IT’S VIKING AWESOME, BITCHES! also viking awesome? cheetohs. and being tall enough to reach them when nobody’s looking.
i was kind of afraid that having four kids at home all day every day might drive me nuts, but it’s been great so far. we take a field trip most mornings, play some music, do some cleaning and/or cooking at baby naptime during the “heat” of the day, play outside in the evenings until about 7PM, get the bedtime train rolling, have the 3 younger kids in bed at 8, EG at 9. at worst, i’m exhausted (like post-chuck-e-cheese. oh my fuck was i worn out. i think i fell asleep at about 930 instead of our usual 11-12) but haven’t gotten stressed out much at all. yay, relative sanity!
a lot of kids are in summer camps. except for an awesome little 1-week morning music camp for the twins – run by DayDreamer’s mom, a music teacher, and her friend, a preschool teacher – we either couldn’t afford the camps offered or weren’t interested in the theme. so it’s all me, woooooooooo! we haven’t run out of stuff to do yet… we stay home on the weekends to chill and grill, but weekday mornings are out and about. in addition to recurring trips to the library, the bookstore, the ped mall downtown, the lunchtime free concert series, we’ve been to chuck e cheese, the local devonian fossil gorge, the art museum, fishing, playing pool over wings, pretzels and fries at the brewpub, the cooking-with-kids series at the grocery store, etc. note how most of those are free? free is good.
now, i would make an effort to make sure most of these field trips were educational, except that, with kids, every moment is a teaching moment (this is the nice way of saying that, when you’re stupid, anything qualifies as educational.) seriously, three little information sponges keep my mouth as busy as a toothless prostitute’s mouth at a trucker’s convention. (i guess all four of the boys are information sponges, but most of the information MonkeyBeef is busy absorbing doesn’t come from me talking. information like “looking over your shoulder while running ends with scraped knees. yeah, every time.” his life is basically one long, run-on, non-verbal teaching moment.)
massive posts of field trips to follow. for now, here are some fun-in-the-backyard pictures:
the sprinkler:
the RC demolition derby invades the nerf dart gun “you’ll shoot your eye out” competition:
the baby actually came back up onto the porch of his own free will. once. usually he just beats ass for the open highway.
i dropped about $20 on bug-catching nets and magnifying cages for everyone, since their favorite books currently include the peterson field guide to insects, the audubon guide to butterflies, the “handy bug answer book,” (which is 400 pages of entomology 101-style info in a q-and-a format, written by my favorite entomology professor at the university of illinois, may berenbaum,) and half a shelf’s worth of assorted children’s books about creepy crawlies. EvilGremlin, the butterfly whisperer, managed to catch this red admiral butterfly without a net, totally impressing his brothers:
