New Furniture

  The blue furniture is going.  The leather is staying.  It looks weird right now but it'll be less crowded soon.

  I'm excited about the new (used) couches!

Shorts that Look More like Capris on Our Little Man

I just think this outfit is so cute!

I'm not "into" dressing our kids up much but these little shorts make me happy.  Daniel is a big boy and these shorts fit well around the waist, but are actually size 2 instead of Size 1.

Result, shorts that look more like capris.

The Pool

I keep forgetting to mention the pool.

  I also keep forgetting to take pictures! These were taken the day we opened the pool and the water was a brisk 71 degrees.  The water is now in the mid 80's and much more comfortable.

  The pool is really a blessing!  I was opposed to a pool when we were house hunting, but we fell in love with this house and the pool came along with it, of course.  Short of filling it in, we were stuck with it.

  It takes a lot of work and quite a bit of expense, but the children enjoy it so much.  The older 5 are good swimmers and Angela is learning. Sarah is very nervous about the pool, thankfully. She likes to sit on the steps but she doesn't want to go deeper. She wears a floatie suit but she is short and the practical upshot is that if she goes in alone, she will float but her face isn't out of the water.  Yes, it is useful that she floats in that we can grab her easily, but the face in the water thing isn't good.

  I am SUPER careful with the young ones.  When all the kids are around the pool, I constantly check Daniel and Sarah and also frequently count heads in the pool.  We very rarely have visitors and guests swim with us, and partly that's because while I enjoy having friends over, it is harder to keep track of my munchkins.

We did make a big change this year in that we are allowing the older 3 children to swim without an adult present. They are all very good swimmers. They are learning to keep track of each other.  Any horseplay means immediate eviction from the pool, and I do check on them regularly.

 

Stints Are Out

Kevin had a doctor's appointment yesterday morning. The operating surgeon came in and said, "You really made me work last week."  He also mentioned needing a chisel to remove some extra bone (?) from K's nose.  Ok, probably don't need more details than that.  It was an arduous and difficult operation for an outpatient surgery.

But the surgeon removed the stints and immediately Kevin could actually...breathe. That's enough to make anyone feel better :-).

We're both really tired.  I'm realizing that I've not been eating well.  I was sick with some little virus plus I've been so busy that I've just been eating lots of ... chocolate.  Chocolate is fine in small doses, but lots isn't too good.  I made beef veggie soup yesterday and coconut flour banana bread this morning, so I have more available that is low carb.

Oh, making the banana bread was kind of funny. I was interrupted again and again and again, to wipe up mandarin orange messes under 2 high chairs, helping kids with various tasks, etc.  Sometimes I make things and forget ingredients.  It really isn't that surprising.

Short and Sweet

It's been a hard week. Kevin is recovering slowly from his surgery.  I've had a minor intestinal illness and have been very busy.  Sigh.  Hard week. But we're alive and I think headed in the right direction.

A Little Laundry Thing

  I have had a few people tell me that they "don't know how I manage" with 8 children who are home MOST of the time thanks to our homeschooling lifestyle.

 There are many facets to managing.  One, I'm fairly organized by nature.  (I am not bragging, it is just the way I am.  I have lots of weaknesses, I assure you!)

Two, I have a bunch of older kids who can do a lot.  I have a husband who works hard to train the children to do a lot.

Three, Kevin and I work to improve efficiency as much as possible.

So, All stainlifters mighty pacs are part of our constant war against the laundry.  You can IMAGINE, or maybe you can't, the piles of laundry that grow and multiply in our laundry room.

Our children do most of the laundry.  Angela, age 5, throws laundry down the chute from the dirty laundry baskets upstairs. She then sorts them into the correct baskets (towels, darks, pinks, and whites).

Miriam starts the loads of laundry, then moves them over to the dryer when they are done, then moves them into baskets when the clothes are done drying.  She does at least 2 loads a day, on average, sometimes more.  We have a big front loading washers and dryers so don't have to do as many loads as you might expect.  We still do plenty!

Our big boys fold the clothing and put it in appropriate baskets. They carry the baskets upstairs to the appropriate rooms.  Isaac and Joseph take turns putting their clothes away, as do the big girls.  I am teaching Miriam how to put her, Sarah's and Angela's clothes away, though it is rather slow going as Sarah's are smaller but not so small that telling her clothes, and M. and A.'s clothes apart, is easy.  I put away Daniel's clothing, and my clothing and Kevin's clothing.

Ok, that's a long explanation, let me talk about the All pacs.

One minor bottleneck in the washing process has been pouring soap for the washer.  It used to be that we had a giant container of wash detergent on a shelf in the laundry room. Whenever Miriam started a load of laundry, she needed me to get her the soap as it was too high for her to reach, and she didn't know how much detergent to put in the cup anyway. That proved a problem as often I was frantically busy with something else at the exact moment she needed soap.  She'd ask for it, I'd say "later" and forget about it, and a load wouldn't be started.  (Ok, I think that is very much using a passive verb tense which is not considered good writing, but I'm not going to fix it!) 

So we found these laundry pacs.  Now Miriam just reaches up and grabs a little pac of detergent, which is encased in a soft membrane.  She drops it into the "detergent" slot, and the membrane dissolves at the appropriate time.  And I am out of the process of washing clothes entirely (except for the important part of telling Miriam to move laundry along, which I do frequently.)

It's a little thing, but it is the little things like this that add up.  Any time I'm involved in a chore, it slows things down.  So we're trying to think about ways to remove me from the chore process for streamlining. It also lightens my load!

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.