This is probably one of those whiny posts, but I'll try to look on the bright side.  Which will look brighter once I get some sleep.

I have lots of awesome pictures to post from our last weekend at Vaughans, plus the intermittent awesomeness that is the end of school/beginning of vacation.  However, since I worked on the house all evening and my kitchen still looks like it belongs to a fraternity house (substituting sippy cups for beer bottles, of course), I'm not going to spend the time uploading them tonight.  Mayhap tomorrow!

Lincoln woke up sick this morning, which made me feel guilty because I have been wishing he would EVER want to cuddle.  Well, he did, in between shaking his whole little body with the heaves.  He stopped that around noon, but he was never a real happy camper.  I still managed to fill my clothesline for the first time (it's got 10 long lines, so that's quite an achievement!) and the laundry is almost all put away.  Evan was wonderful tonight, and after mowing the lawn, grilled steaks for supper.  I felt very suburban, eating steaks and salad on our back deck on a summer evening!  :-)

This is the first day we've had "normal" summer vacation, and it went pretty well.  Poor Cheyenne really wants to be a help, but the other two are very independent and want nothing to do with her assistance!  She offered to make them breakfast this morning, but they both wanted oatmeal, which was outside Cheyenne's area of expertise.  She was pretty cast down about that, and about the fact that a sick little Lincoln only wanted to be in Mommy's arms.  She did make her bed and tidy her room this morning, which truly is quite helpful.  I'm hoping we can keep everything on an even keel this summer so we can all enjoy this togetherness!

I've been laughing at Marilla, I gave her a dollar bill Friday night when we were shopping, and she's played far more with the dollar than she ever would have with a toy the dollar could have bought! She switches it between purses, and puts it in her back pocket (which makes her walk with a swagger!) and generally admires it.

I better let this be it if I'm going to try the "early to bed, early to rise" plan.  We've been "early to rise" a lot lately (the kids' choice, not mine!) so I figured I should start trying to fit the "early to bed" part in, too.

Recent Conversation

After I got done explaining that Daddy was working late so he wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow.

Elliott: "Dave and Mary [Imaginary Mary and her Faithful Husband] are working on Rachel's house."

Pause.

Elliott: "Do you remember Rachel?

Me: "Umm, no?"

Elliott: "She's Dave's great aunt."

Mary and her ever-expanding social circle sure keep us busy.  Other people hope to keep up with the Jones; we can never hope to keep up with Mary.  If we have two bathrooms, Mary has five.  If we drive 3 hours, Mary drives 10 hours to get to her grandparents.  Four kids?  Chump change to Mary.  Her and Dave have 37+.

In non-Mary related news, today is the last day of school for Cheyenne.  I guess it's a tradition for a lot of moms in our neighborhood to take the kids to the beach on the lake on the last day of school.  Cheyenne has a lazy mommy that doesn't feel like taking four kids to the beach, but thankfully her friend Tess' mom is more ambitious.  So Cheyenne is getting sun-baked in celebration, and I am trying to decide what to have for our Daddy-less supper.  Maybe I should ask Mary for advice.

The Calm after the Bug

It is ridiculously late to start writing this post, but I have finally got my house to a point where I am not filled with self-loathing to sit down at the computer. The Cotten kids (and their chauffeur, Bethaney) were down Sunday through Tuesday night, and the seven kids played in grand style. Meaning, every toy and book we own were spread hither and yon. Augmented by the fact that Bethaney and I made a serious dent in the library's bag booksale on Monday, there was a LOT of stuff laying around the house. (I didn't let the little detail that every bookcase we have is already overflowing hinder my avaricious nature whilst book-shopping.) Then, Bethaney left with her kids Tuesday evening, and I got violently ill. And did I mention Evan is out of town for four days? Yeah, the house was a little interesting by this afternoon.

But in pictures, it is back to Sunday evening, where all was peaceful, calm and still.  Well, not really, there were seven kids running around the backyard while Evan juggled, but it was pretty weather.  (I wish this picture showed Evan whistling at me, but I'm pretty sure that didn't happen.  Not sure exactly WHAT he was doing with his mouth, but it was probably integral to juggling.)

There is lots of smoke getting in the way of these pictures, since we were grilling this delicious chicken.  

Funny faces really do seem to be part of the juggling process.

Lincoln isn't sure about tickly grass on his bare legs, so he spent lots of time crawling up and down the deck stairs.

The big sisters.

Monday morning, Cheyenne and Orianna wore matching outfits.  I'm not sure where Cheyenne saw this pose, but she thought it would be a great idea to lay on the floor and have her and Orianna pose like this.  Lincoln doesn't understand the concept of glamour shots, so he just W-sat and grinned.

They ARE glamorous!

These are the skirts I made for them.  Breanna has a matching one, I think these girls would have been ecstatic if she could have been here, matching them!

Lily and Rilla were matching, too.

Rilla's rubber boots are the ones that are on the wrong feet, of course.

Sweet little girls.

Lincoln, falling asleep on our bed for his morning nap.  I don't often get a picture of him sleeping, since he falls asleep by himself in the crib pretty good these days, so I wanted to make sure I captures this sweetness while I had the opportunity.  Though mostly, I'm currently fixated on the fact his overalls look ridiculously short.

A blue princess dashing through the backyard.

And a pink one, who looks like she is ice-skating past next year's garden.

This one looks more like the tavern wench.

Mr. Gilbert, wanting to give me a high-five.  Bethaney put up a beautiful essay about Gilbert on her blog yesterday.  It made me cry, and look forward to hugging him again soon.

Elliott isn't really fitting into the mix with his blue jeans.  Later, he did don the top half of a giraffe costume, which was highly appropriate for the occasion.  He inherited his daddy's fastidious dress sense.

Some could think this picture looks like Cheyenne is ordering people around, but since that is impossible, I don't know what's happening here.

The princesses, getting their swing on.

This moth (moth? butterfly?  I read an interesting, easy way to differentiate them the other day, which I totally forget.).  Anyway, this winged creature landed on Bethaney's hand.

I guess it was feeling princess-y and wanted to join the party.

Trying to get it to step onto Cheyenne's hand.

This was as far as it got.

Orianna and Cheyenne adding some perspective to this picture, to show how much our catalpa/catawba tree has grown.  (Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge, says both names are acceptable.)

Tuesday was flag day, so this is what the kids like before they walked Cheyenne to school.

Lincoln feels the need to clap patriotically.

Gilbert thinks clapping is interesting.

Lily  is taking her job of keeping Gilbert on the wall very seriously.  

Yes, this is a fifth picture of basically the exact same thing.  I find it hard to reject pictures with seven cute kids in them.

As I picked up the aforementioned seventy bazillion toys today, I quickly saw the charm in letting a lot of toys retire prematurely.  I asked Elliott if there were cars he didn't want anymore.  He quickly pulled out about 15, telling me why he didn't want each of them.  "The wheels don't turn on this one, the window is broke here, this part broke off..."  He wasn't examining each one and then deciding, he just had a mental catalog of each and every car!  I knew he played with them a lot, but I hadn't realized the depth of his knowledge!  He's a smart little cookie.  He'll randomly ask me the strangest things lately, but if I pause for a minute and think through all the books I've seen him with, I can usually think of which book prompted that thought or question.  He reads constantly!  He makes life interesting-- like during Rilla and Lincoln's nap today, when he turned every object in the house into a percussion instrument.

My other little boy is walking!  He's been taking steps quite a bit, but today I saw him walk from the sofa over to a toy, crouch down to pick it up, pivot, and walk back to the sofa.  That's officially walking!  He's missing his daddy almost as much as I am-- it took him a long time to go to sleep tonight without Daddy's arms.  There was a lot I needed to be doing, but I sure enjoyed rocking him in my arms in the darkened bedroom until he fell asleep.

Evan is coming home tomorrow, and we're planning on heading north to Vaughan's.  We haven't been up since the end of sugaring, the first week in April.  Quite a bit to do in the interim, so I really SHOULD go to bed!  There's always so much more I would like to write, and then I didn't check Facebook today at all, or anyone's blogs...  I love staying in touch with people through the computer, but it sure can suck up two hours pretty quickly!

Goodreads

I joined the goodreads social network yesterday. I've had friends mention this site, but I think I confused it with another book-related site I had tried and discarded a while back. Anyway, I'm totally excited about having a place to put my "To-Read" list (outside of my clunky Excel document) and keeping track of the books I've read. And the books other people read! I just posted this review of a book I read recently, and they provided html for posting into my blog. I probably won't post these reviews here often, I just wondered how it worked. If anyone reading this is already part of goodreads, please search for me and add me as a friend. The librarian in me is ridiculously excited about this site! :-)


*Aside about being a librarian* I was thinking they other day how I have always sort of downplayed my decision to be a librarian as a lame choice. Not because I think librarians are lame, but because I picked that career just because I liked books. (Well, and because library school was in the same city as Evan White, but I digress.) While thinking about how my brain works, though, and the things I get excited about, I realize there is a lot of librarian in me by nature! I get crazily excited by organizing information and things, whether it be alphabetizing my books, making sure I keep my striped and solid shirts in their separate places in my drawer (stop laughing at me, Olivia!), putting pictures in photo albums, or documenting my reading on goodreads. So I think I picked the right career path. Even better, it doesn't hurt to love organization in my FAVORITE job as a stay-at-home mom!



Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land by Kurt Timmermeister

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked this book because I love small farms, and local eating, and stories about people learning a new career. This book has all of that, but it lacked a good editor. The story is not grouped chronologically, which made it very choppy. He also contradicts himself quite frequently. He starts one paragraph with the sentence "Pigs abhor electrical current, which makes them easy to confine." Three paragraphs later, his opening sentence is "Pigs are great escapers." Pigs won't eat pork; Mama pigs eat their young. Pigs will find every scrap of food and eat it; pigs trample the food and then ignore it and beg for more food. LOTS of these examples. He went into excruciating detail about minutiae of farming, but never mentioned several aspects of his life and farm. His leftist political leanings colored his essays in a mean-spirited way. One insight I did enjoy is his assertion that Craigslist may resurrect small farms. He contrasted trying to find feeder pigs before and after Craigslist. Very interesting! Little tidbits like that kept me reading, and also made me wish he'd had a heavier-handed editor so I could enjoy the book as a whole.



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Esther's 90th Birthday, and Other Not-So Monumental Happenings

 A typical evening, Saturday night-- the kids see the camera and beg, "Take a picture of me!"  I'll take lots of pictures if these little cuties hug and are friends!

 Gorging on Playmobil sets.

 I'm trying to be a better Mommy and let them actually play with their toys-- even if it means they mix things up!  :-)

 It was Esther's 90th birthday Monday evening!

 Her birthday is 4 days after Lincoln's birthday, so we have an 89 year span in our little meeting.

 Lincoln, happy to see his daddy.  Evan came from work-- a full day of painting, as you can tell from his hands.

 Some of the celebrants.  We were all VERY full from a delicious Eleanor Barkley dinner at that point!

 Esther, Sara and Garret laughing...

 Probably at these three.  You have no idea how excited my kids were to see these "kids".

 Twining around the Barkley's treehouse tree.

 Goofy faces.

 She is definitely in the squinchy-eyed smile stage.

 All proud of himself, up in the treehouse-- all of three or four feet off the ground!

 I found this in the entryway the other morning-- Elliott had draped his jacket over the stroller solicitously so the Gilbert doll could sleep better.

 Minus the interfering little brother, this is Marilla's bliss nest-- her ducky blanket, pillow, a Peggy Rathman book, and Lincoln's birthday piano.

 Poor little Marilla woke up sick Wednesday morning.  She hadn't eaten supper Tuesday night, so I thought she was just nauseated from being too hungry, but after 6-7 different vomiting episodes, I didn't know what to think.  After this highly uncomfortable-looking nap, though, she woke up and didn't have any problems for the rest of the day.  When I asked her if she was feeling better, she said, "Yes.  My froat went back down to my tummy now."  It's a good way to describe how throwing up feels!  :-)

 This is the reason I usually don't leave my stepstools set up.  The little monkey was throwing all the lids out of the lid drawer onto the floor.  Fair warning-- if you're cooking at my house, you probably better wash or at least wipe out all bowls and utensils that are in lower cabinets or drawers.  They HAVE been touched by a toddler.

 Rilla during her favorite pastime-- a slideshow of "Pictures of Me When I Was a Little Baby."  She takes a certain displaced-baby satisfaction in periodically saying, "Lincoln wasn't even ALIVE!" with great relish.

 Elliott's artistic endeavors.

 We may be related.

 Playing in their house, even though the official temperature that day was 97°.

 Elliott, who makes his cars talk in.cess.ant.ly while he's playing with them, had one of them say that day, "It's HOT!  HOT like butter!  HOT like spaghetti! HOT like oatmeal! HOT like toast!  HOT like a FLASHLIGHT!"  The flashlight was the hottest thing on that list, according to his inflection.  Thankfully, flashlights aren't that hot.  I went to collect dirty laundry Monday morning, and there was Evan's big Maglite, on, facedown in the kid's hamper.  Still not sure what chain of events led to that one!

 It was a good day to try out the fudge popsicle recipe from Smitten Kitchen's blog.

 I like how the tongue is anticipating the first bite.

 Definitely cute enough to be worth the inevitable stain treating on every piece of clothing my children wore.

 Dirt and strawberry juice can't disguise this goofy gap-toothed baby's gorgeousness.  This boy likes strawberries as much as his red-headed sister.

 Showing me her empty fudgsicle stick.

 After-bath pajamed kids that snuck out for one last play before bed.

 I'm not a knick-knacky person, but a friend in Alaska gave me a Willow Tree figurine right after Cheyenne was born that captured our life at the time perfectly.  It was of a daddy holding a tiny baby, and the mother peering over the daddy's shoulder.  I might have been slightly post-partum hormonal at the time, but I burst into tears over how right it was.  Evan and I spent so much time just staring at our new little girl.  Anyway, I love the non-angel Willow Tree sets, although I told Evan I wanted as many figures as I had children.  I do have five now, including a wall plaque of a family that my mom gave me, so I'm finished collecting them.  This little box was one Evan bought me for an anniversary present when I was pregnant with Marilla.  At the time, I was trying to make maternity clothes, so I used it to story safety pins.  Today, as I was doing some mending, and trying to fit the extra bobbins back in their woefully small storage case, I realized that this was perfect for bobbin storage!

Pretty colors.  And apparently, some dust.  

I'm so proud of myself it's ridiculous, but I patched a three-corner tear in my skirt today.  It's an old skirt, so it didn't have to be perfect, but I put an old piece of jean skirt behind the tear and made it look very neat and tidy.  I'm really enjoying sewing these days, when I get the time.  I think I could spend 8 hours a day doing projects (not just sewing) I've been wanting to do.  I'd probably get bored (though I'd be prepared to test that theory!), but for now, I'll just enjoy the times I do get to do a few things.