Nathan is two years old!!

Wow, these birthdays are actually making me blog with some regularity! And we're guaranteed another post in the next couple of weeks when Luke turns four. :-) And I actually have some time tonight so we'll get more details than on the last one, mostly because I feel guilty about the lack of documentation of Nathan's second year of life...





So we've made it through two years with our fiery little Nathan, and boy oh boy does he keep things exciting around here! He is lightning fast, can get into just about anything, and constantly amazes us by figuring out something or doing something that our other four kids never did. I sort of thought by child #5 that we'd have a handle on this, but HAHA NO.



Which is to say that I love this kid to pieces, but he is not an easy child. I don't know how much of it is Nathan and how much of it is Luke, but they fight constantly (not the arguing kind of fight, but the kicking/punching/biting/scratching kind, and I am completely clueless on how to stop this, since I've never dealt with it before so PLEASE give me advice if you have any!!)--they do not get along the tiniest little bit, and just about every morning I cry thinking about getting through another day of refereeing (let's be honest, I've been thinking about starting antidepressants again, so I don't think it's just them). But for posterity's sake, I will say this: Nathan is simultaneously delightful and difficult. He loves to snuggle but I never know when his cuddling down against my shoulder is going to end up with a ferocious bite to the neck, which kind of encapsulates life with Nate--enjoy the moment, but stay on your guard!

Nathan is still really struggling with eating/weight issues (he weighs 24.5 lbs at age 2, although he's quite tall), and one thing that I've found helps him to eat is if he prepares his own food. So he's gotten quite good at "pushing eggies," and will emphatically tell me he "wansa eggies" and start getting out the pan and the eggs himself. (Not coincidentally, he is one two-year-old who definitely gets the concept of "hot!")

 This photo is not actually from his birthday; it's just that he was so excited about candles that I thought maybe it might entice him to eat a carrot muffin for his snack. It didn't work, by the way. He just sang "habby bir-day" and blew it out, then walked away.

This picture perfectly encapsulates life with Nathan--building something and then running away from it at the speed of light (probably to turn around and kick it on the return lap) and every piece of clothing that he can take off is gone. I honestly could not count the number of times I put pants and socks on this kid every day, but he is soooo obsessed with taking them off. Two days ago I saw Neil changing him for bed, and then less than a minute later I saw Neil walking in one direction and a naked Nathan running in the other, and I was like, hey, are you going to finish getting him ready for bed? and Neil was like, I totally did, and then I rounded the corner and saw that Nathan had peeled out of his sleeper and diaper in the time that it took Neil to walk to the trash can to toss the old diaper.

Nathan's favorite thing in the entire world is "go ahside." He LOVES playing in the backyard with Abigail and Juliet (he adores them just as much as he picks on Luke) and will often bring them his shoes and say, "Ab-ee-dal, Doo-what, go ahside?" And since they adore him and are two little mother hens, they always comply and take him out to go play on the swings or the slide or to chase the chickies (or as Natie calls them "bok-boks and deek-deeks" [bok-boks are the older chickens, deek-deeks are the baby chicks]).



Some wonderful little things about Nathan to round out this post: he is sleeping in his big-boy bed and has done an absolutely terrific job at the transition, he calls animals by their sounds which I think is just darling (I especially love it when he talks about pigs), he is completely obsessed with semi trucks and yells "TRUCKS ROLL" whenever he sees one (thanks to this book which we read about five times a day), an obsession only slightly greater than his passion for "ex-cah-way-ders" (excavators), he is super ticklish and starts laughing when your tickling fingers are a good foot away from his tummy, he loves "smoofies" (smoothies) and tries to cover his ears whenever the blender turns out, but always misses and just puts his hands behind his head, he loves to sit in my lap for stories, especially if he has his "mee-mee" (blankie, which is a trellis-patterned black and white blanket which I bought for our living room couch and he immediately appropriated), he makes the BEST surprised face ever, and he gets super super super excited whenever I say, "Time to go get the kids from school!" and he runs to the door and starts hopping up and down chanting the big kids' names.

And he still loves to cuddle with me when he wakes up in the night. Out of all my kids, he is the only one that I've ever been able to sleep with and actually go to sleep myself. He's had a rough week with a stomach bug and on the third night in a row where I was up with him at 1 am and everyone else was asleep, I just brought him back to bed with me and the two of us slept curled up together for the next four hours (until Nathan wiggled around and put his foot in Neil's mouth and then Neil banished him back to his own bed).

Happy birthday, Nater-tot!

Abigail is 10 years old!

I have lots more photos that I'd love to put up, but I'm blogging during the girls' piano lessons (Abigail is borrowing the pen that I'd planned to use to write a grocery list), so I'm pulling the photo from Facebook that I posted yesterday rather than the gazillion on my iPad.

It's mind-boggling for me to realize that my first little baby is now a decade old. I've done a lot of reminiscing the last few days about those first few days with my precious baby and remembering her at all different stages and phases. I think it's especially poignant for me to think about this as we're closing the door on the baby stage in our family and focusing on raising our family rather than growing our family. This is the first spring in ten years where I haven't had either a newborn or a year-old baby, and it's wonderful but very different.

I've seen so much growth in Abigail over the last year. She has had a very, very, very difficult year in school, and she has come through it with so much grace and resilience, and keeps on going long after I am sitting there fuming at the latest concern about her classroom environment--she sighs, tells me it's super hard, and then gets back to work (and man oh man, has she worked her little tail off this year! She's had three hours of homework just about every night). While it's been an awful year, she has learned so many good and valuable skills about dedication, hard work, and perseverance that will serve her well for the rest of her life (however, Neil & I feel like she's done learning those skills from this particular teacher, and she's moving to a new elementary school next year instead of continuing for the second year in the two-year sequence with this teacher--can you tell that this is the extremely condensed version of this giant drama?!) Anyway, she has worked so hard this year, and I am super proud of her, but also really excited for her new teacher!

Abigail is like my right hand these days. Nathan absolutely adores her and she is always so kind and loving with him; it's no wonder that his face totally lights up when she walks into the room! She is turning into a wonderful little cook and turns out all kinds of delectable concoctions; I love it when it's her week to help out with dinner, and she is always adding little things to my grocery list so that she can make a particular recipe that she's found. She is still passionate about her cheese (remember that little first-grader who insisted on taking double-creme Brie for lunch?!) and one of her birthday wishes was to go to her favorite cheese shop and pick out four varieties for her birthday dinner (she settled on a delectable herb-wrapped Brie, mango-studded Stilton, a sharp Maytag Blue, and a mellow & creamy pumpkin Gouda). She is an absolute delight and I love her dry sense of humor (and she definitely inherited her mother's habit of ironic inflections!) and funny little jokes; she is constantly entertaining the other kids with the latest joke she's made up (my favorite last week: Neil was explaining the Scooby Doo cartoon premise, since Abigail had come across a reference to the show and was wondering what it was, and then she said--totally deadpan--"What do you call a dog who's excellent at both swimming and solving crimes?" and then said, "Scuba Doo!").

It's crazy to realize that we are only eight years from this kiddo heading to college, but I'm definitely seeing the writing on the wall--this year she asked for clothes for her birthday, and we've been fielding questions for a loooong time about how long she has to wait until she can buy an iPod or other electronic device. I'm so grateful for the last ten years I've had with my darling, witty, kind-hearted, and beautiful girl, and looking forward to many many more. 

Love, Aunt Pam

When I first began blogging, one of the things I loved most about it was the connectivity with other women. As time went on and things like Google Reader made it so easy to read without actually accessing the page, I stopped commenting on other blogs and noticed the same decrease in my own comments. It made me so sad--I wondered if anyone was still reading or if I was just saying boring things and maybe I should turn off comments or just stop blogging?

But I always knew I could count on comments from my Aunt Pam. Invariably, a few hours after I would publish a post, I would receive an email with a comment from her. The comments always told me how adorable my children were and what fun memories I was making with them, and would often share a little anecdote about when she had done something similar as a child. And they always ended the same way: "Love, Aunt Pam."

Three years ago, my aunt was diagnosed with a very aggressive type of cancer. For those three years, as she underwent nearly constant chemo and radiation treatments, she continued to write to me and tell me how much she loved me. As she grew more ill, her comments became shorter and often would say simply, "Wonderful post. Love, Aunt Pam." Eventually we just began emailing. And some time after that, she became too weak to return my emails and went into hospice care.

Last week I was thinking about her. I put up a post with a few pictures and emailed her the link, but I never heard back from her.

Yesterday, my mom called to tell me that my aunt had died in her sleep. I was so grateful that she was released from intolerable pain as her body shut down, but I was heartbroken at the same time. My aunt has always lived far away from me, and I haven't seen her in person since Abigail was a baby, but she has been such an amazing example to me of how to truly reach out and love someone from afar. She has been a large presence in both my childhood and adulthood, and has quietly reached out to support me in some times when I felt completely alone and isolated from anyone else, and did so on such a constant, continual, and quiet basis that it always felt completely natural and utterly loving. I spent a long time this morning reading through all of her emails (and there were so many!).

I am so grateful for her loving support in my life, and while I am so, so, so grateful that she is free from pain and illness, I will miss her so much.

Bits and bobs

I hate catch-up blogging. I really do! My favorite kind of blogging is the kind that happens every day, where I'm recording the funny or interesting or dismal or transcendent things that happened that day. It's a much better journal because I can really see the change over time. With catch-up blogging, I feel like I'm just blogging events that don't really change that much in their overall scope. Every year we have birthdays, Christmas, spring break, etc., and they mostly follow the same pattern, but it's the day-to-day stuff that is most interesting to me.

With that said, I'm a terrible daily blogger lately. So terrible, in fact, that when I downloaded some photos from Facebook tonight (yes, this is one of those recycled photo posts) that I realized that it's April and I haven't even made monthly folders for my photos. I always organize them by year and then by month--I have 2015 but that's it. We still haven't replaced that camera that's somewhere in a snowbank in Aspen; any photos are being taken on my iPad and then posted to Facebook with some little caption because that's so much easier than blogging. But here I am anyway with some old photos that you've probably already seen if we're Facebook friends but I still like them so here they are.

The day Luke wore this costume, he told me he was half skier, half princess, and half nothing. 

The other reason that blogging has been hard for me lately is that I just don't feel like there's much that's interesting in my life right now. We're still in the exact same place doing the exact same things. No new babies, no graduation, no new job or house or renovations or projects. I made strawberry jam last weekend, just like I've done in spring for the last nine years. I'm training for a half-marathon, just like I've done over and over again. I'm working more than I'd like to and worrying about the children and wondering what I can do to help Neil graduate. Winter is over. Spring is coming. And I'm hoping desperately that it lifts me out of my ongoing funk.

A few weeks ago the children were on spring break. We stuck pretty close to home most of the time--we went to the library one day and met some friends at the local children's museum another day, but one day we ventured further afield and went to the zoo with Neil. It was SO wonderful to be outside--it was one of the first warm(ish) days that we'd had in forever (it snowed the next day but boy did we enjoy our time in the sunlight while we had it!)

Another day I made strawberry pies--my very favorite recipe here. Soooo good.

And lots of friend time over the break--one day all of the kiddos made this giant fort city out of the living room. This was about halfway through.

Homemade playdough one morning...

...and a grumpy monkey the next.

A rainy afternoon playing with Isaac while the two little boys took naps (simultaneously! Hasn't happened in ages! Sweet manna from heaven!).

My old blender finally gave up the ghost and shattered catastrophically, so I no longer had a valid excuse not to take the plunge I'd been debating for the last two years. And you guys--I am SO in love. We've had it for less than three weeks and I've already made 59 smoothies (it has a counter). I love love love the fact that everything gets perfectly pulverized; I have been drinking regular green smoothies for years and it is soooo nice not to fish bits of spinach or chunks of blueberry out of my teeth or the sippy spout of Nathan's cup! I didn't think I would feel so passionately about it but I totally do. :-) (Plus Abigail is now obsessed with making us smoothies all the time which is pretty awesome. The only downside is that I discovered I have a kiwi allergy, which is a total bummer. I probably wouldn't have noticed without making a 3-kiwi smoothie one day that made my tongue go completely numb for 4 hours.)

Oh man have Luke and I been knocking heads lately...I keep asking him when "sweet Luke" is going to come for a visit--you know, the one that doesn't lie on the floor screaming when his slightest wish is defied? And he scrunches up his face and glares at me and says, "MOM I AM YOUR SWEET LUKE!" and then I kiss him and say, yes, you are Luke, but can you be the happy version of Luke? You know, the one who's not sitting on your brother and calmly looking at a book while he screams his head off?

So I love this photo. Happy Luke! Not screaming-at-me-and-throwing-things-Luke. Please tell me I'm not the only one who has a hard time with four-year-olds. 

And last but not least, some new little chickies to add to our flock. Abigail has been begging for bantam hens ever since we saw how tiny and dainty and adorable they were last year. She is in total heaven right now and has spent a great deal of time cooing over them in their little bathtub home (we will begin integrating them with the older hens in another couple of weeks).

Meet Eleanor...

 ...and Rosemary. (Yes, I was totally sitting on the edge of the tub holding a chick and rereading Animal Vegetable Miracle...I couldn't remember if they had any bantams.) :-)