mes'morial day.

some back story:

i've always been a bit type-A, and i've always hated things getting dirty or sticky.  i've grown a lot in these areas since becoming a parent, but they're still wired in there somewhere.  on top of that, i have a big family.  if you let one kid get sticky, the clean-up is intense.  if you let all the kids get sticky, you feel like the only solution is mail-ordering some new kids, because the old ones are beyond help.  believe me before you judge me: scrubbing down four children who are still too little to bathe themselves, but not too little to somehow get things like peanut butter in their ears, is harder than it sounds.  just believe me.

so anyway, i don't usually volunteer to let them get dirty or sticky.  sure, i let them run around outside in the sawdust pile (we have a sawdust pile, btdubs) and get normal-kid-levels of dirty, but stuff like finger painting and body painting and even, if i'm being brutally honest, blowing bubbles and eating ketchup are sometimes not options at our house.  big family mamas hear me on this.

which brings us to today's post:  today is the day that i let the kids run around in their undergarments and eat millions of s'mores, the stickiest, gooiest, stain-iest food known to man.  and i'm cool with it.  because it's one day.  it's mes'morial day.

i feel like i'm vindicated as a parent by mes'morial day.  i feel like the other 364 days of the year, i can be all, 'no you can't use glitter!  no you can't have ketchup!  no you can't paint-by-number!  no you can't use glue!  no you can't eat glue!'  because of mes'morial day.  (and also the fact that i feed my kids pb&j for breakfast nearly every morning of their existence.  but that is neither here nor there.)

i obviously do not have photos of it happening this year yet, as this blog was set to post at midnight this morning and we do not cheat father time by eating our s'mores early.  but just imagine chocolate and marshmallows on every square inch and in every orafice of every of-age child, and you've got a pretty accurate idea of what's about to go down.

bring it on.

what's up weekly. (memorial day = summer is officially here!)

Happy Friday, folks!

You know what they say: "Another day, another dollar."  Or, in our case, "Another day, another forty thousand moving-related bits that I don't want to do but should." 

Same dad, different dad.

Luckily for me, there were plenty of distractions happening this week, most of them related to the fact that we are now, concretely, in the throes of summer.  Exhibit A:

Yard work.  Yard work is Very Summer.  (As is my clearly beach-ready body.)  I had my little right hand gal help me with some mulching.

Exhibit B:

Strawberries.  Strawberries are also Very Summer.  We bought ten quarts of them at the Amish last week, and processed them all.  (Also with my right hand gal.)  Most of them went into the freezer (I got about 2 gallons), but some of them went into homemade strawberry frozen custard with strawberry sauce.  And it was as amazing as it sounds, so you better believe we will be buying more strawberries this weekend.  I'm trying to decide what to make with them all.

Exhibit C:

Mes'morial Day.  Mes'morial Day is the epitome of Very Summer.  To recap for those of you who are new around here, we eat s'mores on Memorial Day.  That's how it became Mes'morial Day.  Pretty straightforward.

We save up sticks and nut shells all year for our annual fire.  Not that we do that intentionally; it's just that after about a year, we have enough that we're starting to go a little crazy so Todd burns them all at once and just tends the fire all day.  This pit is actually four or five feet deep for some reason, so it's quite a bit of yard waste.

Grammy June made an appearance.

This is why I call this kid Scrappy Doo.  I mean just LOOK AT HIM.  So many heart-eye emojis belong here.

The Real Boy Scouts of America

Exhibit D:

Ukulele is Very, Very Summer.  Although, "Bad to the Bone" on ukulele is not as summery as it could be.

Exhibit E:

...Chickens?  Are chickens summery?  We still love them, we still have DeeVee because I can't bring myself to get rid of him quite yet.  Ophelia got to meet a chicken and it seemed to go over well.

And, just to round out our summery summery week, here's what else we were up to:

Lots of trips to Lowe's and Walmart and the storage unit because: Moving.  Atticus is my box carrier and van tetris-er.  Moving with big kids is a whole different ball game.

Penelope hit her own shaving milestone.  HOW ARE MY KIDS ADULTS ALREADY?!

Juni's favorite activity is laying down by Ophelia and having Sister Time.

And speaking of Ophelia, she's having a killer week.  She finally got a second tooth. (The Lord God said, "It is not good for the tooth to be alone; I will make a it buddy suitable for it.")

Can you see her little toothers in there?  It's hard to get a good picture - they are not unequally yoked; they are both equally miniscule.

She also got a bath.

That's a pretty killer week in Baby Town.

LOOK AT HER SHORRRRRRRRRRRRTS!

And that was our week!

meS'Morial day, 2108

If you've been reading for a while, you know that Memorial Day is the one day of the year I willingly tolerate serving s'mores.  I am just not one for shenanigans... at least, shenanigans that involve melted marshmallow and chocolate.  Everything's all fun and games until someone has to do the laundry.

But on Memorial Day, it's no holds barred.  If the kids want to roll around in marshmallow cream and fill their squirt guns with melted chocolate, I'm all, "S'cool."  I stay as cool as a cucumber.

Well, not really.  In fact, Memorial Day has a history of sending my anxiety through the roof.  (Remember last year when I burned the brats and started crying?)  But I'm always glad we did it in the end.

This year, we celebrated the start of summer with the summeriest meal on the planet: grilled brats and hot dogs, tomato and basil salad, corn on the cob, and chips with guac.  Oh yes.

Unfortunately, Laurelai and Rocco were very under the weather the whole day.  In fact, Laurelai spent approximately 22 hours sleeping because her fever was so high, and Rocco was coughing so hard, and gasping so much, I was genuinely worried it was pertussis.  I spent the day pumping them full of mega doses of ascorbate, and running around to local health food stores in search of special whooping cough treatments.  (Also, I bought homeopathic stress reliever tablets for myself, because: Memorial Day + sick kids.)

Since I'd taken them both off of dairy and sugar, and since they felt so crappy in general, I put them to bed before the s'mores activities.  Which means I'm on the hook to do another s'mores night later this summer when everyone can participate.  Dang.

After the littler ones went to bed, the three big kids headed outside to roast marshmallows over the grill.  This was the very first year I let them wear their normal clothes for this - I usually make them strip down to undies, or put on old jammie shirts to protect their play clothes from the mess.  But they proved themselves responsible, and no one got burned or covered in chocolate, so that was a definite move in the right direction from years past!

I'm so glad to have traditions like this.  I hope that when the kids grow up, they have fond memories of roasting marshmallows together on Memorial Day, and maybe even carry the tradition on in their own families.

mes'morial day.

Last week we celebrated Memorial Day in our usual fashion: it's the one day of summer that I actually allow the kids to make s'mores.  Call me a mean mom, but I just can't handle that level of melted chocolate and marshmallow goo multiplied across a million kids more than once a year.  I just can't.  So we make a huge go of it on Memorial Day, let the kids go nuts, and then wait until the next Memorial Day to do it again.  It works for us.

This year we changed things up a bit, though.  Todd had gathered all our cookout supplies beforehand, but we got a text from our Connection Group that an impromptu gathering was being organized for that evening.  So we took everything over to Josiah and Meghan's house for a barbecue.

You might remember Josiah as the friend who took Atticus out for 'military training' - and, as a result, Atticus refers to Josiah as his 'B.F.F.a.E.': "Best Friend Forever and Ever."  They also have dogs, so now the dogs are Penelope's B.F.F.a.E.'s.  Lissy was totally nonchalant around the dogs, too, even though they were taller than she is.

S'mores are tastier when you eat them with friends.

Rocco's favorite part of the evening involved running/rolling/falling down the hill.  He was seriously so uncoordinated the entire night.  (Meghan later sent me a video of Rocco in which he accidentally fell down four times in less than two minutes.)

 via GIPHY

When we were getting ready to leave, I - for the first time ever - actually forgot a kid.  I swore I'd never be That Mom, but I was rounding up all the sticky, sweaty, hyped-up kids and walked off without Juniper's car seat (with her inside it).  Todd was loading everyone into the van and was like, "Uh, where did you put Juniper?" and I was like, "Uh, she's still over there next to everyone in the yard..."  Awesome.  Give me a medal.

And that's how I ended Memorial Day on a high note.

what's up tri-weekly.

Oh, hello!  It's been a while, no?  I have SO much to tell you about what's been going on lately - way too much for a single post.  So today I'll do a fly-over of the last three weeks, but I'm hoping to be more regular around here from now on, so I'll get to the rest of it later.

Let's start with Mother's Day!  First of all, Juniper gave me a five-hour stretch of sleep, which was the first she'd done that since she had jaundice, and she hasn't done it again since.  I like to believe she knew it was Mother's Day, and it was an intentional gift.  I was still under self-imposed quarantine after having her (which was incredible, and I will never live the postpartum lifestyle any other way again, and I'll tell you more about it soon), so I stayed home from church.  Todd took the big kids, so Juniper and I just hung out in the quiet, cuddling, and I got some Bible reading in.  Best Mother's Day ever.

I've been sorting and purging all our kids' clothes.  The bins have been taking over all our storage space, and now that I have pantry shelving in my laundry room, there is even less room for them.  So I've been trying to set aside time when I can pare down what we're keeping, and putting everything in vacuum-seal bags, one bag per size.  I can fit three bags inside a bin, so I should have significantly fewer bins to store at the end of it all, but let me tell you, it's a job.  My house looks like a clothes-and-Sterilite store exploded.  It's bad.

Juniper turned one month old since the last time I posted!  (She's actually almost seven weeks old at this point, so I'm clearly overdue for this news.)  At the time she turned a month, she was starting to focus her eyes, was still miraculously in newborn-sized clothing, and still spent most of her days sleeping on the couch next to me.  Her days and nights were still pretty scrambled, and we spent many overnight hours cuddling on the couch and watching Friends together.

I've been getting used to The Kraken.  After my failed effort to Parking Lot many moons ago, I've been too intimidated to get behind the wheel again.  Once I was ready to get out of the house again, we would run errands as a family, and Todd would drive me everywhere.  It was a pretty sweet chauffer setup, but it's not exactly a sustainable method.  Last Wednesday, I got behind the wheel myself for the first time since the accident, and we headed up to the Amish.  I didn't cause any pileups on the highway or anything, so I'm feeling better about my driving skills.

The weather has been beautiful, and the kids have spent the majority of their free time in our yard, hunting toads, slugs, and blue-tailed skinks.  They haven't yet caught a skink, though it's not for lack of trying - even though the kids camp out in front of known skink residences, those things are fast.  The toads, however, are less fortunate.

Atticus built a 'museum' in the backyard.

We also got our summer garden in this week.  We'd gotten in some cooler weather crops last month, but our hot weather stuff went in on Wednesday.  In an effort to keep Finneas from digging in the dirt of our new bucket gardens, I let him put some dirt and green bean seeds in a little tub of his own. 

We did have a few rainy days in there, so one Saturday afternoon recently, I let the big kids watch the first Harry Potter movie with me while the little kids were napping.  It was so fun.

Juniper turned six weeks on Memorial day, so I'm beginning daytime sleep training with her.  She is getting big enough to be disturbed and kept awake by the chaos around her, so she's been napping in the pack and play in our room.  It's going really well, and she's catching on really quickly, but I miss having her next to me on the couch all day!  

Yesterday was Ascension Day, so we feasted it up like we normally do, with wine and a charcuterie board.  The kids and I had also baked cookies earlier in the day, which is an enormous feat for me.  Baking with the kids is always really stressful, but we did it!  And we were really glad to have something fresh and yummy to offer when a couple of friends surprised us after dinner when they came to do a bunch of yard work for us!  They ripped out bushes I've hated since we moved in.  They sprayed for weeds.  They raked up years worth of piled up leaves.  They hauled a bunch of brush away.  They disassembled this weird planter in the middle of our front yard.  We'll soon be removing a couple trees from our property, and hopefully boosting our curb appeal with some pretty plantings, and I could NOT be more excited.  I'm so grateful for all the help we've received from our church family in this!

There is so much else to tell you about, like our Mes'morial Day celebrations, our trip to the Big Burr Oak, the big girls getting their hair cut, Juniper's first bath at home, wrapping up our homeschool year, and tons more.  I'll fill you in next week!  Until then, enjoy Laurelai being adorable in her favorite new all-weather accessory: The Kerchief.