A Fun Game Night

When the Owens came over the other night, we had so much fun having dinner and playing games together. The kids enjoyed the night too.

Camden and Jessica reading books together:

The boys watching a movie after Isaac and Jessica fell asleep:

Boy Oh Boy!

A couple weeks ago we babysat for the Kearls and the Hedgecocks because we owed them both for watching our kids more than once. It seems like it is harder and harder for Michael and I to ask anyone to babysit for us anymore, because we have a couple of good friends who we know we can always count on to watch our boys for us if we need them too, but we don’t want to take advantage of their kindness and ask them too frequently. And then most other people we have asked to babysit for us have never asked us back to watch their kids for them, so we don’t feel like we can ask them again. We just have more kids than many of our friends do, so it’s hard to ask people to take on so many little boys all at once. And I guess people don’t ask us to babysit for them because they think it would be too many kids for us, but these photos will lay those fears to rest. So, to all of our friends who read this, please, ask us to babysit – we are always looking for opportunities to trade babysitting with friends.

Anyways, coming back from that little tangent – we watched the Hedgecocks’ and Kearls’ kids, and the Wellses happened to come over that night and brought ice cream, so we ended up having ice cream with all the kids. With our boys and Marie Wells, there were 9 kids total, but it made it a lot more fun to babysit with friends over while we did it.

And the video at the end is from a different night, but it shows a typical game night at our place before we round up all the wild children and put them to bed so that the parents can enjoy some games. The boys (and Katie) will often run back and forth from the bedroom to the living room, and lately they have started yelling things while they run, like “Fire!” or “Tornado!” But a bunch of little kids age 4 and younger yelling “Tornado” sounds a lot like “Tomato,” so I had to grab the camera and catch that on tape. Pretty cute! But, of course, it didn’t take them long to realize they were being recorded, and then they all stopped running to pose and act silly for the camera. Isn’t that always the case – when I want to catch something on video, they stop whatever they are doing and pose for the camera, but if I wanted to take a cute picture of them, they would probably start running around the house.

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Night Out

As I have been catching up on posting some of our pictures from the last couple months, I had to put up this one. We got to go last month with the Kearls and the Hedgecocks to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s performance of The Planets. The music was great and it was really fun to get dressed up and go out with our friends (without any kids, for a change).

The Next Survivor Series

I got this e-mail from my friend, Emily Christensen, and thought it was very cute -- this is a reality show I might actually watch:

The Next Survivor Series

Six married men will be dropped on an island with one car and 3 kids each for six weeks. Each kid will play two sports and either take music or dance classes.

There is no fast food. Each man must take care of his 3 kids; keep his assigned house clean, correct all homework, and complete science projects, cook, do laundry, and pay a list of 'pretend' bills with not enough money.

In addition, each man will have to budget in money for groceries each week. Each man must remember the birthdays of all their friends and relatives, and send cards out on time. Each man must also take each child to a doctor's appointment, a dentist appointment, and a haircut appointment.

He must make one unscheduled and inconvenient visit per child to the Urgent Care. He must also make cookies or cupcakes for a social function. Each man will be responsible for decorating his own assigned house, planting flower s outside and keeping it presentable at all times.

The men will only have access to television when the kids are asleep and all chores are done. The men must shave their legs, wear makeup daily, adorn himself with jewelry, wear uncomfortable yet stylish shoes, keep fingernails polished and eyebrows groomed. During one of the six weeks, the men will have to endure severe abdominal cramps, back aches, and have extreme, unexplained mood swings but never once complain or slow down from other duties.

They must attend weekly school meetings, church, and find time at least once to spend the afternoon at the park or a similar setting. They will need to read a book and then pray with the children each night and in the morning, feed them, dress them, brush their teeth and comb their hair by 7:00 am.

A test will be given at the end of the six weeks, and each father will be required to know all of the following information: each child's birthday, height, weight, shoe size, clothes size and doctor's name. They will also need to know each child's weight and length at birth, time of birth, and length of labor, along with each child's favorite color, middle name, favorite snack, favorite song, favorite drink, favorite toy, biggest fear and what they want to be when they grow up.

The kids vote them off the island based on performance. The last man wins only if . . . he still has enough energy to be intimate with his spouse at a moment's notice.

If the last man does win, he can play the game over and over and over again for the next 18 to 25 years, eventually earning the right to be called ‘Mother.’

Winter in Milwaukee

I know I complain about the winter here in Milwaukee, but there are some nice things about it:

• If I don’t feel like bringing in the groceries from the car, it is cold enough to just leave them in the trunk until Michael gets home from work to help me.

• My children’s constant runny noses that last all winter long here make me look forward to visiting my family in San Diego where the noses clear up almost immediately.

• We don’t have to wait for the water from our kitchen sink faucet to cool down – it is always nice and cold right away.

• Every once in a while the schools and businesses close for a snow day.

• It’s nice to stay inside sometimes and light some candles, wear fuzzy slippers, and wrap up in a blanket to get cozy – as long as you don’t have anywhere to go.

• The snow provides an opportunity for service – there is always someone in need of shoveling their car out or giving their car a push.

• The few times that there is a big snowstorm, it is really fun to bundle up the kids and go out to play for a few minutes, as long as it isn’t too cold and windy.

• Hot chocolate.

• Sometimes it’s fun to change up your wardrobe twice a year when the sweaters come out and then when they go back away again.

• The snow is really quite pretty after it falls (and before the cars drive by and make it all grey by the sides of the roads).

Actually, we had a beautiful big storm yesterday and then went out to play in the snow with the boys last night and it was very nice. As long as there is enough snow that Michael doesn’t have to go to work and all of the kids’ classes and appointments get cancelled so we don’t have to go out in it with all the kids, it is really nice to have a big storm every once in a while. But I have to say, visiting San Diego in December and being able to walk outside with the kids to play in the yard barefoot sure is a pleasant contrast to the lengthy bundling and un-bundling event that takes place every time I have to take the kids out of the house in the winter here.

Thoughts on September Eleventh

So far, I haven’t gotten this personal with the things that I have posted on our blog – usually it is just news and cute stories about the kids or our weekly post keeping everyone up to date with the goings-on of our family. But I figured that since we print out and save the posts from this site as our family journal, I should write down the feelings I have been having about this day.

It has been six years to the day since September 11, 2001. I remember that day – I was doing my semester in Nauvoo, Illinois. That morning I briefly checked my e-mail before going to class, and I remember glancing at a picture on the internet page before my e-mail inbox opened that showed an explosion, and assuming that it was an ad for a movie or something. Then, when we went to class, they announced what had happened with the planes being hijacked and crashing into the Twin Towers in New York and other places. I spent days in the student lobby watching news reports on the television. I remember crying for those people, and especially when they showed video of people jumping from the towers – thinking how terrible that was for those people, but especially for their families to see that too. I remember after several days when there was no longer a large group of students watching the news reports every day, and thinking that I should stop spending all my time watching the reports, but at the same time feeling guilty – like getting back to my own life was somehow making the lost lives of all those people less important.

And now it has already been six years since then. On the Oprah show this afternoon there was a story about September 11th, which focused on the children of those who died that day. It had several teenagers on the show who were children when their father or mother died six years ago. The part that got to me the most was when they showed an interview from 2001 of a father who had lost his wife, and he was describing how he had to explain to his 3 year old son that his mother was dead and wasn’t going to come home. And I thought of Kolby, who is also 3 years old, and how that would be to have to explain such a thing to him. I usually don’t get emotional while watching tv shows or movies, but I cried a lot while I watched that today, thinking of all those children. It said that over 3,000 children were left without a parent after September 11th. Wow.

Seeing something like that sure makes you grateful for all the good things in your life. I find myself thinking that life is hard with Michael gone on overnight call every few days and watching the kids by myself. Or sometimes I wish that we could just not worry about money and go out and get something really nice – even though I don’t usually complain about not having much, I think about how nice it will be someday when we have a real job to have enough money to save up. Or I think that I have it hard because I have so many young kids – even though I know we chose to have them all so close together – but still I feel some self-pity sometimes when I am having a hard day with the boys and thinking that other people don’t really understand because they’re not in the same situation as I am.

But this afternoon I was remembering about a local news story a few months ago about a medical team that was carrying a transplant organ over Lake Michigan when their plane went down in the lake and all of the people on the plane died. Several days after the plane crash, I saw a news story with an interview of the wife of one of the men who had died in that plane crash, and what she said really struck me. She had three young children and her husband was in the medical field, so her situation felt familiar to mine. And she was crying as she said that there was still a pile of dirty laundry in their bedroom. She said that she used to get so mad when her husband just left the laundry out and never put it in the hamper. And then she said that if her husband would just come back, she’d pick up every piece of dirty laundry and never say a word about it. I listened to that and cried that day too.

I think that one positive thing I can get from these stories of families that will never be together again in this life, is that we need to be thankful for what we have while we have it.

Even if Michael is on call overnight at the hospital every few days, he will have a lighter schedule with his next rotation next month, and he will hopefully have a nice family-friendly schedule when he finished his residency in several years, and even if his schedule is awful, I still have a husband who I know would rather be home with me and the boys more than anyplace else, ever. I know some people who seem like they would rather be at school studying to make a better score on the next test, or at the hospital impressing their attending so they will have a better grade, or at work so they can make more money, and I am blessed to have a husband who enjoys learning and working hard, but would rather be with us anytime.

And we may not have much money, but we really are blessed in our financial situation. If it weren’t for the student loans and government aid that we live off of, we would be in a lot of trouble financially. I hear stories of how “poor students” lived in my parents’ generation, and we are pretty well off compared to them. Even though we are considered to be below “poverty level” now as we try to get through school, we have an apartment that is a little crowded as our family continues to grow, but it is comfortable, clean, in a safe neighborhood, and we have good neighbors. With our fourth child on the way, it is not always easy to “live within our means,” but if we are willing to try hard to give up lots of little things that some people might consider necessities, we can make it work. We have been blessed that we have been able to get by without ever having to reconsider our original priority that we made for me to be home with the kids instead of out working and having them be raised by daycare providers.

And on those all-to-frequent days when I get frustrated with the boys and loose my patience and yell at them, I just need to take a minute and think of how lucky I am to have them. So many people have trouble getting pregnant, and we have been so blessed to have children when we decide to. I think of families with children who have mental disabilities, and I wonder how I would be able to handle that – we have been so blessed to have healthy, active children. Our kids eat like crazy, often consuming as much or more at meal time as my husband and I do, and then crying for more food when the meal is over – but we have never had any problems with children who are unhealthily underweight or have food allergies. And our boys are very active, they have creative imaginations, they can be mischievous, and are sometimes destructive, but they are generally good kids – they often play well together, they sleep well, they love learning and doing family activities, and they love each other and Michael and I. So I think that maybe next time Eli rips up one of his storybooks, or the next time Camden spits up all over my dress, or the next time Kolby waits until I have packed all the kids and diaper bags and strollers into the car and am driving away before he lets me know that he needs to go potty, maybe the next time I will try to remember to be thankful for my kids rather than frustrated with them. I am pretty lucky for all the good things I have.