weekly what's up. (the plague, my birthday, and my computer dies before I'm finished.)

Well, well, well.  We meet again.

This week was trucking along at a nice, leisurely pace until it all of a sudden picked up a bunch of steam and adventure right at the very end.  Let me tell you about it.

But first, let me just tell you that as I was writing this blog, my laptop died, leaving these first few photos in a weird order.  I'm publishing this post on our other laptop, but I can't really change the order of the photos on here for some reason, so here's a few unrelated and random photos for good measure before we really jump in.

This is the outfit Ophelia chooses everyday: this princess dress and safari hat.

The babies have been eating a lot more food lately - here the girls are giving them some homemade applesauce.

Last Friday was full of milestones - Atticus mowed his first lawn of the season, and Finneas got to stay up for Third Friday Movie Night, which is when Todd and the 13+ crowd stay up late and watch a movie that the littler set aren't ready for.  Since Finneas turned 13 at the beginning of the month, this was his first chance to join in.  They popped popcorn and watched The Tomorrow War.

I spent a lot of time tackling cleaning projects on Friday, since I've moved my schedule around and now don't have school to teach on that day.  Between Friday and Saturday, I washed the outsides of the windows, cleaned all the floors, and mopped all the walls.  I got grass seed down on our patchy, sad front lawn.  I also took the kids to the Dollar Tree to pick out presents for my upcoming birthday (their idea, not mine, lest you think I'm mining my children for presents.)  It was a really busy, really good couple of days.  I don't love cleaning, but I do love things being clean.

On Saturday, Todd took the kids to the park for a while, and then we had Brinner for Sabbath Dinner, so it was basically like heaven on earth for them.  It's hard to imagine a better day than Park and Brinner Day.

Classic "Nen At the Park."

On Monday evening, Penelope got sick - and I mean, pretty darn sick.  She was puking constantly for a few hours, which is saying something because she never pukes.  It's been yearssssss since she last threw up, but all that went out the window Monday night, and she was sick all day Tuesday.

Wednesday was my birthday!  Each year it becomes more and more acceptable to let the curmudgeonly part of my personality shine, and I don't hate it.

So what am I like at 39?  My favorite things in life other than Todd and the kids are Clean Sheets Day, going to bed at night, changing into the perfect pajama pants, eating hot food while it's still hot, feeling clean after a shower, looking through clean windows, only watching movies for the sets and costume design; things like that.  I'm like the less-exciting embodiment of a slightly-vanilla-scented candle.  But like, an increasingly old and dried out one.  It's cool.  I like to tell myself that's the best kind.

Anyway.  Wednesday started out on a pretty good foot.  Everyone was so kind and sweet to me all morning, I went out and got Culver's for lunch, the girls made brownies for me, and Todd and I planned to go out for some Thai food once the babies were in bed in the evening.  But in the afternoon, Rocco started saying his stomach hurt.  Then Juni's started.  Then Finneas' started.  Then the pyrotechnics began and it was pretty safe to say we shouldn't be leaving the kids at home by themselves, nor should we fill our stomachs with Thai food while on alert that we may start throwing up at any minute.

So we stayed home, I made chicken soup, and we rubbed the backs of the barfers all evening.  At bedtime, we put Juni, Rocco and Finneas in our room to sleep so we could be close by if they needed anything.  Which was good, because they needed us all night - lots of trips to the bathroom, lots of new sheets and clothes, lots of rinsing out of buckets, lots of moving laundry through the washer and dryer.  Around 1:00, Penelope came up to tell us Laurelai had barfed in her bed, so we went down and changed her bedding.  Around 3:00, Callista started throwing up, and she was up every half an hour or so until morning.

Commemorating how we spent my birthday

I never before understood the appeal of having a weirdly large master bedroom.  But between homebirth and Five Thousand Kids with the Flu, I get it now.

By midmorning, everyone was still pretty strung out and feeling pretty rotten, but at least stable enough for me to run Atticus back over to the DMV.  One thing I forgot to tell you before was that I got to spend the morning of my birthday at the DMV.  Atticus' permit had expired and he needed to retake the test to renew it, and my license was set to expire.  We got there and had all the paperwork on hand that we needed for Atticus, but there were approximately fifty thousand documents that they required for me to renew mine in addition to the social security card, birth certificate, and proofs of address that I brought.  Why?  Well, why not?  That's what I always say.

The gal told me I had one more day to renew my license before it expired, so I figured I'd come back in the next day with Atticus so he could take the test again (he missed passing by one question, and he couldn't retake it until the next day).  Unfortunately, when I got there the next day, the same gal told me that my license was already expired and there wasn't a grace period, so I'd have to take the written test and a driving test.

So yesterday, at the age of 39 years old, I sat next to my teenager while we both took the same written test.  Then, I got to take the DMV gal out for a spin in my first-ever experience doing a real-life driving test.  I didn't know that was a real thing, to be honest.  I thought they only did that on TV for theatrical effect.  Luckily, they didn't make me try to parallel park the Kraken, and I got reprimanded once for pulling forward into a(n empty) crosswalk to check for oncoming traffic before turning right at a stop sign.  Whoops; I was under the impression that turning blindly into traffic was frowned on, but what do I know?

Well enough, I guess, because I passed both tests and I am now once again a legal driver in the state of Kansas.

Of course, when we got home, Atticus started throwing up, but I'm sure you saw that coming.

So far, the seven oldest kids have gotten the bug.  Todd and I haven't been hit (knock on wood), and the babies and Oey have also seemed to stay above the fray.  I've tried to keep them at least a little bit corralled away from the sick ones, just so they're not reaching for germy tissues or blankets or barf buckets or anything.  Yesterday afternoon the big kids all hung out downstairs and watched movies, and I kept the littler ones upstairs with me when I could.

So today's plans really just involve thinking healthy thoughts for the rest of us and praying the bigger ones start to feel better!

Now, I'm off to hit 'publish.'  The laptop I'm currently working on is not letting me preview this before posting, so if there are typos, take it up with the laptop jinn or whoever is responsible for my recent string of technological bad luck.