gather 'round, kiddies; I've got some news!

DO YOU SEE, CARLA?! DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU MESS WITH THE WARRIOR get help from your mother?  You get PHOTOS!  Look at that glorious photo up there, all in technicolor and everything.  I can't tell you how excited and relieved I am!  So excited and relieved, in fact, that I used up all my blogging energy already just with being excited and relieved.  Please bear with me, I'm out of practice and I also have three months' worth of photos to sort through.  I'm hoping to get back on here later today to put together a real post if I can gather together my thoughts and get through some photos!

Thank you to those of you who have been praying and helping us!

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!

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.