Quote of the Day

Add this to the list of things I never thought I would have to say out loud.

"Please take your penis off the window."

I'll let you guess which kid had to be told...

I Love a Rainy Night.

Especially when most of the kids are at Vacation Bible School and we have no choice but to sit inside and rest.
I had plans to do a freezer cooking day soon, but when I found stew beef at Wegmans marked down by 60%, those plans kicked into high gear.
So - using 13 different recipes and spending $273, we were able to make 31 meals with 5 servings in each meal.  Including both the chicken and beef meals, using almost all whole food ingredients, that's about $1.76 per serving.  Take THAT, Dream Dinners!!!
I'm thinking we will be good for the rest of the summer and I can continue to scour the meat with close sell-by dates to get some good deals to have ready cooked meats frozen, on hand, for nights to just throw things together when we need to.  If we make a ton of waffles and freeze them this weekend and supplement with Cheerios on a prn basis, we should be good for a while.
That being said - after standing and doing meal prep for 5 hours.  My feet hurt!
God Bless all the cafeteria workers out there. 

$60 dollars worth of stew beef can go a long way! 

The kitchen looked like ti imploded after we finished.  Ugh.  Lots of Clorox wipes used in the clean up. 

It's amazing that only casualty of the whole affair was the silverware drawer that I managed to dump a cup of brown sugar into. 

Flat Freddie's adventures are continuing.
We have yet to get of picture of Caroline at Language Camp, but she loves it.  As in we have to remind her to speak English to the rest of us now because she attempts to answer in whatever language she studied that day.  We are trying to figure out a way we can get a whole family language class going here.  With the kids being the ages they are, NOW is the time to do something like that.
Today we went swimming at our friend's house.  We had a ball.

Here is Freddie at VBS.  The kids are wicked worn out and can't get settled down until almost 10pm, but they are learning so much.  Jim and I are, too.  :)

 And not to be left out...guess who is enjoying his alone time with his parents?!?

Last Day of School

The kids love school.
That being said, we are psyched to be on Vacation.
And because there will never be the same Summer twice,  I approach the upcoming months with a sort of melancholy appreciation and awe.
Little, Crazy Urchins only stay little for so long.
:(
Pretty sure the Crazy part won't go anywhere anytime soon, though.  

This is How We Roll.

To celebrate the first full day of Summer Vacation and Daddy coming home from Montreal, we spent the afternoon at the Udvar-Hazy Museum.
It was great, as usual.
Instead of going early, we headed out about 11.
An excellent decision on our part.  The museum cleared out after lunch.  I don't think there were more than 200 people in the whole place.
We're changing our schedule to do most of our exploring in the afternoons.
Because of the limited crowd, we thought we might do a guided tour of the museum.  It's difficult to try to navigate with a group when it's packed.  We were reluctant after finding out the tour was 90 minutes, but figured we could duck out if needed - and we went for it. 
Another good decision.
The tour was fantastic.  There were a few other kids in the group, older than ours, and the docent did a great job keeping them involved.  It was a hoot to watch.
Mr Eric, the docent, found us after the tour and complimented us on the kid's behavior, remarking on their interest in aviation.  Turns out he is a retired air force pilot and entertained and educated us for almost an hour showing the kids pictures and telling stories. 
Both Sam and Caroline were excited to have someone to talk about Robert S Johnson and Jackie Cochran with.  Mr Eric was amazed that a 7 and 9 year old could tell him about the WASPs, WWII flying aces and Allison Engines. 
Frankly, listening to them all talk, I was pretty impressed, too.
During the whole time that Sam, Caroline, Jim, Nate & Mr Eric were talking, Benjamin was standing at the window watching planes land at Dulles.  He would yell when he saw the lights of an incoming plane and clap and cheer when each plane would land.
There was a bus load of older folks in the area that Ben kept well entertained.  His joy was contagious.  To be able to make others smile is a gift. 

Here is the fist installment of summer pictures.
Introducing..."Flat Freddie" - the mascot at the Older's school.  One of their summer assignments is to take Freddie with them and journal about his adventures.
Well...Freddie got to see some of their very favorite things today!

Nate was upset that he didn't get a Freddie. He made his own this morning.  Here are Nate, Sam and the Freddies standing in front of the Space Shuttle Discovery. 

Freddie enjoyed seeing "Flak Bait" in the Restoration Hangar. 

Freddie learned the SR-71 leaked gas when it was parked because it was built to allow it to expand when it flew.  He thought it was a wicked sexy airplane.  ;)

Mama and Daddy got to pose with Freddie, too.  In the spirit with the bomber airplanes we were admiring, Benjamin acted as an excellent photo-bomber. 

Oh - and lest I forget...
This morning, on the 1st Day of Summer Vacation, Sam and Caroline got up, made their beds, dressed, picked up their rooms and brushed their teeth without prompting.  After that, with some cues, they vacuumed their rooms and worked together to clean the orange bathroom.
It was like living in a parallel universe.
As great as the museum was, seeing the kids clean a bathroom was FLIPPING AWESOME!!!
We are working to get the kids to do more around the house.  We're noticing their behavior and attitude improves with them being more involved.
We need to have the strategies in place to encourage them.
Not only will being able to cook and clean impress the boy's wives when they come of age, we're really noticing differences in behaviors with kids that do chores at home vs the kids that don't.
There are simply too many people living in this house to have it run efficiently without everyone pitching in.
I'm sure they'll be updates on this as the summer goes on...

Antibiotics

Sam earned a long dose of antibiotics when a bug tagged his leg with this nasty beauty on Sunday. 
We are learning the pharmacies in Frederick County that carry dye free medications.
They are few and far between.
Kudos to the pharmacist at Wegmans for making many, many, many calls to help us out.
It was a long day for poor Sammy.
He's looking much better now, thank goodness.  

Dance Recital

Last week was a big week. 
Auntie Dr Chrissy and Danielle come to visit and Caroline had her school assembly AND dance recital.

The studio pictures came out marvelously, but were crazy expensive, so we bought only her jazz pictures.  Adorable!
Caroline did a great job in her performances and most importantly, looked like she was thoroughly enjoying herself the whole time.
For ballet, she danced to "Tale as Old as Time".  It was "ABC"  for jazz and "Best Day of my Life" for tap.  
Her heart was so happy. It was great to watch. 

Did I mention how awesome her brothers are to sit through all those?  It's not easy to be a Little Brother. We'll be making plenty of trips to Udvar-Hazy this summer to make it even, trust me.  We gave the boys the camera at times to entertain themselves and got these gems. 

Thank goodness we didn't have to pay Kodak to print THOSE out. 
But all's well that ends well and we don't have to worry about this flurry of activity again until August. 
AMEN.

It's Been A While...

Since I've posted, let alone worked on the blog! I was finally inspired by the Red Sox 7th consecutive loss and the end of the Blue Jays 11-game winning streak come to an end (hero: Chris Colabello!) to finally upgrade the left bar. It's tough on my little netbook screen without a mouse and an html editor to work on it right so I've tweaked around the edges for now...and I cant remember how to code in HTML anymore its been so long!

The Mayor Himself.

You know you have kids when, instead of sub-referencing movies and classic literature, conversations are  littered with allusions from children's books. 
When we learned that Caroline was receiving an award from the Mayor of Frederick City for her the 35 hours of community service she did this school year, we could hardly help but mentioning The Mayor Himself.  
Caroline was super pleased that Auntie Dr Chrissy and Danielle could be there to cheer her on. 
35 hours is a lot for a 3rd grader.  We're proud of her hard work and spirit of giving.  :)

Mornings

One thing we have been working very hard on as a family is making our mornings more sane. 
Our goal is not having to say, "Hurry up!".  Our other goal get the kids to realize that the time it takes for them to do what they need to do is really very minimal AND that they can then have their time to do what they want with.

It has not been easy. 
Some mornings earlier in the year, I could have cried at all the yelling and general grumpiness we encountered when Urchins dragged themselves out of bed.  Being a Morning Person, it's tough when people don't get up and going as they "should".  I get most of my work done before noon, so those hours in the morning are precious. 
We instituted changes. Earlier bedtimes, laying clothes out the night before, baths at night, having the kids make their lunches in the afternoon, doing homework as soon as the kids get home and me having dinner ready to go before 3 so I can focus on homework and other things during the usual dinner prep time. We also set timers in the mornings to make the kids more aware of how much time they have to work with. 
All the days are not perfect, but mornings are so much better than they used to be.  On Thursday, Sam and Nate got up and dressed, make their beds, picked up their rooms and brushed their teeth TOTALLY on their own.  Another morning this week we were able to get everyone ready in a calm manner and we were out the door at 7:40. 
It.  Was.  Amazing.  :)

Sam had time to do 20 minutes of reading before getting on the bus. 
It's such an accomplishment, especially for him, that we had to get photographic evidence.  :)

P-47 Thunderbolt

This brief blog post is brought to you by the P-47 Thunderbolt documentary from The History Channel that someone was kind enough to put on Youtube.com.
It does seem as if the only time I get to sit to blog is if the kids are watching something, but the boys have built Thunderbolts and Me 109s out of Legos and are sitting in front of the computer watching intently. More importantly, they're not beating the tar out of one another, which has been a recurring theme recently.
I am grateful.

The Youngers and I went strawberry picking on Monday morning.
We got 10 pounds worth in about 40 minutes, not counting the 10 pounds worth that the boys ate.
Out of the whole stash, we have *none* left and plan to go back later this week.  :)
I don't know what kind of crack they sprinkled on the fields, but I'll take it.
The taste is  heavenly.

Here are the scheisters with our stash.   Good thing they didn't weigh the boys before and after we picked or else we would have been charged a lot more.

On Monday afternoon the kids were acting like utter monkeys, so I told them all to go outside and climb trees. This is what I found.

I didn't think they would take my words so literally.  But I was impressed that the cherry tree could support the weight of all 4 kids.  :)

Caroline is doing a school project on Jacqueline Cochran, the founder of the Women's AirForce Service Pilots during WWII.  We were able to scrape together a WASP costume for her using hand-me-down suits and other supplements from her brother's wardrobe.   She is wearing her WASP pin given to her on the anniversary of VE Day.  She is so proud to carry this part of history with her. 
We are proud that she thoughtful enough to begin to appreciate the importance of the the service of the women that have come before her. 

Off to dinner, bathies and bed. 
Not that I dislike having Tball over, but I'm grateful for the extra downtime. 
Amen.