So apparently Georgie asked his Dad yesterday if we’re supposed to be scared of God. George told him that it’s like with parents. If you’re obeying, then you don’t need to be scared. If you’re doing what you know is wrong, then you’re in trouble. Plus, God can see everything!

This whole conversation was relayed to me over dinner last night when George mentioned that Georgie had asked an interesting question earlier in the day. Georgie still remembered the answer at dinnertime and managed to successfully explain it back to us.

I asked Georgie what had made him wonder this in the first place and he responded that it was something Trinity had said. I turned to Trinity to ask her what that had been, but she before I even finished she nonchalantly replied,

“I have Godophobia.” She’s seven. I looked at her. Then I giggled. A lot. You see, Trinity is the one who spent most of her car rides this week making up songs with titles like, “O God, O God” (which I at first though was either a mutant hymn title or perhaps a George Burns movie I had forgotten about) that is basically eight minutes of singing to God all the things she’s thankful that He made: the trees, the birds, cars, spring even though it rains all the time because it makes the flowers grow, electricity (electricity!!), a house to live in so we don’t freeze in the winter, rockets, bugs….. Did I mention the song lasts from the time we leave the house until we arrive at our destination (or one of her parents goes nuts). Spiders are pretty much the only item from the natural world that is absent from her list. I’m fairly certain that Trinity does not have Godophobia.

“Trinity, why do you have Godophobia?” I asked her.

“Well, God is everywhere. {okay fine I’m thinking}. He can be anything {ummm}. He can turn into a spider!”

What??? I was so stunned by this logic that I don’t even think I returned any sort of cogent answer unless you count sputtering (which doesn’t count). Well, I did manage to tell her that I was fairly certain the Bible doesn’t mention God turning into a spider. Hmm, come to think of it, I was busy all day today and still haven’t straightened out her peculiar theology yet. Guess I need to put that on my To Do list. God turning into a spider! Sheesh.

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Last Friday night was the lovely, I mean haunting, Halloween party that Steve & Angie (BIL & SIL) put on every year. After a lot of hemming and hawing (mostly hawing), I decided to put the bridesmaids dress I wore for Kathy’s wedding to good use and went as a beauty contestant, Miss Conception. Handily, I was exactly as far pregnant when I wore the dress the first time as I am now. Phew!

And here’s George, who went as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, and his brother Steve who was Cardinal Biggles from the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch (which is pretty funny).

They’re singing karaoke in the garage.

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So, it occurred to me today that I should probably find out what this baby is that we’re having. Lizard? Panther? Well, boy or girl would probably be helpful to know. Tomorrow morning we’re off to the ultrasound! All the kids are coming too, and somehow I suckered George into coming for the first time since I was pregnant with Georgie.

This will be the sixth ultrasound I’ve had and the second he’s come to. I’m delighted about that, and the kids are going to love it, especially Georgie. We’ll drop them off at Amy’s on the way home. Ahhh, the joy of semi-homeschooling. This will be a good field trip, I think.

I’ve been a total snail about getting going on midwife appointments and everything this time around, partly because I’ve been miserably sick and partly because this is not exactly new stuff for me. All the first several appointments consist of is peeing in a cup and listening to the heartbeat. If anything goes wrong in the really early stages, not much can be done. I can pee all by myself without having to tidy my house while I’m sick so the midwife can come over and not find a war zone. After five healthy pregnancies and one miscarriage, I’m pretty familiar with how things are supposed to go.

I’m nineteen weeks along and not so sick anymore, the baby is big enough to determine sex, I’m far enough along that a few more things can be done to prevent a later term miscarriage if problems do show up, and in a few more weeks the baby would actually have a shot at surviving outside the womb if delivery were unavoidable. So far the youngest surviving baby was born at 21 weeks 6 days gestation!

Amillia Taylor was born at Baptist Children’s Hospital in October weighing only 10 ounces. She was slightly bigger than a pen.

Anyway, It seemed like it was about time to see the midwife. She’ll be coming over Monday for our first appointment (same lady who delivered Faith).

This weekend is our annual card weekend in which me and my card group buddies disentangle ourselves from reality and escape to the beach from Friday to Sunday for a weekend of staying up late to play cards and shopping at the outlet mall. It occurred to me today that I may potentially want to do a bit of shopping for the new squirt and it would be helpful to know if I were girl shopping or boy shopping. I have exactly no boy stuff anymore, so if it’s a boy I guess I will need to do a lot of shopping. Gee bummer! If it’s a girl, not quite so much with the shopping…. I’m reasonably sure I could dig up one or two things for her to wear if I have to.

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And lastly, Amy who is my friend both from church and from online business stuff (she runs JournalModiste. Not the same Amy who does school with the older three kids) tagged me today; and since this is my first tag, it seemed like maybe I should actually do it.

Rules for the tag…
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

1. When I get nervous (which isn’t very often), I tend to get really quiet, slightly bug-eyed, and say “I’m fine” when asked if I’m ok. Usually I don’t actually look nervous and my husband is often the only one who can tell.

2. I hate being pregnant. This wouldn’t be so weird if I hadn’t done it so many times…. Duh!

3. I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was 30 and even then it was frappuccino, which I consider more of a coffee-flavored milkshake. Yes, I’m a coffee wimp. I admit it.

4. The reason I didn’t drink coffee all those years was because my Mom drank strong black coffee the entire time I was growing up. Then she would eat cheese. Then she would put me to bed. Do you know what coffee & cheese breath smells like? Well, it will put you off coffee for 30 years, I’ll tell you that! Oddly, I’m ok with cheese. (My Mother is going to kill me now….).

5. I have one sibling, a brother, and was pretty much the only girl my age on our block. My Mother has one sibling, a brother, and was the only girl on her block. My Mother’s Mother had one sibling, a brother, and was the only girl on her block (she told me once that all the guys on her block used to entertain themselves by standing in a circle and spitting!). All three of us are rather bossy and unintimidated by men. Now you know why!

6. I had super straight, stringy hair the whole time I was growing up. When I got into junior high and high school, I permed it once a year, which both made it look much better and lightened the color. After I got married, I quit perming it so it got straight and darker again (I cut it short so it wasn’t so stringy). When I was 27, I got pregnant with baby #3 and my hair decided to be wavy. It has stayed that way ever since! Now it has the same color and wave as my brother’s and my Dad’s (or what color his used to have before it turned all grey). Much nicer. And free!

7. I’m a humongous Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. I own all seven seasons on DVD, two music CD’s (one from the musical episode and one of music they play at the Bronze, which is the club the kids hang out at on the show. My Hubby bought me those for Christmas last year), the new Buffy Season 8 comics, the Angel Season 6 comics (well, they’re on pre-order and I don’t have the Angel DVD’s because Angel wasn’t as good a show as Buffy), and a trivia book. Oh! And a 2007 calendar. Hmmm, I guess I need to get a new calendar for next year. Hehe.

One of these days when I get completely sick of Buffy, I’m going to lump all this stuff together and sell it all on eBay, where I’m expecting it to make some money eventually (like in ten years).Yes, me nerd, I know. Shhhh, don’t tell.

Okay – so I’m only going to tag 3 people ’cause I’m too lazy to find seven (I have no friends). Also because Amy only tagged three and I’m practicing being a sheep today.
Bethany
Karen
Elly

Ahhh, so much has been going on the last few days. Where to start? First, I’m feeling better. HURRAY!!!! I can tell because 1) I don’t feel like a reject from a zombie movie quite so much anymore, 2) I can walk up my stairs again without huffing like someone who’s just run the Boston Marathon, 3) my house is starting to look less like a blast detonation site, which is because I’ve tidied it up a little bit instead of super helpful friends and family coming to de-sticky it, and 4) I made a decent dinner tonight for the first time in ummmm, never mind. Mostly, even though I’m still returning food at about the same rate, my energy level has improved so much that it’s nowhere near as debilitating.  Yay!

So, busy weekend over here. Friday night my Dad called and invited George and I to go with him to OMSI (our local science & industry museum) to see the BodyWorks 3 show since this was the final weekend. It was fascinating! If you aren’t familiar with it, BodyWorld is a display of bodies that have been donated to science and then “plastinated,” which is more or less what it sounds like.

This technique allows for preservation of not only form, but color as well and allows the bodies to be molded into specific poses so that the viewer can see how the musculature extends or contracts, where the tendons attach, and a whole host of other possibilities. You can read more about it at www.bodyworlds.com. If you saw the newest James Bond movie, BodyWorlds was featured in one of the early scenes.

We told the kids where we were going and received typical responses:

Georgie: I want to go!
Trinity: I want to go!
Georgie: Wait, I don’t know if I want to go. It might be too scary.
Me: Neither of you guys are going. I think you’re still a bit young.
Georgie: Oh good. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see dead bodies.
Trinity: I want to go!

Also this weekend was Georgie’s 9th birthday, so we had a Transformer birthday party for him on Monday. A bunch of his buddies came and we invaded George’s parents’ house for cake & ice cream and presents and then packed everyone all off to Bauman Farms to run around for three hours. Here’s a couple of party pictures:

Trinity modeling what Uncle Steve and Auntie Angie gave Georgie (so lovely!):

Every October, Bauman Farms turns their normally lovely little farm into fall heaven with corn and hay mazes, a zip line, teepee, fort, huge slides and swings, and all kinds of great stuff. We usually go there for Georgie’s birthday. Like a big dummy I let Anika talk me into crawling through one of the hay mazes, which I realized was an error before I even discovered that I then had hay in my skivvies. Duh!

Trinity figured out how to make duck calls all by herself, and then spent the next twenty minutes trying to call the ducks over. Of course when a humongous goose arrived instead and startled her, she jumped back about five feet and promptly switched to “baaaa”ing at the sheep. 

When we finally made it home around 6:30, Kyra was pretty pooped. I put Faith to nap at Mom & Pop’s house instead of taking her to the farm with us, but I let Kyra skip nap. When we arrived home, I pulled her out of the car and put her on the driveway to go in the house and she sort of crumpled in tears. By 7:30 she had disintegrated to wandering around the house crying. Bed time!

Naturally, she didn’t actually want to go to bed and continued crying away in her bunk. The bed is scary. The wall is scary. I’m not sleepy. The ceiling is scary. Clearly logic is going to be no help here!

I picked up her stuffed bunny and took another tack:

Me: Let me introduce you to Peter Rabbit. Say “Hi Peter.”

Kyra stops crying and says hi to Peter.

Me: Peter is reeeeally sleepy and knows he’ll feel much better after he gets a good night sleep, but Peter is scared. He thinks the ceiling is scary and doesn’t like it all dark.

Kyra seems to have forgotten that she herself was protesting twenty seconds ago.

Me: Do you think you can take care of Peter for me? Can he curl up and sleep with you so that he won’t be scared? You’re such a big girl; I know he’ll feel much better with you.

Kyra grins, curls up with Peter, and I hear not a peep as I close the door. Hehe. Success! I head downstairs to go help the big kids finish up their homework. A few minutes later we hear Kyra crying again from her bedroom. What? I could have sworn that worked.

George is upstairs already, so he goes in to see what’s up. The kids and I listen from downstairs.

Kyra in tears: Peter Bunny won’t go to sleep with me!

George scolds: Now Peter Bunny, it’s time for you to go to sleep now. No more fooling around; it’s bedtime. You curl up here with Kyra. It’s not scary. It’s time for bed. Night night.

When he closes the door, the older kids and I laugh and give Daddy the thumbs up. Nice work! Kyra is quiet the whole rest of the night. Some days you just feel like a genius.

Rachel

With the ever-delightful friend known as morning sickness happily staying for an extended visit, I’ve spent much more time on the couch than I typically do (all day vs. no day). The children, meanwhile, have been doing massive amounts of chores that I have codified into lists for each of the older three.

This has several advantages (for me).

1) They get to clean up the gigantic piles of toys, laundry, crayons, sippy cups, stale bread, etc. that they relocate from their original habitats to the far reaches of the house. The clean their rooms every morning (and every morning they are disasters and need it) and tidy the rest of the house every afternoon and evening, by which time it invariably needs tidying again.

2) They get to learn the fine art of correct dishwasher loading (and unloading).

3) Since they wipe the bathrooms down every morning, said areas never get too slimy.

4) The clean, folded laundry that they stuff back into their hampers still folded at least was arranged and taken up to their rooms by them and not me.

5) Spending half the day doing chores keeps them busy so I don’t have to listen to them fighting and coming up with new and more creative ways to torture one another as often.

6) By the time they’re done with their chores (that I don’t have to remind them 5,397 times to do since it’s all written down on the papers that they only lose fourteen times a day), they’re so tired of working that they usually go find some nice way to play together for awhile. Also, they’re too scared to come near me to ask four times each if they can watch a movie.

Hehe. I feel evil yet remarkably clever! Plus the evilness is somewhat mitigated by the feeling that it’s good for them to actually take care of their own stuff and the vague feeling that a whole bunch of old anecdotal George Washington Cherry Tree type of stories probably support this and aren’t prehistoric anecdotes good things to base your parenting decisions on anyway?

So last week after they finally completed their massive chore list, they decided to celebrate by “partying ’til we’re purple” and then discussed the many ways that they could accomplish this. Oddly, most of them involved massive bruising instead of the more obvious markers and were thus ultimately rejected.

Next on the agenda was music choice, since clearly a party upstairs in your little sister’s bedroom requires appropriate music. Also, since I made them bring the card table back downstairs that was going to hold the drinks that I wouldn’t let them have on the carpet, boogieing was the only remaining component of the party.

Georgie went upstairs to look through George’s CD stash, and soon came back out to holler in his usual overly loud voice, “Mom, where’s the Queen CD?” The Queen CD? Yes, this is my eight year old son blithely requesting music from the ’70′s rock opera band that brought the world “We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” along with  many other songs that you would undoubtedly recognize. Thank you, my dear husband, for introducing them to “culture”…..

Well, they couldn’t find the Queen CD so then they started looking for the crazy pirate music CD that their Auntie Masha gave them (songs on it like “Scurvy” and “Nelly the Elephant”). Since that CD had also escaped, they started looking for Jamie Soles, which is very mild, folk-song-y, Christian kids music. Hmmm, let’s see… Queen or Jamie Soles. Hahahaha.

They finally settled upstairs with the soundtrack to PeeWee’s Great Adventure, which is frenetic score by Danny Elfman. I spent the next half an hour wondering if the ceiling was going to come crashing down due to five children jumping around “dancing” upstairs, but it didn’t sound like any purpling was occurring and the couch I was on wasn’t directly beneath the ceiling so I was just thankful that they were happy and out of my hair.

Today after lunch I told them they could go upstairs and watch a movie in my room (so I could take a nap downstairs, thus positioning myself between them and the front door lest anyone try to escape or burglars try to waltz in and steal our peanut-butter encrusted possessions).

Naturally this was the universal signal for a large fight over whose turn it was to pick a movie. Georgie decided that since Anika stole his turn last week (because he was in his room crying over being forced to do the horror known as “borrowing” in multiple-digit subtraction), today was going to be his turn. However, he also unwisely told Trinity that if she drew a picture of herself catching Lex Luthor, they would watch Superman which was what she wanted to do.

So she’s upstairs drawing herself and Lex, and from all the way downstairs I can hear Georgie’s brain looking for an escape clause.

“I know, let’s have a bravery test, girls,” he tells them upstairs in my bedroom.

Hmmm, a bravery test. This sounds to me like he’s come up with some new and clever way to get them to volunteer for torture so that they can then earn the “prize” of getting to watch the movie he wants to watch.

“Georgie…” I holler at him up the stairwell. He comes out looking innocent. “No bravery test.”

“But Mom, I wanted to watch The Mummy.” Hehe. Two points for me. Helps being an expert in Early Childhood Manipulation.

ME: “You promised Trinity you would watch Superman if she drew that picture.”

GEORGIE: “But I don’t want to watch Superman.”

{insert further arguing dialogue here}

ME: “Too bad. A deal’s a deal. Now you forfeit your turn and it goes back to being Ani’s turn.

GEORGIE: “WHAT!!! That makes no sense at all.”

ME: “You expect everyone else to keep their bargains as long as they benefit you, but you don’t want to keep yours when it means giving someone else what you promised them.”

GEORGIE: “Oh.”

No argument to that, which of course translates to “shoot! She’s reading my mind again!” And Mom wins once more!

The girls ended up watching PeeWee’s Great Adventure (hmm, bit of a theme this week, I guess), which Georgie watched most of except for the scary part when Large Marge turns into a monster. At that point he opted to hide in the hall with my pillow until his sisters told him it was over. His younger sisters, I might add….

Thus ends this week’s episode of Juvenile Lawyers.

Rachel

Heehee! I had such a fun day today. I spent the entire day at a seminar on search engine optimization. Gotta tell you, I’m a bit distressed that this actually sounded interesting to me; but it was full of all kinds of fascinating information. So cool!

Anyway, hope you guys had a nice weekend. Anika’s croup went away and she promptly acquired an ear infection while at her other Grandmother’s house, so we got a call at 2am and Anika was returned to us by George’s sister (who was on her way to work) at 7am.

Apparently Anika decided that it wasn’t enough to make her Auntie detour first thing in the morning, she also needed to add her own special design touch to her Aunt’s Volvo by barfing all over it on the drive home. Delightful! I got a somewhat distressed email from the Auntie later that morning asking if I had any advice for getting vomit smell out of a car. This is something we’ve had more experience with than I really care to think about, so we had a few suggestions. Anika seems much better now, but Kyra’s been quite weird.

Kyra got in monster trouble for biting her sister (she’s never been a biter), scooping out most of a jar of peanut butter with her fingers and eating it (I was upstairs for about three minutes!), and then getting into the fridge to get an egg for Faith who promptly broke it all over the floor and then swam in it (ha! At least that one wasn’t on my watch). That was all Monday within about five hours.

She further honed her grief upon grief routine yesterday, and I am beginning to weary of sitting on her for things like flipping out when I tell her to go down the stairs, carefully pouring a cup of milk out onto the table as a form of entertainment, and toothpaste fingerpainting on the upstairs bathroom mirror (actually, she practices this one regularly and has so far proved difficult to deter). Those were all yesterday.

All in all, she’s such a troublemaker that her behavior would be shocking to me if it weren’t for the fact that this is actually the second child in our cache to exhibit such tenacity in the cantankerous department. Georgie (our oldest, now age 8 ) was equally single-minded in his demolition-oriented tendencies.

However, after a solid three years of the extremely terrible and misleadingly labeled “two’s” (that lasted from eighteen months until age four and a half), preceded by nine months of increasingly willful behavior, I remember exactly when it occurred to me that all this stubbornness might at some point parlay into more positive character qualities.

Georgie was in the back yard trying to swing across the monkey bars, which he so far had not managed to master. He missed one of the rungs and landed smack on his back, knocking the wind out of himself. At four years old, he scared himself pretty good and came running over to me on the porch. I looked him in the eyes and talked him through it, explaining that he just startled his lungs when he fell and they were flipping out a little bit which is why he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

I kept eye contact and continued on telling him that this happens sometimes with falls like his and not to be scared because his lungs would remember their job in a few seconds. They did, of course, and he recovered just fine. I assumed that such a scare would mark the end of his monkey bar endeavors.

Not wanting him to give up entirely, I told him that when you first start learning things they are always hard, but not to get discouraged because when you have trouble doing something it just means that you need to practice until you can do it. His eyebrows jumped up, he exclaimed, “oh! Practice!” and then he immediately scampered off to the monkey bars again to do just that. By the end of the week he could go all the way across.

This was the first application of this strong character to a constructive use (overcoming fear and finishing something he started) instead of to decidedly less endearing uses such as taking the forbidden DVD’s (that would be all of them at his age at the time) off the rack ten times every day despite all correctionary measures or grabbing from his cousin every single time they got together for three years in a row.

Georgie is now developing into a fine young man. He still retains that force of will, but has learned and continues to improve at pouring that into productive projects. By age five, he could do fifty piece puzzles. He had a slow start at reading but he keeps plugging away at practicing, and this year his reading has finally sped up and improved dramatically. He builds ridiculously elaborate bionicles from the thirty pages of detailed instructions he prints off the lego.com website and is generally very difficult to sway once he’s made his mind up on something. He is interested in virtually everything, is humongously helpful, and is almost always a happy guy.

So yes Kyra is a gigantic stinker pants, but I know that if I keep after her she’ll settle down into a happy, energetic, determined girl when she gets a little bit bigger. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway….. Hehe. In the meantime, she’s got a really sweet little smile and is pretty cuddly (when her eyes aren’t busy betraying her sneaky plots), so I guess I’ll put in all that work for a couple more years until she calms down a bit. Maybe Faith will be easy like Trinity. Actually, if current behavior is any indicator (and it’s usually a pretty good one at age one), she’s probably going to be a real handful in another year or so herself. Argh!

Rachel