Elisa’s Day

in a few short days we’re off to stay at my dad’s for a whole week ( well, almost, 6 days which is long enough ) and i have spent this whole week, trying to plan and mostly dreading getting ready for that. today when he’s done work, my dad is going to stop by and pick up a bunch of stuff that i wouldn’t have room for in my van, so i have to have that all ready today. and i have two more loads of laundry before we can start packing clothes. packing for many children, including a baby for 6 days, not fun stuff. but hey, art camp, pretty fun stuff. up first, picasso pizzaz. and hannah and the baby and i will just have to amuse ourselves sitting on the beach, shopping and even possibly a trip to the local early years center.

poor ryan is on his own. well, him and the cats. that’s right. cats. i adopted some cats off kijiji. we were having some rodent issues. now we have cat issues. but man the kids are excited. one is questionable. i think the women may have mislead me there. she seems nervous, possibly blind. but the other one is perfect. laid back, loves all the attention the kids can give her, a generally cool cat. they came as a set, so we’ll see if the nervous one settles in or not. in other cat related news, molly loves to chase them around. she’s a crawling master now thanks to the cats. and ryan swears she says kitty. which i guess makes up for the fact that no matter how often i vacuum she now always has copious amounts of cat hair stuck to her sweaty little baby palms and in her little baby pigs.

thunderstorm warnings, with possible hail. i really hope it’s not going to happen ( though it’s looking pretty ominous right now ) because i would hate for hail to pummel the garden, it’s going so well. though it looks like the beans are going to be ready to start picking while i’m gone of course!! few things i love more then fresh beans. ( maybe fresh corn….. ) we had the first “new” potatoes the other day too. delish. always so exciting to eat food you grew. really it’s unfortunate that more people don’t/won’t experience that feeling.

okay, off the computer, on to laundry and packing.

well hopefully we’re done with sickness for awhile. olivia just finished her second round of Rx in a month, as did sidney ( olivia did in fact have a nasty ear infection, and surprise, sidney had tonsillitis ) in light of these two facts, we wrapped up our school year a few days early. i mean, don’t get me started on the absurdity of making the kids go right until the 30th even though marks for report cards go in the second week of june. so with both kids sick again last weekend, i decided to call it a year and told the school as much. and so, with that, our summer begins. thank goodness. looking forward to some sleeping in and some lack of schedule.

busy weekend last weekend, ryan’s mom was here and it was another rainy day at the market. so when my usual veggie guy pleaded with me to take some strawberries off his hands because he was never going to get rid of them in the rain, what could i do? $10 later i have a flat of strawberries ( that he continued to pour pints on top of as i picked veggies ) that i need to do something with. normally i only make raspberry jam, i’m not a big fan of strawberry, but the kids like it, so i kinda thought i might make some anyway. so we did. lots of jam, and one delicious strawberry pie. then sunday we blew through our egg surplus with a ridiculously huge pound cake recipe ( it takes 24 eggs ) and muffins and cookies. at least it solved my end of year gift dilemma for the kids teachers. so wednesday i dropped by the school to grab any last bits of stuff ( and report cards ) and drop off a pound cake for the office, and mini pound cakes plus jam for the teachers.

we had some birthdays too. someone turned one, which is hard to believe.

and finally started crawling, which means i can’t turn my back on her for a second or she’s into the kids book shelf, trying to stick her finger in a light socket, chewing on the kids dirty shoes……general ‘baby on the go’ mischief. i’m definitely in that same bittersweet place i’m sure all mom’s go with the last baby, glad it’s all coming to an end but sad to see it go. i’m finding myself very undedicated to trying to get her on bottles, i am both so ready to be done nursing and so aware this is my last time. even when i felt like maybe we wouldn’t have more before, i always knew there was a [good]chance we’d have more. but with this, the very last baby, it’s so much harder to let that go, even though i want to. and there has been sleeping through the night. which i hope means sooner then later i can split the girls back up two and two, because if i have to listen to hannah and the older girls spend many more early mornings arguing in bed, i may just loose my shit. don’t ask how i plan to split them i haven’t decided yet. the obvious, older two, younger two maybe, but  maybe i mix it up a little too? who knows.

and someone turned six. also hard to believe.

our traditional birthday pancakes, which you get on your actual birthday since you get a cake at your party and two cakes was too many. olivia decided to ask for money for her birthday this year, because she really wanted to take gymnastics, and the only money in our budget for extra curricular right now goes to swimming lessons ( no body needs to know how to walk a balance beam to save their own life so….. ) so that is what she got from all the grandparents and aunties. and she is very excitedly waiting for the fall session to start up now. my mom also gave her a leotard to wear ( which she desperately wanted as well ) and a new book, that she estimates to be about a 4th grade reading level ( based on the vocabulary ) that olivia is already half way through. i am definitely glad she’s in the french, i could see her being much less challenged in a regular class.

and this weekend, i think we’ll have to forgo any going away to spend the entire weekend trying to catch up on all the outside stuff we fell behind on due to the last three weeks of rain. i heard this was the most rain to ever fall in june. and i’d believe it if all the standing water everywhere is any gauge. i just really hope that our garlic and potatoes don’t get rot.

well, one more coffe and then time to get moving. my step dad is away and so his morning chores fall to me, which means there are birds waiting for me to start their day.

my final thought today is, you know the only good part about having to wake a baby up from a nap? getting to snap the elusive ‘cute sleeping baby’ photo without any concern that it might wake them up.

well, change of plans for the weekend. instead of bday parties and a trip to my dad’s, it was chicken pox. sigh. that would be sidney. with the chicken pox. so lets re-cap shall we ( for anyone keeping track ) from novemeber when we all got H1N1. then came strep throat for me. then came the stomach flu for most of us. then olivia got strep. then hannah got pink eye. then sidney got strep. and now she has chicken pox. and olivia has what i was hoping was only a nasty cold, until this morning when she told me her ear hurts. sigh again. seriously.

we’re not a germaphobe family. we don’t believe in hand sanitizer or antibacterial soap or any of those other fear mongering type things. i think into each child’s life a few germs must come. but man. i’m getting a little beat down this year. when i took sidney to the clinic to confirm her chicken pox, her health card came up our old address. which means it hasn’t been scanned since we lived there 3 years ago. so yeah, we get the odd colds and flus, but antibiotics are rare around here usually.

the only good thing out of all this is so far the baby has had nothing ( knocking wood here ) yay for breastfeeding and all it’s crazy immunities.

speaking of the baby, she turns one today, which is crazy. sidney didn’t start crawling until the week before she turned one, and i thought that was a record never to be broken. but here we are, turning one today and no crawling. she can cover some real distance scooching around on her butt, but no crawling. it’s funny when we go to the early years center and there are little nine month olds crawling circles around her.

olivia’s party was called on account of chicken pox, so we’re going to send out new invitations this week and hope some kids can come out on the 10th of july. it’s harder once summer has started, but what can you do? we’ll see.

now i better get everyone dressed for yet another trip into town to “drop in” at my doctors office and hope she can fit us in ( i’m sure she just loves it when people do that……but she always fits us in so……. )

happy birthday molly jane.

now i just can’t wait until there are raspberries and veggies to add to the bowl too.  man real strawberries are good. the very first one eaten made all the work worth while.

i have written, had to abandon half way through, and then never returned to, several updates. june is just a crazy month of work outside and end of school stuff and birthday parties……..so yeah.

today is bake the cake for olivia’s party tomorrow. ( which i will ice tomorrow morning while ryan is doing the swimming lessons/farmers market/pick up ballons run ) then i must try and clean my house to a semi-presentable level for tomorrow. and run into town when ryan gets home for the food for the party ( picnic outside, olivia’s choice ) and any other last minute stuff i need. oh and finally plant the last tomato seedlings which have been sitting outside on the deck in pots for weeks now. oh and take some pictures of the baby…..today one of my goals is to take some pictures of the baby. ryan was always the big picture taker around here. but now he’s not here so much and the pictures are much fewer and far between for it.

time to get the girls up for school.

to say thanks for the suggestions everybody, keep ‘em coming too. even though i’m not commenting, i’m reading them when i can, which right now is not too often. our laptop died on wed. and is in now, hopefully being diagnosed and fixed soon. until then i probably won’t be online, just dropped in on a friend to check my email.

spent most of the long weekend in the gardens, both of the vegetable and flower variety. i’ve learned to embrace the gardening ( not that i had any choice really ) but once i realized i could overcome my minor bug phobia by just wearing gloves all the time ( it literally makes my skin crawl when a bug touches me……in a completely illogical way, which is what makes it a phobia i guess ) it all got much much easier. so with my MIL’s help we got it 90% of the veggies planted and made some real headway on the ridiculously huge flower gardens. all that is left for the veg garden is a second planting of some things to stagger it a bit, and to put the tomato seedlings in after they spend another week or so hardening off.  this year, after two failed attempts at tomatoes on our own, ryan found a local woman that sells heirloom seedlings. so he went at got some and they look great, i really hope we get some tomatoes this year. now if it could just rain, that would be great. until we get some rain to fill the shiny new rain barrel, situated conveniently off the garden shed roof, right in the garden, it’s several trips back and forth to the house with watering cans each time we water, which in this heat is also, several times a day.

this morning before it got too hot, i dug out all the “soil” around our front walkway. which was really less soil, and more this weird gravel of busted up clay pots. see, the previous owners seemed to want as much garden with as little work as they could possible have. so instead of actual weeding, they instead employed every wacky gimmick and trick they could think of to keep the weeds down, which in the end, is just making the lives of those of us who don’t want they crazy, scrubby, invasive ground cover heavy, type garden going on, well…..hellish. everywhere you dig there are buried tarps and rocks, bricks and anything else they could “put down” to keep weeds from coming through. including copious amounts of busted up clay pots. each time we get rid of some ridiculous invasive thing ( first year, lambs ear, last year brown eyed susan, this year i don’t know, a bunch of other crap ) we uncover all this stuff that was getting choked out, including several lovely variegated hostas. which i can’t transplant to beside my walkway until i dig out the clay pot gravel. oh well…..small steps.

and now, can anyone offer any advice as to what to do about small kids and bugs, mosquitoes mostly, but other biting/stinging ones as well? for myself i cover up completely and use spray when i’m out in the early morning before the heat chases them away. but trying to get them to cover up when it’s already 20 degrees at 7am is pretty much impossible, and i am very reluctant to use bug spray on kids and they have all inherited their mothers crazy histamine reaction to being bit unfortunately. hannah was outside this morning for about 3 minutes before she had 4 HUGE mosquito bites and was stung by something worse. i didn’t see it, but she yelped and there was a chunk missing in the center and clear liquid oozing out so i’m thinking bee or more likely deer fly. then it took about 45 seconds for her whole leg to swell up so i dosed her with some benadryl which took the swelling down but now she’s zonked on the couch. i know some people just react worse then others. if i get a tiny spider bite, it is excruciatingly itchy and will last for weeks. my step father rarely gets bit by anything, and when he does it doesn’t bother him and is gone in a couple days. but the girls are like me. they seem to attract them and then react to them.

last year there were countless incidents of majour swelling and many itchy nights spent treating tired kids with multiple bites and last year we weren’t even gardening like we will be this year or had the weather i think we’re going to have this year…….so since i see a lot, a lot of time outside in our future, especially in mosquito heavy places like the garden, i would really like to know what anyone else does for their kids to keep bites to a minimum

i had a bunch of pictures to go with this entry, of the gardens, what we’ve got done, what still needs to be done……but they are just loading way too slow, so i give up. stupid dial up.

miss molly had me up at 5am this morning. but since that was the first time she had me since going to bed around 10 last night, i’ll take it !! man. there are no words that can describe with any justice how good it feels to get a solid 7 hours sleep. lets leave it at that.

so here i sit, house quiet, kids still in bed, drinking my coffee, staring out the window behind the laptop. reminds me of last spring. baby wasn’t here yet, ryan and i were sharing the van, and on days i needed to have it, i’d get up at 5 and drive him to work ( before you call social services, don’t forget grandma and grandpa are here too, nice that there is pretty much always someone in the house for just such occasions ). those mornings were so much nicer then the rushed mornings when my alarm goes off at 630 and it’s straight into the morning routine. though clearly, not nice enough for me to just set my alarm earlier and get up earlier every day …….haha……

the calm is nice. because the rest of my days are feeling a little…..well, insane. it’s just that time of year. so much to do outside,  on top of the so much there always is to do inside. it’s hard to keep on top of it all. today i definitely have to do a big clean, since we have ryan’s mom and stepdad coming for the long weekend. there going to help out, ryan’s mom will be helping us get the garden in and his stepdad will be doing some odd jobs. and the last week or so, since the weather turned nice again, we have just been outside every free second, in the flower gardens, and keeping on top of the berrys we planted last fall so they don’t get choked out by grass….add in the odd play date and that’s it. something had to give. the house is the only logical thing. someday, my kids will be older and my house will be clean again. this is what i keep telling myself anyway.

hannah went with a friend to his gymnastics class this week. it’s a ploy, “bring a friend day” obviously, to get new kids signed up. and it may have worked for us. hannah just really loved it a lot. and we stopped doing kindergym a couple years ago because it was just too expensive to have three kids signed up all the time. but i could put just hannah in the last 6 weeks of class for a pretty decent price. of course the other girls will be upset. but ryan pointed out that they are going to art classes this summer, and hannah is not ( too young ) so maybe that evens things out. maybe also, it just can’t always be all fair all across the board. i think i will sign her up.

the art classes…..so excited. one of the employees at the early years center, heard me talking about staying at my dad’s on the march break and started talking about how much she loved it up there. how every summer she would rent a cottage and sign her kids up for these amazing art classes put on by the art college up there. the classes took up the morning and then then afternoon was spent on the beach. and i thought to myself, well that does sound pretty awesome. so i asked me dad to get me a brochure and found two classes i wanted to sign them up for. he even offered to pick up the tab for one, which was great (even though the prices were really very good too ) so it’s all set. in july we’ll be staying for 4 days and they’ll be taking “picasso pizazz” and in august it’s “pottery for kids” which, wow, how fun is that going to be? i thought about taking a pottery class too, but alas, they had no adult beginner classes. and the age group is 5-7 so they go in the same class which is nice for them, some sister fun time. and the littler girls and i will chill at grandpa’s on the beach for the am and the older girls have all afternoon on the beach as well. i am really looking forward to it ( though we will all miss ryan )

well, both older girls have wandered down, looking for breakfast, so i guess i better get moving, so i can get them off to school……. lots to do today.

well i hope everyone enjoyed their toast in bed breakfasts and home made gifts. i know i did. we even had strawberries in the house for a nice side to my toast and coffee ( a rare occurrence, i try and only buy them in season, but i wanted to decorate a cake i made a few days ago with some so we had leftovers…..they are c.r.a.p. compared to local ones of course, but after a long winter of basically apples and citrus fruit, they were still a nice treat ) and there was much beautiful art work of course as well. then all the girls headed out to brunch where my grandmother and sister met up with us. 4 generations of girls out for brunch. nice. did i get a picture you might ask? well of course not. the intentions were there. but between getting out the door on time and then a flurry of activity getting home ( involving a last minute stop with my sister for a gift for my mom, something she mentioned only the night before at dinner that she saw, finally giving me a solid gift idea to go with the tree we had already gotten here ) no picture was taken. sigh. we’ve been going out for brunch since olivia was a baby. and every year we take a picture. then last year we missed it altogether, this year forgotten picture…..next year i won’t forget.

ryan’s “gift” to me for mother’s day was to paint the bathroom !! Whoo Hoo!! our house is log, but all the interior walls are board and batten. my intention was always to paint them, but i just haven’t gotten to it yet. so finally the first paint was put on. and it just looks so, so good, and makes the room so, so much brighter that it’s all i can do to not just drop everything else and paint and paint until it’s all done. but at least it gives me real vision of how much lighter the house can be once we do get it done. i’ve been living in the cave long enough.  and even better, we picked up a new “eco” paint. it’s made from recycled paint and is low emissions but the very best part is, it’s $15 a gallon, regular price ! so that is awesome.

a quiet week planned so far. i am on a big cleaning and organizing mission. it really hasn’t ever been done since we moved here. so it is getting done now. and i am hoping to sell enough stuff on kijiji to make enough money to buy a wooden swing set for the girls. there is a beautiful cedar one at costco i would love, but it is pricey…..so we’ll see.

hannah is supposed to have swimming today, but she has been complaining about not feeling well all morning and just fell asleep on the couch, so i’m thinking we’ll skip it today. olivia is also on antibiotics for a throat infection……so it’s very likely she passed it along.

i have some bread sitting on the floor in the kitchen, in the sun, hoping it will rise. it’s always a challenge to get bread to rise in here when it’s cold. and make no mistake it is cold. two days after i pulled out all the kids winter clothes, you know it snowed. actual snow. and it’s been freezing at night ( literally, the kids water table is frozen ) but it isn’t supposed to last…..i hope i hope. it sure is annoying to hear the furnace kicking on in may.

every couple of weeks i realize it’s been too long since i took a picture, of any body yes, but especially of the baby, because well, it only takes a few weeks at this age to miss a whole stage. then i take a whole bunch.

having a laugh and showing off her teeth

enjoying the weather

and just being generally cute…..i love when the little baby hair starts to get long and they get the fluffy head going

since i had babies and started driving again ( the ten years before i had babies i had no car and never drove )  i have had 3 minor accidents. one actual collision and two fender bender type deals, one in a parking lot and one in my own driveway. i have always blamed the “mommy brain” but ryan just thinks i’m a bad driver.

i read an interesting article in national geographic about sleep just last week. it was mostly about how little they really understand sleep, why we do it, why we need it. all they really know for sure is that we do. if we don’t sleep we die. there was a lot of type dedicated to sleep disorders like narcolepsy and apnea. and not a single sentence to all us mothers out there.

the one sentence that resonated with me is this ( paraphrasing ) “staying awake for 24 hours, or getting less the 5 hours for 5 nights in a row is the equivalent of having a blood alcohol level of 0.1″ well, dude, every single mother i know ( with the exception of maybe 2 ) gets less sleep then that.  i haven’t gotten more then 5 straight hours of sleep a night in, what, 9 years…..of course that isn’t entirely true, there are nights i get more sleep, but no doubt averaged out with the ones i only get to sleep an hour at a time and hey, it’s about right. so i guess it really is a fucking miracle i function as well as i do then. which i have been telling ryan for years, maybe now he’ll actually believe me a little more.

it really is true though. the kind of clouded head, the inability to remember anything and be distracted by everything……. that is how i feel a lot of the time. and i try very hard to consciously focus when doing things like operating a vehicle, but one slip in concentration is all it takes. and don’t even get me started on all the minor bits and pieces…..every sink almost over flowed, every pot boiled dry, every load of laundry i go back to find dry in the washer or wet in the dryer because they got put in but not turned on.

why we’re unrecognized i don’t know. because we choose to have kids? i guess. because there is some miracle sleep training method out there that if we’d just submit to, we’d be rocking our 9 hours like everyone else? yeah…..right…… well i have to say that sleep training only works in some cases anyway. no matter what method you’re trying. some babies and kids just don’t sleep well. and if they don’t sleep well, you don’t sleep well. they could have dedicated even one paragraph to those of us, the exhausted masses.

i’d wager a guess that motherhood outnumbers all other sleep disorders.

first things first, thank you for the birthday wishes very much. they were much appreciated.

the laptop seems to have healed itself…..very odd. it just started working properly again, all the sudden.

we had a nice and productive weekend. ryan built the girls a sandbox, a little project that has been on tap since we moved in two summers ago. and it got put to good use for sure. saturday was a beautiful day. some friends came over with their sons and we had a bbq for lunch and the kids played and rode their bikes around and the grownups talked and much fun was had. the sandbox was built before they came, and garden and yard work was done after they left, big accomplishments for a single day.

sunday was sadly cool and crazy windy. so our outdoor plans were switched out for indoor plans. i am knee deep in my most hated of chores, the dreaded clothes switch out. huge sigh. i started with miss molly, because at least with molly, even if her drawers and closet are packed with summer clothes, she will not constantly beg me to wear them no matter what the temperature outside might be,  like a few other girls who will remain nameless. so let me tell you how ludicrous it is, at this age by girl number four. at this age, where you stull can’t resist the odd new cute outfit. at this age where people still want to give you the cute outfits, even though they must know you have countless cute outfits all ready…….molly could, no word of an exaggeration here, wear a different thing every single day of the summer. there is a double bed in her room right now, literally covered in various shirts, shorts, capris, dresses, one pieces, skirts…….probably anywhere between 15 and 30 of each thing……..it’s completely ridiculous. and that doesn’t even count the two new little jumpers still hanging in her closet i picked up at costco because i couldn’t resist the cuteness, or the new things her grandma brought back from her trip south. but anyway……it is what it is. i do believe i have made it through the baby stuff anyway. next is the other girls. it’s much less ludicrous. one tub, packed full, for all three of them, plus a few new hand-me-downs from a friends sister ( the above mentioned friend, who with two boys, has no use for her nieces hand-me-downs ) and a few new things also brought home from grandma’s trip. i think we’re good for this year. sidney usually gets two years out of her summer stuff before she grows out of it and i’m pretty sure last year was a “shopping” year for her.

today is a swimming day, with hannah having a lesson at 1pm and olivia having one at 5:15. and today is an olivia home day, which means that i have the pleasure of dragging not just molly to the pool for hannah’s lesson, but also olivia and the little girl i babysit, joy joy. and i desperatly need to do some picking up/cleaning. which it seems like i always say, but it is always true. i have got to say, that i can barely stay on top of it these days. 4 kids under the age of 8. that is a full time job. that is why people don’t have more then a couple kids, because who can do that and work like it seems everyone feels they must. like i feel i must. i have no idea how i’m going to work and keep up on the house, the laundry the cooking/baking. it’s a daunting thought every time i think about it. i may have a line on a job at a new bar in town. if i could work friday and saturday nights, i think i could make enough in those two shifts a week……the most amount of money for the least amount of disruption, that’s what i need. of course that main obstacle is miss molly. for me to do that she needs to start doing one of two things, sleeping more then 2 hours at a time at night, or taking a bottle. neither of which she seems to have any interest in. but we’re working on it.

speaking of that can i say, oh how i long to sleep. to go to sleep and then not have to wake up until morning. it could even be 5 in the morning, as long as i was asleep the whole time in between. molly is by far the happiest baby i’ve ever had. she laughs more then any of the other girls did. so much hilarious baby laughing going on. she plays happily. she shops happily. for hours i might add. she just doesn’t sleep. ever really. i mean, she naps during the day, but a nap is supposed to be 2 hours long. then she stays up all evening with us, happily. never tired. then she sleeps for 2 hour stretches most of the night, once in a while going for a longer 3 to 4 hour stretch in the early am. it is literally torturous. all i can do at this point is tell myself over and over and over again that eventually it will end. and then i will sleep. and there will be no more babies to get up with. molly’s hideous sleep patterns have definitely helped me along this whole “last baby” journey. like ryan said yesterday morning  “you’re lucky you weren’t the first bay or you might have been the only baby”

but if anything can make life seem that much nicer it is a mild winter and an early spring. it is amazing how uplifting an early spring can be after several brutal and never ending winters. i’d say we are a full month ahead of last year. amazing. this is the first year i can ever remember since having kids, that the girls could actually wear little easter dresses on easter. we went for brunch and everyone had bare legs and arms and it was so warm that day.

eta: after looking at this picture a little, i have to say that hannah’s resemblance to sidney bordering on freakish there……….