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!

what's up weekly. (grandparents and milestones and camping trips, oh my!)

Hi everyone! Before we dive on in, I would like to tell you that my postpartum hairline is starting to recover and I think we should all take a moment to say a quick word of thanks to our kind and compassionate Lord.  Maybe he was just sick of cringing every time he looked down at my scalp from above and felt compelled to intervene.  So I think we're both feeling better about the trajectory of things now.

Okay, let's dive in.

Two weeks ago, there was a Psalm Sing on Friday night, so Oey stayed home with me and the babies.  I thought I could get away with cleaning the bathrooms while she watched Paw Patrol nearby on the laptop, but it turns out that, in the mind of Oey, watching on the laptop doesn't count, so we got to watch the same exact episodes on the TV downstairs when I got done with the bathrooms.  I guess I don't make the rules.

That weekend, Todd's parents came down for a visit and got to meet the babies!

I call this one, "Everyone is shocked to see everyone else."

They brought a mini foosball game and the kids spent hours playing.

I call this one, "Girl chat with Grandma."

Whoa.  We have a lot of kids.

The babies turned four months old and they are such a delight and a gift.  

They are on a very predictable routine during the day, and often just wake up once each through the night, though many nights only one will wake up and the other will sleep through until morning.  I feed Eulalie a bottle before bed, and breastfeed Knox on both sides so that I know they're each getting a really full tummy before bedtime.  They spent a couple of weeks going through that dreaded sleep regression, but I think we're coming out on the other side and they're starting to sleep better again.   I'm still really fighting to increase my supply.  It seems like we have good days and hard days with that; it hasn't stabilized the way I'd like it to.  Babies keep you on your toes.

Knox is still Knox - chill, smiley, heavy, soft.  Eulalie is still Eulalie - alert, social, tiny, wiry.  I love that they have both been themselves from the very beginning.  Knox has decided he doesn't like sleeping on his tummy, so he rolls to his back and links his fingers into his crocheted blankie so he can suck his first finger and rub his face with the blankie at the same time.  Eulalie sleeps like a log on her tummy as she sucks her thumb - she barely moves an inch in her sleep.

They are both learning to reach for things and put them in their mouths.  Eulalie has learned to laugh when tickled (Knox still just turns red and holds his breath and looks like he's completely confused).  Eulalie spends much of her awake time gurgling at people and smiling when they make eye contact. She is so social!  And Penelope said the other day that Eulalie is so pretty that she's like Christmas - she makes you feel so happy you feel sad.  It's an overwhelming prettiness.  All the kids constantly comment on how pretty she is.

Knox is overwhelmingly cute, especially when he smiles.  He has dimples!  We call him the Happiest Donut, the Butteriest Biscuit, Buttery Boy, or just Butters.  Sometimes he gets sad, so we call him the Saddest Pickle, but that's very infrequent because he is so good natured and jolly.  The kids love holding him because he's like a weighted blanket - he just melts into you with all his weight and warmth, and he is perfectly content to just snuggle in.

I weighed them the other day and Eulalie weighs 9 lb, 15 oz, and Knox weighs 11 lb, 11 oz.  They're just tiny nuggets.

In other news, Todd and the boys got to go on a camping trip last weekend!  One of the guys at church organized a father-sons campout, so there were around five families that went.  They cooked over a fire, slept under a tarp, and came home with raging cases of poison oak.  All in all, a wild success.  The boys didn't stop talking about it for days.

Gearing up to head out.

Setting up camp.

Doing... something with a hatchet. 

Sword fighting with some wooden swords one of the families brought.

Breakfast in the rain.

Tearing down camp.

And here are a couple little glimpses at my oldest and youngest babies, one of whom doesn't exactly look like a baby anymore.

This is my view when I get up on Saturday mornings: Atticus standing over the stove, cooking his breakfast before he heads to work.  Does he not look like a full-on adult?!

The Sleepiest Marshmallow.

Such a dainty, social girl!

Okay, I'm off to bed.  I still haven't told the poop-chicken-stranger story I promised last week, but I will one day, if only to record it for posterity.  But that day is not today, as I am exhausted and it is now bedtime.  I really can't get over how tired I still am - is it because the babies are twins?  Or because I'm approaching middle age?  Or because the schedule is such a beast to juggle?  I'm not sure if it's mainly attributable to one factor, or if it's a mix of many things, but I am still just wiped out by the end of the day!  So this has been Paige Van Voorst, signing off.

what's up weekly. (airsoft, birthdays, school, babies; in a nutshell, All the Things.)

Well, golly.  It's been a hot minute.  We started school in earnest and everything else has just taken a backseat!  It has been a bit dizzying, to be honest, and I've been working hard to juggle everything that needs to get done.  Luckily, right around the time of my last post, the babies settled into a predictable routine, so that has made it a bit easier, but it still feels pretty, um, robust many days.

At this point, almost EVERYTHING has to be scheduled, or I forget even simple things like eating.  

I wake up around 6:30 so that I can throw in a load of laundry, wash any dishes that didn't get cleaned up the night before, make and eat my breakfast, and read a chapter of my Bible before I get Eulalie up at 7:00.  When she's done eating, I get Knox up and feed him.  From there, they're up for about an hour, and then take a two-hour nap.  They're on this three-hour cycle for the rest of the day, eating at 10:00, 1:00, 4:00 and 7:00.  I feed them once overnight, and we start the routine all over again the next day.  I'm grateful that they're old enough now that I can schedule them like this; managing twins seems to require so much more structure than singles.  That's been my personal experience so far, anyway.

Why is it so cute to put them together in baby gear only made for one baby? I just love it so much.

As for our school days, the kids eat breakfast at 8:00, and once I get the babies down, I try to go downstairs and get a workout in.  I'm still working through the same Ab Rehab program, although I'm making slow progress.  But slow and steady, right?  Then we start school at 9:00 most days. 

Each kid has three types of school to juggle: independent work, read alouds with me, and table work/group work with everyone.  Much of the day they're doing school independently, but I do spend about an hour of read aloud time with each level (high school, middle school, 3rd grade, 2nd grade).

Our table work happens on Wednesdays, and the high school kids have Biology Lab on Fridays, so those days look a bit different.

I have a break from 12:00 - 1:00, which is when I try to get some housework done in addition to eating lunch, then I am back to school until 4:00.  Or, that's the goal anyway; I've been so tired that a few days a week I'm having to cancel a few things in the afternoon so I can get a short nap before the babies get up and eat at 4:00.  Then I clean up, start dinner, and we head into the evening.

The babies are fed and down for the night by 7:30, then I have a bit of down time until I need to pump around 9:30 (I'm having some feeding issues), and then I start getting ready for bed.

The days just fly by.  It's also why I haven't been around here much - blogging is weirdly time consuming, and I just end up not having time, or being too tired by the end of the day!  But also, once I get behind, it takes me so much longer the following week to get everything up-to-date, so it becomes a downward spiral.  (I am haunted to this day by a poster hanging in my 7th grade TAG classroom: "If you don't have the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over?"  Such a good, true, awful reality.)  BUT.  Here I am! So let's see if I can cover it all.

So, what else have we been up to the last few weeks?  Well, what haven't we been up to?

The kids were invited to a birthday pool party a couple of weeks ago, and they were so excited to get to go!  It was my first time taking the babies out in the evening, and it became obvious to me that evenings are not a time that I can be away from home with them!  Honestly, leaving the house with them is difficult any time of day (other than church, I've only ever taken them to an eye doctor appointment, a baby shower, and this birthday party).  Twins are significantly harder away from home than they are when we're at home and in our element.

Todd took me and the babies home partway through the party, but the rest of the kids stayed and swam and had a blast.

The next day, Lolo got to celebrate her own birthday with her own birthday party!  My sister and her family, and my parents all came down to celebrate with us.

She chose cheesecake for her birthday cake, because she's Lolo.

The following Monday, Juni randomly got sick.  It was just her, and it was just one day.  But she ran a fever all day, and she slept so much.  She would get up and play, and then it would be a little while that I hadn't seen her, and when I went to look for her, she'd have crawled back into bed to sleep.  Then after a while, she'd get up and do it again.  By the evening, she perked back up and felt totally normal the next day.  So strange.

The kids dug up one of my beds of potatoes for me, and we got a small yield.  As long as there are more potatoes at the end of the day than the number that I planted, I call that a win.  (We ate them in some potato soup last night, and they were really good!)  We still have another bed to dig up; I'm hoping there will be a better yield in there, since it's in full sun in a south-facing spot.  We'll see.

The week before school kicked off, the kids enjoyed being very domestic, vacuuming and baking cookies.  It is both wonderful and terrible to have a constant supply of baked goods in the house now that the kids can work independently in the kitchen.

(Speaking of working independently in the kitchen, this school year, the middle schoolers have been assigned to breakfast duty, and the high schoolers have been assigned to lunch duty, and may I just say that they outshine me in the kitchen?  I don't think we've ever eaten so well.) 

Laurelai officially turned eleven, and we were all so excited to celebrate with her! She is such a soft, servant-hearted, funny, creative, smart, particular, deliberate little foodie.

Usually on birthdays, we let the kids pick all the meals for the day and allow one meal to be from a restaurant.  She requested that, instead of spending money on restaurant food, we could get a day pass to the pool and go swimming.  So Todd took most of the kids (Oey and the babies stayed back with me), and everyone returned with rave reviews.  It makes me think that maybe next year we'll do a pool pass instead of swimming lessons and Todd can just teach the kids to swim.

With the babies' new routine, I've been giving them baths each night before bed.  I swear it helps them sleep better, plus it gives us the cutest after-dinner view.  Then I nurse Knox on both sides and feed Eulalie a big bottle to keep her little belly full and try to encourage her to gain a bit of weight.  She is currently 9.5 pounds, and Knox is just barely eleven pounds.  (Both in the 0%, just like most of my other babies.)  They're not really gaining, but at least I know they're eating plenty, at least before bed, which eases my mind a little while I figure out my supply issues.

Todd took some of the kids to a wedding.  I had considered attempting to take everyone, but I think I'm just getting more realistic about my capacity and the timeline by which I have expected certain aspects of life to be able to return to normal.  I'm starting to suspect we will be pretty homebound for quite awhile longer.  I was sad to miss out on the festivities, though!

Not an uggo in the bunch.

Not really an activity of note, but the neighbors put some decent deck chairs on the curb, so you better believe we grabbed them. Best $0 I ever spent.  (Well, thats not true - SO MUCH of my stuff was found on the curb.  But this time I didn't even have to grab them myself, I just sent the kids over.  So that absolutely counts for more Free Credits.)  The kids have spent so much time lounging in them.

Gosh, I just love our deck and our outdoor space.  I love how much time the kids spend outside each day because our house has a very indoor-outdoor design.  I still can't get over how much I love this house.

Finneas celebrated his half-birthday.  He is on the downhill slide toward the teens!  (Or, in the words of Tiny Penelope back when we told the kids we were pregnant with Callista, "We're SO CLOSE to the TEENS!")

And in the most recent thrillride, the boys and Lolo took part in another airsoft battle this past weekend.  Apparently, from the photos and stories, it was pretty epic.  I don't know exactly what's going on in all the photos below, but I think we can all conclude that this looks like a fabulous time was had by all.

Giving Knox the pep talk on being the man of the house while the other men were gone.  Knox did a wonderful job protecting us.

Finneas and Rocco

Lolo, wearing an orange vest because she was just there for the vibes.

Atticus on the left, Rocco on the right.  Some of their teammates in the middle.

Atticus and Finneas

And that is what all we've been up to the last few weeks!  Whew!  Just recounting it all made me tired, so I'm off to bed.  Happy weekend!

OH! And even after all of that, I still forgot to tell you the story of how I found myself covered in poop and talking to a stranger that I found standing around in our chicken yard.  I'll have to get to that next time.