lunch blog

For those who asked, you can find the lunch blog here.  Disclaimer:  I am NOT one of those super creative bento bloggers who cuts things into bunny-ears shapes and whatnot.  And I've only been packed eight school lunches, so an expert I am not, but I do find it helpful to record combinations and ideas, so that's what this is. (Comments with suggested lunches would be very welcome!  :-) 

A couple of notes:  I bought a small thermos container for sending hot/cold items that so far seems to work really well.  I also bought a couple dozen small lidded containers that are nicely sized for child-sized portions; I like to pack her lunch in the afternoon when she gets home from school and pop it in the 'fridge so it's one less thing I have to worry about in the morning.  And as you'll probably notice if you click over, she really does well with small munchable fruits/veggies, so that's mostly what I've been sending (things that I would like to send that she doesn't like:  beans (the protein-rich variety, not the green stringed version) and string cheese...we're still working on finding good protein sources.

catching up

You guys, I am so behind on blogging it is not even funny.  I have taken hundreds of pictures and I am too tired/busy to format, save, and upload them, and who wants to read a blog without pictures?  Good thing I'm so behind that I have pictures like the above that I haven't posted yet (from when my mom and my sisters Elise and Mary Beth visited a couple of weeks ago.  The girls spent probably two hours playing with Elise's hair and I thought this particular style looked like those centauresses (is that a word? lady centaurs?) from the original Fantasia.  (I had SO much fun with them while they were here and I was so sad to see them go, especially since both my parents and all four of my sisters are hanging out RIGHT NOW in Provo without me.  Woe is me, woe, woe, woe is me).

Anyway, lots of things have happened lately, which I have photographed, but my camera now refuses to turn on, so...no pictures.

• Abigail started first grade last week--she's gone all day!  It's so long! But she is loving it and thriving.  I think she really enjoys the adventure of taking her lunch every day (although it is a little stressful for me; I even started another blog so I can just record what she takes every day--no, Mom, before you ask, I haven't finished the book on overcoming OCD, or as you put it, "the family disease").  Her teacher seems awesome and another little boy from church is in her class and rides her bus, so I think that has helped the transition.  She starts ballet & jazz lessons in a couple of weeks and I'm hoping she loves them.   The Harry Potter obsession is still going strong--although I did take the books away so she could return to Real Life and get used to the fact that There Are Other Books In This World--but today we built a blanket fort so that Harry (Jules), Ron (Isaac), and Hermione (Abigail) could go camping in the Forbidden Forest and look for werewolves (!!!) and we spent dinner discussing the dream about Harry Potter she had last night.  She keeps trying to weasel clues out of me about the remaining four books (she is so her mother's daughter).
• Juliet is going to preschool in a couple of weeks.  I had really wanted to do a Joy School for her this year, but I couldn't find enough people to do it with, so we signed her up at the last minute last week (fortunately we were able to get into my top choice because another applicant had moved like the day before or something like that).  We went to visit the school and Juliet was almost out of her mind with joy at the fact that their theme this year is monkeys.  Monkeys!  Monkeys!  Juliet was in heaven.  My main concern was having her gone 3 mornings a week, but after I finalized our fall schedule I realized that all 3 mornings were filled with things that she would not like doing, so now I don't feel so bad about it anymore. 
• Isaac is talking more and more these days--his pronunciation improves daily (he no longer says "Otay" and "Ready Shet Go," but the big-boy versions thereof).  He does all kinds of exciting things like building himself chair-ladders so he can eat an entire box of prunes at one go, or gain access to the knife block and start slicing tomatoes.  (In other words, I cannot leave him alone for one single second.) He is starting to recognize and play with his little friends and I think he's really going to enjoy his playgroup this fall.  
• Luke is my sweet darling who spends so much time in his bouncy seat that his head is flattened.  (I feel really horribly guilty about this, actually.)  He is a doll and the three older kids are so sweet with him--even Isaac has gotten much gentler.  All three of them are great at dangling toys in front of him or giving him his pacifier and bouncing him in his seat while I am frantically trying to do something else (it seems like my hands are always sticky these days, I don't know what it is...).  He is sleeping so much better these days and is only waking up to nurse once (occasionally twice) in a 10-hour stretch.  AWESOME.
• I'm teaching this fall and training for a 10-K right now, because I don't have enough to do around here (hah. hah. hah.  actually today Neil came home 2 hours later than usual and I was secretly relieved because it took me that long to finish everything I needed to do before he got home.)  I honestly do not know how women with more than four children do it gracefully--I feel like I am bouncing from crisis to crisis.  But at the same time, it's awesome, and I am having so much fun with my little people and my charming husband.  (And I think things will settle down now that I finally have all the scheduling ironed out--and I bought myself a huge new whiteboard that covers the freezer door.)  I can't believe I considered running a marathon this fall--last week I ran 22 miles, which isn't even a full marathon, and it was SO hard to wedge the miles in with everything else that's going on (oh, did I mention my garden?!)  I also got another calling a month or so ago working with the Laurels (16 to 17-year-old girls in our church) and I am LOVING it.  They are awesome ladies. 

On another note, we went to the temple this weekend for the first time since Luke was born.  It was so nice to be back there--I was able to do both iniatory and endowment sessions (thank you good baby sleeping!).  We stopped off at Navy Pier and went to the Chicago Children's Museum and had ourselves a lovely time (plus very decadent ice cream on the way home).  It was so fun, and I took about 5 pictures before my camera completely gave up the ghost.  

and now if anybody is still reading...I am done for tonight.  Neil is finally home, the kids are all in bed, the house is clean, the laundry is done, and I'm headed for a really hot bubble bath with a stack of books. 

A List of Things I Know I Shouldn't Do, But Do Anyway, And Probably Will Until I Die

1) Take my running shoes off without unlacing them.

2) Eat chips and salsa in my (all white) bed.

3) Throw my clothes on the floor every night after obsessing all day about the cleanliness of my house (and then pick them up every morning).

4) Jump on my bed, because I bought it, and if I break the springs, well, I bought it.

5) Stay up too late reading (like every night) because I want some "me time."

6) Allow my kids to check out as many library books as they want without using a sensible limit like one per year of age or something like that.

7) French fries.  (one of the best days of my life was when we went to Waterloo and it started pouring rain and so we ended up at this tiny little cafe table with two ENORMOUS orders of frites, which in France are double-fried in animal fat, which is so unhealthy but So. Amazingly. Good.  Plus in France they take their frites really seriously and they have about 1000 different things you can dip them in). 

8) Spend hours and hours planning and researching elaborate projects, buy all the materials, and then sit back and watch Neil do all the work.

9) Use Amazon to distract myself when I am doing something on the computer I really loathe and dread (like grading). 

10) Order the same thing over and over at restaurants because I know I like it and I'm afraid of getting something I will hate and have to pay for it anyway.

11) Cheese.  (see above entry on French fries.)

nearly wordless wednesday: mini chef

Isaac loves nothing quite so much as helping me cook.  Whenever I start doing something in the kitchen, he runs in at top speed, drags a chair over, and grabs a spoon, whisk, or measuring cup, and launches right in.  Sometimes it's a little scary (like when we're at the stove--I have given up on keeping him away and instead just focusing on super monitoring), but it's fun to see his fascination with everything and his eagerness to do taste-testing (remarkable and heartening because he is a very reluctant eater these days). 

Isaac's favorite appliance of the moment:  the food processor.  (The pesto and salsa I made last week were a little over-blended, due to his extreme enthusiasm!)

state fair

So remember how Neil's job is working with electric vehicle racing, and how a couple of years ago we had to go to Pole Day for the Indy 500 (I know, poor us, right? We would have gone this year but I was kind of busy having a baby).

The kids all climbed up into the electric go-kart (not available to the general public, so I made them get back out when I saw all the other little kids looking at it longingly). 

So this year the university had a booth at the state fair about the electric vehicle Grand Prix.  Neil spent part of the day down there on Friday, and then the kiddos and I drove down to join him (full disclosure:  I was extremely stressed/nervous about the hour drive and getting all the kids to the fairground by myself, but it went well--although I had to remind myself to do yoga breathing about every two miles from my own made-up fears while the kids quietly ate apples and listened to Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery). 

We spent about five hours at the fair.  I'll just give you the highlights.  :-) (Major highlight being that we all got in free, thanks to Neil's boss and some nice people who gave me their complimentary 4-H tickets in the parking lot.)

Abigail, as influenced by Charlotte's Web, wanted to a) see pigs and b) ride the Ferris Wheel.  Juliet wanted to eat ice cream and have a balloon.


We walked through the cattle barn, the saddle horse barn, the sheep, and finally found the swine barn, which was populated for the week by about a million very loud goats.  Tragedy! 

Abigail was very upset by this (almost as much as Isaac, who was completely terrified by all the very large animals, probably because we started out with the cows, who were tied up to railings and not in pens.  Several thousand pounds of cow right next to Isaac = death grip on Daddy for the rest of the night).  He did finally reach out to pet one goat, screaming "NO NO NO" at the top of his lungs.  I'm not really sure what that was all about.  In case you can't tell, that open mouth in the picture below is not a smile.


As we were walking towards the lone pig at the fair, as directed on the map, a guy gave us free balloons and a woman gave us free ice cream.  Juliet was blissfully content and everyone else suddenly seemed to be in a better mood (plus we found the pig and Abigail was content, even though we did not get to examine 1000 pigs to see which looked the most like Wilbur, which was probably not a bad thing).


 Then we saw the elephants and the hot air balloons and it suddenly became the Best Day of Their Lives.

Our obligatory "we live in a Corn-Growing State" photo...there were seriously cornstalks growing all over the fairgrounds.  Awesome.  (Also, I think/hope I am more slender than I look in this photo.)

At the very end of the night, we made it over to the midway, which was crazy and loud and awesome and waaaaay overpriced.  Fortunately we had the $11.25 that it cost for the girls and I to ride the Ferris wheel together, and the glee and delight and sheer joy in their eyes was worth every penny.  Such a fun day!  I have fond memories of going to the county fair when I was little (I remember bringing peanut butter cookies and blueberry muffins for the 4-H judging) and it was so much fun to revisit some of that with my little family.  I love walking down the midway at night and seeing all the sparkly lights and smelling the elephant ears and just reveling in the craziness of the fair.  I definitely wouldn't want to stay there forever (what's with all the people selling hot tubs?) but it's so fun once a year.

PS...Neil and I went running for our date tonight and it was HOT HOT HOT while we ran our six

miles.  I was feeling all grumpy about the heat and then we went home to cook dinner (actually Neil cooked it while I fed Luke, but it was delish--steaks topped with baby portabello mushrooms, grilled asparagus, blueberries, and steak frites)...and then while we were eating the mother of all rainstorms came and pounded our garden with hail for a good ten minutes and rain for twice that.  Eeek!  I remembered this run (the one where we got totally pounded with rain and a goose pooped on Neil) and suddenly the heat didn't seem so bad.  Plus dinner was awesome.  Rare steak is pretty much the only reason why I am not 100% vegetarian (actually I had a pulled pork sandwich last night at the fair and it was crazy good.  back to the black bean burgers tomorrow!)

 

Luke @ 3 months

he really is the most chubby and delightful little man.  Love snuggling those cheeks!

Lovely

Julesie turned four yesterday!

 Today I woke up and realized that we only have a week left before school starts, so we better pack in the fun while we can.  Fortunately the weather is finally such that we can be outside, so we spent all morning going back and forth between the sandbox and the watercolors (we did have an unfortunate incident where Isaac found himself besmeared with paint and a shovelful of sand down his diaper, thanks to Juliet, who attempted oh-so-sweetly to remedy matters by blasting him with the hose). 



We ate our lunches outside and then had a really lovely quiet time--the girls didn't fight and Luke slept the whole time while I was running.  It honestly does not get any better than that!

One of the things I wanted to do this summer was to do more unplanned meals directly from the garden.  I am a big  meal planner so this was a little bit of an adjustment for me, but it's actually been really fun just going out there in the morning, seeing what's ripe, and seeing what I can concoct from what I have on hand.  Tonight it's eggplant parmesan with tomato-basil sauce (which is seriously making my house smell like heaven as it simmers away on the stove). 

Isaac and Juliet are either the best of friends or the worst of enemies these days.  Right before naptime she whacked him on the head and he bit her in retailiation; right now they're holding hands and running races and jumping off the foyer bench (my kids are way into jumping--we have the occasional bump and bruise, but mostly I just let them go at it.  Builds strong bones, right?). 

And two of my sisters are flying in from Utah tonight!  YAY!

Yesterday our friends called us on Google Video--such a treat.  We miss them so much!                           

And these cheeks.  I cannot get enough of them.  He's getting SO big!

fall planning

I've been kind of a zombie the last few days--Neil has a pretty nasty case of shingles, which means he can't go anywhere near Luke and so the nights have been rough (for me, at least--Neil is getting lots of blissful sleep.  Lucky!!).  But today was my rest day from running, and I actually took a nap, and I feel SO much better!  (Plus we had some friends over this morning and then a lunch get-together afterwards, and I always feel so much better after a few hours chatting with friends.  Never underestimate the power of just talking to other adults who are also in the Trenches of Motherhood).

So I finally felt like I could tackle some things that have been nagging at me, like actually answering emails and figuring out which books I want to give away and reorganizing the girls' closet (for some reason I have been keeping all their dresses hanging up, and it was really sad folding them all up and boxing them for the first time ever.  I hope we have at least one more girl so I can dress up a chubby little darling in those sweet ruffles again).  And I've been making some plans for fall--I'm a little worried because we decided not to put Juliet in preschool.  I just didn't like the idea of her being gone three or four mornings times a week (while I would have loved to do a Joy School, I couldn't find anyone else to do it!  Oh well).  So I feel like I need to have some good concrete plans and activities, and I've been researching classes for both girls and trying to figure out schedules and playgroups and whatnot.

In the midst of all of this, I'm thinking that I want to sign myself up for something too.  Every so often I like to take some new classes (strangely this always seems to coincide with having a new baby...I guess I feel like I really need some self-enrichment!)  In the past I've taken yoga and quilting classes, both of which I really enjoyed and ended up incorporating into my "regular" life. 

I'm thinking this fall about taking ballet classes.  I haven't done any ballet classes since I was seven, and I'm a little nervous about the idea (mostly because I would feel very self-conscious about my not-dancer's body) but I think it could be fun.  Or I could learn some new music--I used to play the piano really well, but I haven't seriously practiced in a long time.  I'd also love to take cooking technique classes, but I don't know if any exist around here...or some practical sewing classes or something like that.  Or flower-arranging, or interior design.  So many possibilities!  I may have to check out online classes too, since I know you can do correspondence courses in things like sourdough (for real.  I think that would be so cool!) 

If you could take a class in anything, what would you choose?

nearly wordless Wednesday: Luke & me

annnnnndddd...we're back

So last week I was talking to my much wiser friend Melanie about this whole blogging thing.  I explained to her that I felt like my blogs were either all of the "woe is me" variety, which I don't particularly care for because I don't like to read that sort of thing, but if I tried to be upbeat and cheery and talk about something neat that we did, it was a false representation of how my life really is (because mostly I am wading through the floor food here).  To which she very tactfully responded that she has found that even if she is blogging about the only good two seconds of the day, those are the two seconds that she'd like to remember.

I've been thinking about that over the last week, and I've found that I'm still taking pictures and composing blog posts in my head, and then I feel jittery because I'm not blogging, and there's so much that I've missed recording that I'd like to have written about--silly things like how beautiful the flowers in my garden are, or the delectable chocolate-swirl cheesecake that Neil made for my birthday (I was doing really well on No Junk July until then), or the night we took the kids to get ice cream and went squirrel-chasing through the park, or how my family has given me yet again the best birthday ever (seriously, I am always so touched by how much thought is put into the gifts.  Amazing people, I tell you). 

So here I am.  And here they are again.   And I wish I had the time to write an update on each kid, because that's what I was planning to do, but Luke is hungry and Neil just got home with a vanload of sweet corn, so I will just tell you that Abigail is obsessed with reading Harry Potter right now (she has read the first three books four times each) and our house is transformed daily into Hogwarts, and Juliet is walking around saying "Expecto Patronum!  Lumos!  Nox!" and yesterday they tried to dress Isaac up like a dementor, and I love them all dearly. 

Michigan

Last week we left for Michigan at 5 am in pursuit of a van with air-conditioning.  This has been a long and disheartening quest--we've had a guy looking at auctions for us for the last 10 weeks--and we finally decided to just bite the bullet and allocate a long weekend for shopping around, and we would come home with a car of some sort.  Wouldn't you know it,  all the cars we were interested in sold?  And we found ourselves trying to decide between overpriced, dirty, high-mileage options.  So depressing.  We were in the midst of this when we got a magical call and the auction guy had bought a car minutes before, right smack in the middle of our price range, with 30,000 less miles and dozens more options than everything else we'd seen.  So grateful.  So thankful.  (So suddenly addicted to the magic of power doors.)   We ended up trading in our old van (which my parents gave us a few years ago, and which was really great for us until the transmission went out...and then the brakes, struts, and AC all in one weekend, which happened to be the weekend Luke was born.  I think my mom was even happier to see that van go than I was!) 

The kids were so ecstatic--it's been incredibly hot here this summer, and Abigail asked me when we were leaving, "Can we have the air conditioning on while we drive home?"  and when I said yes, she asked, " Can we have it on driving around when we get home?" and when she got a second affirmative, her eyes got really huge and she whispered, "Mommy...can we have air conditioning on in the car whenever we want?"  Boy howdy, have we been cranking up that AC!

Anyway, our quick car-buying left us with a couple of free days!  Hurray!  My grandparents took us out for a delightful birthday lunch on Friday, and then I just generally had fun hanging out with my family that day--some shopping with my mom, and lots of talking with my little sister Rosalind (I may or may not have spent a few hours trying on her dresses.  Including her really gorgeous prom dress). 


And then on Saturday we went to the beach.  It was the most perfect beach day--hardly anyone was there, and the weather was gorgeous.  I spent just enough time swimming, just enough time building sand castles, and just enough time lounging in the shade with my two little boys (Isaac was definitely NOT a fan of the water or the sand, but he was all about the snacks).