How to transport sleeping baby into crib

Today, we will address the skill of transporting your sleeping child into his/her crib. There are many possible ways of accomplishing this feat, but we will only discuss a few.

Method #1

After spending what feels like hours getting your infant to sleep, carefully and gently as possible, tiptoe into baby's room. Adjust your hands so that they can carefully maneuver baby off your chest and into the crib, jiggling him/her as little as possible. Set the infant down then place your hand on him/her and start to pray. If he/she begins to wiggle, start chanting 'no, no, no' and pray harder. Then, when baby's eyes pop wide open, pick baby up and start over. You may eventually be able to set baby down without the eyes popping open, but it will probably take a while.

Method #2

This method is called the 'let baby sleep wherever baby is asleep', method. I use this on occasion and out of desperation. I am not a parent who sleeps with my children, but sometimes the situation warrants it. And so if baby is asleep and I'm afraid to move, baby may get the rare opportunity to sleep with me. I've also let baby sleep in the swing, the carseat and the floor. All with monitoring, of course. But sleep is sacred and I'll take it however I can get it!!

Method #3

Levitation. This method needs to be mastered by someone and then passed on to all sleep deprived parents, because it really is the only way not to wake a baby upon placing him/her in bed. I'm just sure of it.


Good luck to all parents attempting any of these methods. And if you perfect levitation, please let me know!

Hodge podge

Due to illness, I haven't posted for almost a week, and so I'm just going to include all my posts in one. How handy is that?

The first matter of business is simply a question. At what point does a child understand the concept of sticking one's head over a bucket or toilet when ill? I thought four and a half was old enough. Apparently not. I'll leave it at that.

Saturday, Andrew and Lillie performed in their first ever piano recital. We've worked hard and it was great to see them play! Since I teach just my own children and don't have any other students right now, we joined with two other teachers in the neighborhood who only have a couple of students and had a joint recital. It brought back a lot of memories from my childhood!

Andrew:



Lillie:



Then, Dad worked on a few 'honey do's', which turned out to be the highlight of the day. He fixed the lawnmower, which was getting necessary as the lawn was a little embarrassing. And then he went to see if he could figure out why we had a leak in the master shower. (Please refer to my list of broken things over the last couple of months!)

When Dad informed Andrew to go get a hammer so he could bang a hole in the wall, the excitement was evident. And so, the kids took turns using this:



To make these:



It's so funny what makes a child's day! Everyone had to have a turn. Sadly, we haven't figured out what was leaking, but I am now sporting one large hole along with the two small holes in the picture, in my bathroom. They are lovely additions, if I do say so myself!

And life goes on...hopefully sickness free in the near future. I have officially Lysoled all the doorknobs, lightswiches and rooms. And now I cross my fingers and pray no one else gets sick!

A successful day!!

Andrew's birthday was lots of fun, thanks to all of his ideas! Here are a few pictures from our eventful day!!


The toilet paper contest



The streamer maze!


PRESENTS!!


And last, but not least, ice cream sundaes!!


And just for good measure!

A decade old!

Michael: "Hey, Andrew. You're a decade old!"

Ten years ago today, my first child was born. He was born in the middle of the night and kindly held off so that his grandparents could make the trek from Wyoming and still make it with time to spare. What a thoughful child! I was in labor for about fourteen hours. Andrew weighed in at a whopping 9lbs 5oz. and was 21 1/2 inches long. He arrived exactly two weeks before his due date and I spent my days in the hospital trying to convince the staff that I wasn't lying about that because he was so big!

Andrew is a great kid. He loves football and he loves to read. He is so stinkin' smart, and I'm not just saying that!! Although I am just a teeny bit biased! I checked him out of school early today and he came walking out with a red smiley face sticker stuck to the middle of his forehead! He can be so much fun. And when he smiles, it just melts my heart.

A few days ago, I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday and he gave me a paper that contained the following information:

0. Present before school
1. Get home from school 3:30
2. Movie theatre 4:00
3. Eat upstairs 6:00
3. or the Mayan
4. Go in the attic 7:00 (He's been bugging me about this for a while. I keep telling him there's nothing up there but insulation. I may have to let him go, just so he'll quit bugging me!)
5. Toilet paper contest 7:30 (Apparently, this consists of wrapping oneself in toilet paper and trying to move.)
6. Streamer maze 8:00
7. Get to end of maze and eat Ice cream sundaes 8:15
8. PRESENTS 8:30
9. Sleep outside!! Start 9:00

He has a very specific idea of how this day should go and it just makes me laugh! So we'll probably do most of it! Why not? I'll take pictures of the events and post those later! Happy decade, my son!!

Confessions of a grownup

Hi. My name is Stacey. I'm 32 and I'm a grownup. I have six kids, two cats and a turtle, a husband and a mortgage. I'm supposed to know the answers to everything from where everyone put their stuff to why cows are named cows. On the road to being a grownup, someone forgot to tell me that I was supposed to know everything too.

The funny thing about being a grownup is that it looks like more fun than it really is. When I was a kid, I thought it would be the BEST! I would get to stay up as late as I wanted and nobody could tell me what to do. Now that I'm a grownup, I wish I could go to bed at 9 instead of wrangling the baby till midnight and sometimes, I really wish someone would just tell me what to do so I don't have to figure it out. Life is full of irony.

I'm not sure I really want to be a kid again, but some days, I'm jealous of the freedom of childhood. The ability to disappear outside for hours playing games and doing nothing. Having nothing to worry about except whether or not you'll get in trouble because you forgot to do your chore. There is magic to childhood.

I don't like to do laundry or pay bills. I hate mowing the lawn. (At least I've retained something from my childhood. Only now, I can't use my hayfever to get out of it.) I don't like cleaning and I don't make my bed. I'm not terribly organized and there's so many things I don't know. In fact, I think I know less the older I get. I still love to read, but have to neglect children in order to do it. I stay up too late and am tired too much. I don't really know what I'm doing in raising children, and I hope they aren't horrified when they figure that out.

Grownups are really just children in big bodies.

Lately, I've been happily willing to give up my status as a grownup. Someone else can take my job for a while. I'm ready for a month in Hawaii with no responsibility. Too bad that's not how life works. Now if THAT is what being a grownup was all about, I'd be all for it! Unfortunately, being a grownup dictates that you have to do such things as pay bills and be responsible and crap. No hiatus to Hawaii. Bummer.

But to end on a positive note, there are some really cool things about all the responsibility of being a grownup. Like watching your kids learn to do amazing things. Or continuing to grow up with your spouse. Or discovering hobbies you never thought you'd have.(For me that's been gardening. Who knew?) Or snuggling that baby that FINALLY fell asleep!

Now if I could just figure out how to only have all the good parts of being a grownup and leave behind all the boring crappy parts!

When it rains...

it pours and pours and rains and hails. Our weather here lately has been indicative of life at our house. It seems since the birth of our youngest child that life has spiraled out of control. Maybe this is the universe telling us that six children is enough and Emily should remain the caboose for good!!

Since Emily's birth, the following things have broken:
1. The lawnmower
2. The master shower leaks
3. The dryer
4. The hot tub
5. The garage door (that was actually broken before but continues to aggrivate me)
6. The van (though technically broken before her birth, not discovered until after)


The following children have injured themselves:

1. Michael (jumped off wall and injured foot)
2. Lillie (stepped on rusty nail)
3. Katherine (bashed head into banister requiring four stitches)

Emily will be six weeks old on Saturday, and I'm thinking that's an awful lot to have happen in six weeks. Especially if you add a newborn to the mix. When people ask how we are adjusting, I smile and say we are surviving. Because we are. We may be barely hanging on while the world crumbles around us, but we are surviving! I'm just hoping that the rain stops soon...

How to survive a day trip:

The following are instructions for anyone insane enough to take six small children to an air show, let alone out in public.

1. Make sure all children are squished on the ride so that eye gouging, hitting, and kicking are easily facilitated.

2. Turn on radio to attempt to drown out the noise, only to discover that the louder the radio, the louder the children.

3. When you realize that the bus ride from the parking lot to the air show is the most exciting part for the almost two year old, you should probably save yourself some trouble and just go home.

4. Continue to tell the oldest children that they are NOT allowed to sit in the stroller or hang onto it.

5. Attempt to keep children from shoving each other over, walking on the backs of each others shoes and force them to share their shaved ice. Parents are SOOOO mean!

6. Stand in really long lines to see cool planes, but make sure all children are as miserable as possible. In other words, make sure children are starving to death, dehydrated and falling asleep. It makes the experience more, well, more something.

7. While going through said cool planes, make sure to repeat the following phrase ad naseum, "Don't touch stuff." Repeat as necessary, interspersing it with, "Get up off the floor".

8. When offered a free drink, take it even though it is not caffeine free. Anything to stop the whining. But then make sure not to get upset when the children decide to wear their drink down their fronts. Just smile and nod.

9. Take exhausted parents out for dinner, but make sure the infant is as hungry as possible. After feeding infant, pinch her a few times so that she cries ALL the way through dinner, making the feeding of the cranky parental units as difficult as humanly possible.

10. Instruct four year old on how to throw the most unreasonable tantrum about which cookie she gets so that you exit the restaurant with as much commotion as possible.

11. Finally, return home, swearing the whole way that you will NEVER do anything like that again. Then within five minutes of arrival, make sure the four year old trips, smashes her face into the banister and needs stitches. It rounds out the day nicely.


I'd like to say we had fun at the air show yesterday, but I'm thinking that's definitely the wrong word to use. So I'll merely say, we went to the air show yesterday.

The rants of an insane mother

Why? Why do the boys insist on ignoring my tirades about their closet? Why do they still shove their clean Sunday shirts in the laundry instead of hanging them up? Is it really THAT much more effort? REALLY? And why, after telling them to take their laundry basket to their room, did they put it on TOP of all their laundry? WHY???? How many billions of times have I had the same conversation with them that consists of, "PUT YOUR LAUNDRY IN THE FLIPPIN' BASKET"!!! Do they really learn so little? Maybe they aren't nearly as smart as I think they are.

And why doesn't Andrew have any socks. I mean seriously. I bought the kid two big bags of socks, his great-grandma donated another, and the kid has no socks. WHERE THE CRAP ARE THEY???? And why does Michael insist on wearing Andrew's shirts, or his own, but backwards? EVERY DAY! I kid you not!

And then, when collecting the boys laundry this morning, I found the scriptures Andrew looked high and low for yesterday. Where did I find them? Under the giant pile of laundry in their closet. Now, if my boys did what their mother asked them to do and put their laundry IN the basket, he might have been able to find them. Because we all know that boys don't know how to look under things. EVER!

And why can't Lillie ever find the brush? It doesn't grow legs. I promise. But she NEVER took it anywhere but the bathroom. EVER. Now, I know Odessa gets into stuff, and if it were her toothbrush, I'd definitely blame Odessa, but she doesn't take off with the hair brush. And why is it always 1.2 seconds before they have to be out the door that she finally decides to look for the brush? WHY???

And while we are on hair, WHY does Andrew insist on having the spikey hair-do, but refuse to use gel to fix it so that it looks like bedhead after it dries. Every day!! Today, I informed him that the next time I saw him without gel on it, I was going to buzz it like his brother. I anticipate doing that by tomorrow.

And while we are ranting, if my stupid cats knock one more glass of water over on the counter ruining any more of my papers, I may kill them. And I'm only a little kidding.

It's been a lovely Monday morning. Can you tell? Oh, and I may go dig my For Sale by Owner sign out of the basement this morning. GRRRR!