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

No, I’ve never been a big salad eater. It’s nice and all, but always seems to contain way too many, you know, vegetables. Blech! Who wants those? Plus, I didn’t even know that other non-iceberg types of greens existed until after I got married. In case you were wondering, I think of iceburg lettuce in much the same way I think of celery: fibrous water. Thank you but if I want crunchy flavorlessness, I’ll chew ice cubes.

I haven’t turned into some wacky salad-lover (because salad-amor can only be bad), but my culinary greens are slowly becoming much more interesting. To me. Ahem, shortly after I got married, I discovered that all lettuce doesn’t have to be pale and sickly-looking and that Romaine is actually much more edible. Fast forward a few pregnancies and tomatoes started looking pretty good as well.

A couple of months ago I got a new cookbook The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio’s Award-Winning Food Show. One of the recipes called for escarole. Escawha? Apparently it was some sort of spicy green that was too swanky for Safeway to carry. Ditto the curly endive in another recipe.

Finally yesterday I got around to going to the Market of Choice down the hill from my house, where they carry all sorts of fancy thises and thatses and slap the “organic” label everywhere you look so they can charge gazillions of dollars for it. There, right next to the $49.99/lb. mushrooms (not even kidding), were my fancy escarole and endive and the more pedestrian romaine. They weren’t even terribly expensive.

I did get suckered into paying $4.99 for a small package that contained about twenty blooms from edible flowers. Some smarty pants decided not to put the names of the flowers on the package (otherwise, who would buy them when they can go raid their friends’ or neighbors’ gardens??), so I had to purchase a pack to take home and try to ID the contents. Of course, this becomes more difficult once the contents are in your stomach.

I had read somewhere or other (I think in that same book, which is full of all sorts of useful side information) that if you wash and spin dry your lettuce when you first buy it and then store it with a couple paper towels in a Ziplock bag that you’ve sucked all the air out of, it will keep in the fridge for up to ten days. Not wanting my new spiffy non-iceberg lettuce to get all gross, I spun it up in my
awesome new Oxo Good Grips Salad Spinner

that’s actually kind of fun to mess with. It’s very zoomy and spinny. You know, “awesome” and “salad spinner” are probably words/phrases that should never be uttered together.

I tasted some of the endive and escarole on the way home, and they both seemed more bitter than would be strictly desirous in a salad, so I stuck a whole bunch of romaine in the bowl and then a little bit of each of the others. Feeling all
epicurean, I then added maple bacon pieces (the real stuff, not disgusting fake bacon bits), tomato, hard boiled egg slices, and toasted pine nuts as well as a bunch of the flowers. A bit of fresh viniagrette for the table and voila! a lovely salad to go with George’s fabulous steak, my crusty bread, Bourbon and Brown Sugar beans (thank you, Bush company), and watermelon. And no, we did not devour all this ourselves. My parents came over and happily helped.

And the salad….. was a hit! Some of the flowers were a bit bitter, but the pansies were quite sweet and yummy. I’m starting to think about maybe making a potted garden next year and I’m going to have to look into some edible flowers for it. The endive and escarole added just a bit of a peppery flavor to the salad without overpowering it and making it gross. The entire bowl got eaten. I was shocked!

So that is my salad story (and I’m stickin’ to it!). Which officially makes me quite possibly the most boring person on earth. To make up for the fact that I’ve just essentially done an entire post on lettuce, I am leaving you with a picture that my FIL took on Saturday at our church’s picnic. This is Faith practicing her supermodel pose, complete with the cadre of admiring onlooking boys behind her. Hehe.

Rachel

And I don’t even say “rocks” unless I’m referring to gray inanimate objects in my backyard, because rocks in the context of “that rocks” is quite lame.

And what is Dr. Horrible? Just Joss Whedon’s new internet-based brilliance, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Plus, it involves singing and Nathan Fillion. Yay! Fillion and Whedon, my two humongous favorites. It’s only online through tomorrow, so go watch it (you’ll probably be able to find it on YouTube or somewhere after that). NOW! Why are you still here?

Dr. Horrible

Also, in the first two episodes, Dr. Horrible himself reminds me rather a lot of my brother when he was in high school. Hehe. Jonathan’s going to love that.

Trinity is off at Babunya’s (Hubby’s Mother) house this week, as per her birthday request, so we are down one child. It’s quite strange how the entire character of the house changes when one of the kids is missing. Hmmm, this is probably a preview of how it will differ when someone heads off to college or gets married.

By 9:30 on Monday morning, the difference became apparent. You see, Georgie is the oldest and tends to act like the oldest in that I’m-the-boss, do-what-I-say-now type of way. Anika, though not the oldest is in no way receptive to other people bossing her around. Trinity, however, is happy to sort of do whatever Georgie wants to do.

Georgie and Trinity spend most of their time playing together happily. Anika spends most of her time playing with the little girls and enjoying being the oldest of their group. When Georgie and Anika are together, they spend most of their time fighting. With our usual Trinity-buffer gone, Monday morning began with lots of yelling, crying, denials, and accusations.

As I looked at my two whacked-out children, I realized that if this wasn’t fixed immediately, this week would be utterly miserable for the entire house, and I hate being miserable! Misery by screaming children is the worst. I asked them if they remembered what the sermon was about on Sunday, and they both remembered that it was on I Corinthians 13 (often referred to as the “Love Chapter”). Good, and what are you supposed to do when you love someone? Be patient and kind. And what does “kind” mean in this context? The word used also means “useful.” So find something useful that you can do for the other person to show them that you love them.

I told them that I wanted them to each find two things to do for the other person that would be useful to show them that you love them and then tell me at the end of the day what the two things were. Hmmm. Silence. Staring at the ceiling. Thinking, thinking. Guess what? No more fighting all day!

By the end of the day Georgie had made lunch for both the little girls when I had asked them each to make lunch for one, and Anika had cleaned up most of Georgie’s mess in the bedroom when I told them both to go clean their room. Neither of them had quite made it to two things, but since the rest of the day passed with no more fighting, that was ok.

Today they didn’t even come down for breakfast until well after 9am (usually they’re down around 8). Apparently they had been reading Georgie’s anatomy book he got from the library. Anika wanted to know where food goes when you eat it (??) so Georgie pulled out this book of the human body and they had been scoping that out together. Georgie told me that they decided they are going to be on the same team now and friends and aren’t going to fight anymore because neither of them likes fighting with the other. Wow! Okay then. True to their plan, I didn’t hear any racket from either of them all day. Phew! They’re so charming with the yelling dispatched.

We’re switching to year round school this year and the way it all lines up, they have June and July off and then start back up in August. August and September will be three days a week and then full schedule begins in October. I’m starting to look forward just the teensiest bit to August. They’ve been exceptionally well behaved so far, but to maintain this behavior I’ve been keeping them quite busy.

We go once a week to the library, the wading pool/park (often 2x here), my Mom’s house (or she comes here), and a local farm store. We get together with each side of the family twice a month for Family Dinner Night, and I’m planning to add softball practice once a week too! Keeping them really busy has the unintended byproduct of keeping me extremely busy on top of my normal household and work duties. I’m old! I’m getting tired! I’m also getting very tired of listening to endless stories of Bionicle histories and plans for new ones, and of the general increase in noise and chatter. My ears are tired.

Every year I tell myself that I’m going to not be quite so fussy about the housework and am going to take the kids to the pool/park/whatever to relax and enjoy summer. Every year this somehow does not quite work out, so I’m feeling pretty good that this summer feels summery and I’m doing the Summer Mom stuff I should be doing. Good job, Me! Sometimes you just need to pat your own back.

Rachel

Trinity is now 8 years old. AAACK!!! Phew. Okay, pardon the flipout there. I am now fine and will continue this message with no further flusterment (I made that word up. My spell-checker is now confused).

Since she is having a joint party in a couple weeks with two other girls from church, today we had nothing really planned. This morning I gave her a gift from me, which was her own set of crochet supplies (yarn, hooks, markers, scissors, and a case to carry it all in) and then I taught her how to chain. She did a nice long one, so tomorrow we will slip stitch the chain together and learn to single crochet which she can practice until her long connected chain grows into a headband.

She and her sisters got to play Cinderella again today, and since it was Triny’s birthday, she actually got to be Cinderella (since naturally there can be only one). They wanted music that was not Johnny Cash and was princess-y; but apparently nothing I had was suitable so they asked me to turn it back off and then they sang “Sing, Sweet Nightingale,” which is the song Cinderella sings as she mops the floors in the movie.

Trinity advised the other girls that they had to mop by moving their rags around in circles across the floor because that’s how princesses do it. I would have felt bad about making her mop on her birthday except that she was clearly having so much fun. I just got out of the way and told them “thank you” when they finished.

Then I had a bunch of errands to run and Trinity got to go with me, which is a special deal around our house. Dragging several kids on errands is something I try diligently to avoid; and if I make it out of the house, I tend to enjoy having no one with me so that I can hear my brain. We went to Walmart (bought her a crown and some Rainbow Chip frosting for the Funfetti cupcake mix I bought yesterday).

Then we went to Bob’s Red Mill and bought 25 pounds of flour (this is the third 25 lb. bag I’ve purchased in two and a half months). She decided that Jamba Juice might be nice so we stopped there for lunch. Then we went to the very exciting Albertson’s (grocery store) and picked up a few necessities like grapes and BBQ beans. As we were driving around she told me that this was one of her best birthdays ever. Yes, mopping and shopping for flour always make me feel special too….

Grandpa and Grandma came over to have dinner with us (spaghetti, garlic bread, and “cheese quesadillas as a side dish” with cupcakes for dessert, as per the birthday girl’s request), and just as we were finishing up, three little neighbor girls unexpectedly came over with a present for Trinity. They hung around and helped us eat our cupcakes, and then Trinity decided they needed to have a pajama party.

So the little girls ran home to put on their jammies, and then they all sat in our living room for an hour watching Looney Toons and SpongeBob while consuming massive amounts of popcorn (to sit atop their cupcakes and ice cream). Pretty good party for being completely impromptu. I even had just the right amount of cupcakes! Phew.

So now my daughter is eight. What a big girl. Here’s a picture from last week when we went strawberry picking with Grandma. I’m going to start calling this her supermodel pose (she doesn’t consciously do this; you point the camera at her, she looks at you, and this is what you get).

Happy Birthday, Sweetie! I love you.

Mommy