Summerschool 2: Popcorn & Scizzors

DAY 1: One day I had the brilliant (read: horrifically messy) idea of putting popcorn in the touch-table. No, not popcorn seeds, but actual popped popcorn! We put the popcorn popper in the touch-table, along with a big bowl, some spoons and scoopers and things, and ran that thing over and over until the touch-table was full of popped popcorn and Orville Redenbacher was well on his way to another purchase by our family. The kids couldn't have been more elated. They loved pouring in the seeds, scooping the popped corn away from the popper, scooping it into jars, eating it all the while. Yes, despite my efforts to reinforce the idea that the popcorn needs to stay inside the table, this activity made a huge mess. Popcorn everywhere. BUT, they had an absolute blast - and for several days. Summerschool that first day was super easy, and provided hours of entertainment. (sorry, no pics. Would have been fun to document the disaster though :)

2: The next summerschool I drew a few trees on construction paper and filled a jar-lid with Elmer's Glue. I showed them how to dip the popcorn in the glue and put it on the tree. I think I even sang the "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" song at one point. The kids got it to varying degrees. Seville went so far as to draw her own tree. Trajan did pretty well with gluing the popcorn on, but ate most of his popcorns after dipping them in the glue, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to convey to him that ed to work, that he could eat the other popcorns but the glue-dipped ones were for his tree. He continued to think of the glue as a dipping-sauce. Oswell showed little interest in gluing popcorn on his tree, but really wanted to draw with the markers and then wanted to play with the scissors, which I had gotten out to cut out some leaves and bugs and things for added fun.

Trajan's Tree

Oswell's Tree (lots of marker-drawing, not so many popcorns)

Seville's Tree, complete with rabbit-dwelling in the trunk next door

Seville added a Cardinal with a long tail to the "example tree"

3. Since the scissors had been such a hit, once Jared got fed up with the mess and threw out the popcorn, I just put all the kid-scissors in the touch-table along with a bunch of things to cut: construction paper, ribbons, yarn, junk mail, whatever. They spent tons of time over the next several days cutting things up. Not really related to popcorn in any way, but one thing led to another.

Summerschool 1: Birds, Eggs, Nests

Though I didn't necessarily intend to have "themes" to the weeks of summerschool, it's actually worked out that way so far (all two weeks!). It has just helped me to come up with ideas for simple things to do that tie together. This week was about birds, nests, and eggs.

When Jared was fiddling with the basketball hoop we discovered a Cardinal's nest in the trees lining our driveway. I saw a couple of birds repeatedly flying to and from a single spot, stood below it and heard cheeping. I got the ladder while the parents were away and sure enough! There were these tiny, featherless, little things opening their enormous mouths to the sky! (sorry sweeties, I'm not your mom).  So we've had fun watching the mom and dad take care of those babies.

I decided to use our resident birds as a jumping-off point for summerschool this week. Here's what we did:

DAY 1: Making birds: I cut out a basic bird shape out of poster board, 1 for each kid. I got my supply of feathers and gave each child a bottle of Elmer's glue to squeeze on their bird shape (and tried really hard not to micromanage their glue usage. They each have their own way of squirting it!). After they got the glue on (by which I mean all over the place), they could choose feathers to put all over their birds. Here are the finished products. I even found exactly 3 googly-eyes in my unboxed-so-far craft stuff.

DAY 2: Making nests: We went outside in the morning, each with a bowl (would have used paper bowls, if I'd had them, but I didn't. Instead we lined a regular bowl with wax paper. Paper bowls would be so much easier). The cardinals had flown the coop and evacuated the nest by then. I read online that they don't re-use their nests, so I took the liberty of taking it down, showing the kids how it was made, and talking about what birds would want for their nests. Then we all went around the yard and collected stuff for making bird nests and put it in our respective bowls (pine needles, sticks, grass, feathers, flowers in some cases). While we were out and about we saw a rabbit, some cool green beetles, and Seville caught a frog, so lots of good outdoorsy-stuff going on. When we were done collecting (and I could sweat no more, about to collapse of pregnant-heat-exhaustion) we went inside and glued the nests together. We basically liberally drizzled Elmers glue all around/on/through our nests and left them to dry. It took them a couple of days, but then I removed them from the wax paper and bowls, and we had little nests.

DAY 3: Making eggs: we made salt dough, and I taught them how to roll a little ball in their hands or on the table to make an egg. I had to make a lot of eggs for them, but they had fun. They also got to experiment with making snakes.

DAY 4: Painting the eggs we made yesterday

DAY 5: We pulled the nests out of their wax paper/bowls and put the eggs in. (We actually went to a park this day for our main event)

The Epiphany

(only 6 of 7 pictured here. That's me on the bottom left)

When I was a kid (one of 7 kids, I might add), my mom determined that there was no way she was hauling all of us to some summerschool/summercamp activity thing, especially at great financial expense. She saw the flier we brought home and the crafts on there and thought "well I can do THAT." And so she did. My memory (probably flawed, but still) is that every day during the summer, after we did our chores she would do "summerschool" with us, which amounted to a creative project, outing, or other fun event for us kids. She did everything from birdwatching to knitting to ceramics.  Though I'm not as craftily proficient as my mom, nor probably as ambitious, given that I am about to have 4 kids 5 and under, I had an epiphany recently.

My beautiful, beloved house I left behind

The backstory: Moving here (to Raleigh, N.C. from Portland, O.R.) has been really hard. One of the hardest things about it is that I feel like I've been robbed of my spring and summer. The last chance I have to bond with my boys before a new sister comes, the last chance to spend time with Seville before she is whisked off to a state-run education - gone under the pile of boxes and paper and endeavors to find doctors and mechanics and stores and put up shelves and safety locks. Just as life was getting barely easy enough to breath now and again, my spring became immediately consumed with preparations for moving across the country.

My new house.

Now that we're here, my time has been consumed with the desperate endeavor to set up a home before the baby comes, and to do this while taking care of my kids, not letting the house become unmanageable, and doing it all while increasingly pregnant. It did not start off well. It's not like I had 15 minutes of spare time before we moved, so I don't know why I thought I'd have it after.  As the saying goes, I couldn't seem to get beyond the urgent things to the important things. Especially being pregnant I am completely sapped of energy and my hips just won't let me walk as much as I need, bend over to put anything away, move a box, etc, so everything is slowgoing, and the progress I do make is excruciatingly inefficient.

After some tearful expressions of frustration and trying to figure out what to do, Jared and I came up with a new plan to try: I would make sure kids were kept more-or-less alive (fed and dressed and stuff), but I would not clean anything up really. We bought a bunch of paper plates and I got to work. My plan was to spend every morning (the few minutes I have after food and clothing is dealt with) doing “summerschool"  with the kids. During naps, in the afternoon, I would spend some time with Seville, and some time moving in. When Jared gets home he makes dinner, cleans the kitchen, and helps get the kids to bed. This allows me to focus on a few “important” things during the day, leaving a few of the “urgent” things to him.

The change in all of our happiness since this started is marked, and such a blessed relief. After a week and a half, everything is better! Seville is enthusiastic about finding out her chore each day (!) so we can do summerschool. The boys run upstairs to get dressed so they can participate.  I have a daily sense of peace about how I spend my time and that my kids aren’t being short-changed and sacrificed on the altar of my busy life. Jared is a rockstar and my hero. We can’t go on like this forever, I expect, but for now, it is life-changing.

I’ve decided to [try to] blog my summerschools, so that other people can get ideas for things to do, and see what we’re up to. I haven’t done well at photo-documenting so far, and maybe never will, but it’s worth documenting anyway, if only so I can feel good about my efforts during my down moments.

A Random picture of my happy kids, for good measure

Since I’ve rambled on here for a while already, I’ll save my first summerschool documentation for another post. Let this one serve as encouragement for any other bewildered, stressed, anxiety-ridden mom who wants to provide more things for her children than she possibly can, as a single human being.  My advice so far: find a way to work something "important" into your daily routine. I know that may be basically impossible for some people. It sure seemed so for me, and would be without Jared's support. Unfortunately, I cannot endorse the idea of stealing my awesome husband, but I hope you have one that can help, or the resources to find another way.

Weekend O' Airplanes and Sickness

We had planned to try to spend the weekend at North Carolina's famous beaches, but I was too sick to go so we stayed "home." We did muster ourselves out the door for an hour or so on Saturday to take the kids to Observation Park - a park at the airport with an airport theme. It's pretty cute. There's an observation deck to watch planes taking off and landing. You're right next to it so you get to hear their jets in all their glory too. They play a feed from the radio tower, so you get to hear what air traffic control is saying while you watch. They also have a play area and big sandbox, and a tiny runway for kids to run around on. I think it's pretty cool, especially for those like me, for whom all things airplane invokes a childhood sense of jubilation and excitement.  Here's a video of Oswell pretending to be a plane on the play-runway. You can see the real runway in the background:

I only regret we didn't manage to get a video of the boys reacting to a plane taking off. It was pretty cute - they got super excited every time. They have both been obsessed with planes  - especially since we went for a ride in Grandpa's plane just before we moved. They think every small plane is Grandpa's plane, and that's what they say when they see one: "Gampa's pane!" :)  I couldn't even get Trajan to leave the observation deck and go to the playstructure at the park. He just wanted to watch planes, even though the wait between take-offs was often 10 minutes or something. He would just patiently stand there saying, "nother pane?"

After we got home, the boys went and found their little toy wind-up planes I got them recently, and proceeded to "fly" around the house - to the dinner table, up the stairs, back and forth in the living room.

I'm pretty sure today  marks the second Father's Day in a row that I've been too sick to do anything for Jared. Which means he's getting hosed, and I feel bad. I've been so sick the last couple of days that I can only get out of bed for short periods of time. My laryngitis has been so bad that I literally had to whisper for about 24 hours - it actually made more sound than trying to talk, which seemed to just shut my throat up completely. When I woke up Saturday morning I couldn't breathe and was so panicked. Jared told me to calm down, take a puff of Oswell's ventilator. It eventually subsided, but I've never experienced my throat being closed like that - it was scary. Now I know how asthmatic kids feel, I guess.

Hopefully we'll manage the beach trip next week. In the meantime, we're just hanging out in a holding pattern (no pun intended) waiting for our house to close so we can move in. Just under 2 weeks now!

Life in Raleigh: Week 2

We are definitely enjoying the sunshine and nice weather in Raleigh. Here's a picture from the other day. It looks positively Ferris Buehler-ish to me (every day is like that here, it seems). The pic is taken from the balcony of the townhouse we're renting for the month. We're subletting it, but it's been fun to see what the other owners are like. It appears the requirements for living in this little townhouse community are 1) Be around 30, give or take a few years, 2) Be single and good-looking, 3) Own a dog (if female, own a small, annoying dog. If male, own a medium to large sized dog.)

Today we took the kids to the pool, and I felt totally out of place among the young singles sunning themselves there (they don't actually go IN the pool, of course). There were no other people there with things like spouses, kids, thy-cellulite, minivans, pool toys, etc. I wanted to declare, "You good-looking people may smugly look on at this frumpy housewife with 3 kids and a big pregnant belly, but I AM YOUR FUTURE!" Of course, I'm probably not actually their future. Jared points out that we probably personify the opposite of everything they believe in. They're probably saying to themselves, "dude, I'm NEVER going to have all those kids and get frumpy like that."  In fairness, all the young single people sunning themselves were very nice (the ones who spoke to us were, anyway). And then I felt bad for assuming they were all smugly judging us for our over-abundance of children, floaty toys and strollers. Maybe they even enjoyed having a bunch of two-year-olds whining over the sounds of their top-40 radio stations. Who wouldn't?

As for housing, on Monday, we officially went forward with buying the house. I spent every spare moment until 5pm on the day our contingency period ended (much to Jared's dismay) looking at alternatives, trying to satisfy myself that this was really our best option. And I think it is. Not exactly my style, but it's a great house and the ward looks to be really wonderful as well. We had some trouble wiring our earnest money, and didn't get it in by the 5pm deadline, but everything is going forward anyway without a hitch. So on June 29, we'll be the owners of a house in Raleigh!

Trajan and Seville playing at the park. Wearing shorts.

The next hurdle was registering Seville for Kindergarten, which involved making an irrevocable personal ranking of the 15-20 schools in my "choice" area, with no ability to tour the schools (except a couple), no idea which one they will send my child to, no information on how they decide, and no time to do decent research without losing my child's place in line.  It's the worst, most confusing system ever. I'd talk more about it, but the thought makes me tired. Here's me on the news whining about it though. Someday maybe I'll elaborate. Suffice it to say, for now, that I am reassuring myself with the fact that we have pretty good odds of getting into a school that is not too terribly far away and seems pretty decent to me. They have a strong parent-community, they're part of the global-schools network, and I think they're probably a great little school. Fortunately for me, most parents seem to look heavily at test scores (I couldn't care less. What do test scores tell you? Either that this school is full of white, privileged kids, or that the teachers "teach to the test," or that the school is academically rigorous - none of which are things I think are appropriate priorities for Kindergarten/early-education). Anyway, this one school gets bad test scores, but has a lot of other great things going for it. If I'm lucky, we'll get in. If not, heaven help us.

Oswell running around at the park.
That's sunlight on him, people!

Seville came to the school with me to tour it. It got her super amped up for Kindergarten, and since then she's bee practicing writing "words I might need for Kindergarten" and reading her new Bob books that I bought her at Costco the other day. It's very cute to see. Almost a shame Kindergarten doesn't start for 2 more months, but I'm glad for selfish reasons. It's all full-day Kindergarten in Wake County, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be lonely with my little friend gone all day :-(  She really is such a delight to have around.

Life in Raleigh: Day 2

Well, we are here and alive! There was one very long day of travel across the country that stressed me out to no end in advance of the trip. But by 1:00am Raleigh, N.C. time we were here alive and well, 1 bag and 2 naps short, but otherwise unscathed. In fact, I had literally laid awake nights worrying about going through security with my kids. I don’t trust my health or that of my unborn fetus to those backscatter-radiation-emitting-cancer-machines they have installed at PDX now (neither do several of the security personnel, btw.)(and I know many people reading this will think I’m kooky-crazy and overprotective, but whatever. Go through yourself, then, if it doesn’t worry you). I’ve traveled enough in the past few months to know that if you decline, which you’re allowed to do, they give you a thorough pat-down. Anyway, if I'M not going in the cancer-thingy, I’m CERTAINLY not sending my kids into it, and I can NOT imagine subjecting my child to a pat-down. I can’t even begin to extrapolate on how inappropriate I think it is to pat down a 5 year old girl, and how confusing it would be to try and help her understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate crotch-groping (and don’t tell me they don’t touch your crotch. I’ve done many times: they do). I read the TSA guidelines on children, which included language to try and convince you they were going to try and avoid pat-downs, but they still say that anyone who declines the radiation-thingy is subject to a thorough pat-down, no matter their age. So here I was, fully prepared to have a show-down with security. We arrived at the airport really early just in case. And I was honestly prepared not to get on the plane, if need be.  

To PDX’s credit, they were very nice and accommodating. When we got up to security they wrangled us all together and we all went through the metal-detector, me and Jared holding the boys, Seville on her own... and THAT WAS IT! No discussions, no pat downs, no insistence on radiation-thingies, just that. I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Jared couldn’t have cared less, I think, except I think he was not looking forward to being the guy with the wife who was arguing with security about them touching her kids’ privates.  I mean, in retrospect, it seems obvious that this is how families with young children should be handled, but given the TSA rules and the stories you hear about old ladies being asked to remove diapers and whatnot, there was no way to know.

So, greatly relieved and with security behind us, the rest of the trip was mostly what you’d expect: Trying to keep kids entertained in a very very small space without irritating neighbors, trying to convince boys to nap (they didn’t), trying to find ways to feed people on airplane snacks and airport food (the carry-on we accidentally left on the plane during our layover had our snacks in it) (we got it back the next day). I have to share the thing we did for entertainment in case you ever travel with kids, something I got from my friend Kate:  I went to the dollar store and bought 8-10 little toys or activities for each child, put each one in a paper bag and stapled it shut. So once each hour we could get out a new “prize” and they could see what was inside.  We had coloring books, toy cars, stamp sets, pinwheels (that will twirl if you hold them up the airplane air vent, by the way), card games, puzzles, all kinds of dumb little toys that would entertain them for a few minutes at a time. We did this on our trip to Tennessee for my brother-in-law’s wedding last summer, and it worked out really well. We didn’t need to use them quite as much this time, since the kids were more interested in movies and interactive iphone games than 9 months ago, but still... parents take note.

We are renting a van at the moment, and starting to search for one to buy. Jared’s car hasn’t arrived yet - I don’t think it will for several more days. We are also in the process of buying a house, but it won’t close for 3 weeks, so we are staying in a townhome near the airport here. It’s fully furnished, and comes complete with 3 kids’ beds and a playroom full of toys. There’s even a pool across the way, that I might be able to take the kids to if I encase them completely in life-preserving paraphernalia. Maybe. It’s a great situation, in any case. We discovered that the temporary housing offered for families in our situation by companies really doesn’t accommodate kids very well, and is exorbitantly expensive - about the same as a nice hotel (we would have to pay for it ourselves). Jared found this place on Craigslist - some guy from Virginia owns it for visiting with his kids, but they are staying with him at his more permanent residence for the summer so he’s renting it out. We totally scored, and I’m so grateful.  The only downside is that it is 3 stories with nice, high ceilings but lots of stairs, which are already pretty hard on me this pregnant. But given everything else, it’s pretty amazingly perfect for us for now.

Tomorrow is the inspection on the house we’re buying, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ll admit to having some reservations about this purchase. It’s not the location or style I would have imagined myself in, but it may just be the best we can do for now. It’s actually a really fantastic home and property. Maybe just a little too big and nice for my immediate comfort level, if that makes any sense. There’s part of me that doesn’t like the idea of moving to a big house in the suburbs - I’d much rather live close-in in a modest house with “character” and “charm.” But our family is definitely growing to larger-than-average, which makes it harder to fit into a smaller house, and the areas I most love are, of course, quite expensive, so we’ll see what comes of things. I’ve ruled out the possibility of renting for a year and moving again - having just watched 15,000lbs of my stuff get packed up and hauled away, I can’t imagine that the difficulty and hassle of doing that myself in a year would be worth whatever extra mojo I could muster in finding a different house, so it’s now or never.  I have until Monday next week to be certain, so I’ll keep you posted.

It’s definitely HOT here! I’m not used to it at all, and so far I’m both delighted and apprehensive. At some moments I have totally loved that we can go outside without sweaters and see sunshine all day. Other times I just want to collapse in an air-conditioned room. It will probably take me some time to adjust, but overall I think I will really like being in a sunnier climate, if not the first hot, muggy, pregnant summer :)

We have treated the last couple of days like vacation, as much as we can, so the kids will have fun. We took them to a park and swimming yesterday. Today we went to the local children’s museum. The hot-dog-stand lady outside the museum asked me, “are these all your kids?” and then she asked, “are you gonna be done after the next one?” These are the types of things I hear that moms of many kids get asked, but it was a first for me. I guess 4 kids magically transports you into the realm of “weird lady with lots of kids” nowadays. Nobody batted an eye at 3. Now I feel like a walking commercial for birth control. Maybe I should come up with a snappy comeback: "Anything else you'd like to know about my personal life, my bedroom habits, or my reproductive health?" But I'm sure nobody means anything when they ask insensitive questions like that.

My camera is dead and it seems the cord maybe didn’t make it with us, so I can’t take any pictures for now. Not that pictures of our temporary townhouse would be very interesting.  Here are pictures of the house we are buying, if all goes through as planned. They are not good pictures at all, taken by the homeowner I assume (selling by owner), but you sort of get the idea. The best is the purple calla lily wallpaper in the "master font". Oh yeah baby.