Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

I've heard that the health benefits of taking a vacation are more from the anticipation of the trip than the trip itself.  We had planned our summer vacation back in February.  So many times I visualized the view of Lake Huron from our rented cottage and the sound of the waves against the shore and even the smell of the campfire and fresh pine.  Through the last uncomfortable trimester of pregnancy I would picture our upcoming week at the beach.  Even during labor with Violet and after my tailbone injury, I kept going to my happy place, which was the fun and relaxation we were going to have Up North.  Truly, we all couldn't wait to experience the natural beauty and peacefulness of Up North Michigan.  A week prior to our trip it was on my shoulders to pack as Will was finishing up a college class and his last week of work before having the month of July off.  It was stressful, packing for my new family of five, and all of the different stores I needed to hit to get the random items we needed for our trip.  The most stressful part was planning and shopping for a week of food, knowing that the nearest store to our rental was at least a half hour away and probably wouldn't have a good selection of the type of food we are used to.  Finally, every last item was bought, prepped and packed and we had the challenge of fitting it into our car.  Decisions were made about whether or not we need three rolls of paper towel versus two and I spent a good ten minutes convincing Will that the giant bag of library books was in fact more important than the bottled water.  Once we were on the road, the girls started complaining that they were hungry and we realized the only edible item accessible was a tin of mints.

The girls did really good on the four hour trip up, and we only had to stop twice.  When we arrived at the cottage we couldn't believe how close it was to the beach and how spectacular the view was.  Stepping out of the car and breathing in the fresh, pine scented air was everything I had dreamed of and more.

The night we arrived was chilly with a strong breeze blowing off the lake - perfect for kite flying.  The girls and I flew kites along the beach while Will built our first campfire and proceeded to cook our dinner over it.  

The next morning we awoke at sunrise, thanks to the fact that the cottage didn't have any window coverings and the girls were convinced they had slept in because the sun was so very bright.  It was a beautiful sunrise, and we were showered, dressed and fed before we would have even been out of bed at home.  We capitalized on our early rising and took a morning walk on the beach.

On the week's menu, I made sure that at least one meal a day was cooked at the campfire.  Will had bought me pie irons for my birthday and we had delicious pizza pockets, garlic cream cheese chicken pies, burgers and fruit pies.  We also had s'mores almost every day.

Unfortunately, the bugs were so bad that Will would run from the house to the campfire and back again to make dinner while we stayed inside and killed the ten mosquitoes that came in each time the sliding door was opened and closed.

By the end of the week even Emma could fend for herself and each of us had our own fly swatter.  Emma would even yell "SKEE-TA!" and smack a bug out of mid air.  Our plans of renting a cottage right on the water so that the kids could play outside all day every day were ruined by biting black flies and amazing amounts of mosquitoes.  Thank God we traded the bottled water for library books!  The week before we left for our trip I researched children's books on beaches, vacations, and the Fourth of July and found about thirty books that I kept out of reach from the girls until we were in the car heading north.  This turned out to be the most valuable item we packed, as we spent a lot of time indoors at the cottage, waiting for the bugs to go away.

There was a super comfy and well worn Lazy Boy recliner there that every family member loved.  I fed Violet in that chair countless times and cuddled the older girls too as I enjoyed the view of the lake out the giant picture window next to the chair.  I also got some of my own reading time in.

The girls continued to get up each morning at sunrise and went to bed at sunset around 10:30 the night before.  This was not enough sleep and as a result they were super cranky, irrational and emotional.  They fought like crazy and drove us absolutely crazy.  The worst part was that they couldn't go outside which is usually the solution to fighting back home.  I had brought several new crafts for them to do in case of rainy days and we utilized those to the fullest.  Besides reading, crafts and fighting, Emma enjoyed having us braid her hair multiple times a day and begging us for food as well as playing dress up with the clothes we had packed.  Lucy enjoyed playing with Violet and tattling on Emma. 

We had packed everything but the kitchen sink it seemed and when we got to the cottage we realized that we had forgotten Violet's bassinet.  This did not help our sleep issues, as I couldn't fully relax at night worrying that someone would step on her in the nest we made for her on the floor, or that Will or I would roll on her in our bed.  Lucy and Emma woke up for various things throughout the night as well and Lucy even threw up in the middle of one of the nights.  The girls shared a bed and their tossing and turning would wake each other up too.  Needless to say all three girls kept us up to the point where Will and I were so sleep deprived we could hardly function.

Friends of ours stopped by on their last day of vacation where they were camping about 45 minutes north of us.  Instead of playing at the beach, the girls got to play in the rain.  I think they had more fun playing in the rain than they did at the beach with the rain cleared up.

The bugs were so bad at the beach that my friend Bonnie and I bailed on the kids and dads and hung out in the cottage while laughing at the crazy antics of our family members fighting off the bugs while building sand castles and riding the frigidly cold waves.

Despite the rain and bugs that day, both families had a relief from sibling fighting so we all ended the day happier than we started.

Once our friends had left, the fighting resumed and we decided that our initial plan of staying at our cottage all week needed to be revised.  We needed to go somewhere for a change of scenery - and in the hopes that all three girls would nap in the car.  We found three different light houses near by which we visited on different days.  In the bottom left picture you can see the girls swatting bugs that were so bad they couldn't even stop smacking them for a picture.

Two of the light houses allowed us to climb to the top.  This was super nerve wracking for me as I worried about the girls climbing but I was surprised to realize that the girls LOVED the thrill of the climb and kept turning around to tell me that I was going to be okay!  I tried explaining to them that I wasn't afraid for myself but for them but they interpreted my anxiety to mean that I was afraid of heights!  I've never had a problem with heights - I have a problem with heights and my babies climbing them!

We also found a waterfall near the cottage with really nice hiking trails and we had fun exploring until we were tired of fighting off the bugs.

 Another day we visited Mackinaw City and all three girls saw the Mackinaw Bridge for the first time.

For some reason the bugs in Mackinaw City weren't bad and so we had fun being outside and visited a playground, had a picnic and shopped the town's Main Street.

 The day before we were supposed to go home, we woke up to a spectacular sunrise.  After the sixth consecutive day of sunrises however, I had enough.  I looked at Will and asked him hypothetically how he would feel if we went home that day.  He looked at me and said he could have the car packed in an hour.  We kept our eyes locked on each other as we tried to gauge if the other person was joking.  After a moment Will got up from his half-dead reclined position on the couch and started packing.  It was hard for me to contain my excitement at the thought of everyone having their own beds that night and NOT waking up at sunrise the following day.  The girls were sad but seemed to get over it rather quickly.  As you can see below we had a lot of packing to do but we were fueled by the thought of not being held hostage by skee-tas in a small, cedar-lined house with a know it all five year old, an irrational three year old and a gassy newborn without a bed.

Looking at our photos after a couple of good night's sleep I am glad that we went as we made lots of great memories.  I am also glad to be home, and although we still have a nervous twitch when anything brushes our arms or legs (skee-tas!), it is nice to be back and sleeping is so much better!  Our kids are back to being our clever five year old, our sweet three year old, and our adorable newborn.  We didn't account for the bugs or the sleep deprivation but it was definitely a vacation to remember!

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.

June went by in the blink of an eye and I can honestly say I've never worked so hard, slept so little and loved so much!

Violet at Two Months

Violet's second month of life was relatively quiet and went by fast.  She is getting stronger thanks in part to Will's regimen of baby gymnastics.  Here she is below standing...

Doing baby pull-ups...

And holding her head up enough to sit by herself on the couch.

Holding her head up is quite a feat, considering the cheeks she is sporting.

 Violet finally met her Great Grandma J. this past month and enjoyed snuggles with her.

And Violet of course enjoyed snuggles with her big sisters all month long.  The bottom picture in the below photo collage shows Violet's feet next to one of Emma's.

Violet is starting to show more of her personality.  She doesn't like to be left alone - awake or sleeping, and she is following in her big sisters footsteps more and more when it comes to sleep - or the lack there of.  In the below photo collage, I snapped a picture of Will yawning while trying to get Violet to sleep one night, and the right two photos Emma snapped of Violet and me, unawares.  Sorry if my yawn looks a bit scary.  It is the real deal of what I look like when sleep deprived.  I usually delete unflattering pictures of myself (it's my camera, my prerogative!) however I just had to keep the one of me yawning as it was a true candid shot that sums up my life right now.

Because of Violet's distaste for being alone and for sleeping, I have resorted to carrying her around in a baby wrap for as long as my back will allow me.  Fortunately, this is enough time for me to get some things done around the house with the older girls and Violet has been known to take naps in this wrap for up to four hours at a time.  Will doesn't wear the pink baby wrap, but somehow is capable of multitasking one-handed.

Here Will is below, holding Violet who is in fact sleeping.  She likes to sleep with her eyes half open which is kind of disturbing to see, and loves holding on to her pacifier like Popeye the Sailor Man holds his pipe.

 Violet, you are such a sweet, social girl and we love you!