Bobby's Sunday Summary

Sorry I don't really have a lot to say right now.  Today was a crazy day.  It was our ward conference so I have been going since early morning and only stopped just in time to come home for dinner.  Because Susan is in the relief society presidency she had meetings after church too.  But it is over now, and hopefully things will start to feel more like normal.  

A Blog Post by Buddy

I want to blog about Little Gym. I swinged on the bar and dropped. We played. The class is over when we played with the last thing. I had fun at it.

(Tell me about the Nature Center we visited with Julia)
There was a cave tree there.

(Anything else you want to say?)
My favorite number is J.
My favorite chicken is Penny. And Roo is the easiest. My favorite other chicken is Roo, too. And the last one is my favorite, too.
There was no eggs today. Daddy said there were eggs.
We went to the hardware store last times. Yeah.
We watched movies.
We got some plant food.

(What's the last thing you want to say in this blog post?)
James is the best cutest baby. My penguin is the best penguin. And the vacuum is the best vacuum. the TOY vacuum is the best vacuum.

Watercolor on recycled copy paper #12, March 2013

6-month comparison photos

Developments this week

I've been working hard on my project list this week, getting all sorts of things going...except the garden. It's remarkably difficult to have everything and everyone aligned just right to allow any hard core work in the garden. Weather has been a factor, but mostly it's the constant interruptions for the boys' naps, feeding, and potty breaks. I can't really dive into a big project and get my hands dirty on my own schedule, y'know? So, this week, I've made significant progress on several smaller projects. I will get to the garden eventually. I hope.

Project-wise, I'm tackling some old ones and toying with new ones. While working on some quiet book pages, I turned on the first couple episodes of Frontier House. Robert was initially excited about watching a movie, but it wasn't the kind of movie he expected:

 

Bored to sleep with his tongue sticking out. Wow. Sorry, Bud.

And later, while I ignored James to work on something like this for Robert's room (pinned 47 weeks ago on Pinterest), he perfected rolling from his back to his tummy...

...and he cut another tooth.

And, finally, while I was rushing to finish two new pages of the aforementioned quiet book before church last week, the kids turned all of the magnetic paper scraps into a pleasant scene. I recorded Alice's 6-minute description of the piece, but even she found it tedious to watch (*gasp*) and I'll spare you the experience. Short version: the top scene is a far away girl walking her pet dog and pet alligator towards a bench in the park. The bottom scene is a girl outside her home, next to her own recreational lake.

I feel like my life is full. A good full. There is more to be done than I can finish when I want to finish it, but I don't feel overwhelmed...yet. It's just a vague feeling of urgency all the time..."what was it I needed to be doing right now?" I'm frequently interrupting one important job to complete another important (or more urgent, or more fun, or more kid-friendly) job. I guess I can't blame the boys' schedules for the lack of gardening going on. I just don't have any large blocks of time to dedicate to one activity. Oh well.  Sometimes I envy my retired neighbors and sometimes I'm glad that retirement is still a ways off.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was rather crazy, although now it is starting to feel a bit more normal again.  A long term member of our ward passed away last week, and because the Bishop was out of town the entire week on business I helped out a lot more then usual.  But that all ended on Friday and Saturday was mostly unscheduled so life started to feel normal again.  But that is just temporary, this next week is going to be rather crazy too.

On saturday we had a big breakfast and cleaned the kids rooms.  Alice's room has traditionally been the scary room to deal with.  She can take out all of her cloths and leave them on the floor just trying to find a single outfit she likes.  Her bed is always covered in book and drawing materials, and if friends come over every toy she has is out on the floor too.  It often takes the entire family half an hour or more on just her room.  This week was different.  She tried really hard all week to keep it clean, and it really paid off.  We were done in about 10 mins with just two people working on it, the other two were in Buddy's room.  We were totally done with the kids rooms in 10 mins.

After cleaning we kept trying to come up with what we wanted to do for a fun family activity.  we decided on a "bike ride to train park".  The train park is about 2 blocks away, and has some trains made out of painted huge concreet pipes.  The kids had fun, and it was not too cold.  Although James was not too happy to be pulled out of his warm house and put in a cold bike trailer.

Boys and their toys

Robert got a surprise package from Grandma Poulson today, containing one bona fide super sock monkey. The monkey got some snuggly hugs before springing into action:

 

Then there's James, sweet guy. Bobby was finishing up the bedtime routine for Buddy and I had to pop out and take care of the chickens, so James found a way to entertain himself in the box of baby toys.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Some pictures of our family from this week.

In the garden again

*heavenly sigh*

I got to play outside again today, and Buddy was right alongside me. I tilled the deep compost/litter in the chickens' pen, cleared out the spots that weren't composting properly, and made a traditional compost pile to mop up the mess. So far, the deep litter system seems to work well for us (i.e. chickens essentially live on the compost pile and you just keep adding new straw on top of your scraps and their droppings). Things I have learned about this:

• Banana peels and corn cobs take FOREVER to decompose, but everything else is unrecognizable after a week or so. That's wicked fast.

• Two "trouble spots" turned up where it was too wet too often (near the waterer) and where I compact it by stepping on it to gather eggs and deliver food/water. The water problem is easy to fix by changing where the waterer resides and being careful not dump the dirty water in the same place every time. The compaction is a more difficult problem. Outside of the soggy spot and the hard spot, the chickens have managed to keep the whole mess well-stirred. I dug in and found oodles of fat earthworms swimming around in there, which certainly motivates the chickens to keep scratching deep. 

• The chickens eat a whole lot of our food scraps over time. I threw two whole heads of half moldy broccoli in the pen this week (grrrrr, so mad at myself!). The chickens didn't even bother to look at the broccoli when I first threw it in there (they like breads, eggshells, rice, and noodles best), but two days later, I could see they had pecked off every bud on both heads. The day after that, only the toughest parts of the broccoli stems were left. They had pecked two heads of broccoli to death. All that green, brassica goodness is now in their eggs. Wahoo! So, the chickens work through the kitchen scraps and stir up the rest, making the microbial process go much faster. What's NOT to love about this system?!

Then Buddy and I cleared around the fruit trees and fertilized them a bit. Buddy is odd around insects and worms. He likes them and points them out to me but doesn't want to be too close. And he certainly won't touch them. But if I put the worm in a cup, Buddy will happily run that cup over to the chickens to give them a treat.

I've spoiled Roo. Every time I stoop down to dig in the soil, she sneaks away from the other girls and kinda hangs out by me. I point out bugs and worms for her to eat, sometimes offering them on my hand. She and the other girls have great eyesight, by the way. They can scratch in the mulch and find nematodes to eat. NEMATODES! Crazy. As much as I love to see them eating nematodes and slugs from my garden paths, I don't like how they fling my mulch everywhere. Gotta find a better solution for that.

I still haven't decided how to proceed with garden projects this season. I won't be buying any new seeds, that's for sure. I'm still tinkering with my garden bed frames. Pictures to come :) I would like to get the brambles situated, but that's a big, heavy-lifting, serious digging, and building kind of project. I trust my soil work, but I don't know if I could build a strong enough trellis. Does anyone out there want to show me how to work with concrete? The trellis is essentially a modified fence. Then there's the grape arbor...way too much building involved for my comfort. More concrete. I'll need to do a lot more research before being comfortable with that project. Yay!

First tooth!

James surprised me this morning with his first tooth. Six months old. That seemed really early to me, so I had to look back at the blog to see how Alice and Buddy did it. Alice cut her second tooth at 8 months (the blog didn't start until she was 6 months old), and Buddy got his first tooth at 7 months. So, James isn't that much earlier than the other two, but he still caught me off guard.

James has had a few rough nights and it's worn me down a bit (the form and wording of this blog post is evidence of that). I couldn't remember a family member's name the other day, and I substituted the word "sabotage" for, um, what was the word I was really looking for? Was it "surprise"? Ugh. I'm hopeless without sleep.

He's been sick. Snotty nose, hoarse voice. Then he got a crazy fever that seemed hottest on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet...I thought I saw heat waves radiating from him. Tylenol knocked it down a bit, but he still woke up every couple hours all night with pain screams. I thought it might be an ear infection, but he hadn't been sick long enough to make that likely. Well, for two nights, I've been "sleeping" with him on the guest bed and soothing him back to sleep every couple hours. He was gnawing on my hand this morning when I felt something like a paper cut. New teeth are sharp! Not pointy-like sharp, but razor-like sharp. He cut me, man.  The new tooth explains a lot of his behavior. He's still sick, though the fever has gone, and I'm just waiting for the other tooth to come in. It's a good thing our guest bed is so darn comfy.

And just for fun, here's a picture of James taking part in his latest infant brain study. All of my children have participated in research studies at the U of I. This was the first time any of them got to have an EEG, though:

James finds all cameras foreign and disorienting. Despite his furrowed brow in the photo, he actually enjoyed the study quite a bit. Robert loved playing with the research assistants and toys in the waiting room.

Homework

Alice's homework the last couple of weeks has been to write sentences incorporating the "words of the week." She finds it absolute torture, but has managed to pull a few entertaining stories out of it. Her target words have been circled, and she often confuses her lowercase b's and d's:

Transcription: The bragin is fat. The grll that was in one fo my hom wrc bibe! Once there was a littl tornatow. It was not dig we were in awr hows it wint a way aftr a littl wiyl.

Translation: The dragon is fat. The girl that was in one of my homework died! Once there was a little tornado. It was not big. We were in our house. It went away after a little while.

All that writing for "the", "once", and "in." I tried to move her towards one sentence with all of the words in it, but that seemed overwhelming to her.

Buddy Turns Three!

It's official, Buddy is now as old as I think he is. I've been thinking he's three years old for almost six months.

He's totally loving his new maturity. "Now that I'm three..." has been the beginning of many interesting sentences: ...I can put on my clothes by myself, ...I can reach this high, ...I can use the potty by myself. He talks a big game, but hasn't actually decided to do any of these things consistently on his own :)

We had a low key family celebration, starting with presents at breakfast. Robert's favorite presents were obviously the enormous bunny lollipop (thanks, Gr and Gr E) and his very own roll of toilet paper. This boy really likes unrolling TP, but he usually gets in trouble for it, so I thought he would enjoy his own roll to do whatever he pleases with it. After carrying it around with him all morning, do you know what he said? "Mommy, I'm going to put this in the bathroom closet so I can use it when I use the potty."

Okay.

He invited his cousins, Will and Kayla, to his birthday dinner (Bill, Kristin, and Sarah joined us as well), and made a special request that Christina Allan join us. She's been his babysitter a couple times recently and he's grown quite fond of her. Buddy's birthday dinner consisted of chicken nuggets, cucumbers, apple slices, juice, and a toy. Those were his exact words. A toy? Really?! Bobby and I marveled at that for a while until we realized where he was headed: Happy Meal. We don't do the fast food thing very often. I guess I'm glad he thinks it's such a special treat. Robert selected bouncy balls for each of his special guests. Bobby made an awesome double-layered chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting, and we did light candles and sing to the boy, but we didn't manage to get a picture of any of it. It kinda stinks to be the last birthday of three in a month...your folks get accustomed to all the birthday hubbub and forget to take pictures.

And he's a middle child.

We may need to save money for therapy.

On to the pictures!

Bobby's Sunday Summary

The past few days have been very tiring.  We have all had a bit of a cold, and Alice had a touch of croupe the last two nights.  James also decided that he was going to wake up ever two hours last night.  Susan is resting right now, and we have delayed taking the kids out of quiet time.  Hopefully we get a good night sleep tonight, because I fly off to California Monday for a meeting. Susan should be OK, just very tired.

A Blog Post by Alice

Today was a horrible day. It was a horrible day because I did not get what I wanted. Ellie gave Naomi a color kind of bug thing and I didn't get it.

Yesterday, I had a play date with Naomi and we had a lot of fun. We made a chicken fence. It's a fence that we made out of sticks that blocked the chickens from getting into the Marlin's yard.