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!

Eyeballs, Games, and Friends of an Avian Persuasion

Well!  What a week.  It's November, which means my thoughts have turned pie-ward, one of my very favorite -wards.  Adelaide and I have already begun our pie-plotting, strategizing which of us will make which pies, and trying to figure out how many pies is too many pies.  (The limit does not exist.)

Speaking of Adelaide, she had her first appointment with the pediatric ophthalmologist.  Everyone in the office was very kind, which we appreciated, even if getting her eyes dilated is not Daughter's favorite thing.

The woman who put the drops in warned us that it often takes 8-10 hours for pupils to return to normal after dilation, but because Adelaide has lighter-colored eyes, it would most likely take longer.  Adelaide and I both wondered why the heck this was, and naturally, Dr. Google had an answer:  The darker your eye color, the more melanin is present in your eye (which I knew), and that melanin acts a kind of filter (which I did not know!), so people with less melanin in their eyes- those with lighter-colored irises- are usually affected more quickly and for longer periods of time than those with more melanin.  Fascinating!  

Other than learning about melanin and its effects on dilation, the doc gave us a course of action for Adelaide's eyes.  We have cheapo glasses on the way (cheapo because we don't know how long she'll be in these before possibly changing to a different kind-- zenni.com, friends who want cheap glasses), and an MRI scheduled for next week to slap down the troubling red flags raised by her combination of symptoms.  I was still a little freaked out after the appointment, but God put my own personal Florence Nightingale (except she goes by Jessie) in my path who told me exactly what to do and where to make the appointment and where to get the cheapo glasses.  I swear to you nurses could achieve world domination if they weren't so busy saving the rest of us rubes.

Two of the kids had parent teacher conferences.  We found this on Atticus's locker and it was all I could do to maintain my composure.  Thankfully I had our son's face staring up at me; seven-year-old boys don't exactly appreciate their mothers embarrassing them at school with tears.

I kept it together.  Barely.

We've maintained our wild lifestyle with this week's game de rigueur, Mancala.

I really thought the boys were too young to grasp how the game is played, but Derek taught them and I was proven wrong, which really is nice sometimes.  They even managed to sneak a game in this morning before school.  You know you love something when you ask to play it at 7 a.m.

We've been entertaining a distinguished visitor to our hydrangea bush.  

I am alerted to his presence not by anything as bourgeois as a doorbell; no, only a Caedmon will do, who cries out in delight anytime his new friend is near.

Caedmon never misses an opportunity to educate the ignorant on the way of the Calvin and the Hobbes.  The cardinal seems to be a willing student.

I hope you all had a wonderful, wonderful week, full of your own versions of Mancala and cardinals, but hopefully noticeably devoid of pupil dilation.

Good Sportsmanship, or How Hasbro Makes Our Children Unusually Violent

In our house, we have an ottoman.

It's one of those padded affairs, bought when our kids were tiny and seemingly intent on falling sideways into every blessed thing, their target, I swear, the delicate temples on either side of their heads.

In addition to preventing brain damage, the ottoman is hollow, lidded with two (padded) squares that can be lifted to reveal two (padded) storage spaces.  These are stacked full of games:  games that teach number recognition and manipulation, games to help preserve and enhance memory, games that teach and expand vocabulary, games that cause tears and murderous threats and bring our children to the brink of going all Cain and Abel on each other.

The latter game, of course, is Sorry!

What is with that game?  Our kids fight with each other, sure, but only Sorry! elicits Lord of the Flies-level passion and violence and cries for a certain brother's head on a pike.  Sorry! may be a rip-off of Parcheesi, but at least the name is more accurate- although if you really wanted to give potential buyers an idea of what they're in for, perhaps No Fair! or I HATE You! would be a little more fitting.

This happens every six months or so:  The kids dig out the dreaded game, I think that maybe this time they'll be able to play like human beings not destined for death row (put that one in the full-to-bursting "Lies I Tell Myself" file), and I chirp, "Sure!  Why not?  Go ahead and play Sorry!"

You know what comes next:  Accusations.  Weeping.  Literal bloodshed, as in I have cleaned blood off the board four times in the last three days.  (Okay, so that was because Atticus has suffered a spate of nose bleeds recently, and they've been so intent on playing that he keeps dripping on the board before he realizes what's happening.  I will admit to being tempted to take a picture of this somewhat gruesome sight and printing off copies to wave in our children's faces every time they ask to play in the future.)


In related news, our children are learning to shake hands and growl, "Good game," even while supremely pissed.

Do Kids Still Play "Upset The Fruit Basket"?

I received an extremely disturbing email from Adelaide's teacher last week.

It would appear that at the beginning of the school year- you know, back when I was fresh off summer vacation and believed I could learn to like doing things with large groups of children, aka completely insane- I signed up to help out with the Valentine's Day party in our daughter's class.

Once I got over the shocking message contained within that email, suppressed memories began misting back.  I'm pretty sure I had blocked almost all traces of that fateful Back-to-School-Night to preserve my sanity in the intervening months.  I now recall that by the time we got to Adelaide's classroom and had stocked her desk, met her teacher, etc, all the easy jobs like bringing drinks and napkins and themed-snacks had been fulfilled by parents who had already come and gone, leaving the stinker responsibilities like "games" for all the holiday parties.

Thankfully my friend Anne was also a latecomer that night, and is to be my partner in Valentine fun.  I sent her a rather desperate and not totally coherent (I PANICKED, OKAY?) email right after I read the teacher's message stating I had signed up to coordinate games for 25 third graders for one hour.  Honestly, even now a part of my brain is having trouble believing this, because this is just not like me.  I'm not sure how I ended up this way, but I (usually) have little problem saying, "No, thank you," to people, and am not someone who feels pressure to say "Yes" to everything under the sun.  This likely has less to do with strength of character than my hermit-like tendencies coupled with having strong female role models in my family who were not afraid to say what they thought.  AND YET.  Here I am, searching Pinterest for Valentine's Day party game ideas.

This is probably because I know that if she asked me to, I would organize games on a monthly basis for Adelaide's teacher.  The way I've been carrying on since receiving her email you'd think Adelaide's school was some kind of displaced Gulag camp amid the Iowa cornfields.  Of course it's a fine school, but that teacher is in there for hours upon hours with those little vectors (I just can't seem to shake my mom's pet name for children, no matter how I try), whereas I'm slated to be there for one measly little hour, after which I will stagger out the door and renew my prayers of thanksgiving for teachers, who will still be stuck in there.


Upon finding out he would be coming with me, Caedmon, however, reacted as if he had won the lottery.  He cannot believe his good fortune:  One whole hour?  With Adelaide?  At school?

Hmm.  I put that gif up there to illustrate Caedmon's state of extreme excitement and anticipation, but I feel like it represents how I feel about the party pretty accurately, too, though for admittedly different reasons.

When You're Stuck Inside

Now that the holidays are more or less over (we have two celebrations to go; one on Saturday and one on Sunday.  While we're looking forward to both, I can't help but think, Just gotta get to Monday, then I'll be freeeee!), it's time for the requisite post on the winter doldrums and cabin fever and snow-cold-blaaaaaargh.

This is the third time I've written this post but it keeps sounding so insufferably whiney I end up delete-delete-deleting in irritation at myself.  I'm trying to turn it from a self indulgent, winter-is-basically-house-arrest monologue to a Hey-we-do-fun-inside-stuff-this-time-of-year reminder.

So.  Fun inside stuff.

We've been playing a lot of games.  Jenga is a family favorite.  Well... it's a favorite of everyone but me.  My nerves can't handle Jenga.  I have to constantly fight the compulsion to lash out wildly at the structure just to end it all and rid my stomach of the horrible tension that exists during Jenga.  Even watching other people play I have to bury my face in my hands and whisper to whomever's unfortunate enough to be sitting next to me to just tell me when it's over.  

That kid up there, though?  I wasn't sure if four years old was old enough to play Jenga, but holy cow.  That kid is a Jenga Master.  His moves don't make any sense.  The tower should topple after most of his moves, but it never does.  I'm expecting his letter from Hogwarts the minute he turns 11, because that is the only explanation to his inexplicable talent.

We've also been playing a lot of Tri-ominos.  Adelaide and I have played the most, simply because she hasn't been in school so we actually have the long stretch of time it takes to complete a game, plus when I play with her I force her to be the score keeper, citing math; you get lots of practice adding and subtracting both positive and negative numbers.  

Derek and I played last night, but I'm not sure when he'll be willing to play with me again.  Something about what I call a victory laugh but he referred to as a cackle.

Derek busted out his trap set for a couple days, and everyone got to take a spin on that.

Click to embiggen and see Cade's tongue sticking out the same way Derek's often does when he's drumming.

I was out for a run when he set it up, but could hear it when I was still almost a block away from the house.  It's... well, it's loud.  I don't know how Derek's parents don't have permanent hearing loss from years of his teenage drumming.  

There's the tongue again.

We did make everyone wear ear plugs.  No need to give them a legitimate reason not to listen to me.

Derek got some practice time in, too, which was tons more fun to listen to, because he doesn't suck.  Not that our children suck.  (Yes, they do.)  I'm sure if any of them choose the drums as their instrument (heaven help me), they'll improve.  

Baking is another great indoor activity, and will help you meet those winter weight gain goals.

Adelaide and I made that apple pie up there on Christmas Eve.  I have to say, if you have an eight-year-old sous chef, everything is so much easier.  She can assemble all your ingredients, mix up the filling while you make and roll out the crust, then falsely lead everyone to believe you're some kind of Martha Stewart by shaping extra dough into whimsical shapes for the top.  If you can get your six-year-old to misbehave on December 23rd, so much the better; he can spend the following day doing heaps of extra chores and your house will be unnaturally clean for your holiday.  

Throw in some books, Legos, and jigsaw puzzles, and you have our winter.  Crislers Gone Wild.  

Five Things Friday

I need everyone to do me a favor and pretend that today is Friday.  So we're all in agreement, then?  Today is Friday!  Happy Friday, everyone!  That means today is Five Things Friday!  Here's what's great this week.

• Adelaide + Hair.  Adelaide has been working on her braiding skillz; having mastered various random triplicate strands made out of things like plastic and wax, she has moved on to human hair.  As I am the only other person in the house with a long, braidable mane, she has been working on my hair frequently, which is great because

• Air conditioning.  I am beyond thankful for AC this week.  It's been hot, and it's been humid, and it makes me think of a couple summers ago when we didn't have a functioning AC, and I was third trimester pregnant with Caedmon and wanted to die.  I say a prayer of thanks every time the AC kicks on, every time I walk into our house which doesn't feel like a Native American sweat lodge, and at random times throughout the day when I'm not at risk for heat stroke in my own home.  I'm not sure that I'll ever take air conditioning for granted again.  Amen.

• Librarians.  This time it's because of a great resource one of our favorite librarians directed me toward- see, I've been trying to incorporate daily math into our schedule over the summer, and while Adelaide has been great about reminding me about her daily multiplication flash cards, aside from that I kind of suck at remembering things, especially things that I don't really like to begin with, like math.  Enter bedtimemath.org!  They send you an email every day with a fun math problem for your kiddos to complete, or if you have one of those fancy smart phones, they also have an app.  Here's today's (because today is Friday, remember?) daily math problem to give you an idea- I really like the fact that I can read the same problem to all three kids, but there are different questions for each age group.  We do not, however, do these at bedtime.  I do not need one more thing to do that close to the finish line.

• Dots.  If you value your productivity or your sanity, do not, I repeat, DO NOT start playing this game.  Derek downloaded it to our tablet for Adelaide.  She played it a few times and enjoyed it.  I decided I'd see what all the fuss was about, especially when I heard it described as "like Tetris or Bejeweled."  What I'd forgotten was Carl Jung's tidbit of wisdom:  "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism or Dots."  I may have paraphrased a bit there.  This game.  Gaaah.

• Robins.  There's a nest that's been on a branch that overhangs our sidewalk for a few years now, and this spring a couple robins moved in.  As it turns out robins are the HGTV of birds and now instead of boring old twigs and grass for furnishings, they've gone for the modern look and weaved duct tape into their nest.  A nice long strand even hangs down from their newly remodeled dwelling, dangling in your face should you happen down our sidewalk.  We noticed what I assume is the mama sitting in the nest for a couple weeks straight, only leaving for short times a couple times a day.  But today both parents are present, which caused perhaps uncalled-for levels excitement amongst the Crisler offspring.  (And who hollered them out of the house with "YOU GUYS, GET OUT HERE!  IT'S MAMA AND PAPA ROBIN!"?  Um... yeah.  Me.)  

Staring at birds.  It's an exciting life we lead around here.

Anyone know when I can be expecting grand-birdies?  My knowledge of the life cycle of the American Robin is nil.

I Should Contact Parker Brothers With This Idea

I have a new favorite game, you guys.


Players required:  At least 2- one adult and one or more children.

Materials:  One kitchen and its contents, plus a book or other activity the adult can hold in her lap.

Instructions for play:  The adult sits quietly with the book (or item of your choosing) in front of you.  Be sure your back is to the kitchen.  The child will take this as an invitation to dismantle the kitchen (because you're not looking directly at them and therefore obviously have no idea what they're doing), but will do so as quietly as they can due to your proximity.  It is imperative that you muffle your snickers when you hear the child try to stealthily slide your 10-pound cast iron Dutch oven out of the kitchen cabinet, and do your best not to laugh aloud when the child accidently drops a whisk then freezes, silently waiting for you to turn around for the next 30 seconds before continuing to empty the silverware drawer.

This will buy you at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted time, but make sure you're paying attention to the sounds behind you, because you want them to think they're still getting away with something when we come to the ultimate step in the game:

Wait until they've unloaded at least one cabinet and maybe a couple drawers, listen to make sure they've put down any heavy objects (just wait for the muffled thud), then whirl around and bellow, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Make sure you do this with a smile on your face.  A smile results in the 2 year old jumping a mile, laughing shakily, then running to you for a hug, where you will feel their little heart beating a million miles an hour.  No smile on the face of the adult ends in terror, tears, and running and hiding from Mommy.



Sometimes I feel a little sorry for Caedmon.

A List. For You. On Monday.

I'm tired.  I bet I know what will make me feel better:   A list!  (Obviously.)

• Derek got back from his annual ESPN Golf Extravaganza Saturday night.  No, it's not something sponsored by ESPN; it's a little vacation he takes to Florida each January with a bunch of his former ESPN co-workers where he gets to golf his big heart out.  I didn't mention it last week because... well, because I'm not crazy.  I'm not sure if you had noticed, but this blog exists on a little something called the internet, which means just about anyone can read it, which means advertising the fact that my husband isn't home is on par (geddit?) with draping our house in neon and issuing an invitation to home invaders everywhere to come pillage to their crooked souls' content.  NO THANK YOU.  Anyway, the kids and I survived the week- it's actually getting a lot easier the older they get, shocker- and he made it back home safely.  Derek and I have also discussed that in return, I'll get to go see my sisters and their families some three-day-weekend soon (which I just remembered I haven't talked to them about yet- Surprise and You're Welcome, Kelli and Steph!).

• Adelaide has a new love:  Checkers.  She's gotten to the point where she can beat the computer 10 times out of 12 on the Easy level, and I can only win against her by a increasingly-narrow margin.  This is partially due to the fact that she played a whole bunch with her Daddy over Christmas break, and he gave her helpful instructions like, "Strategize:  Always think at least two moves ahead."  Which she, of course, took to heart.  So when she plays me, who thinks about strategy for the first five moves but then gets bored with checkers and just wants it to be over as quickly as possible, I begin to seem like a less than worthy opponent.  I'm terrified Chess is next.

• I looked down at both Adelaide and Caedmon when we got to church yesterday and realized that there was a two- to three- inch gap between their socks and the hems of their pants, and the sleeves of their shirts ended far above the wrist.  They appear to be going through a growth spurt.  AGAIN.  (Who could ever have seen this coming?)

• Does anybody know what the story on Downton Abbey is?  I know it's a BBC show that I think airs on PBS around here, but what I want to know is:  What is with the obsession?  Is this something I should be watching?  Does anyone have any idea?

• I've started getting seed catalogs in the mail, which makes me anxious for spring.  (Only 5 more months 'til my final frost date!  Holy cow, that's depressing.)  I cannot wait to get back in my flower beds.  They look so sad right now, all blanketed in white, a few spindly pieces of brown spearing up through the snow here and there.  I keep telling myself the snow is good protection for all those bulbs I planted in the fall, and that hopefully these low temps will help kill off more bugs for this summer- particularly the Japanese Beetles.  

• I just started my Christmas Thank-You's today.  Does this make me a terrible person?  I'll just think of it as me doing my part to extend the holiday cheer well into the new year.  Yeah, that's it.