The Becker Free Library

The big girls finally got bunk beds, which means there is now enough space in the Big Girl Room for Renee to move in. She has been just dying to be one of the Big Girls. Over the past week, we moved the rest of her stuff in to the Big Girl Room, which left us with an entirely empty room. After much deliberation, it was decided that this room should become the Library.
And here it is. A family of bibliophiles such as ourselves will get a lot of use out of this space. My children are the only ones I've ever known to actually wear out books through normal use. I can think of several favorite titles we that are on our third our fourth copies of. The last several mornings, Matt and I have woken up to find all of the children up here digging through books and fighting over the three chairs in there.
With only one bookshelf, we have lots of piles of books on the floor and in baskets. It seems we have been able to acquire both books and children at a faster rate than we have been able to acquire the furniture necessary for either one.

A few dirty little family secrets...

I let my children play in real, unsterilized, not-from-a-bag-from-Home-Depot, dirt. We used to have a sandbox, full of clean, white, sterilized play sand. After many years, the kids wore the sandbox out, so we dragged it to the curb. Where the sandbox used to be is a bare, dusty patch of good old dirt. They've been having more fun digging and playing there than they ever did in the actual sandbox. They have another dirt patch on the side of the driveway, in the tire tracks left by the van, and they also play in the dirt that's in the gutter down by the road. It's OK though- as luck would have it, our house came equipped with a bodily dirt removal facility, complete with a liquid dirt remover dispenser (aka the bathtub), as well as a very high tech computerized machine for removing the dirt from clothing.
We eat a lot of donuts. Our children had a friend come over after church one day recently, and as is our custom, we stopped on the way home to pick up some donuts. The child told us that in his family, they only eat donuts maybe once a year! I nearly keeled over at the very thought. I try to eat donuts at least once a week. Our family is still mourning the closing of Krispy Kreme, and we are seriously considering a trip to Pennsylvania just to get some of their wonderful donuts. As a self-proclaimed food snob, I eat a surprising amount of decidedly un-snobby, even down right trashy, food. Like Little Debbie cakes. And anything from Taco Bell. I'm to much of a snob to set foot in a chain restaurant like Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factory, but I love me a good Big Mac. I love the chemical aftertaste that comes of eating Zingers. I am sitting here with a Butterfinger hangover, because Matt bought too much Halloween candy. I need to remind him never to buy more candy than he is wiling to risk having me eat while he is at work.And this is not a secret, but I had to go out and buy a steel gate, because as you saw the other day, Fly ate her way out through the old wood one. And though she tried, she could NOT squeeze herself underneath.

Some Becker-iffic Randomness

A cake. A very tasty cake, that I made, that the family ate in two sittings over as many days. This thing probably weighed about 15 pounds. Matt insisted I post a picture of it. One of these days I'll start a dedicated food blog (me and 200,000 other foodie wannabes.)
The Becker Cornhuskers Society. I think they're planning on unionizing next summer. That never goes well for either side.
Renee, close up, just because she's cute close up. Sometimes. Other times, I wouldn't touch her with a twenty two and a half foot pole. Here, she is happy because we just had dinner at Friendly's, which is a very rare treat indeed. A rare treat for everyone else at the restaurant that evening was when she stood up and announced (very loudly), "I need to POOP!"
The Dogshank Redemption. Over the past few months, the dog has been chewing her way through the gate we use to keep her confined to the kitchen when we're not home. She's chewed through one bar at a time. Last week, we came home from church and found she had finally chewed her way out. I don't think she knew quite what to do with herself once she got out; I think she just went back in under the kitchen table and took a nap. Dogs don't always think these things all the way through.
Elena, close up, just because she's cute close up. She's bravely working her way through her bowl of bean soup. Periodically, I make some kind of beans for dinner, because they are very cheap, very healthy, and really quite tasty. Despite their reputation as the "Musical Fruit", they have never quite caught on here, and the children all still complain when it's bean night at the Becker house. We have yet to lose any one to bean poisoning. There was also some dissatisfaction with the corn muffins I made. I heard, "Hey, there's corn in these corn muffins!" Yes, indeed. If they had found peas or tomatoes in the corn muffins, I might have granted a little more validity to their complaint.

A Very Lovely Day

We went to one of our favorite places, Stonybrook State Park.
All of us, even the dog.
It's one of the prettiest places I know of. I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Free wheelin'

This is Elena. She is four and three-fourths years old. She just learned how to ride a two-wheel bike with no training wheels.
This is Renee. She is two and three-fourths years old. She just learned how to pedal a tricycle. This is, by the way, the very same tricycle she fell off exactly one year ago and broke her arm.
Elena is the youngest kid we've ever had to learn to ride a bike. She is, actually, the youngest kid I've ever known to learn ow to ride a bike. She's got a lot to live up to. It's tough being on the tail end of a big family- no one wants to be told that they're "too little" to do all the cool stuff the other kids do, and I'm quite sure that played a part in her motivation to learn how to ride. She got tired of watching the other kids hop on to their bikes and leave her eating dust and crying "Hey, guys, wait for me! Wait up! C'mon! MOM, they kids won't WAIT for meeeeee!!!!"
One day a few weeks ago, the kids had some friends over, and they all wanted to ride bikes. We had a few extra bikes, but needed to take the training wheels off Elena's bike for another kid to ride. I never got around to putting the training wheels back on, despite Elena asking me to do it about 389 times over the course of two days. One evening, she had her training-wheel-less bike out in the circle, and was just kind of scooting around on it as the other kids rode circles around her. Now, I had tried to teach her to ride her bike a few times before this summer without great success, and was not feeling up to another round of running in circles stooped over trying to help a small child balance and not crash in to parked cars. I told her I'd pay her five bucks if she could teach herself to ride her bike all by herself. Inside of an hour, that kid was zipping around the circle with the rest of the kids! Lazy parenting pays off sometimes.
Our small garage now contains 9 two-wheel bikes, 7 scooters, and 2 tricycles. We also have squeezed in there a two-seat bike trailer, a jogging stroller, a big red wagon, a red cozy coup kid-size car, 5 sleds, three dozen soccer balls, and equipment for every sport known to man, besides all the regular garage stuff like lawn mowers and wheelbarrows and junk we don't know where else to put. A few times a year, we clean it out and organize everything. We line up all the bikes in size order and toss out all the dead soccer balls. This lasts for exactly one day, then it's back to stacking bikes on top of each other.

Wrapping up summer

Summer is winding down already, for all that we got of it. There was maybe one good two-week run of real summer weather, with a few random warm days tossed in
I think this was the one and only time we dragged out the slip-n-slide. If you believe the warnings printed on the box, using a slip-n-slide is about as dangerous as carrying a bag of pit vipers up the side of Mount Everest while smoking an unfiltered cigarette.
There are stern admonitions to carefully check the area for rocks and debris before setting out the slide. There are various height, weight, and age restrictions for using the slide. There are the usual precautions about parental supervision and death or serious injury if the device is used in any way other than exactly as specified. All of the consumer-safety type groups and pediatric-society type groups frown on these things big time.
Because it's fun. Good, cheap fun. I'm sure those groups are working on getting all slip-n-slides banned or recalled, or at least a law passed that you have to wear a helmet and full body padding to use one. Just pretend you don't see that big rock holding down the top corner of the slide.
All the children survived unharmed, despite all of the slipping and sliding and unheeded warnings.

Hey Mom, watch me! Watch me!!!!

Here it is, mid-August, and it's only just in the last week been warm enough to go to the pool. I guarantee, if we had cancelled our pool membership back in May it would have been the hottest summer on record. I have that kind of power over the weather, ya know. Did you know I can make it rain simply by hanging a few loads of clothes out on the line? I can also clear up cloudy skies by deciding to put the clothes in the dryer. It's good to be me.
We got lots of "awwww, how cute those little girls are!!!" with these matching swim suits. Due to the hand-me-down factor, I don't usually buy new clothes for anyone other than the oldest child, but swim suits don't seem to last for much more than one season.
My kids are little fish. All afternoon I heard, "Hey Mom, MOM! Look! Watch me!" as they demonstrated their latest water acrobatics. They love to swim. Love it. I love sunning myself on the pool deck and watching them swim. Matt doesn't like the hot sun too much, but he does like it when the rest of us are happy, so it worked out well for us all.
We came home and put a bunch of sunburned, red-eyed, exhausted children to bed. We'll only have a few more short weeks of summer left to enjoy the pool, and even at that, we'll probably only get a handful of hot days. Today is on track to be a regular scorcher, maybe our first 90 degree day of the year.

There was a lot of contention last week about which swim goggles belong to who. Joe is upstairs doing his math wearing his goggles, as much in anticipation of going to the pool later as to protect his goggles from the other kids. One pair broke, and Renee took scissors to another pair. Paul ended up not liking the new goggles he picked out, and was trying to negotiate a pretty one-sided deal with one of the other kids for a pair he liked better. Later, we'll enter into negotiations as to towel assignments and diving-toy distribution. I've already rested my voice to be ready for a whole morning of "If you kids don't shape up and stop giving me lip and start doing your work I'm not taking any of you ANYWHERE later!!!!" Good times, really!