We have a “This Little Piggy” book, and in it one of the little piggies has a plaque on the wall that says “Sty Sweet Sty”.  After today’s lunch, I think that’s what we need.  Hannah was “sporting a ‘tude” at lunch time, so other things took precedence over the location of her food (in other words, we let that go).  As I dished the jello onto her plate, she promptly picked it up and placed it on the table (with her hands, of course), and then ate it off the table (with her hands, of course).

So, why do we put food on kid’s plates, anyway?  Why to we even set them up at the table?  (After this meal, and many others, I had to move the chairs and wipe up all the wet sticky food off the floor.  If I delay in performing this task, Hannah goes under there and eats it off the floor.  Inoculation, inoculation.)  And, why do we even put clothes on them?  I suggested that we put the food in a trough on the floor, and let the naked kids just crawl up and scoop it in with their hands.  Andrew had an even better suggestion, have the whole feeding operation outside.

O.k., don’t get hyper.  We won’t do all that.  We will try to force civility on our children, even if at times it seems completely in vain.

Yesterday at the reunion in Criders, they played some variation of a gift game.  The gift I got included some pink foam pieces that as best I can determine are used to separate your toes for a pedicure, or something along that line.  Anyway, to Paul they are reindeer antlers that conveniently hook on his ears.   If you look closely, you can see him wearing them in these pictures.

After being gone and busy for a lot of this week, we have enjoyed having a day at home today and relaxing a lot!  Here are a few pictures.

Hannah had pockets in her pants today, and Paul wanted pockets too.  We pulled out this apron that Aunt Mini made him and then he had pockets.

Hannah wanted to wear the apron too, so when Paul was done with it, she got to wear it.

I mentioned that we did a lot of relaxing today.  I’m telling you, when Hannah woke up at nearly 7:30 this a.m., I was sleeping deeply.  I got up and exercised, but I was really worn out.  Andrew offered to watch the kids so I could sleep.  I told him I probably wouldn’t sleep and tried to putter around until afternoon nap time.  About noon time, I just really wanted to lie down, so I summoned Andrew and asked him to take over.  I crawled in bed for over an hour and slept at least part of the time.  I felt much better when I got up.

I found out that Paul cried too much to even eat lunch, so he went to bed for a long nap early.  Then, after he got up about 3:30 0r so, Andrew took a nap on the couch, and Paul just relaxed on the floor.  (Hannah was still sleeping.)

Later, he crawled in his tee pee and fell asleep, taking another nap.

When he woke up after that, he was crying, and to me he felt and looked like he had a fever, even though it didn’t register that way on the thermometer.  So, I held him as he cried, and gave him some Tylenol.  About 45 min. later, his eyes were no longer glassy, he no longer felt hot, and he was happy.  So…we’ll see what comes of this, if anything.

As I was vacuuming after supper, Paul and Hannah ran around and had fun.  At one point I saw Hannah bringing one of her diapers to the living room.  I asked her what she was doing.  She said “teddy bear”, and walked up to her teddy bear and put the diaper on him (well, laid it on him, she didn’t fasten it on and all like that).  It seems like she knows what essential clothing is, and she brought him the most important piece!

I’m not even sure how to start this post.  There has been so much that I’ve wanted to write about on my blog recently, but I simply have run out of time or energy or both and haven’t posted the pictures and their stories like I have wanted to.  Now, this evening, Andrew has voluntarily taken over Paul and Hannah for the express purpose of giving me a chance to write on my blog.  But, I’m not even in the mood for writing on my blog!  So, how do I do that?  But, this is the chance I have, so here goes anyway.

This week has been one of my marathon weeks.  It really started last Saturday when we took a trip to WV to visit some friends of ours, the Rittenhouses, for the day.  All of my siblings went except Laura & Lucy (they are also the only ones who live out of state).  Since it was 13 of us descending on two aging people, we volunteered to take the lunch.  We all brought stuff and had chicken fajitas for our lunch.  They were really good.  I used a marinade recipe I got off the internet.  It was a little risky, trying a new recipe for the first time in a company setting, and with 5 lbs. of chicken breast meat, but it worked out great and we all enjoyed it.

Hannah with her bear and Mrs.
Rittenhouse’s bear.

After lunch, the younger ones got to climbing around in the barn.

Hannah

Paul & Bobby

After that we took a walk up the hill to the crosses.

Daniel got to bear the weight of many
riders–Glen, Bobby & Hannah–for a short
time walking up the hill to the crosses.

At the top of the hill with the crosses.  This is
a special place for Andrew & I–this is where
he proposed!

Paul, Sally, Andrew, Hannah, Bobby & Glen

Hannah & Andrew on the way down.

Bobby & Paul eating blueberry cobbler and ice
cream after our return from the walk.

Bobby gets real close to his food!

About the time we were trying to leave, people started climbing up in a big tree in their yard.

In the tree: Daniel, Glen & Luke.
On the ground: Katie, Hannah & Andrew

Hannah

Rachel joins the group in the tree.  This looks the
the cover photo for some singing group’s album,
don’t you think?

Hannah enjoys swinging.

Then we got the bright idea to get a picture of all of us up in that tree.

Preparing to get as many of us as are able and
willing up into the tree.  Note that Hannah’s bear
went up ahead of her!

Well, almost all of us got up there.

Here we are! On the left, descending: Glen, Daniel,
Miriam (who is over 20 weeks pregnant!), Gail,
Hannah and her bear.  Back up in the middle and
across: Julia, Rachel holding Paul, Katie, and
Luke holding Bobby.  I’m on the ladder with just
my arm on the tree, too wimpy to get up there.

For me, the combination of having a skirt on plus being plum tired and worn out, I didn’t get up in the tree.

Sally & Mr. Rittenhouse.

Somehow we need a picture of Laura Jean in here!

Sunday we had a morning service at our church, but not an evening one since our pastor and his family were leaving town for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Finally, on Sunday evening I felt like I got my energy back after having this cold.  That was nice.  I also finally got my floors vacuumed and washed and the bathroom cleaned (and everything needs it again by now–sigh).

Monday we had to make several trips out, taking trash to the dump, going to get our car from the tire shop, and going to meet my mom while the kids were napping to get our camera back which Luke had borrowed.  Also, in the evening I discovered our dryer didn’t make heat any more and my clothes weren’t drying.

Tuesday was the last Tuesday for the neighbor children to come for a while.  There are no more Tuesday markets until spring.  So they were here.  Their mom came home early to pick them up so I could go to a dr. appointment.  I left right after I put Paul & Hannah down for naps.  Sometime a little before I came home, 4 of my nieces and nephews came for the evening.  Paul and Hannah were having the time of their lives–so many of their friends coming to play in the same day!  I discovered a trick for managing meal time with 6 small children.

1. Slice and butter all the bread before putting it on the table.

2. Dish up all the plates before seating the people.

3. Don’t let anyone sit down at the table until all the food is served!

Following this, we could then get all the kids seated, pray, and the self-feeders could start right away, and those that needed fed we could start feeding on them right away.  It still doesn’t solve the problem of when does Mom eat, but that’s a small matter.

Wednesday Paul had his 3-year checkup in the a.m., and I had another dr. appointment in the early afternoon.  Andrew went along, graciously, and we shopped for a new dryer at Lowe’s.  I was exhausted the whole time, but we made it through and back home.  In the afternoon, I took a nap for an hour and got restored.  Then, I got a big surprise.  My mom had said for me to bring pies when I asked her what to bring for the Thanksgiving meal on Thursday.  I called her Wednesday evening to find out what else I should bring, and she told me that she had decided Katie, Luke & Glen were going to make the entire meal.  I was happy!  I told her I would just rest up and show up!  And, that’s what we did.

Thursday we spent the day at my parent’s.  We all had a good and relaxing time.  (I plan to post the pictures later.)

We got home from there around 8:00 p.m., and we put the kids to bed.  After that, Andrew and I got moving on getting some food prepared for today, which was a reunion of his mother’s side of the family at Criders.  Andrew made the filling part for 3 pumpkin pies and 3 pecan pies.

My great husband who went against
his policy and worked in the kitchen
the same time as I was working in the
kitchen also.

Notice how he uses the whole kitchen!

The pies were tops, by the way.  I couldn’t have
made them any better myself.  (Do I have him
trained right or what?)

I made two more shells (I had 4 already in the freezer), and I made a 7-layer salad.  Somehow, it was still getting close to mid-night until we had everything cleaned up in the kitchen and ready to go to bed.

Today we went out to Criders and visited with Andrew’s mother’s family.  It was my first time at that reunion, and I saw people I had never met before.  It was nice to put some names to faces.  We also visited the grave of Andrew’s grandparents.

So, now, we are at home once more.  I’m completely tired, even though I didn’t do much at all today.  As far as I know, we will be home all day tomorrow.  I hope to get my quota of sewing done for this week tomorrow so I can stay on schedule with my New Year’s sewing projects.

And, now you know why I haven’t blogged in a whole week, and why I feel ka-putzed.  Next week looks less hectic, and I hope it stays that way!

This will be mostly pictures, but I like lots of pictures.

Gail

Grandma Gardner

Beautiful Hannah!

Katie & Gail mashing the potatoes.

Hannah, Paul & Bobby playing outside before
lunch.  It was a warm and pretty day.

Paul

Hannah, Paul & Bobby watch a tiny green worm
crawling on the porch.

More worm-watching.

Hannah

The settlers getting settled in Catan (and they would
be Andrew, Glen, & Luke).  This is after lunch.  Right
after lunch they had target practice.  Then, they played
the Settlers of Catan.

After the kids woke up from their naps, they ran
back and forth in the living/dining rooms, and
also laps around the table.  Hannah would also
take all the bears and this ball to my dad, and
then she would take them to my mom, or me,
and then take them back to my dad.  They all
had a lot of fun.  It was fun to watch them too!

And, after that, we ate some leftovers for supper, and to Paul’s sadness, we had to come home.  He was having such a great time.  We had a wonderful Thanksgiving day, clear full of blessings.

Finally, after about 3 or 4 weeks of being stalled, they came with a backhoe and dump truck on Wednesday and started the digging.  Since then we have gotten a bunch of rain and are again stalled until it dries up enough for them to run heavy equipment to our yard again.  If it doesn’t rain on Sunday, they hope to make progress again on Monday.

Mr. Miller and Andrew

Today I took Paul and Hannah outside and let them “ride” the backhoe.  They had a great time!  It’s a good thing the backhoe operator’s little black dog wasn’t around.  He bites anyone who touches his equipment.

Paul

Paul & Hannah

Hannah & Paul

Hannah & Paul

Hannah

has got to be this.  Paul got this little toy vacuum from his Aunt Wendy & Uncle Joe last year for his birthday.  He has not ceased to love vacuuming, love vacuum cleaners (begging to go see them when we go into a store, spotting them whenever we are near one no matter where we are), and he wants to be vacuuming whenever I am vacuuming.

Last evening, I got out my Oreck to get the big obvious crumbs up off the floor.  Paul got out his little vacuum and vacuumed too.  It makes sounds and talks as it vacuums.  There is a switch on the back, intended I am sure for parents to turn off the noise feature to keep from going insane.  Well, when I switched off my vacuum and started winding up the cord, Paul bent down and turned off that switch on his vacuum.  I took my vacuum into our bedroom to park it, and Paul brought his in and parked it here, right beside my big Oreck.

I love our Paul!

As soon as he is a little bigger, we’re going to get him set up with one that does the real job, just his size.

I am sewing for some New Year’s presents.  I have a schedule, and so far I am keeping to it.  That means the cleaning is not getting done, I have ceased cooking and we are eating leftovers out of the freezer, and there are toys all over the place from the kids being on automatic at times.

But, that still doesn’t touch how I get the sewing done.

I have help, that’s for sure.  Since Mommy is sitting down, it’s the perfect time to play doctor on her.  Hannah checks for birds in my right ear with the toy otoscope, and Paul uses the reflex hammer to simultaneously check my left ear.

Hannah and Paul take turns hanging on my right arm’s sleeve, trying to see if they can swing off the step by hanging onto it, I think.  I repeatedly ask them to let go so I can use my arm.

When I stop to pin or un-pin my seams, Paul or Hannah start to play with the spool, sometimes taking it completely off the sewing machine, and frequently managing to unthread the needle.  I get lots of practice threading the needle.
I have broken 4 or 5 needles so far, and they are special stretch needles.  I need to go buy some more, because the rest of my needles don’t sew this knit fabric very well at all (they skip too many stitches).

Paul sets up his big truck on the wheel of the sewing machine so that as I sew and it goes around, it makes the wheels of his truck go around.  He loves it!

Hannah and Paul have both gotten their fingers stuck in the sewing machine belt.

Once, I was sewing, and the machine started laboring.  I wasn’t going over a thick part of the material, and I wondered what was the matter.  Both Paul and Hannah were away from the machine, so they couldn’t be trying to holding the wheel still.  I finally found that one of them had stuck the fob on the end of the curtain string down into a hole on my spool of thread.  It was trying to keep the spool from turning to let out thread!  That’s why the machine was laboring.

While I was sewing, at one point Hannah was over on the couch.   She started to whimper and say, “Finger”.  I glanced over and didn’t see anything obvious, so I told her to kiss it.  After a little bit she started crying.  I asked her if she kissed it and she said, “I can’t”.  Then, I looked more closely.  Here, she had her finger stuck in the spoiler of a toy car.  I got up, went over and rescued her finger and kissed it.

Soon after that she came up to me at the sewing machine crying.  This time her finger was stuck in the tool pocket of a toy plastic tool belt.  Sigh.  Hannah and her fingers.

I started sewing a seam, and I heard this weird sound.  I wondered what was going wrong with my sewing machine.  I started looking around.  Here, Paul had put his big truck under the belt of the sewing machine so that as I sewed, the belt rubbed the cab and made a little rattling sound.  I kept sewing, and he enjoyed it.

Sew…that’s how I do it.  Think I am getting lessons in patience here?  This morning I had to decide I was going to be patient as I sewed.  All this is also the reason I stay up late at night to sew, even though it means I am tired the next day.  It’s just easier to sew when all the helpers are in bed.

But, I love them just as much.  My life would be extremely dull without them!

Having a little relaxing time singing a silly song.

Even recover lost photos from my camera’s memory card!  Yay!  He worked several hours last night on it, set up two programs to extract erased photos from my memory card to run overnight, and then he worked on it a while this morning.  It paid off!  He got the lost photos.

What is amazing to me is that these programs were able to bring up and produce the all the pictures I had erased off the memory card.  I guess due to the nature of the camera’s hiccup last evening, it was more difficult for the programs to get the red elephant pictures and the birthday pictures, but Andrew said the third program he tried did get them.  Then, he reformatted the memory card so hopefully it won’t do this again.  That also means that now it really is cleaned off and there are no recoverable images on there any more.

So, ta-da!  Here are the images!

The tiny hotdogs we had for supper.

The gorgeous red elephant cake, not yet dirty.

I specifically asked Paul if he wanted cocoa
powder sprinkled on the red elephant to make
him dirty, and he excitedly said, “Yes!”, so that’s
what we did.  I asked him and he told me exactly
where to put the “dirt”.  Some of the places he
mentioned were the eye, the trunk, and the tail,
but in the end it was all over the elephant.

The dirty red elephant.  When we have asked Paul
where he saw a “dirty red elephant”, he says, “On
the Winnie the Pooh movie.”  As best we can figure,
it’s when Pooh dreams of Heffalumps and Woozles,
some of the elephants have honey on them, and
that must be what he calls a “dirty red elephant”.

Paul blowing out his candles.

Grandma reading one of the books she &
Grandpa gave him.

Paul opening presents.

Paul & Hannah in the tee pee from
Aunt Wendy & Uncle Joe.

A whole bunch of Indians in the
tee pee!

I am so happy to have these images back!  A giant, humongous thank-you to Andrew!  When I woke up this morning, I just decided that as soon as I recovered from all this activity and goings-on, I was just going to make another red elephant cake so I could take pictures and have them for remembering Paul’s third birthday.  Now, I don’t have to stage a mock-up, I have pictures of the original event!  Praise the Lord.  (I actually prayed that we would recover these photos.  God was gracious and answered my prayer, even though it was entirely carnal.)

…that I took pictures throughout the day and put them on our computer and blog intermittently today.  I only wish I had done it one more time before supper.

At the end of the evening, Paul was talking to his Aunt Wendy on the phone while he was in the new teepee she mailed to him for his birthday.  I wanted to take a picture of him, and when I turned on the camera, it said “Memory stick error”.  I turned it off and then on again and took a few pictures.  Now, when I went to upload pictures of Paul’s cake, birthday supper, gifts, etc. to the computer, none are there except the four I took after that error message.

I am sad that my pictures of the great cake, the one with the dirty red elephant on it, are gone.  The pictures of Paul blowing out his candles.  Of Paul opening his presents.  We do have some video footage of these things, and maybe I can get a U-tube clip posted or something, but it’s not the same.

What’s the matter with technology, anyway?

O.k.  There were parties and happy times and great memories even before cameras.  So, I may as well get over it.

For Paul’s birthday supper, we had Baby Swiss Cheese, broccoli, cheese pasta, and tiny hotdogs wrapped in little strips of biscuit dough.  His cake was Red Velvet cake with a red elephant on it holding the strings to a bunch of balloons in his trunk.  The balloons were blue, green, and red.  For the border of the cake, I had blue, green, and red big beads of icing around the top of the cake.  It was really sharp looking.  Since Paul wanted a “dirty red elephant”, I had him show me where to sprinkle cocoa powder on the elephant, which was basically all over it.  So, he had a  red cake with a dirty red elephant, just like he wanted.  He was very, very happy!

I had told him he could pick exactly which part of the cake he wanted to eat, and I would cut out that part for him.  He chose the number 3.  Hannah got to pick her piece too, and she chose the bunch of balloons (no surprise, since she goes crazy over balloons and balls).

We gave Paul a little doctor kit, and I had Hannah give him a little set of miniature plates and cups.  Both of those I picked up at a thrift store this summer.  He also got a wooden train set, some books, and a teepee.  He and Hannah are really happy with his presents.  He also really likes the red elephant name tags I made for his gifts.  He was carrying them around this evening.

Here are the last couple pictures of today.

Paul the Indian talking to his Aunt Wendy on
the phone.  Hmmm…what happened the the
old fashioned smoke signals?

Hannah also wanted to talk to Aunt Wendy.

Here’s Hannah handing the phone
back to her daddy.

Well, a tired mommy is going to bed to try to regain a little more health, and hopefully lots more energy by 5:45 a.m.

Here’s how.  You have an elephant-themed birthday!  This is the red elephant finger jello.

These are the elephant grilled cheese sandwiches (Andrew and I at the pieces edges that were left after I cut these out).

Here’s Paul admiring the elephants.  He is so thrilled with all the elephants today!  He named some of the ones he ate…they were all named Ellie (after ACE’s Ellie the Elephant).

Well, that’s the birthday boy and his special lunch.  He is asking for his red cake.  I need to get it finished before supper!  I have just made the cooked part of the red velvet cake icing and it is cooling.

Lest you think I am wonder woman (I am far from it!), I still have not showered, dressed, or done my hair yet today.  But, Paul is happy, loving his birthday, singing songs, and playing.  I hope he doesn’t remember that his mom looked like a hooligan most of his birthday!