Nathan!

I came home from work last Monday and Nathan crawled across the floor to greet me.  Grandpa K is calling him a sidewinder because he crawls on hands and one knee and one foot.

Then I found out that his first tooth had broken the surface of his gums!  Busy guy.

Now he has two teeth poking through in the front on the bottom.

And his favorite crawl-to destination?  The dog's food and water dish.

Wrestling with Clothing

For our clothing fast month I have been trying to keep down to 7 or 8 articles of street wear. 
Underwear & bras get a free pass.
I have a t-shirt and boxers for my pajamas.
I started with 2 pairs of shorts, 1 pair of black pants for work, 1 skirt, 2 t-shirts, and one "nice" short sleeved shirt. 

I quickly discovered that I needed another pair of shorts and t-shirt in order to have time to wash out spit-up.  A couple of weeks ago the "nice" shirt needed to be washed, so I pulled out another shirt for work.  I was surprised at how relieved I was not to be wearing the same outfit two days in a row to work.  I was concerned about what people would think.

And then came Saturday afternoon.  Most of my "at home" clothing had been pretty heavily worn and was either in the wash or smelled like it needed to be in the wash. (We had gone on a 2 hour hike in the sun Saturday morning.)  I wanted to go to K-mart to get swimming suits for my girls because the handful of elastic-dead fabric hanging off my almost-7-year-old's fanny at swimming lessons bothered me.  I pulled on one of my already worn outfits.  Then my potty training 3 year old overshot the toilet.  YES, IT IS POSSIBLE FOR GIRLS.  I switched back into the sweatier clothing and the baby spit-up on my short.

Then I had this sort of circular conversation in my head -

• Yuck.
• It's only K-mart.
• I don't want to be offensive smelling.
• I could wait until tomorrow when I have clean clothing.
• But I don't like to shop on Sunday.
• I could wear the orange shorts.  They are slightly less disgusting.  But I don't know if they will make people's eyes explode when they see them with my blue shirt. This is Julia's fault for searing my what little color sense I once had.
• It's only K-mart.
• I don't want to end up on one of those e-mail forwards about the low level of clothing propriety at Wal-mart.
• Okay, I'll use a different pair of shorts!

NET:

• I don't consider getting a new swimsuit for my girls excessive.
• For better or worse I still consider what people will think of my appearance. (e.g. are the people at this new church going to think I am a freak because I've worn the same outfit 3 Sundays in a row?!?)
• I don't know what the throwing distance of bad smell for clothing is.

I think I am going to spend some time for the rest of the month meditating on letting go of what others think and looking for what aesthetic enjoyment I COULD take in clothing if I were a little more thoughtful about it.

Ezekiel has a passage in it about God's faithfulness to His people and their unfaithfulness to Him. There is a metaphor of His people being a young woman, and a description of the nice things God does for her.  I think the description of the nice clothing is really interesting and beautiful.

Ezekiel 16: 9-14
Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil.  I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck.  And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.  Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty.  And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God.

Grandpa K's Birthday

We hosted a 70^th Birthday party for Steve’s Dad yesterday.  Grandma had secretly invited a bunch of Grandpa’s family and lured Grandpa to our house under the guise of having lunch with one of his nephews.  I think he was surprised and pleased.

Steve cooked up a bunch of ribs, and I made homemade ice cream.  Grandma got a cake decorated in John Deere colors and the kids helped decorate the crab apple tree with streamers.

My children had fun playing with a little 10 month old great-great nephew of Grandpa’s.  And in turn a couple of teenage great nieces played very graciously with them. 

Crawling toward crawling

I remember as Petra was learning to crawl that I kept waiting for the moment when I could announce, “She’s crawling now!”  But it was such a gradual process, that there wasn’t really a milestone moment when I could say, “Today she learned to cawl.”  It is much the same with Nathan.

He has been doing push-ups for some time now.  He also scoots around on the floor on his belly.  He has been able to rotate for a long time.  The he pushed around, mostly backwards.  Then he started getting his little legs underneath him.  I have seen him several times on his hands and knees rocking back and forth, looking very excited and pleased with himself.  Often he works his feet in place so that if he should straighten out his legs, he would launch forward and face plant.

So now he can get into a crawl position, and he can sort of wiggle forward, but not usually at the same time. 

He can also go from his belly to a sitting position.  If there is something at a good level for him to grab, he can work himself from a sit to a stand.  If somebody holds him to balance him, he will stagger walk forward, looking like a lumbering baby Godzilla. 

More pictures from our Vacation

Open space on the property

A little covered bridge

At the tree house

I'm writing this for my children to read when they have children

I'm feeling a little swamped.  Yesterday was an at-home day, and I got to the end feeling further behind on the house work than I started.  I'm working on getting Paul and Julia to help more, but it is an uphill battle.
"Okay, kids.  It is time to help fold the laundry. 
No, you have to help. 
What are you supposed to be doing right now?
Just pick up a piece of clothing out of the basket.
Stop being silly - one piece of clothing at a time.
That is not folded; that is wadded up.
Daddy is not going to be happy if his shirt is all bunched up like that.
What are you supposed to be doing?
There should be clothing in your hands.
If your hands are not touching clothing, then you are not helping."

Weeding around the carrots sounded remarkably similar. 

Family Vacation

Petra’s legs are a mess.  It’s a sign of a good vacation.  She is sprinkled with mosquito bites.  Her knees are all scratched up from hiking through raspberry bramble.  I told her she looks like she has been in a cat fight.  Last night my parents got an urgent call about diagnosing and treating poison ivy because she has some suspicious red itchy patches above her sock line.  She is also much more tan than when we left a week ago.

Julia is also peppered with mosquito bites.  We all are.  Even though the pool was saline rather than chlorine, her hair is already several shades lighter.  Now, I am a big fan of good sun protection.  We emptied 4 bottles of sunblock during the trip. Even so, I have to say that Julia looks amazing beautiful in her summer tan.  Her hair lightens and her skin tans down to almost the same shade and she is just bronze and gold from top to bottom.

One of the things I noticed the most on Paul this trip was how broad his chest it getting.  He turns 9 this summer and he is getting a broad, wide chest and I’m seeing a preview of the hairy legged teen he is going to become.  Tae Kwon Do has given him some hardness to the muscles in his arms.  Being in the pool is about the only way I can get a big advantage over him in wrestling.

We managed to protect Nathan from too much sun or too many bug bites.  He was safely sleeping in the backpack carrier for the raspberries and poison ivy.  He liked the pool pretty well.  Paul, Julia, and Petra were all a little scared of pools when they were tiny.  Nathan leaned forward in the infant floaty-boat and patted the water.

We made s’mores.

We pretended that the tree house was an ice cream shop.

We swam once or twice a day.

We hiked up a trail to a waterfall and a cave. 

We went fishing.

We explored the creek.

We visited the candy store.

We had a fun time together as a family, and we have the scars to prove it.

Fishing

Steve took Paul and Julia fishing twice.  The first time was on a kind of pontoon boat in a small pond.  The little fish were biting like crazy, even when there was no bait on the hook. They caught one or two keepers and Steve was trying to decide whether it was worth bringing them in.  As they were pulling in to shore the two more big ones bit the lines.  Paul laughed at the expression on my face when I saw they actually had something to show for their afternoon’s efforts.

Grandma Kuhlman taught me how to clean the fish.  I have a new skill set to add to my resume, although I think it would be a fine thing for my Scouts to learn.  And do.

I asked what kind of fish they were.  Steve said he thought they were sunfish.  Grandma mentioned breem, and I think I may have said blue gill.  Steve looked them up and discovered that they were blue gill, which are also called breem, and are a subset of sunfish.  We were all right.  And the fish fried up quite tasty.

Hiking

One of the things we wanted to do on our trip was hike the trail up by a waterfall and to a cave – the cave were I learned that I have fear of caves.  I am so proud of my little Petra, because she made it the whole way up the trail on her own power.  She was pokey, mind you, but she did it. 

Steve brought a flashlight and some head lamps.  As we approached the mouth of the cave, a current of cool air hit us.  It was like being in air conditioning.  My imagination went into overdrive again, but we explored the region within sight of the mouth of the cave.  The rocks were covered in clay and some of us were rather more orange coming out than we were going in.  There is a story that a Civil War soldier was separated from his army and hid from his enemies for a few days in that cave.

Another afternoon we decided we would take a hike and try out one of the other trails on the property.  We found a shortcut to the pool.  We started meandering through the woods, but at somepoint we got off the right trail.  Steve started noticing fence posts that made him think that we were going off the property.  At that point we were on a rocky meadow and the trail was dotted with low raspberry bushes.  The bramble were covered with unripe berries, and the thorns were snatching at us.

Pond on the property

Petra and raspberry bramble

We backtracked a little and then decided to cut cross country to try to find our intended trail.  We walked around a small pond.  Petra kept asking about drowning in it, and I told her that if she stayed out of the pond that we really didn’t need to worry about drowning.  We walked through a little valley or hollow that was full of a bamboo forest.  I kid you not.  Many of the plants were over two inches in diameter.  We scrambled over a couple of rises in bramble and in leaf littered (and poison ivy dotted) woods.  We followed the sound of a bobcat truck that we knew was working construction on the property.  

Paul and Julia were complaining that we were never going to find our way home when Steve called out that he saw a road and a car ahead.  The car was our Tiny.  Steve brought us out of the woods right at our cabin.  Good job, dear.  (He thought we were a quarter mile further east than that.)

Steve looked over a map later and confirmed that we had been off the property.  It is amazing how small an amount of land you can get disoriented on.  I’m not calling it lost, because lost means you don’t know how to get home.  We were never THAT lost.

Visiting the Aquarium

One day was promising rain, so we went to the city to visit the aquarium.  I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid marine biologist, but I really enjoyed seeing all the water life.  I could have spent half an hour just watching the cuttlefish swim.  That sort of leisurely pace isn’t really an option with the kids.  We did get to see a bird show, touch sturgeon, and find sea horses.  I really enjoyed it.

Getting ready to go

As I was packing I realized that one of the children had gotten into the bag of travel toys for Petra and started unpacking it.  “Aaargh!  What are you doing?  Put that back and then get out of there.  You don’t need to be messing with that!”  Then Petra came over to help me.  I told her she could pick out some toys to put in her bag.  She was hilarious.  She kept running off and coming back with stuff she would need.  She brought several toys down from her room one at a time.  I think she brought me some socks.  The best was when she brought me a game disk and one of the Wii remotes.  Those had to be put back away.

Grandma, Petra, Nathan and I traveled south a few days before Steve and the older two.  I was a little embarrassed by how full we packed out the Suburban.  I started trying to embraced greater simplicity. 

On the morning Steve, Paul and Julia were to join us, Steve heard Julia go to the bathroom and return to her room.  A little while later he heard these wracking sobs.  When he went in to see what was wrong, Julia was on her bed weeping, “I have pink eye.  Now I can’t go to the cabin.”  Steve checked her out and, sure enough she had pink eye.  

He reassured her that pink eye would not cause us to cancel our vacation.  He made a call to the home of our optometrist, who is also a family friend and deserves a big old thank you.  They were able to pick up some eye drops for her from the pharmacy on the way south.