I Am His Minion.

Apparently, at school, Mo learned about minions.  

He came home and applied his new found knowledge.  

Harvey and Julius were designated his minions and they were delighted! 

 Harvey especially has taken to the minion roll. 

(but what little brother doesn't want his big brother to WANT him around?)  

Harvey gladly does Mo's bidding.  

Mo commands him to do things and Harvey runs to do it.  

If I object, he looks at me and calmly states, "But he is my minion." 

Mo never goes to time out by himself any more, his minions are with him. 

If Mo wants to play something, he just calls to his minions.  

If one of the older boys is messing with Mo, his minions attack.

I haven't seen anything they weren't willing to do for him.

Today, I wanted Mo to come upstairs to get something from me, and Harvey volunteered to take it down to him.  When I said no, I wanted Mo to come get it.  He said, "But I am his minion."  Pleading with me to let him serve his master.

. 

I am going to have to watch this boy.

Thanksgiving 2011

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

For our Thanksgiving this year we decided to really make it a feast and eat in courses.

Also, my brother in law's family has an annual tradition of an Italian feast on New Years day.  We had talked about joining them this year, but they are going to be gone, so we incorporated some of the Italian feast into Thanksgiving.

Around 10:30 am we started off with appetizers: deviled eggs, crackers and cheese, veggie platter, apples and marshmallow/yogurt dipping sauce and spanakopita.

Later we officially started the feast with a cranberry juice toast and 

Cappiletti soup with rolls.  

The Cappiletti is homemade stuffed pasta, shaped like a little cap, hence the name.

A couple of hours later, we had the Lasagna course.  

Also, homemade by my brother in law.  

We next came the pumpkin pie palette cleanser.

After our tummies had settled a bit, we moved on to the veggie course with baked sweet potatoes.  It turns out if you wrap them in foil then bake them, they are delicious!  We also had succotash and green bean almondine.   

It was all delicious.  

Next came the main course of turkey, 

stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberry jelly.

Last of all was the Pie course.  We had 14 1/2 pies. 2 lemon meringue, 1 pumpkin chiffon, 1 cherry, 1 large apple, 2 chocolate chess, 2 pumpkin spice, 1 large pumpkin, 1 chocolate cream, 1 vanilla pudding, 1 old fashioned cream, 1 strawberry, and 1/2 a pecan pie.  

It was great having the courses.  None of the food got lost in the crowd, you could really savor all of it.  We did end up eating all day long, but we took breaks and played games,

 and there were enough adults that we took turns in the kitchen.  

It was a wonderful day of food, family and fun.

And a good time to reflect on all that we are blessed with.  

Happy Giving Thanks, we are.

Tricks

Yesterday Mo and Carol did tricks

New and Improved!

I found Julius the other day with black marker all over his arms and face.

I said, "You are not supposed to draw on yourself."

To which he responded, "I was just upgrading myself."

For My Happiness

I never wanted to move back to Seattle.  I was content to live across the sound, in our spacious house, with our big yard, next door to my sister, with my hair salon inside. 

 I loved our life.  

But it wasn't the plan to stay there.  It was my plan, but not God's plan.  I have come to love God's plans for me.  One of my favorite scriptures is Proverbs 3:5-6.

His plan was for us to move back to Seattle.  After Trip graduated from graduate school and got a job, his commute ended up being 2 hours each way, taking the ferry and the bus.  This was too much for us.  We had just sacrificed not seeing him for years so he could earn his MBA, we wanted to be near him and his work.  But I was reluctant to give up my house and my sister.

I have found that the Lord is very gentle with me.  He leads me along, letting me believe what I need to, to get where I need to be.  First we had to move to Seattle, but he didn't make me give up my house yet.  We rented it out, this was a blessing and a growing experience (read trial).

We miraculously (the events surrounding this really were a miracle.  I'm not just saying that) found a house in Seattle to rent that would fit all 6 soon to be 7 of us, that we could afford.  We really had to down size.  

After a few months, I started to feel like we should buy a house in Seattle.  How would we do that?  We explored some options and it was apparent that if we were going to buy, we needed to sell our other house.  By this point, I was not enjoying being a landlord, so that wasn't a bad thing.  We were able to sell our house to a wonderful couple who loved it as much as we did, and they were in a better position to take care of all the land and have done great things with it.

We started to look for a house in Seattle.  We really felt like we needed to stay in the area of the city we had been living, but there wasn't much there that we could afford that would house us all.  We now had 5 kids and were just expecting number 6.  We found one that seemed like a good fit.  It was across the street from some friends of ours, it had a full basement that we could utilize as living area.  It was still more money that I thought we could afford and it needed a lot of work.  We prayed about it and felt good about buying it.  We put an offer on it, but it all broke down after the inspection showed even more work that needed doing, and a seller that wasn't wanting to do any repairs.

I was content to wait.  We really were in a good situation, having sold our house, we could sit back and relax, and wait for the right house to come along.  I didn't feel settled or quite like myself though.

A few months later, I was fed up with house hunting.  I didn't want to buy a house anymore.  We had seen everything on the market in our area that we could possibly afford, but none of them were anything I wanted.  One day, I was praying about my frustrations with house hunting and a picture of the house we had originally put an offer on came into my head.  I looked it up and it was back on the market after another pending offer fell through.  I discussed it with Travis and we prayed about it and made an offer on it again for the price we had agreed to before.  The sellers came back saying they wanted more money since they had done some of the work that we wanted done before.  

I was really had to think about it and pray about it.  It was more money than I wanted to spend.  We were in a alright situation where we were.  But, when I prayed about it, the answer came to me that it "was for my happiness." 

It really has been.  I finally felt settled.  We had room for all of our children and another one a few years later.  We have wonderful neighbors, who may not be family, but they are close.  We have since put a salon in this house, too.  My sister we had lived next to, moved to out of state.  Our yard is a more manageable size.  We were able to get chickens.  I have unlimited projects to work on and a garage/shop to do it in.  The Lord has blessed us finically to be able to meet our obligations.  Trip is close to work and so we get to see him much more often.  We have made great friends and love it here.  It truly was for my happiness.

Happy Birthday

To my sweet little Zelda!

She turned one.

What Can I Say, You Are Adorable!

I just had to post some pictures of my cute soon to be 1 year old.

It was hard to get a picture, because she kept walking to me.  

Daphne took this picture, it is my favorite.

Mystery Egg

Last Friday morning, I looked in the nest box and there were no eggs.  That night, I looked in the nest box and there were these 5 eggs.  This is significant because out of our 6 chickens, only 4 of them are currently laying.  

So, who's egg is the light colored one?  

It looks an awful lot like the light colored one in this picture.  

Do you remember who's it is?

Yes, Fancy Pants has started laying again!  

She hasn't laid anything for over 9 months!  But the egg is very definitely hers (that is the beauty of having all different breeds of chickens, they each have unique eggs.)

When she stopped laying, her eggs got farther and farther between and then she laid a smaller misshapen egg and then nothing.  She seemed perfectly healthy in every other way.  I looked up online to see if I could find a reason, but nothing anyone described fit.  She didn't seem egg bound (and if she was she would have died).  Some breeds do stop laying in the winter, but she only started laying the beginning of December 2010 and stopped the end of January 2011.  Now starting again in November 2011.

Maybe she only lays in the winter.

Destructo Girl does Dangerous Tricks For Babies

Zelda is an early walker.  The only problem with that is that she can physically do things that she doesn't have the sense to avoid.

The stairs were the first issue.  She tries to walk down them, never mind that the hight of the stair is about the length of her leg.  She walks right up to them and would just step right off if we weren't there to stop her.  We have door at the top of the stairs and have gotten very good at keeping it closed, but there are 8 more of us in the house of varying ages, so that doesn't always happen.  So, we have also been working on teaching her how to properly go down the stairs.

The other day, she was downstairs and I think, "downstairs, she is at the bottom, she is safe."   Well, no she also happens to be a climber and went up the stairs without anyone knowing.  Since she is a walker, when she goes up the stairs, she doesn't stay in the crawling position, she stands up, and falls down.  She of course cried and I was soothing her and noticed a little blood coming from her mouth.  So, I rinsed it out and was examining things and was horrified to see a bloody spot where one of her perfect little teeth used to be!  She only had 2 and now she has one. 

 It makes me sick every time I see it.  She was checked out by our pediatric dentist the next day.  He says she should be just fine.  Her other teeth will hold the space until her permanent teeth grow in when she is about 6 years old.  There is a possibility that the tissue that will become her permanent tooth was damaged and could cause some problem, but we won't know for 5 or so more years.  We still haven't found the tooth, I think she must have swallowed it.

She doesn't seem upset about it, now.

A few good things have come out of it.  She doesn't try to walk down the stairs anymore.  She sits down at the top and scoots backwards 

to crawl down them. 

Oh, here she stopped and stood up.  We still have to supervise her.

 The second good thing is, I was reminded how fragile she and all the kids are and how precious life is.   Accidents happen, but we want to avoid all that we can. 

To help with this, we also got a gate for the bottom of the stairs.  No more sneaking up the stairs.

She is keeping us on our toes.  She now climbs up to stand on any elevated surface she can.

A small chest of drawers.

The trunk by the front door (she was very proud of herself here).

Here she climbed up to use the computer.

The under-bed drawer.

The stool.  This one is dangerous because she can move it around and 

use it to climb up on even higher things,

like the bench at the table.

She must be related to these boys.

Sick Day!

Last Friday was supposed to be one of those days, when you run all day long.  I was completely scheduled, running here and there.   It would start off getting everyone to school, then get myself and the little kids ready.  Take Harvey to preschool, run errands, pick up Harvey, drop the 3 little kids off at my friend's house, then volunteer at the elementary school for 3 hours.  Pick everyone back up, etc.  The only glitch was, Thursday, Julius started looking droopy, sneezy and coughing. 

 He even had a fever.  I was able to cancel all of our appointments, including Harvey's preschool since the next morning he was coughing too.  We had a lazy day at home with no commitments.  It was wonderful. (It was a good thing too since we ended up having our hot water heater fixed that day, thanks again Nick!)

We all need a sick day once in a while.  (It is even better when you aren't the one who is sick.)

(The picture was a few days later, I asked him to look sick.)

How To Become A Demigod.

Humans have to watch out when young demigods battle.  

Their celestial bronze and imperial gold swords can't hurt a human, but their battles can cause all kind of destruction.  We just won't see it for what it really is, because of the mist.

It is said that Greek half-bloods and Roman half-bloods could never get along.

Lucky for us Percy Jackson, son of the Greek God Poseidon, and Jason Grace, son of the Roman God Jupiter, have become good friends.

To transform our young mortals in to demigods we needed a few things.

Every demigod who has been to camp has a t-shirt.

We started with plain white undershirts and Rit dye.

I wanted a good vibrant color, so we used the stove top method (be sure and add the 1 cup of salt and Tablespoon of detergent).

I used a couple of sticks from the yard to stir.  You are supposed to stir constantly for 30 minutes, but I stirred them intermittently, the color was a little variegated because of it, but they looked fine to me.

  

We then rinsed and dried the shirts, then washed by hand and dried again.

I had the boys iron their own shirts to get them smooth and ready for the stencil. (Note the cardboard in side the shirt, to protect the back from the stencil.)

I found a great tutorial online for making camp half-blood t-shirts with freezer paper stencils.

We adapted it to what we wanted and were good to go.

First we printed out the lettering how we wanted it.  Then each boy traced theirs onto the non-shiny side of the freezer paper.  Adding symbols and additional words if they wanted.

Then we used an exacto knife to cut the letters out.  It took a little getting used to, to get the cuts smooth and nice.  I did this part.  

Ocean's had "Camp Jupiter" with lightening bolts.

Rez had "Camp Half-blood" with Poseidon in Greek underneath it (it is amazing what you can find online and cut and paste into a document) and an anti-lightening symbol and a row boat that fires giant tridents symbolizing Hades and Poseidon preparing war against Zeus.

After ironing the stencil in place with the iron on cotton setting, we dapped black fabric paint on the stencil with a sponge and let it dry overnight.

In the morning we pulled off the stencil.  It was a little tricky in spots because I think I might have saturated the paint to much, it stuck to the cardboard and the paper stuck around the edges of the letters.

We were able to get it off though carefully using the tip of the exacto knife.

With the shirts being done, they needed their weapons.  Nerf and spray paint to the rescue.  First gray primer, then one bronze and one gold (we found that the bronze looked better with a layer of gold underneath, then the bronze on top).

The finishing touches were their hair.  Percy Jackson did not have red hair.  

Luckily Rez has a hairdresser for a mom.  

Ocean got a hair cut, to appear more disciplined as a Roman solider would.

Here are the final results...

Jason Grace, Son of Jupiter,

Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon.