Blogging Before Bachelor

Blogging Before Bachelor. Isn't that great alliteration to add to my Mopping Monday? My rule is that I must blog before watching The Bachelor on Mondays. I've already mopped and even cleaned some of the grout in between my kitchen tiles. I always thought I had dark grey grout until one day I moved a piece of furniture from an area in my kitchen and noticed the grout didn't match the rest of the kitchen.  It was much brighter and prettier. Then I realized some soap and a toothbrush might serve as a simple makeover for my kitchen. That was a few years ago, and it needs it again. My kitchen has kind of a lot of tile, so I just do a section every Monday. I should be done in about two more Mondays.

Rachel is our quiet child. After three years of close observation of her five older siblings, she's beginning to come out of her shell. Here is a video from this weekend where she is practicing for American Idol auditions. She is accompanied by Emily. The lyrics are written by Rachel. I think if she works on her pitch, she might just make it to Hollywood in about 12 years for season 23:




She calls her microphone her "show". In this video you can watch her fireman brother, Jason, take it away from her. Rachel does NOT like anybody stealing her show!




Ok, so I blogged, but now it's 11:30 PM. I wonder if I will still watch The Bachelor. Probably.

One more thought...

I'm sick.  I knew there was no avoiding it when I have three sick children walking around with snot dripping out of their noses, coughing, and sneezing.

Just an addendum to yesterdays post....I enjoyed your comments.  Thanks :)  I know I will get over my frustration. Sarah was supposed to be born on the 3rd so her birthday could've been 02-03-04, and because Emily's is on the 5th, Bradley's on the 4th, so it only would've made sense for her to continue the reverse numerical order. But, she was born on the 1st and ruined my pattern.  Wendy was supposed to be born on the 2nd to help fill in my single digit birthdays, but she was born on the 1st.  Jason was the one to wreck my single digit pattern by being born on the 10th (seriously, Jason, you couldn't have come 13 hours earlier?) Rachel was almost born on the 1st, then I would've had 3 girls born on a 1st of the month. I had contractions on New Years day, went to the hospital, but they sent me home six hours later. If I had been 2 more days pregnant, they would've induced me. I survived all those disappointments. I'm not quite sure what my obsession with numbers is.

Actually, it's not just numbers, it's letters too, but I won't go into that right now, except have you noticed that all of our children's names begin with a different letter?  Now, that one is easier to control and we don't have an "O" yet. The first six children's middle names also have a double letter in them (ee, Aa, ll, cc, tt, nn) except for George Arthur, but there are two r's, just not together.  I felt like such a rebel breaking the pattern. I hope George realizes when he gets older, how special he is.

I'm going to bed now and get some sleep and hopefully get over this cold!

I think this is a good day for a random-draw-out of-a-My Pictures Folder photo kind of day.  And the winner is.....

Santa came!

Ok, that one was kind of boring.  Here's another not so random one:

I posted this picture because I thought this was one of the coolest gifts ever from Santa.  My kids weren't as impressed or excited about it as I was.  They are smart enough to know you can make much larger cakes in a real oven, and when you use the real oven, you get to eat a much larger piece of cake.  They also know they are guaranteed at least one piece of cake nine out of the twelve months of the year.  We'll have to break out the Easy Bake in August and September.

Chocolate Chip Fertility

**I apologize for any inappropriateness in this post.  Sometimes I have a difficult time knowing when to draw the line. I'm sure my father or husband will tell me if I've crossed the line. It's really not that bad.  Keep reading...**

I got my period today. I know it's not all that newsworthy. It's my sixth period since George was born almost nine months ago.  So if you quickly do the math I am a lucky woman to have the opportunity to get my period when my baby is 3 months old and I'm still nursing. There's no sarcasm intended because, seriously, it's all the sooner I can get pregnant. Right?

I'm ready for #8 (we'll hypothetically call him Octavius) because prime numbers make me uncomfortable. Also, 7 kids messes up the whole even distribution of things. Most packages of stuff come in quantities of six, eight, or a dozen. It just doesn't work for seven.

I was kind of hoping to get pregnant in December so that I could be due in late August or early September. I haven't had a child born in either of those months yet. Well, it didn't happen because my cycle was super short in December (I think most likely due to Christmas stress) so even if there was conception, there was very little time for implantation. So we tried again in January to shoot for a late September birthday. However, my husband was out of town for a week, so I wasn't really expecting to get pregnant. I was cool with that because I've tried not getting pregnant before and then Sarah came along, which reminded me that I'm not entirely in control of the whole situation. But I'm so glad she did come along because Sarah, our petite little girl, has the best belly laugh ever and adds a lot of joy to our family.

Anyway, so when I hit day 28 of my cycle last week and I didn't have my period yet, I thought I might be pregnant.  I took a few tests and they were all negative. When day 33 hit, I was a little confused and worried about why my period hadn't started. I thought for sure I must have a tumor in my fallopian tube blocking my eggs. I was relieved to see my period this morning, but then sad that I missed my opportunity for my August or September baby. Now, if I get pregnant this month it will be due around November 2, and since I have always come at least 2 days early, I run the risk of having a baby on Halloween. Eww. Although, it would be pretty cool to go to the hospital with a jack-o-lantern painted on my belly and then see what it looked like after giving birth. (Also Jason owns October for his birthday month.)

If I don't get pregnant this month, but next month, then I will be due right around Thanksgiving time....and Black Friday. (Also, Bradley owns November.)

If I get pregnant in 3 months, my due date will be around Christmastime, which wouldn't be all bad because I don't have a December baby. I would just have to plan ahead a whole lot for Christmas and promise Octavius presents on his half birthdays. But if Octavius isn't born in December, we are back to January and our family already has a January, February, March, April, May, June, and July birthday.

Can you understand my sadness?  No?  Please kick me in the butt and tell me to get over it because I know it's very ridiculous and a little control freakey.  It's bothering me that it's bothering me. As of now, I'm going to shoot for October because it would be kind of awesome if my Octakid was born in October.  Maybe he'll even be a few weeks early and born on the 8th. That would be cool.

But if seven is all we have, I'd be cool with that because I would say we ended on a good note.  I love my George!

So as I sat here pondering what other random picture would be appropriate to post for today's post, my husband came walking into the room to offer me some chocolate. Not even knowing the topic of my post, he ironically handed me this:

I know. Inappropriate. But I think the chocolate chip fertility gods are on my side. It's been orally ingested and we'll wait for the results next month.

Loser or not a Loser?

Either I'm a loser for not being a good blogger or I'm a not a loser for not being a good blogger. The fact that I haven't blogged in four days means I have a life and I'm a little on the busy side. Right? So the fact that I have a life means that I'm not a loser. Right?

Tonight as I was cleaning up the kitchen I told myself that I had to at least blog something before I sit down and watch The Bachelor. Wait....did I say I have life? Ok, maybe that's not true. Either way, I'm ok with it because I got two new Blog Followers in the past week and that makes me happy because my self-esteem is totally based on how many Blog Followers I have.

So Saturday was Rachel's third birthday. Her birthday is a difficult one to remember for some reason.  I think it's the post holiday laziness that causes it, or it's the fact that her birthday has double digits.  Five of my kids have single digit birthdays. Jason's is on October 10th which is easy to remember because his birthday is 10-10. Twenty-two is just kind of difficult to remember. My husband's parents called on the 20th to wish her a happy birthday. My grandmother called on the 21st to wish her a happy birthday. Fortunately we remembered it correctly. I think it helped that her birthday fell on a Saturday.  Maybe in the future we'll just celebrate her birthday on the twenty somethingeth Saturday that's closest to her birthday.

Here are some pictures. Hopefully Rachel will start being a little more conversational now that she is three. My mom told me often that I didn't talk until I was three, and Einstein didn't talk until he was three. It totally proves that I'm a genius.

Every child always gets a birthday "crown" from Emily.

 Her crown kept falling off when she tilted her head and she attempted to open her present with one hand.

 She gave up on trying to keep the crown on.

This year's birthday cake theme is the child's initial in M&Ms.

I blogged.  Yay! Time for The Bachelor!

Crash! Take Two.

Back in November 2006 I went to my six week OBGYN appointment after giving birth to Jason. It was the week of Thanksgiving and snow actually fell from the sky that day, a rare event. The block we live on in our neighborhood has an alleyway that about 15 houses share. It's a quaint little feature in our part of the neighborhood. At the time we didn't have an official driveway and we parked our van parallel to the alleyway in our yard on the grass/mud. As I returned home from my appointment, I made a right hand turn into the narrow alley to find a car was coming the opposite way in the alley. So I pulled into our makeshift muddy driveway to make room for the oncoming car.  However, I poorly assessed the situation, pulled over a little too soon, and in the process I sideswiped a tree in our yard. At first I didn't think there was any damage, and that the awful noise I heard as I scraped the tree was just the tree branches scraping the van windows. But when I got out of the van, I could see I dented the side door and scraped some paint.  Gasp! I was super mad at myself. Our car was only 18 months old, and it made me sad. I mourned for about a day. I wanted to blame it on the unusual snow that was falling that day, but it had nothing to do with the snow. I apologized to my husband and he was very kind and just laughed at me, and he's teased me about it for the past four years.

That following year we had some neighbors complain about our muddy parking spot, and we received a letter from our homeowners association requiring us to install a drive way, or else....... We never found out what the the "or else" was because we gave into the peer pressure and obediently complied and installed a pretty new driveway to replace the eye sore of grass/mud. It was something we knew we needed to do, but we never wanted to spend $2500 for a slab of cement in our yard. I was hoping for a new computer. We ended up placing the driveway parallel to the alley exactly how we had been parking on our grass/mud, so we could pull our van into the spot easily and not have to worry about backing it out and hitting somebody, especially one of our children.

Also since that incident, my dad was kind enough to help us pound out the dent and avoid having to pay what would probably be $750 each for new side doors. (The last place I want to spend my money is on my car. Remember, I wanted a new computer.) Of course there was still evidence of reckless driving on the side of our van, but it definitely looked better.

Are you wondering where I am going with this story? Probably not if you've read the title of this post and peeked at today's picture...

So on Sunday night my husband took the kids (minus Emily because she wasn't feeling well) on a small churchy errand.  Emily and I were on the couch when we heard a strange noise outside  It sounded kind of like a collision, but it didn't sound like two cars, just something smashing or falling. I couldn't quite figure it out. I looked out the window and saw nothing. Coincidentally my husband came home with the kids at the same time. He walked in the house with a grimace on his face. That was when I realized the strange noise we heard right before he came in the door was not a coincidence. He said, "I ran into the fence."

It turns out the same thing happened to my husband that happened to me four years ago (which actually made me feel better about my accident.) There was a car coming out of the alley as he was pulling into it. He pulled over to let the car pass, but unfortunately pulled over a little too early. Since the tree I hit was removed when we installed the driveway, the only thing left to hit was the end fence post which left a nice white latex paint mark along the side of the van....and a dent.  However, my husband didn't really dent the van door, he just kind of re-dented it, and it looks just like it did four years ago, except with white fence paint this time.

 The Re-Dent.  I had a little deja vu when I saw this.

As you can see my husband didn't actually scratch the van paint, he just scraped the paint off the fence. It should come off with some Goo Gone. And I will need my dad to come back and help me pound out the dent again. In this picture I have pointed out my bads, where I actually scratched the paint off the car.

Where the fence used to be.  

As you can see, my husband was making a right turn into the alley and pulled over a little too far and the fence went crunch.

Now the fence is sitting against our garage. You can't even notice it's missing from the street. I don't think we'll even need to repair it. We'll just paint the edges of the section of fence it broke off from.  

I laugh about it today. It's just a car and a fence. I mean, we installed the driveway parallel to the alley so we wouldn't back over any people. A missing fence post and section of fence is no big deal. I'm just really glad I never got the van doors fixed! Seriously, why don't they just make cars out of rubber? Or why don't we drive around giant bumper cars? Wouldn't that make sense?

And it doesn't feel right ending a post without a picture of a kid:

This is Jason on Christmas Day chewing his Hubba Bubba.
Notice the scar between his eyes.  That was accidentally my fault too :(
Picture Here
Story Here 

Random

One of my New Years resolutions was to blog at least 4 times per week.  I think I'm going to break that resolution this week.  It's too bad, but that's the way it goes.  Sadness.

Here's a little recap of the past 3 days.  Perhaps this will help to make up for the lack of promised posts?:

Wednesday - I asked my husband to take the trash out at midnight so I wouldn't have to panic in the morning when I heard the trash truck in the neighborhood.  He didn't seem too happy about it.  It's a man's job though, right?  I'm anti-feminism.

Thursday - Brought some dinner over to my next door neighbor, whose been kind of sick.  My husband and Emily were gone, so I sneaked out while the other kids were cleaning up.  I didn't want to announce that I was going because I was certain there would be several cries of "I want to go!!!"  It was cold and I didn't feel like dealing with it.  I ended up talking to my neighbor longer than I expected, and when I returned home Bradley was crying because he couldn't find me.  He said he checked every room and shouted for me outside.  It made me feel good that he was crying.  I felt loved.

Friday - Um.  I have nothing.  Our babysitter cancelled because she's sick, and I'm in my pajamas because Rachel was sitting on my lap and forgot she didn't have on a diaper, and well you can guess the rest.  So it's Pajama Date Night.  For me at least.

And now since a blog post is only interesting as long as it has a picture, here is a random Christmas photo for the day.
(I'm going to randomly pick one without looking at its thumbnail. Drumroll please.)

Aw, it's a good one.  George got formula in his stocking.  Target brand.  The other kids predicted that he would.  They said, "The baby always gets formula in its stocking."  Santa delivered.  If you click on the photo, you can see George's M&M drool too.

I still need to document the rest of Christmas.  I just don't have the patience tonight.

Homemade Gifts

We have a tradition in our family where the kids draw names and make each other gifts for Christmas. They love making them and they love receiving them.  They can only spend $5 or less for materials.  This is what we came up with this year. These were the first gifts they opened on Christmas Eve.

George was a little lazy this year.  He gave Emily some crochet hooks and yarn and said, "Make your own gift." (This one cost a little more than $5.)

Bradley got a Chinese Chess game from Wendy. Daddy helped with this one.

Sarah got a solitaire "Cracker Barrel" peg game from Bradley. Daddy helped with this one too.

Wendy got a golf tee Tic Tac Toe game from Jason. Daddy helped with this one as well.

Jason got a scripture case with his name in silver glitter letters from Rachel.  I helped on this one.  I just used David's old scripture case that wasn't being used.

 Rachel got a beaded necklace and bracelet from Emily.  The beads were a birthday gift for Emily and she was so pleased to put them to use.  I wish I had a better picture of it.

George got a ribbon pacifier holder from Sarah. I helped with this one.  I wasn't sure what we were going to use for the clip, but one day we were in a parking lot and there was the perfect clip on the ground as a stepped out of the car.  It's the kind that are usually on name badges.  I cleaned it, and it was perfect.

I feel famous

Don't celebrities get gifts and stuff from fans?  Well, today I received a gift from a blog fan. Ok, so she not a total random fan.  I have met Mary in person one time on my stop in Denver in September.  Her daughter is Beth, my blog friend with seven kids. Mary has nine grandkids of her own.  What's another seven kids to sew some art aprons for?  The kids loved them.  My plan was to take the kids' pictures by the easel so it appeared as if they were doing art, but I couldn't find a single paint brush in my house (which tells you how much we paint in this house).  So they are just standing by it:

Cow print for Bradley 

 Purple lace for Emily

Princess Jasmine for Sarah

 Sleeping Beauty for Wendy


Woody for Jason

She's folding her hands in front of her and you can't see it, but Rachel has Lady (from Lady and the Tramp) on hers.

Group Shot

Thanks, Mary!

Emily and Bradley are starting an art class on Friday.  I can teach math, I can teach reading, but I cannot teach art.  It's not one of my talents, at least the drawing and painting kind of art are not my talents.  I think I might be developing a talent for the art of photography though.  It's all about the timing:

One of the reasons I enrolled Emily in an art class is so she can expand beyond cutting out pictures from a coloring book and gluing them to a piece of paper.  Hopefully at the end of class she will be able to draw her own Star Trek characters in love:

(And now I'm wondering, why in the world do we even have a Star Trek coloring book?)

Christmas Eve Eve

 Hot Chocolate!

Wendy was begging me for hot chocolate all week.  She was so happy to finally get some.

Baking cookies and making chocolate covered goodies. 

 Daddy attempted to watch Rudolph with the kids.

Making dip for our Christmas Eve feast.

Jason scrounging for any chocolate scraps he could find.

Back to Blogging

I felt a little sick to my stomach when I logged into my Blogger account and saw that my last post was December 4th!!  My apologies.  I'm back with a New Years Resolution to blog at least 4 times a week. My dad and sister were in town for the past two weeks, there were six excited children running  around (+ one crawling), and finding time to blog was a little difficult.  I am still alive.  Here is a review of the past month or so:

December 5

Daddy baking cookies before the First Presidency Devotional.

December 6

Sarah playing with a tree skirt.

December 7 

George's first Christmas. (7 months old)

December 11 

 Wendy working on her homemade present for Bradley. 

(Another post will be devoted to the homemade gifts.)

I finally bought some plastic hooks to hang the stockings by the chimney with care.  

I got that Merry Christmas sign on Target clearance last year after Christmas.  There was no price tag on it and the cashier asked me how much I wanted to pay for it.  I said, "One dollar." So she gave it to me for $1.  What a bargain!

December 13

We tagged along with Daddy on a business trip to Virginia where there was snow!  It was very exciting. 

December 14

We stayed at a Residence Inn where our room had a full kitchen.  Our first day there we baked gingerbread snowmen.  I was very excited to have a room with a fireplace because our fireplace at home isn't hooked up to the propane tank.  Unfortunately when we used the hotel fireplace it made the room 80 degrees and we had to turn on the AC.

December 15

I addressed my Christmas cards and mailed them.

 December 16

We baked some Pillsbury Funfetti sugar cookies and frosted them. 

We played in the snow without boots or gloves.

December  17

More playing in the snow.  Jason refused to wear his jacket and cried the entire time because he was cold.

David and I attended his company Christmas party.  Daddy crashed with George when we got back to the hotel.  Shhh.  Don't tell my husband I posted this picture.

December 18

 We drove home on Saturday and my dad and sister had already arrived at our house.  We put the kids to bed and I found Jason like this when I checked on them before putting myself to bed.

December 20

Family Home Evening Family Photo with my dad and sister.  

December 21 

Baking cookies.

Cutting cookies.

Visiting Santa at the Festival of Lights.

December 22 

More baking cookies.

More to come......  

Thanks for sticking with me and forgiving me for not blogging for almost and entire month!