Poetry Friday!

One of the things I want to do for school this year is lots of poetry memorization. The goal is for Miriam to learn a new poem every week-ish, so I can post something on this blog and you can all see what a talented, dramatic genius my daughter is and how she's guaranteed stardom when she gets her big break.

Here's the latest recitation:

Has it really been that long?

Ooh! Ooh! I wannit! I wannit!

Quotable Quotes

"I opened the cupboard, and the chocolate powder was just sitting there, looking at me with puppy-dog eyes."
--Mr. Pickles justifying why he had to make brownies one night
(pssht, like I need justification!)

Quick Prayer Request -- UPDATED

Please keep my Grampa B. in your prayers. I just found out he's in the hospital with pneumonia. He's almost 99.
Thanks.

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UPDATE 9/17

Thanks for all your prayers -- Grampa's going home today! From my dad:

He was hospitalized for a Pneumonia infection, and possibly a small kidney infection. Treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics seems to have worked, and so they are releasing him. Many thanks to my sister, M.E. & her husband for being great care givers! (There was no heart attack, as was first feared.) I guess they made them tough in 1910!

My mom also said:

The doctor was amazed that Grampa doesn’t take any medication except for a low-dose aspirin and a vitamin daily. When he asked if Grampa smokes, Aunt M.E. told him, “Not any more. He started smoking when he was 9, but quit when he was 12.”

And yes, he was a character and a half -- still is! Oh, the stories. Perhaps the secret to longevity is mischievousness. :)

Meet Our New Family Members!

I can't believe I haven't written about this yet! One of my pseudo-birthday presents to myself was gerbils! A friend of mine bought what she THOUGHT was two males from the pet store, until they had six babies. They do best in pairs, so my friend offered us two of them.

So now, meet Peter:


and Paul:

Miriam suggested the names, and I applied them. Paul used to be golden, and then changed into this browny mix -- he had a conversion, you might say. (yuk yuk yuk) He's the more social and exploratory of the two. Peter is a little more skittish. They're both very sweet.

So, what are gerbils, you ask? They're little rodents, between mice and rats in size. They have long hairy tails with little tufts on the end. They love digging (which is why they live in an aquarium instead of a wire cage) and chewing.

You should see this wooden house now -- all the openings have been somewhat enlarged, and the corners rounded. For toys we give them toilet paper tubes, and cardboard boxes for houses. (Amazon makes the PERFECT sized boxes.) They used to have a wheel, but chewed it into little bits in less than a week.

They're extremely social animals, which is what makes them such great pets for kids -- they don't bite (at least on purpose -- we've experienced a couple exploratory nibbles, though). They love sleeping in little furry heaps.


The girls take care of them every day -- Miriam is in charge of the water bottle, and Katie is in charge of food. I change their litter about once a week. (Another advantage -- they don't really have an odor -- you have to get up right next to their cage before you can even smell their little animally smell.) They've been a lot of fun -- very cute, very low maintenance. The ideal first pet! Their lifespan is about 2-3 years I think, so maybe when the Peter & Paul era is at an end, after a decent mourning period we can graduate to bigger game (like a bunny! ...please?).

Yet another childhood fantasy goes fffffffft.

I recently finished reading this book to the girls, "Half Magic" by Edward Eager. It's the most hilarious book. (and one of many I pilfer-- I mean, borrowed from the parents' library) Yesterday while the girls were playing in the basement and I was otherwise occupied with Joseph in the living room, Katie came upstairs, found Miriam's wallet, and brought it down. I heard coins clanking on the table downstairs for a while. After a time Miriam came upstairs, sighed heavily, and said, "It just didn't work."
"What didn't work?" I asked.
"Well," she replied, "I wanted to be a baby again, so I got all my coins and tried wishing on them but none of them worked."
"Ah," I said. "No magic talismans in your wallet then?"
"Nope," she said, and sighed again.

Today, she asked me, "Are there any fairies in this world?"
I felt like a murderer when I admitted, "Probably not." (Since you KNOW every time a child says it doesn't believe in fairies anymore, somewhere a fairy drops down dead.)
"Because," with a shy smile, "it would be nice if we had some fairy dust so we could fly."
I felt terrible for killing her hope.
I suppose there's always parasailing. Or hang gliding.

When I'm dead, of course.

One Big Happy

The girls really love their baby brother. So much so that I often find myself breaking up fights over who gets to play with him and make him smile. I can't blame them, though. Isn't he scrumptious?

onyourmarkgetsetgo!

Okay, so the latest excuse for why I hadn't updated our blog for a while is that we've been too busy living to write about living -- what with squeezing out the last few drops of fun from our summer vacation and getting ready for the new school year as well as all the usual housekeeping routines, August was a pretty packed month. Fun, but packed! I had only just started ordering the girls' school books the week before school began. I've still got a couple more books in the queue. I've had everything pretty much planned for a while, just still need to do some tweaking. It's going to be an interesting month, figuring out how to juggle everything.

As for the fun things we've been doing, Mr. Pickles took several days off the last week of summer vacation so we could do fun family stuff together. And naturally we forgot to bring the camera to anything, so you'll all just have to read the old fashioned way and imagine pictures in your head. Shocking, I know!

One Saturday we woke up and discovered that we absolutely nothing whatsoever planned for that day at all. At first we didn't know what to do with ourselves, but then we decided to make it a Fun Family Day and went to a local farm park. I had never been there, although the rest of the Pickles went last year while I was at a homeschooling conference. Miriam remembered a lot from last time and was showing me around. There was a barn with goats, sheep, and a couple litters of baby pigs, and giant horses. In the fields were cows and some calves, more sheep and lots more goats (including a couple really cute goat kids), and in pens there were chickens, turkeys, ducks, and a peacock (which sadly was molting so it didn't have a very impressive tail). It was neat watching all the animals. There girls were also impressed by the old farm's outhouse. :) At the end of the afternoon you could try milking one of the dairy cows. Miriam actually wanted to try it this year, and was very proud of herself that she actually got a couple streams of milk in the bucket. The cows were extremely placid. Katie's favorite part of the day was riding on the toy tractors, though.

Another neat part of the day was that there was an equestrian show going on all day in one part of the park. Miriam and I were in heaven. We watched a lot of the dressage and show jumping and talked about which horses were best and which were prettiest. If I were independently wealthy I'd totally have a horse and compete in shows. Watching the show brought me back to the happiest summer of my life, when I took horseback riding lessons. I think I was 12. They really made a big impression on me, and left me with a life-long desire to work with horses again someday. I was tickled that Miriam liked watching the horses as much as I did.

The next week we made our annual pilgrimage to a local waterpark. We had a bit of a crisis when we first arrived -- since it was the last week the park was open, its hours were drastically reduced and didn't open until 3 hours after we arrived. At first the girls were heartbroken. But I had noticed on the map that there was a zoo nearby, so we decided to check it out. It turned out to be the most fun day ever! The zoo was a great little zoo. All the animals were really tame and friendly (well, maybe all except the alligator). They had a petting barn full of sheep, goats, and alpacas, with lots of little baby animals everywhere. You could purchase a bucket of feed to give to the animals around the park, as well as baby bottles of milk for the lambs. There were a couple spider monkeys, which were fun -- the girls enjoyed watching them using their tails to hang on to things, as well as seeing the baby hold tight to its mother. The reptile house had a lot of really cool, enormous snakes that I was very thankful were behind thick glass. There was even a little 20-minute safari ride where we got to meet an ostrich named Tweety, a watusi named Bubbles, a blue antelope named Thor, and sundry other animals from Africa. Tweety thought my shirt tasted interesting. This zoo was right in the middle of the suburbs -- can you imagine waking up each morning to see zebras, ostriches and antelope right behind your backyard?? How cool would that be?

After we had our fun at the zoo, we headed over to the water park. Miriam had just recently discovered that she could swim unassisted, plus one of her friends showed up while we were there, so she was in little mermaid heaven. The water at its deepest was 3 1/2 feet -- just up to Miriam's shoulders. She went on all the slides she could, and climbed on all the floating rafts, and jumped and splashed and had a gay ol' time. Katie, on the other hand, spent most of the time shivering. Poor kid -- I need to get her a wetsuit. She wasn't quite old enough yet to really enjoy the park -- she went on one slide and climbed on a plastic turtle and splashed a bit in the shallow parts. But once she got Mr. Pickles' undivided attention while I tried to keep up with Miriam, she had more fun "swimming" around (wearing a big life vest). Joseph had great fun splashing and trying to grab streams of water, and just looking around and listening to all the water. At the end of the day we were all thoroughly tired out. Katie fell asleep in the car on the way home, fell back asleep on a chair after we got home, slept through dinner, and didn't wake up when I deposited her in her bed. She woke up next morning amused to be still in her clothes.

So the day was a big success!

Later in the week we went to see an exhibit of Jim Henson's Muppets at one of the many pocket-sized museums in DC. It was a really neat exhibit with lots of interesting background history. The girls, not surprisingly, enjoyed the hands-on part where you could use felt pieces to make your own muppet faces, or perform your own puppet show which showed up on a TV screen. It was one of those fun touristy things that we only do once a year, since we live here, so why should we do touristy things? I hope to be able to take advantage of more museum exhibits like this and incorporate them into our school year. I love the flexibility of homeschooling!

The rest of our Last Vacation Week was spent around the house, relaxing and doing last-minute school planning and bickering and getting on each other's nerves -- so we were pretty much ready for school to start. :)

Here comes trouble!

Here is a lightning-speed tour of Joseph's last 3 months. (*sniff* I can't believe he's almost 6 months old already!) Big things going on!

As I mentioned before, at 3 months Joseph discovered his hands. This become a source of never-ending entertainment. He spent that month developing his grabbing skills.

Must... get... princess.... Must... eat... princess....

Arrrrrrr! The horror! (As you can see, Joseph lives hand-to-mouth... literally.)

All his practicing paid off, because he now has a reach of about 4 feet, give or take -- at least it seems that way when he's in your arms and you're trying to keep something out of his reach. It's impossible. Especially if it's something that stains clothing really horribly, like tomato sauce.

The discovery of his hands was helpful for his parents as well -- it helped him fall asleep more quickly when he discovered how to suck on his fingers.

Not his thumb, mind you -- two fingers. I guess he likes a bigger mouthful.

At four months old, he introduced baby babbling into our lives. His especial favorite is "ah-ba!" particularly in the middle of the night after he's eaten and is SUPPOSED to have gone back to sleep. And of course he's mastering the baby standard, motorboating, with lots of drool.

He also began rolling over both ways -- back-to-front and front-to-back. Fortunately, for a while, he could only roll to the right, so he couldn't get very far because he'd roll into the couch and then get stuck until someone rescued him. He has a funny fuss noise -- he complains with his mouth closed. It's like an annoyed-sounding hum.

At five months, Houston, we have mobility! He figured out how to roll the OTHER way, as well as rotate on his stomach to reach a toy.

...or whole toybox, as the case may be.

He's also begun doing push-ups. (ah-wooga! ah-wooga!)

Just today we caught him doing a push-up and then launching himself forward -- he used to just back himself into a corner and get stuck (this seems to be a theme...). But if he develops forward mobility... I think I should start babyproofing NOW.

...But how could this precious little peanut EVER get in trouble?

The Cake Says It All

Lord our God, when your Son was dying on the altar of the cross, he gave us as our mother the one he had chosen to be his own mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary; grant that we who call upon the holy name of Mary, our mother, with confidence in her protection may receive strength and comfort in all our needs. We ask this through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

What did I ever do to deserve a child like this?

I'm keeping this note forever.

You should have seen the OTHER kid!

Alternately titled: What Happens When You're Being Naughty and Jumping Off the Furniture and Lose an Argument With the Coffee Table

(it's a much prettier blue in real life)

Sigh, our baby's growing up!

Miriam just hit another milestone! Last month she went from this:

...an exTREMEly wiggly tooth for WEEKS,

to this:
...a hole in her head!! I took this right after she asked me to yank it out. How do you think she feels about her first lost tooth? :)

Another big milestone was first trip to the hair salon. She's been begging to get her hair cut short for quite a while now -- all her best friends had recently gotten haircuts. But I wasn't ready to let it go yet! Finally I realized how ridiculous I was being -- it's her hair! All she wants is a trim! She's always so hot in the summers anyway, and her hair is so thick. So I finally took her to the local Hair Butchery and sat there while I watched all her pretty golden locks falling to the floor. I wanted to weep -- but then as the stylist dried and brushed and fluffed and actually styled it, it still looked pretty -- and so neat and chic! Miriam LOVES it. I think she really loves how cool she feels. At vacation bible school the next day she told anyone who would listen all about her new haircut.

Before:
After:


A couple days later I also chopped Katie's hair.

Before:

After:

It's not quite as cute as Miriam's -- I started cutting it one way and changed my mind halfway through the haircut -- but after a couple weeks it looks a little less, well, chopped. (You know what they say: the difference between a bad haircut and a good haircut is about two weeks.) :)

I also trimmed some hair from around Joseph's ears, since they had started to disappear. I also had to snip some off his neck, too, since it was almost as long as Miriam's. :) It's amazing how that makes him look a little less babyish and a little more boyish.

Now it's MY turn!

Joseph at 3-- no, 4-- no, 5 months!

Let the picturefest begin! Here's the first installment.

Here is Joseph's 3-month photo shoot. Well, it's actually closer to 4 months, since he turned 3 months while we were in California. He's in the cutie patootie outfit crocheted by Aunt Terri and Nana before Miriam was born. I just replaced the pink ribbon with blue.





I think this is my favorite. I just love his little boy cowlick. :)




Such a happy boy!


Now, who do you think he looks more like?

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit B 1/2

McCain is a Super Genius

I have hope once again for the outcome of the election. I think all the people, women in particular, who were disappointed when Hilary lost the nomination, and then again when Obama didn't appoint her his VP, are enthusiastic about Palin. She's one of us! She understands us! And the dems attacking her is only helping the Republican ticket -- I've read several comment from women who were extremely annoyed -- even offended -- by some of the idiotic things said about her. It seems like this upcoming election will be the female vote vs. the minority vote, much like the Democratic campaign was. Iiiiiinteresting. Verrrrrrry iiiiiiiiinteresting. This is gonna be a fun circus to watch!

(psst. note the sidebar!)

First Week Back to School!

This is my latest excuse for why I haven't update the blog in a while. :) I do have several drafts waiting to be completed... honest...

Here's a lovely piece by Elizabeth Foss about the first day of homeschooling. It was exactly what I needed to hear this week: I am not alone! We had quite the adjustment this week, accompanied by much challenging of authority (them), scolding (me), and whining (both of us). But at least the girls beg to "do school" every waking moment, so they're enjoying all the new school toys. For now. We'll see how long it takes for the bloom to fall off the rose. Meanwhile I feel like I'm running a three-ring circus, which I am, literally. Three very different children with three extremely different needs, often occurring all at the same time. I feel like I'm constantly living in a triage situation.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

(Image credit: "Books in Winter" by Jessie Wilcox Smith from art.com)

Our Son is Talented

Anyone care to posit a theory as to how our sweet little baby got himself in this position last night? (aside from our personal theory, which is space aliens)

One thing is for certain: our crib bumper is completely worthless.