what's up weekly. (Callista's birthday, and random summer break tidbits.)

Hello, fellow party people.  This summer is seeming to just fly by.  Between house projects and school and  all the popup activities that happen in the summer, I feel like the days are just gone before I even open my eyes.

Last weekend, Knox was running a fever and was really congested.  Poor buddy - his fever was so high and he was so congested and miserable.  I kept the babies home from church, which was the second weekend in a row (Eulalie had had the fever and congestion the previous week).  Which meant it was the second weekend in a row that I missed Todd teaching at church.  He has recently started the Elder Candidacy process, which opens up a lot more opportunities for teaching and leading parts of the service.  The weekend before last, he preached a truly excellent sermon on Christian education (I listened to it online after it posted later in the week), and this past week he led the first page of the liturgy, as well as preached a shorter exhortation on a section in the Westminster Catechism on adultery.

As we went into the week, Knox still wasn't feeling great.  Poor buddy went down hard.  I was still working on juggling schoolwork and errands, and cooking, and surviving Whole 30, so it was a rough start to the week, but things started looking up by Tuesday or Wednesday.  Wednesday night, Todd and I got out by ourselves to a local steak place after the babies were in bed (I love having older teens at home to hold down the fort).

Atticus had quite the week.  Now that he has his car up and running, Todd took him to get it registered so it is now street legal, which is wonderful because I also really love driving it.  It's a really great car.

Now that the car is fixed, Atticus been hunting for more projects (his summer assignment is to work on some kind of project each day).  Luckily for him, the younger boys jumped onto one of the beds and broke the slats, so the timing on that worked out perfectly and the bed is now fixed.  Todd also donned his Mr. Fix-It uniform this week and replaced the kitchen faucet and repaired the leaking garbage disposal.  It was way more time-consuming than it really should have been, but he powered through and I am now the proud owner of what feels like an entirely new kitchen now that my faucet works and my drain isn't pouring water.

So what were the girls up to this week?  Well, they made Birth Day cupcakes on Tuesday to celebrate the anniversary of the overturning of R v. Wade.  

And, the biggest news of all, Callista had a birthday!  She is eight!  She is so funny and handimated and sharp.  She has deep thoughts about God, and asks great questions.  She tells the longest stories.  She is growing out her nails, prioritizes doing her hair each day (and praying it would grow longer), and when she spends money on herself (which isn't often; she is a saver), it's usually on clothes or shoes.  She loves holding babies more than anyone I know.  She likes keeping things clean and organized.  She is so girly and affectionate and sweet-hearted, but she is also so strong and confident.  She is definitely a force.  I just love her to pieces and I'm so glad she's mine.

what's up weekly.

Am I any closer to Frankensteining a computer/camera/software solution to our laptop problem?  Almost three months since our computer went on the fritz, I would love to be able to say yes, but alas.  Still no photo access.  I'm trying not to feel upset by the whole situation.  I know it seems small, but I have no access to photos of the twins turning one, or of our last day of school, or any number of other small and large moments we seem to celebrate so often around here.  I'm not actively taking many new photos, since the camera card is full and so to take new photos means having to delete old photos that can't be backed up.  And life just moves so quickly that if it isn't documented, it can easily get forgotten.  It's honestly the whole reason I blog- to remember the things that slip so quickly through my hands.  And I'm without the tool that makes that possible.  And I feel like I'm missing so much.  I'm trying not to dwell on it, but I am feeling increasingly disheartened.

There's not much to tell beyond that, I suppose.  The babies are growing and gaining weight and being wonderful.  Nursing is still going well.

I'm over halfway through a round of Whole30 and hating it.  Why do I do this to myself? 

I've started a new routine of vacuuming and mopping all the floors each night after dinner, and I can't believe how much stress is alleviated by such a simple thing.  The house looks better, and I don't worry so much about the babies finding tiny things.

Yesterday, Atticus worked with a neighbor to get our second car up and running.  It's been sitting in the garage since we moved here and had some issues that we just hadn't gotten around to fixing.  Atticus took the task on with the understanding that if he could get it running, he could use it as "his" car for a while (though it is still ours).  It still has some quirks that need to be addressed, but it's officially mobile now and Todd and Atticus will go next week to get it registered and road-legal.

We're in the full swing of summer school.  I had to do things a bit differently this year from what we've done in the past; there were some areas I was noticing needed some special attention, which I just don't have time to slow down and zero in on during the school year.  So I decided we're going to spend some intentional time this summer focusing on a few main areas with each of the kids.  

Juniper and Callista are focusing on phonics and reading skills. Rocco and Lolo are working on reading skills and grammar. Finneas is working on finishing up the extra school year he started in the spring so that he can level up again in the Fall.  Penelope is doing a kind of finishing school/home ec course with me (we're covering etiquette, service, hospitality and personal presentation).  And Atticus' assignment is to work as much as he can - take on as many shifts as his employer needs him to, tackle as many mowing jobs as he can get, work on the car, and help with house projects as the needs arise.  Oey and the babies are assigned to look adorable and play as much as their little hearts can take.

They all also do a little bit of math and reading each day, and they have decided to all do Same Page Summer together, where they'll follow a read-through plan of the New Testament between May and September.  (They're so cute - they have a whole routine where they all spread their Bibles out and sit around the Kindle listening to the passage together on audiobook while eating Goldfish crackers.  It would make a cute photo.)

Last night, Lolo and I went to a floral arrangement class and had a great time.  It was the first time that I had not been the one to lay the babies down at bedtime, which was strange but good but sad.  It felt like a milestone - so many of those happening lately with the babies, where I feel like there's some sign we've made it through to the other side of those early days.  Anyway, the flower class was fun and here's the photo I took of my arrangement:

It had hydrangeas.  Imagine it in all its glory.

Anyway, I'm going to go eat some stupid Whole30-approved but woefully inadequate substitute for microwave popcorn and M&Ms and try to wish myself forward in time to the day when I am no longer on Whole30 and the Lord restores to me the photos the locusts have eaten.

weekly what's up (except that it's been over a month - whoops!)

Well, well, well. We meet again.  It feels like it's been a time, times and half a time since we last chatted.  I can't possibly fill you in on everything we've been up to over the last month, mostly because that's a lot of time to cover, and also because I depend on photos to jog my memory, and we are still photo-less around here.

It's kind of a multi-layered problem.  The charging port on my regular laptop died, so I can't charge the computer where I keep my photos.  I have a backup Mac laptop, but it didn't have a port for transferring photos from the camera.  So I bought a port and have transferred photos onto the Mac, but all of my culling and editing is done in Lightroom, which is (wamp wamp, you guessed it) still on the PC laptop and isn't compatible with the Mac.  So.  Here we are, with two laptops, a camera, a phone, and a camera card reader, and I still don't have access to my photos.  It's fine; we'll probably survive this tribulation.  It's likely not the worst crisis a person has ever faced.  But.  It has left me really unmotivated to blog, and I've realized how heavily I depend on my weekly photo review to actually know what to even write about anymore.  So I'll just have to scrape my mothering-muddled memory the best I can and we'll see what I come up with.

I definitely know for a fact that the babies turned ONE!  In my last post, I was marveling over them turning eleven months.  Since then, Knox learned to clap, Lalie is constantly pulling up to standing, and they can both rub their heads if you ask them if they're baptized.  They are both teeny weeny beanies - Knox weighed in at 12 lb, 15 oz on his birthday, and Eulalie was 13 lb, 9 oz.  She's probably gained close to a pound since then - she is really chunking out all of a sudden.  (My babies all have done that - they are itty bitty for a long time, but as soon as they start standing and walking, they gain a bunch of weight.). 

I made a steak dinner the night of their birthday, to celebrate having reached the finish line of our first year with the twins.  It was such a glorious and fun and amazing and hard year, and unlike anything I've ever done before.  I wouldn't have traded it for anything.  They are a precious gift from the Lord, and I am so grateful for them both.  

Another thing that has happened in the last month is that we are finally finished with our school year!  The kids worked so hard, and we finished up on the 23rd.  I just have to brag on the kids a minute - we went out to the local donut place to celebrate, and I kind of gave everyone the rundown before we went inside.  ("When we get inside, we're going to be quiet and not run around.  You're going to each pick out which donut you want, but wait patiently until it's your turn to order one at a time - don't just yell it out.  And don't touch the glass on the donut case - someone has to clean that, so be respectful."). We got inside, the kids did amazingly well, and the 20-something gal behind the counter told them they were so respectful, and she even gave them two free bags of donut holes with our order because they had done such a good job.  I was so proud of them.

The night of our last day, we headed to the airport to pick up our friend LisaGrace, who lives in Seattle and was staying the night with us for a fun, brief visit while she was in the Midwest.  I have known her for such a long time, and it was so wonderful to sit on the couch chatting again.  (We were roommates for a summer in college, and after I got married, we used to sit in the living room once a week to work on memorizing the entire book of Galatians.  So many good memories.) The next day her brother Mark came to pick her up, so I got to catch up with him, too!  I think I met him when he was about Atticus' age.  Time is really weird.

Speaking of time being weird, Penelope turned 15 and she hosted the cutest little book-themed tea party for a couple of friends.  They made pressed flower bookmarks, played a "guess the novel" game, drank tea and lemonade, ate dainty snacks, and then played a rousing game of rebel croquet, which is where you don't really know the rules, and you don't really have all the pieces to the croquet set, so you just kind of whack at things with the mallets.  I imagine the March sisters probably played the same game at some point.

What else?  Knox has been growing and developing in a way that made me want to get an extra set of eyes on him.  I'd kind of hit some dead ends finding a doctor, so I reached out to a friend at church who is a chiropractor and craniosacral therapist, just asking if she knew of anyone in the area.  She came by the house to take a look at him, and ended up doing a full chiropractic and CST adjustment.  He is like a totally different kid!  I really can't believe it!  I've noticed changes in his movement, his mood, his milestones.  I am really feeling a lot of relief and encouragement.

And I think I'll stop on that high note.  I'm sure there's all kinds of things I'm forgetting, like the day Laurelai swelled up head-to-toe in weird hives and her eyes and lips basically swelled shut, and how the it happened the same day that Juni sliced off a good portion of her fingernail with a potato peeler, all the way down to the nail bed.  It was bleeding everywhere.  It was a crazy day.  BUT.  We're not going to go into those things, because I want to end on a high note (although, technically, it's still a high note because both girls are fine now).  So we'll just leave it at that, and hopefully I'll check in soon!  Until then!