Wherein I Sympathize with the Pressure Cooker

Last week, it was the washing machine that smelled like vomit. We took it apart and scraped out the mold and bleached the parts and put it back together.

A snowy jaunt through the school lot near us

Yesterday, it was the pressure cooker exploding black beans all over my kitchen ceiling.

So tonight, when Ethan was away at the prayer meeting and our upstairs obstinate, finicky toilet overflowed all over the bathroom floor with two inches of water, causing four boys to come racing downstairs with a huge explanation of exactly who was in the bathroom and exactly what did NOT happen, causing me to holler, "Just tell me what DID happen!!! What are you even TALKING about???" and then racing upstairs to decode their explanation and then plunging the toilet and then racing downstairs to get on my shoes and then racing outside to unlock the shed and then racing back in for the chicken-closing-up flashlight which was misplaced and then racing around for ANY flashlight and meanwhile hollering EVERYONE JUST STAY IN YOUR ROOMS AND MAKE THEM PERFECT!!! and then racing back out to the shed and then clumsily climbing over tools and beach accessories to reach the shop vac and then racing back in (slower, this time, with the shop vac) and then racing upstairs (slower still) and then vacuuming up the water and throwing sopping towels in the tub and then switching the laundry over so as to make room in the washing machine for said sopping towels...

Well. The shreds of paper left over from snowflake-making that I did not initiate, and the random crayons, markers, and drawing books strewn ALL OVER may have just been my undoing. I threatened to lock up anything that...moved.

But just then...

My four oldest girls came downstairs with a sheet of colored paper, folded neatly and tied daintily with some baker's twine.

"This is for you," they said.

Dear Mama,
We are

Sorry for all The wrong Things we did today.

Heres a little something from all of us listed below.

We hope you like them!

Lily - $1

Mimi - ¢30

Edee - ¢2 and stickers

Salem - makeing herself look good

Love,

Lily Miriam Eden and Salem Love you

And fffffffffffffttttttttttt, just like that, all the pressure was released. We called the boys downstairs and opened the carton of chocolate chip cookie ice cream.

It was (sort of) fun learning how to take apart the washing machine. I needed a new pressure cooker anyway, if only because the gasket on mine smelt of burnt beans from over a month ago and because none of the recipes dealt with *my* kind of thrifted cooker. And the bathroom floor is now considerably cleaner than it has been in a very long time.

So I suppose all clouds do have a silver lining. Or at least a dingy gray.

"The Drop Box"

This is a movie I don't want to miss. It will only be in theaters March 3-5.




This article gives a little background.

I will cry all the way through it. But sometimes, tears are good.

(There is a video embedded in this post. Email subscribers may need to click over.)

There and Back Again

Well, I suppose that when you get many months behind on something, and then you go to remedy that fact, the mere thought that you are many months behind on something may just be the impetus you need to stop and get a coffee and change your direction to something infinitely more pressing, say, that book you never finished reading, and then you find that you are even more months behind next you think of it; and also, A.A. Milne has you thinking like Owl talks.

Quick catch-up: People had birthdays.

So probably the best thing to do is to forget the "catching up" that just won't be done, and start where you are.

So.

Where we are is in the midst of a stomach bug/pink eye/ear infection/sore throat session that seems to have hit every one of the children. Not all of the children have gone through all of the stages, but many have. I vacillate between being grateful that not all of the children had to go through all of the stages and being fearful that not all of the children have had to go through all of the stages ... yet.

Gideon (5), pink eye victim #1

Everyone's tired of tea, and tired of elderberry syrup, and tired of fire water, and tired of pain medicine and salt socks and tissues and bowls and eye ... gunk.

Zebulun (19 mos.) sporting a different kind of eyewear

Yesterday's snow was actually a welcome change. At least there was something different to see outside, and eight of them managed to bundle themselves up and get out in it.

(I know. But please...when it may be the only day they have to play in the snow as a 5-year old, or a 9-year old, or whatever, what's a few more days of being sick? So they said, and they may be right.)

Oh, wait. They did have another day of snow play, and here's proof.

Zebby, really wanting to be on the other side of this window.

If it's any indication how very tired they are of being sick, I had two children fighting tears over my having to cancel their dentist appointments this morning. So...when you'd rather go to the dentist...

It's just very tiring.

But there's tapioca soaking for some Boba Tea (which, yes, we shall most definitely call Frog Spawn Tea), and someday...someday...someday...well, this, too, shall pass.

Ada (2), doing her interpretive fitness-ball-chair dance. It's a sight.

Double Entendre

My husband called me to the window this morning.

"Uh-oh," he said. "There's a hearse, dead on the road."

I think Gary Larson would be drawn to that.

Shopping List

A certain 2-year old came into our bedroom this morning and asked, "Do you want to see my rock?"

"Sure," I mumbled into my pillow.

"Oh-tay," she said, and she proceeded to shove her hands down her leggings and pull out a pebble.

I sat up and looked down at her. There were several more unusual lumps showing through her leggings. "How many rocks do you have in there?" I asked.

She shoved her hands down her leggings again, counting. She counted all the way up to eight but only produced four other rocks.

"I have eight rocks," she said. "And you need to go to the store and buy me pockets."

Long-suffering

I'm fairly sure that one of the downfalls of being the youngest of ten children is when your five older sisters put you in a doll's dress, stick a bow in your hair, cart you around, and call you "Zebulinda."

Especially when you're a boy.

Ruminate

My husband was gently prodding me to "just write something" for the blog.

"I don't have anything to write!" I said. "There's nothing new for me to say! We still have ten kids. I'm still doing laundry, trying to get out of doing meals, and spending too much time on the Internet. What else is there?"

"Just ruminate," he said.

ruminate:

1. to chew again what has been chewed slightly and swallowed
2. to engage in contemplation

So pardon me while I ruminate for a bit.

I am a cheater when it comes to homeschooling. I have been homeschooling for twelve (oops! That's what comes of writing down the first number that comes to your head..."Ben is 12, that's a number, YES! Write it down!") eight years now, and I only figured out this tactic two years ago. Here it is: We start our year in April, take off however much we want to take off for summer, and then start back up when we feel like it (usually mid-August). Then, whenever we are asked, "How long have you been doing school?" we can answer, "Oh, we're on week 13" in the beginning of October. It all sounds very industrious and productive. Really, it's all semantics. I'm a cheater, and I like it.

Zebulun, in his favorite place of all...Outside.

This is the kind of 10-year old girl everyone should have. She's wonderful.

Companionship.

 TWO THINGS have surprised me over the past two years of cheating (and also, not incidentally, finishing each year ahead-of-time):

1. The Read-Aloud. I have become a fervent campaigner for the necessity of read-alouds. Read-alouds (when Mom reads to the children) were always the first thing to be dropped when school started getting stressful or rushed. We did our math, we did our phonics, we called it good.

Now, they are the last thing to be dropped. We may not have time for math, we may not have time for phonics, but we MUST make time for read-alouds! Almost every day, during their breakfast and again during their lunch, the children listen to me read a chapter from a book. Currently, we are reading The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew during breakfast and Five Children and It during lunch. It typically takes us a little over a week to finish a book, and it is unarguably the most important part of our day. It sets our family culture, it forms shared memories, it improves their listening skills and vocabulary and sense of humor...I could honestly do a whole post on this. I am that passionate about it. 

And that surprises me.

2. I like science. My eighth-grade self would be mortified by this statement. Honestly, my thirty-year old self would be mortified by this statement. But suddenly, science is a subject that I don't want to skip! I am just as eager as my children to figure out what is going to happen in the experiment and to figure out why it happened.

An assassin bug eating a beetle on a butterfly bush. That's science!

Science is really a revealing of mysteries! It's fascinating! I feel slightly robbed that my early interactions with science, beginning in about third grade, were right after a soggy cracker-and-cheese lunch, where my carb-induced haze and the need for a nap combined to turn that heavy hardback textbook into one very uncomfortable pillow.

That's not science. That's a siesta.

And that is a bone. Also, that is boy science. Parts of dead things are still your father's territory.

Science is saying, "Watch how this world works! Look what God did! Look how He put this together, and what He has revealed to us so that we may understand a bit of how it is put together! Look what we can make things in this world do because we know a bit about how it is put together!"

I think it's mesmerizing.

And that surprises me.

So there you have it. Ruminations. (Does that surprise you?)