5 days out: goodbye, routine. Hello, padded room.

Life is just a little bit crazy right now. Blaine went back to work today, and Ellie met the pediatrician and got checked out. She’s doing fabulously, had gotten down to 9 lbs. 1 oz. but was at 9 lbs. 2 oz. today so we’re climbing again. Her heart sounds perfect, she’s not jaundiced, and we couldn’t ask for anything more.

But. How do you take seven children into a doctor’s clinic smoothly? How do you take less than twelve minutes to get everyone into the van and buckled? To carry an infant car seat or to put baby in sling? Stroller – double to contain Pierce too, or single and have Pierce walk? All these questions, along with about a hundred more, have yet to be answered. Hello, overwhelmed. I managed to lose Pierce for about 30 seconds in a small store, (he was by the toys mere feet away, but that didn’t stop the moment of panic) forget to pack a few things we really wished we had taken, forget to change the baby’s diaper before the situation became desperate, and we didn’t make it to three of the stores I’d hoped to make it to. It was a lesson in what not to do, pretty much.

When the doctor looked at my kids and said he really wanted to know how I do what I do, how I have such well behaved children, I couldn’t help but think… “Show them what overwhelmed looks like it. Show them what craziness really is. They’ll all be so terrified Momma’s about to lose the last thread of sanity she owns, they’ll fall into line and act like perfect little ducklings. Who knows… she might forget to feed them next. Yep, better keep your act together, or she’ll lose everything entirely. Our lunch is depending on it.”

I’ve had seven babies. Six times before, I’ve sponge bathed my babies, cared for their umbilical cord stump, waited for it to fall off. This time? I totally forgot. I decided Ellie needed a bath, took her into the shower with me, and was mid-suds when I realized I was not supposed to get her cord wet. Seriously?! Where is my brain? To top it all off, approximately 36 hours later, a friend was over, after spending the last 36 hours cleaning her cord with alcohol trying to ease my regret in having bathed a baby when they tell you not to. I was chatting with my friend when I looked down to the shoulder that Elliot had been resting on moments earlier. There stuck her cord, sitting on my shirt like something entirely revolting. Oh. My. Word.

The best part was when I was relaying the whole story to the pediatrician, waiting for him to scold me and tell me what horrible things I’d done to the well-being of Elliot’s perfectly shaped belly button (that no one will ever see in her teen and adult years, to be certain) and at the end of the story, the pediatrician laughed. He told me to leave it alone, put the rubbing alcohol away, and step away from my mommy guilt… and take a nap. Because apparently I need one.

Sterling drew me an owl picture. When I giggled at his rendition, he asked what was wrong. I pointed to the mouth of the owl, lips and all. I think Sterling was a bit offended at my reaction – until he realized he drawn lips on an owl. Oh, we laughed.

Ruby’s new line: “I was accidentally out of my mind.” She first said, "Is it 'My brain is out of my mind' or 'My mind is out of my brain?'" Somewhere along the line, it’s evolved. I can’t bring myself to correct her. She makes me smile.

Comedic entertainment. It’s all that’s keeping me going right now.

Oh the weather outside…

It’s snowing. For the first time this season, the weather is in the 20’s and it’s snowing enough to stick. Slightly. Ruby went out to help her older siblings gather kindling this morning before the snow (might, just maybe, if she’s lucky) covered up the ground, but she was so top heavy she was fearful she might go headfirst when she bent to retrieve sticks from the ground.

I, of course, laughed and took a photo before I sent her on her way.

Just for the record, this climate is nothing like I grew up in. They have –30 degree wind chill temps.

We were at the zoo yesterday. In t-shirts. It was 62 degrees.

The kids are hoping it snows enough to sled in. This whole southern living business is pretty odd, I tell you!

I never imagined this.

These days are hard. School seems to drag on forever, co-op has become a stress like no other and keeps me awake at night, it’s all I can do to keep up with the house somewhat and laundry, Pierce is tearing the house apart as fast as I can put it back together and refusing to take naps many days, and my belly is bigger and causing me more pain than it’s ever been at just shy of 23 weeks.

It’s funny, as a kid, picturing motherhood didn’t include absolute exhaustion. It didn’t include frustration or anger or sticking to the floor when I stumble into the kitchen after consoling a child with growing pains at 3am. It didn’t include repeating myself over and over and over or searching for lost objects that I didn’t lose or potty training a single child for six months with limited success.

Strangely enough, I pictured lovely children, well-behaved, without all the work. I imagined clean, pressed (HA!) and smiling children. This just wasn’t what I imagined.

Messes. Oh, the messes. The laundry, the mountains of work without the energy to climb anything more than the path to the couch. The pure exhaustion and achiness that pregnancy brings. The unending meal preparation and the inability to feed my children one helping of anything that fills them up.

But.

I didn’t picture the discussions either. The talks of sin and Christ’s love. The discussions of those painful growing up moments that are inevitable.

The laughs. Oh, the laughs. The hilarious things that a child comes up with. The heart stopping moment when you find your two year old standing high in the air, perched on a tiny patch of instability. The baby kissing “his baby” in Momma’s belly, loving someone so unconditionally that they’ve never met, don’t fully understand, and who is taking up more and more of “their” lap space.

The different personalities. The ones I see myself in clearly, and the ones I don’t understand in the slightest because they are so unlike me. The ones who are word oriented and the ones who crunch numbers like nobody’s business. Outgoing. Shy. Energetic. Quiet.

If I had to describe them each in a word…

Liberty… perfectionist

Eden… scattered

Sterling… mathematical

Ruby… passionate

Charlotte… imaginative

Pierce… hungry

Yeah. I never pictured any of this. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest thing I’ve done, and the only thing I can’t quit. Day after day, new struggles face me in the lives of these children. I never imagined this. But I’m having the time of my life – on the good days and the bad.

Liberty's making pancakes - from a mix. She's over an hour in and I just heard the first oil spray hit the pan. I can teach them how to cook… but how on earth do you teach them speed?!

Sterling asked me how big a yard was. My reply was, “3 feet. 36 inches. A yard stick. You know, that’s why we call it a YARD stick.”

My son just snorted at me. In that brief second, he realized he’d asked a very stupid question. I love it. (If you saw how they play with yard sticks around here, you’d understand better. We have about 10 of them, from the farm show and from Blaine’s parents’ hardware store. They frequently become swords, roads, and, with the help of bread twist ties, bridges. Yard sticks are something he knows VERY well.)

Yesterday Sterling learned about nickels. We sorted out 2 quarters, 10 nickels, 5 dimes, and 50 pennies into four piles to make a point on the value of each coin. What Sterling got out of our piles? “We have $2 here!” I’m not the least bit math minded. My son is scaring me.

Pierce is back to his normal self. Temper tantrums, requiring lots of correction, and eating everything in sight normal Pierce. Thankful. Even for the exhausting job of the constant need to correct him. Funny: I dropped a butter knife onto the tile floor with a crash that sounded worse that it really was. Pierce took the opportunity to correct me back. “Momma! No no!”

Ruby was told that today at co-op she has PE and needs to wear jeans. She came back with five jean skirts for me to choose from, insisting that a jean skirt with leggings is really easy to run in. She just can’t stand it.

Eden is the first child I’ve ever had to tell to write out her math answers using numbers, not words. She had an entire lesson that she wrote answers like “five hundred twenty six thousand nine hundred fifty two” – in cursive. I’m sorry. I’m glad you know place value and how a number reads in words. But my brain does not want to convert that to numbers, so you’ll have to indulge me and use numbers next time.

Charlotte insists she’s three now, so she’s big. Until last night. When asked why she wasn’t helping to clean up supper, she informed me she’s not that big. It went into a several-minute dissertation on why three years old is pretty big, but she’s not quite big enough to do work, because she’s still pretty short. With the ability to have a discussion like that, she’s being recruited into service. She’s a fabulous “Crawl under the table for any runaway cups, silverware, napkins, or large pieces of food picker-upper”.

The pancakes were worth the wait. If you have the chance, the pecan-glazed mix from Aldi is pretty darn fabulous. And a ten year old can make them. If they have an hour and a half.

Oh, Ruby.

Ruby fills out a “meeting strip” every day during math. With the day’s date, a pattern to finish, and a coin cup box for the coins I’ve handed her to be counted and recorded, she apparently was getting bored with the routine. This is the one she handed me last week:

I was told to finish the letters to make the date. Each of the letters for October are half there (except the c, since she couldn’t draw only half). Impressive shorthand, dear Ruby. Not quite what I was after, but impressive nonetheless.

A sight.

There’s a sight I never did want to see.

Ruby’s math papers, tea-drenched. She’s heartbroken to have to wait to finish her math until the papers dry, to be sure.

Happy Friday. I hope yours is going better than mine!

Confusion with Ruby.

Ruby: “Sterling, you’re weird.”

My ears perked up. I’m pretty sure she’s never heard anyone called weird before. I’m also nearly certain she has NO CLUE what it means.

“The only person weirder than you is Satan,” she continued. Now I’m quite certain she has no idea what she’s saying.

“No, you’re even weirder than Satan. Satan is just evil. He’s not weird.” Okay, now I’m wondering who on earth taught her what “evil” means, since she seems to have a clear perspective of the word.

I stepped in. “Ruby, what does weird mean?”

“It means you’re really funny.”

Alrighty then. Now that we have that one cleared up, she’s making slightly more sense. Slightly. Earlier in the morning she’d asked me if Satan eats fire for his food. I think it’s time to sit the kids down, figure out what they think, what they know, and set a few things straight. Wow.

Lazy summer days…

Ruby gets full enjoyment out of the swing.

You know, as opposed to the lesser enjoyment she gets out of other things in life. No, not so much. Life is full speed ahead and quite the fun game for Ruby. (And she wears this dress about three days a week. As in, every time it’s clean. It is, according to her, the cutest thing she owns.)

Sterling has been playing with wood lately. He asked me what I wanted him to make me. I told him I’d like another bedroom and bathroom added on to our house. He informed me he’d have to break a wall out to connect it, and he’d probably just build me a new house instead. Um… okay! He hasn’t realized the value of a good demo job. If current talk around here turns into more than talk, he might just get to try his hand at both demoing a wall and building. We’ll see!

Sigh. It’s such a rough life.

The garden is doing well. We’re eating broccoli, beans, zucchini, peppers, kale, and yesterday brought the first tomatoes.

This is (one of) my lavender plants. It’s the oldest. It moved in a pot from one place to another many times, before finally going in the ground when we bought our house. Turns out, planting it over the septic tank does good things for lavender. It’s huge!

Brady thought she needed in on my photos the other day. All 8.5 pounds of her, she’s much loved and believes herself to be human, I think. I haven’t found her eyes in a while, though…

Disconnected.

Here I sit, typing a post that can’t be published for another two days – I hope it’s only two days, anyway. Life without internet seems strangely quiet. I rather expected to have a bunch more free time, but I don’t. I have a bunch more nauseous and tired time instead. Something about a rolling stomach doesn’t encourage a clean house. Shocker, I know.

Life moves on. Liberty has rather mastered the doggy paddle and is having a great time in the deep end. Fun skills to master. Eden remains the flailing octopus, doing her best to drown herself and anyone trying to keep her afloat. She’ll get there. Pierce though… he thinks he can swim. He kicks and swings his arms and I haven’t completely gotten the nerve to let him go, but it would seem that he might have some ability to keep himself above water. Funny boy. Sterling and Ruby and Charlotte love their lifejackets.

Ruby wants to know why she can’t feel the baby kick yet. Charlotte wants to know why it isn’t born yet. Pierce just wants to know why my belly is getting bigger. It’s rather fun to watch them look forward to the new sibling. As the youngest child of two, I never experienced anything like it. I’ve had fun watching them experience it. Watching Pierce become a big brother though – I’m a little scared of that. It’ll be interesting how he handles it.

Ruby came in from a trip to the outside garbage can for me. She was blowing out of her nose strangely.

“Is there a bead up my nose?” She sticks her nose in my face. Is this a trick question?

“Why would there be a bead up your nose?”

“Because I stuck one up there but now I can’t find it.”

Wavering between laughing and scolding, I opted for the latter. I plugged one side and told her to blow. Nothing. I told her to blow again. And with that, a pink pony bead flew out and hit me in the face. I’ll have to work on my defense strategy next time. Although, should there ever be a next time, we’re quite clear on the consequences.

I’ve never thought to tell them not to put things up their noses. I don’t ever remember encountering this problem before. I’d have thought that at 4 years 10.5 months, she’d have been past the point of seeing that as a good idea. Leave it to Ruby.

Sterling was told to get the clothes out of the dryer and bring them to me. I was halfway through folding them when an obviously food-clad shirt was drawn up for the folding. Then I found two kids cups in the load. Really? Upon questioning, Sterling wasn’t sure where the cups came from. But he was QUITE certain he brought me the clean clothes. He was sent to the laundry room to check. He came back empty handed, adamant they were the clothes he’d taken from the dryer. Liberty went to investigate. She came back with a laundry basket of clean clothes. They’d been sitting in the laundry room.

They were whites. All whites. My dear six year old son took all-white clothes out of the dryer, put them in a basket, then grabbed the basket next to his clean basket and brought me a basket of dark colored clothes instead. And he never noticed the discrepancy.

Oh. My. Word.

I was headed to a meeting the other night and the kids were all in the yard. As I drove along the front of our yard on the road, the kids were waving like crazy in the yard. What was a mom to do? I waved back, hand out the window, hollering my goodbyes. Right then a car was coming towards me, and he was waving like a maniac back at me.

Excuse me while I feel like an idiot. That guy must have thought I was the friendliest neighbor ever.

Oh, for cute.

Four new circle skirts

made from this pattern

slightly edited on the waistband for ease of knowing where the back is (and covering my sewing machine’s hatred for sewing two piece of elastic together)

and four new necklaces, made from matching fabric from this pattern,

made four very happy girls. Four very cute very happy girls.

With skirts that spin out like every little girl’s dream,

it makes my shorts/leggings under every dress/skirt rule very, very important!

Get the little sister to do it.

Overheard between Charlotte and Ruby:

“You just swing your hand like this and it’ll fly away.”

Charlotte stood, hand raised above the moth, frozen in fear.

“Charlie! You just swing your hand like this and it’ll fly off the chair.”

Still, Charlie stared at the bug, unwilling to swing.

“Char-lie! Just swing at it. It won’t hurt you. Those kind of bugs don’t bite or anything. Just swing it away.”

I finally stepped in.

“Ruby, why does Charlie need to sweep the moth off of your chair?”

I knew. I already knew. And yet.

“Ugh, Momma, I don’t want to touch that thing! It’s gross!”

Education: beginning again.

These four children started back to school today.

Ruby’s in kindergarten.

Sterling’s in first grade.

Eden’s in fourth grade.

Liberty’s in fifth grade.

Momma’s in shock.

These two have the sole responsibility to keep themselves busy – and out of trouble – during our educating hours.

Deep breath. I can do this. We did it today. We got done before supper time. Laundry is four loads deep but didn’t get started until 4 pm. Supper happened, late, but it happened. The house… yeah, don’t ask too many questions about it.

I can do this.

Camping: Stump Lake, ND

 

While the kids spun around on an old-fashioned (read: super fun) merry-go-round, my mother took these photos:

In order to get said photos, she did this:

I’m nearly positive it is the first time I have ever seen my mother on a merry-go-round. Go Mom.

 

 

 

 

In other stories, Charlotte gave it her best attempt in learning to ride a bike. She was marginally successful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And since Sterling learned how to do this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and do it fabulously well, Ruby decided to do this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

although she’s not quite so fabulous at it. Give her some time. She’s not about to be one-upped by her older brother.

Farm education, wooly style.

On my parents little sheep farm























near a small town in South Dakota

the kids got to watch the sheep sheerer
























one rainy morning in June.
















Educational stuff, to be sure.


(Can I just throw in there how bad my back would hurt if I were bent over at such an angle for hours on end each day? Ouch.)