ahem...

Well, so the cold is finally gone and I actually feel human and can breathe again. Apparently the only remnant left is a slight cough and the fact that my voice has almost completely disappeared. Which is quite annoying and has created the challenge to communicate as much as possible by e-mail in order to save what’s left for things that can’t be e-mailed, like yelling at talking to my kids. At work, this is actually possible as I don’t have a lot of need to talk to very many people and can e-mail anyone I care to, even if they’re sitting next to me. I think I’ve actually managed to go several hours now without uttering a single word out loud. We’ll have to see if I can make it until the end of the day, which might mean that I’ll have enough voice left to deal with picking the kids up from daycare, rushing home to get a quick dinner and changed into swimsuits and sitting through swimming lessons/chasing Becca tonight. As long as my phone doesn’t ring, I’m probably set!

Swimming lessons

When we moved into our house, we decided that it would be very important to make sure that our kids know how to swim. For 2 main reasons. First, we live near a lake. And although we can’t access it from our yard, our neighbors can – they actually access one of 3 short ‘channels’ that were cleverly incorporated into the man-made lake when it was created, in order to maximize the number of ‘waterfront’ lots (someone probably made a lot of money off of that one). Our lot is just off the corner of one of these ‘channels’ so that the neighbors next to us and behind us (we live on a corner) both access the channel but we do not. But we do have very nice neighbors behind us who let us go through their yard whenever we want to get to the channel (Ron takes the older girls fishing fairly often off of their dock platform) and their gate is not kept locked. Second, the neighbors next to us (not the behind-us-ones) have an in-ground pool and their gate does not have a lock on it either. We have combination locks on our gates but there are times when we leave them unlocked (Ron has a tendency to leave them open quite often, for example). So we decided that swimming is definitely a necessary skill. Not to mention that I grew up swimming in a lake and want my kids to enjoy the water as much as I do.

We put Abby in swimming lessons when she was 3 years old and potty trained. Even though she cried through the entire first lesson, she still did everything that the teachers wanted her to do and she was fine after that. She loves being in the water and paddling around, but being our hesitant, non-risk-taking child she loves everything about swimming lessons – as long as they don’t try to get her to actually swim. Last year we did 2 sessions (4 weeks) of lessons and although the teachers had graduated her into the next-higher group, she didn’t like doing the things (such as ‘swimming’) that were required, so she got moved back down into her comfort zone.

Hannah has never liked the water, even as a baby. Anything bigger than the bathtub terrified her. The first time we ever got her to do more than sit on the steps of a pool was during swimming lessons last year. Our choice – whether right or not – was to put her in lessons and get her comfortable in the water even though she fought it like crazy. It took all 4 weeks but by the end she finally could get through a 45-minute lesson without crying and on the last day even jumped off the diving board herself instead of being dropped in the water off the end of it. And best of all, she was now perfectly happy in a pool, paddling around with a floating ring on and having fun. Mission somewhat accomplished.

We started this summer’s lessons last week and they run through this week. Hannah is doing awesome! Not a tear shed and she’s having a blast. And starting to actually swim on her own! Abby cried throughout the entire first lesson but has been tear-free since and has even been doing some of the swimming that is required in the next higher level. I am so darn proud of both of them. I love watching them learn – and seeing how they interact with their teachers and the other kids. I don’t like the fact that I leave work at 5pm and have to pick the kids up at daycare, get them home, get everyone including myself fed and the big girls changed into their bathing suits and drive to lessons by 6pm. Yeah, right. We’ve eaten every ‘quick and easy’ dinner option I can think of – mainly sandwiches, hot dogs, and frozen waffles. So much for a healthy, balanced, sit-down dinner… Oh well – there’s always next week.

My grossest road trip

Karen over at Pediascribe is doing a contest where you have to enter by submitting your 'dirtiest' story - or at least a good story explaining a time when you really, really needed a shower from something your kids did. Ok, well here's my best attempt!

My friend Mary and I visit back and forth several times a year. We have a whole schedule worked out, based on kids' birthdays, holidays - it's actually quite complicated but generally we see each other every month or two, either here or at her house, which is about 2 hours away.

Now there are a few stories I could tell about various times when our kids have gotten sick at each other's (or their own) houses during one of these visits. Like the time that her daughter Emma threw up all over me while I was holding her on my lap. Or the flu/reflux that Becca had on and off last Christmas and afterward which caused her to throw up without warning several times while we were at Mary's house. I kind of figure that those two cancel each other out. ;)

The 'best' story though, is one that took place during the drive to Mary's house last March. We had bought a new (not NEW - it is 9 years old, but new to us) minivan just a couple of days earlier and my girls had only ridden in it a couple of times for short trips to daycare and such. My girls have always done well on car trips and I can't remember any of them ever getting carsick. Well, there's a first time for everything. Hannah fell asleep on this trip and she woke up abruptly about halfway to Mary's. She sits right behind me so I couldn't see her through the rear view mirror. I just heard her wake up and then say, 'Mommy - I threw up!'.

So expecting just a little, simple mess, I stopped at the next exit and found a gas station. Well, Hannah was right - she had thrown up. A lot. All over herself, her booster seat and her winter coat. So I get her out of the van and find the wet wipes that I carry in the diaper bag. Ok. I clean off her coat as best as I can but wet wipes aren't doing the job too well. Off comes the coat. This is the first day of March and it's freezing out. Hannah is standing outside with no coat while I'm desperately trying to use wet wipes to clean off her booster seat and seatbelt - at least somewhat. She's crying and hanging on me and therefore getting the mess all over my coat and clothes. I finally have to just buckle her back into the van, give her the grocery bag I was using as a garbage bag in case she threw up again and just head back onto the freeway. Hannah is still crying because she was so rudely awakened by throwing up, plus she's cold, wet and stinky. Becca is now awake and screaming because she's still strapped in her carseat, and Abby is asking every 2 seconds, "are we there yet?", "what happened?", "is Hannah ok?", "did Hannah throw up?", "why did Hannah throw up?", etc.

I was now covered in vomit myself and between that, the smell and the crying/noise, the rest of the trip was one of the longest hours of my life. I was ecstatic to get to Mary's and her washing machine and shower! Thankfully some scrubbing and Febreze got the van looking and smelling fresh again too and we added an empty ice cream bucket for our trip home, which - thankfully - was not needed, nor has been since.

Timber...

So here’s the other ‘tree’ story I promised…

When we bought our house, it was in need of a great deal of help, aesthetically. Previous owners had let the yard get completely overgrown and at some point in the past, someone had decided to take a ‘rustic’ approach to landscaping. Thus, the yard was filled with trees – many dead or dying, and large overgrown shrubbery. Not to mention the huge ‘rock garden’ that took up most of the front yard. The first summer that we were in the house, Ron worked from home and spent pretty much the entire summer working on the yard. This accomplished a few things, some of which were entirely unintentional. First, the yard looks a thousand times better than it did when we bought the house, increasing our equity and re-sellable value. The kids actually have a nice, safe yard area to run around and play in. Also, Ron got to know many people in the neighborhood as they all stopped by to compliment him on the improvements.

I won’t go too far into exactly what the house and yard looked like because I don’t want to bore you all to death. Let’s just mention a few things. Like mustard yellow siding. Dark brown trim in some places and white trim in others. Dead rosebushes. Half-buried bricks outlining areas which it can be assumed were intended to be ‘landscaped areas’. Day lilies overtaking many areas. Weeds. Oh yes, and the killer trees.

Ron dubbed them the ‘killer’ trees, specifically because they had long (several inches in most cases) thorns sticking out from the trunks and branches, all the way down to the ground. We’ve had a couple of opinions, and I think they were a ‘thorny’ variety of locust tree, especially considering that we also had a couple of the ‘thornless’ variety of the same tree in the yard as well. The two ‘killer’ trees were the main reason that Ron started improving the yard – we could just imagine what would happen if Abby or Hannah (who was only a toddler at the time) were to brush up against, or even worse fall against, one of these trees. So down they came. And as long as he was at it, Ron took down most of the other trees in the yard as well. As well as the scrubby bushes. And the rocks. And the half-sunken bricks. At the end of the year, we had a very nicely improved yard – to a point, since we’d run out of money and Ron was again working full-time. We did leave 3 trees in the front yard. Two were nice maples which we hoped would thrive now that they were visible and free to grow up and out. The third, up against the house by the girls’ bedroom windows, was a very nice-looking, tall tree which appeared to be of the ‘thornless locust’ variety (I don’t claim to be a tree expert so could be completely off the wall here). I saw no reason to cut down a tree with no real reason – it was in good health and wasn’t an immediate danger to our kids. Plus it shaded the roof of our house pretty nicely. So it stayed.

Ron and I have argued about this tree ever since. It did drop large seed pods all over the roof and yard every year and completely clog the gutters on that side of the house. It was planted extremely close to the house and Ron felt that the roots were beginning to damage our foundation – we have been getting minor flooding on that side of the basement. And we never completed the landscape area over there because we couldn’t agree on whether it would include this tree or not, so it became quite a nice garden – of weeds. No matter how much I tried to keep up with pulling them, we grew a wonderful crop of not-so-lovely weeds every summer. So this year, I finally gave in. The tree could come out.

Ron found a ‘tree guy’ pretty easily – the truck pulled up next to him at a red light so he called the number on the truck right then. The guy came over that night, quoted us a decent price (and gave us 30 days to pay him – a key factor given our financial issues at the moment), and the next day the tree was gone.

Here are a few pictures of the original yard - this is after Ron had already started some of his work on it. We never did take a good 'before' picture of the house unfortunately.

Here is Ron rototilling the former 'rock garden' area after taking out the trees, bushes, bricks, timbers and rocks (the rocks are still residing under our back deck until we can find either the money to get rid of them or someone who wants a whole lot of unsifted landscape rocks).

Here is a 'before' picture that I took last week before the tree came down. Ignore our weedy and half-dead lawn - that's a whole other issue.

Taking down this tree became a larger event than we anticipated, involving 3 guys (one of whom spent the morning climbing said tree to cut the smaller branches off), one wood chipper, a chainsaw, rope, and about every neighborhood kid within about a half-mile radius. The neighbors across the street set up chairs in the driveway so they could relax and enjoy the entertainment. I was home that day since we had not been able to find alternate daycare while our main daycare provider was on vacation (this was the week of July 4^th), so was able to watch, listen and take a ton of pictures. Thankfully they took a nice long lunch break so Becca was able to get a decent nap. By the end of the day, just a short stump was left. And now, even that is gone – leaving a giant hole in our yard which Ron has not had time to deal with since the only day off he’s had since then was when he was sick last week.

So good-bye tree – I do miss you, but I guess it’s for the best.

Here are some pictures of the tree coming down...

And a few 'after' pictures. The first one is the girls' idea of a 'replacement' tree. :)

And here's what our yard currently looks like. And probably will look like for the foreseeable future given Ron's work schedule lately.

Sniffle, cough, sneeze

Ok, so today I was determined to write something thought-provoking, humorous and hopefully less wordy than usual. Uh-huh. As I'm now the not-so-proud recipient of a bad summer cold, courtesy of my husband who was sick at the beginning of the week, I'm going to beg off since my brain is not working very well today. And what parts of it are working, are busy worrying about my kids who are home with our 15-year-old niece today since daycare is on vacation and with swimming lessons and a sick husband, I waited until the last minute to try to find an alternate arrangement. Not to mention that our usual backups weren't available either. Thankfully our niece was able and willing to come look after 3 bored, whiny kids all day. I'm just hoping my house is in one piece when I get home tonight.

Today is also the funeral for the fallen police officer here. At 11am EST a moment of silence was held to honor him. Over 2,500 are expected to attend the funeral and thousands are also expected to line the procession route between the church and the cemetery. It is amazing to see the outpouring of support for his family and his daughter - by other police families as well as the general public. Police officers and support personnel from adjacent cities are covering our city's needs during the funeral so that every single officer in our department can attend the funeral. It's been over 20 years since an officer had died in the line of duty here.

I'm off to hole up for an hour somewhere with my box of kleenex and my ipod. Have a good weekend all!

And the Bad Mommy award goes to...

Ok, so I’ve been the recipient of this one before – after all, who hasn’t at one time or another. Kids are kids and accidents happen. I’m just glad that this one wasn’t bad – I’m still determined that Becca will be my first child to reach the age of 3 without having had stitches. Of course, she’s my daredevil, fearless child so that’s probably a futile wish considering that my non-risk-taking and careful children have had stitches already. Mind you that I’ve never had stitches in my life (not counting childbirth anyway). Broken bone, yes – stitches no. Yet both Abby and Hannah have. Oops.

Well this story is from swimming lessons last night. Both Abby and Hannah are taking them, which means that Becca and I sit in the bleachers with the other parents/siblings to watch. Lessons are at the middle school pool – an indoor pool so it’s like a jungle (according to my friend Kristi’s husband, Steve) or a sauna (according to me) in there. The first year that we put Abby in lessons, when Hannah was 2, a plastic Dora figurine with horse Pinto kept her occupied pretty much the whole time as she ‘rode’ Dora on Pinto up and down the bleacher row over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s because Becca is younger or what, but we’ve been through most of the easily-traveling toys in our arsenal so far and nothing keeps her occupied for more than a few minutes at a time. Her favorite game is to take off walking as fast as she can along the bleacher row until she reaches the set of 4 steps at the end that go down into the hallway. The ‘game’ is that Mommy chases her down the row and scoops her up before she gets to the steps. Well, last night, I didn’t quite make it in time. Usually she does very well with steps, but in this instance, she knew I was coming to get her and she was therefore in a hurry. So she fell. In slow motion, she rrrroooollllllllllllllleeeeeddd down the four stairs (hard tile ones, no less) until I reached her at the bottom. Not really a huge deal – she cried her little heart out for about 5 minutes and then was fine except for the large bruise forming on her forehead. But all in all, really not a bad fall. Except that I felt like the worst mommy in the world for those 5 minutes. I have the feeling that with this child though, I’m going to have to get used to it. Ten minutes later she was taking off down the bleacher row again just like nothing had happened. Except that mean Mommy didn’t let her get anywhere near the steps anymore. Sorry, little one.

So Ron was home sick yesterday – apparently it is a cold, not allergies. He was pretty darn miserable all day. And I woke up with a sore throat this morning. Thanks, dear.

Trees

I love trees. I love spring when the leaves come out, all fresh and green. I love fall when the leaves turn beautiful and crisp and are fun to crunch as you walk. I even love to rake them - ok, within reason though.

There were two times though in the past week when trees have been an annoyance, a frustration and downright irritating.

We went to our local fireworks show on July 4^th with good friends and their kids. Well, actually I ended up taking Ron and Becca home early in the evening because he was grumpy and not feeling sociable and she NEEDED to go to bed on time. We hadn’t been to these fireworks before so weren’t quite up on where to sit for the best view. We asked a couple of people and the consensus seemed to be to sit on the middle school lawn facing the road and that the fireworks would be visible straight to the east where there is a low tree line. Ok, so we found a great spot to sit, near the porta-potties, in the shade yet with an excellent view of where (we thought) the fireworks would appear come darkness. Oh no. That was not to be. When the fireworks eventually began (we realized that from now on we can wait until more like 7pm instead of 3:30 to secure our parking spaces and seating area) - and we were able to tell which were the ‘real’ ones rather than the multitude of illegal ones going off in the surrounding neighborhoods – they went off more like to the northeast. Right behind a nice tall strand of trees. Within about 10 seconds (or so it seemed) the lawn, which had been quite full of other people either similarly misinformed or who didn’t care if they actually could SEE the fireworks, virtually emptied as everyone gathered up their blankets, chairs, bags, etc. and ran to the left or right in search of open ground with decent visibility. We ended up on a curb, under a streetlight. There were still trees blocking the lowest fireworks, but we could see probably a good 2/3 of them pretty well if we ignored (or tried) the streetlight glare. We threw down a blanket for the kids but we stood and watched. It was a good show – or at least I think it was.

I must say too, by this point we were all tired, having sat in the heat and sun and crowds all afternoon and evening, dealing with keeping 5 (and then 4 after Ron and Becca left) kids of varying ages and genders occupied. Kristi’s 2-year-old son is potty training, which necessitated trips to the porta-potties every half hour. I must say too that he did rather well all day whereas Hannah who is 2 years older had two wet accidents (sigh). So although we were a bit frustrated by the whole viewing the fireworks through the trees issue, when we got to our well-illuminated final viewing spot, we were quite silly and slap-happy. When Kristi’s 5-year-old (his birthday is actually July 4^th – happy birthday, Noah!) started shouting the word, ‘Awesome!’ after every single firework, she finally challenged him to come up with a different word to describe them all. Well, a 5-year-old does have a somewhat limited vocabulary, so after the first few minutes, Kristi and I took over. You probably had to have been there for our exclamations of, “too darn low!”, “shimmery!”, “multi-colored!”, “groovy!”, “not high enough!”, etc. to actually sound funny, but we had a blast. It was rather like free association, shouting out the first thing that came to mind that hadn’t already been used. It was probably the most fun I’ve actually had at fireworks in a long time – since there were no umbrellas, raindrops, mosquitoes or crying babies involved. So trees aside, we had a very good time.

I’ll get to the other tree story later – it involves some explanation (and hopefully photos) of how our front yard appeared when we bought our house 3 ½ years ago versus how it looks today.

Random thoughts for a Wednesday...

Today was the second day in a row that Becca has waved to me out the window when I’ve been leaving daycare after dropping the kids off. It’s incredibly cute to see her little smiling face as she’s waving but it breaks my heart to have to be leaving her. While having the week off last week was extremely nice, it makes the transition back to the ‘real world’ of work and daycare just that much harder. My ‘baby’ girl is getting to be such a ‘big’ girl now. She's turning into such a little ham too - she knows to 'smile' for the camera when we point it at her, which usually involves scrunching up her face with her eyes almost closed. Silly girl.

So parents everywhere always say the same thing about how much energy their kids have – wishing they could bottle it and sell it or have at least half as much themselves. My kids slept in almost every day last week, thus making it much more difficult to get them to bed at the usual 8pm bedtime that we hold to (since they usually have to be up at 6:30am). I was thinking this morning about how nice it would be to get 10+ hours of sleep a night and started wondering if there’s any correlation between getting so much sleep (versus the oh, 5-6 hours a night that I usually average, for example) and how much energy kids exhibit during the day… I wouldn’t be at all surprised. However nice it would be to get that much sleep though, I have way too many things that need to get done in the evenings to even think about heading to bed at 8pm most nights.

I forgot to have Abby put her glasses on this morning so now she’ll have to go all day without them unless I can run home at lunch to grab them and take them over to daycare. And even though it would be great to see the kids at lunch like I used to when I was going and nursing Becca every day, I’ve realized lately that it throws both their routine at daycare, as well as daycare’s general routine, off if I show up at unusual times. My kids usually do fine when I leave them at daycare in the mornings – no tears or clinging. But if I stop in at lunch, I get the whole drama – crying while hanging desperately onto my leg or arm – when I go to leave. Usually from Abby, who is my child that craves routine and doesn’t deal well with change. So now I debate whether it’s more important to take her glasses over there and deal with the drama or let her go without them all day… What would you do?

Ron has either bad allergies or the start of a nasty cold right now. I so hope it’s just allergies because the thought of dealing with a summer cold – either in myself or the girls – right now is not something I want to deal with. Oh yes, and for his sake too, of course. ;)

To protect and serve...

I came back to work yesterday after a week off (by default – I hadn’t been originally planning on the whole week, but had daycare issues). I was expecting to have a quiet day to catch up on e-mail, phone messages, (not to mention blog-reading, listening to podcasts, blog posting – shhh!) – the usual post-vacation stuff. Instead I had a whirlwind of a day making maps.

Ok, now I make maps for a living – that’s basically what ‘GIS’ boils down to. I love making maps. These were the most difficult ones that I’ve had to make though and not because they were all that complicated. Usually I make maps showing things like ‘future land use’ and ‘zoning’, or ‘structure fire locations’ – things that are fairly abstract anyway.

I hadn’t watched the news over the weekend and hadn’t been on the internet to catch any news stories either. I did flip on the news briefly yesterday morning and caught a quick blurb about a police officer being killed – I quickly changed the channel though since Hannah was watching and I didn’t think that was a story she needed to hear more about.

Within minutes after I got to work, I got a call from our public safety liaison and soon after that he and a police officer were here going through specifics about the incident early Sunday morning. When a police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty on a domestic dispute. A 29-year-old father of a little girl, who is only 3 years old. The suspect was arrested at the scene. I spent the day making maps showing locations of police officers who responded during and after the incident, where the suspect was located, where the fallen officer was and how he was removed from the scene to be rushed to the hospital.

You pretty much take for granted the danger that police officers face every day when they head off to work just like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us though, they know that every day on the job could potentially be their last. Not that other jobs don’t involve danger and heck, any of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow or something. But police officers walk into situations daily where they don’t know what to expect and have to therefore expect the worst. Because they never know when a guy with a shotgun might be hiding in a garage – a guy who’s a competitive marksman and has a grudge against authority – a guy who could decide to pull that trigger. A 29-year-old father walks around the back of a house to set up a rear perimeter and cover the back door and never comes back.

My heart goes out to his family and daughter and they are in my prayers.

Ah... Peace and quiet at last...

Yes, the 4th hasn't even gotten here and yet I'm exhausted. It's a good exhausted though, born of busy, hectic, loud, crazy days with houseguests. I love having Mary come to visit. I do have to admit to a feeling of relief though when they leave and I have my house back.

If I'm exhausted, then my kids are downright pooped. Especially the littlest one, who didn't get her nap today because we packed up 5 kids to head to the beach. Poor little thing - she conked out on the way home so I let her sleep in her carseat while we ate dinner and I kept an eye on her through the screen door into the garage. Waking up a cranky baby to try to get some food into her tummy before bed wasn't a fun experience though. Neither was washing sand and sunscreen off of 5 kids after chasing and wrangling them all afternoon. And next year it'll be 6 kids since Mary's expecting her 3rd in January (on Becca's birthday no less). I think we'll skip the beach next year though.

All in all it was a good extended weekend though. They got here at dinnertime on Saturday. After church on Sunday, Mary and I took off for our kid-free trip to the awesome 'Art in the Park/Village Craft Market' at Summer Celebration in Muskegon. And yes, I spent money that we don't have on the absolutely coolest hair gizmo I've ever owned. Your basic 'butterfly' style clasp, hand worked in bronze and it holds my thick hair better than anything else I've ever tried. And it's beautiful too. We walked around the new WalMart in Muskegon afterward and I was absolutely amazed and disgusted by how much less groceries are there than we're paying at Meijer in Grand Rapids. Yes, I know - it's WalMart. And as a (former) city planner, I hate it with a passion. But as a frantic mom with little money to spend, I have to admit that I shop there. And would buy groceries there too if there was a darn supercenter in Grand Rapids! I spent $27 on Sunday at WalMart and I estimate that the same exact items would've cost me at least $10 more here . I wonder if it would be worth the gas to drive to Muskegon or Holland to grocery shop. Probably not - besides we have a hard time finding time to shop at the Meijer down the street much less driving 20-30 miles away.

So, yesterday we had our friend Kristi's son Noah's 5th birthday party. As a lucky mom of a child with a summer birthday (he turns 5 tomorrow on July 4th actually), she has done pool parties most years but this year did his party at Frog Hollow Park which is a local park that we've actually never been to before. The kids had a blast. And although I had to chase Becca part of the time (she inevitably heads to the tallest ladder/platform she can find), there were a lot of things she could safely play on as well. Other than the horrendously loud whistles in the goody bags it was a good time. And wore the kids out very well. Today, Mary and I actually enjoyed a quiet morning relaxing with just Becca upstairs as all 4 of the older kids played downstairs in the basement - without fighting once. I am absolutely flabbergasted. Usually Mary's kids are the culprits - but on this visit mine were the instigators in most cases. Abby spent yesterday whining and bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. Hannah has gotten time-outs for let's see - spitting at her sister, hitting her sister, not taking turns with her sister, shoving her sister, need I go on? I think my kids need a break from each other. Or school. Or both, as they'll get this fall. If we survive that long anyway.

So I'm heading to bed for some much-needed sleep. Good-night and happy July 4th!