After & Before

In an attempt to pump some life into our newly-painted but hideously bland living space, I tried painting an "accent wall". I was afraid it would look about ten years out of date (accent walls are soooo early 2000's), but I was desperate for some color. Well, I was right again. It looked ten years out of date. It was just one wall, so I painted it back to the color I had just finished painting it a few weeks ago. Boooooooring.
It looks a little livelier with the addition of the "gallery wall", which is a very up-to-date decorating trend. Looking at all those baby pictures sorta reminds me of the bulletin boards outside hospital nurseries that have pictures of all the babies born there during the last year. In this case, all the babies were born by me personally over the last twelve years. What I won't do to follow a trend...
In other news, today we played everyone's favorite post-windstorm game of running through our neighbors' yards to retrieve all the junk that blew away. Lawn chairs, outdoor storage totes, the roof to the girls' playhouse, that sort of stuff. Elena here, wearing hip waders, is standing on one of the several temporary bridges that the children have put up to cross the moat that has formed around our yard. We could use some dry weather.
David has become a virtual rolling accident-mobile. He's gotten quite fast, and leaves a wake of destruction behind him wherever he goes. He has been very busy with things like pulling stuff down off tables onto his head and getting his fingers stuck in places he should not be putting them in the first place. Even with seven of us looking out for him, he manages to smack his head with alarming frequency.
He is awfully cute. Here's hoping that good judgement and better balance are in his future.
Occasionally, he tires of his duties as solo destructive force. Here he is chillaxin' in one of his favorite spots, prepared just for him courtesy of the Society of Older Sisters for the Protection of Their American Girl Dolls.

Movin' on up

After nearly two months of motoring around backwards, baby D has finally achieved forward motion. This is providential, as we could not afford to replace his transmission. He is now capable of getting into all kinds of new and wonderful trouble. Our circa-1960's house has a funky step-down living room, which until now has provided a measure of containment for the baby. Watch as he climbs up and out! We're going to be in a whole lot of trouble until he learns to master going up and down the stairs.

Whistle while you work

What you would be hearing, if you could be here with me live, is the gleeful sound of children who were offered a substantial (to them) sum of money to do a menial (to me) but necessary chore. It's amazing how the salve of cold, hard cash applied across a number of children eases the pain of hard labor.
What they are doing is removing many hundreds of nails from a big pile of salvaged oak floor boards. I had put a wanted ad on craigslist a while back looking for some old strip oak flooring to match the existing floors in our house, to put in the new addition. Amazingly, a guy contacted me who was ripping out some of the exact stuff I was looking for. We were more than happy to take it off his hands. The huge pile of nail-y wood has been taking up precious space in the garage for a few months now, while Matt and I scratched our heads over what would be the most effective way of pulling out all those nails to get the boards ready to be re-installed in our house. It turns out all we had to do was dangle a few twenty dollar bills in front of the children. They had the whole job done in a few hours!
We are now employing the same strategy to wipe out a whole bunch more big jobs around the homestead. No sooner had the children dropped their hammers, I sent them out to the back yard (aka "The Becker Mudflats") to start picking rocks out of the rough-graded muck from last fall's construction. We have a pretty bad track record when it comes to growing grass. As it stands right now, we have almost no grass at all in the back, so we're gonna have to do something. Green spray paint is starting to sound like a reasonable idea. We'll keep you posted, because there's nothing more exciting than reading about growing grass except for maybe actually watching grass grow.
David, as always, is enjoying watching other people work. He's got a great crawl-up view of the back yard from the sliding glass door.

Child's play

This plastic tub was bought to store all of Baby D's toys. So far, it has spent more time storing Renee.
D isn't particularly interested in any of his toys anyhow. He'd rather play with Daddy's cell phone and the dog's icky tennis balls and the newspaper we have stacked up to start the fire with.
I love the jeans Elena is wearing. Let's take a close look...
These pants have lived a very hard life. The knee on the right has already been patched over once, and a new hole has been worn through the patch. I'm not sure if it's worth patching these again, even though we still have one more little girl in line to wear them. By the time the kids' clothes have been outgrown by all potential wearers in the house, there's not much left holding them together but a dirt and a few threads.

On cute babies and lots of children

If you've been following my blog, you may have noticed that the topics of my posts fall into three main categories:

1. Food

2. Cute things the kids do

3. Catastrophes of the sort that are very funny when they happen to somebody else (like this and this and this)

I've been doing a lot of the first type lately, and we try to avoid the third type, so today for your enjoyment is a cute kid. Try not to smile while you watch the video.

Occasionally, I also write about the trials and tribulations of having a larger family in a small-family world. Every.single.time. I'm out in public with all the children (which is often) I get comments from strangers, usually along the lines of "Wow, are they all yours?" or "Boy, you've sure got your hands full!" Most people are very nice, and we often get a remark about how well-behaved and helpful the children are. This is nothing new; running errands with all the children has made us a sort of carnival side show since back when we only had four children. What I'm finding remarkable of late is how many people remember our family, even when I don't have any children with me. This morning I had to go and have blood drawn for some lab tests, which I do fairly frequently. I happened to be by myself this time, but both the women who work at the lab asked me where all the kids were, and said how much they liked seeing them come in because they were always so good. A few weeks ago I was out shopping at one of the thrift stores we frequent, with only two children with me. When we were checking out, the cashier asked where all the other kids were that day. This sort of thing has been happening more frequently; I guess our family is pretty memorable!

Go home now. No more food.

This is probably what the owners were thinking, as my children descended like a plague of hungry locusts upon the China Buffet last night. This was the first time we've all been out to eat since David was born ten months ago, and was David's first restaurant experience.
Actually, they love us at China Buffet. I think they're amazed that there are actually children out there who can be well-behaved in public; our crew does pretty well. The size of our brood makes it necessary to run a pretty tight ship. One child making a little noise is easy to overlook, but six children making a little noise has an astounding multiplying effect, and people start giving us the stink eye. As thus, I've tried to train everybody to keep their voices down and stick close together so we don't seem like so many people.
David is enjoying all things food these days. This morning he had his first pancakes. He was stuffing them into his mouth so fast he could barely breathe. When that boy's hungry, he goes to town.
He also tried sausage for the first time. He put the first piece into his mouth, and got a quizzical expression on his face while he rolled it around his tongue for a few seconds. Suddenly his eyes got very wide, and he reached down with both fists and started stuffing sausages down his gullet like it was going to be his last meal. It looks like he'll be able to hold his own around the Becker dinner table.