I just realized that I didn’t take a single photo of the cupcakes Annalie decorated for her birthday party today. I took the photo above of one of the unfrosted cupcakes, because happy cupcake is happy, and that’s kinda neat. I took a few shots of the kids eating cupcakes at the party, but the decorations probably aren’t very visible, and who knows when I’ll get around to downloading those photos off the memory card anyway.

I’m bummed that I don’t have a picture of the cupcakes, because she really had fun decorating them. But I also think, “Eh. Whatever.” And that indifference bums me out a little bit too.

There was a reason I was kind of distracted today, though. Sonja—one of my favorite people on this or any other planet—was busy having her baby yesterday and today, and I was checking my phone every time I even imagined it might have beeped or buzzed, anxious for news. From the little I’ve heard, the day was far more exciting than they would have liked, but everyone is fine. Whew. Also, yay! Baby!

I was going to try to blog every day this month. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, I just wanted to set myself the goal and see if I could reach it. I did great for nine days. Maybe I should just be thankful I got that many posts written, and work on keeping myself afloat until there’s another calm week when I can write a post every day. Maybe intermittent blogging is all I can do right now.

I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that it’s impossible for me to do all the things I need to do in my daily life (homeschool an 8-year-old and parent a toddler, be a halfway decent wife/daughter/sister, keep the clutter and dishes and laundry from taking over the house, cook the occasional meal, crochet baby blankets and golden snitches, keep up email correspondence with friends, sleep more than four hours a night) AND ALSO blog on a regular basis. At least not like I used to, with lots of photos and thoughtfully composed paragraphs.

I just…can’t. And that makes me really sad. I don’t know what else could possibly give at this point. I guess I could give up reading and TV. I’ve already basically given up painting, and am trying to find a way to cram exercising back in there somewhere.

Sigh.

Just in case you were wondering.

I was astonished when I realized that I hadn’t done a post of Annalie’s tweets for over a year. A YEAR. How did that happen? I have no idea. Let’s start fixing that, shall we?

MARCH 2011

“Oh! Sorry I didn’t brush my teeth yet. I got carried away with my imaginationings.”

“I know four things that catch fire: cars, forests, any kind of buildings–like restaurants or homes or movie theaters–and hair.”

“Ah, nothing’s better than a good burp.”

“She’s the cutest little thing. I could just eat her up like an ice cream cake.”

“Perhaps you would like some e-musement? I’d be happy to give you some.”

“Laughed their butts off? That’s impossible. No one can laugh THAT hard.”

“I think I’ll hula-hoop for a bit. It might calm my nerves.”

“My baby has beautiful blue eyes…just like yours truly.”

“Now I shall begin my quest for my village!”

“(in a deep voice) ‘You look wonderful, dipped in magical. You look golden, like you are made of love.’ (falsetto) ‘Why thank you, sir!’”

“When I add the friction between the fractions, should I use seconds, minutes, hours, or days?”

“When she grows up she’ll be just like her mom, a fierce predator! But even then she’ll still be my baby, Kitty Clover.”

“Soon everyone will be my butler, and I’ll be generous to everyone. Who’s nicer now!?”

“We have an escaper! I repeat, we have an escaper! Katy escaped!”

“Would you like to try my vegetable salad? It’s famous! It won Healthiest, Tastiest Salad at the county fair. I only use FRESH ingredients.”

“Yesterday in Sunday School we learned about shepherds and what they technically do.”

APRIL 2011

“A clean restaurant is a happy restaurant, I always say. Or at least I’ll start saying it now.”

“This looks like a job for…Super Sis!”

“I’ve been workin’ on my beatboxin’.”

“The recipe is: two buns, one burger, lettuce, a pickle, and exactly one thousand sesame seeds–no more, no less.”

“When I see a patch of green, green grass it makes me want to spin and jump and run on it.”

“I think I’ll go back in time and ask a genius scientist to invent Pokemon.”

“Circus peanuts are my only weakness.”

“Let’s blow UP this pop stand!”

“I don’t care if they’re called jellybeans. I’m gonna call them jelly EGGS.”

“That is one freaky vehicle. ”

“I’m just the cook and the waitress; I’m not the person who points the way and shouts the name of the Chicken Pot Clock.”

“We’re wasting time! And if we’re wasting time, we’re wasting wind.”

“Note to self: coconut shampoo does not taste as good as it smells.”

“Airplanes are not my preferred mode of travel. I prefer to travel on the ground. A nice, fun, relaxing trip in a car–that’s what I like.”

“Ree! Ree! Peeees?” is what Elliora says as she clambers onto your lap, shoving a book into your hand.

How could you possibly say no?

p.s. New banner, in honor of Annalie’s 8th birthday party, which will feature miniature golfing and dinosaur cupcakes. Thanks, B!

*cough, cough* Gracious! It’s dusty in here, isn’t it? Let me just wipe away these cobwebs and blow off the dust…there, that’s better. I’m a little embarrassed at how I’ve neglected things around here. I have resolved to do better in May. Wish me luck.

My mom and my niece Aurora are here visiting us for a few weeks! It’s fun having them here, but my mom and I have been a little surprised by how much more exhausting it is to have three kids in the house (two of them toddlers) than it is to have only two. Of course, this is partly because Aurora has never been to our house before, had never flown on a plane, had never been more than a couple hours’ drive away from Omaha before. And Aurora is very two right now. In fact, she’s just about two and a half, which means she’s entering that period of disequilibrium that kids often go through around their half-birthdays. (I’ve talked about this before with Annalie.)

Since Elliora is almost exactly a year younger than Aurora, she’s been going through a bit of disequilibrium herself lately, which isn’t surprising. She’s changing so fast these days, adding new words every day and even putting them together in short sentences. Three of her first-year molars have just popped through her gums, and at the park the other day she was climbing all over the big-kid play structure and going down the slides without any help from anyone. She cracks us up every day with mannerisms and reactions that seem older than her 18 months. She regularly eats more than her big sister, and when we have brussels sprouts or asparagus (!?) she eats as much or more than I do. She is meeting life head-on and keeping up with her cousin and big sister just fine.

Annalie, meanwhile, is almost eight! Her birthday is only eight days away. She’s been simply FANTASTIC with her sister and her cousin. She’s been patient and calm through tantrums and craziness. Since they’ve both been sitting in the back row of the minivan, Annalie has been buckling Aurora into her carseat every time we go anywhere, and unbuckling her at the other end. She’s willingly shared food and toys with the littles, and more than once she’s cheerfully agreed to wait to do something she wanted to do until naptime. I think I’m gonna love eight.

What have you guys been up to?

There are so many violets in our backyard in the spring that it looks almost completely purple for a couple of weeks. It’s one of the reasons Elliora’s middle name is Violet, because our backyard looked like this around the time we found out we were pregnant. It was actually even more violet-covered a week before this, believe it or not. It’s almost the end of violet season around here.

Here’s an alternate Day 7 shot. Our LED twinkle lights (they’re not Christmas lights because we keep them up year-round) cast interesting pools of light and shadow on the ceiling and walls around them. I was inspired by Bex’s shot of her grandparents’ vintage bunch-of-grapes lamp and the cool shadows it cast.

Hey, look! I am actually done blogging every single one of my 7 Days photos from the run that was only a couple of weeks ago! Not only that, but…I MADE IT THROUGH THE WHOLE WEEK WITHOUT GETTING SICK. IT WAS A 7 DAYS MIRACLE! *cue angelic choirs*

I expect to come down with the plague shortly, now that I said that. (Although I originally wrote that almost two weeks ago and I’m still not sick.) I guess there was that toothache I had that week—really that I had had on and off since around my birthday almost a month ago. It was finally resolved on Day 6 when I went to the dentist. It turned out the problem was a cavity in one of my remaining wisdom teeth. The solution was easy: pull the tooth. It was done and I was driving home less than 30 minutes later, much relieved. I don’t really count that as being sick.

While I’m blogging, a couple of quick things:

• Up until a few days ago, I was more than a month behind on uploading photos to Flickr. I’m still taking photos every day, I just don’t get around to doing anything with them. I’m starting to catch up and am hoping to be caught up before I leave for Omaha. Wish me luck.
• Instagram finally released an app for Android phones, just a few days before Facebook bought Instagram. So I’m enjoying using Instagram as a new, easy way to share photos from my phone on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can see my photos here.
• Elliora has a new favorite all-purpose word, suitable for all sentiments and occasions: MINE. Her dad’s laptop? “Mine!” Annalie’s jacket? “Mine!” My frosted mini-wheats? “Mine mine mine!” Lily the cat? “MIIIIIINE!”
• We’re heading to Omaha on Friday, just me and the girls. (Poor Troy, he has to stay here and work, and have the house to himself for a week and a half.) When we come home, my mom and my niece are coming with us. They’re going to stay and visit for three whole weeks and will be here to celebrate Annalie’s eighth birthday. We’re all pretty excited about that.
• Party plans for Annalie’s birthday were on hold for a while, because we weren’t sure if my mom was going to be able to come here, or if she’d have to stay in Omaha because of some family obligations. Now that we know, I have sorted out the party plans and I think it’s gonna be really fun. It’s a big relief to finally have a plan.
• Chris wrote something great about blogging with two small children that expressed perfectly how I feel, so I’m just going to quote her:
  

  Well, I’d still love to have an awesome, regularly-updated website. That endeavour is sitting on a back burner, as our time and energy are all earmarked for other stuff for a while.

  In my mind I have an enormous stovetop with quite a lot of burners, especially at the back.

• I started a page to keep track of all the words Elliora says. She’s adding about three or four new ones every day. There’s a button for it over on the sidebar. —>

How on earth did it get to be mid-April already!?

On Day 6 of 7 Days, I asked Annalie to go outside on the deck and play with Elliora for a bit while I cleaned up the kitchen. She didn’t really want to, but she did it anyway, wrapping up in her blanket and grouching her way out there. Despite her reluctance, I thanked her politely. (I’d gotten my way, after all, which makes it easier to be polite!)

I saw her pick up a piece of sidewalk chalk and brightly suggested I could give her some sentences to write for handwriting practice. “How about, ‘My mom is awesome’? Or maybe ‘I love my mom! She’s the best ever!’”

Annalie gave me a dirty look and said, “How do you spell ‘stupid’? I laughed, said she could figure that one out on her own, and went back to cleaning the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Annalie called out, “Mom, can you please come and see what I drew?” I went out on the deck to see her sitting next to this drawing, fighting a grin.

She drew me scolding her, and herself imagining blowing a raspberry at me. See the little tongue in the thought bubble? I cracked up and told her that was very smart, because blowing raspberries in her head is much less likely to get her into trouble than doing it in someone’s face. She laughed, all hostility gone.

I love that Annalie can pour her anger or frustration into creating something–a drawing, a dance, a puppet show–and the negative feelings seem to evaporate in the process, leaving only the art.

Then, even though I had another idea planned for that day’s photo, I took a picture of the drawing and all our feet for my 7 Days self-portrait. How could I not?

These two. They’re such stinkers sometimes, but they make life so very fun.

Last week, we made an impromptu trip down to Southern Virgina to see Karyl and her girls.

Karyl and I are both Navy wives. We’re accustomed to our husbands being gone for weeks or months at a time, and working long hours when they’re not gone. Most of the time, we deal with it just fine.

Once in a while, we struggle. It just happens that last week, we were both struggling a little bit. That made it seem like the perfect time for a 7 Days meet-up.

And you know what? It was. We arrived on Tuesday and had a great time hanging out, eating good food, playing outside, talking and laughing together. Grace and Annalie immediately jumped right back into the friendship they established when Karyl and her girls visited us last summer, when Sonja and Noah were visiting. And Mary Ellen loved Elliora. She seemed to think she was a living doll, and Elliora didn’t seem to mind that at all. Anytime we walked anywhere, Elliora walked straight to ME and grabbed her hand.

I dragged everyone all the way to Virginia Beach, to my favorite Greek restaurant, Elia’s. The hummus and pita there are to die for, and the rest of the food is delicious too. We were regulars at Elia’s when we lived in Virginia Beach over a decade ago, and just like every other time we’ve been there since we moved away—even when years have gone by between visits—Elia remembered us as soon as we walked in the door.

We sat in a booth right next to a high wall. On the other side of that wall was the grill, and Annalie and Grace amused themselves by occasionally standing on the seat and peeking over to chat with Elia and the other people working that day, all of whom seemed to get a kick out of it. Everyone enjoyed the food, especially Elliora. She took bites out of a lemon, rind and all; ate the hummus by the fingerful after we ran out of pita; and gnawed a kabob full of chicken clean. Annalie even branched out from her usual chicken nuggets, and thought the chicken kabobs and rice were really tasty.

The next morning, we all walked Grace to school and got to see her classroom and meet her lovely teacher.

Walking back to Karyl’s, I spotted this heart-shaped rock in the dirt path. I love finding random hearts in the world like this.

We stopped at the playground to let the kids blow off some steam, and so we could get our 7 Days shots.

The theme for Day 5 was FRESH. Karyl’s had the idea that we could be getting some fresh air, which we certainly got playing on the swings. But even more than the air, the time spent with a friend refreshed me. Thanks again, Karyl! We went home with lighter hearts, already looking forward to the next visit.

We’ve had a string of good days lately. It’s probably due to a combination of factors—we’re recovered from all the travel we did in January and February, no one is sick, everyone is sleeping better—but I think the biggest factor is that we’ve gotten back into a routine.

I know that I function better when life is somewhat predictable, and I know that my kids do too. For some reason I have a really hard time sticking to a routine, even under ideal circumstances; throw a baby and frequent travel and a husband regularly working long hours into the mix and all is confusion and chaos and lost tempers and pouting and hands thrown up in defeat.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across some reading and math workbooks that looked like a good fit for Annalie. I had Annalie look them over, and she thought they looked good too. We talked, and agreed that we were going to start out by doing one lesson per day from each book. That’s not very much, considering that last year before Elliora was born we were consistently doing two to three hours of sit-down schoolwork per day, but I figured it would be a good way to ease back into things.

At first, Annalie resisted every suggestion that it was time to do some schoolwork, but I stayed calm and persisted. She thought it was pretty cool when I told her that she could take a pre-test before each math chapter, and if there were concepts she already had a grasp on, we could skip some of those lessons. Within a couple days, she had stopped arguing and was doing the work with no complaint. Now, she actually seems excited to sit down and do school. (Of course, this is in addition to all of the unschooly things we do every day, but it seemed like it was time to re-introduce some discipline back into our days, for both of us.)

Today, she suggested that instead of doing the one page of reading in the workbook, she could read the Magic School Bus book that my mom had just sent her. I told her that was a great idea. She read every single word in that book to me, without hesitation or angst. We paused several times to discuss additional information she’d gleaned about the subject (teeth) from Wild Kratts (you might want to turn your volume down before clicking that link). The reading moved from the dining-room table to Elliora’s bedroom briefly when there was a diaper change, and Annalie didn’t even blink, just moved, made herself comfortable in the nursing chair, and kept reading.

Something seems to have clicked for Annalie with both reading and math recently. She’s had the skills for a long time, but it was almost as if she wasn’t emotionally ready to read on her own. Now, she’s suddenly doing multiplication and adding two-column numbers in her head with ease. She’s reading pretty much everything she sees without much difficulty at all. She still isn’t what I’d call a reader, which makes me a little sad, but that’s okay. I imagine that there are a lot of people who would shake their heads at all the hours I spent indoors reading books as a kid when I could have been outside enjoying fresh air and sunshine.

I think when she’s ready, Annalie will discover chapter books and how reading them is like seeing a movie in your head. (Also, she’ll discover the house rule that kids have to turn off the light at bedtime…unless they’re reading. That’ll probably motivate her to read more!) Until then, there isn’t really a reason to rush. One of the best things about homeschooling is that kids have the freedom to move at their own pace. And I’ve been doing this long enough now that I know Annalie really will move ahead. She doesn’t really do slow and steady. Just when it seems like she’s been stalled in the same place forever, she’ll leap and bound far ahead of where I would have expected her to be. And that’s absolutely, totally okay.

In addition to the ease with which we’ve been getting schoolwork done every day, Annalie has gone from surly and uncooperative to pleasant and helpful when it comes to unloading the dishwasher, playing with Elliora while I make dinner, putting her toys away, running downstairs to fetch me a Coke Zero, whatever. I suppose her change in attitude is partly because she’s consistently getting more sleep, and partly because she’s not seven and a half anymore (she’ll be eight in two months). But mostly, I think it’s because we’ve gotten a good routine going.

Annalie knows that when she wakes up, she can play games on my laptop or watch one of her shows until Elliora and I come out for breakfast. She knows that after breakfast, she can play till 8:45, when I’ll ask her to unload the dishwasher if it needs doing. She knows that after that, we’ll sit down and do some schoolwork until it’s time for Elliora’s morning nap, and so on. And knowing what’s coming next seems to make her happy.

It makes perfect sense, really. I’m the same way. I can handle unpredictability better than she can, probably, but I am a lot happier when I know what’s coming up, even though I resist schedules. That’s why I am writing this post: to remind myself, when I start to slide away from the routine, that it really does make things easier. And if we have a routine, then we get to experience the best part about living a predictable life: doing something unpredictable! Being spontaneous is about a hundred times more fun when you have a routine to break away from.