As I was going through the potluck line at church yesterday, one of the men in line looked at me and told me I looked really beautiful and that pregnant women are always so beautiful. Then he got embarrassed and said that might be chauvinistic. I laughed and told him thank you, it was really nice to hear.

And since this is the only compliment I’ve gotten since…..???…., it was really nice to hear. -The typical comments I’ve been getting lately have been much more like this:

“Hmm, your dress looks like it’s getting small,” from another guy at church yesterday about my new dress that I got three days ago and is NOT getting small {the translation, of course, is “Hmm, your belly looks like it’s getting big”}.

“When are you due? You still have two months left?” followed by huge grins and snickering from at least three of my friends and family members at Anika & Faith’s birthday party on Saturday.

And this one from another guy last week at church,

Him: At least you’re almost done.

Me: I still have two months left.

Him: {Stare stare, dead silence, stare stare}

Why thank you!!! Why don’t they all just say what they really mean: “Oh my gosh, you’re a whale! What in the world will you look like in two months? How will you be able to stay upright when you walk without falling forward on your face?? You’re going to be HUUUUUUGE!!!! Can’t wait to see that.” Probably because they know I’d slap them silly if they were stupid enough to say that.

Yes, I’m also one of those people who slaps people who come up and touch my belly as if it were public property. I can’t help it; it’s a reflex. You touch my belly; I slap your hand. You didn’t ask, neither am I. I did that to a lady at church a month or so ago and she thought it was really funny . Hmph! Can you tell that the only place I’ve been going lately has been church, where I’ve taken to slapping random people (well, there and bed, but that doesn’t really count as any type of social interaction)?

Anyway, I smiled the whole rest of the day yesterday after the guy at church complimented me. No, it wasn’t creepy or weird. He’s the tallest guy in church and just a big sweetheart. He and his wife are both lovely people. I’d always heard rumors that some guys think pregnancy is pretty. Haven’t actually met one before…. Thank you, Mr. Tall, for making me smile all day and for not looking at me like I’m two months from giving birth to what could only be a walrus. I’ll have to get George to take a picture of me to post on here so you out-of-towners can see what I look like. On second thought, that would just increase the pool of people telling me I look like a beach ball wearing a sweater, so maybe not….

Rachel

Not particularly interested in a quilt but still want to help donate to the airline tickets to bring Silas home? I talked with Erica and I’ve put together a donation button that goes straight to their PayPal account so anything you donate will go directly to them.

If you want to skip buying a couple of hair accessories (or CD’s or whatever) this month and would like to donate $5 or $10 (or more if you want, of course) towards Silas’s airline tickets, you can do that through the button below. Small increments tend to add up fast!

Help bring Silas home!

Thank you guys soooooo much for your generosity. I know David & Erica appreciate it and so do I.

Rachel

My BIL and SIL, David & Erica (George’s brother and brother’s wife), are adopting a little boy from Ethiopia and will be traveling from Arizona to Ethiopia in the next few weeks to go pick him up. His name is Silas and he’s three years old. Travel to Ethiopia is expensive, so one of their friends has made a beautiful hand-made quilt and is selling it on eBay with all the proceeds going toward David, Erica, and Silas’s plane tickets.

Here’s Silas and here’s the quilt (and yes, they made him his own quilt to keep as well). Is he adorable or what??? The quilt is based on the Ethiopian flag with a little inset of the African continent there on the right side.

Silas will be joining my two nieces and my nephew, who are all thrilled to have a new little brother (especially my nephew). I sat down (with my computer) and interviewed (via IM) my SIL Erica about adoption, Silas, and the general process yesterday so you can get to know them a bit more. We both decided that doing interviews is kind of fun!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rachel: You have three children between the ages of five and ten. What made you decide to adopt a fourth?

Erica: Adoption has always been close to my heart.  I babysat for a family that adopted three of their four children, I have a passion for orphans, but wasn’t sure if adoption would ever be an option after three kids.  It was actually my husband who sent me an email saying he felt the Lord calling us to adopt.

Rachel:  How did you decide on Ethiopia?

Or possibly because I am effectively procrastinating doing the dishes and starting a load of the kids’ laundry (I’m not telling which; I’m sure you can all figure that out yourselves….)…. it is now time for Princess Bride Trivia! Yes, I wasted a significant portion of my feckless youth watching this ridiculous movie (which I now have to watch again this afternoon with the kids when they get home from school) and have seen this movie more times than anyone should really see any movie. My supporting evidence for this boastful claim is that of the twenty questions on the quiz, I got fifteen right (missed #2,5,13 [missed the guy right before Westley], 14, and couldn’t remember the order or all the pieces to 18).

So, if you grew up watching this movie or are named Jonathan and happen to be my brother, I fully expect to you waste valuable moments of your day by taking this quiz and then posting your score in the comments section so I can further boast about how much higher my score is than yours. Moowahahahahahhaa! Good sales pitch, no?

Princess Bride Trivia

Rachel

Do this really need further exposition? In case you are one of those blissful childless people who has never experienced this lovely pastime, I just want you to know that when you have kids and get to potty training (by which time, hopefully I’ll be done or maybe have only one left), I plan to laugh at you a lot when you complain about how rotten it is.

Faith is nearly two (Feb 1st), has become rather more compliant in the last few months (which was a surprise because she was such a stinker at 18 months and is, after all, nearly two), and her verbal skills are improving enough that she would be able to tell us when she has to go potty if we were to get her trained. Plus, she occasionally goes over to the diaper box and starts looking like, “errrr, can someone change me please,” when she needs to be changed and no one has noticed yet. All of these are good indicators that she’s about ready.

Plus, the new baby is two months away and if I start now, she should be completely done by then with plenty of time to spare so I won’t have to mess with two in diapers. I’ve done that three times before, and you end up spending all day changing diapers. It’s a tad on the depressing side….

We like the inaccurately-name “one day” potty training method over here. Basically, the first day you give them tons and tons and tons to drink and basically they sit on the potty chair all day and you sit with them and read to them or do something nearby and recruit siblings to help entertain them. Whenever they actually go to the bathroom in the chair, you make a huge deal over it and give them M & M’s or something (this time it’s chocolate chips, since that’s what’s in my cupboard).

This gives them a pretty good idea of how their plumbing works and what it feels like when they have to go and where they’re supposed to be going (you know, not on the sofa) and how great it is to go in the right place because hey, chocolate!

The next day I usually put them in plastic pants and let them run around, but put them on the potty every half an hour (yes, I actually set the timer so I know when it’s time for them to pee). I do that for a few days. By the end of the week, they’re usually pretty much done (starting on a Monday is good and a week where virtually nothing else is going on and you aren’t going anywhere is helpful too).

Trinity was done including overnight in one week, Kyra took two, Anika took about a month to really have everything worked out including naptimes and bedtime, and Georgie…. we won’t talk about. Georgie did his usual trick for that age, which was to figure out precisely what I wanted him to do and how to do it on the very first day and then to immediately decide that he wasn’t going to do it because it was much more fun to pee on the floor, the couch, the chair, and everywhere else and then come and tell me what he had done with a huge grin on his face. Not the brightest of tactics. It was all out war for several months.

Anyway, I decided to start Faith this morning. I was really tired this morning and the only juice I had lying around was apple juice, so not thinking very clearly, I gave her a bunch of that. Now she has a lovely case of diarrhea! First one made it into the potty chair (hurray!). Next two not so much. Stupid Mommy! We are going to wait a couple more days until that clears back up and then start over. There’s no point to beginning training a kid with the runs. They can’t tell what’s coming and don’t have as much warning. It’s just too hard for them to gauge.

This will put us at Thursday, which is not the ideal day to start. Hmmm, I may have just found the excuse I needed to put this off for another week. Hehe. Since I spent all morning sitting on the kitchen floor reading things like “Pajama Time” and “I am a Bunny” to a small, half-naked child, my house is a disaster, I have six loads of laundry waiting to be folded on the couch, and I’m still exhausted.

At least dinner is planned out for the week, we have groceries (thank you, George), and I just pulled a loaf of bread out of the oven. Considering this morning’s activities, the house smells much better than it should (ahhh, one of the many redeeming qualities of fresh bread).

May your potty training years be brief (and nearly over), and your kitchen be fully stocked.

Rachel

Kyra and Faith often come in when they wake up in the morning (around 8:15 or so) and climb up on me & George’s bed to visit for a few minutes. The other day George was already showered and in his office when Kyra came in to visit with me (she’s 3). Her lips have been a bit chapped and I noticed she had an owee on her lip.

ME: Kyra, did you bite your lip?

KYRA: Yes.

ME: Sweetie, don’t do that. Then it makes an owee and bleeds.

KYRA: But Mommy, I like blood. It tastes yummy.

ME: No, yucky!

KYRA: You know what else tastes yummy?

ME: {No answer. How can I get out of this conversation?}

KYRA: Boogers!

ME: Nooooo, that’s disgusting! Don’t eat boogers. Gross!!!!

KYRA: No Mommy, they’re really good. You should try them.

Okay, well time for a shower now. Despite that very polite invitation to share, I declined the Booger Breakfast. Apparently I’m raising a vampiric snot-eater. Argh!!! Why in the world do children do this?? My son and I used to have similar conversations, although he didn’t try to talk me into eating this new delicacy. Blech! So disgusting.

So there’s the gross-out post for today. I had to write this down so that I don’t forget. As much as I would I would like to forget the entire conversation ever occurred, I am torn by my desire for amnesia and my desire to embarrass Kyra with this story in about ten years. Hehe. Hey, if I have to listen to this stuff now, I think it’s entirely fair to remind them of it later so they can errr, enjoy it to when they’re old enough to appreciate it…. It’s almost as good as the picture of Kyra playing the piano naked (she thinks that picture is hilarious now). I’m sure I’ll be able to put that to good use later.

Rachel

Oh wait, that’s “Resistance is futile.” Well, if they had small children and didn’t live in a cube, no doubt they would agree that mopping is also futile.

My out-of-town cousin and his family (three kids) came over on Saturday for the day, and my parents and my brother & family (one kid) came over to visit with them too (we had a great time). This made seventeen people, eight adults and nine kids. We cleaned up the house tolerably well, but I sort of petered out when it came to mopping my kitchen/dining room floor and just swept it instead.

This happens a lot when I’m pregnant. Mopping sort of drops to the very last thing on the list, you know, like the thing I do if every other thing in the entire house is cleaned, organized, folded, put away, I’ve eaten, the kids are all in bed, and I still have enough energy left to do it….

It occurred to me that mopping right before seventeen people were here could potentially be a stupid idea anyway. I didn’t do it. Then we were planning a family New Year’s Eve party of Monday night (25 people), so I again contemplated moppage but again rejected the idea. After the spill list for the weekend, I was pretty happy that I hadn’t bothered.

Spill #1 ~ Saturday afternoon Georgie drops his cup of orange juice on the kitchen floor.

Spill #2 ~ Saturday afternoon my cousin knocks his cup of coffee on the floor but cleverly manages to miss spilling any on his wife’s white sweater.

Spill #3 ~ Sunday afternoon Faith dumps her cup of milk all over the table and kitchen floor (actually, I think this was Kyra’s milk that she had declined to finish and hadn’t bothered to put on the counter).

Spill #4 ~  Monday morning, Kyra tips her cup of orange juice over onto her chair and the floor. I hadn’t even made it back to the kitchen to wring out the rag when….

Spill #5 ~ Anika dumps her orange juice on Kyra and the floor. Kyra was a bit distraught at this point.

Spill #6 ~ Anika decided that she wanted some leftover mac & cheese for dinner, so she put it in a bowl and microwaved it. Instead of removing her bowl from the microwave to the table, she took it out and dropped it so the macaroni got thrown all over the kitchen (the bowl wasn’t hot).

And the moral of the story is….. if you want clean floors, don’t have small children (or cousins). I figure that after all that, at least half of my kitchen is now clean. Four spills under the kitchen table and two on the kitchen floor got cleaned up, so that’s a good chunk of floor that got wiped down. That counts, right? RIGHT? Okay then. Of course, now that the last of our scheduled company is done, they’ve quit spilling everything in sight.

See, there’s two theories on mopping: One, you could mop before company comes and dazzle them with your shiny, sparkling floor for the five minutes before everyone dumps their drinks and crumbs on it; or two, you could mop after company comes so that you can enjoy your sparkling, shiny floor for the five minutes before your own family dumps their crumbs and drinks on it. That’s it. Those are the only two choices when you have five children under age ten. Well, that’s not true. You could just do neither of those and procrastinate mopping as long as humanly possible and just not mop until you can’t stand it any more. Hmmm, tough decision….

Rachel