Pics and Update

This will be a bit random. Kevin is coming along. He still feels unwell much of the time with some pain and quite a bit of discomfort.  His sleeping schedule is off too, not surprisingly.  The biggest challenge of my life right now is keeping the children moderately quiet so he can sleep when he needs to sleep.

Here are some random pics from the last few days.

  This was from a few days ago.  I sauntered over to the barn to throw something into the weeds and found this MASS of ants.  Yes, those are ants!  I don't know why they were swarming in that particular spot.  Perhaps the rain from the previous day made their underground nest too damp for comfort?  A few hours later, most of them were gone. Weird.

I just think this is a cute picture of Daniel.  We have a baby gate between the family room and the breakfast room.  The family room has 2 other exits, but both have doors we can close so Daniel can indeed be "trapped" in the family room.  He often sits by or stands clinging on to the baby gate, murmuring (or yelling) indignantly. He can't quite vocalize it yet, but he is clearly thinking, "Lemme OUT of here!"

 

The night before Kevin's surgery, he and 2 kids ran off to a friend's house to pick tart cherries.  They picked quite a few and we pitted them that evening and put them into freezer bags.  Cherry cobbler with these cherries is a much appreciated treat by many (not all!) in the household. Those who don't like it either don't like fruit (that would be our 8 year old son) or think the cobbler is too tart, even with lots of sugar.

 Yesterday morning, I took the children to a local park for a couple of hours.  It was the kind of park with one giant piece of play equipment all connected.  It worked very well as I could keep track of our 8 children relatively easily.  I don't worry much about the older 4 kids but the younger 4...well, I want to keep close track of them. 

This park is known as the "spider web" park because of this feature on its playset.

Today I went to another park which is older and has a lot of play equipment separated by grassy spaces.  It was nice, I guess, but I found it stressful as it was hard to keep track of Sarah, in particular!  She kept wandering about and was hidden by play equipment, and of course I DID need to keep track of other kids as well.  I prefer yesterday's play area.  I polled the children, and half liked yesterday's better, and half liked today's better.