Minis

It struck me as hilarious when the kids put on our tennis shoes this morning.  The way their jeans just covered over the top made it look like they might just have gigantic feet.  And then I looked at them and saw little mini people.  Maybe not mini people of Josh and I, but little people that are already grown up in some way.

Snipped again

Viv's neck is a bit on the shorter side.  As soon as her hair grows beyond her chin I find myself asking how her head is attatched  (my mind sees one of those barbie's that the head fell of then you just jam in back on to the neck stump).  It is probably my vanity more than hers that makes me keep her hair in a bob, yet is suits her.  It has been a few weeks that I have been wanting to get the length back up but too lazy to just get the scissors.  Today I hacked it.  Last time we bobbed I tried layering it a bit to see if the curl at the bottom would make it curl under - not so- her hair is like her personality, a bit crazy.  So this time I gave her a bit of an A-line stack, which is my favorite hair cut on me and will stay out of her way more for the activities she does. She's a cutie and loved the attention of getting a hair-cut, she could care less what her hair actually looks like.

What a ham! as soon as a camera is near she strikes the craziest poses and looks goofy cute.  

Resurgence

To begin with, we have recently signed up for an at home deliver of veggies and other organic products.  Yes, you can order everything on the internet and be a complete shut in if you like.  I don't have to go to the grocery store anymore and I love it!  Two hours of my life restored.  Now if my kids want to throw a fit we can do it in the privacy of my own home and I don't have to get overstimulated with advertising for crap.  I love it.  The kids love it too.  It is like Christmas every friday - and the gift keeps on giving because it becomes their dinner!  Again, I love the whole concept.

Furthermore, I love the concept of getting local and organic foods.  For some weird reason, the grocery stores around here are rather fickle and don't have good selections of either meat or produce.  Now I know I am getting both from a fresh source. With the whole deal I also get to choice other organic-type products that I probably otherwise would not try.  Online they are on sale so I order some without walking down the perceived over priced 'organics' isle at the grocery store.  It has been super pleasant and we have made some crazy good finds, such as today's lunch:

These little nuggets are delicious!   They are not chicken, which in the land of chicken nuggets is actually a relief.  I have had an over reactive gag reflex recently with meat products - and even the idea of commercial chicken nuggets makes me nauseous.  You know that one bad nugget with the 'other' stuff in it. Gag.  These little guys are smooth!  They are made of fugiprotien - basically mushrooms - but the texture is as beautiful as the best homemade chicken pot pie.   They were delicious and I was mad I gave most of them to the kids.  The next box is all for me.


I find in this tale of day a few resurgent patterns of my youth that made me even think it worthy to post (besides spreading the word to meat eaters about Quorn).

One - the return to home delivery.  When I grew up we had milk delivered to our back porch.  By the time I came around we got the regular gallons that you would by in the store, but I vaguely remember that we did once set out our used bottles and the were traded out and returned full of milk.

Two -  When I was going through the finicky teen years I had a bad experience with beef that made me a psedu-vegetarian for awhile.  My mother was extremely patient and accommodating.  I insisted that it was medical - I would barf and be bulimic if all she served me was meat.  Yet, with this recent resurgence of hyper-sensitive gag reflexes I find myself cutting the teen me some slack.  I have always liked vegetable products better - the first time I ate a veggie-burger at Hard Rock I thought I had gone to heaven. Now the Quorn stuff.  I start to wonder if at some point my body gets overloaded with byproducts of animal products and puts on the gag breaks.  It is a crazy thought - but it creeps up on me even while reading fiction to my kids at night (we have been reading Jungle Book and I gag each time Mowgli makes a kill and eats it and moves on...could he really eat it raw and stomach it?).

Three - the feeling that with the turning of the seasons and finally have a fall again that there are some comforting parts of my past that are surging to the top again.  It is strange and invigorating.  Inside of me I am somewhat ageless and yet trapped in a 'time' that is constructed of my current life status.  Thus to feel more of the old me in the present time is....interesting.  I like it.  Just like the kids like opening up groceries; there is something fresh and nourishing inside.  I'm not a vegetarian but stomach a bit more of my past than I have let myself do in a while.

Squirrel

As it is officially fall, we have been having fun watching the squirrels go crazy getting the winter wares stored, and we had some fun mimicking them.  This is how each of my children looks with four grapes in their mouth:

If he weren't smiling you wouldn't guess there was anything unusual about his cheeks

Yes, the are still packed with grapes.

Not quite as well endowed in the cheek department.

Her face is just too petite to accomodate much.

Entertaining us all by making 'grape juice press' with his hands.

Amazing that I caught this one 'grape escape.'

Time to open the totes -

before someone crashes my creative party!

Right now is one of those moments where I wish I was isolated in the world for the next 24 hours with just myself and this one train of thought.  I want to create this book!  In my head it is a masterpiece, or at least very interesting to me (and as publication would have it, there are several thousand others out there that have similar tastes as me).

You see, I have held on to all my personal journals since I started keeping one in the 3rd grade.  I was a very avid journal keeper - probably mostly for moments like these where the thoughts before bedtime behind burning eyes were dancing a furious jig.  When single - in my own room- in my own bed- governing my own time schedule - I could snatch pen and paper and extract those little dancing delights (or demons) from my head and let them live on the paper.

It must be a party in my basement.  All those journals with all those baby thoughts and pre-adolescent thoughts annoying and jamming around those teenage and college years.  Yep, I stopped the journal writing somewhere close to the time that I got married (lights out is determined as a collective).

But here is the genius - I have even gone so far as purchasing some of the material within the last year, for 'family history' purposes - to add to those prefunctory words the visual representation and a later perspective.  In short, I digitize my journals, slaps some authentic photos of yours truly with them (to represent the true akwardness of life as a young one) and then put in my NOW thoughts.  It is a journal about a journal-ish!

Ah, sure, it has been done before.  But won't it be fun to do the creating with reality from my own life?!  I dream bestseller.  I am content with thinking printed.  I think, ....I think I have enough motivation for it now.  I think,....I think it could pass for my master's thesis.  Depends.  But hey, what a gift to me this Christmas to actual start out this book that I have been thinking of for so many years?  I can print it for me as a gift from Josh ;).

Truth - this is just the easies manuscript for me to start with of the at least 4 solid ones that I keep throwing around in my noggin.  If I can just reproduce the creative part of me from before then I will have a framework for at least two others of the major thought books.

Well, it has been bliss to think of it now for a few minutes as the thought offsrping of uninterrupted homework ----ARGH!! There is Josh with his key at the door.  I tell you, these times slip way too fast out of my fingers, head, future......

Johnny Appleseed Festival

Toy demonstration - Faith loving a porcelian head doll.

Our town just gets more and more awesome the longer we live here!  This weekend we made sure to go to the quintessetial festival of the town - the Johnny Appleseed Festival.  Johnny is buried in a park here just off the river and they have a park around it that this past weekend was FULL of historical reinactments and tradesmens showing the crafts of Johnny's century.  I love seeing everyone in period clothing working with their hands!  We remembered a lot of the toys of our own (Josh and I's) childhood that we really fun and got some ideas for Christmas ;) this year.  

Faith loving a rag doll (gratefully she didn't grab the bone doll made of a large cow leg bone.)

Union soldier training -they were shooting their guns across the river.

Stoic fur trader - or buyer since he admitted to having bought most his furs from Indian Nations.

More authentic fur trader -pretty ecletic dudes.

Teaching Viv to play a handcrafted dulcimer.

Danny waiting patiently for the wood worker to string his bow which he decided to spend his heard earned chore money on and couldn't be happier with his choice.

Someone else making our chicken'n dumpling dinner.

Where they cooked our dinner.  AUTHENTIC!

Smithy making spoons right before our very eyes.

Colonial calvary playing on flutes and drums and shooting their guns.

Friday Food Fun

Friday I got my first door delivery of veggies/fruits from GreenBean Deliveries.  I ways happy, as where the kids, as you can see by their stellar apple smiles!  You can choose to get your produce as local grown, organic, or sustainably grown - and boy could we tell with the apples!  They tasted like the apples of my childhood - right from the tree!  That was just the start of our food fun on Friday.

For a long time Friday night has been pizza night for the family- it was born out of days when Josh used to work crazy and never be home and I was doing in-home-daycare and was exhausted by Friday and decided that my hard earned money would pay for a break on Friday night.  Well, although we love him, Papa Johns was recently voted out of our pocket book planning and we took to the 'new normal' -homemade!

Lucky the kids had been in a play-dough fettish all week long so when I gave them their real pizza dough to roll out they were awesome!  We used a Better Homes and Gardens recipe for the crust and it was YUMMY!  The girls stuck with traditional toppings but Danny and I went artizan on our pizza.  It was delicious and although a bit messier and more work than the take-out option, since Josh was home it was something special that we did together - Uh correction, something that we DO together.

Beauty secrets without the Plastic Surgeon

A few days ago Viv was picking 'flowers' (weeds) and holding them to her nose to smell them unawares of a previous occupant of the flowers - a BEE!  He let Viv know who was there first by stinging her in the bottom lip.  Viv was a champ and cried a bit and then walked around befuddled a bit by the size of her bottom lip.  Here it is at almost its biggest:

Crazy eh!?!  She is not even pushing it out at all!  It got a bit puffier toward the middle of the day and then settled before dinner.  Overnight it got a bit puffier again and drained down her chin somewhat so she was more bulldog the next day.  By day three she was fine.  

A house. A house of their own.

Saturday was a special day - a day of near slavery to a special family cause.  While we were going through all the interior construction we kept saving little bits and pieces of the renovation for a kids' playhouse.  The kids have remembered it all and our garage has been waiting for the event.  So, it was with a great deal of time, and gratitude for the new fall weather temperatures, that we put together the framework of a kids' playhouse with the end result of having the garage cleaned out of stuff!We are using the wall of the garage as the 4th wall of the playhouse so eventually we can turn it into a chicken house that would have heat in the winter.  You can see from this side the window that was torn out from the kids' bedroom, now back in a kids' room.  Josh and I had fun putting this thing together.  The construction consisted of two 4x4 posts as corner anchors and then a pencil and a saw and some screws.  Both Josh and I grew up making treehouses of make-shift scraps and hammering away in happiness without a master plan - we intend that the kids will get to do the same in the years to come with this house so there was no need for perfection, just a basic structure.

The main idea of the house came from the brick walls you can see here that we tore out of our kitchen area.  It was a backsplash that was really quarter facing brick on the whole thing - super heavy and sturdy.  When we tore it up we intended to make the kids a 3 little pig house out of it.  As you can see, the kids occupied themselves, after having moved a lot of sod for me, with playing on the big boards and picking the ripening berry/seeds of weeds and administering them to each other in various concotions.  Viv's  hands are stained for it.

As we were digging out the corner posts we ran into these rocks.  I had surmised earlier in the year that there was a walking path of sorts going around the garage but couldn't get it all dug out before.  With all the recent rain, I found the path!  It is actually the original foundation stones of the original carriage house.  The stones are beautiful and very ancient.  Some were buried under the dirt and sod about 5 inches, but with the ground so soft we just jumped on the shovel until we hit solid.  They do make a pretty path.  We took the sod from uncovering them and moved it into the missing grass areas of the yard to seed in better growth as I did earlier in the summer, which actually worked.

The working wonder of it all was seeing the garage.  With all the renovation stuff in there we could hardly fit our bikes in the two door garage, and always fearing that I would either get tetanus from a rusty nail or pop a bike tire as I was storing it in there.  We got all the old lumber out; bad stuff to the alley, good stuff to the attic, and then Josh fashioned together a rough hitching post for the bikes.  

In moving some ancient brick out of the garage I started the footings for next years' garden!  I had worried about using this area because the Rose O'Sharon from the neighbors (which makes a lovely green fence) encroaches a lot.  Yet, with the thick brick and a layer of cardboard and lasagna gardening I will have the perfect plot for the spring without taking up any of the yard area!  That was my favorite part of all the cleaning, although Josh kept asking if I was getting distracted - no, I was just finding the approriate home for the bricks.  

It was a full Saturday, and we loved it, despite both Josh and I having a head cold.  We are certainly feeling it today.  But, the whole family was outside in the backyard together the whole day, which was a wonder of wonders.  And now the kids can go outside in their own little home of self expression and leave the big house a bit cleaner, and perhaps I will have time for gardening, or doing my homework!

Help-y helpersons (helperdaughters)

My kids are fantastically amazing!  Once in a set routine they are better on task than I.  Even more amazing, they are almost as good at folding laundry as me!  Each morning after breakfast and getting dressed the are privelaged to help me with a chore, and they really do feel privelaged!

There has been a gradual shift from it being more of a chore for me to involve them in the activity to them being really helpy helpers.  The LOVE doing laundry with me, and I noticed this past week that the pile did actually diminish faster than me doing it myself!  My little people folded the majority of their own clothes, and they did it well!  They have been putting them away by themselves for awhile, but the folding of it was a small little miracle!

The next day they were so disappointed when I told them that we did not have laundry to fold that morning - but they perked right up when I told them we did have the bathroom to clean!  (totally my kids)  In fact, Danny got mad at me this week that I had started cleaning the bathroom without him because he wanted so bad to clean the toilet bowl and I had already done it.  Crisis.  What a blessed crisis.

Poetics in Life

While I was studying Structuralism, Deconstructionism, and PostStructuralism, they were being the conglomerate little bricoleurs of my world.  

Root, root, root for the home team!

It was a genius quick committed moment that made sure we got tickets to the last season game of the Tin Caps - which happened to be the best game we have been to yet!  The made an amazing strategic play in the first inning to make sure that they were ahead for the rest of the game.  Then there were just some fantastic hits and errors from the other team that made it a shut out!  It was an exciting game to watch, which is saying a lot for baseball.  There was a tragic foul ball that went into the right stands and hit a man right in the head with force and things stalled out for about 20 minutes until they had cleared the fan to the ambulance.  From our side, a lot of people were unsure what was happening but my conjecture of the whole event was accurate - as we overheard the next day in Church from people that were sitting in the stands nearby.

Some super cool friends joined us on the grass for the game and then the fireworks after (you have to move from the grass cuz they set the fireworks off from right there!) which was a perfect distraction for the kids and fun conversation for the adults.  

Moreover - the best lesson was that putting in the effort to make sure you go out and do something special as a family does really pay off.  Unfortunately, I spend too much time murmuring about how much work it will be for me to coordinate everything, when in the end I don't remember all that stuff so much as how FUN it was to go.  Much more fun than just sitting home.  It fits my purpose - to provide growth for my kids and myself and we grow together too.  And the Tin Caps are pretty good for a minor league team - they are in the play-offs, maybe another game ahead?  Next season for sure!

A rare find

It is super difficult to find a really good movie these days.  One that you don't mind watching back to back in one day.  This past weekend we found one!  It was the perfect show for everyone.

Mirror Mirror is a 3-D take on the ever one dimensional tale of Snow White.

Even as just a fable, all the characters in Snow White have been depicted for centuries as so blank and pale, as if everyone should be called Snow White a.k.a. boring!  Even with the magic nuance of animation and some quirky songs, Disney fell short.  The only great lessons from the Grimm Brothers tale is that beauty can be deadly and jealousy is sure to get you killed.

Thus, it was with great surprise that we encountered Mirror Mirror.  I pretty much picked it out because I am entertained by most of Julia Roberts' acting and it would be a familiar story for the kids as well as having heard good reviews on the costuming.  Little did I know that each character not only was real, but also relatable!  Even the prince, who most often gets left out in these princess tales, had a full character arch that made you like him even more (not to mention that Armie Hammer is really a good actor: when you first meet him he is easily taken for the pretty face but as soon as he is under the puppy love potion - ah! genius).

The costuming WAS amazing.  They even made camo look elegant on dwarfs.  Details, people, details.  Everything about each dress was made perfectly!  Hair design on the queen and Snow was a little lacking, but it a way it worked really well in making them still be very real.

Plot line was well done.  I appreciated that they did not try to deviate too far from the storyline- the queen is evil, the prince falls in love with Snow, Snow is almost killed but then finds the dwarfs.  Yet, the changed a bit of the chronology of the basics to make a more living picture of how things work (although they keep the fantasy timing of merely weeks as an overall timeline yet make it seem like more time because of the fliming sequencing ex: Snow learns to be a bandit in basically one day in the story chronology, but the sequencing makes it seem like it took much longer which both ought to be true).  The lines were extremely witty, not just funny, but witty.  They played on all the common fairy tale lines in such a way that they were comical.  Happily, because of the wit, you didn't feel that they were trying to modernize the tale.

Ah, and as the best part - morals!  The tale turns to moral lesson; from story to sermon oh so gracefully. Pefectly, it isn't an overall moral, but a lesson learned in the arc of each character. The queen learns something, Snow learns something, the dwarfs learn something, the prince learns something.  It's really lovely.  We watched it 3 times in two days and I appreciated it every time.  Still thinking about it in fact.

A Day of Life

I recently have been reflecting upon how blessed of a life I really have.  I often loose persepective while in the daily throws of how amazing it is that I get to sit with my kids every morning while I wake up my slow morning grump self.  They cuddle and read to me without rushing me off to the first days' deadline.  No rush out the door to school or to work.  We just sit and read until we are ready to have some breakfast.

The rest of the day goes the way of the weather.  No  deadlines, we just do what we do what seems best that day.  Sunny days means outside games and exploration.  It is actually quite nice not to even have landscaping because it means that all the stuff they are picking to make various concoctions are weeds and need picked anyway!

On a good day, after all our chores and learning is done we reward ourselves with an outing!  With new helmets we got to go out for a good long family ride/run that is a trail around our favorite splash park!  

Sounds difficult, I know, but these crazy ducks keep me going all day long and exersice my patience, my planning, my knowledge, my soul, and endurance everyday.  Lucky for me, I get to be a part of it all everyday without missing a beat....or beating ;)

Has us all in stitches

 Remember this sad face boy?  Yep, that was the stitches of July.

 And here are the stitches for August.  Danny really would be racking up the bills if we didn't have some expert sewers in the family.  Thursday night Danny got the classic poolside chin split.  He was super tough.  He cried for a second in shock.  I pulled him out and we slapped a towel on it.  I could see his cute little baby fat poking out so I knew that Daddy would have to fix him.

Josh, the ever compassionate father, decided to spare Danny the pain of a needle for the anethesia and instead just pinched the skin and had me smash him to the floor with my body weight and let him scream through the two stitches.  I am super proud of my boy, as soon as the needle was out the screeches stopped and he just listened to the instructions so no stitches were pulled.  We ended up with two to squeeze that fat back inside.  Danny has been a champ and left his 'whiskers' alone now for 3 days, not itching them at all!  We are confident that he will get through it all without a scar, you can't even tell which toe he had stitches on this summer and that was a huge cut!  (good work Uncle Jeff, we'll see if Daddy's seamstressing is just as fancy)