what's up weekly: road trip edition.

"Hey kids, it's me! I bet you thought I was dead!" (Name that movie.)  Well, I'm not dead.  We were just... out of town.  A long, long way out of town.  We just got back from a two-week trip to South Dakota and then Idaho (and then back to South Dakota) before returning home.  It was a doozy, and we had a great time.

I will dive deeper into our trip at some point, but for now let me just back up a little to before our trip.  We had a lot of prepping to do - hauling nine people across 4100 miles is no small feat.  I started by washing the wool coats.

Um, ewwww much?  Apparently the coats were due for a cleaning.  To be clear, this was the second round of water after draining the previous, more disgusting water.

Not because we were taking wool coats with us (hello, heat wave), but because I do completely irrational things when I'm facing a looming deadline.  I procrastinated on planning our itinerary, but gosh darnit if the wool coats were going to get cleaned.  (In reality, I had planned to start homeschool two days after our return, so I was trying to get some last minute projects finished up that I knew I wouldn't get to once school kicked off, like sorting our bookshelves and seasonal clothes, and cleaning out the laundry room.  The wool coats were part of that effort.)

Then we had a stomach bug go through two days before we were set to get in the car.  (A TRAUMATIC stomach bug - the kind that you need to give the carpet cleaners an emergency call over.)  If that's not enough to send a large family mom into a panic, I don't know what is.  

But luckily it was extremely limited - only a couple kids caught it, and it had passed within a day.  Todd bought some Cheer Up Flowers, and the carpet cleaners came the day before we left, and everything was set right as rain before our departure.

The boys watching the carpet cleaners do their thing.

I did finally get around to some trip prep.  I got some food preserved so it didn't go bad while we were gone - I dehydrated the ripe tomatoes from our garden, and I turned as much of our extra raw milk into yogurt and cheese as I could.  Juni helped me bake some oatmeal for our trip, since baked oatmeal is easy to eat in the car and is the magic bullet breakfast for preventing Atticus from getting car sick at all.  Don't ask me why, it just is.

Tomatoes going into the oven.

Paneer being pressed out.

My own personal kitchen aide.

Atticus mowed the lawn for us so the grass didn't look crazy while we were gone.  Look at those diagonal stripes. 

Our travel itinerary was packed full of fun stuff.  The first day of our drive was a blast, with all our regular stops on the way to South Dakota.

The next day, we laid low and rested, visiting with family and running around outside.

The next day, we were back in the car for a drive to Idaho.  It was a whole lot of Wyoming and Montana (he who has ears, let him hear).

We finally arrived in Idaho for the main event: Grace Agenda, a yearly conference hosted by Christ Church.  We got to hear fantastic authors and speakers, see long-distance friends who also came, sing psalms, go to a block party, and attend church.  It was fanflippingtastic.

After three days at that Presby Party, we hopped back in the car for our trip back to South Dakota.  Unfortunately our Idaho Airbnb didn't have a kitchen, so I wasn't able to bake oatmeal for that trip.  We spent a lot of time cleaning up puke along the side of a very scenic river through a National Forest.

Reminded me of that particularly scenic poop Finneas took in the Badlands.  Our kids are baller enough to pick the best places to have emergency stops.  I bet your kids don't do that.

We spent the next four days in South Dakota, enjoying the time with Papa and Grandma.

Then it was back in the car for our last car ride of this trip.  And after about twenty-seven thousand trips to the bathroom along the way, we were finally home.

Like I said, I will fill you in on more details later (once I've more carefully gone through the 1700 photos we took) but that was the main overview.

We got home super late Saturday night, and I knew right away we would not be starting school on Monday morning.  As much as I would like to start earlier this year so we can be done earlier in the summer next year, it just wasn't going to happen and I needed to be honest about it.  So we took this week "off," which is all relative when you're recovering from spending 80 hours in the car, and you are given a little extra time for house projects before school starts.  So I cleaned out the girls' room closet, I deep cleaned the fish tank after one child dumped THE ENTIRE HUGE CANISTER of fish food in there and the fish were suffocating, I washed (and unfortunately shrunk) our curtains, I ironed our church clothes, I finished assembling school portfolios from last year, I scrubbed both bathrooms and showers, I scraped crappy nasty caulk from the upstairs tub and recaulked, we ran errands, we had chiro appointments, I vacuumed out the van, I got totally caught up on laundry, and I frosted the bathroom window.

Today, my new dishwasher is scheduled to be delivered and installed (PRAISE THE LORD FOR HIS KINDNESS!), and we will be prepping for Laurelai's birthday party this weekend.  And then... the school year kicks off.  Wish me luck - this school year might be a doozy.  I have reduced the number of weeks we're planning on doing school, while still trying to fit the same amount of work in, so we'll see if that was a good idea or not in the coming weeks!

And finally, in pregnancy update news, I am large and in charge.

In this photo, I'm not actually pregnant, I'm just showing you the physical ramifications of eating everything they're advertising on their sign.

Psych, just kidding; I actually was pregnant in that photo.  Got you good that time.   Week 22.

Week 23.

Week 24.

Well.  That was an as-brief-as-I-could-possibly-make-it overview of the last three weeks at our house (slash "in our van")!

what's up weekly.

Hi, hi!  I am exhausted this week, so I'm going to try to keep this pretty short and sweet.  This pregnancy is really taking it out of me - even though I'm only 21 weeks, and still in the second trimester, I am really tired and really big, and I find myself needing tons of sleep.  My goal this week was to nap each day, but it didn't even happen once because we had stuff going on every morning, and I just didn't get time.  So here's a rundown of what we were filling our time with:

Over the weekend, we made an impromptu trip to Boonville.  We spent so much time there last summer during the mask mandate, but we hadn't been back yet this summer.  We picked up pizza from Casey's and let the kids run wild on the playground.

The girls quickly made friends with some other girls who were there, and they spent much of the evening running around playing Huggie Monster.

Penelope also spent time on Saturday taking everything out of the van and vacuuming it out, because it bothered her how much dirt had accumulated all over the floor and in the car seats.  If I haven't said it recently, I'll say it now: I love having big kids.  (I also love that I get to have big kids without giving up having little kids.  I get the best of all worlds!) 

On Sunday, the sisters were looking especially adorable (or, in the case of Penelope, SO OLD.  Vacuuming the van really aged her.)

THEN!!!  I had my ultrasound appointment on Monday!  

Todd and I dropped the kids off at a friend's house so we could go together, and when we came back to pick everyone up, Callista started crying because she had been under the impression that we were going to the hospital to get the baby out and bring it home.  Poor, poor girl - she is so excited for the baby, but the waiting game is HARD for little ones.  They have no concept of time, so saying things like, "The baby will come when the weather is cold and the Christmas tree is in the house" is helpful, but not exactly a reassurance in mid-June when she's already been waiting for the new baby for six whole weeks.

So, here's what we know from our ultrasound: no doomsday prophecies were spoken (unlike our experience with Juni), so that was a huge sigh of relief; I am measuring right at my due date, which is actually a week or two larger than I normally am at this point; and we are having a GIRL!

We waited until later in the day to tell the kids the baby's gender, so I decorated a little bit as a surprise, and we ate ice cream bars to celebrate.

Between my growth rate, and the fact that all of my girls have come before the 20-week ultrasound due date, I suspect we'll be having this baby a little on the early side rather than the late side.  If that's the case, that would be a huge relief: my due date is December 19, and it has been kind of stressing me out to assume we'll be going past that date and cutting it so close to Christmas.

So anyway.  That was our biggest news of the week.

In the afternoon on Monday, I picked up an Azure Standard order, which was the first time in forever.  It felt good and I'm considering starting to order more of our groceries through there; at least the ones that are comparably priced to what I currently pay locally - the 8% shipping fee is actually lower than our 10% local sales tax, so that's a small savings, plus it's a Christian-owned company and I have wanted to start spending our money a bit more intentionally.

On Tuesday, Todd took Atticus to Kansas City for his first orthotropics appointment since Covid started.  Atticus was thrilled to get to spend that one-on-one road trip time together again.  I was hoping they would be able to stop at Ikea for me on the way home, but the shelves I was hoping to get before school starts up again were out of stock.  Huge bummer.

While they were gone, Finneas smacked himself in the head while whipping a toy around, and wanted me to take a picture of the blood before I cleaned it up so he could impress Atticus.  Boys, am I right?

On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I took the kids to a friend's pool to swim.  (The first day, I took the big three girls, the second day I took the boys, and both days Juni stayed behind with the homebound so she wouldn't drown.)

In addition to all of that, I've been working on cleaning out the laundry room and the boys' closet this week, as well as sorting outgrown clothes in anticipation of the upcoming seasonal swap-out.  The basement is still in the "worse before it gets better" project stage as a result, but I think there's light at the end of the tunnel. 

Today I'll be running errands and hopefully taking a nap, although I still have some work to do in the basement that is best done during naptime, so we'll see if that happens.

The kids have spent inordinate amounts of time playing in the garage with the Duplos this week; we don't always have them out and available, so when they do come out, they're pretty novel.

And that was our week.  Maybe not as short and sweet as I thought I could make it, but that just goes to show how good and full we really have it around here.