Foresting and Kid Dates

Katie and her friend Frances have discovered that warm weather means a plethora of garter snakes in the forest.

The bridge is the favorite spot for these three...using big sticks to play with leverage, small sticks and dandelions to throw in the stream to play with the current.

{Dancy, Thora, Samson}

One day he might go over...

Thora has a flower garden in the forest!

Crossing the Creek

Train Game!

This little boy adopted Katie the one time we saw him in our forest group. His mom said he likes to play with older girls, but they don't usually let him. Katie knew just how to handle him, though!

Foresting always ends like this. There are four kids in this picture.

After wayyy too long living with Dancy's overly long, thin, tangly, hair that got in her food all the time, I finally told her it was time to chop. Dancy already had a date scheduled with Shad, so Shad just added the haircut in. Same as her sisters, Dancy loved all the chat time!

And then they went ice skating! And took loads of pictures of and with each other. Dancy loves her new haircut, but loved it even more when she got home and Katie said it looked like Black Widow's hair from Infinity War.

Quick nap in between dates...

{Dancy, Shad, Katie}

That same evening, Shad had a date scheduled with Katie. They got a box of ice cream cones (and had to eat them all, so that meant two each) and walked around the mall. Then they ended up at Big 5 where Katie got all hoppin' excited over volleyballs and wanted to buy a yellow one for me for Mother's Day. She's awesome like that!

Katie liked this hat at the comic book store.

The kids have been earning dates with parents because I decided that'd be a good reward for their sticker charts. Tommy, Katie, and Dancy earn a date when they complete a level of ABC Mouse (a curriculum supplement app we use for school), and Thora earned two dates for filling in her "Big Girl" chart twice. We've been coaching her out of the threenager business. We're so done with that. Shad and I have always thought it to be important to take our kids on dates so they get one-on-one time with us. But life gets in the way sometimes, so I decided that'd be the best reward for them...forcing their parents to make the time for a date. And we do try to get it in right away. Thora has been waiting almost a month to go ice skating with Shad, though. It's summer and we're crazy busy! She picked ice cream at Costco for her first date with me. Tommy also had a date with me where we went to the comic book store and bought a comic book, then got Boba. I just need to be better about taking a picture or two on my dates.

Hibernating January

In December, Thora suddenly had interest in potty training, thanks to Dancy getting her excited about pretty underwear. So I did what little I was willing to do before Christmas: I got excited with her, we picked out her treat (biggest purple bag of Skittles possible!), and discussed that we would start after New Year. While happy to finally be ready to potty train this three-year-old, I savored the little freedom I had left.

Momma got contacts and Samson got a haircut! Shad did the cut while I was at my appointment, so it was a surprise for both of us when I came home. Samson was the first to notice I wasn't wearing glasses.

This is Thora being Princess Sofia talking on the phone to her sister, Princess Amber.

Hooray! She peed! Lori got many of these pictures, and some of poop when that finally happened. Aren't you glad you aren't Lori?

Potty training Thora took the. whole. month. She picked up peeing on the toilet pretty quickly, then I gave her underwear and accidents were all over the place. So we spent a couple days keeping the underwear clean. Then I gave her pants and the accidents were all over the place. So we spent a couple days keeping the pants clean. Then we ventured out in public. And had those accidents. And then there was the week when she pooped in her underwear DAILY. Seven or eight days straight. It was rough. I definitely had moments of crying like the mom in this video:

And then finally, FINALLY things clicked and I declared her to have become a big girl, sent Lori LOTS of poop emojis, and earned her reward: a date with Lori to get her ears pierced and have ice cream. I think that was achieved in February though. Text records show February 9th to be the date. One month and one week to potty train. Thora did voluntarily give up naptime diapers, which was more than any other kid did. So she's at a one-a-day for bedtime status and I'm happy to stay there for a while now that I'm back in the thick of potty training again with Samson.

Here's a fun story: I mostly stayed home as much as I could while potty training Thora. But there was that one time that I had to go to Walmart to get new tires on the van...and was there for nearly 2 hours while they changed the tires and oil...and Thora was wearing underwear (which she did keep clean and even peed on the toilet, but was still stressful for me), Katie threw up twice, and Sam's nose was running constantly. I was so glad when they paged me to pick up my van! Oh, icing on the cake: the cleaning lady at Walmart never got to the vomit the whole time I was there. Don't know what she was doing, but they were definitely paging her for over an hour.

Back to pictures...

Samson just got it into his head one day that he needed to have tape on his hands. Kept it up for a couple days.

Maaaany months ago back in Kansas we found this huge Lego Friends amusement park set on clearance. Shad and I kept it hidden in our closet until Christmas and gave it to the kids as a group gift. We all participated in building it.

Mom made a chocolate smoothie for breakfast! Yay for sneaky spinach!

Art class. Always colorful.

Adorable

Sometimes they exasperate me.

Milk in the hair.

From milk in the hair to falling asleep on the couch reading books. Parenting is a roller coaster.

And then cuddling on me while sleeping. This almost never happens anymore!

Because we live in Colorado where it's dry as heck and I humidify like crazy. And we order a lot from Amazon. Tommy's art.

I'm trying to remember, but I'm thinking this was the first snow that stayed for more than 12 hours. Or maybe I woke up and surprise! This was there. Dunno. But I still love this window view.

Frozen flakes on the roof.

Got a new fridge! That was an exhausting day. The fridge that was already in the house had a bad leaking problem. As in, I had to always keep a cup to catch the drips and if the cup got bumped or pushed out of place, water everywhere. So we managed that for a while, but the deal breaker was the day I suddenly heard the water pouring into the cup. Found this fridge on facebook for $125 and the guy delivered it. Missionaries helped install it while Shad was at work. 

Dancy built this.

Snow day! I figured out a good system for managing the kids playing in the snow and still keeping the carpet at the entry clean and dry: double layers of towels and processing one kid at a time. I'd sit them down and pull off all the wet clothes, then take them over to the fireplace to dry in front of the fire. Kids took to the couches with blankets to watch Netflix and warm up.

So that system worked well until Tommy's coat was too close to the fireplace and was actually touching the glass and the zipper melted.

And thus, January ended.

The Four Houses of Hogwarts

Shad and I have been having a lot of laughs lately, analyzing our kids' personalities by their Hogwarts houses. Tommy and Katie both took a test online to determine their houses: Ravenclaw and Slytherin, respectively. Dancy needed no test; she is straight up Hufflepuff, no doubt about it!

Pottermore describes Slytherin qualities as proud, cunning, ambitious. Katie likes attention. I can't get her to work independently on schoolwork. There's no praise and glory in that. No, I have to be there with her, giving her the compliments she craves. She is sneaky. I had a jumbo Kit Kat bar open on the kitchen counter one week that Shad and I would snack out of here and there. One day I saw a piece with one bite out of it, set back in the wrapper. I thought it was strange, but also reasoned that I very well could have done that--taken a bite, got distracted, come back later with zero recollection. Plausible. But the next day it happened again and this time I knew it wasn't me, and didn't think the previous incident was me anymore, either. Shad said he hadn't done it. It was easy for us to guess who of our kids would do that. Thora can't reach, Tom and Dancy would've eaten the whole bar, so...Katie. Shad asked the kids who had done it. Tommy was confused. Katie sort of denied it, but then a smile crept up her face and she giggled. Way to sneak candy and try not to get caught, kid.

Ravenclaw: Wit. Learning. Wisdom. Tommy is never not asking questions. He loves learning. He inspires much of our homeschool learning with his wonder and curiousity. Just last week we had an interesting train of subjects. Starting with geography, I had quizzed him on US States. He knew all but five, with North Dakota being one of those five. I taught him Montana, the Spanish word for mountain country; South Dakota, home of Mount Rushmore; and North Dakota, Teddy Roosevelt's refuge from New York City and politics. But then we had to learn about Teddy Roosevelt. We read a book about the teddy bear and why it exists, followed by a biography focusing on Teddy's childhood, followed by an adulthood biography. While reading that, we learned that President Roosevelt mediated a coal miners' strike. In wanting to understand more what coal mining is, we watched October Sky, and came away excited about rockets. It's a good thing I have a cousin who works for Blue Origin in Seattle and can get all the answers we need! And then because we're suddenly excited about rockets and spaceships, we watched The Martian. And Tommy developed questions about growing potatoes. I guess we'll try that this summer and learn. Just to recap, that was geography, North Dakota, Teddy Roosevelt, coal mining, rockets, space, potatoes.

And now Hufflepuff. Loyal. Patient. Fair. Sundance is like Luna Lovegood as a Hufflepuff. Don't get me wrong, Dancy is still smart as can be, being self-taught in colors, shapes, alphabet and now requesting writing lessons. Being a Hufflepuff child brings a whole new set of challenges to a parent. Yes, she's happy, bright, bubbly, charming, and loving, but she's also all those things even while I try to discipline her. During potty training, when she would simply poop in her underwear just because, I would try to impress upon her the severity of that and how she needs to stop doing that 3 days a week. I would tell her how gross it is, and how I have to clean it, and how I'm really, really mad at her right now, and she'd smile back at me and say, "That's okay, I forgive you!" Wait, no. You missed the point. Or with meal times on the occasion when we offer a treat for finishing food, she'll ask to be dismissed with only half eaten food past the half hour allowance we give, but still want dessert. We explain to her that if she wants dessert she needs to finish dinner, but if she's "full" she may go. "Woohoo! Yippee! I'm done!" Here's a more detailed account I texted to a friend on December 18: "We baked gingerbread cookies today. If the kids finished their lunch, they got to pick a cookie. Katie spent a long time looking at the trays, so I asked her which one she was looking for. We had made a lot of different shapes. "The biggest one," said the Slytherin. Dancy was going to get the sparkliest one, but took too long with her lunch. We told her she had to be done and get down. "Hooray!" Yeah, but you don't get a cookie. "That's okay!" said the Hufflepuff."