Author: brookeshelf

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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The best thing about St. Patrick’s Day is how easy it is to celebrate.  Just slap somethin’ green on your kids, and voila!  Done!  Putting green food coloring in everyone’s food is another good option, but I always forget.  I alwas intend to make my Irish-American Soda Bread, too (it’s sweeter and cake-ier than regular soda bread, mmm) but I forget that, too.

You know what I don’t ever forget?  SHAMROCK DONUTS.  From the Banbury Cross Bakery.  Them’s good stuff.

How about one more picture of cute kids for your pleasure?

I love Katie’s combination smile/raspberry.  It’s like she’s simultaneously thrilled by the attention and grossed out by cooties.  Love it.

Gotcha?

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I was feeling so smug, thinking I had finally managed to capture one of Katie’s smiles on camera.  But then I realized that Katie smiling . . .

. . . really isn’t all that different from Katie not-smiling . . .

 

. . . oh, well.   But I see the difference, and trust me, the smiles are cute.  They go a long ways towards moving her away from what I call the “Beardless Orson Welles” phase.

In the meantime, when I was downloading pictures off of my camera, I also found about fifty different variations of this photo:

This, according to Jeffrey, is titled “Blueberry Muffins in Mountain Landscape.”  The foil represents the mountains, and he referred to the muffins as “the villagers.”  Ah, there’s nothing better than child-created Outsider Art.  Do you know of any good examples?

This Blog, Circa 1995

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While I was brushing my teeth this morning, I began to have extremely geeky thoughts about Star Trek aliens.

One of the premises of the Star Trek universe (as far as I understand it) is that there are many alien races that are basically humanoid in shape.  This is because life evolved in the similar ways across the universe, with only little variations from species to species.

So — if that’s the idea, then does that mean that all Star Trek aliens have primate counterparts on their planets?

Do the Vulcans have evolutionary primate ancestors with corresponding big pointy ears?  Are there Ferengi orangutangs with very big ears horrible teeth?  Klingon gorillas with crazy bumpy foreheads?  Borg monkeys?

Of course not.  That’s silly.

The Borg would never assimilate monkeys.

The reason why I’m writing this is because during my freshman year of college, I was always coming up with goofy ideas like the one above.  A friend of mine told me that if I were ever to create a website (websites being novelties back then) then its header would read “No matter who you are, by visiting this site your view of the world is going to be permanently altered.”  I was flattered by this.

Although, I told him then — and I am not making this up — that if I were to create a website, I would want to make one that was a big online encyclopedia that anybody could contribute to.

That’s right.  My dream website as a college freshman was Wikipedia.  So you can imagine how gratified I was when, ten years later, somebody actually did the job for me.

Thanks, nerds!  Now get crackin’ on that teleportation device!

Baby Smiles

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Katie has begun to smile over the past week.  The smiles are always big, beautiful, and far too brief, like a flashlight with faulty batteries.  For a few fleeting instants, Katie’s face looks like it has a personality beyond “feed me.”  I’ve been trying to get a photograph of one, but the smile is always over before the camera’s ready, so instead I have a lot of pictures of Katie looking adorably cross-eyed and confused (in other words, same as usual).  I’ll post a smile as soon as I manage to get one.

In other news, Katie has also begun to recognize voices.  If she’s crying in her crib after a nap, she’ll calm down as soon as I enter the room and start speaking to her.  Diaper changes are no longer the traumatic experiences they once were.  Nursing is a cinch; she knows just what to do.  Best of all, she’s still growing at a fabulous rate.  She’s topping 10-11 pounds by my estimate, and her body is sturdy and strong, without any more of the fragile floppiness that so often plagues newborns.

And she’s still beloved by all.  A charmed life, in other words.

Archaeology

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We had a Family Home Evening lesson about journal writing last week. It was secretly part of my plan to get Jeffrey interested in writing — I’ll do just about anything to get him to practice handwriting, which he hates.

So, we talked about the benefits of journaling, and I even hauled out a few of my old journals to show the kids.  One was a little chubby volume covered in faux-Chinese embroidered fabric, used when I was ten.  The entries are brief, with a lot of page space taken up with fancy, loop-de-loop embellished signatures.

Fancy signatures were, apparently, an important thing for me when I was ten.

The other volume was one I kept in high school.  The entries are longer, of course, but are still plenty of drawings and sketches in the margins.  Jeffrey was nonplussed at first, but a few days after the lesson, he picked up the journals and began to leaf through them.

He couldn’t really read them (they’re in cursive) but was fascinated with something that, for him, seemed quite old.

“Mom!” he exclaimed.  “These books are history! They are part of our family history! They are ancient artifacts from thousands of years ago!”

I hastily explained that the books were only 15-20 years old.  Which I knew for him was an era shrouded in the Mysterious Mists of Time.

“Whoa,” he said, “These are the oldest books I’ve ever seen in my LIFE!”

Which, of course, is not true, but why spoil it?  Jeffrey now sees me as a semi-mystical scribe of ancient lore, and who am I to ruin that?

Actually, I discovered that spending time reading funny stories from my journal was the best way to get Jeffrey to write in his.  I found a description of a Young Women’s activity that went awry — while singing a slow, inspirational song to folks at a rest home, the accompanist accidentally hit the “demo” button on her electric keyboard, and “Flight of the Bumblebee” began to play instead — and the kids found it hilarious.  Jeffrey laughed while jumping up and down, then rushed to get his journal.  Without any prompting, he sat down and wrote about his day: “I went to visit the doctor.”  (We had, for his persistent cough.  It turned out to be nothing.)

Sure, the rest of the page was taken up with pictures of “army guys fighting,” but a sentence!  A whole sentence!  It was a day destined to go down in history.

Breakfast Adventures

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It used to be that Jeffrey slept like a teenager.  If left to his own devices, he’d sleep deep and late, requiring me to use a crowbar to get him out of bed for school.  Even on Christmas morning, he’d easily snooze until 7:30 or 8:00.

BUT .  .  .

Somehow in the past couple of weeks, his internal clock has been flipped around, and how he’s up and about at 5:45 almost every morning.  I suspect that it might have something to do with Katie’s crying at night, but Brian and I are suffering.  Dealing with a newborn in the dark is one thing.  Dealing with an overactive eight-year-old is something else.

We try to get him to go back to bed, but he more often wanders around the house, doing odd deeds which we don’t discover until we’re up and dressed a few hours later

Like: taking all the instruction manuals for our Wii games out of their cases and putting them in a pile.

Or: dragging a sleeping bag out of the basement and making a tent with it.

Or: taking the weather report in the newspaper and leaving it in some unfathomable place in the house.  It’s always in a different place each time.

On weekends, Jeffrey goes so far to wake up his siblings and then helping them make breakfast.  “Make breakfast,” of course, is limited by Jeffrey’s meager set of cooking skills.  Last Saturday, Brian and I emerged from our room to find the kids having a “tea party” in the sun room with sippy cups of water, two rolls of Ritz crackers, and 64 slices of American Cheese.

(“Mmmm  . . . 64 slices of American Cheese . . .”) <– five points for those of you who can name this reference.

The other breakfast trend is what the kids refer to as “Toast Buffet.”  Jeffrey puts in slice after slice of bread in the toaster, and then lines up a variety of toppings on the counter: butter, peanut butter, raspberry honey butter, honey, and whatever jelly or jam they find in the fridge.  The kids can put whatever combination of spreads on their toast and then munch down.  Evidence of a Toast Buffet includes about seven different table knives crusted over with multiple spready things, a bowl of rejected toast slices, and crumbs.  Lots of crumbs.  Everywhere.

Brian and I think this is ADORABLE, although, I will admit it makes our household supply of sandwich bread disappear faster than I’d prefer.

But why dwell on the downside?  I’m just glad they haven’t discovered the jar of Nutella in the pantry.

Wimmy and the Usurper

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The day little Katie was born, Brian spent time talking to the kids about how our family had changed.

“William, you now have a little sister,” he explained to them.  “And Eleanor has a little brother and a little sister.”

Eleanor, who has always been intrigued by the technicalities of family relationships, took it one stop further.

“Yeah, William.  Now you are a middle child, like me, instead of the youngest,” she said excitedly.  “Baby Katie has REPLACED YOU!”

Brian and I found this statement hilarious.  But William has been taking his status change a little hard.  He doesn’t take it out on his baby sister — he is as fond of her as the rest of the kids (although he did admit briefly that he “liked Baby Katie when she was in Mommy’s tummy”).  But his frustration at the changes in his life have come out in other ways.  He’s more likely to throw a temper tantrum, especially when it comes to leaving the house for church or preschool.  His usually hearty appetite has diminished, and he hasn’t been sleeping as well (although this is in large part to sharing a room with Jeffrey).

The rest of our children were too little to really register a change in lifestyle when their new sibling came along.  Jeffrey and Eleanor were just 2 1/2 or 2, and didn’t have the long-term memory to remember life before the new baby.  William’s the first to notice and be upset that he’s not getting as much one-on-one Mom Time as he used to.

We know it’s a phase, and he’ll grow out of it eventually.  But in the meantime, it’s hard not to feel for the little guy.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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I like to think of Valentine’s Day as a celebration of love.  My love for baked goods.  Behold:

A successfully made Red Velvet Cake!  I attempted this same cake recipe last Valentine’s, and it was not pretty.  I didn’t have the right size cake pan, so the batter overflowed in the oven, and what was left in the pan collapsed into a big cake crater.

Oh, and I didn’t have enough red food dye, so the cake crater was the color of Spam.

But this year, I invested in the proper pan, and a full ounce of dye (that’s what you need, apparently) and lo!  A cake worth destroying! A happy Valentine’s was enjoyed by all!

Oh, and Katie felt the love, too:

Hmm.  On second thought, I think I’ll count this last picture as my Valentine’s present.  Yum.

 

Ten Days Old

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My sister in law, Debbie, came over this past Monday to take photos of little Katie.  Here are some of the results: whaddya think?

 

I’m a big fan of the one where’s she’s crying.  Maybe because it makes her cheeks look even more like dinner rolls than usual?  (Mmm, delicious baby dinner rolls . . .)

She’s Here!

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Introducing . . .

The fabulous Katherine Suzanne!

She arrived this past Friday, Jan. 21 at 2:55 p.m.

Clocking in at 7 lbs, 9 oz. and measuring in at 21″ long . . .

. . . she’s one cute-but-exhausting handful.

The delivery went very well; like the other kids, she came faster than expected and surprised everyone.  (You’d think we’d be able to recognize the pattern by now.)  We came home from the hospital on Sunday afternoon and Katie is settling in well.  She’s a pretty mellow baby, excepting when she’s getting a diaper change.  The other children are crazy about her, and always want to watch while I nurse or rock her.

Annnnd that’s about all I can write while holding her in one arm.  More to come later (um, maybe.  I’m really tired).