I Still Have This Blog

I remembered that I had a blog. Mostly, I realized the link to this blog is still on my Instagram profile thing. So I checked to see when I last updated and then thought I should maybe update again? Sure.

Soooooooo, my family no longer lives in Illinois. We live in Iowa now. So there's that. All of my kids are in school now, too! My oldest is in second grade, my middle is in first grade, and my youngest goes to preschool (because it's free in our city); so I get about three hours a day for four days a week to do stuff kid-free. I would have said "to do whatever I want" but that's not true. I mostly have to spend one of those kid-free chunks of time doing grocery shopping and another of those kid-free chunks of time doing laundry. I really don't know what I do for the other two chunks but one of those days I probably nap because mmmmmmm naps. And I think I probably just watch TV or read or something one day.

I think I'll throw in some pictures from the last however many months because people like pictures...

I like to beard our family photos. This one is on the bag I use when we go to the library.

Simon turned 7 in April. He had a creepy crawly birthday party.

Charlotte turned 4 in May and had a rainbows & unicorn party.

Jonas turned 6 in August. He had a Mario party.

Chase had a Michael Jackson birthday party in September.

Halloween: Batgirl Charz, Ninja Jonas, Enderman Sime

I creeped kids out with my Bearded Lady Halloween costume.

So that's my random update. There ya go...

We're Still Breathing

It's been what, almost two months since my last post? That sounds about right.

If you follow me on twitter, you may have read:

According to my 2yo, I'm wrong about everything, always, even if I give her exactly what she asked. She lets me know with screams.
— Alisha Abner (@weesherweesh) November 14, 2013

I feel like most of my day is spent having small tyrants yell at me. When one makes behavior progress, another gets worse. But I guess that's just the way these things go.

Photo by Emily B Photography

These little things aren't tyrants 100% of the time, though. The other day 4-year-old Jonas "walked" at least a quarter mile of the walk home from school dancing like Jamiroquai. Seriously, when I asked him who he was being (suspecting his answer but not wanting to influence it), he said, "Jamiroquai." Lately he's been singing "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" by the Backstreet Boys, "Volcano" by The Presidents of the United States of America (this is his favorite to sing while sitting on the potty), "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)" by Ylvis, and "Talk on Indolence" by The Avett Brothers (who he calls "Ado Brothers"). The kid has said for a couple years now that he has music in his bones. I've started playing rhythm/pattern games with him on his drums.

Jonas in his favorite sweater. Photo by Emily B Photography

Simon has a best buddy at school. He and his auntie have been to our house twice now. Everyday I ask Simon who he played with at recess, and the answer is always this friend. When I ask him what they played, 95% of the time it's Spider-Man (and there's often a game or two of "Chase the Girls" as well). I took this picture of them at their friend's birthday party. It makes me happy. Both boys have a framed copy now.

Best Buddies

Charzie, oh Charzie! This one is so incredibly smart, so incredibly adorable and so incredibly manipulative! She is an absolute joy one moment and will drive me to the brink of insanity the next. We had to take pretty much all of her toys out of her room to keep her from getting up to play during nap time. It is vital that I get her into bed for nap before 1:00pm, otherwise legendary battles ensue. She doesn't have to be asleep by 1:00, just in bed. But this girl completely melts my heart when she does things to make me happy. She will say, "Are you happy, Mommy? I want to help you and make you happy!" then she will give me a bite of what she's eating or clean up or whatever she can think to do.

Photo by Emily B Photography

Let's see, what has happened in the last couple months? Well, Halloween happened...

Boo-tiful Ghost, Swamp Creature & Skeleton

I made/adapted the kids' costumes. Jonas' make-up irritated his eyes and we had to go with a partially painted face with a bandit-type mask for actual Halloween since we had family portraits scheduled for a couple days later. The kids had fun with Halloween, but I sort of lost my love for my favorite holiday. The weather was dreary, we didn't really do anything all that special and the kids misbehaved pretty badly. But Chase & I had a pretty great couple costume (even if no one got it)...

Vampire Weekend at Bernie's

In case you need it explained, Vampire Weekend is a hipster-y band. Weekend at Bernie's is a movie from 1989 where a couple guys have a party at Bernie's house only Bernie is dead and they pretend that he is alive and partying with them. (There are sequels.)

Let's see, what else? I'll be discontinuing my job as our church's administrator, but I do hope to start doing the occasional freelance cake and/or invitation designs. I was on the ball and already designed and ordered our Christmas cards for this year; I just received an email that they've been shipped! And now you're probably pretty much caught up. So here are a few more pics from our session with Emily B Photography:

Accurate depiction of what it's like wrangling our kids for a nice pic

Check out Charzie's face

Sword sticks

Sword sticks

Okay, I guess by a few more pics I really meant a bunch more. Oh well!

Colorful School Days & a Park Poop

So my kindergartener has been getting into trouble lately at school. Mostly he finishes his work, gets bored and gets chatty. Really chatty. He had his first "red day" at school this week.

His school uses a color-coded behavior chart type of discipline/encouragement and here's a little of how it goes:

Green = good/neutral, everyone starts off on green

Yellow = bad, note home
Orange = worse (I was unaware that orange existed until this week), note home
Red = really bad & a chat with parents

So that's from acceptable to bad. But then there's...

Blue = better than good
Purple = super good, great even!
Pink = pretty much unattainably good! You win the behavior chart! Or something...

It's all pretty confusing. I think I really just got the hang of it this week, mostly because Simon has been a few different colors. I emailed with his teacher and we've hopefully found a way to help. Mostly, Simon (and a few other kids) will be given extra busy work allowed to practice their "word wall words" when they finish their work. I even let Sime pick out a brand new little notebook to take to school for this.

Another thing that will hopefully help is rewarding him if he stays at green or above all week. Simon's teacher suggested this. Since he had a bad last couple days, this morning I told him if he got above green today, we would celebrate. The kid got all the way up to purple (super good, great even!). So to celebrate we got McDonald's for dinner and had a picnic at the park.

Yay, right?! Well, so far this post has only focused on one child. Enter Charzie, my newly potty-trained two-year-old. She's been constipated/refusing to poop for the last three or four days. She had a few painful poos and got scared of going. I gave her stool softener. Then I got some prune juice. She wouldn't drink the prune juice. Then I found the right mixture of prune juice + apple juice + water so that she would drink it. She drank quite a bit of it today. I also gave her half of a FiberOne bar. Then she finally pooped! Hooray! She worked up quite the sweat and it was rock hard (yeah, too much detail, I know, but poop is a subject frequently mentioned here). So I was relieved that I wasn't going to have to deal with poop at the park now! Or was I?

Yes, yes I was. And not just Charzie's...

The kids and I were mid-McD's picnic when Charz announced she had to go potty. I thought it would be a quick pee-pee but it turned out to be a big ol' poop. This one was much easier to push out, I could tell. She had gotten like four days worth out in an hour! So we wiped, flushed, washed hands and went back to our McD's picnic. We cleaned up, took our toys & drinks to the van, then went to the playground. We'd been at the playground maybe five minutes when Charzie announced that she once again had to go potty, just pee-pee. Simon & Jonas also announced that they had to go potty, too.

Since the main doors to the bathrooms were open and there was someone else in the women's room, I let the boys go pee in the men's and told them to come stand outside the women's when they were finished. As I was helping Charz, I smelled something stinky. I looked down and saw she had some remnant poo in her panties. I don't think she even realized she had gone, it was more of a shart really (when you pass gas and a little something extra comes out...), but poo nonetheless... and I had left the diaper bag in the van. Then I heard Jonas' poop song, the one where he sings to the world that he just pooped. Did I mention that I had taken the kids out for this picnic alone? Yeah...

I yelled to Jonas that he would have to wipe himself because I couldn't go in the men's room. All the while people were walking by and going in and out of the bathrooms. I wiped Charz up as best I could with the cheap toilet paper. I got her undies and pants off. Thankfully her shirt was long enough to cover her. We washed hands and I wrapped her messy stuff in a paper towel and walked out to see Jonas standing at the door of the men's room with his shorts & undies around his ankles. He looked at me and said, "I pooped, Mommy."

So I picked him up, took him to the women's bathroom, wiped him, flushed, had him finally pull up his shorts, washed hands and headed to the van with both boys and a pants-less Charzie. Got her cleaned up and put fresh undies & pants on her and we went back to the playground even though I really just wanted to go home.

We were there to celebrate Simon's "purple day" and had only played for five minutes before Poop-fest 2013 happened. So we went back and played. Both boys bonked their heads. Charz threw a fit because she wanted to do things big kids were doing, but we stayed. And we saw some friends! Then we went home, I gave the kids a bath and got them all ready and put them to bed.

One would think I would have learned by now that at least one child always has a poop incident whenever I take them all somewhere by myself, right? But if I did, I wouldn't have as many amusing stories for you, then, would I?