Starvation, American Style

Had a slight crisis with Brian last night - he came down after bedtime, crying that he was hungry, but he was too full to eat. Go figure, right? It took me a while, but I finally realized that he had noticed as he was lying in bed that he could feel his ribs. From that, he deduced that he must not be eating enough. And if he wasn't eating enough, he must be hungry. Got it?

And believe me, this kid eats enough.

I think he's going into an anxiety stage here - today he came up to me (with that scared, worried look kids get when they think they have something fatal) and told me he could feel something, right here, in his chest. I explained to him that that was his heart beating and that that particular symptom had been going on since before he was born. He looked only partly relieved. I don't think he trusts me. Maybe because I laughed at him about the starvation thing. Poor guy.

Another Day at the Beach

Larry and I, in one of those lapses of sound judgment for which we are reknowned (can't remember how to spell that), decided to take the kids on another day trip to the beach. I even dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to ensure an early start, which was very difficult, as I am still trying (after 4 months) to acclimate myself to Daylight Savings Time. Anyway, we actually had the car loaded with all our gear (no mean feat) and everyone had just gotten buckled in and Larry was just about to sit himself in the driver's seat when Brian announced that his stomach felt funny. Being seasoned parents, we took him inside and told him to hurry up and vomit, because we had to get going. Boy, is that kid going to have a lot to tell his therapist someday. 20 minutes and no puke later, we deposited him back in the car with his very own plastic bag to vomit into, if necessary. And we refused to feed him. So he arrived at the beach a very traumatized little kid. And Larry and I had a not-so-relaxing ride ourselves, listening to him whimper and waiting for him to blow, so to speak. But he didn't.

It just occurred to me that I have reset my theoretical vomit-counter-widget back to zero again. Darn.

We left Anna at home, because for some reason she had no desire to sit in a car with all of her detested siblings for 3 hours just to watch them frolic at the beach. Boy - you can just feel that love, can't you? We don't mind - that way we didn't have to take 2 vans. Though I think I will opt to take 2 vans next time anyway - Brian and Rachel and David bickered in the back seat most of the way home, to the point where I would have knocked all their heads together if I just could have reached them.

But it was fun - really. The weather was good, the beach wasn't too crowded, and I only spent about half the time worrying about rip tides. The other half I spent protecting Susie from some very hungry seagulls. One of them snatched a sandwich out of Theo's hand. I didn't even know that seagulls liked salami. As an added bonus, we were able to get some kite-flying in. To understand kite-flying in our family, you have to think back to Charlie Brown trying, year after sorry year, to kick that football without Lucy pulling it away from him at the last minute. Well, with Larry, this will be the year that we actually get the kite aloft for more than, say, 15 seconds. It wasn't, of course. Larry blames the kite. Luckily, the kids don't seem to notice this pattern and are always willing to give it another go. They are so sweet and trusting. Or stupid, maybe.

Now was that a nice thing to say about my own children? It's just that, sometimes, you just gotta wonder.

The ride home was blessedly uneventful, aside from the aforementioned constant bickering from the back row. And even that served its purpose - it made me glad to get home.

Summer Burnout

You know, after a summer spent incarcerated with 4 children and one angry teenager (the other, non-angry, teenager having been smart enough to get himself the heck out of here for the summer), I'm beginning to think that the joys of family togetherness are vastly overrated. June was fun (even with moving and all), but since then we've had approximately 60 days of temps in the 90's, humidity ditto; we've done 6 (count them, 6) jigsaw puzzles, eaten around 16 gazillion popsicles, celebrated about 15 "special" lemonade days, went to the pool so much that even the kids begged not to go again, and got absolutely nowhere on renovating/painting/cleaning up this house. In other words, we're in a rut. I think I'll go tell Larry that we need to take a cross-country trip, just to liven things up. He looks like he needs a vacation, anyway. And I've developed a strange hankering to see the Great Lakes.

I'd would like to point out (with a certain sense of pride) that I have not written about vomit for over a week. If I were just a bit more computer-savvy, I'd figure out how to put one of those widgets(?) on the side of my blog that would proclaim "This blog puke-free for (fill in the blank) days." Of course, I would have reset the counter to zero with this paragraph, I suppose.

Tomato Follies

Well, we just finished canning some more tomato sauce here. I got a good deal on a half bushel at the farmers' market and, for some reason, decided it would be a good idea to spend a hot summer day in the kitchen with a steaming canning kettle. I wish I could justify this activity on economic grounds, but I figure it's costing us about 3 dollars a quart to make our own sauce - that is, about twice as much as it would cost me in the store. The peach jam I'm going to make tomorrow (good deal on those, too, wouldn't you know?) is even pricier - it comes out to 2 dollars a pint (that's 4 dollars a quart for you mathematics-phobes out there). I have to fall back on the educational justification - the kids need to learn how people made their food before the advent of supermarkets and year-round fresh produce. And let me tell you, my teenage daughter is really appreciating this lesson. About as much as she appreciates the lessons on how to clean a bathroom.

Potty Animal

Summer's back - it went away for a few days and we were teased with sweatshirt weather and beautiful gray skies, but now it is back with a vengeance. That's okay - I like being miserable.

Potty training is going along swimmingly here, as usual (ahem). I decided that waiting far too long to train the other kids had caused all the problems we've had in the potty department; so I confiscated Susie's diapers months ago (before she turned 2). As a result, she pees on the floor and yells, "Towel!" and I run and bring towels to clean it all up. She's trained me pretty well, don't you think?

What I should have done is paper-trained her. And smacked her (gently) on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper every time she messed up. Too bad there is no #7 on the horizon to try that out on.