Together Again in Heaven: June Trifecta

Violet's past month may have been quiet, but the rest of the family's certainly was not. This was my first full month with Will back to work since Violet was born and I have to say that it was definitely exhausting! Just trying to clothe, feed, and keep everyone in a peaceful equilibrium was most times more than this mama could handle. I knew that with the addition of another family member there would be emotional adjustments for the big sisters, additional laundry and generally not enough of me to go around but whew! The emotional adjustments have taken the form of sibling rivalry to it's highest degree and the laundry has more than tripled thanks to the trifecta of three girls with the uncanny ability to cover bedding, clothes and any sort of unwashable surface with pee, poop and puke.

Besides the crazy amounts of laundry, I am still adjusting to the crazy amounts of unplanned baths and showers because someone looks and smells like they rolled around in chicken poop but can't for the life of them figure out how it happened but will have a nervous breakdown if I don't wash it off of them right NOW, someone else woke up with puke INSIDE their pajamas, or someone else woke me up at the crack of dawn to announce that she had peed the bed. And don't even get me started on the pee, poop and puke habits of the newest member of this tribe! The fact that I haven't found a diaper yet that can do it's job on Violet is really frustrating - I've bought smaller diapers, bigger diapers, expensive diapers, cheap diapers, and used all varieties of cloth diapers but the only solution that works so far is to put a water proof pad underneath her wherever she is. Thankfully, their cuteness (when not fighting) generally saved the day and I continue to be in awe of the fact that God gave me such an amazing trifecta.

My tailbone continues to improve, and now my only complaints are that it is still uncomfortable to sit on the couch or in the car. Fortunately, my current circumstances do not allow for much couch or car time. A friend of mine lent me her marvelous daughter each Friday this past month to lend a hand and keep the girls entertained (a.k.a. to keep the fighting to a controlled minimum) and I have to say it was such a nice combination of big sister care, new ideas, and youthful energy. Pictured below are some of the fun things they did together this past month. She shares a love of dress up, crafts and has inspired a new interest in the art of hairstyles.

Emma is now obsessed with having her hair braided and notices girls and women with braided hair wherever we go. I know I am out of the fashion loop, but either I am just now noticing braided hair because of Emma's interest, or it is in style now and my three year old is more up to date than I am. Speaking of style, here are the girls below in the right hand picture having fun while Will bought a pair of dress shoes. In the left hand pictures, a friend met us for lunch at Costco where we shopped, ate and turned heads with six kids collectively.

They definitely have more fashion sense than me, and they also have more dancing abilities than I do too. Here they are below at their dance recital, where they proudly danced in front of their family. Based on how I choked back tears pretty unsuccessfully, I am thinking a week long dehydration marathon may be in order for when my babies graduate from high school.

I need to clarify that the tiny picture above of pinks, purples and blues in the trunk of our car is not the tiny dancers, but just their costumes. I got a kick out of how two outfits took up our entire trunk. The girls miss dance class and are looking forward to taking a tap class in the fall together. Since the girls aren't in school yet, the end of dance class was our official start of summer. Below are how we have spent our time so far, as laid back as possible. Here Lucy is below giving Charlie some love. In the bottom corner picture, Charlie is feasting on a can of tuna because we were completely out of dry and wet cat food and I just couldn't get out of the house to buy some more for oh, about a week. Charlie did not mind in the least, and fortunately I had stocked up on the tuna a while back when it was on sale. I was just concerned he would get used to the high class food!

I was able to do a small amount of structured activities with the girls this past month and it was great. I really miss being able to do these things with the girls like we did before Violet was born, but I am telling myself we will be able to again soon. Below in clockwise are the girls making Thank You cards with me, doing "candy experiments" which was inspired by an activity Lucy did at the library, making a double batch of Muddy Buddies so that the girls could do equal amounts of everything and inspired by the fact that there were "no good snacks" in the house, and the bottom three pictures are of homemade bubbles that used ingredients I already had and were inspired by the fact that we had run out of bubbles. Necessity to not take three kids to the store truly is the mother of invention.

Most of the time though, the girls had what my educator friends would call free play. I truly do believe that kids this age really only ever need free play but there is a fine balance between too little free play and too much. I always know when too much free play has been achieved based on the level of fighting that escalates in direct correlation with the amount of time spent in free play. Below the girls are "doing Daddy's hair" with fists of ice cubes on a hot day, putting chalk graffiti on the back of our house (not allowed and when discovered by me ended with a good wall washing by a pair of sorry cuties), a view of their art desk in their bedroom that is in a constant state of disaster, and finally them playing Little House on the Prairie. The doll blanket afghans on their heads was completely their doing.

I have to say that I am constantly torn between allowing creative ideas and activities while watching the price of materials and the constant mess. I am a self-proclaimed frugal neat freak and fostering creativity sometimes needs more of a laid back personality. Lucy and Emma's favorite mediums when creating are masking tape, clear tape, liquid of any type with their most accessible being water, chalk, paint, markers (the more permanent the better), Ziploc bags, plastic containers from the kitchen, straws, any food (the less sweet the better), hair accessories, blankets, pillows, staples, and crayons. Their favorite canvas includes daddy, sister's hair, skin, bed sheets (Emma did a custom dot to dot with orange crayon on her polka dot bed sheets), carpet, brick walls and table tops. If no other options are available, they will take paper. My favorite option is sending them outside where little damage can be done and the mediums they choose to use are less expensive and mostly free. Here they are below riding their bikes in the cemetery in our neighborhood, riding their bikes with Charlie trotting faithfully beside them around the loop at the church next door, swimming in the backyard, and putting on a show with leaves.

Here they are below with Caddy their caterpillar who hopefully became a Monarch butterfly when she so slyly escaped after Lucy forgot to put the lid back on bug box. They discovered what type of leaves Caddy preferred, and kept her happy for several days at least.

And there is always yard work to help with. Here they are below helping Will put in a new potato bed. We learned last summer that our local deer leave potato plants alone so we are going to make them a permanent fixture outside of the fenced portion of our garden. We also forgot to put frames into one of the bee hives and were greeted with a mountain of comb and honey which we had to scrape out and are now enjoying. We also harvested bowls and bowls of luscious strawberries from our garden and even made about a dozen half pint jars of Strawberry Rhubarb jam with our very own strawberries and rhubarb.

When it's time to come inside for quiet time, I can usually be persuaded to be lenient on my quiet time rules if a learning opportunity has presented itself and the opportunity happens to be free, quiet and still allow me to get some stuff done. The perfect Get Out of Jail for Free card presented itself this past month when our neighbors had a giant tree cut down. The girls watched the entire episode out of our kitchen window and spent about three times longer than a required quiet time doing it which was a win win for everyone.

We've joined the summer reading program at the library and the girls have enjoyed their Outdoor Explorer program which meets once a week in the library's garden. Lucy found an abandoned duck egg there and was super proud to show all of her fellow explorers. We went back later that night to show Will and were sorry to see a pair of ducks sitting near the egg, but not on the egg. We are afraid that by touching the egg, the Mama and Daddy duck didn't want it anymore. From now on we won't touch any egg we find that doesn't belong to our own chickens!

The girls have had more time to spend with their friends that are usually in school which has been nice. Below in clockwise order are the girls enjoying a lunch on Main Street with our friends on their last day of school, running through the rain after because we walked there and didn't check the forecast first, having fun at our friend's Lego birthday party and putting on a show on our front porch with another friend.

We had a lot of family time this past month with relatives in town from out West and my Uncle in town for a week from Africa. My sister came and stayed with us for a weekend, and we got to meet an Aunt and cousin that we had never met before but hope to see regularly now - or as regularly as can be arranged living on opposite ends of the country.

We celebrated Grandma T's birthday and Violet got to meet her Great Grandma J for the first time too.

And finally, we had a lovely Father's Day with Will which included lots of relaxing, yummy foods and a splendid picnic lunch in the park joined by my sister who played a hilarious game of hide and seek with the girls.