Spring at last!

What a joy it was to get outside today and work in the sunshine after so many long months of winter! It seemed like we were out there every possible minute soaking up that glorious light and heat. We repaired fences that had broken under the weight of snow and ice, dug up the garden and sowed lettuce seeds into that rich black dirt, and freshened things up for the chickens (man oh man did the kids love this! Isaac was at a birthday party so he didn't participate in the straw-strewing, but the other kids were in heaven).

I gleaned so much satisfaction from pounding in nails and digging around in my garden and even power-washing my patio until it was pristine and ready to go for al fresco meals! Oh friends, it was glorious. And the kids spent hours on their bikes today--when they got out of the shower before dinner they were practically falling asleep in their plates thanks to all that exercise!

But fortunately they managed to eat up (this delicious brussels sprouts dish that I made up on the fly, plus everyone's favorite soup and homemade whole-wheat bread) before they tumbled into their clean sheets and clean jammies and slipped away into dreamland. It was a lovely day (and now for the 8 loads of laundry I managed to run during the day but only folded 3!). Looking forward to some time with Hulu while Neil finishes his 7-mile run (I did mine earlier this week; one more week solo and then we'll start doing our long runs together...I didn't anticipate when I was making babysitter arrangements that we'd be able to run outside this early!!). 

Still here

Most days I feel like I've given up on blogging, but occasionally I don't, and apparently this is one of those days.

I was thinking yesterday that poor Nathan doesn't have much record of his life and Nathan, if you want to know why, it is because YOU WERE CRAZY and you had not one self-preservational bone in your body and I sure hope you've grown out of it by the time you're old enough to read this. Pretty much all of my free time these days goes to frantically trying to keep you safe and putting out fires (literally--last week you figured out how to light the gas fireplace and it's only by the grace of God that we escaped unsinged).

 At 23 months, Nate, these are your favorite things to do: lie on the cat, pull the cat's tail, lie on top of Luke, sit on Luke's head, break Isaac's constructions, follow Juliet around begging for her to read to you, climb to the top of Abigail's bunk bed and jump up and down, eat toothpaste, eat chapstick, hide everyone's toothbrush, put all the toilet paper you can find into the toilet and flush vigorously, carefully pour milk over the kitchen windows, turn on every faucet in the house, sit on Luke, wreck Luke's traintracks/Magnatiles creations/Little People towns, run away at the library, and basically do all of the two-year-old stuff that none of your siblings actually did so your parents were completely unprepared when you acted like a normal two-year-old. Thanks for making sure we didn't miss out on that one.

 Good thing you're so darn cute, even with the juice of a dozen strawberries all over your clothes and face. And it's a good thing that your sisters think you're the cutest thing in the world so that they're motivated to protect you from wrathful brothers whose Lincoln Log house has just been destroyed for the millionth time...

So...life has been so busy. I don't know if it's just because I have five kids, or because of Neil's schedule, or because of my work schedule, or because of the THOUSANDS OF HOURS of homework the girls seem to have lately (seriously, folks, I don't remember having homework in elementary school, much less multiple hours every night). There definitely are never enough hours in the day these days, and I'm really looking forward to summer break and actually having some down time with the kiddos instead of trying to help three of them with homework while I simultaneously keep Luke and Nathan from killing each other and cook dinner (which is why today we had takeout pizza, thank you very much...I literally had not eaten all day because it was just so, so, so hectic, and the three oldest had swimming lessons and I needed to get them to their lessons and then take the youngest two over to the church with me so I could help teach the Activity Days girls). One of my friends told me once that things change so much when all your kids are in school, and the days are so slow-paced and then the afternoons/evenings are frantic activity. I'm starting to see that happening and I think what is going on? My kids aren't even that old and they aren't doing the gazillion activities that all their classmates seem to do!! This is already crazy town!

But anyway. I guess I don't have much to say other than we are busy busy busy and I just keep on hoping that someday I will feel like I'm all caught up on everything for longer than 5 minutes. And I wish I could recapture some of the energy and vitality and confidence I had in my twenties when I thought I had it all figured out and felt like I was doing an awesome job on everything--the older I get (and the older my kids get!) the more I realize that I'm just touching the tip of the figuring-life-out iceberg.