Outing

Under most circumstances, I'd rather try to bathe twelve cats in the dark than take my kids on errands. The result is the same. You end up wrestling with a small irrational creature, frustrated, tired, and convinced that one of them has pooped while you weren't watching. Caterwalling and tears ensue. Except that when it's taking kids on errands, all of that is happening on aisle 5 at Walmart.
Today was an exception. We wanted to take the kids to see Frozen (by far the best movie put out by Disney in a long time). If we were going to be in town, we needed groceries. The other thing about having a large family and driving a municipal stadium everywhere is that you really avoid making too many trips to town. I  think my gas bill could feed a small family for a month.  We took a large breath and rolled the whole raucous herd into the bus. I have to stop here and admit that I love the life and excitement these kids bring to every activity. Doing stuff with them just makes me happy. But I digress.......
Sam's was our first stop. Usually, I'm there during the week or on Sunday afternoon. Nothing during those times prepared me for the sheer crush of people milling about the parking lot and store. I include the parking lot because people seemed to mosy through it as if they were window shopping for their next vehicle. No worries about people actually trying to make their way to an empty spot in the outer boondocks. 
David and I decided to divide and conquer in order to be able to get our stuff and get out in slightly less time than it took the Israelites to cross the desert. It worked well! The kids took joy in helping to heap our carts with all the stuff they like to scarf down during the week. They pointed out 500 other "yummy" looking foods (gum, trail mix, crackers, cookies, cheesecake...) that they really needed. With all the sympathy of someone who has to cough up the dough to feed these creatures with black holes for stomachs, I refused. Most of it. Some of it. OK. I bought the fishy crackers. And cheese sticks. And bacon. I'm sure I would have gotten all that anyway.
David took most of the kids to the bus while I checked out. As I watched them gather round him like little electrons around the big daddy nucleus, I couldn't hide my smile. We're a big family when you look at it from the outside. And lots of people were looking.
After Sams, we ate a snack in the picnic area of another local grocery while David ran in for coffee. My kids were everywhere. Crawling through hoops set up as a bike rack. Jumping from rock to rock. Playing follow the leader. Without a 'real'  play set, they had a ball just being with each other. And eating fishy crackers and cheese. See. I knew it would be handy.
The movie theater was surprisingly packed for a movie that has been out this long. We found good seats. The three big kids in  front of us and the rest scattered on and around us. Watching them laugh and engage in the story was as much fun as the movie itself.
Next stop. Food. Yes. More food. We dropped a small fortune at McDonald's for the sole  purpose of letting the hoodlums run and play after nearly two hours of sitting still. I was so proud of my kids. We filled two tables. They played and responded well to orders and discipline. We gathered them to go and I began to mentally pat myself on the back for the order we were managing to keep. Then Devin went and lit off the emergency alarm on our way out the door. Yeah. That's my  kid. So sorry. We were just leaving. Enjoy the ear piercing siren.
By this time it was 7:30. We're usually starting to work kids toward bed. And we still had to do Walmart. Divide and conquer once again saved us both time and frustration. I couldn't help but marvel at the fun we would have missed out on if we hadn't attempted what might have seemed crazy. The kids reveled in the experience of just being out with us. They were distracting and funny and helpful and worth having along.
We got home with tired kids and tired adults. But we were all happy.

Gilligan and the Internet

I wonder what would happen if life ever got boring around here. If there were an equal and opposite reaction to boring at my house, it might have to be a rainforest complete with howler monkeys and singing bears (you know... Like Jungle Book) being found in Antarctica.
Somehow everything happens here at once. We came home from Christmas vacation sick. Very sick. Our kids, on the other hand, felt great. When we began to feel better, David twisted his knee badly. Two different doctors later and we will soon get to pay a small fortune to have it fixed. As a final treat, our internet went down.
When we have no Internet, we also have no cell signal. And no phone. Entirely disconnected from the outside world, I found myself wandering around the house holding my cell phone up, seeking signal like the crew of Gilligan's Island sought radio waves. Please God, let someone be out there.
Fast forward to tonight. With David out of commission in the crawling department, I volunteered to be his hands under the house to fix our phone line. Two days with little to no outside connections had made me desperate. After all, it's only dark, creepy and 20 degrees outside. What could go wrong?
For starters, someone left the water hose on and part of under the house was soggy. I crawled in and found the wire. Slowly, I followed it down the house to where it ended, trying to avoid the worst of the mud. Spider webs dangled in my face and the cat, who had staked claim on a warm spot down there, began to howl his warning at my intrusion. The wire was not plugged in to anything. I  picked up the frayed end and wondered if we'd been getting internet by magic.  Apparently, it had been daisy chained into another wire and had come loose. No magic.  Just a great cat fight under the house had dislodged it. Great.
I should mention here that my electronic experience amounts to nil. This wire needed to be spliced into another one. David talked me through it. Red to red, green to green. Tape them together. Due to my new found electrical genius the phone line ever was, of course, still broken.
During this stage, there were times I had to just sit and wait for David to go check something or get a tool. I'm not proud to admit it, but generous amounts of extra fiber to my diet had resulted in equal amounts of intolerable flatulence. In the confines of the under house space, I had no one to blame my misery on but myself. As my eyes began to water and I considered escaping to the less polluted outdoors. But I needed my internet.
Plan B. We ran another line. Which involved trying to get it up through the floorboard and then running it down the length of the house. By this time, I'd crawled the length of the house about three times. My toes had begun to hurt. I considered the lengths to which I would go in order to have internet back. In the end, I decided that I had double benefits. Not only did I renew my connection with the outside world, but I also had an embarrassing and disgusting story to share with my readers.
As I finished my part in the ordeal and headed out, my calves decided they'd had enough too and cramped up. If anyone ever tells you that crawling isn't exercise, slap them for me. I hobbled my way up the stairs and into a hot shower. My amazing husband made coffee and we celebrated by staying up too late watching Netflix. This is definitely the good life.

Christmas Vacation

We're home and recovering from Christmas.  No trip is really complete until a few people have gotten sick and have to spend days laying around watching TV. The trip as a whole was so full of blogable material that it's hard to know where to begin.....

We loaded enough electronic devices to power a Dallas suburb into our van.  I'm not sure exactly how I managed to make it through family trips as a kid without a tablet, a gaming system and a phone, but the concept is terrifying to my children. Or maybe it's just that my parents had more tolerance for hearing,  "are we there yet?" "I'm hungry", "I need to go potty", "I pooped", "tell him to stop touching me!".  My mother scoffed when we first bought a car with a built in dvd player.  She regaled us with stories of how they read and sang across country.  I noticed that her van now sports three TV screens and a movie for the trip across town.  No matter.  The kids loved it and all wanted to pile in with Nana.

My amazing husband bought me a new phone before we left.  It's fancy and I love it.  Which means I'm super panicked about dropping or losing it. Which also means I do both more often.

Our first night in Arkansas, we gathered at my sister's house. 14 children, 7 adults.  We were horribly outnumbered. The kids spent time marking out territory and testing boundaries. Yes.  That toy is hers.  No you may not pee outside.  We're in town.  Oh, yeah.  It's dark.  Go ahead.  Yes.  You need to eat your nachos. At least half of it.  Fine.  One bite. Just go play with your cousins. You can fill up on cookies later.  And play they did.  14 children have an astounding scope of imagination. Later, they put on a nativity vignette with Christmas caroling. It included one of our adoptive hopefuls who owned his part by baaaing out his lines and crawling around on all fours for a good part of the rest of the night. 

David's sister, Rachel came with us. She slept on the couch in the living room of the house that was graciously loaned to us. As it turns out, my children far preferred to wake her for their travel insomnia than knock on my door.  Score! Everyone should take a teenager on family vacations. She got to deal with nose bleeds, sleep walking, thirsty kids, sniffles, and that one child who  believes travel is an excellent excuse to start getting up at 4am. I got to catch a cold and spend my time trying to keep my entire brain from leaking out my nose.

We took the kids to a nature museum on Friday.  They ran and played, enjoying the snakes and displays and a fishing game. We took a picnic lunch outside. The boys ducked around the trees and fed bits of their lunch to the geese in the pond. Then Devin waddled out from behind a tree. Yep. It was poop. The upside of it was that it put us in just the right place, once I'd cleaned him up, to watch volunteers feed a mouse to the rattlesnake. Later, I heard that Y and Drew had been hoping the mouse might escape. It was cuter than the snake, and therefore the snake was evil.

Later, in a move I blame entirely on cold meds, I found myself  leaning against a red Firebird that was parked next to my bus in the McDonald's parking lot. Yes. We took the kids to Mc D's. In freezing temperatures, my little cavemen needed to wreck havoc in somewhere built for it. I needed ice cream mixed with m&ms. Everyone wins. I leaned on the driver's side door while chatting with my parents for about 10 minutes only to find out the teenager in the driver's seat was apparently texting about the whole experience. I apologized profusely to the girl who simply rolled her eyes and turned back to her phone.   Defeated, I crawled into the bus for a quick getaway. After spending ten minutes polishing her window with my backside, she could at least have tossed me a quarter. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I looked back to find her pantomimng the story to a load of her friends who'd pulled up beside her.  They laughed riotously at my expense.  Smiling, I waved heartily as we passed by.   Yes.  It was me!  I sat on your car.   The crazy lady with a bus full of kids and her brain stuffed into a dozen kleenexes in her pocket.

By the way, they lady who took this picture really had an eye for.....placement. First picture in a long time of 'us girls' and I have a deer hat. I love family photos.

Transportation

No matter how often we do it, I'm always amazed at how much work it takes to  transport children anywhere. And before you ask,  I'll explain. To travel is the act to going from one place to another. It's what we did before we had kids. Throw a couple things in the car and go.   Transporting, on the other hand, is a system or means of conveying people and/or goods from place to place by means of a vehicle, aircraft, or ship.  Yes. I got the definitions from a dictionary.
By the time we have packed 36 pairs of socks, 16 sets of pajamas, 27 pairs of shoes, 25 pairs of pants, 45 shirts, an orchards worth of apples, a flat of water bottles, extra bedding, books, toys, our own coffee maker (yes, we're that dedicated to our morning caffeine fix), gifts and the assortment of miscellany that must go with us these days, we definitely fall within the category of transportation. No way about it, we're hauling goods.
I'm not sure what it is about preparing to travel that drives children and animals crazy. Days before suitcases even come out of hiding they begin climbing the walls in anticipation of the hours soon to be spent buckled down into their seats. The animals are just starting their empty house party early.  The children are determined to leave their mark before we go. Just in case the animals forget who's job it usually is to wreck havoc. Legos get spread hither and yon, creating a charming minefield for chores I'm trying to accomplish. Chuy has twice actually made it into the playdoh before getting caught and eaten several bites.  I'm sure we'll be dealing with multi-colored poop soon. Tony decided to help me pack by spreading the stacks of clothing I had on the couch around the living room floor.
I have lists to help me stay organized when I pack. I write down the things I need to remember. It would be more helpful if I actually remembered to reference the list as I pack.  We made it Arkansas with no socks or underwear for David, no copies of family pictures, and a couple of gifts left behind. It could be worse. We didn't leave any children behind. Yet. No one had a massive poop on the road. No one threw up.  Gosh! What an uneventful trip!
The blue bus transported our crew well. We took out a bench to make room for everything and the kitchen sink that we had packed. I consequently found myself wedged between Chuy and Devin 's carseats. Not a place created for large bums.  I let Rachel sit in front so that I could nap and manage the heathen. Yeah, right.  The trip actually went amazingly well. Bathroom stops were the most fun. There's nothing like watching someone's jaw drop as they count 7 kids coming out of a car.  Classic. 

We wish you a flu free Christmas!

In this season of family gatherings and gift giving, there's nothing that gives more than the flu. We travel hundreds of miles to share new germs with all our loved ones. Just to make sure they don't miss out on the fun.

I'm not sure if it's the flu or not, but I've got a second child down with fever. Drew started it and seems to be on the mend today, so maybe it will go quickly through and be done. Though that's not normally how we like to do things in a big family. Big families are all about experiencing life to the fullest. We're not content with getting an illness just once. We like to work through just one or two people at a time so that we can give it back to the first ones a few weeks later.  Flu. The gift that keeps on giving.

My general reaction to  anyone getting sick is to make chicken soup.  There’s nothing more soothing than a nice, warm chicken soup when you’re sick.  It doesn’t matter what ails you.  Chicken soup makes it better.  I’ll even eat it out of a can.  Or the little dry packets with noodles.  Or on a train, or in the rain.  With a fox and in my socks!.....Sorry.  Mommy moment there.  There’s only one problem with chicken soup.  I am the only one in my family who likes it.   Nevertheless, I made chicken soup today.  I cut up butternut squash, celery and onions and sauteed them with cubed chicken.  Chuy climbed up on a chair by the counter to, “help you” as he says.  Which means he ate three slices of butternut squash and one and a half sticks of chopped celery as I processed it.  I let him help me make breakfast the other day and he ate half a bell pepper before I could get it in the pan to cook.  He sure does love to help.   Maybe I do chop extra little pieces for him so that he can keep busy with eating instead of going all shogun with my knives.  It’s a good tradeoff.  

I still had the problem of my family not wanting what I cooked.  I can’t stand people not liking my food.  It’s not that I get offended.  I just want to make food that people want to eat.  So if there’s something they don’t like, I take is as a personal challenge to find a way to fix it so they will.  This time, I added curry seasoning and coconut milk.  Chicken curry soup.  Big hit!  Danae ate two bowls, and David mmmed and ahhhed and said it’s been too long since we’ve had curry.  Not only did it satisfy my deep seated need for chicken soup, but it cleared our sinuses as well!  Win, win! I’ll definitely be eating the leftovers for lunch.

I hope we make it through the end of the year without serious illness and that this is just a quick passing thing.  We’ve got family that we want to see and friends we want to party with. By the way, party means something entirely different once you’re married with children.  I may have to write a post on that someday.  

Dirty Jobs

For the weak of stomach, I'm going to warn you now. This post is just gross. In fact.....for the weak of stomach, my blog may not be for you. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time up to my elbows in poop, pee and other amorphous disgustingness I will refer to as sludge. Dirty Jobs has nothing on me.
We used to call them the tornado twins. Then Chuy became mobile. Now we vascilate between the Tornado Trio and Huey, Duey, and Luey. I told David today that we could add one more and call them the four horsemen of the poopocolypse. Either way, they were at It again this week. No sooner had we arrived at the playground, then Devin pooped in his pants. Just a little,  and he was so very apologetic and thankful for help. I left the rest of the kids with Cortney while I went to clean him up. See what happens when you hang out with me? You get to be in the fun stories.
Cortney became suspicious of Tony and called him over to confess. "Are you poopy?"
"No," Tony lied as his stench felled several birds overhead and provided a natural buffer zone that kids instinctively skirted. Cortney decided to check for herself.  Which, in retrospect must be like checking the level of the swamp by wading into it. You might learn what you need to know, but in the end you'll be covered in.....sludge and wishing you had some boiling water handy.
Tony blew out all sides of his pull up.  No matter that I've spent a couple days trying to coax him into pooping in the potty. Warm baths. Promises of candyland raining down on his happy little head if he would just poop in the potty. Nope. He waited until all I had around me was a public restroom and a stack of criminally undersized baby wipes. Cortney met me at the bathroom door with Tony just as I was letting Devin out. 
Really, I think all public restooms ought to fit one stall with a hand held shower head and an industrial sized floor drain. It would decrease the amount of little girls who had to walk by our spectacle going, But mommy! He's naked!" Yeah. It was one of those poops. Stripped down to his birthday suit and cheerfully greeting all who came by to visit him in the bathroom.
"Hi! I Tony!  I pooped!" I did the best I could and turned him back out on the unsuspecting public.
The next couple hours passed tolerably well. We ran some errands, switching out who went in for their stuff so we could leave kids in the car. Best way to shop with kids ever. In the pre-Chistmas crush, its so easy for little ones to disappear in racks of clothing and spend years knocking about Narnia before you ever find them again.
The unfortunate thing about errands is that they always take longer than you think they will. By the time we were done, we were running late for our evening Bible study. Time to book it home. About halfway there, that ominous ding sounded, warning of an impending lack of gas. I glanced at the fuel gauge to see that it was on empty. Not near. On. My palms began to sweat. I dropped Cortney off and headed immediately to the gas station. No small surprise, but every single child needed to go potty when we got there.  We were 5 minutes late. Not bad. If I could swing by the house and get David, we'd be ok.
There's something you have to understand about the proximity of the gas station to my house. If I stand at the end of my driveway, I can see the gas station. It is close enough that Danae and Drew occasionally get to ride their bikes there for an afternoon treat. In the amount of time it takes to read this, you can walk there and back again. In the amount of time it took to drive it, Chuy had filled and exceeded his diaper so much it was oozing down his legs and all over his car seat. The stench wafting from him was singeing my nose hairs and making my eyes water. We had to stop and hose down the baby. Giving up all pretense of being on time, I got out and dealt with more poop.
If poop was all I dealt with this week I would have been grateful.  But it wasn't. This takes a great deal of humility to write, but I've been dealing with a roach problem lately. Not in the kitchen, mostly but every so often I find one elsewhere. Waiting for me in the shower. Hiding under a discarded sock. Crawling across my arm at 2am. Yeah. That one left me awake and paranoid for hours. Also, it's not the little house roaches. It's the great big texas-sized,  you-can-rope-and-ride-them kind. I've scrubbed and sprayed and been held back only by the wisdom of my husband from seriously poisoning the whole family in my attempts to be thoroughly rid of them. Then I discovered the feed box.
Just outside our door we have a large deck box to hold animal food, guinea pig shavings and assorted items that need to be kept out of the weather. A cow masquerading as a puppy I used to have chewed it up. It has apparently not been as weather tight as it's supposed to be.  The children haven't done a great job of keeping it cleaned out. While looking for something yesterday (I forget what, now in the horror of the details to follow) I discovered the mother of all roach nests. Right outside my front door. They had established their own government and were preparing for full scale invasion of foreign lands. In other words, my house.
I drafted Drew for the job. But he couldn't do it alone. Together we shoveled the most foul smelling muck and roach housing I have ever dealt with. I've sprayed and cleaned and showered. But I still feel dirty. Ugh. Maybe the experience will help him think to keep his feed area clean. I really hope it will sound the death toll for the nasty critters.

Big blue bus

The Chevy Express 15 passenger van is my dream car. I mean, who isn't attracted to those sleek lines and amazing maneuverability? Said no one ever. Nope. The reason you succumb to those 4 rows of cloth benches and manual seat adjusters is one thing. Kids. Lots of them.
We've always loved to travel. One reason for that is the ability to have less interrupted conversation. At home, conversations go something like this:
David,  over morning coffee, "Hey, honey. I was thinking we should -"
Random child, "Moooooom! Tony hit me!"
Me, "hold that thought." Spank Tony,  resolve a sharing issue, change a filthy diaper, feed hungry children, get David to put babies down for naps, then send him to run the errands that only a crazy person would take kids to do, move over a load of laundry, solve the world shattering crisis Danae is currently dealing with, tell Drew to take out the trash, notice he looks like he hasn't had a shower since his latest mudbath, send him to shower, fix snack for now awake babies, clean kitchen, make supper, feed the hordes, bathe babies, change another poopy diaper (what was the point of the bath?), jammies and bedtime.  "Ok, Dear. What was it you were saying?"
David, "I think we should take a road trip. "
In the car, we have a captive audience. Conversation flows a little more smoothly. David, "You know, I think we should adopt more kids."
Random wail from the backseat.
Me, "Turn the music up, honey, we can still hear them. Yes. We definitely need more kids. Look how many seats in this van are still empty!"
In truth, the kids think the van is the coolest thing ever. Its a roving social club.  They're making up awesome names for it and thinking of all the friends they can take places now.  I'm excited to be able to spread carseats out and not have to that tilt-buckle thing. It's daunting, though, for other people. "Do you have to have a CDL to drive that thing?" My hairdresser asked me.  For the record no. No you don't.  You may need an industrial sized thermos of extra strength coffee, the economy pack of dramamine and several professional opinions that you're not as crazy as you feel. But a regular licence is fine.
I ended up with a late night trip to walmart a few days ago. Something happened that I hadn't expected.   A thirty-something year old woman with short, sporty hair pushed her cart down the row ahead of me. She stopped to unload at the 15 passenger van that had parked caddy-corner to me. I caught her eye in passing and she noticed me stop at our van. Like two English speaking people in a foreign country, we had an instant connection. Yeah. I'm a van owner too. Welcome to the small group of crazy people with too many kids to drive a cute car.