Recent Happenings.

The dogwood tree had a serious split from a very heavy, wet, late snow.  We tried to repair it, but the  branch kept cracking further and further down, so Andy had to take it off a few weeks ago.

Since Sarah has been home from college, the little ones want to hang out in her room as much as possible.    This is what happens with they hang out with Sarah.

These pics were taken at the beginning of May on a trolley ride.  We went to a free performance of an educational play about Ben Franklin, and the trolley ride was included.  During the play, Philip ate 3 cups of peach yogurt.  

On the trolley ride back, Philip threw up 3 cups of peach yogurt all over the trolley floor.

Regina and I cut out the sod and planted flowers the day Brian left.  By now, much of the grass has retaken its territory, but we do have several seedlings coming up...sunflowers, cosmos, etc.  

OK, these next pictures...........

Basically, Saturday night Regina climbed up someplace high and fell down.  Initially there was swelling the size of a golf ball, and a small cut on the top of her cheekbone.  After I assessed that her vision was undamaged and there was no concussion. we iced it to keep the swelling down.

Sunday morning, this is Regina WITH her ice pack.....

and here she was WITHOUT.

Her eye was able to open wider and wider as the day went on.  At first, she wanted to hide her face from everybody so they wouldn't see her and ask what happened.  By the afternoon, she had gotten over her self-consciousness and was back to her peppy self, and her face shape is much more normal now.  

It's turning some pretty colors, though.  Brian would be proud.

The surreal shot was taken with my crappy cell phone on the carousel.  Regina, in the foreground, names all horses Buttercup.  The twins, in the distance, have just become big enough to catch rings.  I was hoping to catch their outstretched hands, too, but my camera just doesn't have the right stuff.

And finally, Little Man at 9 months old.  He was in the baby pool (and loved it) for the first time today.

Regina Is A Little Stinker.

Okay, so on our second floor there are four bedrooms.  One is the boys', and one is where the stairs go up to the third floor, so it has no privacy at all and as a result we use it as our schoolroom rather than a bedroom.

The remaining two bedrooms were occupied by the girls - the pink one for sleeping, the white one for all their dressers and toys.

This has been working out for us pretty well, except for one snag - Summer.  The pink room has no air conditioner, the white one does.

Today I got a bee in my bonnet to swap the beds and the dressers, so I conscripted my husband and sons to do the heavy lifting.  The switch didn't take long at all, so in about two hours we had moved everything, decorated, and cleaned up, leaving us with two functional rooms.  The girls were excited about the new setup and about the prospect of sleeping in air-conditioned comfort on this 95-degree, humid night.  

One half of the pink room.
I designated a place to read,  because the twins are becoming voracious, compulsive readers.

It won't be long before the carpet is covered with books and cast-off clothing, which will give Mommy an aneurysm.

The other half - still a work in progress.  Notice the top shelf of the closet?

Natalie in particular was delighted because she found herself a new little nook to hide and read.  It wasn't long before I realized that she had climbed up to the top shelf of the closet and had made a nest out of pillows and blankets.  She kept climbing back down, saying she had to "get things organized."  Must be her new word.  Not long after that, she had a comfy little setup with books and toys lining the shelf's perimeter.  

Natalie's nook.

Regina was in and out of the rooms while we were cleaning and reorganizing.  She was also trying to climb up with Natalie, but we wouldn't allow that.  At one point, all the girls were coloring in the white room, and I was carrying a basket of clothes into the pink room, which I thought was empty.  I heard a voice and turned to look at the closet, and I saw this:

Yep, she succeeded in climbing up once we were all out of her way the room, and she was happily swinging from the clothes bar.

The kid's got some upper body strength, I'll give her that.

Havin' Some Fun Tonight.

I should have titled this post "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."

We have been cleaning our yard, patio and garage this week.  It's a slow process that involves deciding where to put all the accumulated junk that has piled up over the past four years, including all the junk that we had to take out of our old house and my mother's house, which both sold about six months ago.  Since that was the middle of winter, it was easier to just pile everything on the patio and in the garage than to deal with it all in the deep chill of winter.

But winter didn't last forever, and when the warm weather came, the patio began  beckoning to us from under her deep layer of debris, detritus and refuse.  It's actually a pleasant and shady place to sit.  Not that we'd know.

So we cleaned it off.  There were piles of scrap lumber and broken chairs, etc., that needed disposal.  My husband likes to burn anything made of paper or wood to reduce the amount of trash we put out.  We put some things into the burn barrel and went back to cleaning, keeping an eye on the barrel, of course.

When supper was ready, we went in to eat - forgetting about the burn barrel.  Andy was at work, Brian was away for the weekend.  It was just me, Conor, and the little girls at the table.  

There was a knock at the door.  I have some free things out on the front sidewalk (unwanted items unearthed in the backyard cleanout), so I assumed it was somebody inquiring about them.  Instead, it was a neighbor.

Her - "Do you know that you have wood burning out back?"

Me, nonchalantly - "Oh yes, we know."

Her - "No, I mean piles of wood, burning on the ground."

Me - Well, actually, I didn't say anything, because my heart was in my throat.  Yikes!  I hope I thanked her adequately.

Out back, we found that something had fallen out of the burn barrel, and ignited two of our wood racks that held our split firewood for the winter.  In addition, there were several spots on the ground around where dead leaves were burning.  I didn't actually see the conflagration because I was busy filling up buckets and trash cans.  Conor was the one who went up for the initial assessment.  All I could see was columns of smoke, which led me to believe that we had started a brush fire and the whole mountain was burning.

The actual damage was less serious, although still pretty serious.  Thank God that neighbor passed just then, so we could get it under control while there was still time.  It took us about 45 minutes until everything was fully extinguished.

Earlier in the year, our big wood rack shifted somehow and there was a small wood avalanche.  Some of the logs that had fallen were burned.

This wood rack was about ten feet long and stacked as high as those upright wood stakes.  It caught fire from underneath in two places.

I never did like how close Andy stacked the wood to the burn barrel.

My cousin Ian remarked, "Well, at least now you have charcoal!"

This is the dinner that was interrupted. 

What is this, the sixth fire incident we've had here?  Two chimney fires.  One blackened pot on the stove that filled the house with smoke.  One grease fire in a frying pan.  One box of matches that burst into flames when  accidentally left atop the woodstove.  I hate fire.  I wish I could be done with it forever.

I feel like I should say that this is the first incident we've had with the barrel in the four years we've been burning here.

I can't believe we forgot about the burn barrel.  I can't believe that the woods didn't catch fire.  I can't believe how the Lord spared us from a serious disaster, when we clearly don't deserve to be spared the consequences of our own foolishness.

My pitifully small heart is not capable of gratefulness that is as vast and profound as God deserves from me..

Picture Parade: Too Smart For Her Own Good.

Big Drama at the Stefo House Today

Found this in the third floor bathroom today.

What a giant baby I am - my first instinct was to stand there frozen and scream.

Learned later that it's an Eastern Milk Snake.

It looks so small here.  Trust me, it looked a lot larger gliding across my bathroom threshhold.

3 feet long at least.

The temperature sensor on my vehicle today.

Picture Parade: Strange Fruit.

That's Theresa peeking out of the top of the dogwood tree.  Yes, that's right, I said the top of the dogwood.  Sheesh.  I took the picture looking out of a second floor window, and she was about eye level with me.  I'd guess it's only about 20 feet off the ground.

Picture Parade: Bathtime. Then Second Bathtime.

Regina used to hate every minute of her bathtime, especially the hair-washing.  She hated the water so much that she wouldn't deign to sit down in the water, and her "bathtime" ended up being a quick and traumatic standing pat-down.

Not anymore.  In fact, this time after she was washed, dried and dressed, she made a desperate dash for the water when my head was turned.

She was successful.

Problem-solving, Personified.

Before and After

Wrecking Ball

Cleanup crew

Busted.

Notice all the hershey kiss wrappers and the slightly guilty look.

Mommy, Are You Gonna Be Mad?

Picture Parade: Chaos in a Cute Package

A Tribute to Our Van

Last February, my husband was bringing some trees down with his chainsaw when, against all odds, a tree decided to defy the laws of physics and gravity and fall, backwards AND uphill, smashing the cab of our 12-passenger van.  

The gray van joined our family in February of 2007, about six weeks after the birth of our twins brought our family size to 10.  Before that I was driving a station wagon that seated 8.  All of us couldn't fit in it at one time, and two infant carseats made the interior uncomfortably cramped.  I didn't even know my husband was buying this van until one evening I was driving his car one way down the street and I saw him driving the van toward me.  He slowed down, rolled down the window, and called, "Wanna go for a ride?  Pull that thing in the back and let's go!"

We called it Fluffy, on account of the first three letters of the license plate - FLF. It had rear wheel drive, which meant I was terrified to drive it in any kind of winter weather unless my husband put studded snow tires on it.  It took us to Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Ohio, Georgia.  It faithfully limped to and from Washington, D.C. one year while having some kind of problem that involved overheating, stalling, and not being able to exceed 40 mph.  We painted the windows purple and white for football games, loaded it up with bicycles (inside and out) to go on family trail bike-rides, took our oldest son to the emergency room in it, laid out on a rear seat, after he fell off our high porch.  It sheltered us on that bitterly cold night when we had to evacuate our house due to a fire, and drove around aimlessly while we wondered if we'd have a home to come back to.  A whole lot of living took place in that van.

Granted, it was a rusty P-O-S.  Gray paint, gray vinyl seats, gray rubber floor. It only had the original AM/FM radio. The side windows didn't actually open, just propped out a few inches, and the rear blower didn't work. At one time, there had been A/C, but the system was not rechargeable. Thus  was it roasting hot in the summer and an icebox in the winter.  The cargo doors were rusting out at the bottom, and it had some kind of rear latch malfunction - once in a while the doors would randomly swing open upon acceleration.  Its biggest draw was that it had vinyl seats and a rubber floor.  Not the most attractive, to be sure, but I didn't give a rip if somebody was carsick, or careless with their coke, chicken nuggets or barbecue sauce.  Any messes were easily taken down by removing all of our junk and whipping out the garden hose.  Seriously.

Speaking of messes - boy, could it hold a lot of stuff.  There were four rows of seats, with ample space between the front seats and along the side doors.  If that wasn't enough space, there was a 4' by 6' cargo area in the rear.  We could fit Dad, Mom, as many kids as we could find, and a grandmother or a friend or two, PLUS all of our stuff.

And then my husband went and dropped a tree on it.

I know how terrible he felt about it, how painful it was to watch that tree come down despite his careful preparations.  But even as it happened, he accepted that all things happen with God's own perfect timing, and that the van is just a thing.  God would provide for our needs, and we had to trust in that.

Scene of the crime.  The upside is that the tree kept us warm for a month.

After about 6 weeks of looking, we found a 9-passenger Suburban in our price range that would accommodate us.  At first I didn't like it at all - not only did it not have nearly the room the van had, but it was too new and too nice.

Fluffy was something of an eyesore (the older kids called it the Clampett van) but I didn't worry if something happened to it.  Heck, the first month I had it, I backed into every telephone pole in town.  There was a nice dent in the rear corner panel where I slid into a pole trying to turn into our snowy alley.  One time, in a Dollar General parking lot, I backed out of my parking place and punched into the rear end of the poor little car behind me - actually lifted it off the ground.    The van's looks were not the biggest concern on my mind.

Now I had this pristine Suburban, waiting helplessly to be destroyed by my wild things.  For the first few months I had a ban on food or drinks, but I couldn't keep up the resistance.  It was about the time I caught the twins scribbling on the upholstery with crayons that I conceded defeat.

I am still not overly fond of the Suburban, but have made my peace with resignation, and of course I am grateful that we have any safe, reliable vehicle at all.

When Noelle and Natalie were learning easy words last spring, I realized that they could read all the sounds I needed - ee, an, ike, said, short vowels - to tell the story of Dad, the Tree, and the Van.  And thus was a classic born:

Dad, the Tree, and the Van

Dad likes to chop trees.

A tree fell on the van.

Dad can not stop the tree.

A tree can crush a van.

The van said, "Crunch."

Now we have no van.

Dad is sad.

The End.

I did all the illustrations myself.  Be jealous.