I have so many little matters to tell you of, that I cannot wait any longer before I begin to put them down.
Nov 23rd, 2012 by ECM
This year, we introduced Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Matthew to the joys of cutting down your own tree. Last year we walked down to the tree lot (just outside our subdivision) in flip flops and sweated buckets sawing and sawing at the tree. This year Derek literally had the whole tree cut in under a minute. NB for next year: make sure the saw they give us is sharp!
Nov 22nd, 2012 by ECM
Grilled scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage for Thanksgiving breakfast!
Nov 21st, 2012 by ECM
We’re stretching out Christmas this year, celebrating our first Christmas morning today with Grandma and Grandpa Muller and Uncle Matthew.
Same Christmas pajamas as last year–they still fit in them (though Susie’s are a bit small)!
Matching dresses! (And Elizabeth is relieved that she doesn’t have to share Betsy anymore!)
Now I’m off to start working on tomorrow’s dinner!
Nov 19th, 2012 by ECM
Susie’s vocabulary has exploded this past month; she’s still not stringing words together, but she imitates everything we say, and I can’t even list all her words anymore. Grandma and Grandpa Muller are here this week, and they noticed right away how she copies everything her big sister does! She loves to dance, to color with the big kids, to help Mommy unload the dishwasher, and to dust. Her hair is so unruly that she really needs something in it all the time, but she says “Ow” as soon as I approach her with the comb. She is scared of loud noises like the vacuum and the blender. She’s gotten a bit more clingy of late, crying every week when I drop her off in the church nursery. If she’s not playing with the big kids, she wants to be held by Mommy. Sigh.
Nov 16th, 2012 by ECM
Nov 15th, 2012 by ECM
It stinks to be the only parent at home on nights when the one night potty-trained child in the house decides to wet the bed at 2:30 am (fortunately having climbed back into her own from her snuggle fest with Tommy at bedtime so I’m not peeling soaked pajamas off both of them), wakes up her brother when she gets into bed with him (because I was too tired to put new sheets on her bed), keeps us all awake with her talking until well past 3:30, and wakes up early in the morning. Not that it mattered, because Susie was up at 6:45, chattering away, and crying when I didn’t get her out right away. This should teach me not to stay up past 9 pm when I’m on my own! Excuse me while I make another cup of black tea and put the sheets in the dryer. It’s going to be a long day.
Nov 14th, 2012 by ECM
I realized in bed last night that yesterday was Elizabeth’s three-and-a-half year birthday! Time for a little update just on her. She still gallops everywhere, dances in ballet class or in the living room, loves to be read to, and loves to help cook. She’s so helpful about folding washcloths, washing windows with a sock, pulling Susie’s shoes off and putting them in the closet, even trying to sweep the dirt off the patio. For all her cheerful, bouncy ways, she doesn’t have as much energy as Tommy or Susie. She’ll ride her trike or run for a short time, then tell me she’s tired and needs to rest. I’m trying to work on her stamina a bit. She is our earliest riser, though, and never happier than first thing in the morning. She’ll sleep for two to three hours if I put her down for a nap, but she can skip it as needed. I’m trying to decide at what point to just bite the bullet and let her drop it–she is definitely more cheerful in the evenings when she’s napped, but she falls asleep a lot earlier when she hasn’t. She tells me every day that she wants to do “what you and Tommy are doing” for school, so I’ve started going through the ABC Bible Verses book with her and will probably start our alphabet puzzle one of these days for letter recognition. Like Tommy, she’s been read to so much since birth that she will sit still and listen to a book without many pictures (like Little House), though she loves Richard Scarry and Gyo Fujikawa for bedtime reading. She’s really gotten into coloring in the past month or two (though her pictures are still monochromatic scribbles most of the time). Our biggest issue is that she still sucks her thumb and twirls her hair any moment she has down time. We’ve tried Thum polish, bribes, threats, constant reminders…nothing has worked. Her dentist definitely wants us to work on it, but we are out of ideas! Unfortunately, her little sidekick does everything her big sister does, so we have two hardened thumb suckers nowadays. She is such a happy member of our family!
Nov 13th, 2012 by ECM
My favorite thing to do with the big kids this fall has been snuggling up together to read the Little House books. I have such vivid memories of doing the same thing with my mom, a quarter century ago! We’re almost through Little House on the Prairie, and though I’ve read it over 20 times, I feel like I’m reading it with new eyes. You guys, do you realize how amazing Caroline Ingalls (“Ma”) was? She was totally isolated from her family and friends, doctors, church, or stores, keeping house in the most primitive of situations as her husband literally spent a year building the house around her. And then they had to leave it all. As portrayed by Laura, Ma never complains. She chooses to be grateful for the necessities Pa provides. (Oh good! A prairie hen, that I’ll have to butcher, and pluck, and cook over an open fire because I don’t have a stove, and serve with the same three staples and spices I’ve been using for all of our meals for the past four months!) She ensures that her daughters have complete respect for their father. She chooses to be content in her circumstances, and she makes the home a lovely, peaceful place for the whole family. I really want to be the kind of wife and mom that Ma was.
One thing that I’ve learned in the past eight-and-a-half years of marriage is that my attitude largely sets the atmosphere of the home. In our early years of marriage, I had this ideal that we’d go to the grocery store together, that we’d cook together (or that Derek would do the dishes after I cooked), and that he’d be home to focus on OUR FAMILY at 5 pm every night, and all weekend. I can’t believe I was so naive. (In my defense, I had friends at the time whose husbands really did do all those things. Fortunately, I came to realize that they were the rare exceptions rather than the norm!) I got such a bad attitude when my hardworking husband got stuck working late, had to go in on the weekend, or didn’t wash the dishes because he’d put in a 14 hour day at work and just wanted to collapse. The reality of our life, especially since the kids came along, is that we are lucky to have Daddy home by the time we start dinner, because we have to eat when the kids are hungry, not when it’s convenient for the adults. Late nights are less common now that he’s teaching, but they are common enough that I have developed a firm plan of attack for putting three kids to bed by myself. Weekends are ideally for family time, but Derek has been out of town six of the last ten weekends on work trips. Admittedly, this is not ideal. I used to get so worked up about it, and I’m sure I’ve complained to many of you many times about feeling like a single mom. But in general, I’m realizing that if I choose to be cheerful about it and supportive of Derek when he does manage to get home, our home atmosphere is calmer than when I whine, complain to him the moment he comes in the door, and generally show the kids that Mommy doesn’t have it all together. I need to focus on when my husband deep cleans the baby’s room without being asked (This weekend, he was wiping down walls, moving furniture, and steam cleaning the floors! Have I mentioned I’m madly in love with him?!) or washes up a huge pile of dishes after I’ve spent all afternoon cooking with three little “helpers,” or offers to run out at 9 pm to pick something up from the grocery store so I don’t have to drag the kids out the next day. And as I’ve said in the past, our family life is SO much healthier now than when Derek was slaving away at the big law firm–the kids see him almost every day, and he’s able to lead family worship before bed and knows most of our major routines. It’s all about perspective. On the harder days, I have to remind myself that I am getting to stay home with my kids because my husband works so hard to provide for us. And back to Ma Ingalls, my life is so much easier, on every level, than hers was! I really am incredibly blessed!
Nov 12th, 2012 by ECM
I’m trying hard to do more messy art projects with the kids now that we’re officially doing kindergarten, and I got this idea on pinterest. We harvested the seeds from a couple of our smaller pumpkins, painted them, and used them to make autumn tree art projects with our friend James.
I helped Elizabeth with the glue, but Tommy did his all by himself! The little brown scrap was Susie’s. She seriously thinks she’s as big as the other kids and should be able to do everything they do!
Rainy days are rare here, but when they come, it’s nice to spend a cozy morning, coloring at the table.
