Independence Day

 It's perhaps a bit late to blog about the Fourth of July, but I'm going to do it anyway. You can see our fruit dessert that had the kiddos cheering above and the star cutout watermelon popsicles below. They were cuter than they were yummy. Fun, though.

In another "pinterest inpsired failure" on my part, I dyed juice ice cubes red and blue and then added them into juice. It turned purple, but the girls thought it was an awesome reminder of "blue and red make purple". Such positive children! This is a very good thing for a mama who so often fails at anything "pinterest-inspired"!

Miss Mouse took the following three photos. I helped her set my camera settings before Mike took the girls to fireworks; we talked about what each setting did and why we set them how we did. She came home with some pretty impressive images for a seven-year-old, I thought. We printed them off, and she entered them in the fair. She came home with two blue ribbons and a red along with a "people's choice" award for one of the photos!!! On the topic of the fair, Sunny entered a fleece tied blanket and got a blue ribbon and a "people's choice" award, as well! People loved my children's art!!! Oh, happy mama!!!

I found Manly Mouse dressed like this on the Fourth.

 It was not hard to see who did the dressing.

Our attempt at a family Independence Day photo. Mighty Mouse had been up all night on the third. Can you tell?

Really. If there was any doubt in the above photo, there's none here. This is one unhappy, tired, little boy.

Maybe some ages are easier to photograph than others....Manly doesn't always look concerned, but the newest photos I have of him looking cheery aren't on the computer yet. I love his cheeks in these, though. Can you tell that Sunny is in her element snuggling this little cuddlebug? They are peas.in.a.pod.

As I went through these photos tonight, I kind of couldn't believe how grown up the girls are looking.

I took these goofy shots on the 1st of July, but I wanted to include them to prove that following a half-way-decent night's sleep, Mighty Mouse is about the funniest little person and sweetest little boy anyone ever could meet!

He loves hats. He calls it an "at", and I'm searching desperately for a boyish one that will make him feel as happy as this pink one of Sunny's.

His latest "joke", as of August 16, is to point to himself and say "baby?" and then laugh hysterically. I laugh with him on the outside, but inside it hurts just a little because he really still IS a baby and has just had to grow up so fast that he no longer knows it.

When I Grow Up

It's humbling needing help, accepting assistance. In my experience as a mom, even a mom of three young children, I found I could do most things myself. I became quite independent, and the kids and I functioned as a fairly well-oiled machine. Then came little Manly Mouse. Four children on one parent was my tipping factor, I guess. Even with the incredible amount of help that big sisters Miss Mouse and Sunny offer, there are just times that I cannot.do.it.myself.  That's humbling for me.

However, it's not as discouraging to find I need help as I thought it might be. It's been truly ENcouraging and inspiring, in fact.  Being the needy recipient of assistance has led me to decide that when I "grow up", that is when my children grow up, one thing I'm particularly excited about is being able to offer help to others. The children really don't have to be all that "grown up", either, to start being helpers themselves, and that's one thing, as I treasure these evenings of rocking my tiny baby and these days of walking hand-in-chubby-little-hand with Mighty Mouse, that I am very, very excited to share with the kiddos.

Here are some examples from my past year:

*Last fall, just as I was definitely beginning to look and feel pregnant again, Mighty had a wild night in church. He wasn't being naughty as much as just exuberant.  Well, his exuberance tipped over his "non-spill" bowl of Cheerios. They went flying, several pews back. Of course we were right up front. Ugh. I decided to wait until after the service to pick them up, but before I could start, the family behind us had them all picked up. The two oldest children in the family, who I think were around 8 and 10, and their father had picked up our entire bowl of spilled cereal.

*Last spring we attended a going-away party for the family who picked up said Cheerios. Manly Mouse was three weeks old, and it was basically our first time out in public as a family of six. Mighty Mouse found what his sisters termed "the playground" at the house of the people hosting the party, so Mike was supervising him while I attempted to balance the car seat and plates of food for myself and each of the girls. A friend whose daughters are around our girls' ages and a bit older refused to let me get the food myself and instead waited on me, bringing us everything we needed to our table. On our way home from the party I told Mike I thought that would be one of the best things about having children who are a little older. So many times we focus on how they aren't "babies" anymore, but how fun will it be to teach them to help out other people?!

*Our second Sunday at church as a fivesome (Mike was down south, and the girls had had just more than enough of skipping worship "because Daddy's not going to be there today".....I wasn't being let off the hook by them any longer!), Mighty did great through the entire sermon. Then came Communion, and I honestly had no idea what to do with the wiggly toddler who needed mama to carry him up for Communion (because he was actually really needing mama to put him down for a nap) while I also was holding a sleeping, 7-week-old Manly Mouse.  I figured I'd manage, but then as I attempted to put Mighty's shoes back on one-handed while holding Manly (we do outdoor worship in the summer, and Mighty had managed to squirm out of his shoes during the sermon...it was good entertainment for him for that portion of the service...), a friend stepped in and asked to take Manly. I happily handed off the sleeping bundle-of-snuggles and was able to hold Mighty and get myself and the "big three" up for Communion. Manly joined our friend's family to be blessed that Sunday. It reminded me of the phrase that "it takes a village to raise a child". I was thankful for my youngest son being cared for by "the village" so that I could give a little more of me to my other little boy who needed more of me that day.

*The other day we needed groceries on perhaps the hottest day in July. It was stifling hot, but we were out of almost every snack and basic food in the house. Sure, we had lots of frozen meat, but that was really about it!  So, after Mighty's nap, we headed to the grocery store. We have a very particular system going for shopping these days. It involves Miss Mouse pushing the cart; Sunny sometimes takes a turn. Mighty rides in the stroller; Manly rides in his carseat in the stroller, while I push the stroller.  We are thankful for the drive-up option to pick up our groceries because I don't allow Miss Mouse to push the loaded cart in the parking lot. Neither do the store employees. I had planned to have her try it one day last spring, and the young men at the check out line decided they would not let her do that and instead carried our groceries out themselves (for some reason the drive-up was closed)! Very sweet!  Anyway, that particular hot day reflected Mighty's mood perfectly. He was grouchy. We got near the watermelon, and he started saying "apple". I explained they were watermelon and that we'd have to pay for them. Things went downhill from there, so we shopped the produce section with a toddler shouting "apple! apple!" in the most pathetic "please-can't-I-have-an-apple" tone that you ever did hear. I stayed fairly calm on the outside but had made the decision to get a few produce items and beat it out of the store. Until we got over to the grapefruit/orange section and an elderly woman leaned down to Mighty, who was in tears, and told him his shirt was "sure nice" and asked him where he got it. As Mighty's tearful shouts of "apple" subsided, my tears nearly fell because the woman reminded me of how my grandma might have calmly talked to a little person in a store. Mighty didn't answer the lady, but he smiled and calmed down after she visited with him. I guess he just needed his mind taken off the forbidden "apple". We ended up getting our entire list, thanks to that kind woman who helped out a sad little boy instead of just staring and shaking her head or something. I hear other people getting that kind of reaction, and I wonder if I just don't notice when it happens to me or if I'm just somehow blessed to find all these really kind people in my path!  Either way, I want to be like that elderly woman someday.

*Today we proudly gathered up a summer's worth of library program projects and headed to the library to fulfill our program requirements. The girls spent hours and hours on this for the reward of having their pictures in the paper. When we got there, Manly had not yet fallen asleep for his carseat nap the way I had hoped and planned. While the girls waited in line to turn in their projects, I walked Manly and Mighty around in the stroller, hoping Manly would close his eyes and have a cat nap. No such luck. We waited behind a family trying to get a library card, and then we let a young mom go ahead of us to rent a movie; her baby and husband had already gone out to the car because apparently that baby wasn't taking his or her carseat nap either! Finally it was our turn. The girls proudly laid their drawings and coloring sheets and projects on the counter along with wallet-size smiling pictures of themselves.....and were promptly told that they hadn't done everything they needed. The young man at the counter obviously was not a parent...nor probably an uncle...or a babysitter, even, and he just insisted that even though the "challenge question" sheet said, "parent may tailor to child's ability", it had to all be filled out in order to qualify. He didn't look at the drawings the girls had spent two entire afternoons on. He didn't ask what "special powers" they gave their robots that they were supposed to come up with. He just insisted and insisted that the spots they'd left blank - that were blank because I followed the instruction allowing me to tailor the questions to their abilities and ages - disqualified them from completing the program. He suggested I go google the answers and have them write them in the blank. Never mind that I had intentionally NOT let the girls just google the answers to these questions because I try to teach them that the best research is done by reading books rather than trusting wikipedia; never mind that we had a baby who had begun to fuss his little heart out; never mind that Mighty was standing, by this time, in his stroller trying to figure out why his biggest sister had alligator tears dripping down her face; never mind that in my opinion, my googling the answer and then writing it in for them, because that's what I'd have had to do with the limited time we had, constitutes cheating......It was really horrible. Miss Mouse was sobbing by the time we reached the computer kiosks, which it turned out I didn't even know how to log onto; I was crying by the time I figured out how to log in; Manly was screaming bloody murder by this time.....Into the middle of this, a kind woman who'd been in line behind us came over with a scrap of paper on which she'd written the author and name of a children's book series that she said her now-grown children had enjoyed. She quietly said how sorry she was and how she could tell the girls had worked so hard on their drawings - the drawings the librarian hadn't even looked at. I told her I'd never have expected them to be able to leave blanks on their sheets, except for that little note about parents being able to make it age-appropriate for their children. She just nodded and said again how sorry she was and how she wished she could do something. I pulled myself together and thanked her for the book suggestions and her kindness. We left the library without having been able to get the girls' sheets filled out. Miss Mouse cried so hard I didn't have the heart to take her on the grocery store run I had planned. In attempt to show her some "solidarity" or something - perhaps my own silent protest - I refused to turn in my adult summer library program sheet that I'd brought with in order to win a cool water bottle. That'll show...somebody...something. Or not.  In all it was a really awful culmination to an entire summer's worth of effort, but the sting was softened so much by the kindness of a person who could have easily looked at us and wondered why in the world I would bring a fussy baby into a library to turn in half-complete sheets. I want to be like her when my children are grown; I want to offer the mom of younger children suggestions for fun books, and I want to see beyond the appearance of chaos to the carefully drawn and colored pictures, works of art from the hearts of little girls.

I'm planning to email the children's librarian about the situation, but rather than spend more time than I already have fuming about the situation, I decided to incorporate it into this post that I've wanted to write for quite awhile. Because really, it ended up being a lesson for the girls and me about how to be kind to others when they need a friend; and maybe that lesson is even more important than having one's picture featured in the paper......

Of Mice....And A Man

What an exciting day we had here today!  It started out slowly. Mike needed to be two hours away for church this morning, which gave me, unfortunately, an excuse to stay home this morning. But I enjoyed my coffee on our cracked patio while watching the big three play in the yard, and I enjoyed reading to the girls, finishing up The Trumpet of the Swan, while the boys napped in the early afternoon. It was a lazy, idyllic sort of day.

Manly Mouse is trying his hardest to nap in his bassinet these days. Usually he can do about 30-45 minutes at a shot during the day, but if I can get him in there without nursing, with just snuggles and shushing and singing and rocking, then I figure that's a success. It's such fun to see him wake up smiling and cooing, which he doesn't do as readily if he's eaten himself to sleep. Shorter naps from him does make it seem like I'm constantly putting him down for a nap, but if he naps, even for those short periods, in his crib, then it does give me two free hands to attend to the other kiddos. This is a good thing. So is holding a sleeping, sweet, toothless little fellow. Win, win, either way, I guess.

Anyway, my point was that Manly was napping in his crib late this afternoon, so I decided to put the other three out in the yard, turn on the sprinkler, and have some fun watching them get soaking wet while doing some much-needed garden-weeding myself.  By the time I got all three herded into swimming suits and sunscreened and got the sprinkler turned on, I figured I had already used up half of Manly's naptime, but still, it was sort of exciting to put on my gardening gloves and head out to the garden.

It was going along splendidly. The weeds, though taller than I am, were pulling out beautifully, and I was pumped to see that some of our turnips really did come up! Along I went, pulling, pulling, pulling, until I noticed some fuzz in the soil. Well, I thought, that looks like Jola (pronounced Joe-lah) the rabbit has been laying in our garden. She's our "pet" wild rabbit that we watch in the yard. Mighty thinks she's a cat and meows at the door whenever he sees her. Strange, thought I, that a rabbit would stay in the garden long enough to lose that amount of hair.

All these thoughts ran through my mind in quick succession and I brushed my fingers against the furry spot.....and suddenly jolted away with a screech when I saw tiny little moving creatures in what I immediately identified as a mouse nest!!!!

Goodness. What a fright. What a startle.

The girls were overjoyed, of course. Little furry creatures with twitching ears? Babies? Um, yeah, right up these girls' alley. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. We have a mouse nest full of little baby mice in the middle of our jungle of a garden.

Impressively I never did start to shake. Got a bit dizzy as the shock wore off. Thanked God that I had my gardening gloves on. But no shaking.

To my Mom's and sister's (and maybe everyone else who is reading this's) dismay, the girls and I decided to really hope Mike would not insist on killing the family of mice. The girls kept going over to the garden to check on them. Mighty went over periodically and said, "Ohhhhhh", though I'm pretty sure he didn't see the little family given that they were still fairly camoflauged. Miss Mouse tried valiantly to take a picture of the mouse family, but all she kept getting was the furry nest.  I, um, chose not to go back over to look at the squirmy little things.

For some reason, though, as disgusted as I was to have nearly grabbed a handful of mice, their little wriggling bodies all cuddled together and covered with their mama's fur made me smile. And it hurt my stomach to think of Mike killing them. After all, if I'd have kept the garden weeded, little Mouse Mama probably wouldn't have thought it looked like an abandoned jungle, perfect in which to raise her brood. Plus, the girls love all things gross like that - currently we are owners of an ant farm, a wormery (which I somehow end up watering every now and then because I happen to love worms as much as Sunny does!), a jar with a caterpillar and a chrysalis, and, now, a garden-mouse-nest.  I'd have laughed if someone had painted my life before my eyes like this in high school. Laughed.

However, even back then I'd have cried about a mouse losing her life protecting her babies. Sheesh. It's only been in recent years I've been able to handle driving by road kill.

Anyway, back to our afternoon. I texted Mike something along the lines of "I have a story for you!!", so he came in the door ready for an earful. I described the incident to him, resulting in more than a few chuckles on his part as he imagined the scene in his mind. Then I asked if he would consider not terminating the mouse family. Well, that gained me quite a look and the response of, "They're outside. Why would I kill them?".  We decided to leave the mouse tenants in the garden alone, though I'm not sure whether or not Miss Mouse and Sunny will now be able to donate their produce from that garden to the food bank.....I thought of ways to sterilize the produce, but it didn't seem any safer or friendlier to give bleach-washed-produce to hungry people than to give them food mice had trounced all over.....

So, for now, the mice stay where they are. I explained to the girls that if they stay outside, they are our friends, and they can stay. Just like the ants we spent several weeks learning about. If they stay outside, we can be happy to see them (at least the kind we have up here). But if they come inside, I will melt their exoskeletons with essential oil/alcohol spray faster than they can take a breath. And I won't feel bad about it. Not one bit. Same goes for mice. If they stay in the yard, they're welcome. If they venture into our garage, vehicles, or house, that means war. My fingers are crossed that the three random cats we have patrolling our yard will also help with this endeavour.  Honestly, I think that there are probably mice all over the city, and we just don't often run across their abodes. These particular nesting rodents cannot be the first to have summered in our yard. Thankfully we haven't had a mouse problem even so. I am prepared to take public blame if we suddenly have an influx of rodents this winter.

Interestingly, I asked Mike tonight what he'd have done if I had begged him to go terminate them as soon as he got home. He smiled and said, "I'd have handed you a hammer and told you to do it yourself if it was that important.".  So, apparently, my great hunter has his limits. The two bears on our walls in the basement, and the several more that have been in our freezers, the rattlesnake that is still frozen out in the garage freezer, and the countless (no, not countless - he has a running tab) four legged creatures that we've eaten are purposeful hunts. Apparently killing rodent families isn't so much in his recreational ideal. I told him I loved him so much more for it.

And then Manly made the biggest burping sound he's ever made, and Mike told me I had disgusted my son with my mushy-romantic talk.

Incidentally, my grandpa, Papa, told of having seen a mama shrew carrying her babies frantically ahead of his tractor as he was plowing a field. He recalled thinking how easily he could have just kept going and run right over her, but he chose instead to slow the tractor and let her get out of that particular row before continuing on. He said he just couldn't run over a mama trying to save her babies.

Similarly, my own Dad had a raccoon problem in a barn last year. Mama raccoon had gotten into the attic of the barn and had a litter (litter?) of raccoon babies. Dad knew where he could block the mama from getting back to her babies. It would have been easy to do - babies would have starved to death, exterminating a potential problem. A dangerous potential problem, really. But Dad couldn't - wouldn't - do it. He let the mama raccoon come and go and raise her little ones. I have a feeling I know how the story ends and that it did not end well for the raccoon family, but it ended a whole lot more sportingly than letting baby animals of any kind starve to death in the attic of a barn.

So now, tonight, Mike made a choice that his daughters will tell their children about - the time when Mom found the mouse nest in the garden, and Dad refused to kill the mice. Hopefully the story doesn't end in Mom and kiddos moving out of the house for a period of time in November so that Daddy could get rid of the mouse infestation then. But, I'm proud tonight and so much more in love than fourteen years ago when I *thought* I was really in love.

**I did check on the mouse nest tonight, and Mama Mouse has moved some of the fur I accidentally scraped off back on top of her nest. The mice are not visible, but you can see the fur covering moving in and out in the rhythm of their breathing.