Good, Bad, Good

Things have been good and then they have been bad and then good again.  So... normal life.


Good

We recently headed south for a quick Kansas fix.  Whilst there, we held babies.

We played with the other nieces, too, but they don't hold still long enough for me to take a picture, so here's more baby-holding.

Bad

Monday morning I woke up at 5:30.  It was one of those sleepy, coming-slowly-to-consciousness "Wait, what time is it?" before jolting upright and realizing you didn't hear your alarm or never set it or something, the result being you overslept by nearly an hour and left your friend standing alone in the dark at 5 a.m.  I felt terrible.  She insisted that it was fine, she needed a day off anyway, blah blah blah, lies lies lies to make me feel better.

It was too late to run, so I decided I'd go ahead and get a little work done before rousing the rest of the family.  I went downstairs to make my coffee.  Coffee maker goes on strike, won't dispense a single solitary drop of caffeine-nectar-goodness, and how do I keep breaking coffee makers?  I do not have fancy tastes, or the need of special gadgets or anything.  I use regular-people drip coffee makers (Dear internet people who spend a curious amount of time each day preparing a liquid that ends up tasting about the same as the stuff truckers buy at gas stations:  get a hobby.  Perhaps a high-maintenance tiny dog?), and regular-people coffee (cheapo coffee beans from Aldi that I do, admittedly, grind myself because cockroaches are gross), so why does my coffee maker keep breaking?

Anyway, after learning that I would not be getting any coffee, successfully suppressing the urge to rend my clothing and tearfully ask the universe why bad things happen to good people, I decided that I would move on, and get to working.  I booted up the computer, and there was no internet.  No internet means no work.  So at 5:50 a.m. I gave up on Monday.





Good

Our children are finally old enough that playing games with them doesn't make me want to die (I'm looking at you, Hi-Ho! Cherry-O and your ilk).  We love Qwirkle,

and Quiddler with the older two,

and Atticus will play chess with tiny Darth Vader when Derek isn't home, because Atticus and Derek love chess but I do not, because it is boring.

Bad

Yesterday afternoon Caedmon began screaming and running around even more than usual.  Bees again.  Atticus had those two bee stings last month, Caedmon got two yesterday, and Adelaide claims to have seen a line of bees going in and out of a hole in the ground.  Do bees nest in the ground?  I thought they built their hives up in, um, you know, places that are not holes in the ground.

It turns out neither of our boys are allergic to bees, so today Caedmon is just sporting an extra welt on his forearm and one ear is about 20% larger and weirder looking than the other, but who cares because ears are super weird-looking anyway.  I know this because I spent a solid ten minutes staring at one yesterday, trying to scrape a bee's stinger out of one of those folds of cartilage that make up the outer ear.  The pinna?  See above gif yet again.






Good

Atticus likes to pedal this knife-sharpening contraption that my grandparents have at their house.  You push one of the pedals- the other being currently non-functional- and the stone spins.  Atticus pushes one of the pedals, and Grandpa inevitably whips out a pocket knife to sharpen, and tells us about pedaling the tool as a boy, then as he got older using it to sharpen mower blades, and boy, wasn't that a pain!

Freedom and Stuff

July 3rd I put on my dusty Creative Mom hat and had our kids do a fun Independence Day-themed craft that ended up looking like we trailed random bits of glue and salt all over black construction paper then sprayed it with blood.  This was all true except for the blood- that was just food coloring.  The sad part was when Atticus asked what the heck they were supposed to look like and I told him, "Fireworks, of course!" his response was "What are 'fireworks'?"

The problem with fireworks is that they're usually set off when it's dark which has a disturbing tendency to come about late at night.  I have this thing about our kids sleeping at night, so... it's true.  Two of our three children had never seen fireworks.  I'm not sorry.  (A friend of mine unabashedly dislikes fireworks.  "It's like watching money explode in the air!"  This is hilarious to me.)

This year, however, despite the fact that Derek had to work, I decided to brave the throngs of patriotic people (another reason not to attend fireworks displays- no offense, my fellow Americans), solely because Derek's parents offered to come help wrangle the children.  So off we went to Reiman Gardens to listen to a local municipal band and look at flowers and harass Derek while he tried to work.  And watch fireworks.

They say grandchildren keep you young (although I have a sneaking suspicion "they" are people without grandchildren), probably through activities like this one:

Take this little child-flippy-thing times fifty and you have a substantial percentage of Derek's dad's evening.

As our children see any grandparent trying to rest on the ground as an open invitation for super-fun-human-trampoline-time, Dennis soon suggested we tour the gardens.  

Why, yes, this is a statue of a rabbit in a giant garden, but I can't decide whether I should be crying "WHYYYYY?" to the heavens when seeing this or laughing because he looks like Psycho-Not-To-Be-Trusted Rabbit, which, in my possibly unbalanced opinion, is how all gardeners should view rabbits.  

Gnomes are, of course, another popular garden feature:

Friends, meet Elwood, the World's Largest Concrete Gnome.  Elwood was nice and everything, but he's no Viktor. 

He meant nothing to us, Viktor.  Nothing.

And what did we find in the children's area?

A whole string of Tardis's!  (What's the consensus on the plural for "Tardis"?  Tardis's?  Tardii?)  I'm not real sure what Doctor Who has to do with flowers, but when something this awesome happens, I'm not inclined to question it much.

Weeping Angels plus Children's Area equals... Fun?  Education?  Nightmares?

Never mind that, children- look at this Sonic Screwdriver Windchime!

You know, for being at a public garden and, you know, loving flowers the way I do, I took very few photos of flowers while we were there.  And by "very few" I mean ZERO, because I'm a failure.  

I did photograph some Wild Caedmon while I was there, though, so it wasn't a total loss.  Is it just me, or does Cade look more like a forty-year-old man here than a three-year-old boy?

We also made sure to pester Derek a bit before the fireworks started:

Believe me, we are terrific pester-ers.

We finished the evening by introducing our children to the wonder of a fireworks show.  They liked it.  A bit.

I've spent the past four days recovering from all this frivolity, and reckon I'll be ready to do it all again in right about one year, which is an 95% attitude improvement from how I felt while waiting 45 minutes to get out of the blasted parking lot because no one was there to direct traffic.  

Merry America, friends!

3 1/2 Nieces

Last week I went and saw my sisters.

Wait, was it last week?  You know, I don't think it was.  I think it was the week before that.  Crikey, I meant to write about this sooner.  This is how most of my blog posts go; I write dozens and dozens in my head each month, but only a few actually make it on here, and not because of my rigorous self-editing process or anything, but because by the time I've sat down to write about it, I've forgotten whatever it was that made that one topic so interesting.  You don't know how many times I've sat in this chair and thought Hmmm, peanut butter... it had something to do with peanut butter or I know there was a potential post somewhere in there about vacuuming, and it was just hilarious, but- but that can't be right, can it?  It all gets tangled and lost somewhere in the vault (let me just stop and say how ridiculous it is that I just referred to my own brain as "the vault" when anyone knows it should have a title more like "the sieve" or "that closet at your great-grandma's house that everyone's afraid to go into and smells weird"), never to be thought of again.

The only reason I haven't forgotten about this post is because if I didn't have a husband and children of my own, I'd be that annoying family member that stops by waaaaay too often because my nieces are the sweetest and best and most beautiful and smartest and funniest and most scrumptious little girls in the world.  After my Adelaide, of course.

My excuse for going down for a visit in the first place was to visit my newest niece, six-week-old Norah:

She is soft and warm and smells good and loves to be cuddled.  It was heaven.  

I also got to spend some long overdue quality time with her big sister Charlotte:

Charlotte is somehow almost two years old.  I'm not quite sure how this happened.  

Charlotte takes her new role as big sis seriously.  She lets anyone with hearing know if there's the remotest possibility that Norah might need something, and when she's not helping with Norah, she's swaying and rocking her own baby doll to sleep.  Kelli joked that Charlotte is more maternal than she is.  This is true, but by the end of two days I'd decided Charlotte is more maternal than Michelle Duggar.  

Char's other favorite thing to do (aside from holding tea parties) was smile, which makes it all the more mystifying that I never get a good picture of her.  This is probably because all I can do is smile goofily back when she unleashes the full force of her cuteness on me.

This is Norah smiling and cooing at me, and Charlotte kissing Norah's hand, because that's just what they both do.  You can see why I didn't want to leave.

We also got to see my other niece, Vada:

We had to let her sit on Adelaide before I could get a good picture of her; in every single other one she was a blur, because's that's just what stage she's in right now.  Her mom, my sister Steph, is due to have her second baby in April.  I get exhausted just thinking about Stephanie's life.  

Derek's mom was so, so kind and watched our kiddos for a few days, making all this baby time possible.  This made everyone happy:  I got to see my sisters and their families, my kids got to have some much-begged-for grandma time, and Derek got to golf 126 holes down in Florida, all but ten in the pouring rain.  He had his golf stuff strewn around the house for days after he got back, just waiting for it to dry out.  Fortunately, his life with us is so hectic back home that he was still able to look at a sopping wet trip as a vacation.  

We also got to get together with my dad and his wife after I'd reunited with our kids:

I love this picture of Norah because that is how Adelaide slept for the first couple months of her life:  arms stretched up, hands on either side of her head.  It was also a little bittersweet to see Char wearing so many of Adelaide's hand-me-down clothing.  Nothing shows you how monstrously gigantic your children have gotten as seeing their sweet, former teeny tiny clothes on your nieces.

Adelaide's two goals for the trip were to jump on the hay bales at grandma's house (done within fourteen hours of our arrival), and to hold precious Norah.  Two for two, Adelaidey.  (Note again how UTTERLY HUGE our children apparently are.  It would seem I've been spending too much time with friends who have kids that are older than my own; I've been thinking of our children as relatively small and young.  This trip set me straight, because all three are obviously humongous and apparently also practically on the verge of leaving for college.)

I swear I could make an entire photo book just of Kelli and Aaron reading to our children, and we live seven hours apart.  Every time we see them, one of our kiddos finds and coerces either the aunt or the uncle (probably whomever happens to be sitting down) to read them a book (or five), and the other two soon flock to the impromptu story time.  

It was such a good trip, and not just because traveling with our three kids gets easier and easier as they get older (so. much. easier.).  Now I just have to count the days (or months, I guess, *sob*) until we get to see them all again.

Stars and Stripes

I attended a small parochial school from preschool through sixth grade.  Among other things, this school was big on Responsibility.  The students in every grade had certain Responsibilities, which changed and accumulated as you moved up through the different grade levels.  Even our reward system was designed to teach Responsibility:  I remember being praised (along with a classmate) for something or other in third grade, and as our reward, we got to go outside and beat the chalkboard erasers against the pavement, cleaning them out (yippee!).  The fact that we were delighted to do so speaks more to the deft maneuvering of the teachers than the actual joy of the task.

By the time we reached sixth grade, I (along with all seven of my fellow classmates) had various Responsibilities, which we rotated through each week.  One week I would be in charge of devotions at the start of the day, the next I was helping serve lunch, then I was bringing milk to the little kids for their morning snack.

One such Responsibility with which we were entrusted was that of Flag Duty.  Working in pairs, we would take the American flag, unfold it, hook it up to the flag pole, and hoist it up at the beginning of the day.  At the day's end, we would reverse the whole process, carefully folding it and putting it away when finished.  When you were on Flag Duty, you had to keep a careful eye on the windows of your classroom, because if rain threatened, it was you and your partner's Responsibility to hustle outside and bring the flag down.

Part of Flag Duty included specific instructions given at the beginning of the year on how to take care of the flag; also known as Respecting the Flag.  Respect for the flag included folding it in a very specific and precise manner, not allowing it to get wet or tattered in any way, and never ever ever allowing it to touch the ground.

Now, being snotty eleven- and twelve-year-olds, we naturally had to question what the big deal was with the flag and the ground- although never in the presence of any kind of authority figure (read: teacher, principal, pastor, janitor, etc).  Being relatively compliant little Lutherans, we never actually let the flag come in contact with the ground, but we questioned and joked about it frequently:  What would actually happen if it did slip and fall?  Spontaneous combustion?  An earthquake splitting the ground and swallowing the offending cloth whole?  And what if one of us had a seizure or a heart attack or something, and then dropped it?  Was that still considered Disrespect?  At eleven years old, I had a pretty firm theoretical grasp on the whole Respecting the Flag concept, but little real world knowledge.

I was reminded of my elementary school naivete yesterday, while watching war veterans handle an American flag.  Derek's grandpa passed away last week.  A World War II veteran, his funeral service included a gun salute, the playing of Taps, and of course, the American flag.

I watched those two men fold that flag in precise triangles, ending with only the white stars on a field of blue visible.  As they carefully handled it, never letting it fall, it occurred to me that Respecting the Flag isn't really about the flag at all:  it's about all that it represents.  Right then, it was a symbol of the gratitude and appreciation for the wartime service of one man.  It was acknowledgment and it was thanks for his bravery and courage.  It was Respect for a person.

It's only taken me 17 years, but I think I finally get it.

Multi-Generational

The Crisler Men Across Four Generations:

That's Derek with our two sons, his dad, Dennis, and his dad, Don.

Nothing says Thursday like alliteration fun, right?

I love looking at photos like these.  I like to search for the similar physical traits within relatives, and find it fascinating to see something pop up across several generations.  I love that when I first saw a photo of Derek's grandpa when he was young, I saw our son Atticus' eyes in a face born eighty-some years before Atticus.

I felt the same way the first time I saw my great-grandma's handwriting and realized it looks exactly like mine.

Heredity is a funny thing, isn't it?