If I could catch time in a bottle...

The first thing that I'd like to do ...is catch up on the laundry. It's been another busy month here at the Becker house. Joe tried to capture time here- 1/11/11 at 11:11, to be precise. While the rest of us were busily plugging away at our school day, good old Joe stopped us all to watch the clock turn to this semi-historic moment in numerical history. It's the type of event that is very important to a quirky, scatter-brained daydreamer like Joe.
It's been cold, at least outside. Or so I hear. I certainly don't go out there. Brrr. I've had very little reason to leave my house for the past month. I can go days without so much as leaning out the front door; the children take turns with things like bringing in wood, taking out the garbage, and getting the mail, thus freeing me up to spend time drinking coffee by the fire.Don't pity them too much. These kids have it about as good as it comes. Here they are engaging in their winter Saturday morning ritual of rotting their brains out in front of cartoons. They actually get out of bed early so as to maximize their allowable screen time. I'll let them enjoy it while they can; come springtime, we'll be canceling cable. They'll need to get an early start if they want the lawn mowed and the gardens weeded before breakfast...
Baby D doesn't get out much, either. He has to be satisfied with his in-house entertainment options. The big kids thought it would be fun to stuff him in a laundry basket with a pile of pillows and blankets and then dump some toys on top of him. They were right- David thought this was great fun.

These are the days of our lives

We had a bunch of kids over for the day last week (plus the regular bunch of kids who live here permanently.) We had pancakes for lunch, a LOT of pancakes, plus a dozen eggs scrambled with cheese, ham and sausage. Those kids inhaled it all so fast, I had to count my fingers when they were done to make sure nobody ate one by accident. Nine kids can eat a lot of food in one sitting.
Elena is enjoying one of the kids' new creations, the Pancake Burger. It is, as you can see, a flat sausage patty sandwiched between two pancakes. This was a logical variation to the Pancake Dog, a longtime kid favorite made with a sausage link wrapped in a pancake.
It ain't slave labor if the kid likes to do it. This is Elena again, shoveling snow for us. She likes to be outside in the snow. Renee is out there too, off to the side, 'helping' by making snow angels. My children are prolific snow angel makers- our yard often looks like the aftermath of some large scale angel massacre.
Here we have Renee holding the register receipt from last night's grocery shopping trip. You know you eat a lot when your receipt is taller than some of your children. At that, we only stopped shopping because we ran out of room in the cart; I'll still have to go back and finish my list. When we were checking out, there was some doubt among the grocery store staff as to whether they would be able to fit all the bagged groceries back into the cart; they almost went to get a second one, but I just had my child labor division carry the overflow bags out to the van for me. And, of course, I had coupons! You really, really don't want to be in line behind us at the store! I wonder if they'd start letting me just drive my van right through the store, at least then I could get a week's worth of groceries in one trip.

Hum hum HUMmmmm

My children are hummers. It must be a genetic condition, because they all do it. They seem to feed off of each other- one child will hum a few bars from "Happy Birthday" or the "Star Wars" theme song, and the others will join in one by one until a veritable jubilee of humming, whistling, knee-slapping and foot-stomping erupts. For kicks, sometimes me or Matt will quietly sing a few notes from a familiar song from the next room, just to see how long it takes for it to infect the rest of the children (not long!) Four out of the five older children are also whistlers, which snowballs through them the same way. Here they are humming some of the "Carol of the Bells". Somebody please tell these kids Christmas is OVER!

Drip.

We have a lot of stuff in our house that falls into the category of "sorta broken". Sometimes, the problem fixes itself or otherwise goes away; eventually, this stuff degrades until it becomes "mostly broken" or "very broken and of great urgency". We do try to fix stuff before it gets to that last category, but ya know, we're pretty busy. Our "sorta broken" shower has decided it wants to be fixed; we had been able to keep it from dripping by turning the handles just-so, but over the weekend it started dripping continuously. We have upgraded its condition to "mostly broken", and plans are underway to fix it before it becomes a screaming five-alarm emergency.
Whenever something breaks or needs doing, we debate as to whether to do the job ourselves or pay someone who knows what they're doing to do it for us. The plumber I had in this morning wants seven hundred clams to fix the problem for us (not including fixing the access wall), so we're gonna have at it ourselves. Some bonus problems that came along with the leak at no extra charge: there are no shut off valves to turn off the water going to the faucet, the access door for shower faucet is behind a toilet that had to be disassembled in order to open the door, and the door that is supposed to allow us access to the faucet was placed too low down to actually allow said access, so we have to cut a new, bigger hole in the wall.
In other news, our very long Christmas vacation has come to an end. Matt had to go back to work, and we here had to pick up our books again as well. It didn't go too badly for our first day back; the kids got a respectable amount of work done, and I only had to shush Elena one time for singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Christmas is finally over- we took our wreath out of the window on Saturday, and ate the last few cookies before lunch today. The kids are back to watching regular old Scooby Doo instead of Yogi Bear's First Christmas or The Flintstone's Christmas Carol for the tenth time.

The best of the last of 2010

It's been a busy between-holiday week here at the Beckers. Joe celebrated his tenth birthday right in between Christmas and New Years. Because his birthday fell on a church night, we couldn't have his special birthday dinner, so the celebrating got dragged out over several days. Joe did not object to having two sets of birthdays; here he is having fun with his new min-foosball set.
Elena did not get her two front teeth for Christmas, but she did get lots of tiger stuff. She is on something of a tiger kick. We will not, sadly, be getting a pet tiger. We just don't have the space in the yard for a tiger cage (among other reasons.)
Poor little Renee looks so sad and dejected, sitting alone at the end of the driveway watching all the big kids (plus a handful of extras) play street hockey. She actually did not want to play hockey with them, but she is sitting on her hockey stick so that nobody else can play with it.
Baby D is now sitting up on his own. We still sit him with his back against the couch and a few strategic pillows placed around him, because he does tend to dive for toys and throw himself backwards without thinking about the consequences of his head hitting the floor.
He's also doing better eating his food. The dog is his new best friend, at least at mealtimes, because David rather enjoys throwing his baby biscuits on the floor. Our dog is all about getting a free meal, even if its only soggy zwieback.
And then there's this. He's been sitting like this all week up in the girls' room. I believe he was a casualty in a massive nerf war that occurred when the kids had some friends over this week. I'm not sure what he did to deserve a mouth full of hot lead, er, styrofoam. That'll teach him to mess with Renee.

The Last Day of Christmas

I think we're finally done with Christmas. On the way home from our last gathering the other night Elena asked, "How many days are left in Christmas?" We had a wonderful time with everything this year- the food all came out good, everyone was healthy, and I didn't have to leave my house on Christmas day. We're ready for our normal lives back- "normal" being a relative term, of course!

Not a creature was stirring...

It has been very, very busy at the Becker house the past few weeks, hence the lack of updates. Of course, it's usually very, very busy at the Becker house; the getting-ready-for-Christmas busyness has just made it seem even busier than our normal level of busy. Above you see David (not) helping me with some of my cookie baking; in spite of his help, I managed to put out a respectable number of cookies.
Christmas morning dawned (actually, they started well before dawn) with what has become our tradition: the children get up at six a.m. and play Christmas carols on the piano until Matt and I decide getting up out of bed is less painful than listening to another rousing chorus of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" sung by children who don't quite remember all the words. This, plus the two-harmonica version of Jingle Bells that sent the dog running to hide under the bed, was far more energizing than a grande gingerbread latte.
I do most of my shopping online these days. In the little photo caption on Amazon.com, this stuffed tiger looked like a normal-sized stuffed animal. Imagine my surprise when a three-foot-high box was delivered by UPS with this guy inside it. If I had read the product description a little more carefully, I might have noticed the dimensions and realized how big it was. Elena loves him nontheless, and has named him Jacob.
The rest of the kids enjoyed their new stuff too. They got the usual assortment of legos, nerf guns, slippers, pajamas, and board games. Enjoy the little video of David eating wrapping paper!