what's up weekly. (school photos, BIG announcement, and generic news. Full week.)

Well.  I have to say, this week was startlingly eventful.  We typically live very full lives, but nothing really happens, if that makes sense.  But this week, we actually did some stuff.  So let's dig in.

First, this is a paragraph for moms with children exclusively under the age of seven.  Right now, it is pure work.  Yes, you enjoy their smoochy faces and round bellies and screechy giggles when you tickle them.  But they don't exactly pull their own weight, you know what I mean.  So you're tired and you're worn out, and you wonder how the other moms seem to be keeping it together.  But you wait, and you're consistent in giving them love and discipline, and then one day, you wake up, and your oldest is twelve and he is BEGGING YOU to let him mow the lawn.  AND he does an actually good job at it because he's old enough to be genuinely proficient.  Blink of an eye, folks.  "The days are long but the years are short" and all that.

Sunday was Father's Day.  We started off the morning by getting photos of the kids with Todd while everyone was dressed and ready to leave for church, since by the end of church everyone looks like they got caught in a lightning storm and you've missed your photo op.

Then, because mothers always seem to end up being the main beneficiaries of Father's Day, I also got my picture taken with the kids.

Then, while Todd was taking the photos, we sprung THIS surprise on everyone.  (Spoiler: we announced to them that WE'RE HAVING ANOTHER BABY! and it took them like forty-seven years to understand what we were saying.  Anticlimax, your name is the Van Voorst kids.)

The littlest girls were intrigued by the idea that there is a baby in my belly.  Callista kept trying to look down my shirt to see it.  "I can't see her.  Will you take her out so she can walk around?", followed by many questions about how we're going to get the baby out of there.

After church, I took advantage of Father's Day to get some daytime shut-eye.  Just call Father's Day the new Mother's Day.  (Or really, the new Any Given Day, since I seem to fall asleep ALL THE DAYS ALWAYS anymore.)

After lunch and naps, Todd opened his gifts.  The kids really outdid themselves with the handmade gifts this year.  Most of the kids made handmade cards, Atticus wrote and illustrated a very detailed graphic novel, Finneas wrote a book of poetry, Penelope wrote a story and created some home decor out of glitter ribbon and toilet paper rolls, Laurelai typed him a story about him being a superhero dad that ended with the line, "I love you as much as I need to."  Callista gave him a huge drawing of just herself.

"Father's Day: so I am giving you this."

"I love you dad and I will never stop it dad."

In the evening, we had a popcorn party for dinner and watched Courageous.  Right at the very end, the power went out due to an intense thunderstorm.  A big tree had completely collapsed on a powerline in our neighborhood and everyone was out of power for nine hours.  It made everything more interesting.  For instance, toothbrushing is always a major event in our household as all the kids pile in our main floor bathroom at once, but it was made more interesting by brushing by lantern light.

Cards are also more interesting in the dark at 11:00 p.m.  (We let them continue to stay up for a while after the initial outage, hoping the power would return, since they sleep with box fans running and salt lamps on, and we figured they'd have a harder time falling asleep without them.  We were right, but at a certain point we faced the inevitable and made them go to bed anyway.)

Luckily the power returned about 8:00 the next morning - I wasn't sure what I was going to make them for breakfast, so I'm glad it went on before the kids got up.  (I always serve hot breakfast, and we don't keep tons of cereal or bread on hand; plus I didn't want to get things out of the fridge and risk spoiling things that were trying to stay cold.  So my options were pretty limited.)  I didn't sleep well all night, not just because without the air conditioning it was stiflingly hot, and without the fan running it was deafeningly silent, but because I kept waking up to do the math on how much it would cost to replace the contents of our two fridges/freezers and our deep freeze.  I'm glad nothing seems to have spoiled, because I would have needed Bitcoin-level amounts of money to replace that much food, with grocery prices what they are right now.

On Monday (or was it Tuesday?) we took our Last Day of School photos.  Notice I didn't say it was our last day of school.  We finished last week, but the photo session didn't happen as punctually as it would have in a more organized woman's family.

And other than that, each day this week held something fun.  Monday, I had my first call with the midwife (actually, her nurse), and in the evening we had dinner with some friends out on their farm.  Tuesday, we went to another friend's house to play in the morning, and on Wednesday we went back to the farm to play.  The kids got to feed horses, catch chickens, and jump on a trampoline.  Dream life accomplished.

The weather was gorgeous, so we spent our afternoons playing in the neighbor's yard.  (Our grass babies are still trying to make their way in the world, so our backyard is off-limits; luckily we have super kind neighbors who let us play on their swings.)  With the weather being so mild and beautiful, Penelope asked me to make... chili, of all things.  So I did.

I also made southern biscuits (from a southern cookbook that has me wanting to dredge every last thing I own in cornmeal and then deep fry it).  I made two batches of biscuits: one with gluten, and another one using the same recipe but with King Arthur GF baking mix.  I can't vouch for the glutenized ones, but I can tell you that I ate EIGHT - count 'em, EIGHT - gluten-free biscuits like I was going to die in my sleep that night and I needed to make every last moment count.  I can't describe to you how good they were - crunchy on the bottom, soft in the middle, even a little bit flaky, slathered in butter and honey.  NOW, I say this as a person who hasn't eaten a biscuit in probably 15 years, and who hasn't tasted anything with gluten in six, so I could be sadly mistaken about how good these were by normal standards.  But for someone who rarely bakes gluten-free items because they all come out so crappy, this was a true win.

These were the gluteny ones.  The GF ones didn't get brown on top but still tasted good.

Anyway, I can stop talking about these biscuits (but I won't stop thinking about them).  Yesterday, we picked up a Walmart order, then WE ALL WENT TO TARGET.  It has been nearly a year since I set foot in a Target.  I will say this: I love the carts and the prices on clothes. I hate the fact that a couple of my kids have not yet had opportunity for ample training on how to behave in public, or recent opportunities to be reminded.  I am having to start from scratch with kids that are much too old to be learning this for the first time, and I blame Covid.  So, it was a bittersweet trip but it was necessary in a number of ways.

We also spent the day eating foods Callista requested for her birthday - pancakes for breakfast, hot dogs and macaroni for lunch, and Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner.  Her birthday isn't until tomorrow, but we decided to eat her special meals a few days early.

Today I will be focusing on getting my house cleaned and finally getting caught up on dishes.  I haven't had a working dishwasher for over a week now, and let me tell you, a family our size that prepares and eats three meals a day at home can pile up dishes like you wouldn't believe.  I did four sink loads of dishes yesterday, and I'm still not even caught up, and that's with ordering take out for dinner.  Whew.

And that wraps up the week!  Like I said, eventful, eventful.  But oh, so great.

what's up weekly.

I'm going to shoot you straight: it's been a rough stretch around here over the last couple of days, with the kids being sick and my dishwasher not working, so I'm going to make this short and sweet.  BUT I will go ahead and back up to the weekend, back when everyone was healthy and adorable and I had endearment to spare.

I would like to highlight a few megacuties this week: First up, Juni Bear.

She plays piano, she rocks a tank top, she has hair long enough for two (read it, two) piggytails now... is there anything this girl can't do?

Oh yeah, she also insisted on sitting on the potty this week.  She has been ready to potty train for a while now - she always tells me she has to poop before she goes, and basically begs to use the toilet rather than go in her diaper.  Then as soon as she goes, she begs to be changed.  I know I should have jumped on this opportunity sooner, but the truth is that we have a couple of long road trips planned for over the summer, and it is so much easier to travel with a diapered toddler than one that requires the use of a stop and a public toilet every time they have to pee (which is often).  So I was hoping to wait until September, but I'm not sure she'll let me.  She climbed right up on the potty, sat there all relaxed (and didn't freak out once she was up so high, suspended over the pool of doom, which is the way most toddlers act when you put them on the big potty for the first time), and she strained like she knew exactly what to do next.  Nothing of consequence actually happened, but it was like she owned the toilet and she knew it.  I think it's time.

Next megacutie highlight: Rocco.

NEEDISAYMORE?!

Next megacutie highlight: Brothers with Fresh Haircuts.

Next megacutie highlight: Sick Callista, feat. Princess Dress and Ice Pack for Debilitating Headache.

This was about the point in the week when things turned south.  Todd had already been battling a pretty hardcore bug earlier in the day - fever, congestion, chills, sweats, exhaustion, headache, achiness.  Then the kids started getting hit.  Penelope, Laurelai, Finneas and Callista all got hit around the same time Wednesday night and ran fevers through the night.  Callista and Lolo woke up feeling much better, Penelope and Finneas weren't so lucky.  They really fought through the day yesterday with high fevers and bad headaches.

Luckily, none of the rest of us have seemed to come down with it yet (knock on wood), and also luckily, today is technically our last day of school, but all of our sickies finished their work earlier this week.  Atticus is the only one with a couple of things to wrap up, and he is feeling fine so far, so we seem to have crossed the finish line!

While the kids were strung out yesterday, I needed to step outside for a bit of a breather, so I took the opportunity to hang a clothesline between two of our trees.  I have wished for a clothesline since we moved in - our Story City house had both indoor and outdoor lines, our Cedar Falls house had indoor lines, but I have nowhere to hang dry large items here.  I have tried to figure out where to put posts, and tried to calculate how much it might cost, but a couple weeks ago I just got realistic about things and bought a couple of eye bolts and a loop of wire at Lowe's.  $10 and 10 minutes later, here we are.

Now.  It's time to gird up my loins and face my Friday.  Happy weekend, all!

what's up weekly.

Celebrate good times, COME ON!  It's a celebration!  (Because what Friday ISN'T a celebration, amiright?  You know I'm right.)

Rocco celebrated by showing off his one-armed pushups.  Juni was mightily impressed.

Atticus turned twelve-and-a-half on Saturday.  We are on the downhill slide toward teenagerhood.  This next phase is going to be SO FUN!

Not to be outdone, outshone, or outgrown, Rocco also hit a milestone this week: he lost his first tooth!  He named it Bob the Doctor.  (I didn't clarify if that means it is a real doctor, or more like a Dr. Jill.)

Todd took him outside for some senior photos to commemorate this step into adulthood.  This sultry look is called, "My sister and I are both staring my future in the face, and are unsure of what it holds for me."

This one's called, "Psych! We're both optimists."

I pulled a Ma and made jam.  Oven-roasted jam.  It is so good I have been known to eat it from the jar like sticky soup.  Unfortunately, it turns out jamming is a lot of work, and these two cafeteria-sized sheet pans turned into only two pints of soup jam.  And you know how I feel about high-investment, low-reward activities: I don't like them.  So it looks like my canning efforts maxed out at two pints this year.  WHICH IS TWO PINTS MORE THAN I CANNED LAST YEAR, so that's like a 200% increase in pints, and I like to think of that as a win!

This little girl gang was thick as thieves again this week.

Because the weather was so beautiful, because the kids are able to prepare their own 'picnic' lunches now and nothing depends on me doing extra work, and because our backyard is still torn up, the kids have been having lunch time picnics out on the front lawn many days.

And in "News That I Wish Wasn't News," here is the newest member of the VV clan:

I am hopeful that he isn't long for this world.

And in more News That I Wish Wasn't News, I'm off to go look up how to get rid of a cyst without a professional's help.  I have a cyst on my chest that I've been ignoring since early 2020, but it is getting so large that I'm pretty sure I only have a few days before it sprouts a face and classifies as a second head.  Wish me luck.