what's up MONTHLY. Yikes.

Oh wow.  My blogging record is truly abysmal this month.  It's been a full four weeks since I last checked in.  That's a really long time in the lifetime of small children.  

Look at the party vibe you've missed out on in the meantime!

Oey Mysterio

The twins are now five-and-a-half months old, if you can believe it.  Eulalie has two teeth, Knox is reaching for things and putting them in his mouth, and they both are so social.  

I have to button her onesies outside of her pants or she wiggles right out of them.

Oh, twins are so precious. They always find ways to touch each other or wiggle closer to each other.  The best word I have for the feeling I get watching them is "wonder."  Pure awe.  Amazement.  There is Eulalie, and there is Knox, and then there is this third element that is "twins," and I get a front row seat to see all three grow and develop.  I really do look at them most days and wonder how I got to be one of the lucky few who are gifted two babies at once. 

We're trying out a new nighttime routine, in which I feed them around 11:00 before I go to bed, and then they sleep until about 7:30 the next morning.  We're all getting much better sleep, but I don't seem to be making as much milk, so I might need to add another night feeding back in... but golly, I really don't want to.  Those middle-of-the-night feedings take about 45 minutes to feed them both, and it is so painful to be that tired and awake for that long in the middle of the night!  

Anyway.  You didn't come here just to hear me detail the babies' schedule.  It is very full, I'll say that.  I am finding that life with twins is very busy.  Not that that's a shocker to anyone, but the actual juggling of things has given me a run for my money.  As the babies get older, the workload is mellowing into a more predictable fullness, but it's still quite full.  It's truly wild.  Most days, there is genuinely not enough time in the day to get everything done that needs to be done, so some things are holding on by a thread, and I'm going to bed exhausted each night.

In addition to the babies, the rest of life keeps trucking along.  The older kids are getting older, life is getting busier for them, and I am along for the ride!

So let me give you a brief-ish (?) rundown of what our past month has held for us.

The Babies Moved Beds:

After I originally moved the babies into the nursery overnight, they were sharing the single crib that was set up in there already.  But as they got bigger, they got wigglier and were starting to scooch next to each other in their sleep.  Which was adorable, but not exactly safe.  So we pulled out our second crib and Todd got it all set up for them.  We did some rearranging in the nursery, and now they each have their own bed, although the cribs are touching so as they get older they can still reach other if they want to.  

Half Birthdays and Birthdays

Our April birthday girls each celebrated their half-birthdays, and Todd celebrated his 46th (full, actual) birthday.

No photos of Todd on his birthday.  Face palm.  Picture this: dark-haired man smiles through his majestic beard at his myriad progeny as they do him homage and shower him with homemade cards and Dollar Tree snacks.  Nearby sits the wooden numbers declaring he is forty-six.  Bejammied wife is nearby, smiling but unfortunately cameraless.

A thousand words are worth a picture.

Camping

We were on break from school for a week in the middle of the month, so my parents came down with their camper and stayed the week in a campground by the river.  They had the kids out for campfire cooking, crafting, and general merriment.  The last night of their stay, they set up a projector in the yard and we got to watch The Greatest Showman on the bigger screen.

Airsoft Battle

A family at church hosted an airsoft battle and the kids got all geared out to go.

If you look closely through the camouflage, you can see there is a boy in there somewhere.  A Finneas, I believe.

Juni, owning the day.

School

After our break week, the kids jumped back into their independent schoolwork with both feet.  I took a second week off from the things I help them with, since I had a number of home management projects I needed to tackle. 

Reformation Day Party and Hosting

Christ Church Leavenworth hosted its annual Reformation Day party the weekend before Reformation Day.  Penelope dressed as Perpetua, as part of a group costume of Christian women through the ages, and her group won the costume contest!

For some reason, these photos uploaded in backwards order, and I'm too lazy to redo them, so humor me and just let me tell the story in reverse.

Learning the Virginia Reel

Penelope looked so regal

Lolo went as a character from one of Penelope's original books.

Callista was Una from St. George and the Dragon.

These babies stole the show.

This was Halloween night, not the Reformation Day party, but golly, aren't they cute?

Can I just take a moment to document how stinking DIFFICULT it is to paint a baby's face??!

After the party, our friends Josiah and Meghan, and their kids, stayed the night with us.  Other than our families, it was the first time we've hosted anyone since the babies were born.  It was so wonderful to spend a little extra time with good friends.

Canning

I have jumped back on the canned-wagon.  The weather is cooler, and the potatoes and apples I bought needed to get dealt with, so I've been working hard to tackle them.  I have put up around seventy quarts of potatoes, thirty quarts of applesauce, seventeen pints of maple syrup, and fifteen quarts of spiced apples so far.  It has been a busy time.

Other Photos You Should See:

Atticus has been saving up, and finally got to pick up something he's been saving up for.

Reformation Day 

Yesterday was Reformation Day, so we celebrated with our first cheeseboard of the season!  This is the official kickoff holiday for us, and WE ARE READY for holiday season!

Okay, that's it!  A very high-altitude flyover view of the last month!

what's up weekly. (a week in which the news is barely news.)

Hi all!  I'll admit on the front end that I don't really know why I'm posting this week - there is very little to report.  But maybe that's actually why I'm posting - I don't feel quite so overwhelmed by the quantity of news!

Last Sunday, Todd had the opportunity to preach on Psalm 11 at church! It was so great getting to see him up there again - it's been over four years since he's preached.  Which is crazy to think about - a lot has happened in that time.

Monday, I cancelled school so I could go grocery shopping before the port worker strike started, just in case things got crazy after that.  It was an all day endeavor, and I was exhausted by the end of it.  I found a good deal on arm roast, so I also got those prepped as stew meat and put in jars to can the next day.  I also cleaned out the kitchen fridge.  It was such a long day.

Tuesday, we worked hard to get caught up on the work we missed the day before, and I took Atticus to go mow a friend's yard in the afternoon.  Todd took the kids with him to go get milk while I prepped dinner.  I haven't made that drive with them since the twins were born, since evenings are really busy with the babies, and it was also so hot this summer that I didn't want to put the babies in the van for that long.  (The back of the van has spotty air conditioning, and it was even too hot for a while for Todd to take the other kids, so they would stay home with me while he went.)  It was nice to have a little bit of quiet time before dinner when the babies were sleeping and the kids were out of the house - I got the kitchen cleaned, some cheese made, and dinner prepped all without interruption.

Wednesday was our regular "fun" school day - we did map drill and math drill in the morning, then I read to the younger kids from "Five Children and It," which they're loving.  In the afternoon, I read to the younger kids again from their geography books, and we mapped Marco Polo's progress from Venice to Jerusalem.  After that, the big kids joined us and we read from "Tom Sawyer" for an hour, which everyone is really enjoying - including me.  The voices in that one are fun to do!  I really enjoy doing books with lots of voices or different accents.  

Yesterday, we had another "regular" school day, though I set the high school kids to doing their afternoon read aloud time independently so I could get a nap in.  I still need to nap many days through the week, and am needing to keep an early bedtime.  The babies have started back to waking up multiple times a night, which is tolerable because I know that getting those extra feedings in through the night is good for their growth and helpful for my milk supply.  But it also means I need to be extra diligent about getting sleep at other times or I just really can't function.

Supply issues are still a forefront stressor.  The last few days have gone a bit more smoothly, probably helped in part or in full by those extra night feedings.  The babies aren't as fussy and I'm not finding myself needing to make as many supplemental bottles as I was needing to last week.  A friend has given me a lot of frozen breastmilk that she pumped but didn't end up using, which is just a huge blessing.  It makes supplementing a lot less stressful, but my ultimate hope is to not need to depend on outside sources of milk for the babies.

Looking pretty proud of themselves.

Speaking of the babies, they both learned to roll themselves from their backs to their tummies this week - and within about five minutes of one another!  First of all, let me say that I find twins to be so remarkable.  Watching them be simultaneously individuals and also twins blows my mind - they even poop at the same time most of the time!  So wonderfully strange.  So anyway, they're rolling around now, so you never know when you walk away if they'll be in the same place you set them down!

Well, I think that's about it for the news.  Small items of note: we still have nine (NINE.) chickens, most of which are looking like females.  (That's too many chickens.)  And unfortunately, none have started to lay eggs yet.  (So many pointless, smelly chickens.)  I'm hoping that that changes soon, and that we have at least a couple roosters so we don't have quite such a difficult task facing us when it comes time to decide which ones to keep.  (We'll be giving our B String chickens back to the friend who gave us the incubator and the eggs.)

Unrelatedly, Finneas found this IN OUR HOUSE.  NO THANK YOU.

And that's all, folks!