You've Got Personality

We colored Easter eggs on the Monday after Easter -- better late than never I say.  This is just how my life is running lately.  But we got the five dozen eggs hard boiled and made a rainbow of dye cups and then mostly let the kids go.  I loved how much the finished eggs reflected the personalities (and just stages in some cases) of each of the children.  And here they are:

On the right side of this box, you see Tallulah's eggs.  She's three now and likes to color eggs, but has no patience for letting them sit in the dye and get dark.  They were put in the cups and pulled almost immediately out.  She did draw a little bit on two or three of the eggs before she dipped them.  She pretty much always selected a color that no one was using so that she did not have to wait for someone else to get done.

On the left of the box, you see Fred's eggs.  She was a little more creative and  a little more patient.  She made certain to do a variety of colors.  Some are darker than others and some are even a mixture of colors.  I believe that she was done second.  This is probably owing to the fact that she dominates and demands the colors she wants to use before someone else gets them.  (Although I have to say she was pretty good natured while doing this.)

On the left side of this box are Charlie's eggs.  The color he chose most often was his favorite color, green.  There are some mixed colors, but he was very particular about exactly what color he wanted to use for each.  You can't tell, but some are dipped half and half, which was also done very deliberately.  He probably even named one Luigi.  One was left white, but had colorful drawings all over it.

On the right side, you have George's eggs.  He did some interesting things with his, but the most telling thing about his eggs is that he left two undone.  Not that he wanted them white.  He just got sidetracked when Dad started watching funny clips on YouTube and did not bother to come back. Well, until I started dumping the dyes down the sink.  Then Harriet told him what I was doing and he came running, hollering that he wasn't done yet!

 Here is the last box.  There was one leftover egg that I colored.  The rest of the box belongs to Harriet's eggs.  It is a little harder to tell in pictures, but the majority of hers are extremely dark, richly colored eggs.  There are some that are half and half and some that are color mixtures and some that have drops of other colors on the tops.  She had a very specific idea in mind and also experimented to see what things might happen.  Toward the end (when she did not have to share dye with anyone -- except maybe Charlie), she began putting her eggs in a cup and then setting a timer for five minutes.  She would go and do something else until the timer went off and then come and check on her egg to see how it was doing.  She is always willing to put the effort in to get the results she wants.

I just looked at the finished products and had to laugh a little.  To a mother, they really tell a story.  Just a short little story I was dying to tell.  Sorry, couldn't resist that yolk... I mean joke.

Daddy was gone from Sunday night to Friday night last week. (Yeah, we survived.) Baby (who's not really the baby anymore because #6 was born but oh well) asked once or twice last week, "Where's Daddy?" just like she does once or twice a week on normal workday weeks. Daddy took care of her in the middle of the night last night when she woke up crying. But this Monday morning at 9:15 am (she's been up for about 1 1/2 hours) she asks, "Where's Daddy?" I respond with the normal, "At work." She replies, "I miss him." Not once did she say that when he was gone all last week, LOL!

Where your heart is

Lately, I've been playing a lot of Bejeweled. I know it is a serious time-waster. At least when my game of choice was Word Challenge, I felt like I was getting a little bit of a mental challenge. Oh well. For better or worse, Bejeweled is the game of the moment for me.

George and Charlie enjoy watching me play. They like to try to find things to point out that I haven't seen yet. They get really disgusted with me when I play somewhere else and mess up "their" move. George started noticing the statistics recently. He's keeping track of my progress and reports to Charlie what the title of my current level is. Charlie, it seems, is enamored with this. He has added "Gem Finder" to his list of what he wants to be when he grows up.

Well, with this in mind, after scripture reading the other night, he said to me, "Mom, do you pray that I can't be a gem finder?" As often happens, he was making a conclusion that I wasn't sure where it came from. So I asked what he meant. "Well, when you pray, you say we shouldn't find treasure on the earth."

I love it when kids listen and process stuff that you don't even think they're paying any attention to. So we took a moment to discuss what it means to seek for treasure in heaven instead of on earth. And how it doesn't really relate to your choice of profession... unless you get too greedy. He's still got Gem Finder on his list.

Not-so Grown Up

A little while ago, Charlie and I were having a conversation about describing children by different titles. I told him that Baby was not really a "baby" anymore, but more a "toddler." Fred is considered a "tween," Harriet is a "big girl," George is probably now a "big boy," and he's probably a "little boy."

He thought those labels were probably mostly okay, but he told me that he was still kind of a toddler. I told him that last year he was a "preschooler" and that toddler comes before preschooler, so really he's not in the toddler category anymore. But he insisted that he is still a little bit of a toddler. Curious, I asked him why he thought that.

His answer, "Cause I still think lots of things are mine."

Looks so good I could just eat it!

Here's another reminder to me how boys think with their stomachs.


We were working in the yard the other night and the sun was setting. Many of the clouds in the sky were half pink and half grey-blue. The beauty of sunsets is amazing to me. I stopped and pointed this out to Charlie, telling him that God is the best artist EVER! He looked around at the clouds and said, "They look like suckers. I think I would love to just lick them!" And he proceeded to pretend to do a giant lick in the sky.


I see beauty, he sees food. Or maybe we both see beauty in it, but we associate it with different things. Anyway, it made me giggle.

Just giggle while you clean -- or at least CLEAN while you giggle!

In my somewhat continuing effort to purge and declutter, organize and clean, I'm trying to enlist others to help. Some are more of a help than others. Today, for instance, Brian is working in the garage, throwing some things out and organizing so that we can park at least the bikes and strollers and stuff in there as well as make room for more of my junk that I'm not ready to part with yet. He's so great not to grumble (very much) about my pack-ratting.

For the last two or three hours I've been in the big girls' room trying to help them get things cleaned up and stuff. We've got a pretty good amount of trash heading out and half a garbage bag of give-away stuff. Harriet is generally better at parting with things than Fred is, but I've been pleasantly surprised at what Fred's been willing to give up. However, we've hit the wall. At least I have. I don't want to do the cleaning for them, because I want them to know where to put things when they clean their own room. I'm trying to direct and help, but not do. But they've gotten to the point where they are tired of trying to get stuff done and so they are just laughing and playing with each other. That's when I had to leave.

Don't get me wrong. I'm delighted that they are playing together and not fighting. But I can't stand to sit there and gather a bunch of their craft stuff in a pile and ask, "Okay, where does it make sense to put this?" or get a bunch of Barbie clothes and ask where they keep Barbie stuff and have them point and continue giggling. So here I am blogging instead. I was hoping that they'd get their floor clean enough to vacuum today, because seriously I don't know the last time that happened. (I know that will totally gross some of you out. Sorry.) Don't think it's going to work out. But I guess that's okay, because we don't have school on Monday and we can start again.

Lucky them!

Which way was that again?

This story is from way back. Fred was probably only 3 years old. Harriet was still little, but old enough to feed herself things off her high chair tray. I remember we were eating and I was trying to keep pieces of whatever I was feeding Harriet on her tray. Fred was messing around while she was eating. Finally I looked at her and said, "Eat right!" I went back to my meal and feeding Harriet. I looked at her and she was still playing around while she ate. I told her again, "Eat right!"

She looked back at me and leaned sideways in her booster seat and said, "Eat left too, Mom?"