ clock came and that is exactly what I did: sit up, breathe, stretch, pop up, shower. I think this may have been made slightly easier by the fact that I used the alarm on my cell phone which is really loud and sounds like a phone and it scared the crap out of me. Actually, I think who it really startled was George who I had not directly mentioned my experiment to. He showed up in the shower about ten minutes later.

I’m planning to try this whole six o’ clock thing through the rest of January and see how it goes. Then I’ll either try moving it back an hour or will give up in disgust and go back to my lazy ways. So far it is now 8:44 and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. This is going to be my lead for next week’s GNGC edition, so now I don’t have to worry about that next week. Yay!

I’ve already organized bills stuff for this week and am generally enjoying having had some time to hear myself think before the swarming masses wake up and crowd out whatever conversation myself and I were having.

Ahh, and here’s swarmers #1 and #3. Guess it’s about time to go. Ha! We have a little bit of snow again this morning (under 1″). Georgie’s reaction: “Oh no! Not again!” What kid reacts to snow like that? Apparently one who spent two weeks stuck in the house.

Rachel

After much thought this year, I’m beginning to see the logic of having twelve days of Christmas instead of just one. I always assumed that the twelve days referred to the days leading up to Christmas, but this is not so. They are the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany, which is January 6th. The four weeks(-ish) prior to Christmas are the season of Advent, which looks forward to the coming of Christ.

Anyway, due to weather-related peculiarity our Christmas seemed odd this year. We were stuck in the house for all but one day for the entire two weeks prior to Christmas Day, which meant no shopping (hurray for Amazon or we’d have no presents!) or visiting friends or going to church or anything at all. Very weird.

Thankfully the snow began to melt enough on Christmas Eve for my family to make it here and happily a bit more on Christmas Day so we could get to Hubby’s family’s house on Christmas Day.

I like playing hearts with my side of the family and Dutch Blitz with my SIL’s on Hubby’s side on holidays. When my Dad’s parents lived up here we used to hang around with all Dad’s brothers and his parents and play hearts (at least that’s how I remember it), so now playing hearts says Christmasy, family things to me. However, holidays also involve a lot of things like eating good food, opening presents, and other non-cards activities. Besides that, I think I may be the only one on my side who has such a strong attachment to playing hearts.

Moving to a Twelve Days of Christmas type of schedule would take care of this because then we could spend all day in the kitchen on the holiday for those who like to do such a thing and I could get my cards fix later. Plus, no more problem of scurry, scurry, scurry, oh look it’s over already. I hate that.

I may have to do some thinking about how to do Christmas on a more leisurely schedule. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so. I was poking around today looking for websites on twelve days of Christmas things, and found some interesting things. One of them was about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. Apparently there is some dispute about the origin and meaning of the song, but one of the ideas is that the numbers in the days are all used to help catechize children.

The numbers help remember things like this: Four Calling Birds reminds us of the Four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Five Golden Rings reminds us of the Five Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Six Geese-A-laying reminds of the Six Days of Creation, etc. Pretty neat! I’m always up for cheesy memory helps. Here’s the link in case you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the song): Twelve Days of Christmas. I’m going to have to put that in my Christmas box for next year so it doesn’t get lost and I can teach it to the kiddos.

Actually, they probably already have all this stuff memorized due to our excellent RCC Sunday School program. So nice! I think the sum total of what I learned in all my Sunday School years growing up in a non-Reformed church was that Jesus loved me and the song, “Father Abraham had many sons.” So sad. Now I’m going to have to go quiz the kids and see what they know.

Well, we are having what seems like it’s going to be about a gazillion people here tomorrow night for New Year’s Eve, so I’m off to go clean some more. Downstairs is about done. I love that the children like to mop and don’t complain too much about helping when we ask them to! It’s especially nice since, you know, three-fourths of the mess is from them in the first place.

Rachel

Wait, isn’t that every day? George and I managed to escape for a date on Friday. Yay! We saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. The best part was the steak I had at Claim Jumper. I love Keanu, but, oh wait. I hate Keanu. Okay, not personally since I don’t know him, but I think a horny toad could make a larger variety of facial expressions than Keanu. Or a tree stump. It is a neverending mystery how that man has an acting career. Every time I see one of his movies, I have the same discussion with myself. Poor George has to hear it over and over. And now you get to too. Aren’t you lucky?

Actually, the best part of that movie really was….. the preview for Terminator: Salvation. Eeek! Okay, I’m a huge Christian Bale fan, which I’m pretty sure goes along with liking the flavor of actors who can actually act. And, I’m a big Terminator fan. Used to watch those with my Dad. Thanks for corrupting me early, Pop! Terminator + Christian Bale as John Connor = AWESOME! Yes, yes. Me dork. I know. Plus, it’s the first part of a trilogy so there’s more to come. Yay!

So, this week we have been snowed in. In Portland, land of little snow! Saturday night we got five or six inches and the whole rest of the city had enough that church was canceled on Sunday. I always feel weird when I don’t go to church on Sunday.

Yesterday George decided he needed to go to Walmart (he’s one of those guys who needs to get out of the house every day or he starts getting weird and cooped up), so he hopped in the truck and backed out the driveway. Then he spun his tires on the street, and since he couldn’t get back in the driveway he had to roll the truck down and park it on the side of the road. It was a very short trip.

Today George decided he needed to go to Walmart again. Determined to go anywhere, he headed across the street to go move that truck. An hour later he had successfully cleared most of the ice from beneath the truck and managed to roll it several more feet backwards along the curb down the hill. I watched from our bedroom window. Hey man, it’s 25 degrees out there!

Then he decided to try taking our mammoth van. After trying to pull out of the driveway three or four times and managing to not munch the neighbors nice car, he finally made it out of the driveway and off the mad, mad worlds of Walmart and Winco. I managed to not have a heart attack watching him try to get out of the driveway and have ordered chains from Amazon. They should be here in a couple of days, just in time for the next big snowstorm headed our way. Tomorrow the kids and I are making Christmas cookies. Yummy!

Hope if you are stuck, you are enjoying the Christmas season. Actually, I hope that even if you aren’t stuck.

Rachel

Gak! Do you realize that Christmas is two weeks from Thursday? Ack! I was feeling all organized because most of my Christmas shopping is done and almost everything that isn’t for the kids is wrapped. But our cards aren’t done, my letter isn’t written, George hasn’t taken the picture or figured out what he’s going to do for it yet, and I’m in the middle of several crochet and legwarmer projects. Plus, none of the wrapping for the kids is done.

Okay, well I’ll sit down and crochet and work on my projects tonight. Tomorrow I’ll wrap. Thursday is Shaw Family Dinner Night; Friday I’ll write my letter. Oh wait, tomorrow is the girls’ choir thing. Well, that won’t take all night. This is doable. I should be able to catch up this week, I hope. I hate feeling behind. It makes me nuts. At least laundry is caught up. 

Rachel

Happy Thanksgiving! We had ours tonight (Wednesday)
as is our usual custom, and then our van went kablooie on the way home,
which has also been our usual custom as of late. Blurg! Our half an
hour return trip became an hour and a half return trip requiring a mere
two stops to the side of the road to let the car cool down. We are now
in the process of making up a new “I hate cars” song.

Thanksgiving was great. My BIL deep fried a turkey, as is his usual custom, and this year it was butterbeer and garlic (he was apparently feeling Harry Potter-ish). Sounds weird; tastes awesome. Deep fried turkey is extremely moist, and it is definitely the best way to cook a bird.

So I got home tonight (finally) and checked my
inbox to discover an email from Gymboree. Apparently calendar-reading
is not one of their strong suits over there. They have started their
Black Friday sale already! Since this is technically Wednesday night or
Thursday morning depending on where you live, I don’t know what they’re
doing, but I’m going to go buy coats for my kids for next year as soon
as I’m done with this . $14 each! Plus I got a 20% off coupon in
the mail the other day, which makes these coats closer to $11 instead of say, $40. Yay!!!

Then I shall sleep because tomorrow I have to
conquer the stupid couch o’ clean clothes before I trek to the outlet
mall at midnight (or 11:00 since that’s when our crazy outlet opens)
for the $4.50 gymmies. I love Black Friday! I should just save up all
my money and only buy clothes on that day. Happy Thanksgiving (again)!

Rachel

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with vampirism. I just like the title and I’m reeeeally tired so the ol’ brain isn’t working too swiftly. Actually, that doesn’t even makes sense. How would vampirism bite you back? Vampires are the ones that bit you in the first place. “People bite back” just sounds silly.

Have you seen the trailers for the new Twilight movie? Is it just me or does that just look stupid? And another thing, why in the world would some vampire guy who is hundreds of years old be interested in a teenage girl? I remember being a teenage girl. I remember the teenage girls around me at the time. I have eyeballs and see teenage girls around me.

Teenage girls as a group are quite possibly the silliest creatures on the planet outside of say, baby kangaroos, which have the advantage of being small and adorable. Wouldn’t a several hundred year old man be interested in someone with a modicum of wisdom floating around the skull cavity?

Even Buffy, which is one of my all time favorite TV shows, has two hundreds of years old vampires dating her at various points in the series. Oh wait, she’s a slayer and has all the responsibility that that entails helping her mature quickly. Phew! Rationalization complete. Now I can enjoy my show without stupid niggling questions. Plus, how can you complain when the two vamps in question are these guys?

I mean really, who has cheekbones like Spike there at the top? Ridiculous! And if you are a big Bones fan, you should go watch the first season of Buffy before David Boreanaz’s face matured. Looks totally different.

Hmmmm, so apparently this post is actually all about vampires. Did I mention I am tired and have nothing to say. This is pretty representative on Rachel’s brain on not much sleep. So sad.

Rachel

Hey, guess what? Only six weeks left until Christmas. The panicking all at once may commence now. But not for me! I have got my Christmas gifts spreadsheet all up to date and am working on gift ideas and things, organized my calendar, and am hoping to sit down and write up a December meal plan so I don’t have to think about food next month. Yay! Feel free to hate me (or email me and I’ll send you copies of my spreadsheet, calendar, and meal plan once I get them finished off).

Every year at this time, my card group buddies and I head off to the beach for a weekend of Dutch Blitz, Christmas (or otherwise) shopping at the Outlet Mall down there, and general hanging around with no non-nursing children or Hubbies, who get to stay home and watch assorted children. I love coming home and hearing how their weekend has gone. George does such a good job with them.

We’ve gone I think four years in a row now and I have yet to make it without being either pregnant or bringing a baby. Oh well. Henry’s pretty nice, so he should be fine except for the whole getting teeth in and being extra fussy lately. Oh the joy!

The girls and I have been playing Dutch Blitz for six years or so now, I think. So nice to have a group of women over every other week to eat lots of junk food with, listen to Beatles music or Abba if somehow my SIL Masha manages to get control over the CD player, and yell at other people when they win. Nice stress reliever.

Hey, you know that would make a good stocking stuffer or present. Hang on while I go put that on my spreadsheet for Trinity (my kids better not be surreptitiously reading this). Here’s a picture of it on Amazon (wonder of the modern world) and a link to it:

The game is a speed game sort of like multi-player solitare. I grew up playing double sol with my parents and always rather liked that. Think that’s about it around here. Been busy thinking about Christmas prep and doing things like chopping up and freezing bell peppers (18 of them!), pressure canning soup and chili, and jarring up dry ingredients for pancakes, baked oatmeal, bran pan, corn bread, and other breakfasty stuff. I’ve been feeling rather productive lately, I must say. Might as well make good use of that before it goes away.

Rachel

Friday night for Halloween we went to our church’s annual Reformation Night party (did you know that Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses on the door of the Wittenburg Castle Church on October 31, 1517? This, of course, was the spark for the Protestant Reformation). The party always involves booths with games and things that involve a rather large amount of candy being transferred to my childrens’ bags. This year they seemed to come home with sort of an extra lot of loot.

Saturday morning my son greeted me with a smile and a piece of paper that he had “forgotten” to give me on Friday which explained how he and the girls (older two) were planning to stay up all night eating candy on Reformation Day 2008 (as opposed any other visiting ones that might not be in 2008 I guess). Apparently he and Trinity had actually done this. Anika, being somewhat wiser, did not eat candy all night and instead spent her wee hours actually sleeping.

Yes, I would have preferred to have received this information on Friday; but alas, by Saturday our only options were let them run around like maniacs on horrific sugar highs all day or lull them into a stupor by letting them watch TV all day and hoping they got tummyaches (such good parenting). By the time you have six children, the answer to any question is “whichever one makes less noise.” We opted for the latter choice.

George told them in the morning that they should quit eating candy, which of course they declined to do. Normally we would have straightened that out, but eating disgusting amounts of candy at once tends to be a self-correcting problem and this way hopefully they would remember the lesson next year.

By Sunday morning Trinity was complaining that her stomach hurt. Off and on all morning she didn’t feel well and by the time we got to church she was starting to cry in that “I’m going to throw up within five seconds” kind of way. George grabbed the closest thing he could for her to barf into, which turned out to be….. the box of remaining candy Georgie was bringing over to his friend’s house. I’m just glad it wasn’t my purse.

So Trinity will probably not make this mistake next year. Somehow I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this from Georgie though. Maybe he’ll be like my brother who once ate twelve roasted marshmallows in a row and promptly returned them on the other side of our grandparents’ Winnebago. He didn’t eat marshmallows again for years. Actually, I’m not sure he eats them now. Hehe.

Hope you had a lovely Halloween that did not involve unidentifiable stomach contents hurling your way!

Rachel

So I don’t know whether it’s just because Georgie is getting to be a bigger boy now and not a littler boy, but he seems to be stepping up his domination quotient a bit lately. As fun as that may sound, it usually results in lots of loud “Georgie, stop that!” from the girls and/or his Dad or me. Oh the joy!

I’ve been pondering this thoughtfully, trying to come up with responses appropriate to bigger boys. Yesterday he and I had a talk about being a benevolent ruler. I don’t have a problem really with him trying to rule. I’m fairly sure that just naturally comes with that spiffy ‘y’ chromosome. God made men for dominion, and this 10-year old stuff is training for the grown-up version (that’s what I tell myself anyway). He does need to be kind in his leadership though and not just obnoxious in all the various ways he can come up with to do so.

That was the subject of our conversation this morning. I told him that every time he gets into it with one of the girls, I was going to call him over and have him go think up and do two kind, useful things for whoever he offended and then come back and tell me what he did so that he can practice leading through serving. The idea sort of has a restitutionary quality to it as well except that it’s behavioral instead of with physical items that you’ve stolen.

Anyway, he agreed that this sounded like a good idea and was very relieved to discover that this new response was not charging him a quarter every time he’s yucky to his sisters. Ha ha! Now I know your Achilles Heel, Georgie. I’ll just have to file that one away for future evil reference….

So this morning the kids were out cleaning up the mess they made in the garage, and when they were finished Georgie and the older two girls bounded up to me all excited to tell me their new plan.

Trinity: Guess what? I get to be Georgie’s slave for a week!

Anika: Yeah, and then after that it’s my turn and I get to be Georgie’s slave for a week!

Me: Oh really. And when does Georgie get to be your slave?

Georgie: What??

Me: You weren’t planning to be their slave at all? Oh, well then you get to be the slave first.

Georgie: Well that’s not happening.

Me: You shouldn’t ask them to do something you aren’t willing to do first. That’s what we were talking about this morning. Remember? Servant leadership?

Georgie: Okay, we won’t do slaves then.

Ridiculous children! Apparently it was Georgie’s idea for the girls to be slaves (which I assumed), but he was just going to have it be for a day. They opted for the extension. Ridiculous children! At least the garage is cleaner.

RAchel