Dog House

If the kids had it their way today I would have been fired and replaced by four highly trained and individualized caretakers. Let me elaborate (but not exaggerate):
A. Beau didn't like me for taking him to Hobby Lobby (aka "The Store That Turns My Child Into The Devil") because he would rather play with me at home in his room. He could play in his room for hours and wants me to, too, and no, it does not count if I am reading a book or talking on my phone or (heaven forbid!), falling asleep. I was also a mean mom for cleaning his bum because it stunk, telling him to get off the counter while I was making dinner, and not making soup for dinner (he hates soup but he thinks he likes it, see "E."). He was also mad at me for holding Marianne (see "D.")
B. Jacob was mad at me in his dark brooding way for a large part of the afternoon because I was unavailable to cut out dozens of circles for him so he could turn them into planets (see "C."), and because I don't have black paper and I was unwilling to paint his room black so it could properly replicate the solar system. He was also mad at me for making him empty the dishwasher and putting on a boring movie for quiet time (that he actually loved.) He was mad when I wouldn't take him back to the school to give his teacher her gift that we just finished, but was then happy when I caved and loaded everyone up and delivered said teacher gift.
C. Bekah was mad at me for giving her the wrong colored cup of chocolate milk for breakfast. I think I was still a little sore from a similar episode the night before because I just picked her untouched cup of milk up and threw it in the sink. Then she was mad at me for that. And then for telling her to choose between a fit and school. (She chose school, thank goodness...that's one of those threats that I really don't have the will to carry out.) After school I was mostly on her good side because I was helping her with her teacher gift all afternoon. "Helping" is a stretch because she was also very caught up in the "boring" movie (see "B."). But when I was not helping with her gift I was in trouble (see "D."). I was also in trouble for something before dinner...oh yeah, when I asked Beau to put his shoes away but Bekah grabbed them instead and Beau screamed at her to give them back but she just ran to his room and threw them in and then Beau allegedly threw them at her because he was so mad and then she collapsed on the floor screaming, "Someone help me!" for the next fifteen minutes but I couldn't (and didn't want to) because I was holding Marianne and making dinner (see "D." and "E.").
D. Marianne was mad at me for putting her on the floor. Period. Except for the blessed 30 minutes when she somehow dug deep within herself and found the will and the ability to happily exist among the toys, carpet, crumbs and trash on the floor. She did take a couple of naps during the day, too, but not at the times I would have chosen (still grateful though!). Read: I held her all day. Or sat next to her on the floor/couch/chair.
E. I made noodles for dinner. With sauce and meat and cheese all mixed in. With salad. Enough said, I am the devil. At least that was until they all tried the noodles with sauce and meat and cheese and loved it. Mom is not a crazy witch trying to make dinner miserable, thankyouverymuch.

So now it's 10:07 and the house is quiet with everyone in bed and I just can't bring myself to go to sleep because I finally have a minute to do anything I want and so I'm writing this post to get the rest of the day off my chest and now I'm going to go paint for a minute...want to see my latest creation? Look up "Eagle Nebula." This is that: (the left side is just scrap, fyi).

Total Eclipse of the Sun

 Today Marianne ate my SmartTaste Ronzoni pasta box while I shopped for our groceries. I thought she was just sucking on the box until I pulled it away from her mouth and realized half of the top was missing. I pointed this out to the check-out clerk so he wouldn't get grossed out by accidentally touching the top and he just shrugged and said, "It's okay. It's edible." (Um, really?), and then, "It'll pass." And then he chuckled to himself about his clever pun. I chuckled too, half at him, half at the pun that I'm sure I would have never heard before if I married someone refined and proper and not Rus. (I would have so missed out on bathroom humor without Rus.)
Anywho...what you're really here to see are our shots of last night's eclipse. It was just like the last eclipse I saw, except I'm not in middle school and I got to use these snazzy eclipse glasses instead of a slightly challenging pin-hole thingermajigger. Oh and I got to enjoy it with my kids, who were totally thrilled to watch the sun get slowly overtaken by the moon. Here is a progression.  

When the sun was fully eclipsed people in our neighborhood started cheering. It was fun and disconcerting - we thought we were alone in our yard enjoying the view and then suddenly we could hear, but not see, all these people nearby.
You can thank me later that I didn't post all the pics that Rus took of the sun by placing his glasses over the camera lens just like it says you're not supposed to on the warning label. It was a very convincing warning label; I almost felt like I was letting my children do something really dangerous. Another note about these glasses: They were made for Rus' head. See how perfectly they fit him?

 Everyone else had to hold theirs on the whole time or else they might fall off and simultaneously cause blindness - Not Rus. He was sporting the look the whole time just cause he could. Look closely at how they fit me - see all that overhang in the back? Maybe you can't...It was at least an inch. This just proves, once again, that Rus' head is huge.

 See the children holding theirs on? FYI Beau did wear his to look at the sun, just not in the picture where I ask him to. These pictures were taken just minutes before the full eclipse. I thought the lighting was awesome.

Back to the Future Bekah

What is cute and blue eyed, can spin indefinitely without getting dizzy, and knows every word to Johnny B. Goode?
Bekah.
Who can sing Johnny B. Goode two dozen times in a row without getting sick of it (and simultaneously drive everyone nearby crazy)?
Bekah.
Who knows every word to a dozen other 50s songs and likes to sing them in half time and has done so day in and day out for the last month?
Bekah.
Who sang Johnny B. Goode all day yesterday?
Nope, not Bekah.
Beau. He's been a good student.

Here is my spinning wonder. She loved that her poodle skirt could spin so high. And she wore shorts underneath to protect her modesty, dontyouworry.

 

And here she is, Chuck Berry in the flesh. I told her she needs to work on her moves. I even showed her the Chuck Berry, and Michael J. Fox.

Oh and just so you know, this girl recently made big bucks from the tooth fairy. (The tooth fairy that has incidentally been exposed. It turns out Bekah is a handwriting expert, and when the tooth fairy fills out the questionnaire that Bekah left for him in the middle of the night, it looks eerily similar to Dad's handwriting.) Check out this beautiful smile:

Mother's Day

Yesterday, of course was Mother's Day. I was sure to let Rus sleep in on Saturday morning, because what I really wanted most of all was to sleep in myself on Sunday. And HOORAY! Wish granted...Rus even woke me up (sometime after 8am hallelujah), saying that my breakfast of caramel rolls was done. Yum, sugary yum. I didn't have to change Marianne's stinky bum and I didn't have to clean up the monumental stack of dishes I made making dinner. Thank you Rus!
Bekah and Jacob also spoiled me with gifts they made at school. Their gifts were actually quite good! Jacob made me a beautiful clay sunflower - he shaped it and stamped it and painted it himself.

Then he hung it on a push-pin in my room, right above my bed so I could see it everyday. He also helped his teacher come up with this:

Bekah made me a beautiful sunflower drawing. The sunflowers were drawn with a hot glue gun and then she colored everything else with oil pastels. She also did some weaving with different colored yarns around a paper cup and attached a bead handle. I think it'll be my new coin jar in the van. So cute!

 
Her card cracked me up too:

The kids also helped Rus buy me some jammies. Did you know I loved Hello Kitty? Me neither, but they were soft and comfy. (I told Bekah they needed to be soft and no buttons. Mission accomplished.)
 And here I am with all my loot: Caramel Rolls, artwork, cards and pizza cutter.

I am a truly blessed woman.

Motherhood is...

Here is my non-winning essay for the NieNie Dialogues essay contest. The essay winners wrote really good and inspiring essays (and they all involved some life drama - adoption, illness, death - and I'm good staying out of those categories). 

Today as I loved on my six-month-old daughter’s neck and thought about how beautiful and amazing she was…she spit up on me. I grabbed the nearest thing, wiped up the spit-up, and scolded her in sing-song baby speak until she gurgled with laughter and started cooing. I was still over the moon for her, just slightly wetter and smellier than ten seconds before.

Motherhood.

Messes and bleach, mayhem and quiet time, wonder and futility. Motherhood is the mother of all contradictions. I have never loved a little person so completely, and I have never been so immobilized and furious at the same little person’s irrationality. The fact that God can both complete me and disassemble me with my own child is further evidence of his genius.

My own coming-to-motherhood story began like the grade school chant:

First came love, then came marriage, then came a bouncing baby girl who stripped me of any parenting ideals I might have had. She was beautiful and demanding, chubby and picky, happy and gloriously opinionated. At six months all eighteen pounds of her felt like the weight of the world – how amazing that I was allowed to hold her; how terrifying it was to be her world! I felt marvelously under-qualified. (She is seven now – I still feel the same way.)

Motherhood, she taught me, is about sick days and adventures, veggies and treats, early bedtimes and late night glow-sticks. One moment I was elated to claim that beautiful pigtailed girl singing in the front row of the program at church, and the next I realized that her brother (next to her) was proudly picking his nose. The son that could be Evel Knievel on his bicycle was reduced to tears when put on a t-ball team. Bandaids could heal anything and, “Go empty the dishwasher,” was a life sentence. My three-year-old once lamented after eating a ring pop, “My hands are going to be sticky forever!” I could relate. Sometimes, in hard times, I feared that everything would be the same way forever: boogers and tears and cries like chicken pecks on a weary mother hen. And then my daughter would paint me a picture, “That’s you and me momma,” and I would wish that I could package her in that moment, store her carefully in tissue and ribbons and keep her that way forever…Small hands with dirty chipped nails, skewed pigtails and a streak of pink paint on her cheek.

Slowly, painstakingly, the trickling streams of experience have deposited themselves into one simple pool and reflect the age old wisdom that grandmas like to share in the grocery store line: Being a mom is so hard. But once you are one, not being one is unimaginable. Being a mother is the contradictions – the constantly shifting ground, the heartache and bliss, the sneaking suspicion that you might be going crazy – and it is joy – the deeply felt happiness that in my house has four distinct names: Rebekah. Jacob. Beau. Marianne.

Need a Good Laugh? No Really...

Marianne has a funny face.
Well actually she has a super cute, super chubby face with beautiful blue eyes and full pink lips...
Lips that quite often like to do this:

She has started doing this face regularly in the last couple of weeks. Funky nose breathing accompanies it, (she could possibly suffocate herself just by doing this with her lips),...so I can usually tell when she's making this face even when I'm not looking at her because of the sound of her breathing. It totally cracks me up! I wondered where on earth this silly face came from! I told Rus about her silly lips and he said, "What, like this?"

BWAHAHAHA!!!

I can't even tell you how many fits of laughter I have had over this goofy face gene that Marianne and her daddy share! I can't make this face...neither can Bekah or Jacob or Beau...
Good thing they normally look like this or I might not be able to live with them!

Marianne at Eight Months EEK!

So the Bug is eight months old. She is silly, sometimes goofy, wiggly, squealy, and still undeniably squishy. She has great hair but some weird cowlicks, bright blue eyes, and rubber-band-everything. She loves water - spraying, dripping, trickling, puddling, pooling, splashing water. She hates food until it's in her mouth. Then she doesn't hate it but doesn't spit it out, either. If she did have a favorite food it would be avocados (unless you count the contraband brownies that Dad feeds her). She loves windows - especially our windows because they are at her level. She loves Colonel - his tail, his wet nose, his presence in the yard when she's looking out the window at him. (She freaks Colonel out for some reason, though - he'll jump up and move away if she gets too close.)
Marianne loves her Daddy. She lunges for him and gifts him with a radiant smile every day when he gets home from work. She loves to pull the hair on his arms until he calls for mercy, and then loves to do it even more. She loves Bekah and Jacob and Beau, too, but Jacob is probably her favorite because he gives her the most attention. Or maybe it's because he's found that his nose is really good at tickling her belly.
Marianne loves paper, lint, fuzz - the smaller the better - she can find it anywhere and everywhere. She explores the world around her through her mouth. The camera strap, toothbrushes, and oh, heaven - my wallet - she loves to suck on my wallet.
Marianne loves to look at books. She'll give them a full 90 seconds of her attention before they go in her mouth. She loves to throw things, drop things and crawl over things. She is becoming an explorer-extraordinaire.
She is bright and happy and owns 100% of my heart. (As do each of my other children. And Rus. You figure out the math.)

Love you, Bug.