New Camera and New Kitty and New School Year

My old camera finally bit the dust. I guess I dropped it off the back of the hay wagon at the pumpkin patch one too many times. My new camera is quite spiffy. It has this cool little function that recognizes smiles and will take a picture when it "sees" one. The bad thing about this camera is the pictures are so huge and take up so much memory, it takes forever to download. M likes high-quality pictures just in case we get one of those award winning shots.We also have another new kitty. Ling-Ling is a little jealous, but she will realize that with another cat around, she won't get all the unwanted attention too! Cleo is a doofus. She walked right under the muzzled, chained, panting, drooling Doberman without even realizing she could have been lunch.
And I started school today! We haven't done school work since we found out we were moving. It was nice to pull out our old friends, the school books, once more. We treated today like any other first day of school. We practiced our routine, getting the books out in the order we will use them, and talking about what subjects we are going to study. I even gave the boys their first spelling test (so I know what level to start them on).

Happy Birthday S!

S turned six years old yesterday! We celebrated by hooking up the Nintendo, grilling Krabby Patties (cheese burgers for those of you who don't watch Spongebob), opening presents, and eating chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, and chocolate ice cream. Can you guess who likes chocolate in our house?

Hellraiser

E sat in front of her plate until 10:30 and we had to leave. She didn't get to brush her teeth and almost forgot her shoes. She had to wait 30 minutes in the waiting room at the dentist (where I read three issues of People magazine, including a blurb about child stars in horror films. Like Exorcist and The Omen). So was I surprised that she refused to open her mouth? Was I surprised that she stuck out her bottom lip and refused to even look at the dental hygienist and the dentist? I had to reschedule her appointment, which means I'm going to have to spend another hour driving. And they told me to not bring the other kids. So I will have to find a baby sitter. I was so mad. And was I surprised to see her like this when we got home? Not really. And I could use the break.

S says he wants to go to the dentist every day. IJ has an ectopic tooth. This means his six year molar is coming up underneath his baby molar. We might have to have the baby tooth pulled.

Mean Mom

I'm such a mean mom. I made my kids wash the van yesterday. They washed Grandad's car too, just for a nice surprise. And then I made them eat their dinner. And when S and E didn't eat, I sent them to bed, promising they would get their uneaten dinner for breakfast. IJ got to stay up and watch a movie with me, so when he went to bed he reported this: E crawled up into S's top bunk so they wouldn't be lonely. Which is funny to me because most kids have their own room. My four kids share one room. And two is too lonely.

And true to my word, I served dinner for breakfast. S happily ate his. He wakes up early and hungry. E is still working on hers. And moaning about the whole thing. Today we are going to the dentist, with a side trip to the library. Big City, here we come!

One of My Better Ideas

I made this schedule and posted it in my kitchen. Now I know how many eggs, loaves of bread, jars of jam, and packages of lunch meat I need to buy every week. And we never get sick of having the same thing every morning. And my kids don't holler "I want peanut butter and jelly, not grilled cheese!" because they don't have a choice. I don't work in a restaurant!

What's for dinner tonight? I have no idea. We've been eating chicken for two, no three days now and I think the kids are ready for a change. And how do you like my quote? I say it every night. Followed by, "If you choose not to eat it, you choose to go to bed hungry."

The Training Continues

I was just telling L the other day how E seems to be developing her feminine side. She plays with her baby dolls and likes to dress up pretty. She is very attentive to what her little sister is doing and "mothers" her. And then I find them like this: E is pounding a pretend plant stake into the ground with her dad's hammer while F pours handfuls of dirt down her back. They were so filthy they both a bath. And within an hour of their bath, F looked like this: She is in to body art, much like a certain older sister of hers. The blue is marker. The purple is blackberry cobbler.

Getting the dog and the kitty used to each other is taking a lot of training sessions. I like this picture because the cat has laser beam eyes. The dog is muzzled. The muzzle doesn't stop her from trying to eat the cat though. I'm afraid we won't be able to keep my cat! :( My readers are really into Pokemon. We came home with all the Pokemon books our local library had on their shelves. After doing some research, I came to understand the attraction of these little creatures. And when I see my boys like this: I like those pocket monsters even more.

Last Days of Summer

Nothin' says Summer is Ending like blackberries and giant zucchini. While I have acres of my own blackberries, I am dependent on my friends for giant zucchini. This morning, after making my 6th loaf of zucchini bread for the freezer, I stepped outside and took a deep breath. I could taste the ripening blackberries all around me. I marched the kids outside to help me pick: IJ has a handy-dandy picker made out of a gallon sized water bottle: Here is my bread and my soon-to-be jam and cobbler: And the berries are only half of what I picked. Off one bush. There are plenty more for the pickin'.

Who loves blackberry jam?

It Ain't Easy Bein' Green...

...so I'm temporarily giving up. Just line-drying my laundry though. At my old house we line-dried whenever we could. We do the same thing here, but since I don't have a working clothesline, I use the garden fence. It works just as well, if not better, except for one thing. Earwigs. They like to hang out on my clothes pins and then scurry into the clothes when no one is looking. I didn't have this problem at my old house. Maybe my old neighbors all used heavy quantities of pesticides so we had lower levels of insects that could invade my laundry. But here we have large quantities of earwigs and other insects. I don't mind, except for when I'm folding laundry in my room at night and the earwigs fall out of the clothes as I shake them smooth. I have to pick them up and run to throw them in the toilet because they give me the creeps! E and S cry and try to save their lives. I flush them. And then last night was the final straw... one earwig escaped my notice and scurried along my leg inside my pajama pants! While I was wearing them! So now I'm done with line-drying!

Banded Alder Borer

S found several of these on our woodpile today. S was very excited because IJ found one a few days ago and he was quite jealous. These bugs are pretty big and wonderfully colored. Even the dog (who isn't quite forgiven and spends a lot of time locked in the van) and F got excited: Here she is, saying "Buh guh!"

The Nature of Things

This cool cat is so good with kids. She lets F play with her tail. She lets E and S carry her all over the house. She plays with whatever toy IJ can create. And she hangs out with me at the end of a long day and purrs.But she absolutely, positively HATES the dog. I'm so mad at the dog I won't even call her My Pathetic Doberman. I'm thinking about changing her name to most hated dog ever. The most hated dog ever pushed our back door open when the cat was being held by E. Most hated dog ever BIT my little baby E as the cat ran for her life. Then a fight ensued with much yelling and screaming by kids and pets alike. I chased the most hated dog ever out the door and whacked her with a paint roller (the only weapon I had available). Neither animal was hurt and the kids were just shaken.

In other news, before the whole cat and dog fight, I took the kids out for a stroll. I really wanted them to discover something new and exciting that they had never seen before. And we weren't disappointed. After finding spiders living at the tops of thistles and tall grasses, we found these cool bugs living on an alder. They look like tiny lady bugs, but I think they are aphids. I will probably spend the rest of the day trying to find out what kind of bug they are (instead of cleaning and unpacking the last of the hard-to-unpack boxes).

My New Kitty!

Our new kitty came home with us this week! She is a great cat and a perfect match for our family. She is outgoing and not at all worried about small children. She is exploring every nook and cranny in the house. I love how she is going to force us to keep surfaces clear and uncluttered. By knocking things off shelves. And hopefully breaking them so I can get rid of them.

This is how we are socializing My Pathetic Doberman: She is muzzled and leashed when she is in the house and the cat is free. Otherwise the cat has her own room with a lock so no kids or dogs can disturb her kitty rest. And here she is taking a moment to curl up next to sleeping F:

Off for Another Week...

...see ya in the Hometown!

And those not in the Hometown, I'll post again next week.

My Little Niece

I've been having so much fun with My Little Niece. I've been playing with her like she is my little baby doll. Not like I don't have any of my own or anything, right? But I'm smitten. I can tell she is a relation. I simply adore her. Look at those blue eyes! S is glad there is someone else in the family that has the same eye color that he has. I took so many cute pictures of Baby K, that my Baby F got a little jealous! So we did a little tandem feeding, just like the old days when IJ and S were babies together: So much for my weaning plan. But I can't think of a better way to spend my first rainy day in my new home than having a pile of wool-clad babies napping with a knitting project on my lap:

Baby K

Look who is visiting us for the weekend! My older sister and her baby! Isn't she just the perfect image of sweetness?

Super Paper Airplanes

The kids haven't left our property since we came back from our last trip to the Old Hometown. And I've left twice; once to go to Costco and once to go to the dentist. Today a few books on folding paper airplanes came into the local library (local as in a short 30 minute drive), so I packed up the kids and picked them up. We also stopped at the local market and bought ice cream bars for a treat. This is what a baby looks like after she falls asleep eating ice cream:And these are the super airplanes that I spent the afternoon folding:
These are the hardest and coolest airplanes I have ever folded. I had to pull out my old scrapbooking stuff to make the cuts needed. The ungrateful child on the right (the one who isn't smiling) thought his plane looked cool, but didn't like the way it flew (far and fast, but not far or fast enough). He ruined it trying to add flaps. See if I ever fold another plane for him!

My Pathetic Life

Just kiddin' That title sounded fun this morning. My dearest husband set a computer up for me, all me! We are networked and can access each other's files. We can both be online and on the phone! And I don't have some dumpy hand-me-down computer; I have the one that ran our household for years! Wait, that sounds the same. But the computer is customized with tricked-out harddrives and stuff. Sweet! Here is my sweetheart, climbing under the house to run an ethernet cable from one end to the other.Our house is so long and has so many walls that a wireless router didn't have the strength to keep us together. And here is the Under The House Gang, that survived large insects, arachnids, rodents, and fungi to help their dad by holding the flashlight.When the temps reached 100 degrees last week, IJ and I built a solar cooker and made some rice for dinner. I wrote it off as a science project when I asked him if he remembered our light unit in Science last Spring. We chatted casually about light waves and the greenhouse effect as we glued aluminum foil to an old moving box (with F's help).After a few modifications in my design, which I made up myself after looking at other designs online, I look forward to cooking dinner the lazy way on sunny days.

IJ is quite possibly the best big brother in the world if you are a girl under the age of two: Riding into the sunset on Buster, the trusty spring-horse. We have no space for him indoors, so he lives in our Pathetic Front Yard.