Well, the boys managed to recover from the croup without any visits to the hospital (although it was near thing, and thank you very much for your prayers), we had a nice visit with my parents over Christmas (they left this morning in a brutal cold wind, probably thankful they live in Tennessee), Christmas does not get put away until New Year's, my nausea is slowly improving, and Andy and I are trying to relax a little in the face of some stressful but probably not bad news which is making our outlook for the new year a bit uncertain. It's been a bit of a long December, a cold December, a December not half as snowy as many have experienced, but as always, in spite of everything, Christmas comes no matter that you've only baked one batch of chocolate chip cookies and didn't have a chance to make the traditional Christmas morning cardamon bread, and the year changes and time moves on.
The kids have spent a lot of time doing this over the past few days:
That would be playing Wii. Actually, the grownups played quite a bit of Wii, too.
I spoke too soon. Farmerboy is down with a fever today (day 1). The twins are on their fourth and fifth days of fever, and both of them have really painful sore throats and varying shades of croup. J., in particular, is probably as sick as he's ever been. He's completely lost his voice and cries whenever he coughs. If you could, would you spare a few prayers for him? We were a little concerned we might have to go to the ER last night because of his breathing.
Just a brief note to anyone who is going to wonder where is Angela and why isn't she posting (all two of you ;-)...
I tried to post some learning notes over the weekend, but every time I tried to add a picture, my browser would lock up. I have glittery pictures, pictures of St. Lucia buns, pictures of our Christmas tree... but after about 45 minutes of nothing working, I just gave up. I will try to post again sometime, but...
I have a two year old with croup, one 4 year old who woke us up at 4 AM by throwing up in his bed (I feel kind of mean being thankful it was his bed, as we already had one sick kid in our bed), and another 4 year old who just came down with the general ickiness today. And...
Andy has a busy week, which means he'll be working late most days. And...
Christmas is next week and I am not done shopping. And...
My parents are coming up to spend several days with us (finally!), so somebody had better pick up this house.
I have made it to 13 weeks, and after a tense moment yesterday at my OB appointment, the midwife was able to find a good heartbeat. (Much relief there.) The first trimester ickiness is beginning to lift a little, but I'm still not moving fast enough to be very efficient at all of this. So the blog will probably be quiet for a while as I try to get the kids to wrap up some of their schoolwork, sit with little boys in the bathroom with the shower on cold, and (ahem) do laundry.
Wishing everyone a peaceful Advent and a merry Christmas!
I am sipping tea with honey because I seem to have a little tickle in my throat. I know I am going to pay for this in about fifteen minutes because sweets make me nauseous. I feel strange talking to people about my particular brand of pregnancy nausea because it isn't stereotypical. I am not on the couch throwing up for three months. In fact, I rarely throw up. (Unless beans are involved. Can't do beans, thank you very much, or vegetable soup. Or pineapple really. And when I was pregnant with Gareth the smell of bread made me feel like I was going to throw up, so grocery shopping was always a little dicey.) What happens is I constantly feel like I must eat, but nearly everything makes me feel sick right after I've eaten it. After 7 first trimesters, I am now sure that this is a torture invented by the ancient Greeks. It smacks of Tantalus.
Two
On the other hand, while I am sitting on the couch trying not to move and therefore disturb whatever equilibrium my stomach has gained, I like to watch Food Network. And I like to read about food. I just finished my annual re-reading of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. I first discovered Laurie Colwin's books at a library book sale when we lived in St. Louis. I did not realize she was dead until I had read most of the book and had already decided that I wanted to be Laurie Colwin when I grew up. When I learned that she had died at the age of 48, leaving behind her young daughter and husband, I burst into tears. It took me a while before I could pick the book up again to finish it. Now I re-read this book every year when I get it down to make her gingerbread recipe right after Thanksgiving. This year I got it down so my mother-in-law and my kids could make her gingerbread recipe. The book (and the recipe, which I highly recommend) is just as good as ever.
Three
While I sit around and try not to feel guilty because Andy is doing the dishes at night and also dealing with a couple of hyperactive preschoolers, I also think about things like, those people who worry about homeschoolers being unsocialized have it all wrong. Yeah, I know. But this is why. I keep seeing and hearing references women make in blogs, on message boards, and in real life about how they call each other just to talk. I'm pretty sure this is a normal part of female socialization, and one I seem to have missed out on. Aside from it being impossible to talk on the phone in my house because of the NOISE and also because seeing Mom on the phone gives certain little people automatic permission (somehow) to do anything they are never, ever allowed to do, I have never figured out how to call somebody on the phone just "to talk". So apparently 17 years of formal schooling and immersion in peer culture was completely useless from that point of view. I still have no social skills.
Four
Really, I think I was designed to write letters. Real letters. On paper. In pen. When I was a teenager, several of my best friends were long-distance (setting up a standard which holds to this day), and we would sit in class and write long, episodic letters to each other, mainly involving our novels, what TV shows we were watching, and how bored we were. I miss letters. E-mail was wonderful when people used to use e-mail like letters, but then e-mail took too long, and so people just wrote blogs to keep friends up to date and stayed up all night chatting with Instant Messanger. But then blogs took too long, and people switched to facebook and twitter. (Maybe they still IM, I don't know. I had to give up IM a long time ago because it took too much time. Which is also why I don't log on to facebook or twitter much anymore either.) With a pen and paper letter, you could write long, thoughtful responses even if it took you three or four days because paper and pen are so very much more portable than even the most portable computer, and far easier to use to compose long, thoughtful responses than a cell phone.
I'm such a Luddite.
Five
Katydid asked me the other day, "Mommy, is one reason why some women don't like to be pregnant that it makes them look fat?"
Six
Unrelated to Katydid's comment, which reminded me a little of an innocent comment my husband once made involving shrubberies, a green maternity shirt, and me being 9 months pregnant... I have started trying to exercise in the mornings. I think it is helping just a bit, although I can barely get through fifteen minutes without someone needing a stinky diaper changed.
Seven
The wind is blowing across the field like a freight train this afternoon, gusts up to 40 mph and a windchill of 5 degrees. In western NY, the Weather Channel reports "blinding snowfall." Here it's fairly clear. Puffy purple-gray clouds smear across the sky like healing bruises, that weird, pinkish late afternoon winter light glowing around them. The trees on top of the hill are a uniform wall of charcoal gray, alleviated here and there by a spike of piney green or a slash of stark birch white. Yellow grass tops bend over a crusty blanket of snow -- about 6 inches now, less than we had on Wednesday because it rained a little Wednesday night. Every now and then a wind gust whips up a handful of snow and flings it into the sky, but there's little drifting because ice is holding the snow in place.
The boys keep asking if it's winter now. Yes, dear, I say. It's winter. I make an imperfect attempt to build a fire in the woodstove every day now. I have finally ordered snow boots for everyone. I would love a big bowl of beef stew, but will settle for the pizza I am going to ask my husband to pick up on his way home. I am grateful I didn't have to take anyone out today. Instead, we all hunkered down inside, and listened to the wind blow.
Winter is here. We got three inches of snow on Saturday when we were supposed to have "accumulations of less than an inch". We were supposed to get together with the other families in our Little Flowers/Blue Knights group for a "St. Nicholas Eve" dinner and Mass, but we had to cancel. Andy still had to go to his company Christmas party, though, and by that time the Weather Service had issued a "snow advisory" predicting 2-6 inches. The snow had almost ended by then, so the totals in the advisory were really no-brainers. Looks like more snow in the forecast for today, Wednesday, and Thursday, with highs in the 20's and 30's. I knew it would be December eventually.
Andy moved the chicken coop to its winter position behind the outer garage (where we have access to electricity and can plug in the de-icer for the waterer.) Yesterday I took the quintessential "upstate New York December calendar" picture:
Well, maybe not. Especially considering he's wearing a University of Tennessee ballcap. But that's what it reminded me of.
Katydid is supposed to play her violin with a small group of music students at our favorite local farm store this weekend. She is excited. Christmas carols are her favorite music. I ordered A Child's Book of Christmas Carols from Neumann Press for her this year, so she could mess around with them on the piano. The book itself is very nice -- lots of cheerful illustrations and, of course, all the carols are traditional, and at about an intermediate playing level. (I can play them and I took 2.5 years of piano in late elementary school.)
Next Saturday is also the last swimming lesson for this session. The instructor told me this past Saturday that Gareth and Katydid should expect to move up a little and that next year he thought it would be good for them to sign up for the local swim team. That's a long way from a year or so ago when they barely knew how to swim!
Oh, and Saturday is also a holiday open house at the farm where we buy some of our meat. Dare I say that I hope I can score a ham???
The Advent candles finally came. So now we can actually light the Advent wreath. It's only the second week of Advent, so I'm almost on time... right?
I'm not going to try to catch up on weeks 14 and 15, as mostly we cleaned house, had Thanksgiving, visited with Grandma and Grandpa, and I chewed gum assiduously in an attempt to keep early pregnancy nausea at bay... and alas, I have no pictures from this week because I was too busy participating in whatever activities the boys undertook (cookies, glitter) to wield a camera at the same time... but here are a few notes from this week... whatever number it is.
We actually had a couple of other picture books which it wouldn't let me add to the carousel. The boys enjoyed them, though, so I thought I would mention them, too:
Farmerboy's comment about Gawain... "It's a really strange book, isn't it, Mommy?"
The big kids seem to be slogging through some of their reading right now... Gareth informs me that The Two Towers has hit a "boring" point, and Katydid is determined to finish Little Women, even though, "The ending isn't as interesting as the beginning. They're all older."
I had to confess to her that I had never finished Little Women either.
The boys made cardboard spaceships from pizza boxes. J. covered his in glitter. Farmerboy got immensely frustrated trying to contrive a way to put landing gear on the bottom of his ship so that they would stay and hold the ship up. N. cut himself with a pair of safety scissors while I was in the shower and bled much more than I thought possible from a cut given by "safety" scissors. (He's ok.)
Chipmunk lovingly covered many, many sheets of construction paper in lots and lots of glitter. I am thinking of cutting out ornaments from his glittered paper. It can't actually matter that any more glitter comes off considering the amount of glitter already swept into the corners of the room.
Chipmunk really would do well at a Montessori school. He is in a "washing hands" period right now. The problem: I can't really stay in the bathroom with him as often as he wants to go in there and wash his hands. Sometimes this can be disastrous, as today when he got bored with washing his hands and decided to wash a sink full of stuffed animals, dirty socks, Legos, and a walkie-talkie. Later, he got bored washing his hands and stuffed a foam sword and a bunch of Legos in the toilet. And no, I do not really let him in there without supervision. His siblings just need to learn how to close the door.
More on the Chipmunk/Montessori theme... he also likes to watch me cook. I must supply him with measuring cups and spoons of his own and something to pour and scoop. Not thinking one night, I supplied him with sugar. Sugar should not really be used in Montessori pouring and scooping activities. I mean, if you thought you might try it sometime.
One thing we have not done lately is go outside. I just haven't had the energy to get everybody bundled up and deal with the mud. I did stuff everyone in snow clothes to go outside on Tuesday so they could play in what snow there was before it melted, and good grief, it took at least 45 minutes, if not more. It's no wonder I'm ready to move to Florida by the end of January.
The big kids continue to be dedicated users of the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum, putting in at least an hour a day, and sometimes two or more. I would like to do a review, but I can't say when that will happen. I will say that I think, in spite of the price, that it's been worth it. I don't know that I'd consider it for a child who is a self-starting writer, who will sit and write for hours on his or her own... but for a child who wants to write a book and can't figure out how to start or where to go from the beginning... it's excellent.
Outside my window: Rain, rain, rain. A little windy. Warm for the end of the November -- temps in the mid 40's -- which is why this is rain and not snow. A little snow in the forecast for this week, though. I don't mind snow in December so much....
(12/1/09... The morning begins with a soft sprinkling of snow flurries.)
I am thinking... Right now I'm just frustrated because typepad's editor is not behaving properly and refuses to unbold text. I am also thinking that 6 is a difficult age for doing art. (Farmerboy is going through sheets of drawing paper because he isn't "doing it right." Sigh.)
I am thankful for... a brief window of not feeling too icky in the morning. Lets me get a few things done, although I should probably make more of it.
From the learning rooms... After a week off for Thanksgiving and a visit from Grandma and Grandpa, my goal this morning is to simply get my two big kids out of bed so I can take a shower. If that happens before noon, today will be a success. Otherwise... the little boys have already watched a Magic School Bus episode about space this morning and gotten their space pictures out to work on... Katydid will be focusing on Advent and Christmas... and Gareth is continuing on with our study of medieval Britain. I should probably also figure out what books we'll be reading, now that we've finished Beowulf.
From the kitchen... I'm hoping to make some cookies with the little boys this week... in the mornings, of course, before my "afternoon and evening sickness" takes hold. (Small note to add now that is 6 PM instead of 8 AM... I did make some cookies with the boys this morning, and aiyee, do I need a better system for making cookies with the boys. I'm thinking of splitting them up and assigning a cookie helper for each cookie making session. Then they can just fight about whose turn it is to help instead of fighting over the dough, who has his chair where, who threw flour all over the island... and also there would probably be fewer walnut shells being smashed with bare hands.)
I am creating... Well, this is a tough one. There is, of course, a baby in the early stages of creation here, and that means that I am on the couch a lot (unfortunately). I'm not so great at sitting, and when I don't feel good, sometimes I get into a funk where nothing sounds good to read either. I don't like watching TV much. So I tried to pick up a hand-quilting kit I recieved for Christmas years ago. I started working on some potholders. But there are times I don't even feel together enough for that. I also have a short story I have been working on from time to time... I should be working on it a little every day, because I have been writing long enough to know that inspiration really comes only to those who work... but I have yet to find a decent, regular time, and haven't been motivated enough to pull it out and work on it at odd moments. Could have something to do with feeling foggy, too.
I am going... to take a shower. How's that for ambition?
I am reading... not much of anything right now. Just finished reading my friend Sarah Prineas' Magic Thief books, which I enjoyed very much.
I am hoping... that I have enough energy to take the big kids to Chess Club.
I am hearing... the twins arguing about "who's the leader" or some other important point of warfare... and Chipmunk ringing our brass bell as he plays priest at the china cabinet... and now the boys marching around humming the Empire's theme from Star Wars. Hmmm...
Around the house... we cleaned up pretty well for Thanksgiving. Now the tricky part is to keep it that way.
One of my favorite things... the first snow in December, after the Christmas lights have gone up.
A few plans for the rest of the week... er, survive???
, and we would sit in class and write long, episodic letters to each other, mainly involving our novels, what TV shows we were watching, and how bored we were. I miss letters. E-mail was wonderful when people used to use e-mail like letters, but then e-mail took too long, and so people just wrote blogs to keep friends up to date and stayed up all night chatting with Instant Messanger. But then blogs took too long, and people switched to facebook and twitter. (Maybe they still IM, I don't know. I had to give up IM a long time ago because it took too much time. Which is also why I don't log on to facebook or twitter much anymore either.) With a pen and paper letter, you could write long, thoughtful responses even if it took you three or four days because paper and pen are so very much more portable than even the most portable computer, and far easier to use to compose long, thoughtful responses than a cell phone.
and 
. Her favorite is A Fairy-Tale Christmas, I think. She has loved fairy tales since she was very small.
Recent Comments