The lady at the ticket counter didn’t seem to think two to ten was high enough adult/child ratio. What she didn’t know was that there are tricks to taking bunches of kids out. Hehe. So here is a brief tutorial of how to take ten kids on an outing, which I’m sure you all do on a regular basis and will no doubt find completely invaluable.

1. Pick really nice kids to take. If you don’t know any nice kids, rent some. They’re worth the extra money. We chose these (in case you’re wondering why there are only nine here, Henry didn’t quite make it into this shot):

2. Own or steal a huge van:

3. Make sure there are two or more adults (or a couple of teenagers). Very important!

4. Fortify yourself. And no matter what they say, do not let them con you into buying them any of this:

5. Get there as close as possible to when your destination opens. Get them out of bed, stuff them with food. Then leave. Every moment you delay is one fewer minute you get to spend doing something fun with them before they get hungry, tired, or both and turn into lunatic. You do not want to be around when that happens to ten children. Think Zombieland: (and yes, this is actually my arm and watch).

6. Make them wear hats (or headscarves for the girls in the summer). Yes, you guys think I’m just hat-obsessed for no logical reason whatsoever, but guess what? It makes the kids infinitely easier to spot in a crowd. When I look around, instead of having to scan every head for hair and faces that look like the ones I want, I can skip most of them and just zero in on the ones with hats. This sounds absurd but it definitely makes them stick out more:

7. Now that you’re all organized, everyone pick a buddy! Guess what? You don’t actually have to have eyes on ten kids at all times. Before you go inside (at which point if this isn’t done they will be too distracted to function), tell each child that they need to pick a buddy, older kids with younger kids. Remind them that each older child is responsible for keeping track of their little one and each little one must mind the older one. Our guys immediately paired themselves off as follows:

Skyler and Faith

Anika and Silas

Georgie and Henry

Trinity and Olivia

Nichol and Kyra

What was funny to me about this was that none of these pairings are the ones I would have anticipated, but each set seemed to have a great time together. The older kids were extremely conscientious about keeping track of their little guys and the smaller ones were excellent about staying with their very own big kid.

We’d explore a particular section of the museum and each set of kids would go check out what looked interesting to them. When it was time to go to the next section, we just looked for pairs of hats. Easy peasy!

8. Have fun!

Do It Yourself Watershed

Safari Puppet Theater

Chem Lab (Trinity and Olivia spent ages in here and did nearly all of the experiments)

Look at the above picture of my son. That’s the goofy face he makes when I try to get pictures of him. And do you know why he does this? Here’s a hint:

But haha! I sneaked this one when he wasn’t looking.

9. Take them out to McDonald’s afterwards, but NO HAPPY MEALS (unless you have tons of money). We spent $27 on all twelve of us: two 10pc chicken nugget meals with two sodas and two fries, two large fries, one six piece chicken nuggets, three cheeseburgers, one hamburger, two large sodas, two waters, one filet of fish sandwich meal, on spicy chicken sandwich. It’s called sharing.

My favorite part of the above picture is the three people in the left corner staring at us like we’re insane. I zoomed on the lady with the black hair and she’s looking directly into my lens. Hahaha! Did I mention that people stare like this everywhere we go?

9. And lastly, take lots of pictures (this is the part I usually forget. Thank you, phone camera!). That’s it! Now you are ready to round up all the children in your neighborhood and take them to a museum.

Thank you, Nichol, Skyler, Olivia, and Silas for coming with us. Spending the day with the ten of you kids was a joy, and you’re all getting so grown up! Love you guys.

Auntie Rachel

Thanks to el crappo economo, my website business started tanking in August 2008. By January I was in full web redesign mode to try to breathe new life into a dying entity. By April, we were offloading expenditures, such as the kids’ school (I started homeschooling). By June the hit was hard enough that we moved in with my parents who graciously decided that they would rather we lived with them than in our van. By July, the website was costing more in payroll than it was bringing in, so I shut it down. It was weird for about a week and then I recovered. I don’t miss it at all. Kinda miss the money though…

Most of my summer was spent trying to figure out school for this year, which now seems to be humming along rather nicely. We’re on Christmas break at the moment, but the kids generally are enjoying their studies and I like teaching. We’re doing ancient history this year and I’m thoroughly enjoying learning all of that since somehow that part sort of got skipped in both high school and college (and I took a whole year of Western Civ at Portland State! So depressing.).

Our Egypt studies were a huge hit, and Georgie has begun to develop an appreciation for ancient literature. He thought the Epic of Gilgamesh was great (it was a young person’s version that sort of glosses over that whole part with Shamhat taming Enkidu). I read the full version myself for the first time and loved it! Now we’re going through stories of Greek heroes in prep for next term’s ancient Greece studies. They keep pointing out that they’ve heard half the names and other references from Harry Potter. Brilliant!

Georgie and I have had several conversations about worldviews and how the cultures we’re learning about differ from what we believe and why we believe what we do. He’s starting to recognize this stuff in reconstituted form when he watches television now, which has prompted some interesting discussions. Bwahahaha! My evil plan to make him aware is beginning to work even at eleven years old. Awesome!

George has been working himself to oblivion trying to make up for my lack of income generating-ness. He’s doing quite a good job, too. A couple weeks ago he was off on a shoot from Tuesday until Friday in Buffalo, NY and Cleveland, OH. That was the week there was a horrible storm in that part of the county. I worried about him the whole time he was gone, and after the story I heard when he returned I felt totally justified!!!!

His outgoing flight was from here to Newark and then they took a prop plane from Newark to Buffalo. George and his business partner guy Tim sat in the front of the plane right next to the flight attendant and Tim’s a pretty chatty guy so they spent the whole flight talking to her.

About fifteen minutes before landing they hit some pretty choppy turbulence due to high wind followed by a loud BANG at which point the flight got much worse. George spent the rest of the flight trying not to have to use the barf bag but Tim noticed that all the color drained right out of the flight attendant’s face and she suddenly got very quiet. The plane felt like it was listing with the pilot fighting to correct for it.

After they disembarked, Tim had to return to the plane to retrieve a forgotten item. The flight attendant was there and furtively confided that the plane had lost an engine. As in losing one of the two engines on the plane. In a windstorm. The flight got in around 8 or 9 am. By then end of that day both the Buffalo and Chicago airports were closed due to snow and wind respectively.

But by 3pm George and Tim had finished their work in Chicago and were headed down the interstate to Cleveland. After checking into the hotel and having what George described as a “terrible dinner,” they hit the proverbial sack (or hay depending on which part of the country you are from). By this time the interstate they had driven on to get from Chicago to Cleveland was also closed due to foul weather. But wait! The fun just never stops!

Around 11pm my time I received the following phone call:

George: Hi.

Me: Hi. Isn’t it one in the morning there? And what’s that weird noise in the background?

George: We’re at the hotel. That’s the fire alarm. Everyone’s out in the hall in their pajamas.

Me: Umm, sweetie, if the fire alarm is going off in the middle of the night, don’t you think it might be a good idea to get out of the hotel?

George: No, it’s minus ten degrees and blizzard conditions out there. Besides, I think it’s a sewage leak. There’s a bunch of water down the hall. The fire department is coming. We’re on the second floor. It’s fine. Oh hey, I think the alarm finally shut off. Oh, nope it’s back.

Me: George, sewer leaks can have fumes and weird things that are flammable. I think you should go out of there. Like now!

George: I gotta go. They’re sending us all to the lobby. Bye.

Charming! So after two hours of standing in the lobby, it turned out to be someone’s fire sprinkler went off and sent water gushing down the second floor. George and Tim got moved to the third floor where they got a couple more hours of sleep before heading back to work.

The rest of their trip was uneventful although even more sleep deprived since they went to a late movie, didn’t go to bed until midnight, and then had to get up at 3:30 to catch the red eye back home. I didn’t find out about the whole airplane engine debacle until I picked George up and Tim spilled the beans. I don’t think he was planning to tell me that part at all.

Considering the fact that I was worried already and the weather got so bad while they were there that every airport and road they used got shut down within hours of them being there, it was probably good that he didn’t tell me about the airplane when it happened. Then neither of us would have gotten any sleep. And now my January plans involve reinstating our life insurance and getting on LegalZoom to set up a will.

I think that’s all for today. There is one more story from this summer that I want to write down before I forget it entirely and then I’m hoping to post with a little more regularity, so I hope you four readers feel extra special now! Stay tuned tomorrow for Georgie and the Amazing Escaping Snakes!

Rachel

Then last night was a lovely jolt back into reality as we got slaughtered 22 to 3 by one of the best teams in the league. Even their girls hit way out past our center fielder. Plus, their pitcher was pitching short balls that seemed to find the plate at the last moment. The first time I was up, I let three strikes whiz on by without even swinging because they looked like they were going to be balls. Duh!

Also from yesterday, now I have a beautiful two square inch purple bruise adorning my left shin right below my knee. It matches the one and a half inch bruise on the same shin just above my ankle that I got last week (and yes, I did measure both bruises, ’cause why wouldn’t you??). Apparently I need to work on catching grounders on grass. Those tend to pop up at all kinds of weird angles because the ground is uneven, and they seem particularly fond of hitting me in the left shin. At least they aren’t popping me in the eye! Since I play infield most of the grounders that come my direction are on dirt which is much smoother. Good thing too! My next ball-related purchase is going to be shin guards because hey, me = wimp. I don’t really mind having purple lumps on my legs (when I was in Jr. High I played touch football with the boys on the blacktop every lunch break for two years and had permanent scabs on both knees for that entire time), but I don’t like not being able to sleep because my leg hurts any time anything touches it. Kind of obnoxious.

Otherwise things are going pretty well around here. We’re starting to settle in nicely, and I’ve been working on school curriculum for our next term which starts next week. In addition to our usual coursework, we’re starting two new subjects, Botany and Drawing, both of which I’m pretty excited about. The Botany book is put out by Apologia and is awesome. I come from science nerd people (like sand people but without the sand and the Banthas), and Apologia’s stuff is just as in depth as any science person could hope for when teaching their nine year old. When a book explains in Chapter 1 the term binomial nomenclature including the breakdown of the Latin roots of each word, you know that the book is going to be great.

Okay, well I’m off. You guys have a lovely holiday weekend, and may your 4th of July partying be safe and include lots of nice weather.

Rachel

The side garden box

Gardening is so much more fun when your big sister helps you!

Blue-eyed Trinity Flower (also a few other things like
peppers, green onion, carrots, romaine, basil, oregano)

Anika, Super Sweet Varietal

See! We really did plant a square foot garden. Hopefully it will actually grow something (weeds don’t count).

Rachel

Small problem: our backyard is tiny. I was pretty sure this was going to be the death knell for my gardening dream, but then a bunch of my friends got all hung up on this crazy thing called Square Foot Gardening and my garden fantasy was reborn.

The idea is pretty simple. You know how all your seed packages say things on the back like “Space two inches apart in rows eighteen inches apart”? Well, instead of planting in rows, you plant in one foot squares. Instead of planting in eighteen in rows, you plant each seed two inches apart in all directions. So you can fit 36 carrots in one square foot.

You build a 4′ x 4′ box on a pedestal and then fill it with brand new gardening soil (he has some special mixture but we just bought bags). You mark off your box into 16 one foot squares and then plant one crop in each square. Since you have new soil that is separate from the rest of your yard, it doesn’t have so much in the way of weeds and is all full of nutrients plants like instead of whatever old brown stuff you have in your yard. The box dimensions make it so that you can reach to the center of the box from wherever you are around the outside.

We don’t have a decent spot for a box, but happily we already had planters all around the deck that were about 2′ x 10′ on one side and 2′ x 6 on the other. George has been planting stuff in there practically since we moved in, but he sweetly transplanted all his things elsewhere in the yard so I could take over the planters.

Last weekend we planted basil, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, green onions, lettuce, strawberries, and a sunflower before the weather decide it needed to have a 50mph windstorm. Charming! It’s been raining ever since, but hopefully we’ll be able to put in the cucumbers and snow peas plus more tomatoes and peppers shortly. The kids have been enthusiastic (well, George less so until I told him he was responsible for the strawberries), and I’m looking forward to yummy things! Yay for spring!

Rachel

Experimentation has shown that said Mother will, indeed, get sick under such circumstances. Unfortunately, baby boy is still sick and has managed to also infect two sisters so now I have me and three children under age five sick. It’s really delightful and is involving much wailing and gnashing of teeth (by me).

On the plus side, my massive website upgrade is nearly done, which makes me indescribably happy. I was hoping to get almost everything wrapped up this week but have been somewhat waylaid by the aforementioned illness, so my timeline is off by a week or so. It’s very depressing since I was looking forward to returning to my native habitat and leaving the confines of my bedroom office where I have been sequestered now for far too long.

Maybe a handsome prince will come kiss me and sweep me away. Oh wait, that already happened. Guess that’s the virus talking. Anyway, hopefully next week will bring good work news and a family returned to health. Guess I should go wipe Henry snot off my sleeve and take a nap.

Prost!

Rachel

Today my big project was revamping the Gymboree News Blog. I upgraded my blog software; switched out the template to a snazzy new one that I really like; got rid of the unnecessary stuff on the sidebar and added important things like email signup, Favorite Posts, and a Twitter feed box; hooked it up to my email service so the blog posts automatically go out to people on the list; hooked it up to Twitter so blog post titles will be tweeted for people there (increasing exposure and readership); added a little advertising here and there; added stats to everything so I can tell how many people are reading the emails, blog, and tweets; deleted some old pages that didn’t need to be there; updated the About the Author page; and generally cleaned up and revamped the entire thing. It took about seven hours. Then I fed Henry some oatmeal and took a power nap.

Even though I’ve been doing web stuff for six years now, I still always underestimate how long projects will take. All of those things on that list are easy enough to do, but getting them all done and figured out and cooperating with each other without breaking each other is a bit more complicated (upgrading is notorious for breaking stuff all by itself; happily it went smooth as could be this time). Plus, just keeping track of all the little pieces is a headache.

But it’s all done now, which is great because I’m picking up a new blog editor this week to run the GNGC blog (swapping for a link back to her site on each post) and now it’s all cleaned up, spanking new and ready to go. Yay!

Okay, I’m off. Must go make dinner and put Mr. Cranky Pants to nap before he hits my caps lock again.

Rachel

On the other hand, this month is website work month for me and after working maybe two or three hours per week for the last two years or so, things have finally come to the point where pretty much everything needs revamping, recoding, or worse. So my waking hours have all been spent doing that.

The older kids are in school in the afternoon when the little ones are napping, and they’ve all been fairly well put together in the mornings. Plus, George and I have both been home so even though we’re both working, we are also both able to keep an eye on things. Yay for working from home!

Almost all of the work on my first site, HiddenAuction.com is done, and now I’m about ready to move on to Gymboree News. There is so much to do there that I’ve been procrastinating it for oh, about two years now. But I’m going to spend the whole rest of the month on it, race through, and hopefully get it all up and running properly by February 1st. Then I can go back to two hours a week. And then I’ll have all this extra time from getting up early that I’ll be able to use on non-computer activities (that’s the plan anyway). I’m so excited!

Okay, well in addition to writing the opening for Gymboree News and publishing the newsletter tonight and the fiddling with the HiddenAuction.com home page and hiring a coder for some custom programming that I did this morning, today I also have to get my marketing package for Gymboree News organized. This is the busiest time of year for that and I saved my whole package from last year (which I completely redid from the year before and which worked very well) so it shouldn’t be too bad. I hope.

Oh! Part of my grand, take-over-the-world marketing plan involves Facebook so I’ve been monkeying around on there quite a bit. So in my doodling, I found these really cool Facebook badges that are now on the side of my Shubinesque.com website. You can see some of our recent pictures from the snowstorm and if you are say, my mother or grandparents, you can sign up for Facebook by clicking on my or George’s name. So go do that.

That’s about all the news around here. Time to go make biscuits to go with dinner. Mmmmm, biscuits….

Rachel

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

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