It's Over

Greeting cards have all been sent (not by me, of course), the Christmas rush is through. Our delayed Christmas is over with no fanfare. The kids are all here for the whole week. Isaac will be going to the New Year's eve dance and the girls will be going to stay the night with our next door neighbor from Coppell. We will probably play games with the two remaining boys after we get the babies in bed.

I really like New Year's Eve. There's not as much hype as with Christmas, so there is less let-down if it doesn't turn out. As a young person it was great to be able to stay up so late for it. Even though I stay up till midnight pretty regularly, there's just something about New Year's that makes me happy. I like the idea of big get-togethers and organized parties, but if that doesn't happen we can just watch parties on TV.

Maybe it is just all the great memories of playing Monopoly and whatever with friends, or going to the church dances, or there was the year I spent at Disneyland. More recently I went to my friend's anniversary ball and got to party with my husband for the first time. That is one of my favorite memories with him so far.

Then there is the anticipation of the coming year and the sudden (if unfounded) belief that empowering change is possible. I don't know. I just like it. Have a wonderful and blessed new year.

Christmas Ditty

I love Christmas and I love all of my faithful readers (and even my unfaithful click-by's), so I wanted to give you a little something. I had the idea to do this a couple of days ago, but I couldn't do it while the babies were sleeping because they would wake up, and I didn't want to do it while they were screeching in the background. Since Christmas is upon us, we just have to take what we can get, so I let them screech in the foreground. You probably wanted to see them more than you wanted to see me, anyway.



Have a most Merry Christmas. And be excellent to each other.

My Honey

I took the big girls to the mall recently. Their main hope was to find Twilight T-shirts. As I was looking at the group shot T-shirt, it struck me that Emmett looked a lot like the pictures of Mike as a strapping young man that I had been looking at over Thanksgiving. Maybe you can't see it, but I can fantasize.

Family Reunion Revisit

My family met Marla's family for the first time last year when we went to Utah for the Lay family reunion. Yeah, that's how long it takes me to upload a video.



Some Dinosaurs are scarier than others. And some people are sillier than others. It's a magical leopleuridon, Charlie. He's showing us the way. Thomas, sorry about the rated ex content.

The Truth About Blending Families

This is stinking hard. It doesn't matter how good the kids are, how everyone gets along or how much you all love each other, there will be conflict. When there are only four days a month that everyone is together, progress in conflict resolution is exceptionally difficult. That is compounded by the fact that there are other parties involved outside the home who have concerns about the children, and often differing views that may be in direct conflict with your own goals and resolutions.

Fairness. It doesn't matter how hard you try, the biological children or the step-children will feel like you are showing favoritism or being somehow unfair. You absolutely cannot discipline a step-child as severely as you do your own children because the history of love isn't there to balance out the severity, so any correction to the step kids makes you the wicked stepmother. Then, because you are not as harsh with them, your own children feel like you love them less. Somehow balancing that is an extraordinary feat.

But the children are the smallest part of it. The biggest problem is having two different child rearing perspectives (same as any parenting relationship) and then having experience-reinforced child-rearing opinion. That may not be such a problem in a relationship with passive, amiable people. Two stubborn thick-heads in this situation multiplies the difficulty. Mike and I spend an average of 20 minutes every weekend that the kids are here, locked up in our room discussing how to deal with a child or situation. It is rarely a calm discussion.

It's just stinking hard.

It Starts

Everyone says "Twins, how do you do it?" I say: After the third month it was easy. They hold their own bottles, put food in their own mouths and just play together. It is a lot of fun.

That was before yesterday. Amelia* was listening to her echo as she yelled into an empty pitcher. A short while later, I heard the same sound, followed by sloshing. I followed her the sound to the bathroom where she had finally discovered the toilet. I knew this was coming. So I wash her hands and take off her wet shirt.

I was trying to put away dishes from the dishwasher. Anastasia figured out that she could open the cabinet any time she wanted. Both of them decided to pull out the contents of it.

While I am still trying to clean the kitchen and decide what to make for a dinner, I hear a tinkling sound that I expect is a spoon on a glass bowl. I didn't worry about it because it sounded like she was on the floor by the dining room table, but I couldn't think of why the bowl would be there. Still I continued to work.

The sound of breaking glass sent me running. Anastasia had pushed my ice cream bowl from the night before off of the couch and onto the concrete. How she got up on the couch, I don't know. I put her down and grabbed the broom and dustpan.

Before I can get that done, I hear Amelia screaming in the kitchen. Trash is scattered on the floor and she has her finger stuck in the partially intact raw-edge lid of a tin can. I take it out. No blood. I clean up the trash and put in a new bag as quickly as I can so I can get back to the broken glass before they do, and make sure they don't undo the trash again before I can finish the glass.

Once the glass is cleaned, I sit on the couch, TV on with both babies in my lap and wait for Mike to get home.

*The names given here may not reflect the actual perpetrator, but a close approximation.

Tall Enough for Trouble

Have I mentioned yet that the girls absolutely love the phone. Some of you have even received calls from them. It was the first thing they ever fought over. They are getting strong enough to play tug of war with each other and the phone.

The issue is compounded by them being old enough now to reach the height of the average table. This was when we were still in Missouri.

I put lights up outside my house on the trees, hedges and garage door. It was pretty easy because the trees are only a few years old. I won't take pictures because it is exceptionally unimpressive.

How to Tell Who's Who

People always ask me how I tell the twins apart. Simply put, every once in a while, I endanger one so that she gets an injury, making it obvious who is who. But I make sure that both are neglected equally. This time it was Amelia. She fell off Grandma's bed and met a nightstand or something on the way down. The pictures in blue are before it happened.

Anastasia is just plain silly. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes while we were there. Obviously my little chubbies are not on a low-carb diet.

Far West Missouri Farm Fun 1

The first day we spent on the farm, Grandpa saddled up the horses and worked with the kids on them a little bit. Shortly thereafter he stepped in a mole hole and twisted up his ankle. That made the whole week a little less fun for him.

The next day Mike arrived with Mikey and Lexi and Mike saddled up the horses to let the kids and himself ride. I didn't manage to because I was making pie and taking care of babies. Consequently, I did not get any pictures of them.

Was it then Thanksgiving that I finally got to ride? There was plenty of time to because when we got our late start (10am on dressing the turkey) and although the turkey had been in the fridge 3 days, it was still pretty frozen. Then, although we preheated the oven we did not put the turkey in for another 40 minutes. Then after we put it in, one of us (probably me) managed to turn off the oven. A few hours later the whole thing was still cold. We finally ate around 7.

Far West Missouri Farm Fun 2

The golf cart is the way to get around on the farm--Especially when you are saddle sore from trying to control a stubborn, green broke horse. Unfortunately, no one waited for Lexi, so she is walking bow-legged down the hill behind Emylie.

Grandpa and Mike let the kids do a little shooting, but everyone had had their turn by the time I arrived with the camera. I was up in the farm house (soon to be Bed and Breakfast) trying to get the babies down for their nap and heard the guns going off. As far away as they were, it was loud enough I was afraid it would wake the barely sleeping babies. This was on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

Bed and Breakfast Progress

It has been six weeks since I last visited Missouri, and progress continues on the Bed and Breakfast conversion.





The front gate has been converted into an ultra-classy wheelchair ramp that flows flawlessly into the flagstone patio.





While we were there, the trim around the porch was put up, so that wood is no longer visible.










There is a little wrap-around deck in back, and there will be a balcony above it. What was the porch is now a garage. I think all the siding had been installed by the time we left.