The Incredible Shrinking Family

Over a period of 2 months this summer (literally, Bayley left June 26th and Erin, August 26th), we went from 12 people living in the house to just eight.  And yes I really do mean 'just' eight, because our household seems profoundly.... smaller.

June 26th on our way to deliver Bayley to the airport

July 2nd 5:30 am (which hopefully explains some of the outfits) at the airport to see Kegan off.

July 3rd, preparing to take Rhys to the airport.

August 26th, seeing Erin off to Idaho.

Just like when they each came into our home as babies, and each one made a huge impact and difference (don't believe anyone who says 'you don't notice another one after three,' a statement that was very clearly first made by someone who never had more than 3 children, because believe me, you notice every single one of them.... even when they come in pairs), we have been deeply affected by the departure and subsequent absence of each in our daily lives.  It is an interesting combination of emotions.  On the one hand we miss them each so deeply that it can be a physical pain, but on the other, we are extremely proud of the people each of them have become and of what each of them is doing now.  So, while we may miss them terribly, we wouldn't wish things to be other than they are.  When they were little and we were wrapped up in the daily work of rearing and teaching and feeding and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning ( and hopefully playing and playing and playing), I don't think we thought too hard about it, but weren't we putting in all this work with this future in mind?  A future where they could confidently drive or fly all alone across the country (or out of it), where they could do their own laundry and clean up their own messes and prepare their own food and just.... function in the world without us.  Isn't it our job as parents to turn our children into responsible people who don't really need us anymore?  And it really is great to see them grown and independent, but I miss the little kids who followed me into the bathroom and sat on the floor and waited while I showered too (and kindly handed me a towel when I was finished).

Our little group of eight is adjusting though.  We all fit in a much smaller vehicle (that admittedly lacks a DVD player and television).  We only need two pews at church.  If we order six pizzas, there are actually leftovers and six gallons of milk will get us through a week. Sunday afternoon has become designated letter-writing time, and Monday evenings we are all very anxious to get together to read the emails from our missionaries (and Fionn hardly ever bursts into tears anymore when we do---really, she did the first several times). Studying Spanish has become way more important than it ever previously was in our homeschool, and yes, that is at least partially because the younger siblings are all seriously concerned that nerf gun battles with Kegan and Rhys upon their return will just be that much more difficult if the returned missionaries can openly converse strategy in a tongue no one else can understand.  My cell phone is stolen on a regular basis by a little sibling who wants to send Erin a picture of something they made or leave her a bizarre voicemail or who just wants to text her good morning.

And some things haven't really changed too much  at all.   The tell tale sound of someone pawing through a huge tub of lego is still likely to be heard anytime of day (or night).  People still doodle on every available scrap of  paper (or styrofoam plate, or plastic cup...._).  The stereo still occasionally plays music from Zelda. And an  FHE game of charades is every bit as hilarious as ever. Seriously, if you haven't seen Noah act out a zombie unicorn from outer space eating bacon (Noah's bacon), you are really missing out.  

Our little family this morning.

"We Didn't Do It"

We traveled to Utah this week for a cousin's wedding.  Where we discovered that while Colorado seems to be experiencing a cooler summer than usual, Utah is decidedly not.  And also that Utah has way more doughnut places than Colorado.  At least our part of Colorado.  Why are there more doughnut places everywhere we go than at home?  And that Fionn truly believes that thinking about chocolate will help a person get to sleep.  Because "If I think of chocolate then I think of eating it and it is so good that I just faint."

On our first morning at the hotel, Kris and I decided to go on a walk while the kids went down to breakfast. Except most of the kids were not even conscious at this point, just Liam and Fionn.  So we sent them to their older siblings' hotel room, shook a couple of said older siblings awake and went merrily on our way. Shortly after leaving the hotel I received a fairly cryptic text message from Amik that said "We did not do it." Honestly, Amik doesn't like to waste a lot of words especially when texting and so his messages are frequently somewhat cryptic, I think I asked him what he hadn't done, put the phone back in my pocket and continued on my way.  We were already on our way back to the hotel when I looked at my phone again and saw Amik's response "I think someone pulled the fire alarm."  Only then did it register that we had been listening to emergency sirens for the past 20 minutes or so.

Amik's need to assure us of his innocence probably stems from an incident when he was 4 or 5 and most assuredly did do it.  We were playing in the gym of Kris's middle school on a snowy weekend when suddenly the school fire alarm began to blare throughout the empty-but-for-us building,  accompanied by blinding strobe lights.  Amik freely admitted at that time to being the culprit, explaining with a shrug of his shoulders that he "just wanted to see what would happen."  Well, what would happen is that his younger siblings would cry hysterically and run to their parents in fear, while his older siblings would all cover their ears and cringe at the deafening noise and his father would make a desperate dash across the school to dig through his secretary's desk in search of the number to call and cancel the alarm before a fire truck really did show up.  Probably, all in all, a way better show than Amik ever expected.  He, by the way, was the only one who remained completely calm, quietly observing the results of his little experiment.

Back to Utah and the much more recent past: we arrived back at the hotel to find several police cars and fire trucks out front, but inside everyone seemed to be going ahead  with their free breakfast, no longer particularly concerned by the firemen in their midst.  The only sign of Fionn's certain initial panic was that she was still clutching her lion buddy with her at  breakfast, whether for her protection or his I am not sure.     Apparently what happened was a sprinkler head in the ceiling one of the rooms broke.  How exactly this occurred depends on who you ask, but whatever transpired in room 309 before the sprinkler head became detached from the wall, what occurred after was a torrent of water and fire repellent gushing from the front door of the room, into the hallway, adjoining rooms, and pouring through walls and ceilings to the two floors below, accompanied by the the earsplitting screech of the fire alarm... at approximately 7:30 am, BTW.  Erin, directed her siblings to grab their shoes, but Fionnula stood in the center of the room crying that her shoes and in fact everything she owned, including her lion, were in the other room (ours), before Erin really needed to address this issue though the hotel staff had determined the issue and shut down the alarm.

That night Fionn was careful to pack up all her things and place them conveniently near the door in case she needed to evacuate for any reason and for the rest of our stay, there were industrial fans blowing through the hallways, which could be loud, but which also helped to relieve some of the ridiculous Utah heat... and made you feel a little like a movie star when you walked through the gauntlet of them with your hair blowing back.

Homeschooling is Scary

I wasn't homeschooled. Kris wasn't homeschooled. I was vaguely aware of one family as a kid who did homeschool.  I thought they were weird.  Then I read a book when my girls were tiny that said I didn't have to send my babies away  as soon as they turned 5.  And that seemed like a great plan to me.  I didn't want to send them anywhere.  I liked them home with me.  So when Erin turned 5 we didn't send her to school.  And we started to teach them at home to read and to add.  We read about penguins and fireworks and elephants and Australia, and it was a lot of fun.  We made play dough and watched movies and danced a lot and played weird imaginary games.  We drew a lot of pictures and went sledding in the backyard.  But despite all the fun I was having and the sheer joy I experienced in just having my kids around me, there were frequently these little nagging thoughts creeping in...was I messing them up forever?  Would they ever be able to function in society?  Could I teach Algebra?  Chemistry?  What if they wanted to know how to build a robot? What if the neighbors called the police?  What if they really did score below the 13th percentile? What if they lived in my basement forever?  How would they get into college?  Was I messing them up forever?

Last week I took Aislin to the college to take the accuplacer.  If she could prove by means of this one test on a computer that she was 'college-ready', she could register for classes at the college in the Fall.  I told Aislin not to worry.  Just be calm.  Do her best.  It wasn't that important.  If you don't pass the first time, then at least you know what the test is like now and you go home and study and come back to take it again later. No big deal.  Start classes this Fall or start classes next Fall.  There isn't really a required timeline for these things.  And I really believed everything I told her.  Except that, no matter what you tell someone, they will never really believe that it is ok to not pass a test.  No it is devastating.  So I sat in the little room outside the testing room and watched her take the test and was so nervous.  Because what if I had failed her?  What if my homeschooling had not prepared her for this day?  She wanted to take art at the college THIS fall.  Not next Fall.  And if she couldn't, it would be All. Our. Fault.  No one to blame but us, we made sure of that when we decided yeas ago to buck the system and do this all on our own.  We accepted then all the responsibility.

Homeschooling has been one big, long, complicated... experiment for us.  We have tried various things.  we have stuck with some, we have trashed others.  Sometimes we have done it one way for a long long time. Sometimes we have thrown out one idea before it has even had the chance to become a habit.  We don't have a lot of very concrete examples around us that we can turn to and say..look, now THAT obviously works.  What we do have is a very strong belief that this is the right thing for our family.  And by 'this' I mean learning at home together.  I don't mean Saxon math or Apologia science or The Story of the World.  And I don't mean classical education or unschooling or Charlotte Mason.   And that belief is what keeps us going when we are sure that we really are messing them up for life.  That belief is what keeps us going when it seems like everything is against us.  That belief is what keeps us going when nothing seems to be working. When we wonder if one child will ever learn to read or if another will ever write a coherent sentence...  or a legible one. When someone cries day after day over a math lesson.  When we wonder if it really matters if they know this or if they know that or if they have to learn this before they can learn that.  That belief is what keeps us going when we worry that they will grow up to be TOO different from everyone else.  Sometimes we just close our eyes and move forward with the faith that our children belong home with us and with one another and the rest will fall into place.

Aislin passed that test.  She will be taking Drawing 1 and Western Civ at the college this Fall.  She will continue to work on math and writing at home.  She will attend her second year of seminary.  She will work part time.  She will blog when she feels like it. She will doodle on every available scrap of paper in the house. And probably keep trying to figure out how to fix the photo at the top of my blog.  She will cook dinner sometimes and breakfast a lot and cookies even more often.  Best of all, she will still be home with me a lot.  She will still play with her little brothers and sisters and occasionally stay up way to late watching movies or playing games with her not so little brothers and sisters.  And I can breathe a small sigh of relief, because for right now, this homeschooling thing really does seem to be working.  And, so far, no one is messed up for life.

Happy Birthday Kegan and Rhys!

Well, I haven't been on here for a super long time because things got really busy here in May with graduations and farewells and buying zillions of white shirts and black socks and then in the last two weeks we put our 3 missionaries each on separate planes and sent them away.  The whole process has been exhausting, and someday I may write all about it,but that's not today.  If you do want to keep up with the missionaries you can here: http://enrightmissionaries.blogspot.com/ though.

Today I just want to commemorate Kegan and Rhys' birthday with some of my favorite pictures from over the last year.  They are cell phone pics, so forgive the quality, but so worth keeping I think.  

Happy Birthday, my boys!  See you in two years!

Thoughts on Moving...and Moving and Moving

The thing about moving every other year or so, at least for me, is it forced me to clean up and throw out and organize.  This week the kids and I have been cleaning and organizing bedrooms, and I can tell from the accumulation of stuff that we have been in one place for a loooong time.

I fact, we have lived in this house for over six years.  And no I don't have proper curtains on all the windows.  Don't ask. We have never lived in any other house this long.   Fionn and Liam can't remember ever living anywhere else, while their oldest siblings remember 8 separate homes and the accompanying moves.  Sometimes the younger kids feel a certain jealousy about the perceived adventure of a move (an adventure the oldest tell us we should hold off on for a few more years to spare them the experience of EVER helping to move the piano again--let alone the boxes and boxes and boxes of books).

 Our first house we moved into before we had any children.  The kitchen was wallpapered with a big brown and butterscotch colored plaid.  Lovely.  The bathroom wallpaper looked like tin foil. Even better. The previous owner luckily had moved his extensive beer can collection with him, though he left behind the 2x4s he had installed all over a basement wall to display them....and an antique piece of oak furniture which Kris restored and we actually still have.

 When we moved again we had five children, and inexplicably decided to move within town, mostly to get a bigger house I guess.  Or a different neighborhood?  New ward?  I don't know, and though we loved our house (in the end), looking back we still cringe at the financially stupid (sooooo stupid) move this was.  At the time though, we blissfully signed the papers and moved our little family in.... and spent our first night sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor under windows that we couldn't fully shut against the October cold because the Virginia Creeper, that looked so picturesque in its fall colors against the brick on the outside of the house was nothing but, well, creepy where it had grown through the bedroom windows to the inside of the house.

On one move, my kids inexplicably all had Gatorade type drinks as part of their travel snacks .  Not sure whose brilliant idea that was.  But sports drinks make you have to pee something furious....I typically try to keep everyone a little on the dehydrated side when we travel and for good reason.  Pretty sure we visited way more gas station bathrooms on that trip than I am actually comfortable with.

Once we moved into a not-quite-finished modular home.  Everything seemed good until we realized that the doorway into the laundry room was too small for our washer and dryer to fit through.  And the door that opened to the outside from the laundry room was a good 8 feet off the ground, with no stairs yet built.  To the rescue? People in our branch who owned an auto shop.  They lifted our appliances up to the back door with whatever marvelous crane-type thingy they use to lift engines out of cars.  Genius.

Same modular home.  Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. We were a family of ten with all the furniture and stuff a family of that size would be expected to have.  By the time we had finished unloading the truck, we literally had a narrow passageway to walk from the bedrooms on one end of the house to the kitchen and bedroom on the other end through the stacked boxes and furniture that filled all available space in living, dining, and family rooms.

We were preparing to move out of Eastern Colorado, as in had already loaded all our worldly possessions into a moving van that was parked out front and were ready to spend the night in sleeping bags on the bare living room floor, when the town's tornado siren went off.  So we spent our last night huddled in the basement with a radio and a few very terrified children who mostly just wanted to move to the mountains already where tornadoes were not much of a threat.

We have moved in a snowstorm.  We have had our car breakdown on a move.  We have moved into our new home and found the furnace so inadequate that we had to borrow heaters and all sleep in one room.  We moved once when I was into my ninth month of pregnancy.  We have moved with children puking into buckets on the way.  One move dragged on for months and we lived amid our boxed up things waiting and waiting and waiting for our new home to be ready.  So, yeah, adventures in moving...poor Liam and Fionn are so deprived!

Liam Had a Birthday

Last week, Liam had a birthday.  I can tell my kids are getting big by the food they choose for birthday meals. Liam's birthday dinner was chicken cordon bleu and his dessert a trifle. See?  I don't think I have anyone left who will let me off with a request for pigs in a blanket and potato chips anymore.  Okay, I don't think anyone has ever requested potato chips actually.

Anyway, Liam is 10 now!  Double digits.  Except, if you ask his siblings, I would be willing to bet that several of them would at first tell you that he is 5.  Really, that is the age that Liam is stuck at for many of us, and our automatic response to "How old is Liam?" is frequently "Five!"  I suspect that the reason for the confusion may stem from the fact that Liam was five longer than he was any other age.  In fact he was five for about.....4 years.  Really.  Okay, not really.   But he sure thought he was.  See, when Ronan turned five, Liam was so impressed by it that he decided to be five too.  So from about the age of 2 1/2, Liam told everyone who asked, and sometimes those who didn't, that he was five years old.  And we learned that a lot of people are fairly clueless about what an average five year old (or two year old for that matter) looks and acts like, because an awful lot of people took his word for it.  The only remnant of that stage of Liam's life,  besides our tendency to sometimes still think he is five, is his 'buddy,' an African Wild Dog named....you guessed it 'Five.'  I don't know, it was a special number to him.

Random Liam stories...

Once, Kris bought a fully cooked pot roast at a school fundraiser.  He brought it home after work, all wrapped in foil and resting in a disposable foil pan.  Apparently I said something like "Let's get this puppy in the oven."  I was later alerted by some older siblings to a serious conversation going on between Ronan (who really was five) and Liam (who really wanted to be five) in their bedroom.  They were very seriously debating whether or not Daddy had actually brought home a puppy for dinner .  And whether or not I had willingly put said puppy in the oven.  And whether or not they would be expected to actually eat the puppy.  Oops.

Liam likes to pick flowers for me.  On a walk one day (he was probably three, but he thought he was five), he was picking lots of wildflowers and I told him he better leave a few to drop seeds to make next year's flowers and he told me very matter of factly that seeds don't make flowers, Jesus makes the flowers and He makes them because girls like them.

Last month Kris and I took Liam, Fionn, Ronan and Noah to show them a footbridge that goes over I 25.  We stood on the bridge watching the traffic pass beneath our feet (If you have never done this, by the way, you are missing out on some serious fun in life.  I used to do this in LA when I was a kid.)  The kids started to wave at the passing cars and trucks.  Nearly everyone waved backed, many truckers honked, one person waved out his sunroof.  Eventually though we  had to go. When I told Liam it was time to go though, he loudly lamented: "But everybody LOVES me!" And then proceeded to wave a big, grandiose goodbye and blow kisses to his adoring fans below on the highway!

And a photo gallery, cause he is too cute for only one:

Being Seven

This is our baby.  She turned seven the end of last year, in fact this picture was taken on her birthday.  At the zoo, which is where Fionn typically prefers to spend her birthdays.  I realize that at seven she doesn't really qualify as a baby anymore.  But she is still our baby.  Anyway, some things Fionn has accomplished since turning seven:

She reads.  Really reads.  Like on her own, picks up a book and reads it because she wants to, not because someone told her to read it.  Yes, in this picture she is reading a comic book.  Baby Blues I believe.  You can probably tell that it is a very tattered and well worn copy too, so you might be able to surmise from that that I am totally okay with my kids reading comic books.  And you would be right.  One morning I came home after driving some older sibling somewhere and found Fionnula perched on the back of a living room chair contentedly reading all by herself because she wanted to. 

She earned a 'Green Band' at the YMCA.  Which basically means that the Y recognizes her as someone who can swim and thus is allowed anywhere in the pools without a parent hovering close by.  Funny thing about that green band, Fionnula has been in a pool on a very regular basis since she was about 18 months old.  And she has been a pretty confident swimmer now for probably 2 years.  But she was not at all interested in taking any  test  to prove her swimming ability to anyone else.  She was perfectly content to swim around in the area of the pool designated for the 'Red Bands.'  Until suddenly, she wasn't okay with it anymore and one afternoon while we were at the pool announced her intention of taking the test.  Kris ran her through it once, she asked the lifeguard to test her, and she did it. 

And this last week, Fionn learned to ride a bike.  Our kids don't ride bikes when they are tiny.  So she had never been on just two wheels until Friday when she and Kris headed to the park where she learned the basics.  And then Saturday she actually went on a bike ride with her parents and some brothers.  We went again today.  That isn't to say that there aren't some scary moments, like Saturday when Kris nearly leaped from his own bike to ensure that she actually did come to a stop rather than exiting the church parking lot at full speed right onto a busy street (but he didn't have to actually make that leap, because she did manage a screeching stop after all), or today when she suddenly careened off the bike path and down a relatively steep embankment full of cacti and yucca (she did eventually crash, disentangled herself from the bike, informed us she was okay and that she would need some help getting her bike back up on the path).

Also, she added to her collection of Disney Princesses that inhabit her bed.  Okay, so maybe this accomplishment may not seem to be of the same caliber as some of the previous ones, but it is equally important to her.  Plus, I like the picture, aren't they cute?  And anyway, she saved all her money to buy herself something awesome at Disney World and she picked out that Belle doll on day 2 there I think, stuck with that decision for the next several days of our trip and very proudly purchased her and brought her safely home.

Anyway, I look at Fionn and wonder: what have I accomplished since my last birthday?