Pink Lego? Heck Yes! Bring It On!

On Saturday we took Fionn to Target to spend her birthday gift card (thank you Grandma).  And Fionnula very excitedly ran straight to the display of new pink and purple Lego Friends and picked out two sets.  Yes I have read the various articles screaming about the new "lego for girls" and how it is limiting the interests of little girls, yes I have seen little Riley rant at the toy companies for making all the 'girl' toys pink while boys get all the other colors, I've even read through the relatively long-winded petition on change.org demanding that Lego "go back to advertising and offering all LEGO to boys and girls!"  Really?  Really?!

How is Lego NOT offering all its toys to both boys and girls?  One article actually said that the 'cool' lego is in the 'boy' aisle at the toy store.  It isn't the boy aisle!  It's the Lego aisle, and I assure you, no one will stop you from purchasing things from these shelves based on your gender.  Really.  Girls can have the Harry Potter Lego or the Sponge Bob Lego or the Alien Quest Lego.  Maybe the problem isn't with Lego as much as it is with everyone's perception in the first place that Lego and action figure aisles are FOR boys.

Also, I noticed that everything I read against the Lego Friends sets complained bitterly that the girl sets were all about girls in beauty shops and girls performing music and lounging by the pool. No where did I see mentioned one of the sets Fionn picked in which the minifigure is an inventor in a lab full of chemistry sets, tools, a microscope and a robot.  It is a relatively pink lab.  But SO WHAT?!  I was sitting by Fionn when she played with this set today.  She told me that her 'inventor' worked at a museum and was identifying the 'potion' which Fionn had carefully placed under the tiny microscope.  This same set comes with a tiny laptop which all of Fionn's Lego fan brothers seriously envy.  I assume none of the tirades against Lego bother to mention this particular set because it goes against one of their main points--that Lego is narrowing the realm of possibilities in little girls' imaginations to traditionally 'girlish' occupations and past times.

Kris asked Fionn before she bought the sets, why she liked them so much, and she shrugged her shoulders and said matter of factly; "because they have girls in them."  Ah ha.  She didn't say because they were pink and purple even though those are her favorite colors (in fact, those are also favorite colors of a couple of Fionn's brothers!), She didn't say it was because of anything the girl's were doing, whether that be designing clothes, or singing into a microphone, or building robots.  She said she liked them because they were all about girls.

So.... how is it different to tell our little girls that they SHOULD NOT want the pink and purple toys than it is to tell them that they SHOULD.  The simple answer is it isn't different.

Back to Seminary

I am not a morning person.  Many of you are cracking up right now because that is such a huge understatement.  Homeschool works well for me because no one has to be dressed and fed and anywhere at 8:00.  Well, except for Kris sometimes, however he is pretty self-sufficient.  But a few years ago something new crept into our homeschool...early morning seminary.  So, from now on, until Fionnula graduates (which is 13 more years if you are curious, plus the 5 we already put in), someone will always have to be somewhere, mostly dressed, but not necessarily fed, at 6:15 am.  Seriously.

So, try to picture a typical school day morning at my house;

First, we can't leave out the detail that anywhere between about 1:30 and 4:30 Fionnula has more than likely crawled  into my bed and burrowed her wicked cold fingers and toes into my body.  Despite the total shock to my system I go back to sleep.  I am resilient.

At 5:45 the first alarm goes off.  That's right the first alarm.  This is the alarm that tells me if my boys aren't up yet they better be soon.  So I stumble, half blind and mostly incoherent (because neither my feet, nor my eyes, nor my brain function at 5:45) down to their room to ensure they are awake.  Usually at least one of them is, but sometimes I begin to hear their alarm as soon as I round the top of the first flight of stairs and arrive in a pitch dark basement to find 3 soundly sleeping boys.  Hence the need for MY alarm to go off at this ridiculous hour.

Then I go back to bed, grab my cell phone on the way and turn on its already pre-set alarm for 6:45, crawl under the covers and go back to sleep.  I am vaguely conscious when the boys each kiss me goodbye a few minutes later.  You see, this year, we are part of a blessed 3 family carpool, which means that every third month, I don't drive AT ALL.  Which is beyond awesome.  But this month, I am driving the pick up after route.  Which means I can go back to sleep for another hour.

At 6:45 my cell phone alarm goes off.  I have my routine perfectly timed, it takes me 5 minutes to be out the door, it takes me 5 minutes to drive to the church, but...  it takes the bus at least 10 minutes to warm up enough that humans can safely ride in it on a January morning.  So, the 6:45 alarm is the start the bus alarm.  I can do this remotely from my bedroom window.  But sadly not from my bed.  Then I......you guessed it.....go back to bed.  Really.  I sleep for another 5 minutes.  THEN I get up, get dressed (and I use the term loosely folks, sweats, jammies, almost anything will work...a swimming suit.  Ok not really.), brush my teeth and am out the door.

Essentially, within five minutes of arriving at full consciousness, I am driving an 8,000 pound vehicle around the neighborhood.  More than likely on ice.  Be scared, be very, very scared.

Witches and Wizards

This summer we went to see the last Harry Potter movie.  As I sat in the theatre looking at all my little witches and wizards (and yes they were wearing robes and many of them were carrying wands) I thought how Harry Potter has been such a huge part of their childhoods and I was definitely feeling a bit melancholy at the thought that this was 'the end.'  But then I got the idea in my head to write a blog post about my family and Harry Potter and I started looking at all the related family photos, and I realized, that for my family, Harry Potter will never 'end.'  Pictures like these

Getting ready for HBP Release Day Party

Fred and George, complete with hand made broom

Erin and Bayley are 20 and 18 now, but when they were 7 and 6 we read the The Sorceror's Stone out loud for the first time.  Kris had heard about it on the radio, I had read about it in a catalog, we checked it out  from the library and made it our family read aloud book.  And we were hooked.  We got the second one as a gift from my parents shortly after it came out and read that one in record time too.  As each book came out, we read it aloud together.  No one was supposed to read ahead.  I almost always did.  The kids tried hiding the books from me.  But I am devious.  Sometimes Kris and I took turns reading until we had both lost our voices.  We irresponsibly let our kids stay up way past their bedtimes.  We bought book 4 when we stopped for a bathroom break on our way home to Stratton and spotted it on display at a Safeway, but from then on it was Amazon release day delivery and we spent THE day glued to the front window, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the UPS truck.  We read book five on Kris's parents deck the summer we were living in their basement.  We read book 6 coming to and from church in Raton and it was sooo hard to leave it in the car and go in to sacrament meeting!  We ended up with two book 7s when Amazon failed to deliver it by 5 pm on the release date (yes, we called them as soon as it was a minute past 5) and we had to run to the book store to fetch one and start reading immediately (the Amazon one was free...but late).  We have seen every movie together, attended the book release parties, and have made July 31st into a family holiday with Aunt Marge pinatas and wizard trivia and treasure hunts.

OOTP Book Release Party

Our House Elf

So,yes, that last movie seemed a little bittersweet, especially as I looked about me and pondered all the other changes that were coming in our family.  Except, in the weeks that followed I saw our tattered copies of the books still being toted about obsessively, the robes still donned fairly regularly and it was still perfectly normal for two or three or four children to be racing about the house casting spells at one another.  And a few weeks after the movie we celebrated Harry's Birthday with butter beer and pumpkin pasties and chocolate frogs.  I don't think Harry Potter is going to just fade away.

Mama Birds, Daddy Birds, Baby Birds and Science in the Backyard

So one morning last month, I went out back to check hot tub chemicals (my daily chore and I have yet to get a really good grip on it but, anyway...) and noticed something going on atop the electrical meter right outside the back door.  A couple robins were very intent on building a nest there, about a foot above our grill and just a few inches from where the back screen door slams against the wall approximately a hundred times a day.  Fionn and I spent a lot of our morning watching the nest building process, but I was sure that Mama Bird would smarten up real quick and find a new place to build for real.  However, a couple days later I lifted Fionn up to peek in said nest (it was just enough above my head that I couldn't see in) and she reported there were eggs there.

Ta-da!!!

There was lots of excitement about the eggs, and there was lots of climbing on chairs, and chairs stacked on chairs, to get a good look too.  Now everyone was wondering when they would hatch  (I was figuring never, because I still thought Mama Bird was going to make a run for it, especially now that the nest itself was producing even more traffic and chaos then is normal on our back porch.)  But, some internet-savvy child of ours googled the query and reported that we could expect baby birds in 12-16 days.

This is actually Daddy Bird, who usually just hung about the yard,
but occasionally took a turn on the nest.

So, we took to nest watching, and the comings and goings of Mama and Daddy bird over the next two weeks.  And endured lots of night time scolding from grumpy birds when we ventured out after dark.  But precisely 14 days after we believe those eggs to have been laid, we had a baby bird.  One.  The other eggs totally disappeared and that is a complete mystery.  Raccoons?

Not so very cute, is he?

Getting a little fluffier, can you see him down there?

Thinking my camera is someone there to feed him.

 Ahhh... that's more like it.  (By the way, I am an extremely
amateur photographer, and it is really, really hard to get a shot
of Mama Bird feeding Baby Bird.  I think it may have been
complicated by the fact that I was trying to read a science
lesson to my younger kids at the same time.

So, as I mentioned, we love the Google at our house.  And now that we had a baby bird, we were wondering when he would learn to fly and were watching anxiously for that day to come.  Google told us that he should fly in about another two weeks.  So we spent our two weeks watching Mama and Daddy bird constantly feeding him, and cleaning out his nest.  But two weeks came and went and our baby didn't go anywhere.  I think he had it pretty good in there.  With the disappearing siblings, there was plenty of room and he just wasn't too interested in going anywhere.  A couple kids reported seeing him stick out a foot, but he didn't make the leap.

See, getting big and fluffy and cute now, isn't he?

Then, on day 16, I went out to check on our little guy and the nest was all quiet.  So I got out one of those chairs my children had been stacking up for better baby bird viewing and peeked right in that nest (which was really brave of me, because I was a little scared that he would pop up and nip off my nose or something (birds do that right?) and if he had even threatened to do such a thing, I guarantee you, I would have made an extremely ungraceful dismount from my chair.  Luckily no one else was up, so I could risk it.  But our little guy was gone.  We had totally missed the flying lesson.  Luckily Google had also taught us that little birds take about 10 more days to become competent flyers and that until then they are still hanging around near the nest with Mama and Daddy bird still keeping a close eye on them.  The kids located our baby bird in the back corner of the yard where he continued to hang out for a couple of weeks.  And we would occasionally spot him around the yard.

And here is our baby all grown up (and saving China), no perched in our
neighbor's tree getting ready to  take off on his own.

P.S.  This post has absolutely nothing to do with Bayley moving into an apartment in Fort Collins next month.

Some Things I May Have Neglected to Mention

The problem with  blogging, at least for me, is I tend to blog only very occasionally and mostly about the most incidental occurrences so that I frequently skip right by the important occasions.  So, a few things I probably should have mentioned.

Rhys got his braces off.

 Liam turned eight and was baptized.

 Erin and Bayley graduated from Pikes Peak Community College.

Summer Vacation--Bah!

Today we went to the park with a few friends and I was reminded of why I hate summer vacation.  Don't get me wrong, I don't hate summer.  I love the sunshine and the warm weather interspersed with spectacular thunderstorms; love the flowers, love being outside and growing things; love blowing bubbles in the wind and watching my kids running through the sprinklers (okay, fine, sometimes I run through them too--but in a very dignified and mature way); love cooking outdoors, hiking in the mountains; love, love, love that I can walk outside nearly every single day and I sincerely appreciate the complete and total lack of ice and snow.  But I hate summer vacation.

"Huh?"  You ask.  Well, let me explain.  From August through May us homeschoolers essentially have the world to ourselves Monday through Friday from roughly 8 am to 3 pm.  Well, we share it with the retirees and stay at home moms with preschoolers.  The library, the YMCA, the public parks, the zoos and museums, even the stores.  They are all ours.  And we like it that way.  When I take my kids to the Y during the school year, we frequently have a whole pool to ourselves.  When we go to the library, the librarians are relaxed, friendly and helpful and the few other patrons there are the same.  We have the run of the parks or zoos;  even the big parks are relatively empty on a school day in October or April.

Not so once school lets out for the summer.  Suddenly, everything is packed to the limit.  The Y pool on an average Tuesday afternoon during summer break is unbearable.  Screaming, yelling, totally out of control and mostly unsupervised children from one end of the pool to the other.  The librarians are on edge and typically there is a game of chase going on throughout the stacks.  The parks?  Oh my...the parks.  Today there was no less than 3 separate day camps at the relatively small neighborhood park we went to.  The day camps are my nemeses.  I hate them.  When I pull up to the Y, or the library, or a park and see the tell-tale school bus, I sometimes turn around and drive home.  It's true.

It won't take me too long to figure out the basic schedules this summer of the biggest and loudest groups and to adjust our schedule accordingly.  We will enjoy the weather and the gardening and the water fights of summer.  And we will take advantage of the chance summer affords us to play with PS friends.  But the truth is we really look forward to the end of summer vacation, when the world will be all ours again.

Easter Eggs

 I seem to have missed the memo regarding posting lots of cute family Easter portraits on Facebook.  All my friends are doing it.  I feel left out.  But we didn't take any cute family portraits on Easter.  We did take some pictures of the eggs we dyed though.  We are not exactly traditionalists when it comes to Easter Egg dying.  Take a look:

You should see the mutant gingerbread people we make at Christmas.