kids

Funny Freeze-Frame Moments

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Betty just makes me chuckle.  Her accessories now include fuzzy hello kitty slippers.  It doesn’t matter if it’s 90 degrees with 99 percent humidity outside, she loves to wear them.

The other thing she loves to do is be with her big sisters.

 

My first attempt at shooting a picture with all three girls in their matching dresses that Grandma made.  Betty kept walking towards me, and I don’t realize how very tall Nadine is, until trying to stage all three of them together.  Every time she would kneel down, so would the other two, which still made for an awkward angle.  I love how Betty gives her cheesiest grin whenever a camera, or a phone, or anything resembling either of those things, is pointed in her direction.

On Sunday, we had a fun family picnic with the Weldons and my sister-in-law’s parents.  It was so much fun!  Betty loved the pool, and actually swam in just swimmies and without me holding her!  She doesn’t mind water in her face.  My all-time favorite moment of the day was putting her into this get-up.  Thanks to Capri for shooting this picture with her camera while I was in the water.  I couldn’t stop laughing!  The swimmies kept her little body from slipping down through the tube, and she just floated around the pool, jabbering away and loving it.

There were other really funny moments, which we’ll leave out of print.  But I’d love to know what you think we’re laughing about.

 

If at least twenty people comment about what they think is so funny, I will tell you.  Those of you who were there, are not allowed to say!

An Afternoon in Philly

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A little while ago our family took a day trip into Philadelphia.  No agenda.  Just ourselves.  We had a meltdown from the 4-year-old, so I took just the tall crowd up the Art Museum steps for some fun pictures.

We saw five different weddings being shot around the Art Museum.  Couldn’t help sneaking this picture.

It wasn’t until I was shooting pictures of our kids when I saw how funny their outfits were.  About 99 percent of the time I let them choose their own clothes.  Sometimes I veto a certain ensemble when we are going someplace nice.  Usually I don’t.  They are who they are.  I love their confidence.

Shadows are such close friends.

Yes, Jack was carrying a gun in the city and brandishing it while he ran down the steps.  One gun was bright blue and the other was a marshmallow blaster made of PVC piping.  Always ready for battle.

The tears flowed for quite a while before finally subsiding.  I love these kids!

Not every day do you see a UFO on wheels!

At last, her sweet face came out for a smile.

Can you guess where this is?

If that was you behind us in your Ferrari, you made my boys’ day.

I love Philadelphia.  It’s my favorite city with so many memories made there.  I can always be persuaded to spend a day in Philly.

Running Through The Night and More

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After my last weepy post, I have been blessed by the hugs, reassurances, and reminders of faithful friends all around me.  It is difficult for me to know the balance between honesty and what could come across as, “Pity me, please,” that is so often inundating our lives… or walls.  It is my true hope that I can be real both in life and in writing.  That what you see is what you get.  I have daily struggles, and validating that fact is better than ignoring them.  I want to convey a well-balanced story of my heart and life, without being depressing or making one cock their head and wonder if everything is always perfect.  My life is an open book, and I hope I can be courageous enough to show you not only the beautiful parts of it, but also the difficult and sometimes ugly.  Ultimately, everything points to Jesus, the Author and Perfector of my faith.

This week has been full of spring-time activities.  A long-anticipated visit from an old friend.  Night-time talks on the front porch.  Roses from our garden in full bloom.  Putting a bathing suit on Betty for the first time.

Strawberry picking with the kids.

The boys decked themselves out the other day in this fashion.  Paperclips in their ears, gaudy jewelry, and the usual bling all over Jack.  They love to be tough and strong.  They can also be so gentle and loving.  I am constantly amazed by this sweet balance that both they and their Daddy possess.

Speaking of Matthew… he took me on a date Friday night.  We enjoyed live music at Burlap & Bean, with some delicious coffee and tea.  We had some much-needed time to reconnect and pray together.

Tonight he is running through most of the night in preparation for his ultra-marathon next month.  We will be posting more details about it soon.  I plan on interviewing him myself to answer the many questions poised his way.  In fact, if you have any questions about his goal of running 100 miles in 24 hours, please post them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to add them to the interview!

God painted a beautiful rainbow this evening.  I ran outside in the rain with a cardboard box on my head, squealing at the sight.  I always try to imagine I’m Noah, seeing a rainbow for the first time.  It always works, and I’m amazed every time.  God’s promises will never ever fail.

Purple and Camo: The Perfect Blend

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This morning as we ate crepes there was much drawing going on around the table.  Robots, cats, and flaming arrows (which I innocently thought were flowers).  Elijah asked Elsie how to spell her name.  She began to clearly spell it out for him in a teacher-like voice.  Then she proceeded to tell him, “Elijah, you didn’t do it correct.  Here, let me do it for you.”  He is the type to be able to chuckle to himself at her bossiness, and we exchanged smiles about it.

This weekend there was a father-daughter dance at church.  The girls were decked out in their “wedding dresses” (dresses they wore to Matt’s brother’s wedding) all afternoon.  Yes, Elsie wore a yellow head-band.  One would never know the drama that went on with that decision.  When they came home that night Elsie told me that, “I was only dancing with my feet one time.”  The rest of the time Daddy held her while they danced.  We both realize this will not always be so, so we treasure the small beautiful girl with the high-pitched voice that we sometimes just want to be quiet.  Even though some days the tears seem to come in the quantity to fill a small ocean, we love our precious Elsie Rose who knows how to spell her name and loves everything pink.  And purple.

Then we have our oldest, who didn’t need to be held to meet Daddy’s eyes while they danced.  Her beauty is swiftly unfolding, and it’s frightening and exciting all at once to see her growing up.  When we were driving to church the other day she dramatically yelled from the back seat, “Don’t open the windows!  My earrings are dangly!”  Elijah agreed that they just might fly out.  It was pretty funny.

While the two oldest girls were away, the boys, Betty, and I stayed home.  At the moment I was taking this picture, I was not exactly happy with the mess going on here.  They made strawberry-watermelon juice with every kitchen tool imaginable and I was stepping on sticky juice all night.  Matt left me with a smile that said, “Enjoy them, they’re just being boys.”  After this picture, they hopped in the tub, Betty went to bed, and I made pizza.  Then I introduced the boys to one of my favorite shows as a kid: Knight Rider, and we ate homemade pizza and oohed and aaahed over the coolness of Kit, and there was nothing girly until the purple clad girls came home donning balloons and memories of dancing with Daddy.

Our house is full of the mixture of flowers and flounce, camo and guns.  Gaudy necklaces and hair ties that don’t match, bicycles that make loud noises and robot drawings.  Pretty tea parties and scary bike ramps.  Perfume and stinky feet.  Hello Kitty bandaids covering a scratch and bruised and bloody knees that deflect the stick of  a bandaid.  Once in awhile these two worlds collide, and I catch moments of gentle love between them.  True gentlemen can put aside their macho muscles to gently hug their sisters and tell them how pretty they look.  Strong women can hang on to their femininity while scaling daunting heights and playing in the mud.  When boys and girls live together there are clashes, yes, but there is also a perfect blending of beauty and brawn, sweet and salty, tenderness and toughness.  Sometimes I don’t always appreciate their differences and honestly I sometimes define different as wrong.  Don’t we all?  But having five little personalities surrounding me every day all day long, I realize and must embrace their differences and not try to compare them with others or change them.  They each fill a void that would otherwise be in this world, and together they are the perfect blend.

Sweet Six

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Jack Attack turned six last weekend.

We had a relaxed family day at Grandma Weldon’s.  While the rain poured outside, we enjoyed chocolate cupcakes and a warm fire.

A new game of Perfection made us laugh, with its power to startle every single time it exploded.

Betty loves to give kisses, and who is better to love than Daddy?

So now we have a six-year-old in the house.  Even though he’s still patiently waiting for his first tooth to fall out, he’s growing up.  He’s my own personal body guard and he’s my sweet little boy.    I do hope he always dreams big, like his walls that are covered in taped up wishes and dreams.  Pages of lego magazines and cars and toys.  Drawings he has made.  Cockeyed static stickers.  He has so many dreams of being a man.  One day he will be just that, and I pray that his heart will always be tender towards others.  I know that one day he won’t have playing cards duct-taped to his bicycle wheels to make it sounds like a motorbike.  He won’t always wear his shirts backwards or forget to put on his underwear.   He will no longer have a shelf full of shiny rocks, bottle caps, lego men, old keys, and special memories.  Or, maybe he will.

There is Always a Song

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She asked me if the word “flower” started with an “L”.  I said, No, it starts with an “F”, and then went back to what I was doing.  A minute later, she brought me the paper she had been working on and showed me the word “flower” written across it in neat four-year-old handwriting.  My jaw dropped.  Something clicked in that little brain of hers, and this week she started to read sentences like, I am Sam, and Mat sat.  Yesterday she was singing her ABC’s opera-style.  Infact, she sings more than half of her day away.  Her words tell stories, feelings, and funnies.  She recently hurt her big toe and I overheard her telling Nadine about it.  She was saying how her owie was “right on my big pinky.  It was SO much bleeding.  Mommy put a bandaid on it.  It’s a kitty bandaid.  It’s pink.  I like them.  Where did you get the hello kitty  bandaids, Mommy?  Wegmans?  I like that store.”  And on she goes until she falls asleep at night.  Even then, Nadine informs me she talks in her sleep.  Elsie, last night you said, ‘I want crackers!’ in your sleep!  When I told her to drink some more water she said, I’m going to lose my heart if I do that!  When we were outside, she was looking at her shadow and said, Look at the statue of my hair!  Her little pony tails were sticking out.   

This morning she told me, Mom, I want to go skydiving for our date.  When we’re driving, the inside volume of our car is usually on the higher decibel level.  If you can imagine two or three conversations going on, complete with sound effects, sometimes a baby squawking in the midst, and then to top it all off, Elsie is usually singing.  Songs about life.  Songs about Jesus.  Songs about her family.  It is so out of place sometimes.  Usually I just hear lots of noise.  Then when I separate the sounds, I can hear her little sweet song, oblivious to the cacophony around her, singing from her heart.  Oh, Elsie Rose.  What a beautiful song you bring to our lives.

The Law of Disorder

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It’s inevitable.  The messes.  The laundry piles.  The law of physics which says that even when things are left perfectly alone, they will eventually deteriorate.  Order must always decrease.  It should be called the law of home-making.  This is a typical laundry day in our house:

That doesn’t include sheets that have been accidentally wet during the night.  Thankfully those sheets and blankets were already on the laundry room floor when I heard Elijah frantically yelling, “Mom!  Mom!  The sink is doing it again!” The sheets were quick to soak up some of the gallons of water rushing out of our small sink in the bathroom, but the flood was pretty extreme.  The plug will sometimes fall into ‘closed’ position and is very difficult to pull back up again.  Unfortunately, the water was left running at the same time.  So… an extra little mopping was done here today.  Ah, entropy.

Speaking of things being left alone… yesterday we had somewhat of a scare.  Again, I heard a rather desperate call for me from upstairs.  Betty was in the bathroom with the door closed (she can do that too) and she had reached the lock with her little hands and locked the door.  The lock is only able to be opened from the outside of the door with a skeleton key, as the doorknobs are those old-fashioned giant diamonds.  I immediately freaked out and called Matthew.  I needed the skeleton key, which both of us saw recently but couldn’t remember where, or a locksmith.  With visions of disaster speeding through my head, I prayed and then did the only reasonable thing I could think of doing quickly: climb onto the roof.  So, out the boys’ bedroom window I crawled, walking carefully to the adjacent bathroom window, the hot slanted rooftop toasty under my sandals.  I pried open the screen of the bathroom window and gave Betty a startle when I called her name.  She was sitting in front of the door, playing with the other kids’ fingers under the door, looking unfazed by the whole ordeal.  I unlocked the door and everyone cheered.  Jack said, “Mom, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen you do!”  I really, really hope that I never have to climb out on the roof again.  The kids all had a crash course on why putting Betty in the bathroom is NOT a good idea, and we are on the lookout for our skeleton key in case anything like that happens again.  Thankfully it was such a warm day, so the windows were all open!

My fourth load of wash is on the clothesline, school happened, and we have laughed entropy in the face by all of our vacuuming and putting away.  I’m desperately hoping to do better than cereal for supper tonight.  Cooking is one thing that does not fall into any law of physics.  This is called the second law of home-making: supper, if left completely alone, will not just happen.

Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick

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The other day Jack tried explaining that he wanted me to take a picture of him floating away, just like he had seen in a photo once.  We had the sidewalk chalk out, and he had drawn a balloon.  So, I climbed the tree and tried my best to to capture the image of him being pulled into the sky by a single balloon.  Super fun!

Jack likes to say things like, “Oh, grateful,” instead of “Oh, great.”  When Matt asked him if he had a high metabolism he answered, “I forget.”  I purposely don’t really watch them on the trampoline, because their bravery exceeds my own.  However, when I’m hanging laundry on the clothesline, they are drawn to the black circle of bounce and I’m forced to watch their aerial flips and daring leaps.  He is a regular ninja when it comes to the trampoline, and it’s both frightening and exhilarating to watch him.  When he runs, he looks more like a gazelle.  Every few steps he flies through the air in a leap and keeps on going.  Higher is better.  Harder is better.  Pain is weakness leaving the body.  His legs are more bruised than not.  He never wakes up during the night, so when he came stumbling into our room one night I knew something was wrong.  Turns out he fell out of bed… which means he fell from the top bunk.  Ouch!  I have no idea how his wiry body slid out with the side rail on, but I’m glad he was okay.  He loves oats, life, and everything in-between.  For him, every day is about as exciting as being swept away by a single balloon.

Oh My Tacky Yard

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This week, our neighbor was cleaning out his basement.  The kids happened to be outside, and he happened to offer them bags of his old treasures.  I agreed to them accepting the gifts as long as they stayed in the back yard.

I haven’t seen so much excitement over plastic in a long time!  They went hog wild, hanging eggs on the trees, bushes, and my favorite: the alley fence.

Jack specially put up the black cat (not sure where that fits in the Easter theme going here), to scare away the ever-dreaded “Alley Cat”.  The very first day we moved here, I woke up hearing a meowing sound, only to find a black and white cat standing in our bedroom looking up at me.  I screamed, thinking it was a skunk at first.  Learning it was only a cat, I escorted it downstairs to the basement, where I shooed it outside through the outside doors which we had forgotten to close the night before.  Mystery solved.  Ever since then, however, we have spotted it here and there in our yard, and the kids get all in a tizzy.  I’m glad Jack came up with this idea.

Pretty scary!

So, even though I’m pretty much anti-plastic-decorations, I felt it was worth it to see the joy on their faces as they arranged each egg carefully throughout the yard.

Tacky to the enth degree, but perfect as well.