Hermit the Frog, Benny the Pooh, and Who has time to blog anymore?

I know I have repeatedly said that having big kids is a big help,and it is, but the bottom line is that life is extremely full right now.  Too full to blog frequently.  So I am going to take advantage of having time tonight and post a bunch of mostly unrelated thoughts and pictures.

Such as...

This is the drain in the downstairs bathroom.  The items you see in the drain are:  a piece of soap, a pencil, a blue crayon, and the piece of mesh that fell out of the faucet.  The thing poking out of the wall of the pipe is the part that lifts the plug up and down.  The plug is MIA.

C and A are such different learners that I hardly know where to start with Natalie.  Will she be a deep thinker like Caleb, but struggle with reading?  Will she zip through the basics like Annalise?  Will she show me another completely different learning style?  She likes to have some worksheets to do, but she also likes to play.  I've decided to add a planner form for her to my weekly plan.  I'm planning 3 days of work and allowing 4 days to complete it.  One project she and I are working on is a "thing alphabet" -  B is for Buttons, etc.

Caleb and I made one of these when he was 2!  I would swear I posted it on this blog, but I can't find it.

Natalie is the one who says Hermit the Frog and Benny the Pooh.  And she's not being funny!  Although she often does try to be funny on purpose (and succeeds!)

Irene slept 9 hours each of the last two nights.  Maybe she is just an awesome sleeper, or maybe it is easier for a baby to get the picture in a house full of kids.  I can tell she differentiates between day and night.  If I turn on a light at night, she looks around for where the light came from.  Of course our house is much much quieter at night and in the daytime too!  I think there is a difference in me too -  it felt very natural to quickly establish a bedtime routine.  I don't mean to compare her to Mako, but it is kind of like how it is with a dog - there is so much said through body language that people who rely on speech don't notice.

One of Natalie's art projects this week was a giant paper doll.  I planned this activity without having a piece of cardboard big enough to carry it out.  Fortunately, my neighbor was throwing out a huge box on Monday.  We took the lid in, traced Natalie onto it, then I cut it out with a knife so that the outline was left on the box lid.  Then we took the lid back to my neighbor's house secretly and put it back where it had been.  We meant it as a big joke, but since we didn't tell anyone we did it, we don't know if anyone else thought it was funny!

I've done a lot more reading than I expected to at this time.  One book I read was The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.  It's about the French Revolution and a mysterious hero who saves some of the people slated for execution.  It's a very quick read and lots of fun.  About 4 chapters from the end I had figured out the ending and I still loved it when I was right!  I also read Dracula by Bram Stoker.  Horror is not a genre that I ever read, but I liked Dracula - it was extremely intense and scary.  I cannot stomach the Halloween decorations including Dracula this year because of it!  An interesting thing about Dracula is the way the story is told - it is presented as a collection of journal entries, personal letters, and newspaper clippings from several different characters.  The sensation is that you feel you are collecting information instead of being told a story.

I got tired of reading Dragon books to the kids and am reading them Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell.  They are loving it!   It's about a girl who gets left behind on her island home and has to survive on her own.  I think a good follow up book would be Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth Speare, but they are looking forward to reading How to Twist a Dragon's Tale by Cressida Cowell.

Annalise was here:

Too cool to drool.

The kids' bedroom:

We occasionally run into families where multiple kids share a bedroom, but not often.  When I talk to the moms, I find that there are lots of benefits to having our kids all in one room.  It is hard when it comes to storage (all of the time) or if someone wants to play alone (much less of the time).  However, the kids get along best after the lights are out.  They talk and laugh - sometimes too loudly.  We want to build another room in our house and that will spread the kids out some, but in their own imaginations, they would all sleep in one room and keep all their toys on another!  We may be getting too old for that to be reality, but I'm glad they are so attached to each other.