America's Next Top Model

Ummm, or maybe not.  Probably a good thing we homeschool; all four of my older children seem to have a preference for this style of sandals-with-socks.  Renee is still developing her sense of style.   I sent an older child in to change this morning who was wearing shorts and sandals with heavy wool hiking socks.  This one slipped past quality control.

And what was wrong with the matrix this morning?  All I wanted from the world was to sit in my plastic lawn chair in the driveway and sip my coffee in the beautiful sunshine.  I had kids screaming, dog barking, kids who had to go potty, dog barking, kids who needed help with their work again, dog barking, phone ringing, kids screaming to me that the dog is barking.  My kingdom for a minute's quiet!  

Sports Fans!

The kids have been after me to acquire a basketball hoop for the driveway.  There hadn't been any that sounded promising on craigslist, and I was not quite ready to drop $150 on a brand new one, so I figured I'd wait around and see what turned up.
As luck would have it, my next door neighbor was out in the yard this afternoon, and asked me out of the blue if our kids would be interested in taking their old basketball hoop, as his boys were grown and didn't use it anymore.  We gladly accepted his generous offer; he even adjusted the height and had his son wheel it over to our driveway.  The kids have been happily fighting over whose turn it is all afternoon.
This here is a totally new sport we just invented.  I'm certain it has Olympic potential.  We call it Dog Soccer.  To play, you need at least four soccer balls and four frisbees, and as many people as you can gather (in our case, usually 6 or 7).  Oh, you also need a dog.  Preferably a very fast, athletic dog.  The rules are as follows:  throw the frisbees and whale on the soccer balls in every direction until the whole team collapses on the grass in exhaustion or the dog runs away.  It's quite fun; we've been playing every night this week.
Players can sub out at will.  This one is awfully cute.  
Green grass, blue skies, healthy children, fresh air.  It doesn't get much better than this!

Everybody loves a parade!

Except for the dog, who sat in my lap for the whole hour and a half.  At least she didn't try to herd up the little Shriner's cars.
The kids were in it for the candy that many of the parade-marchers threw into the crowds.  Happy (early) Memorial Day!

Ahem.

You.  Yeah, that's right.  Sorry to wake you up, you do look so very comfortable,  but that is not where dogs sleep.  Not in this house.  My house. Oh no.  Just hop on down to the floor, if it please you, and thank you very much.  

Our wooden boy

I was watching the kids playing outside the door, and couldn't help chuckling at poor little Joe.  He looked so much like Pinocchio, with his too-small clothes and socks pulled up and skinny arms and legs, skipping around the yard.  

Floored

Boy what a job.  We refinished our living room & dining room floors.  This means, of course, removing everything from these rooms, right down to the baseboards.  Like most people,I didn't realize just how much stuff  we had in those rooms, until I had to find another place to put it.  Six enormous book shelves crammed full of books and school stuff, a dining room table for eight, massive armoire, couch, chair, and more odds and ends of furniture and ordinary junk.  All this stuff had to be stacked and stuffed into the other rooms of our house.  Here we have the rooms devoid of furnishings just after we sanded the floors.  The kids and dog are playing some kind of slamball-bowling-roller-derby type of game on those wide open floors.  
Ahhhhh, finished.  After a much longer drying time than was given on the label of the stain can.  These rooms are in the dead middle of the house, right inside the front door.  It was very inconvenient to work around.  To get to the kitchen, you had to go out the lower back door, around the house, and in through the garage.  Try doing that 80 times a day for five days.  I give it about 12 hours before some child or animal carves an irreparable scratch, or scribbles with sharpie, or starts a campfire in the middle of the floor.  

Look closely- it's what you *don't* see that's important

This week we (and by we I mean me, of course) are doing more painting.  Living room, dining room, hallway, and porch are going "Antique White".  Even the kids are starting to hate Antique White and all its generic, pale, bland, colorlessness.  But house buyers like neutral paint, so neutral we shall go.  We really, really are going to sell this house, I swear!  Anyways, painting means removing everything from the walls, including the clock that hung on this spot on the wall right here.  When you've had a clock in the same place on the wall for the last 10 years, you become accustomed to looking at that spot when you need to check the time.  So for the last two days I've been checking the time on a blank wall.  You don't realize how often you look at a clock until the clock isn't there anymore.  Priority number one this morning is putting it back up.

Since I've been very busy and distracted with the house being all torn apart, my children have been putting all of their efforts into driving me crazy.  To be fair, it's a short drive.  I'll work on finding them a more productive way to channel their energies. Children who have the gall to complain of boredom in my presence will suddenly find themselves with so much to do, they'll long to be bored again.

The Barfing Beckers

So why would I put a picture of a lovely birthday cake in a post that is, presumably, about barfing?  It's relevant, I assure you.  You see, Paul's birthday party was cancelled due to the stomach bug that went through our house (scroll through some of the older posts to hear part of the story).  Everyone except me got it, and boy was it nasty!  We spent an entire month dealing with it, one after another.  Paul finally got his party rescheduled, although it seemed like we might have to cancel it again.  You see, on the Sunday before his scheduled party, we were at our annual church picnic.  Matt was pushing little Renee on the swings when she barfed all over herself.  There's nothing like having three kids come flying down the hill yelling to me "Mom!  Daddy needs you now! Renee barfed all over the swings!"  We got her cleaned up as best we could and Matt made a hasty retreat from the picnic with her.

 

She seemed fine after that.  Until Wednesday.  We were out grocery shopping, and were running late, as we needed to be at church by 6 and it was nearing 5:30.  So we stopped at the drive thru at McDonalds for a better-than-nothing quick dinner.  In between placing our order and picking up our food, Renee (again) barfed all over the backseat of the van.  We got her home and cleaned her (and the van) up.  Again, she seemed fine, so I let her eat her McNuggets, though I did keep her home from church that night.

Everything seemed fine on Thursday morning, the day of the party.  The kids were excited, and preparations went off without a hitch.  All the boys had a terrific time, right up until the very end.  One boy took a hit to the head during a football game.  We brought him in and put ice on his head, and he told me he thought he needed to throw up.  This not being my child, I wasn't sure if he really meant it, or if he was just upset from getting hit, and I didn't want to embarrass him in front of the other boys at the party.  And besides, his mother was due to arrive any minute.  If I hadn't learned this lesson by then, you can be sure I've learned it now: when a kid says he's gonna throw up, believe him!  As soon as the poor boy's mom came in and went over to him, he lost his lunch in a very spectacular fashion all over the living room.  The other mom and I both stood there trying to catch it in our hands.  Matt just couldn't help himself and had to laugh at the sight of it all.  We have enough kids and have been through enough that we've seen pretty much everything, and really, you do just have to laugh at stuff like this sometimes.  The party was over anyways, so all the kids went home and good old Matt cleaned up the mess.

If only that was the end of our tale.  On our way to our homeschool classes this afternoon, Elena started complaining she wasn't feeling well and didn't want to go.  I figured she was just trying to get out of going to class because she wanted to play out on the playground with her friends, and besides, we were already almost there.  I sent all the kids in to their first class.  Halfway through, another mom came out to tell me that my daughter was not feeling well in her ballet class.  Poor Elena was indeed lying curled up on the floor, not looking well at all.  Not wanting yet another catastrophic barfing incident, I hustled her out to the van.  I went back in to make quick arrangements to have some friends look after and bring home the other three children, and got Elena and Renee strapped in to their seats to go home.

Now, unfortunate experiences in the past have led me to always have a small trash can handy in the van in case of carsickness (there's a whole 'nother set of stories there!)  The old trash can I'd had in there was, umm, filled during the Joe-barfing-at-gymnastics incident just a few weeks ago, and I had to throw out the whole can.  Just a few days ago, I bought a brand new trash can at the dollar store,  lined it with several trash bags, and placed it in the van.  Before taking off, I handed the can to Elena.  And it's a good thing, as she needed it before we were halfway home.  For probably the first time in Becker history, a child throwing up in a moving vehicle managed to get it all in the bucket!  And of course, there's nothing like flying down the freeway to the sound of a child throwing up in the back seat.  Thanks to my foresight, when we pulled into the driveway, I only had to pull out the first "full" bag, toss it out, and put the trash can back in it's place.

Poor baby is home on the couch being taken care of now.  Let's hope this is the last chapter in the Tale of the Barfing Beckers.