Lots of snow

Me: Looks like we might get more snow tonight.
Sam: What?? We already have like 4 feet!
Frankie: No. We have 2 foots.
Me: You're right, Frankie. We do each have 2 feet.

I may not be keeping up on pictures, but Elena does a pretty good job now that she has a camera of her own. 

And speaking of all the snow, we've had more than our fair share of snow days and late starts/early outs. The wind chill has been cold enough to drive the kids back inside pretty quickly, but they have had fun building forts inside! (They're not so enthusiastic about cleaning up the forts when they are done.)

Here's a few shots of their latest 2-story creation (also taken by Elena):

Christmas Poems

I failed to get any pictures of our family at Xmas this year - I've really been dropping the ball on documenting anything on camera lately. I recall one of Seth's aunt, who is the 7th of 10 children telling me once that she doesn't have a single photograph of herself as a child. Now I can see why - especially considering she lived long before the age of the constantly available smartphone camera....which I don't have...which is probably part of my problem.

Our sister-in-law got a couple of pictures on our hay ride with Seth's family Xmas day so I have those at least:

And my sister got a video of the kids reciting their Christmas poems for my mom. Grandma's request for a gift this year was for all of the grandchildren to memorize and recite one poem. They all did a great job - except for Frankie. I think he finally said his poem after lots of goofing off and the cameras had been put away, but you won't get to see it.

A few are hard to hear so I added captions. They each memorized a new poem for her birthday this month as well. I wasn't there for that one, but I'll see if I can get them to recite them again on film sometime soon (don't hold your breath!)

E-learning days

I got a little taste today of what it might be like to homeschool. It reaffirmed my decision not to homeschool. I had been super gung-ho about it before Elena got to Kindergarten age. And then I realized that my lack of focus and ability to keep a clean house under normal circumstances combined with the very social personalities of all of our children (especially throwing little ones in the mix) was a recipe for total disaster.

School was cancelled Monday through Wednesday this week due to ridiculously cold temperatures (this morning it was -30 when we woke up). Unfortunately this landed on Catholic Schools Week - the funnest week of the year for our kids.  Anyway, many area schools have implemented what they call "e-learning" days, where homework is sent home on snow days for the kids to do so they don't have to make up the day later. I do like the not having to make it up later part.

Overall it wasn't really too bad. Upsides included the fact that I've been able to wear my cozy pajamas for the last 3 days, we've all been able to sleep in (although some chose not to) and the total time spent on school work was probably 2-3 hours over the course of 2 days so we still got a HUGE break.

And these were the downsides (because downsides are always more interesting than upsides, aren't they?):

1) Lots of crying - Charlie had to get his work done before he could go play (I had already given him quite a bit of playtime at this point) which resulted in a good 45 minutes of crying before he sat down to do his 30 minutes of homework.

2) Lots of yelling (on my part) after hearing "Why do I have to do this?" "Can I go now?" "I need the computer now." "I'm still using it." "Frankie is cutting up my homework with a scissors!" "Where is a ruler?" "How do you spell....?" "I don't know how to do this!" "Am I done yet?" "Can you get Frankie away from me?", etc all coming at me at once for a solid hour. Frankie was crying a good chunk of the time because he saw everyone else on the computer and wanted to work on it himself. Then there was checking the homework to make sure it was done right and having to enforce a few re-dos (Oh the Horror!!!!). On top of it all I suddenly remembered 2 important tax documents that I needed to file immediately right in the middle of this so that didn't help.

3) More TV for Frankie than I normally allow. If the kids are all gone, Frankie can sometimes play independently for awhile without needing my immediate attention - it's not frequent, but it happens. But if the kids are home, he generally needs to be interfering with whatever one of us is trying to do all the time. Normally we just manage to do our thing with him in the mix or we take turns distracting him/pinning him down but that wasn't going so well with schoolwork. I finally had to just plunk him in front of the TV until everyone was done with their work, which didn't work that well either because the other 3 kept wandering away from their work to go watch TV with him.

4) A ridiculously messy house. We spent all morning Monday getting the house cleaned up since I've been gone the last 2 weekends and will be busy again the next 4 weekends. Well, that was all pretty much undone and then some during the brief period we spent on schoolwork (and taxes) this morning.

I was reminded of a blog post I read awhile back by a blogger named Simcha Fisher, who used to homeschool and quit somewhere around the arrival of her 7th or 8th child. As an explanation of why she quit homeschooling, she shares the picture below (to which I do not own any rights, for which I apologize) of their first day of homeschooling one year. I'm pretty sure things would be the same in our house. They were wondering why the toddler was letting them get their math done, and then they found this:

Remember Bob Ross?

Seth and the kids were trying to find a show to watch that everyone could enjoy, which of course resulted in every kid arguing that their particular favorite, from Team Umi Zumi to the Cosby Show, would be the best show for the family to watch.

While they were looking, he happened to see that Bob Ross was on and clicked on it to show the kids this hippie artist from our childhood. And they LOVED it. They were all engrossed the entire show and when it was done they begged to watch another one. Elena said, "I could watch this all day."

At least now we know what to pick when we want to watch something together. For those of you who don't know Bob Ross - or like me, knew him but didn't know his name, it's this guy:

Green eyes?

The other day Frankie went into the bathroom, and after a little while I heard him yell out: "YEEEESSSSS!!!! YESS!!! YES! YES! YES!" And then he ran out of the bathroom exclaiming, "MOM, I HAVE GREEN EYES!!!!"

For the record his eyes are still blue, but green is his favorite color. None of the kids' eyes are quite as blue as Seth's so I suppose he was able to convince himself they were green.

You can't see his eyes in this picture, but it's a good belly pic anyway. I'm about half-way through now, and Frankie is enjoying his new pillow. 

Language through a 5-year-old's eyes

I was watching something on TV in Spanish, and the characters started laughing. Charlie noticed they were laughing, and here's the brief conversation we had.

Charlie: "Mom, how do people laugh in Spanish?"

Me: "The same way we do."

Charlie: "But laughing is in English."

Me: "No, it's not. Laughing is universal. People laugh in every language in the world."

Charlie then proceeded to try out a wide variety of laughs. When he was done, he said: "Mom, did I laugh in Spanish???"

Scaring Daddy

The kids had "ugly sweater day" at school last week. Here is what Charlie wore to school. It doesn't show in the picture, but the headband has blinking red lights on it in addition to the big elf ears.

Right after I took this picture, I told Charlie he could go and wake Daddy up. I didn't really think about what Charlie was wearing. Or the fact that I normally wake him up and not Charlie. Or the fact that Seth tends to freak out easily when woken from a deep sleep. Nor did I take Charlie's quirky personality into consideration.

So instead of going up and just telling Seth it was time to wake up like I thought he would, Charlie turned on his blinking red lights, snuck into the dark room and proceeded to silently hover over Seth's face until he woke up. The result was that Seth opened his eyes to tiny blinking lights and huge ears an inch from his face, which startled him pretty good. He said he's just glad he didn't impulsively punch Charlie upon waking.

This kid never ceases to crack me up.

Sam's 10th Birthday

We had Sam's 10th birthday party last week, which entailed having nine 3rd and 4th grade boys over at our house. There were several more we could have invited, but we finally had to limit him to just inviting school/neighborhood friends. They spent the first hour running around the house chasing/wrestling/attacking each other in every room of the house. Then Seth braved the cold and brought the whole crew to a large snow pile in town so they could go sledding for an hour. It did kind of double as his birthday party, too, after all. Only a couple of sleds broke and there were no major injuries so I considered that a success.

Then came time to feed them. Fortunately we had enough food to keep them happy and they managed to sit down and be relatively still for a few minutes. Want to know what nine 10-year old boys talk about when they are all stuck together in one room? Poop. That's pretty much it. Try as we might to change the topic of conversation (and we did!), they kept just circling back to poop. It started by sharing every story they have ever heard/experienced involving poop...which then became making up outlandish stories about poop...which digressed into just spastically shouting the word "Poop!" at random....and finished with a chorus of songs such as "Poop! There it is" and "I Poop." 

Ok, I'm not being completely honest. To be fair, they did occasionally change the topic to farts.  At least that was when parents are within earshot - I seemed to notice a change to the topic of girls from time to time as I moved further away from the group. It honestly terrifies me to think how the conversations go when adults are completely removed from the picture.

That was followed by an all out nerf-gun battle all over the house. And then we tried to settle them down with a movie - which worked for the first half of the movie anyway.

All in all, they had lots of fun and our house survived with only a few minor things broken aside from my dreams of having a somewhat tasteful and organized party at a sound level of under 80 decibels. I was unable to capture the crew all in one place long enough to get a picture so you'll just have to do your best to visualize it all.

Flirting

Charlie was looking at the jacket to a movie he hadn't seen, and asked if a couple on the back was married. I said they're not married, but they like each other.

Later he showed the picture and told Seth, "This guy and this girl like each other."
So Seth said, "Oh? Do they flirt a lot in the movie?"
Charlie thought about it and said, "No. I don't think there's any farting in this movie."

Halloween and All Saints

St. Ed's school had their annual Saints Day Contest this year. It's one of my favorite events: I love seeing all the creative costumes. I do not envy the judges at all because the kids all do such a good job every year. Sam and Charlie both got first place this year for their age group. Charlie was St. Joseph and Sam was St. Lawrence. Fortunately most biblical and saints costumes can be created with old pillowcases and sheets. Elena's was a little more complicated this year as she chose St. Catherine Laboure, who has a habit similar to The Flying Nun. I had to leave for work before they were fully dressed, and Seth had an early meeting so unfortunately we were dependent on their teachers for photos this year. We're still waiting on Elena's, but I'll share as soon as I can.

 And for Halloween this year we had a Ninja Turtle, Chewbacca, a "Good Dragon" as Frakie called himself, and Annabeth from the Percy Jackson book series. The extras are some of the local cousins.