0, 5, 9, 10 - or Happy Birthday Boyness

0, 5, 9, and 10 are the ages of my children, now that Boyness has turned nine.

Nine suddenly feels pretty old. He was still kind of stuck in little-kid land, at least in my head, until the moment I said "YAY, you're NINE!" and then stood in my living room all thunderstruck like a complete idiot as I realized that my boy was NINE.

He's learned to milk the birthday machine, at least a little (next year's revision will be to invite more friends, he says, although I'm not sure I agree with that one). "We can have a family party when daddy is off the day before my birthday, and then we'll have my friends come have a real party on my real birthday, and then I'll go to Nana's house and have my birthday sleepover the day after."

Luckily the family party consisted of hot dogs and rootbeer floats.

For his and-friends party, he wanted balloons. Many, many balloons. I HATE balloons - not so much the actual fact of them, not blowing them up, not even them popping, what I hate is the kids fighting with them and the fact that there are balloons in the house for a month after any given birthday; and aside from the fact that I would experience a wash of pure balloon-hatred every time I saw one, we plan to have two more parties here this month. So we compromised. I contained all the balloons on strands, and the kids took turns throwing a dart at them until there was not a single balloony survivor floating around waiting to start a fight:



When Boyness turned 5 I wrote: "In a conversation containing 1000 words, 449 of those will be "Star Wars,"" and this is still essentially true if you add the word "lego" immediately before "Star Wars." Given that fact, it's no real surprise that he liked his birthday presents so much:





And just because I can't let a whole post go without some Chubble...last night as we were cleaning up, BittyPrincess left a bowl of extra frosting a little too close, and this is what happened:

By Way of Explanation

This is what happens when I try to sit at the computer and get something done:



And that is why my posts are few and my grammar and syntax are terrible.

Picturefied

I didn't realize I had some more photos on my camera, so I'm going to go ahead and post them now.

In unrelated news, shortly before clicking into the blog editor I went to get my coffee, and spilled some on myself, fresh out of the coffeemaker. I have a barely-blistering burn on my belly (say that five times fast). Not cool.

On with the pictures. Chubble LOVES her sink bath. She loves it SO MUCH. She will splash around in there for half an hour or more. And this is what it looks like:



Feel free to laugh. She's quite happy in there and I'm quite glad to get half an hour to sit on the floor next to the sink and read-or-something. I'm waiting for her to figure out that she can't move anymore; she's already figured out that if she locks her legs I can't get her out.

I had pictures on the camera from our snow last week. Here's one I took the day before one of those trees (if I was all smart and photo-y I'd circle which one it was, but I'm not) fell into the neighbor's fence.



Chubble was...underwhelmed...by all the snow:




She preferred watching the big kids play through the window (I actually put her in a high chair and she sat there laughing at them for at least an hour), or riding around in my jacket:



And finally:



That is my very first attempt-in-progress at homebrewing my own beer, right after pitching the yeast. Because I'm stubborn and because the kits seemed a little too pre-packaged, I had someone (I think he's the owner) at the semi-local brew shop make up a package with fresh-milled grains and whole hops; this one is his Hefeweizen. This morning it is happily bubbling away.

PS - pay no attention to the incredibly ugly wallpaper. It's in my laundry room where I don't have to look at it often.

Carabiner Lovies and Other Stories

I blinked and November passed. It's actually a little scary how that happened.

Chubble is attached to a carabiner; and by this I do not mean that my convenient new babyproofing method is to utilize one of the aforementioned objects to secure her out of harm's way, I mean that she has developed an emotional attachment to a blue carabiner. The other day she whacked her head on the counter trying to dive to it. I refuse to sleep with a carabiner or to have one snuggled against my breast while she nurses, so we'll see how long this lasts.

In the beginning of November, some of our extended family visited. We had a fantastic time despite the fact that I have four children and they ("they" being my children and not the more distant relations in this exchange) are difficult to do anything with. I haven't forgotten to send them the information they requested (not sure if they read this blog), I've just apparently lost all of November somewhere.

The blog has been more than a little neglected, mostly because I think things like "oh, I'll just wait until I can pay attention to it for a few minutes," and that never happens. So now I'm typing while I'm making Green Goo - that gloriously green herbal salve that will hopefully solve all of Chubble's skin issues - and kind of thinking "this sucks, but at least I'm posting." I've also been taking other endeavors in bite-sized chunks, which has resulted in the completion of a small handful of knitting projects (me! knitting!) and a couple of smallish sewing projects; primary in my mind right now is the one in which I altered a pair of Chubble's pants to be shorter and wider, a project that came out well but took significantly longer than it would have taken to just make her some new pants "from scratch."

Our power went out in a tiny storm earlier this month. It gave me a good excuse to start a fire and pretend like I was roughing it even though the baby and I got to have a fire, managed to make coffee, were plenty warm, and finished a knitting project.

Here's Chubble "helping" me knit:



And our "roughing it" setup. Note the coffee press.



My very-second completed knitting project: a hat for Chubble:



Our hot water heater is half broken. One of the heating elements isn't working. Our landlord is trying to figure out how to call in warranty service.

We had a nice snow, and then a wind storm where we didn't lose power, but did lose a tree into the neighbor's fence. Francesco and the big kids spent Thanksgiving morning helping clean up the tree and fix the fence. We then departed to MIL's, where we had a great time despite too many people and despite the fact that MIL asked me not to bring anything but then bought pies from the store (which I find mildly offensive given that I, in my own not-terribly-humble opinion, make one mean pie). Still, getting stuffed silly and having the kids behave is, indeed, my idea of fun.

Hmmmm.

Also on the topic of things-we-did-this-month: we went to the Pacific Science Center twice; once with our own family and a friend, and once with Aunty Betsy when she came to visit (the child-asshatness that the kids - particularly Boyness - indulged in when she was here would be worth a post of its own, if I ever posted). It was more than a little fun the first time we went, and then way too crowded the second.

Cubble enjoyed the baby play zone surprisingly much.




She flaps her arms when she's excited, like she's going to fly off or something:




BittyPrincess managed to learn something, go Science Center!



The big kids' favorite the first time (the second time there were too many people for it to be really fun) was the spelling game:



Oh look, small spaces are fun:




We left right at rush hour and tried to stall for a bit at the fountain. And yes, the kids ran around trying (not) to get wet.



I think that brings us approximately to date in a weird muddled kind of way. And if anyone has read this instead of just glancing at pictures and being done with it, I will be mightily surprised.

More later

Happy Halloween!

We ran a veritable Halloween gauntlet this year: a party on the 30th, a big downtown event in the early afternoon on the 31st, and then your standard trick-or-treating stuff.

I was fried. It was all I could do to make sure none of the children got misplaced or trampled. I didn't get pictures until after the kids were busy getting a sugar high and had undone half their costumes. Still, here they are:

Pumpkins, round 2

We were a bit premature in carving our jack-o-lanterns this year. In consequence, they rotted on our mantle. So we tried again!

Chubble loves everything about pumpkins. It's hard to capture hyperexcited flapping-armed baby on camera, though, especially since Chubble isn't particularly photogenic.

Grabby

Chubble has been in an interesting "grabby" stage for a while now, where she'll try to get her hands on anything we're working with...



Which means projects slapped off the table and other such irritations. Thankfully, it's also usually pretty cute, especially if she's trying like heck to grab a toy and not a phone/wallet/camera/other-thing-she-could-completely-destroy.

Anyway, merrily we roll along. Or not...Chubble doesn't roll yet, even though she sits well now. I think she just can't be bothered. No teeth yet (I happen to like the toothless phase, a lot). Wearing 24m or 2t, and that's not just about the humongous diaper butt, because her 12m long-sleeved shirts aren't exactly long-sleeved anymore. I can't remember weights/times, but I think she's giving her big brother a serious run for his biggest-baby ribbon, because she's wearing some of his old suspenders that I remember him wearing at around this stage, too, and they don't have a lot of wiggle room left.