Help Me Save The Rainforest! (A post by Katie)

Every month I have to do a "Helping Our World" project where I have to do something that has a positive effect on our world. So, I've decided to put up my BCR (brief constructed response) I made back November about how we should save the rain forest. This was not hard at all, so don't worry:

"It is EXTREMELY important to save the rain forest. The tropical rain forest used to cover 14% of the earth's surface. Now, it only covers 6%! Over half of the rain forest has been destroyed! This is NOT good. More than 20% of the world's oxygen comes from the rain forest. We need oxygen to survive, so we need the rain forest. 137 plants, animal, and insect species are lost every day (update: that's 50,005 per year)! We should not kill all these plants, animals, and insects in ONE DAY, every day! There are 3,000 known plants that help treat cancer. 70% of these are found in the rain forest (update: that's 2,100/3,000 plants).Cancer is terrible, and we need these plants to fight it! 1 1/2 acres of the rain forest are destroyed EVERY SECOND (update-that's 200,000 acres everyday, and 780 miles every year)! We use many items from the tropical rain forest on a daily basis, such as banana,coffee beans,cocoa beans,rubber, alkaloids, digitalis, spices, etc. We need these things, as they are a part of our lives. If we destroy the rain forest, we will lose many things that are important in our lives."

 

Interesting start to the week

Yesterday morning was not particularly rough or chaotic.  Mondays always stink, of course, and the girls were a little lethargic but otherwise it was a pretty standard morning.  I decided, sort of last minute, to add a decorative white chocolate swirl to the cookies Beth was taking in to school for her birthday, so I was a little behind on dressing Ruth, Lucy and myself, but that often happens for various reasons anyway.

When it came time to wait for the bus, I sat in the van with the door open, feeding Ruth a banana while Lucy played in the back seat.  Ruth was just wearing a t-shirt and diaper and Lucy was sporting a very old nightgown that is at least 3 sizes too big for her.  I was wearing my pjs as well, an old pair of pants littered with swiss cheese holes and a flimsy t-shirt with a collar that has been pulled down too many times to be public-appropriate but again - we were just sitting in the car, waiting for the bus.

When the bus finally came, it bombed by the house as if we'd never existed.  Beth, Claire and Abbie all immediately began to yell in panic, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of the bus coming to a sudden halt down the road.  I jumped out of the car and yelled, "Don't run out in the road!  Wait, wait!" to the girls, but they were all flailing and yelling themselves and they didn't hear me.  Before I could reach them (they were halfway down the driveway) they started to run - down the busy highway- towards the bus.

I charged after them, with Ruth dangling like a football in one arm and a banana in the other, trying to will the cars on the road to stop (why weren't the cars stopping?) with my mind.  The girls rounded the corner of our neighbors yard, still flailing and hopping around like puppies, and I yelled to them "Stay in the grass!  STAY IN THE GRASS!"

As I was rounding the corner myself, I heard a shriek of terror coming from our yard.  Poor Lucy didn't understand what was happening; all she knew was that we were sitting in the car one moment, running wild and screaming the next.  I looked around my neighbor's hedge to see Lucy, looking exactly like Newt from Aliens,

crying in terror and running directly for the road, where she must have assumed we'd gone.  "No, Lucy, stop, STOP!" I started to yell, torn between guiding the older girls along the road towards the bus (which, to be clear, was nowhere near our house) and turning back to bodily stop Lucy's panic-stricken progress towards the road.  In the end, realizing that traffic had finally, finally stopped for the bus, I shouted a last instruction to the older girls and then turned back to Lucy, who ran to my side, shaky and teary.  The older girls made it onto the bus without further incident, and as the bus door hissed shut and I breathed a sigh of relief it finally dawned on me what sort of picture we presented to the many, many cars who were now stopped on the road, giving them ample opportunity to take in the sight.

With as much dignity as I could, I got a firm grip on my banana, pulled Ruth's shirt down to cover her belly, put my arm around my little wild-child and, hoping against hope that the holes in my pants were not where I thought they were, turned my back to the gaping onlookers and returned home.

Magic Daddy

I've just hurt my leg exercising, so while I sit at the computer holding a squirmy baby and icing my calf I might as well put up a story on here that I've been meaning to tell.

On Good Friday, we were all in the car on the way to see Katie in our parish's Passion Play.  Lucy was in a talkative mode, so Chris was egging her on by asking her various random questions.

"Do you know what I do when I'm at work?" he asked her.

This has proven to be a nebulous concept for the girls over the years.  When Katie was in kindergarten she told her teacher that Chris was "kind of a nurse."  The other girls tend to just shrug and say, "he helps doctors somehow."

Lucy, however, did not hesitate.  In her decisive and prompt way she immediately answered, "You bring people back alive."

When people ask me if it bothers Chris that he doesn't have any sons, I always just shake my head.  They totally don't get it.  He may not have someone to arm wrestle, but he has six little girls who adore the ground he walks on.  He is absolutely and without rival their hero.

I mean, when I say they believe he can raise the dead, I am saying that quite literally.

Sometimes I worry that we are bad parents...

Abbie insisted today on wearing her hair in a side ponytail, "like the girl in Napoleon Dynamite."

As she checked out my handiwork in the mirror, she said, "No other girl in my class has thought about doing this!  I'm going to be the first."

Yes, I thought.  I have no doubt that you will be the first... in kindergarten.   

You know what, though?  She looked really cute.

This isn't the clearest picture but it's the only one I took.

Yee-Haw!

The Girl Scouts had their Daddy (and Granddaddy)-daughter dance today, and the Mlineks rocked it.

(Miss Lucy insisted on jumping into the picture and bringing the crazy, as she so often does.)

 While the cow-folk were doing the "Tush-Push" (I am not even making that up!), Ruth was sitting around at home, being happy for no reason at all:

A good day all around!

Deus Benedicat

Claire made her First Communion today!

God bless you, my sweet and silly girl, today and always.

Picture update

Lucy had a birthday! 

She did not want her picture taken, but I was very proud of the cake.

I did capture her when she wasn't looking, but on reflection I think this is more a picture of my nephew.  Not only because he looks so adorable here, but because of  his role as the masculine center in a sea of women.  I wonder how many more pictures he will take in his life where he is surrounded by girls. ( I tend to think quite a few. )

Easter was wonderful!  The girls had very little patience for pictures, because they were anxious to converge on Grandma and Grandpa Mlinek's house and eat everything in sight.

Between the adorable baby, the fun morning searching for baskets, the sweet and funny girls, the afternoon spent hanging out with family - it was pretty easy to count our blessings this Easter!

Winning, no tiger blood necessary

I have some pictures to put up from Lu's birthday, but right now I need to brag, just a little.

Report cards came home last week, and there was nothing but one letter in sight for every single girl.

Yeah, that's right:  all of my kids got all A's.  Every single one.  My kids, you say?  I know.  Who'da thunk it?

(Although you know, they are Chris' kids too, which explains a lot here.)

Seriously, though, I am very proud of them.  These girls take their schoolwork seriously, and they all work very hard every day.  The fact that they are all brilliant in addition to being gorgeous, gracious and grounded is just icing on the cake.

An Open Letter to the Tooth Fairy

Okay, look.  It's time for you fairies to get it together.

You need a standard, and you need to stick to it.  If a dollar a tooth is the going rate, you need to understand that when you decide to make your particular children feel "special" by giving them ten dollars or a gift bag full of spa lotions or whatever...you are doing so at the expense of every other kid your child encounters, all of whom now feel like shit.

Yes, I just cursed.  I'm pretty ticked off, Tooth Fairy.  Seriously.  You might have an inferiority complex that is assuaged by showering your tiny charges with extravagant gifts, but it doesn't make you cool.  It makes you obnoxious. 

Plus, is that really how you want your own child to feel "special?"  Because they have more bling than the next kid?  Have you really thought this through, Tooth Fairy?  Because those simpering, talentless dolts on My Super Sweet Sixteen got their start somewhere.  Is this really where you want to go?

Yes, I'm a little bit bitter because my kids have a harried, overworked Tooth Fairy who has more than one set of teeth to cover, and can't pay out $10/tooth because she hopes to one day send her kids to college.  All of her kids need braces, too, and ironically the Tooth Fairy Union doesn't carry dental insurance.

You know what, though, I've had my say and I'm not going to sweat it any further.  We all know our Tooth Fairy loves our kids, even though it sometimes takes a day or two for her to get around to putting that measly dollar under the pillow.  Luckily, I haven't raised kids who need a lot of swag to know they are special.

A snippet from a particularly impressive show

The girls put on quite a few shows, but I rarely post them because the videos are always too long to upload.  However, I've just realized that putting them on YouTube bypasses the blog's limitations, so get ready!  There will be more home-show awesomeness in this blog's future!

This one came about because 1- Adele, a favorite around here, just came out with a new CD and Katie is obsessed with it, and 2- Grandma and Grandpa Mlinek were watching the girls while Chris and I went to see a talk by Scott Hahn, thus providing a bigger audience than usual.  They did routines to quite a few songs, but this one was my favorite:

Moment in time

Ruth just turned 6 months old, and here a few things about her now:

*She sticks her tongue out all the time.  Her tongue does not just stick out, she curls it up on one side of her lip, like she's concentrating on something.  She probably spends a good half of her day like that.

*She has learned how to cluck her tongue, and it makes her very proud if you cluck back at her.  I think she's under the impression that this is actual communicating.

*She is still not rolling from back to front, or really making any moves towards mobility.  She seems pretty content to just lie around and let all of us suckers entertain her.  The one thing she loves, though, is kicking her legs.  When I put her in her bouncy seat, she will kick her legs with all she's got, making the seat bounce up and down violently.

Here's a cute video of Miss Ruth, showing off both her total lack of understanding about moving around and her favorite tongue position:

Shut eye

The sleeping-all-through-the-night dream is dead.

I shouldn't complain too much since Ruth usually only wakes up once, but she maximizes the torture by taking a solid hour to two hours to go back to sleep, and often by that time it isn't worth it for me to go back to bed before Katie needs to get up.  I've regressed back into my Rip Van Winkle ways;  if Chris gets up with the girls, or gets home early so that I can take a nap, I am quite literally dead to the world until somebody comes and physically wakes me up.  I've lost the ability to wake up on my own.

The funny thing though is that, unlike the previous five times I've done this, all this sleep deprivation has not sucked out my will to live.  I'm one of those people who really, really needs sleep and lots of it and that's not a trait that jives all that well with raising six kids.  All flippancy aside, it has been a serious cross of mine for the past 11 years and one that has often left me in almost total despair.  Imagine my surprise, then, when suddenly here I am, getting very little sleep, and I feel....just fine.  Tired but otherwise okay, happy even.

How funny that the answer to my desperate prayers for more sleep are answered, not by getting more sleep, and not by needing less, but by....just not minding it so much.  Can't explain it, but I'm not going to complain!  It seems best to me to just accept it gratefully when a little mercy is thrown my way, in a way that I would never have thought was possible.

Define this

I was driving the elementary girls into school the other day when Abbie asked me to define "courageous."  I did my Lemony Snickett-y best, and then asked her why she wanted to know.

"I am supposed to do something courageous this week for Girl Scouts," she said.

"Punch a kid in the face!" Beth suggested beside her.

"That's not courageous," Abbie said.

Beth clarified, "Punch an older kid in the face."

The trouble with living in the fake country

I like to call where we live "the fake country," a place where your neighbor might have, in their otherwise perfectly suburban yard, a goat pen.  Or, more inexplicably, a horse.  A place where the waitress at your local diner might tell you that working through her 3rd trimester hasn't been that hard at the restaurant, it's milking the cows on her farm that is really killing her.

Most of the time I love living here.  It's the best of both worlds, where I can stroll past the horse farm during my walk (not to be confused with the suburban house, where there is only one horse) and drive less than 15 minutes to get sushi (and it's good sushi, too.)  Sometimes, though, it can make life a little awkward.  In places like story-time, for instance, that mecca for stay-at-home suburban moms who are willing to do anything to get out of the house, even if it involves the public humiliation of dancing to "head, shoulders, knees and toes" as if it were actual music.

The theme for Storytime last week was mice.  All the books featured friendly, adorable mice doing things like having tea parties, making cookies, and playing hide-and-seek.  We played a game involving matching colored felt mice to colored felt clocks and sang songs about how you should never, ever, scoop up the field mice and bop them on the head.

Settling in to read the sequal to "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,"* the librarian asked the kids what they would do if they saw a mouse in their house.  One little girl said that she would have a tea party (inspired by the book we'd just read), one little boy claimed that he might keep the mouse as a pet.  Lucy looked over her peers with that blunt, straightforward way she has and then loudly (so loudly! I really cannot emphasize enough how loudly) yelled out over the other children, "I would put the mouse in a trap!  Then throw it in the garbage!)

The librarian chuckled, and the other parents looked at me in horror.  But what can I say?  Twice a year when the field in front of our house is plowed, we actually do have mice visiting our house, and when they do.....we kill them and throw the trap away.  Although the mice we get can be kind of cute (they look exactly like the Frisbys from The Rats of Nymh, tiny little things with a habit of hopping more than scurrying and standing on two paws instead of all fours) my girls are not at all sentimental about them.  All the books in the world might anthropomorphize mice, but when my kids see a mouse they see something that is a pain in the neck anywhere but outdoors, what with all the pooping and eating of chocolate chips that they do. 

Oh, well.  We luckily weren't going for the "most sheltered" award at the library anyway.  I do wish Lucy would learn to control her volume a little better, though.

*Am I the only one out there who thinks they are starting to milk the "If you give a..." cash cow to death?  I love the "Mouse...Cookie" book, I was on board with the Pig and her pancakes, we even own the one about the Moose and his Muffins...but it's all starting to feel a little done-to-death, isn't it?  I mean, there are only so many overly-pushy animals in the world.

The (un)Predictable Lucy (a post by Katie)

   Lucy has gotten the idea in her head that fat=pregnant, and we have tried to get her to realize the difference.

     Me (picking up Claire's favorite stuffed animal, Beary): Beary is fat! Look at him!
     Lucy:Him not fat, Katie! That's not a nice word! (So now I'm thinking that she's finally understanding)
      Mom: That's right, Lucy. Katie shouldn't have said that.
      Me: Yeah, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that he was fat.
     Lucy: It not fat, it pregnant!


I burst out laughing hysterically and couldn't stop. I guess we have a ways to go.

 

                                                                             

                                 "Beauty" make-up, courtesy of Claire

(note how the she is wearing the same outfit in ALL the pictures, which were taken on different days).

                                 Typical happy Baby Ruth look.

A bunch of stuff...

1.
Our van is dead.  Actually, it's more mostly dead, but it will cost more than it is worth to fix it. This is devastating to me.  I know that we are in the market for a school bus anyway, and I know the old van is a filthy, banged-up, outdated, and did I mention filthy? jalopy but....I loved it.  In light of the monster we are about to buy, it looks sleek and.....really easy to park.  I had hoped to spend many a school day tooling around in the old "dusty camel" as it is affectionately called.  (The nickname comes from the time we were heckled about our unkempt car.....by churchmen hosting a drive-thru nativity.) It makes me sadder than is maybe reasonable to think about putting the Dusty Camel to sleep....

2.
We are in the market for a 12 passenger van.  This is deeply unexciting to me.  I am terrified of the logistics of driving such a gigantic van. The cost of the gas alone is enough to make my knees shake.  Plus, you know, I'm not exactly a stylish-car kind of gal, but I never quite pictured myself at the helm of an industrial vehicle.  On the plus side, it will be nice to fit our entire family in one car!  And for the first time in about a gazillion years, we will have an extra space for anyone who would like to ride along with us. (And really, who won't want to be seen cruising in our party bus?)

3. We have not had a single illness-free week since Christmas.  Christmas!!!  Claire is on antibiotics now and I am hoping against hope that we are finally done.  I finally understand what drove poor Jasper to chew up the walls.  I'm about there, myself, these days.

4.  This is how our first day of Lent ended.  Very appropriate, let me tell you.  Full day of school + multiple illnesses/injuries + mass close to bedtime = ugly scene, indeed.

5.
Early this winter, I was in need of a hat for Ruth that wouldn't slip over her eyes but wouldn't cut off circulation on her big ol' bobblehead, and that would keep her head warm without making it too warm.  So one afternoon I knit one, and it has been her signature look ever since.  I put it on her the other day, after a while of not needing it, and :  whoa!  This baby is growing! 

The Violent Bear it Away

Overheard while playing with clay in the kitchen:
Lucy, "I need more red, Abbie.  I am making Jesus and it needs to be bloody because He is going to be dead."

Happy (Belated) Valentine's Day!

I never got around to posting yesterday because it ended up being a pretty busy day.  Chris gave me the most romantic gift he possibly could have after what feels like a month of being under house-arrest:  he came home early so that I could go spend a few hours alone at a coffee shop.  I took the laptop (so that I could work on a short story - it's about werewolves, very deep stuff) and - oh the bliss of time spent out of the house and in silence!!!  I couldn't have been happier.

Ruth did her best to help out with the Valentine's spirit by sleeping the entire time I was gone, so that Chris was able to get in a workout and reorganize his stash of beer in the basement.

The girls all enjoyed their V-day gifts (I found very cute and fancy-looking blank books, something we are all suckers for around here) and enjoyed their school parties, double-dosed because the CCD classes that night also had little celebrations.  Back at home we had grouper and lobster for dinner with Bailey's cheesecake for dessert.  (I overheard Beth and Katie talking:  "I don't ever drink alcohol but I know what it tastes like, since Mom and Dad are so obsessed with cooking with it!")  The girls drank chocolate milk out of their heart-shaped champagne glasses (which they loved - thanks, Mom!) and Chris and I had some of our favorite Molly Dooker wine and it was happiness and pink hearts all around.  We wound up the evening with a little Wipeout!, our favorite family show, and......it was just a great day.  I'm not sure how I lucked out like this, because I know without a doubt that I do not deserve to be this happy.

(This video is from a couple of days ago, because I didn't have the camera on when Ruth burst into hysterical laughter yesterday, but her sisters get belly-laughs like this just about every day and I think it illustrates pretty well what happy love looks like:)

 

The Quotable Beth

Beth:  Face it Mom, it's better for us to live in a trash heap, because then we know where everything is.

Today.....

T

...was American Explorers Day in the elementary school.  Can you guess #1-Who this is and #2 - Which explorer she is supposed to be?*

...Ruth rolled over for the second time!  Here's the video:

J

 

Saved

*Amerigo Vespucci