what's up weekly. (no photos? no problem. I mean, it's a problem but it's no problem.)

Another week, another still-can't-get-my-photos-onto-the-blog.  Which is a real shame, because it's been a pretty cute couple of weeks.

First of all, the babies turned ELEVEN MONTHS OLD.  Which is crazy because I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I just had twins.  Like, where did these people come from, and how have they already been here for so long?

They are still tiny.  Eulalie has finally lapped Knox in weight and has crossed the thirteen-pound mark! (13# 1oz, to be exact.).  He is still hovering right below that hurdle at 12# 15 oz.  He is scooching around everywhere now, so they're into everything and loving it.  His top two teeth finally popped through, so he is happier than he had been for a while, and Eulalie is the cheerfullest little Beans you ever did see.  When they go to bed, they love to play with me for a minute - Eulalie loves to grab my hand through the crib slats and then wrestle it and bite it just like a puppy does.  Knox just likes to cuddle with my other hand.  Then, when I leave the room, they play with each other for a little bit before falling asleep.  Knox just pokes the top of her head, and Eulalie tries to reach his feet so she can steal his socks and chew on them.

We are working on dropping their evening nap and extending bedtime a little later.  They still get fussy if they don't get put to bed for a quick rest time from 5:00-5:30, but they don't fall asleep.  It's like they just need a breather.  Then they eat dinner with us, then nurse or have a bottle, and then play until 7:00 or 7:30.  It is really helping to open up our evenings, and dinner time specifically, for them to be able to make it through this stretch at a leisurely pace and without fussiness.

Okay.  That's the update on the babies, which is very cute and informative but lacks photos so we should move on because their faces are more interesting than their schedule.

Next on the list, let me tell you that you're sad I'm not posting Easter photos.  The kids were adorable in their Easter outfits, the food all day was beautiful and delicious, and not a single one of us was sick, which was not the most notable Easter miracle that has ever happened, but it's still pretty notable.  We had bagels and lox with mimosas for breakfast, then we hightailed it to church, then after the service we came home for a pretty ham-and-potatoes lunch with the prettiest table decorations I've ever pulled off.  (This blog really can't handle photolessness.). Then the big kids staged an egg hunt in the basement since it was raining outside, and we had cheeseboard for dinner and watched Risen before bed.  Oey wore her Easter dress all day because she said it made her look like a princess, which it did.  But again, you'll have to take my word on it.

Other items of note are, first, that Rocco finished third grade yesterday!  I will still have him do math and free reading through the summer, since we do those subjects all year, but he has finished the rest of his curriculum load and can now say he's a fourth grader!  We will take a break this upcoming week, and then the rest of the kids will trickle to a finish after that.

Last night, Todd took me out for a date night.  I said I wanted Thai food, knowing full well that I was rolling the dice on ruining the whole evening because the Thai place in town has good food but terrible everything else.  It smells like sewer backup.  You can't walk in the main door, you have to use a weird side door, and all the windows are all blacked out.  When you get inside, it feels kind of storage-unity and I'm not exactly sure what happened to the walls to make them all weirdly dinged up but something happened to the walls.  I'm pretty sure it's a front for some kind of crime ring - really smelly illicit poker games?  Thai boxing fight club?  Definitely some health code violations at the very least, but I'm not sure how someone would make money on that.  Anyway.  Good food, horrible experience.  But that's how badly I wanted the food.

We arrived and the door was locked.  Not the main door, which is always locked because it's a delivery entrance, but the weird side door.  I told Todd that must be our sign to go to the Italian place instead, but as we were walking back to the car, an employee stuck his head out the door and looked at us.  We tried to explain that the door was locked, and he was like, "Yeah, that's how this one works."  Sure.  That seems normal.  So we went in, and it did indeed smell bad, but not as bad as an open pipe, so I was like, it's fine. Todd's face said it was Not Fine.  The employee walked us to our table, which was filthy, but he said there were only two people working that day so they were behind.  When we sat down and the guy went to get our menus, I suggested we order our food to go, but Todd was like no.  How long was it going to take to get our dirty food if only two people are even there working?

So we got up to leave and we passed the guy as he was coming with our menus.  Todd just booked it out but I felt like I had to explain so I was like, "We changed our minds! Thank you!" and kept walking, like a real weirdo.  Then we went and gorged ourselves on pasta and bread and then went to Walmart to buy new pants, which is unrelated but seems related.

And that is our photoless week.  Black and white never made me feel so blue.  I NEED TO SEE PHOTOS OF MY BABIES' FACES OR I'LL DIIIIIIIE.

weekly what's up: Still on Hiatus.

Still no news to report, no photos to share.  Our main laptop isn't charging, so I don't have access to our photos, and a blog post without photos is a nothingburger.  No one wants to watch me ramble in black and white for the next twenty minutes.  

Luckily, this week would have been short and sweet anyway.  Not much news to share, other than that the babies (specifically Eulalie) seem to have a death wish and I both ordered a Dechoker and looked up the number for Poison Control this week.  First, she found a large foil sequin on the floor from one of the girls' crafting endeavors and promptly swallowed it, where it got stuck in her throat and would not come out.  It was flat, so it kept sticking to the side of her throat and wouldn't come up or go down.  She finally gagged enough that she started throwing up, and that did the trick, but it was horrible and stressful.

The next day, she somehow got ahold of an ant trap.  Atticus just looked down and she had ants crawling all over her face and she had spilled the liquid bait all over herself.  Luckily it was one that said it was safe for kids and pets, but it also said "keep out of reach of children and pets"... so riddle me that.  Anyway, all's well that ends well, but I am feeling trepidation about keeping an eye on the babies as they become more mobile.

In the meantime, I'm trying to look around the house for anything that should be kept out of the way of the babies, and it's literally impossible.  The floor is always covered with dropped food, even though we literally sweep at least three times a day and vacuum once a day.  Do people with twins just have a robot vacuum running 24/7?  How on earth can a person keep up?  And that's to say nothing of the craft supplies, the Legos, the beads, the GI Joe accessories, the Calico Critters, the little tiny hair rubber bands, the crayons, and all the other things that end up all over the floor all day long that are the perfect size for getting lodged in a tiny airway.  Do they make tiny protective hamster balls for babies to roll around in?  (No, that's a terrible idea.  They would definitely roll themselves down the stairs when the bigger kids inevitably leave the baby gate open like always.). 

Are we certain that twins regularly survive childhood?  I mean, seriously - who was the last adult twin you met?  Maybe they don't really exist.  Or maybe the ones that do make it don't have older siblings or otherwise distracted mothers.  I'd like to see the statistics on that.

weekly what's update: there will be no weekly what's up.

Well, I did end up posting a blog from last week that you probably haven't seen yet since it just posted like two minutes ago, so you might want to click through to read that.  But the long and short of it is that my laptop charging port fizzled out mid-post, so I'm working from another laptop for the time being.  But the problem is that all my photos and my photo software are all on my main one, so I don't have access to those right now, and I don't feel like posting some long string of writing without any photos to break up the visual monotony, so I'm quickly going to bullet-point the things I'd like to tell you about someday if I ever have access to photos again.

*Oey did get sick Friday night, and I got sick Saturday morning, and Todd got sick Monday, and so everyone ended up getting it except the babies.

*Todd preached on Sunday but I couldn't go because I was still lying in a sodden and despairing heap in my bed that day.

* Atticus has been working on getting our second car up and running so he can start driving it.

* Knox started crawling, and we have been working on adjusting the babies' schedule to a four-hour cycle, and trying (and not yet succeeding) to drop their third nap.

* I've been switching out the kids' seasonal clothing this week and it's about done me in.  I'm so close to, and yet so far from finishing.

Okay.  That's a much more boring way to detail our week than usual, mostly because it's missing the best part: the adorable faces.  But alas.  This is all I can manage for now.  Please be praying I can get the charging port fixed!  

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.

what's up weekly. (Princess Bride edition, for no real reason at all.)

Tyrone, you know how much I love blogging, but I've got laundry to fold, sheets to put back on the beds, a kitchen to clean, and Guilder to frame for it.  I'm swamped.

So I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

Last Saturday, my family came down for our Second Annual Chinese Food Day.  We all sat around rolling egg rolls and wontons, and then gorging ourselves on fried food and stir fry.  The kids played with cousins, I got to see my sister for the first time in months.  Finneas and a couple of the other kids got to open birthday gifts.  It was incredible.

Cousins folding wontons

Cousins taking a snack break

The OG Egg Rollers on a reunion tour

Listen to me: this is the stuff great childhoods are made of.  Deep-fried pockets of meat and soy sauce.

On Monday, we jumped back into school after Spring Break.  Finneas started his new grade level, and things went really well.  He seems pretty unfazed by the transition; his workload seems pretty similar, actually.  It does make for very full days for me, though, and I'm feeling a little stretched thin, but I am telling myself that we only have eight weeks left until the end of the year - I can juggle it for eight weeks.  Maybe at some point, in all my free time, I'll write a "Day in the Life" post again like I used to, just to document what these wild days look like at this moment in time.

Our current Wednesday Read Aloud is The Secret Garden

Tuesday, the babies turned ten months old!  They are just so much fun.  Eulalie is waving and chattering and crawling all over the place.  Knox is blowing raspberries and learning how to beat his chest on command like Tarzan.  The other day, I laid them next to each other on the floor for diaper changes, and they really saw each other.  They were each talking and smiling and grabbing at the other's face.  They were mesmerized.  Now, they've started moving to the touching ends of their cribs so they can be closer during naptimes.  It is so, so, so sweet.

They are both just tiny beans - Knox is 12 lbs, 13 oz, and Eulalie is 12 lbs 12 oz.  All our babies are small, but they might be vying with Laurelai for smallest Van Voorsts at a year.  We'll see what happens!

My milk supply hasn't seemed to fully recover since my bout with mastitis a couple of weeks ago, so we've started supplementing the babies with raw goat's milk.  I'm thankful that it sits well in Knox's tummy, and doesn't make him vomit like cow's milk does, but he's not super interested in it.  I'm glad to know we have it if he needs it, though.  Eulalie has been taking a bottle of it at night before bed, and she's willing to drink it cold from a sippy cup when she's in her high chair.  (Knox can't really be bothered with either a cup or a bottle.)

On Wednesday, I got sucked in to watching a series of YouTube videos about a rescued box turtle, and now I'm convinced Stumpi has been woefully neglected and needs daily baths, among other things.  She needs a manicure, and maybe a good scrubbing, and probably some Vitamin A supplements so she doesn't get turtle measles? I'm mostly kidding.  I don't really know about these things, as evidenced by the fact that she actually hisses at me when I try to take care of her.  I don't know why she won't just let me love her, but whatever.  She does seem to really enjoy her soaks in the Turtle Tub anyway.  

So, that was our week.  We are now a few school weeks into experimenting with a four-day week.  (Well, four days for me - some of the kids still have independent schoolwork to tackle on Fridays, but I have relegated all the direct instruction responsibilities to M-Th.)  I just didn't have time to tackle housework and errands when we were doing school all five days.  So today I'm hoping to take my workday to wash the windows, wash the walls, shop for shorts, take the kids to Dollar Tree to shop for my birthday presents, take Atticus to a yardwork job and to the DMV, pull out the kids' summer clothes... I think my plans may be a bit too ambitious, so we'll see how far we get down the list.  But the tasks aren't going to do themselves, so I can't just sit around chatting with you dingdongs all day - I gotta go!

Have a wonderful weekend!

what's up weekly. (photos of butchering a hog - look away.)

Last Friday when I left you, I mentioned that the boys were off to a hog butcher day.  A family we're friends with at church raised hogs for a few families this year, with the understanding that we'd all participate in turning them to meat when it came time.  Since we butchered them ourselves, we basically got them for the cost of feeding them.

They went Friday morning, and Atticus was the one who killed our pig.  I saw video of it, and I was so thankful to the Lord that it was so humane.  Atticus was a dead shot with the rifle, and the pig went down so quickly and without pain.  The guy who was walking everyone through each step of the process, who estimated he'd personally processed tens of thousands of pigs in his lifetime, said to Atticus, "Nice shot, kid!"  Of the four pigs done that day, ours was done the smoothest and Atticus held his own with the men.  He felt really proud of himself, as he should.

After that came the gutting and skinning and all of that loveliness.  Then the meat was hung up overnight, and the boys spent a little time practice shooting at our friend's range before coming home.

The next morning they were off again, this time to part the meat out into usable cuts.

The younger brothers were in charge of bagging the cuts.

I got two giant hams (which I'm going to cure and hopefully smoke before Easter), twenty pounds of bacon (again, the plan is to cure and smoke it), pork chops, bones, lard and a tonnnnnn of ground pork (we eat a lot of sausage).  I lost count of the bags as I was loading them into the freezer, so I need to go back and count them to find out just how many.  But I think we ended up with about 200# of meat, and we only paid $300, plus we know how our pig was both raised and killed.  I'm really happy with how it went, and I think we'll plan to do this again next year.

So far, I've made pork chops..  The flavor was really good - not "piggy" or "farmy", you know what I mean? - but I overcooked them so they turned out dry.  Wamp wamp.  After all that work the boys did, I dried out the meat.  Luckily we have plenty more for me to practice on.

On Sunday, we all made it to church, and it actually went well!  We are in a season where church is really hard for us.  The babies don't do well missing nap, and it's hard for me to wrangle them both.  Todd has his hands full with the other eight in service (most of whom do fine, but the littler ones need a lot of supervision), and Penelope has been having some health issues that make church difficult for her to manage.  But while the babies did cry for much of the morning, by the time service was over, they'd calmed down, and Penelope felt well enough to stay a bit longer, so we all stayed for the fellowship meal instead of some of us needing to come home early.  So that was really wonderful.  As the babies get closer to a year old, and as we learn more about managing Penelope's health, I'm starting to catch little glimmers of normalcy returning.

On Monday, we kicked off Spring Break!  It's been a nice breather, and the weather has been beautiful, so we've been soaking it in.  We had some friends over for a play date, and another family over for dinner.  I went grocery shopping and had an eye doctor appointment.  We washed and deep cleaned the van.  Atticus started some spring yardwork for some of his mowing clients.  We cleaned up our own yard.  This morning we're going to go to the yard waste site to get some compost.  This week has been both restful and productive, which I feel is the best way to spend break because you don't feel like you squandered it by the end.

The kids wanted to ride bikes, but they need supervision out front and I often don't have time to just sit there, so I decided to multitask and fold laundry while watching.  I was quite the spectacle to the neighbor kid, who just calls me Ten Kids Lady and who wanted to know how much laundry I have to do each week.  A lot of laundry, Twenty Questions Kid.  A lot of laundry.

Today I need to get some school planning done, because Finneas is skipping to the next grade starting on Monday.  When he started school, it took him a little while to get his feet under him, so we moved slowly.  But how he's really accelerating, and I think it's time to move him forward.  It's kind of a weird time of year to make major changes, but I think we'll be happy we did.  So I need to print off our syllabus, pull out our books, and rearrange my daily schedule to fit in yet another grade level of instruction - he's currently working in the same grade as Laurelai, so now that they'll be in two separate grades, I'll need to carve out more instructional time.  I don't know where it's going to come from, but we'll figure it out.

The younger kids have nine weeks of school left, the three oldest have twelve.  We are getting very close to summer break and I'm getting excited!  Okay, now I'm off to figure out how to smoke these hams.  Have a great weekend!

Lunchtime spent in the front row of this gentlemen's duel.  Nonplussed.

what's up weekly. (there's a lactraitor in our midst.)

Oh gravy.  This week has been a wild ride.  Just grab yourself a cup of coffee, settle in, and get ready to hear about how my boob tried to kill me.

Last Saturday, Finneas had some friends over for pizza and hanging out, to celebrate his upcoming birthday.  (He's not the boob who tried to kill me; I'm getting there.  Just let me cook.)  There was a specific moment when I was standing there talking to one of his friends when I suddenly thought, "I do not feel good," but there wasn't much I could do about it at the moment.  The friends went home, I made Sabbath dinner, and I felt like I was getting a cold but not much more.

But by the evening, I had a headache and was feeling less well, so I made the decision to keep the babies and Oey home with me from church the next day, which was good because I woke up with a low fever and I felt like crap.  And the cherry on top was that I had developed a clogged duct overnight, so I even woke up early to pump because it was starting to get uncomfortable.  Through the day, I continued to feel unwell and headachey, but I mostly just felt like I was getting the recurrent chest gunk I've been fighting with all winter. 

By Monday morning, I was pretty sure I had influenza.  I was achey and headachey and had spiked a really high fever - it was up to 105 at one point, and even with Tylenol I was only able to get it down to 103.  I could barely get out of bed or off the couch.  I slept on and off most of the day, and other than feeding the babies and then laying them down for naps, I asked the big kids to watch them because I was so sick.  I couldn't get myself in and out of the tub or shower without my temperature spiking painfully.  I barely was able to eat or drink anything and I puked a couple of times.  I had texted my midwife to ask what I could take for the fever, and she said it didn't sound like mastitis, even though the clogged duct was getting more painful, because with mastitis, fevers don't typically go that high and you don't barf.

But by Tuesday, my fever was still just as high and I was sweating profusely all day.  I was able to smell infection coming out of my pores on my left side, and the mastitis swelling and rash had started.  By the afternoon I was puking up everything I swallowed.  My milk supply seemed totally drained by the fact that I hadn't had much to eat or drink for two days, and everything I did consume came back up.  The babies weren't eating and were crying.  It was all so much.  So Todd ran out and picked up some antibiotics from a nurse friend of ours.

By the time we went to bed that night, just a few hours after taking the first pill, my fever had broken, the pain started to ease off a little, and I had stopped puking.  I woke up at 4:00 a.m., hungry and able to eat for the first time in days.  I chugged a whole quart of water and stood in front of the fridge in the dark, eating cold rotisserie chicken like someone in an ad for depression meds.

By Wednesday morning, I was feeling so much better, I half-jokingly asked Todd if I could just take all the antibiotic pills at once because they made me feel so good.  He half-jokingly compared me to Johnny Cash and said "they make me feel good" is the reason everyone gives for taking too many handfuls of prescription meds.  So we came to the mutual agreement that I'll only take them as prescribed.

Anyway, by yesterday I was still on the mend.  The thrill of feeling better has worn off a bit and I'm feeling tired and still very sore and in pain, though that's improving.  My main concern is getting my milk supply back up for the babies.  Eulalie willingly takes a bottle, but I'm running low on stored breastmilk to give her, and Knox won't even take a bottle.  So it's been a challenging couple of days.  I've tried to increase their table foods, but Knox seems to have food sensitivities, and I'm afraid of giving him the wrong thing or too much of something, which would cause him to vomit and end up emptier than he was before.  Eulalie tolerates cow's milk, but too much gives her a rash, and even a little bit makes Knox puke.  I think I'm going to ask our milk farmer for some goat milk this week and give that a try, but again... risking new things with Knox makes me nervous, and also, I don't even know if I could get him to drink it because again, he doesn't take a bottle. 

I really just need my supply to come back up, but I worry that won't happen.  Prayers would be appreciated.

OKAY.  Now, on to better, less boob-centric, news.

1.  Todd started Academia Latina with the younger crew a couple weekends ago.  He had taught the older two kids the introductory levels back when we lived in Columbia, and they've continued to self-instruct since then.  But it was time for Finneas and Laurelai to jump in, and Rocco was capable of joining them... and then since Todd was already right there teaching, the younger girls decided to join in... and thus was born The Academia.

The little girls paying close attention in class.

2.  Eulalie can now sit.  Yes, that is late.  Yes, I know it's kind of weird she can crawl but she couldn't sit yet.  But anyway, we're all squared away now.

Pretty girl.

3. Laurelai had her half birthday.

4.  AND FINNEAS TURNED THIRTEEN!

To be honest, I'm a little surprised he survived this long.  Or not at all surprised.  One or the other.  

He is quick-witted and funny.  He's competitive.  He's charismatic and always has a little gaggle of followers.  He's diligent at his schoolwork and values doing well.

He told me once that he wanted to get in a fight sometime, just so he could get the chance to feel what it felt like to punch a bully in the face.  When I said that it meant he'd probably get punched in the face, too, he simply shrugged and said, "Oh, that doesn't scare me."  While I think it shows he's still young and a bit naive, it also shows something more deeply true about him: he's genuinely not afraid of things that I assume people must be afraid of.  He's brave in ways I don't fully understand.  He doesn't go along with the crowd, and often gets the crowd to follow him instead.

He's loyal and committed, and he and Rocco have such a tight, unique bond.  He is tenderhearted with the babies and loves helping to dress and hold them.  

As Todd wrote here, it seems like God has singled him out for special work.  I'm excited to see what that is.

The kids dressed up Knox like the Stars and Stripes.  (Or, really, I dressed him like the Stripes, and then the kids got the idea to top him off with the Stars.)

Well, there's the news.  Today, Todd and the boys will be off butchering a hog, and the girls and I have some house cleaning to tackle, so it looks like a great start to a great weekend.  Hope you have a good one, too!