Apocolypse???

We had a crazy hail storm this evening! It had been a gorgeous day: the girls spent most of the afternoon running around outside and enjoying the sunshine. Imagine our surprise when shortly after dinner the sun suddenly darkened and the sky quite literally opened up.

It sounded like we were being attacked by gumballs. I've never seen anything like it. One minute the weather was clear and the next minute we could barely see out the windows due to all the hail. We had to crate Jasper because I was afraid that he was going to crash out the window, he was that frantic.

So anyway, here are the pictures. Remember that for most of today it's been around 70 degrees! The storm lasted for maybe five minutes, and at the end of it our yard was white. I was about ready to break out the blessed candles! (3 Days of Darkness paranoia, anyone?)

Yeah for me!

A friend of mine just had a baby (and by just, I mean the baby was born in February and I just now remembered to take her a meal) so I decided to try out a neat little trick with cupcakes that another friend recently showed me, and take the family the results.

I took a cake decorating class last month and I really loved it. The problem is that practice makes perfect but there are only so many cakes one can make, especially when one has given up desserts for Lent. So my skills are not exactly at the pro-level, but I have to say that I'm proud of what I made today. Here it is, a cupcake bouquet:


My results did not look as good as my friends, but I think the family I gave them to liked it. Really, though, my main goal is mostly just to impress the girls and I think I've got that locked up.

I love my Mom! (Despite potential evidence to the contrary...)

I am, without (much) shame going to lay the blame on the five parasites...er, children, for whom I've shed every last remaining cell in my brain.

What happened? Well, in a nutshell, this: I met my mom, my aunt, and my Arizona cousin Katie in Gettysburg for the afternoon. Katie is a professed history geek and is spending a few days enjoying a stroll through the Civil War, and since she makes a wonderful (and cheap) tour guide, my mom and aunt and I met up with her to take advantage.

So I spent almost the entire day with my mom yesterday. It was a great day, it was great to see my cousin again, the museum in Gettysburg is way better than it was the last time I went, and I enjoyed spending time with my mom and my aunt. For the record, I knew without a doubt that my mom's birthday was coming up: I had prepared a cake for her, and I told all the girls to make her cards. I knew her birthday was the 16th, I knew it was right around St. Patrick's Day.........I just didn't realize that all these things had coalesced at that very moment.

Uh, in other words, I forgot that yesterday was my mom's birthday. You know, the woman who is responsible for my existence and all.

Yeah...

So, Happy Birthday Mom! I hope the cake still counts even though I made it thinking that I was - for once - ahead of the curve. I love you very much! And I hope nobody holds it against you that you have such a very stupid daughter.

A question for Cesar...

How is it that the dog who does this:

And this:

Can also sit in the kitchen for half an hour doing this:

Mr. Mom

I volunteered at the girls' school this afternoon, and when we returned home I could tell that something was up.

The hallway floor was covered in flecks of styrofoam.
The loaf of bread that had been uneaten when I left this afternoon was now just a chunk, laying half-flattened on the stovetop. I could see teeth marks all over the crust.
My bed was covered in both styrofoam flecks and bread crumbs. The kicker was when I saw that Lucy was wearing summer pajamas. As she tried to plunge a toilet.

Chris, it seemed, had quite a busy afternoon. I've had times like this myself, but even though I totally sympathized, it couldn't stop me from doing something unforgivable. As Chris began to explain the time line of destruction, I giggled. Then I gathered all my powers of control and listened compassionately.

Until I giggled again.

I couldn't help it! He described the mayhem :Lucy demanded snack after snack for the first 30 min, then she toppled off of the kitchen chair forcing Chris to lunge and save her. Then she had a horrific and messy dirty diaper. He needed a breather, so he let her take half a piece of bread into our bedroom (a big no-no for me ) only to discover after 20 min that she had helped herself to the entire loaf and shredded it all over our bedroom. She had also gone into our closet and found a picture frame wrapped in Styrofoam peanuts, which she happily tore into less manageable pieces and flung around. Chris' twenty minutes of peace came at a high price. So he spent the next twenty minutes vacuuming up, because - as he stated it, "Even I didn't feel right letting you come home to that." After calming Lucy down and getting her settled in front of our bedroom tv, he foolishly returned to his videogame in the basement. Naturally, Lucy then went into the kitchen, crawled up on the table and dumped a few cups of milk onto the floor (as well as herself.) How the plunger worked into any of this is anybody's guess.

I kissed Chris, gave him a hug, and agreed that he had a terrible afternoon, one that would have left me in tears.

And then I laughed and laughed.

Light of my eyes

Things have been kind of bumpy around here for a while. For a variety of reasons that I'm going to keep vague we have been very stressed, this week in particular. Sometimes, though, a little chink of light will cut through, and sometimes a little chink is all you need.

After school today, Claire sat in the kitchen and read Hop on Pop to me while I made dinner. On her own. I had to give her little prompts now and then, but that kid sat on her stool and read the entire thing out loud (and for a first "real" book, it's pretty darn long!) I was so proud of her I almost cried.

Claire has struggled more in learning to read than the older two girls did. She doesn't memorize well, so her sight words have been a chore and some days it seemed like letter sounds were never going to stick in that little brain. She was so determined, though. She set her shining blue eyes on this goal - wanting to be a big girl, wanting to read like her sisters, wanting to make us proud - and now here she is, a book propped on her lap and victory in her hands.

I love this kid! And I am so proud of her! Little Larry. That's what she'll always be to me. But just watch how she grows.

sorry for the long silence (again)

Life is good, life is good, life is good. But sometimes it's stressful, too.

I'll update more when my head stops spinning.

How a houseful of girls spend their Saturday morning

Playing videogames (Lego StarWars, to be exact) and watching this video over and over again because it is so cool:

Return of the Children

Update on the The Hollow's Black Plague:

Beth needed to return home yesterday, due to a fever.
The rest of the kids came back this afternoon, Abbie and Lucy both having developed fevers overnight. My poor Mother-in-Law was up all night with Lucy, as I understand it.

Man, I hope they don't end up with fevers themselves.

However, both Chris and I are on the mend: Chris still has a wicked cough, but he's gone all morning and afternoon without his temp spiking again, and my back is definitely on the mend. I can walk around almost normally now, and pick Lucy up without stabbing pain. So here's hoping things continue to get better!

And, wow, am I glad we had those two days to decompress and recover ourselves. This week is looking like a hectic one!

Chris had a terrible day yesterday

My back is still out. I am completely useless, and Chris has had one heck of an intro into Mr. Mom-hood.

He has been keeping up with the lunches, school-papers etc. fairly well, but things began to get hairy when Beth came home with a fever on Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, both Claire and Chris woke up with fevers. Homework was piled up, projects were in dire need of being completed, Chris felt like garbage, and I couldn't do much more than occasionally limp through the kitchen.

In one day, Lucy made a gigantic mess in the kitchen, which is pretty standard but before that was cleaned up, Abbie had a huge accident in the bathroom. Abbie is four years old now, and hasn't had an accident in.........I can't even remember when. Then Jasper had an accident in the kitchen. We haven't had issues like that with him since he was a few weeks old. Claire was croupy and whiny, Abbie kept bursting into tears, Lucy was a whirlwind of terror, and Chris was getting hot flashes from his fever.

I was in bed, reading a book.

Thank God for my in-laws, who swooped in here and took the girls today, giving Chris a chance to catch up on sleep. (They also miraculously managed to fix our mail box, do the laundry, clean the kitchen and the bathroom in the time it took for Chris to take me to the chiropractor and back!)

I think Chris was one incident away from turning green and crashing through a wall to run off into the sunset, so I am so, so, so grateful that his parents were here and able to save us!

I feel guilty that Chris had such a terrible time, having to handle that all on his own.
But I am laughing just a teeny little bit, too.

Always darkest just before dawn....

I'm going to do something I've never done on here before. I don't consider this a "real" blog, because I've never had any intentions for this site other than keeping family and the odd friend updated on our lives.

I'm just so touched by this, though, that I'm going to reference another (very Real) blog. We here have been going through our own tough times (and since you're all family I know I don't need to explain what that is) and it is so easy to fall prey to what this article calls "the big lie." There are some people very dear to me, as well, who are going through tough times, and it's hard not to get a little angry at God and think, like St. Theresa(I believe), "If this is how You treat your friends, no wonder you have so many enemies."

This puts it all in perspective, though.

I'm not 100% up on blog etiquette, so I'm just going to link the article directly. This was written by Michael Dubruiel, a wonderful Catholic writer, who was married to Amy Welborn, another wonderful Catholic writer. Michael died unexpectedly this week, and this is his last column.

Please take a moment to read the article, and pray for the Dubriel family.

Time to put down the old horse

I took a walk yesterday with my dog.

This shouldn't have been a catastrophic event.

But it was. The path was very icy, so I decided to take Jasper to a field and play catch for a while to burn off some energy, in the hopes that he would pull less on the leash once we began our walk in earnest. So we played catch some, and it was fun. For a treat, because it is Jasper's very favorite thing, I chased him around the field some and then let him chase me. I don't even know what happened, but one minute I was laughing and running away from the dog and the next minute found me doubled over, feeling as though my back had just collapsed like a demolished building, wondering if I was going to be able to make it to the car.

If I were a horse, I'd totally be simmering in the glue factory by now.

If there is one thing I grateful for, though, it's this: I'm so glad the dishwasher is working!!!

DISHWASHER RESSURECTION!!!!!

Cue the choirs of angels and rays of light from heaven!

My dishes will be cleaned tonight while I sleep, without the girls and I having to do a thing to them. And I will feel better in the morning about the level of germiness in Lucy's bottle.

And this was all accomplished without the need to make any purchases at all. Just a man with a bag full of......magic things, I guess.

I have the best Father-in-law in the world! Thank you!

Crazy Abbie in public

We took the girls to the Science Center today, in honor of Claire's birthday. We had a great time, but as always happens we hit a point where suddenly all five girls needed to get to the bathroom immediately.

So we all file in, and although Abbie was the first one in a stall she was the last to come out. As we were standing against the wall of the fairly crowded bathroom, waiting, the sound of singing began to come from one of the stalls. It was Abbie, and this is what she was singing:

Dear Father, I write you
in spite of years of silence
You've cleaned up, found Jesus
Things are good or so I've heard
This bottle of Stevens awakens ancient feelings
Like father, stepfather, the son is drowning in the flood!!

Yeah, Abbie was singing some Weezer in the public bathroom. I don't know whether I should be ashamed of what bad parents we are, that we let her listen to stuff like that, or if I should be proud that my kids clearly know good music from garbage.

In any case, the people in the bathroom enjoyed the show.

Dishwasher Armageddon, Day 6

This is what my sink looks like by 7pm every night:

We? Are awesome!

Dishwasher Armageddon, Day 5

When I first had to tackle the dirty contents of our broken dishwasher, I experienced a moment of true despair. I actually procrastinated a full day before finally plunging my hands in.

We're on day 4 of the Armageddon, though, and the truth is....it's not all that bad.

I've found that it is best to just keep one half of the sink full of hot soapy water, and wash everything immediately. I am probably still spending a huge amount of time bending over the sink, but because it is in such small increments over the course of the day, it doesn't feel that way. The surprising thing too is that the kitchen has actually been staying more tidy, because I'm not leaving anything "for later."

I had planned on escalating the melodrama as the Armageddon continues, and I still might just because I think it is funny. If I'm completely honest, though, I have to admit.......

Now, don't repeat this, okay? Lean in close, I don't want to say this too loud, but....

I think I can live like this. I actually don't mind it all that much.

Is there something wrong with me? Is this normal? I guess if it is instigating a cleaner kitchen I should just accept it and not look too deep into the reasons why. But don't tell anyone I said so.

Abbie, still crazy

We let the girls stay up late last night, and we all watched the auditions on American Idol together. When it was time for bed, Chris told the girls, who had strewn their various toys and blankets all over the basement, "pack it up and head upstairs!"

Abbie looked over at him and said, "Why? Are we going to Hollywood?"

A birthday for Larry

Happy birthday to the most enthusiastic kid going!

Despite the fact that Claire's favorite food has consistently been the kid-standard pizza, nuggets and mac and cheese, the birthday girl insisted that for her dinner she wanted.....salmon and corn. Now, salmon is an actual, honest-to-goodness favorite of one of our kids....but it isn't Claire's. She genuinely likes some "grown-up" foods, like sushi and shrimp, but she refused to even consider those; it just had to be salmon and corn, of all random things.

Sometimes this kid just weirds out, and I have no idea how to handle it.

So, after a very stressful afternoon, Chris came home and whipped up some salmon for Claire (Chris is the fish pro around here, another reason we tried to convince Claire to pick something else, something I could cook without screwing up.) Claire, of course, only ended up eating about three bites. As we knew she would, because she doesn't really like salmon.

Luckily she picked a birthday dessert that she actually wanted, so that she didn't end her birthday with an empty stomach. She still has occasional texture issues, so it was just a huge old ice-cream sundae for her. We made cupcakes for her kindergarten class, but she didn't want any cake at home. Given the fact that she's still just as likely to puke up cake as not, I think it was for the best.

So, happy birthday little one! You keep me on my toes, but I wouldn't have it any other way!

Dishwasher Armageddon, Day 3

Claire claims that even though it is her birthday, she still wants to help clean the dishes tonight!

We'll see!

Dishwasher Armageddon, Day 2.5

I am recording this for legal purposes. This is a direct quote from the girls," Washing dishes is fun! I hope we get to do this every night!"

Let's see how that fares a few more days into the Armageddon.

Meanwhile, while the rest of the family was gainfully employed, what do you think Lucy was doing?