Happy Halloween!

Punctuation and Astronauts

 

There's an awful lot of "big girl" going on in our house these days.

 

Can you see the camo-boots in this picture? Yep, a trendy headband (thank you, Auntie Stephi!), a skirt, a sparkly shirt, a pink kickball....and camo boots. That's our Miss Mouse, and we love it!

 



 

We had one great kickball game going that afternoon. Mighty Mouse napped for hours in his crib, so the girls and I hung out in the front yard, enjoying what might have been one of the last sunny, fall days.

We've been a little preoccupied this year with a certain smallest Mouse to get our leaves raked. The elder Mice haven't minded a bit!

 



I love these pictures because I think Miss Mouse looks like such a nerd in them!!! Hopefully anyone reading this knows me well enough to know that's a compliment! The little girl descends from two of the biggest nerds she'll ever know, so she's fitting in just fine with her sparkles and camo. If she wasn't so incredibly sensitive, I think we could already have a Star Wars geek on our hands. As it is, I think we'll wait on that awhile....VeggieTales still isn't setting very well with her.

 



Notice the boots? Notice the squint of pure autumn joy on her face? I love it!

 



 

I'm not sure there are words for these!

 

 

She raked up her own pile since her parents weren't going to be doing it.

 

 

It's been so fun having a kindergartener around! We had a great summer. It wasn't one without challenges and bumps, but we figured a lot of things out and were clicking along pretty smoothly by the mid-summer point.  It was good to get a break (a "break"!) when Mighty Mouse arrived; I think we were all ready for some time off, even though we don't spend an entire 6-7 hour period sitting at the table everyday or anything.  Three weeks, though, was enough, and we were back at it. It was as good to get back into kindergarten again as it was to take a break. It's trickier, for sure, with a newborn around, so we're dealing with other bumps and challenges. We'll get through them, though, too; I keep telling myself there will be a time again when we wake up one day and realize we're "clicking along" again instead of chugging and huffing and puffing along! It's been especially fun getting to go on two field trips lately through the local homeschool group that we [finally] joined. The first was to a nature center about an hour away and took my mom's assistance while she was here for me to get a kindergartener, a preschooler, and a two-week old out there. We were "only" fifteen minutes late! Miss Mouse didn't miss much, and she was so, SO proud! The next field trip was last week, and I did it on my own with all three. We visited a fire station. It definitely freaked Sunny out leading to some wild behavior later (Miss Mouse would have thrown an inexplicable 45-minute fit; Sunny gets wild), but it was totally worth it. The girls have been really excited about fire fighters and fire stations ever since. It was great for them to get to see a fireman in his full gear, and it was ridiculously fun for ALL of us to see them slide down the fire pole! The only thing that could have been better would have been to get to try to slide myself.....but, of course, that's not allowed.

 

One fun thing this fall has been seeing how Miss Mouse is stretching her vocabulary. It's always been decent, but she's getting so much more "adult". My Mom took her to pick up Applebee's carside-to-go one night, and they drove by a chiropractor's office where Mike and I have both gone from time to time. Miss Mouse pointed it out to my mom and said, "That's where Mommy went to get punctuation!"  My Mom is so good with things like this! She covered her mouth until she could stop laughing and then gently said to Miss Mouse, "Oh! I think my chiropractor calls it accupuncture; do you think that's the same thing your mom had?" Of course, Miss Mouse said, "Yes! THAT'S what it was called!".

 

The day we were playing kickball outside, Sunny decided to start stealing the kickball and running under our neighbors' bush with it. The girls were having quite a high time being silly. Suddenly, Miss Mouse says to her sister, "You are like an astronaut!" I started laughing (because I'm not quite as quick as my mom!) and asked her what she meant. She said it again. So I asked if she knew what an astronaut was. She said, "Well, like someone at a football game who gets the crowd excited!". I told her an astronaut is someone who goes to outer space like Neil Armstrong - she knows him from our preschool unit on him. She looked confused, but after some thought she said, "Oh, I think I meant 'mascot'".  Have I mentioned I love this???!!

Smile!!

A contemplative Mighty Mouse

 



 

A smirking Mighty Mouse - he started last Wednesday

 

 

I'd count this as a definite smile....

 

 

 

Here, though, is the all-out grin! He looks so much like his sister Sunny and his Great Grandpa Don and Great Auntie Linda who both had/have wide, infectious smiles.

 

*Even in these not-technically-spectacular photos you can see how broken out the little guy's face is. I actually took him in for a doctor's appointment today to find out what was going on with his face since he was red and sore looking from ear to ear, behind the ears, and from forehead to chin. It turns out that on his cheeks he has "infant acne" which was a relief since it will just clear up on its own, but on his forehead, eyebrows, nose, ears, and behind the ears, he has cradle cap. I was so bummed! Miss Mouse had it really badly in her hair, and she lost a lot of hair when I combed the scales out. I'm not sure if it is recommended to do that anymore, but hopefully we can get control of it now when it is "just" on his face and not yet in his hair so badly. His doctor recommended a healing ointment that is supposed to show lots of progress in three to five days. Otherwise he might have to go to a medication to clear it up, but hopefully that won't be needed. On the one hand, I'm really glad it is not attributable to anything I'm eating or doing to him (food, laundry soap, etc.); on the other hand, I'm really hoping that this cream works quickly because he just looks so sore and raw. My usual mommy-guilt was pretty much alleviated when I asked the doctor if I had contributed to the cradle cap; she said that it is more common and often worse in breastfed babies because of their moms' hormonal fluctuations. Even I am not going to feel guilty about hormone fluctuations! It's not like I can do much about them! So hopefully we'll have lots more smiling pictures in the near future without sore-looking cradle cap present!

[Finally] Introducing Mighty Mouse!

 

Though in these pictures I took on September 18th before we left the hospital, he may look like Mighty Sleepy Mouse, he really is "Mighty Mouse".

 

 

Mighty Mouse was all of ten minutes old, and he grabbed onto his Daddy's hand and held on! Tightly! It was both amazing and incredibly precious.

 

At the hospital, he was too long for the blankets, causing terrible difficulty in keeping him swaddled 'properly'.  He was born at 21.5 inches and 9 pounds, 2 ounces. For a baby, there is a lot of him to love! I've explained to the girls that in a room of ten babies, he'd be taller and heavier than nine of them. It was rather fun telling our friends and family his weight and height. After three babies all around the upper-six-poundish mark, no one really expected Mighty Mouse to be a whole lot bigger than eight-or-so pounds. No one, that is, except his Mommy and Daddy! His three pound head start on his sisters explains so many things about our experience with this pregnancy that it really was more affirming than shocking to hear his official stats.  With all the excitement about his size, I should add that we are completely and totally in love with him - every last ounce and inch - and think he is just perfect!

 

So many blog posts have rattled around in my head these past few weeks. I have one on why I am so very thrilled (and terrified) to have a little boy to raise; I have one on our adjusting to this family expansion; I have one on the way Miss Mouse confuses a few words here and there lately as she is expanding her vocabulary into larger and larger words.

 

I hope I remember some of those posts when I have a bit more time to type. I really do. For now, it's taking every ounce of my energy and time to keep our house running now that Mike is back at work and my Mom is gone. Mike got two lovely, amazing, incredible weeks off this time. It was unbelievably great to be together as a family of five for this adjustment. The day he went back to work, my Mom came for a week. Between the two of them, they got me through most of the evenings where I would cry for literally no reason at 9 p.m. My sister did the same thing in June after the birth of her first baby, so I think I'll blame it on hormones or heredity! Whatever the reason, it was a good stage to get through with support around! This past week, on Monday, we started back up with kindergarten, albeit a scaled-back version for now. We're hitting the basics - math and phonics along with some sciency (is that a word?)/social study type fun. We're trying to do lots of projects, too....definitely my way of handling the guilt I feel for all the time that is necessarily devoted to the newest member of the household and, thereby, taken from the older members (mainly of the three- and five-year old variety). I think it's probably best to handle my guilt by project-overload rather than by going out with a credit card to buy them their little heart's desires, but I suppose time will only tell!  So far the guilt is pretty much completely unfounded since Miss Mouse and Sunny adore their little brother and would stand on their heads (have attempted this, I should add!) to help him.

 

Welcome to our family, Mighty Mouse!

 

 

Panda

The girls and I saw on the news the other day that there was a baby panda born at the San Diego Zoo. Miss Mouse picked up right away on the fact that there was a zoocam through which you can watch the little "it" anytime. They won't know if it is a boy or girl for a few weeks.  Though she didn't really understand what the zoocam was, it sounded cool. I explained that it was sort of like skyping with the pandas except that only we could see them, not the other way around at all.

Now keep in mind the girls have just seen video of a giant panda mom and her tiny cub on the news.

Also keep in mind that we did look on the zoo website and viewed the sleeping panda and baby for several minutes. I thought it was fairly boring to watch a bear sleep; the girls thought it was "super interesting".

So, we're clear on the fact that there has been quite a lot of panda watching by this point?

Good. Then my semi-despair at the question of the Mice may be more understandable.  After watching the zoocam, Sunny asks me:
"Mommy, are you bigger than a giant panda?"

Um, no. Not even right now, thank you very much. 

Miss Mouse was so astonished at my answer that she reiterated the question, apparently to be sure I had understood:
"Mom, really, a giant panda is bigger than you?"

Shockingly, yes. Yes, they are. I even googled it, and a giant panda female is around 200 pounds with a giant panda male being around 250. Add to that their massively fluffy hair.....I'm not sure who was more shocked by this conversation, but I was definitely the most entertained!

Harvesting

My parents are beginning their wheat harvest. They've already finished harvesting their peas. My sister and my nephew are up at the farm, ready to help....my sister, at least. Matthias will help by lightening the days for Grammy and Grandpa Bob in between tractor repairs, truck repairs, radio repairs, the normal harvest events!

But we're here.

We love it here. We're doing great with our basic schedule of a relaxed breakfast, kindergarten, play time, lunch, reading time, "Mama time" (each girls' time with me individually)/quiet time (each girls' time alone), more play time, dinner, clean up, and bedtime. I'm a farm girl, though, and it's been several years since I've been home during wheat harvest.

Sooooo.....today we drove out to the farm that grows the food we get through our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to take part in our harvest event opportunities of sweet corn, green beans, and tomatoes. As usual, I overestimated myself and thought I could feasibly do the harvesting by myself with the girls. It didn't seem like something that would really be up Mike's alley.  Fortunately, I'm married to someone smarter than myself, so Mike just shook his head at my "do-it-myself" plan! We loaded up immediately after breakfast this morning and drove the hour or so out of town to "the farm" (I made sure Sunny knew it wasn't really "THE farm").

The first pick we decided on was the tomatoes. To our surprise and delight, the girls' two little friends hopped out of their van with their daddy at the same time we were hopping out! What fun!  Each of our families were pretty happy to come away with two five gallon pails of tomatoes!

For us it was then on to the cornfield. Miss Mouse identified this pick as her absolute favorite. In her words, "I felt so 'big girl' when we picked corn because when Daddy would take the corn up to the van, he left me to keep picking, just like a grown-n-up!".  To be clear, this field consisted of a few rows of corn - long rows, but it was a narrow field, making it definitely safe to "leave" Miss Mouse in the field. Sunny, on the other hand, did not appreciate the corn pick quite as much as the tomato. With the tomatoes, she carefully and delicately placed the tomatoes I picked into the pail we shared. The corn just seemed "scratchy" to her, and she complained basically the whole time that she "could not walk in here".  Thankfully it did not take as long as it could have to pick 120 ears of corn. The enthusiasm of Miss Mouse certainly did not hurt in the speed with which the ears of corn added up!

We had a much happier Sunny when we moved onto the bean field. She refused to pick any beans, but she enjoyed picking bouquets of weeds. Miss Mouse was pooped out by the time we got to the beans, too, and ended up dumping her bucket into mine. So much for my idea of picking three of the buckets full of beans (we have "tickets" to use and could have used two tickets to pick three buckets rather than one ticket to pick two buckets...we actually could have gotten four buckets for two tickets, but I only had three buckets along...and we were already out of bags due to the massive amounts of corn and tomatoes already in the back of the van)! It turned out to be just fine, though, because by the time my bucket was 85% full, my abdominal muscles, the ones that still even exist, were screaming at me that they were completely and totally done bending over, done crawling on the ground, and definitely done having to stand back up again. Thus, we came away with two nearly-full five gallon buckets of green beans. I was thankful that we have grown purple beans in our backyard in the past so that the girls were not as enamored by the purple bean field as the rest of the children there today; my body really couldn't have taken anymore picking.

Sunny's favorite part of the day came just as we were getting ready to leave. I needed to turn in our tickets at the main farmyard garden, so I turned the girls loose on the flower field, which is a "free" pick meaning that we didn't need to use a ticket for it; they could just pick as many flowers as they wanted. While they picked their fills of flowers, Mike headed over to the free basil pick for one last hurrah for me.  All I can say is that this man must love me; he filled our remaining five gallon pail with basil for me to turn into pesto! Yep, I thought it was loving when he engineered a beautiful engagement proposal, but I couldn't have imagined he'd ever be happily picking a five gallon pail of basil for me! 

It wasn't until tonight that Sunny did confess to me that she stayed "close" to her sister "when we were picking fwowers because I was a little scared to pick them alone". She did say the flower pick was her favorite part of the day, but I was glad she was willing to identify her scared feelings (she often refuses to identify a feeling....the best way I can tell if I "hit it" correctly is that the correct feeling is the one at which she shouts, "NO!" the loudest!), even though I felt like a horribly neglectful mother leaving her to pick flowers alone if she was scared!  I did explain to her that I was watching her the entire time and was never far away, though it must have felt like it.

After all this harvesting of yummy, locally-grown, organic (I think?) goodness, where did we grab lunch on the way home? Yep, that's right. McDonald's. Ish!  What a fun day, though!  I still miss the smell of wheat and the taste of it, too, but it was ridiculously fun to harvest so much food with the Mice that we know we'll be enjoying all winter long! I couldn't stop smiling the whole way back home!

Pink

 Pink. It's my favorite color.

 

Apparently the girls were feeling particularly feminine today and particularly fond of pink (thanks to Auntie Steph for the super cute outfits!), so I took advantage of the copious amounts of pink floating around to do some of our own back-to-school shots.  It doesn't particularly matter to me that we started our kindergarten on June 4 or that I have pictures of Miss Mouse leaping into the air with excitement on her first day or that as everyone else is gearing up to start school tomorrow, we are getting set for a break sometime soon.....Between all the back-to-school talk circulating in their groups of friends and all the buy-our-store's-clothes-advertisements during the news these days, the girls were eager to be "models" for our back-to-school "advertisements"!

Our sweet Miss Mouse looks more grown-up everyday! She certainly is a school girl!

 



 

Sunny's been having some sleeping trouble as of late - just off and on nightmares, but she tends to be awake for a looooong time after having one - so she's a little bit more difficult to capture on camera these days. I miss her big, cheesy, for-the-camera grin and am hoping it comes back someday soon (along with many, many, many solid nights of sleep in a row for her....my solid nights are numbered anyway, but as long as she gets them, I can manage without them, I think!).

This isn't a sad Miss Mouse; it's a contemplative Miss Mouse.

 



 

 

Would you believe the day started out with these two Mice in pajamas having a "wrestling contest" in the living room? Now, here by afternoon, they're all frilly and floofy in pink and pearls. I love it!

 

 

Last but not least, I joined the Mice for some 36 week pictures. I've been wanting to get some since Monday, when we were actually 36 on-the-dot, but it appears we have been losing a shocking amount of daylight in the past few weeks. By the time we get the Mice to bed, there isn't enough daylight in our backyard for a proper without-flash photo of my tummy! So, I did what I could with a tripod in the backyard this afternoon. If nothing else, I think these show how deliriously excited these two big sisters are to meet "Brother". The other day I pointed out to Sunny that he will have a name other than "Brother" once he is living outside of me; she was sort of shocked by that and seemed somewhat disappointed even after I attempted to console her with the fact that she could still call him Brother if she wanted! The next few weeks will be an adventure; this whole pregnancy has been quite the adventure sharing it with two small, big sisters - a precious, amazing, humbling, exciting, exhausting, exhiliarating, lovely adventure.