5/7/17

The 4-6 Shift

Ya know how jobs are hard and stuff?  This month my job has been killing me, specifically the 4-6pm shift.  It's finals this week for both me and my right hand woman.   The weather has been garbage so the kids are inside and underfoot and feeling cooped up all day.  Utah Springs are the worst.  They swing back and forth between glorious and depressing and it makes me angry.  I think it makes a lot of people short tempered.  We're ready to be outside.  As I write this it is the last day of Spring Semester for college and Summer Break begins now.  It's snowing.  This is lame.

Part of my struggle with the 4-6 hours this month is my fault:  I dialed back my kid's activities this year so that I didn't have to rip babies out of beds and drive people places.  Despite scaling back we are still fairly busy:  Mimi has Girl Scouts, Jude has Boy Scouts, Jude and Si have baseball, Mimi has activity days.  Everybody has homework and chores.  

Rather than letting this stupid weather get the best of us we focused on different projects around the house and built some skills.  I believe that all mother's have their strengths.  Some are runners and that's their thing, some are good at reading with their kids, some are good at playing toys with their children, some are good at organizing everybody's lives and getting everybody to a million activities. Right now my strength is encouraging creativity in my kids.  I'm not the mom who is going to get their kid to have 1000 hours of violin playing, but I'm trying to make my kids confident with a paintbrush or a spatula in their hands.  So we create using art and food.

This picture shows Lou doing exactly what Mimi did when she was little:  waffles and peas.  They just fit together so nicely and it's fun to watch in horror as she eats them.  Whatever you want kid, just eat.  Wide berth to be creative about it.

 Mimi recently participated in a teen's baking challenge where she learned how to make cupcakes and then invented her own twist on the cupcake.
 She created a chocolate cupcake with chocolate ganache, strawberry icing and a dipped strawberry on top.  And she won!  I love watching her carefully plate whatever she's making.  It's the best kind of art to me:  art I can eat!  She makes so much food I have trouble keeping up with the eating of all of it but I certainly do my best.
 I've also been working with the boys on their cooking skills.  Silas took a cue from Mimi and I found him watching Martha Stewart intently.  This kid loves to eat.  He recorded the recipe and then made this chocolate tart.  When I say made, I mean made.  I coach but my hands are hands off because I have a babe in arms.  I love how proud they feel when they make the whole thing themselves from scratch.  I love their confidence when they share what they made with other people.  And I love that I trust them to make things correctly so that I can serve it to other people.

LouLou is in a very creative phase.  She loves to paint and play with play dough.  I feel like a great mother when I actually get all the stuff out and let her make the mess she wants to make.

Having a vegan around the house means new recipes.  Our whole family LOVES these weird cauliflower tacos.

Philo has been developing his feelings.  He gets so mad at me some times!  In this case he was losing it because I wouldn't let him climb into the shark tank.  I'm obviously the worst.

During Spring Break we went up to the new indoor aquarium/animal place up in Layton.  They let you in the bird room to feed them and they land on you.  It's scary having all of those birds flitting around on you but the kids dug it.

You know how every once in a great while all of your kids are engaged in the same activity?  This was one of those moments.  I'd bought them each canvases and they were planning what they were going to do with them.  They're still in progress.

Nobody could be more pleased with herself than Lou when she's painting.  She lives for it.  Her canned smile lights me up.

IDK what's up with me these days but being a single parent of five kids has been testing my patience this month.  I'm working on it.  But sometimes it feels like they're all out to take me down.  

I want this.

Philo is about 15 months and that kid is everywhere.  He's so curious about the world and needs to interact with everything and everybody.  I love days when we can just play play play and I can follow him around being amused at whatever he gets himself into.  With these two it's literally cleaning up one room while they trash the other.  I can't remember if my other babies were this effective in creating giant messes as these two darlings.  I brought a rake inside to cope and I just make room by room piles until I can handle cleaning everything up at the end of the day.

New find: mama's lipstick.  It's a right of passage.

They're both pretty good eaters.  I'm even able to indulge whatever weird food I'm craving because they're willing to scarf it down too.  Oh Mai Pho is the very best.

Philo on the move is very risky business.

For teacher appreciation week Mimi brought three of her teachers dinner to take home to their families.  It was a hit.  

My girls on Easter.  M10 BL2

My favorite kind of creations are ones Mimi makes while I'm taking a nap.  These were for our little Easter party.

I am so taken by this little boy and his silly self that I take pictures instead of wiping him off.  Dirty faces are the type of thing only a mother can appreciate.

Blue haired Jude has taken up Rubik's cubes. They're challenging for me so we downloaded the instructions and we work on them together.  He's smart.


Here's my squad.  Five kids 10 and under.  Love my bigs, love my littles, love how they interact with each other.  


4/25/17

Winter to Spring Doing Our Thing

Alright,  Checking in.  Here's some stuff.
I don't know if you already know this but raising five kids and working and managing all my extra people and dealing with law schools and adulting in general is time demanding.  So the blog falls by the wayside.  

I've reapplied to law schools in Utah.  I got into both of them.  BYU (LDS school) has an honor code including parameters about hair.  When I interviewed with them I went in head to toe pink because why hide the ball but after I got in and had to go to Admitted Student's Day I needed to address the hair situation.  

This is my solution until I make some decisions.  I've not decided which school I'm going to yet. 
Got this wig in Las Vegas because errybody knows if you're buying a wig you go to where the black girls go.  And as far as the style, go big or go home, right?  

I'm not convinced I'm passing.  When people look at me I don't know if they're looking at the most amazing hair a woman has ever had OR if they're trying to assess if it's a wig and why.  I feel really conspicuous when I wear it.  Believe it or not I feel as uncomfortable looking "normal" as the people who say "You're so brave" would if they had my style.  
See?  Totally comfortable.  I yam what I yam.  And I yam a little bit nuts.
 That's my update.  Bit nuts, worrying about law school, still having fun.  

And here are the kids updates.

 Lou (2 1/2) is in the best phase.  She happily entertains herself all day and she's just charming.  Other than her ear piercing shriek cultivated by the persistent invasion of space and teasing courtesy of Silas, she is an absolute doll.  She has so many words but my favorites are when you ask her if she needs her diaper changed and she says "No, I fine." and "Yas Qween."
Mimi's update is that she is doing great in school, has moved to share a room with Lou, sold a ton of Girl Scout Cookies, and is still playing with her American Girl Dolls and it makes me so happy.  She is interested in making money so here are a couple of photos that Niya uses to send her on modeling jobs.  She's helpful and doing a lot of cooking, but she's suffering with allergies and is currently planning her post-high school culinary school life in a "less dry country like Fiji."



Jude is in a macho phase, as is evident in his pictures.  He's a tough guy.  He's really into his Scout program, baseball, reading, and spending his life in the backyard.  He prefers to be outside.  

Jude's hair color of choice is turqouise right now.  Tough guy though he is he definitely has a weak spot for the babies.


The children helped Robyn with this painting which she then submitted to her school's art show.  The kids were so surprised when their names were up on the wall!

Parenting these last few months has come with a lot of politics and horror.  The chaos of the current state of American politics added upon the chaos of having five children cooped up indoors during this rainy spring leaves me feeling overwhelmed.
Mimi, however, is a light and a joy EXCEPT WHEN SHE'S ON ALLERGY MEDS.  Note to self next year:  only give her the nose spray crap because she's a total terror if you give her claritin or others.
M is living the life though.  She loves her teacher who allows for her crazy headband collection.  Yes, she still wears the headbands.  Remember when she was little and had specific headbands just for sleeping?
This is Girl Scouts.  We went on a rad field trip to the Utah Opera where they create all the gigantic sets and hand make all of the costumes.  I wished Pam could be there the whole time.

We also obtained an animal.  I fought it for a long time but then resolved that the children needed an animal.  So we went to Kitty City (pronounced titty city if you're Silas) and this old cat was super chill when the children mauled her.  I hate the way cats feel when you pet them but this one feels soft and doesn't make me want to wash my hands.  I think she's ugly.  The kids adore her.  We named her Moonshadow.
Oh Philo.  Such a babe.  He finally learned to walk at 14 months which is a great relief because that kid weighs 25 pounds and doesn't help when you hold him.  His tricks include saying a few words (mama, bye, dada, yeah, quack, all done) and messing up my house.  With so many people here it's impossible to really baby proof the house so it's mostly chasing after him as he runs with a sharpie and helps put away the knives.  Thankfully we are all on alert and make sure he's safe.
Hush is a great not living with us father.  He takes the babies every other weekend and a few times during the week. It affords me plenty of big kids time including a road trip down to Las Vegas to support Alex through her divorce from Lil' Pat.  It was fun to show them the Chihuly at the Bellagio because they'd studied his art with me last summer.
Sometimes you want a rad jacket for Jude but it costs like $1000 and you have to settle for a picture of it instead.
More Mimi.  We had like two days of nice weather last month and Mimi gave Ty and Jude pedicures.  She told them they were superhero pedicures, hence the facemasks.
Oh,  Saint Patrick's Day.  Our traditions are the mustaches, green dye in everything, gold coins, house trashed by the leprechauns.
I feel we represented in full force this year.  Greenans commit.
Philo at the Children's Museum experiencing a tactile moment of bliss.
Grandpa Jim also came to town and helped us with a bunch of yard work.  He was helpful!  He did not ski though.  He wimped out.

We also hit Mystic Hot Springs sometime in March which was rad and so much fun.


Oh, and we went to Danville to see Pam's play.  We're a busy fam.  Self explanatory pictures.