We are going to Wildlife Safari on Friday. I’m so excited! It’s this huge drive through animal park where the animals are in their own habitats and wonder around while you drive right through the middle in your car. Ostriches come up to your windows and all kinds of stuff. I’m so excited!
We’ve been telling the kids for a few weeks now that we are taking them somewhere three hours away and that we’re not telling them when we’re going (this turned out to be smart since we’ve had to reschedule it twice now). Listening to their terrible guesses has been quite amusing (for me) the last three weeks. One of the little ones wanted to know if we were going to McDonald’s. Sure! We’re driving three hours for McD’s. The older ones immediately corrected that.
So this week we started giving them more hints. It’s three hours south on I-5 if you drive 60mph. It has ostriches there. This would have been more helpful if they had been able to figure out how to spell “ostrich,” but since we wouldn’t tell them and they kept typing in “ostrege,” it didn’t get them too far.
This morning George finally told them the name of the town it’s in, so they Googled that and figured it out. I don’t know if they’re more excited or I am. We went when Georgie was a baby (he was too small to remember) and loved it. They haven’t been so they don’t know what to expect.
We have it all budgeted out, got Zoo Memberships, planned car breakfast and picnic lunch, and tomorrow I’m organizing everything. If you have an Oregon Zoo annual membership, you get 1/2 off your Wildlife Safari admission. It was going to be $82 admission for our gigantic family without the Zoo pass and the Zoo passes are $69 per family, so Zoo + 1/2 off WLS = $110. Basically for $30 more than it would cost us to go to Wildlife Safari once, now we can go to the zoo up here as many times as we want through the end of next August. Hehe.
And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for (come on, you know you have)…. This is why Kyra is lucky to be alive. This is the scene that greeted me when I went to wake her up from her nap (which she took in Trinity’s bed due to malfeasance on Faith’s part necessitating Faith taking her nap in her and Kyra’s room by herself):
Yes, that’s Kyra’s hair on the left.
And the fabric on the right is from….
the big hole cut out of Trinity’s pillowcase. See the orange fluff on the bed there? That’s actually not Kyra’s. You’ll meet the hapless owner of that hair in a minute.
More Kyra hair all over the bed (nice big blob on the left by the pillow).
Even Garfield is sad. I thought the orange hair was from him, but he appears to have survived the nap intact.
Meet Sally. Sally is about two feet long and has been Trinity’s friend for years. Now she is Trinity’s friend with….
a really bad haircut.
And the Demon Barber of Long Street herself.
If you’re going to lop off your hair, at least try to get it even!
So Kyra gets a trip to the hairdresser tomorrow, and will undoubtedly return home with a much shorter haircut. I usually cut the kids’ hair, but this is slightly beyond what I want to mess with. She took a least three inches off in chunks on one side and then did the same on the other but it looks like she just took off wisps there so she has long and short mixed all over on that side. Ugh. Every time I try to look at it, more comes out in my hand. Not a good way to make your Mommy happy. Did I mention she’s in a wedding at the end of August?
So instead of going out to dinner with her Auntie Masha tonight, spending the night at Babunya’s house (a.k.a. “Tanya”), and playing with Babunya all day tomorrow, Kyra instead received gigantic disciplinary action from her Father (because Mommy was worried she might actually damage said child) followed by cleaning up her big snippy mess and not going on her overnight trip.
You see, this morning I emerged from my shower to hear children #1 and #3 fighting with each other loudly enough that I could hear every word they said downstairs from my bathroom upstairs. Since this is the third day in a row that such behavior had been exhibited from dawn until bed, they both met the morning with the business end of Mom’s wrath. After that, the morning went along quite cheerfully.
After lunch I let the little girls watch Sleeping Beauty for a bit so I could clean my pantry. Apparently Faith opted to remain on the couch watching Prince Philip fight Maleficent when duty called instead of doing her doodie in the specified recepticle where it belongs. This earned her Father’s wrath and she also had to sleep in her bedroom by herself because only big girls get to nap in the same room with their big sisters.
Which left big sister Kyra sleeping in her big sister Trinity’s room, and now I think we’re all caught up. At least Henry’s been nice lately (and Trinity has been a good girl too). He’s four months old now, and is doing fabulously. About a week after he hit three months, we moved him into a crib in the little girls’ room.
Yes, danger danger, I know; however, he falls asleep in my bed and then by the time I move him to his crib in the other room, the girls are alseep. Then he wakes up and comes back in for breakfast with me before they wake up so they don’t have much opportunity to do things like cut his hair….
Around the same time we moved him out, he finally quit doing that snorting thing that was keeping him awake all the time. The doctor said that was from tiny nasal passages and he should outgrow it around three months. Guess they were right! I was able to add coffee and chocolate back into my diet without it bothering him.
Cheesecake and more than a bite or two of ice cream is still verboten (my eating cheesecake makes him absolutely miserable for two or three days afterward). I haven’t been drinking milk either, and I’m kind of looking forward to adding that back in. I’ve been slowly adding in cheese, a little milk in my frappe, and increasing amounts of ice cream to my diet with minimal effects on Henry’s part, so I’m hoping his digestive system is beginning to adjust.
We’ve discovered that when he’s sleeping well, not snorting, and his tummy isn’t bothering him, he’s quite a happy little boy. He doesn’t generally cry without a reason, smiles easily, is happy to be held or not, and is generally quite adorable. Plus, he’s lengthening his sleeping schedule out again.
He’s slept longer than eight hours in a row with no feeding in the middle anywhere for the last three nights. Last night I put him down around 9:30, fed him at 11:00 and moved him to the girls room, and then woke him up to feed him at 8:30 this morning (one of us needed to nurse anyway). That was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in over a year! Hurray!
Here’s a picture I took about a week and a half ago. I cleaned the kitchen. Henry took a nap.
Kids are so cute when they’re asleep. Then they wake up…. I think that’s
about it for today. I think I’ve earned liquor (yay pineapple mojito!).
Rachel
Written by Rachel Shubin ~ Fiendish friend for effusive fun!
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