Walking Statistics

Statistics for no particular reason:

Kid #1 walked at 17mo
Kid #2 walked at 12mo
Kid #3 walked at 12mo
Kid #4 walked at 10mo

They are all different. Still, it makes me wonder about #5 :-)

Wall Drawings

OK, Jane has entered the early creative phase of 'wall paintings'... She did it a few times in our rental with crayons, and we were able to get that off with a brush and some dish washing detergent (which was good, since we were just renting the house and it was on the market and had regular showings. We would not have been happy if it hadn't come off). We put all the crayons away and I think it happened only one or two more times, but not as excessively. She was very good in detecting crayons that one of the other kids had left laying around :-)

Now we are in our new house and it is ours and I have become less vigilant with the drawing utensils. The crayons are still out of reach, but we have lots of coloured pencils lying around that the boys use a lot and that Jane and Tara like to use to to draw on paper. But of course, the walls are so nice and freshly painted, that Jane sometimes can't resist it and starts drawing on them again... I haven't tried to get it off yet, but would welcome tips of how to do it. These are just painted walls, but I think the pencil would have to be taken off in a different way than crayons.

Sometimes I catch her running laughing out of the room where we keep the pencils, clutching a pencil tightly in her hands, and laughing hard when I try to get it away from her... Redirecting to paper sometimes helps, but not always. Another day I found both of the girls happily standing on Tara's bed, both having a pencil, having a ball drawing on that wall....

I have gotten very good at recognizing the sound of a pencil drawing on a wall :-)

Jane can Jump!

Jane now is finally able to get off the ground!!!! For the longest time, she tried, and ended up 'jumping without getting off the ground'. So funny to watch!!!! :-)

Another skill down!

Leuke Lunch

Ik had vandaag de 'Dutch Luncheon' van de lokale 'International Womens Club'. Dat was waarvoor ik de drop nodig had, bedankt voor alle info, ik heb het op tijd kunnen krijgen. Het was een leuke lunch, ik ben blij dat ik gegaan ben. Ik gebruik de club om nieuwe contacten te maken, omdat we hier nog maar net naartoe verhuisd zijn. Ik heb zelfs een paar andere Nederlanders ontmoet!

De kinderen hebben zich uitstekend gedragen. Ik had een tas vol speelgoed en boeken meegebracht en dat hielp natuurlijk een hoop. Ik had nog wat klompen, dus 2 van de 4 liepen op klompen, voor een authentiek Nederlands tintje :-)

Ik kwam zelfs een andere Nederlandse tegen die ik jaren geleden in Vermont had ontmoet. We waren daar ooit een daagje geweest, toen ik nog maar 2 kinderen had. Daarna hadden we geen contact meer gehouden. Ik had haar leren kennen via een Amerikaanse email vriendin die zelf ook een tijdje in Nederland heeft gewoond. Heel leuk om haar plotseling daar weer terug te zien!

Timmy and the medicine spoon.....

Just had a close call with Timmy and a medicine spoon. This morning, while eating breakfast, he found a medicine spoon lying around. You know one of the transparent tube ones, with a spoon at the end, used for giving a few teaspoons of medicine. I never considered those a particular safety hazard. Little did I know! :-) So Timmy found one and decided he would put his finger in it! And that wouldn't be so bad, weren't it for not being able to get it out again!!!

By the time he came over to me, the top was turning blue already! So I tried to get it off, but wasn't able to. It was REALLY stuck! I let him put his hand under cold streaming water, in the hope that that would help. Put liquid soap on it, let him elevate it, NOTHING! I just wasn't able to get it off. Tried calling Sander, but he was not at his desk. Then I called our ped's office. Felt kind of silly for calling for something like that, but I couldn't leave it on like this either. So I talked to a nurse, who told me to use lots of liquid dishwashing detergent on it and keep it elevated. Did that and after a few minutes, I finally was able to pull it off!!! Using considerable force! I was soooo relieved. The finger was turning more and more blue by then, so I saw us going off to the emergency room already.... After we got the spoon off, it turned nice and pink again within minutes.

Life is never boring!!!

A Fox!!!!

This morning Sander woke me up and told me there was a fox in our back yard!!! So neat!! We watched him (or her :-) for a few minutes before he disappeared again. He was pretty close to the house, I am not sure what he was doing there. I throw out some food every day for the squirrels and the birds, but it was too early for them and I don't think a fox would eat that food.

We have lots of squirrels and small squirrel like creatures (they look like chipmunks, but don't have the stripes. They are kind of reddish and just look like miniature squirrels and are very, very fast. Any ideas? Is is just a different kind of squirrel?) We also have tons of blue jays every morning and some other birds that I haven't identified yet (haven't found the birds book in all of our boxes). But the fox was a new one!

My Midwife Visit

I had a midwife's visit on Tuesday. I had lost 2 lbs since 2 weeks ago! Also, my uterus size was still the same, but she thought the baby was the right size and had dropped somewhat already. It was a nice visit, the kids behaved really well and didn't get into any fights about toys. She checked my iron which had gone up a little and I had spilled some sugar in my urine, so she gave me test strips to monitor at home. If I spill it too often, she recommended doing the GTT. She told me they don't use the glucola drink, they use the one where you come in in the morning before eating anything, they draw your blood, then you go out, get breakfast and come back and they draw blood again.

The baby is nicely head down and not posterior any more. All the kids listened with the fetoscope to the heart beat. It was fun to watch them concentrate on the sound. Jane looked so seriously!

One more office visit and then they will do a home visit. Nice, then I don't have to go out! :-)

We chatted some about how things were going and then the hour was over and I went to the store to get some more 50 lbs bags of salt, since our driveway is incredibly icy!!!

Back in Cloth Diapers

We are back in cloth diapers!!!! I have used cloth at home since Tara was born, but last year, when we moved to Europe, I wasn't able to take them with me, so they were in disposables for quite a while. Then in December, when I got my stuff back out of storage, I also got back the cloth diapers and since then, I have been using cloth again!! (just at home, for longer trips out of the house and for at night I use disposables) I got almost all the diapers and wraps 2nd hand from consignment stores etc, so it saves quite a lot of money.

>It's weird but I am SO GLAD to be back to using cloth (even if it's only
>temporary). It will be hard though, to go back to using disposables in a few
>weeks! All I will see is $.13 going down the tube everytime I change him!!
>LOL

I know the feeling. We also use wash clothes again instead of wipes and they are so much more effective and that's another thing that saves some money. Of course, now we miss out on the Chubs boxes :-) But we have so many of them anyway, that I can live with that.

Tara is wanting to wear underwear some days, but now always successful in it yet. But since I have to wash the diapers anyway, I just dump the underwear and clothes after accidents in there, so it isn't any extra work.

The Joys of Slings

(reaction to someone complaining about her baby boy ALWAYS wriggling out of his stroller straps)

Had to laugh about this one. All my kids have been like that. The only time when they would stay in a stroller was if they felt like it, which isn't too often... They can escape from any set of straps in strollers and in supermarket carts and in high chairs.... I have always been amazed about how people would sit down to eat something in a food court and they would park the stroller next to them and the baby would just stay in there, sitting!!! Just watching them and munching something. My kids always wanted OUT and either walk around or sit at the table and eat there (for at least a few minutes until they want to walk around :-)

That's why I usually don't even take a stroller, but just use a sling. And for the boys we used a backpack, it was rather hard to climb out of that one, although Timmy managed to do even that. The big drawback with a backpack with Cees was that he always threw up.... Not because of the backpack, just because that happened fairly often. It is not fun to have a baby in a backpack throwing up on you and himself in the middle of a store!!!

I remember one day when Tim was a baby and I was out with a friend and Timmy kept standing up in the stroller, that she told me 'you should just put him down every time he does that, then he will stop doing it within a few days.' Ha, that might have worked for her baby, but I had been doing that for MONTHS with Tim and it still didn't work and has never worked after that either... Oh well :-)

Freezing Rain AGAIN!!!

Yet another day with freezing rain! I haven't been out with the kids in a week! We do kick the boys out in the back yard to do some sledding, but the last days it was too cold to even do that. Yesterday Cees wanted to go sledding and came back in after 5 or 10 minutes, complaining that his face was freezing. It was below zero, so I wasn't really surprised...

You know, I don't really mind snow, but I HATE the freezing rain. It makes our driveway impossible to get up and we now have layers of ice, sand, salt, snow, more sand, more snow, more ice etc on it.... It will take a while to get that clean!

The kids, btw, don't seem to mind. We got a new Lego Dacta Technic set this week and the boys have been busy building a dinosaur and a car and an elevator, all with motor and lights. They are having lots of fun with it! The girls enjoy just playing around and watching teletubbies or Winnie the Pooh.

Duplo!

Jane's newest addiction is Duplo! She can spent hours just building high towers and taking them apart again. She is soooo focused doing it, it is very cute to watch. She also loves the Duplo animals (of which we have sooo many, since I love to buy them)

Hubby is happy about it, since he is a grownup lego addict, so he likes it when he sees something like this in his kids :-)

My house might still be unorganized, but the Duplo IS organized already!

Someone replied:
>Kenzie loves this too, but has hard time doing it if Maddie
>(who is *3* today!!) is around and Maddie will constantly take
>what she is building, and generally make Kenzie frustrated!!
>
>How is Tara when Jane is into her Duplos??

Usually they are fine together, but sometimes they both want the same baby or so and things end in a screaming and hitting match.... We have tons of Duplos, so that helps a lot, most things will have a duplicate somewhere. And now that the Duplo is organized, I often am able to find it really soon! :-)

Even Timmy at 5yo still likes to play with the Duplo. He builds zoos or whole dinosaur worlds. And of course the Duplo train is a favorite of all kids. They let it ride through the whole house! We need some more rails.

More Homeschooling Questions Answered

>Well Karen you've got guts!!! I don't think i'd be able to home school my
>kids. That's wonderful that you have though. How do you know what to
>teach them? Do you have a book that tells you what they should be learning
>at what age? I would love to know more. I'm sure it would be much more
>fun for my daughter to learn at home since there's no pressure of the time
>just nice and relaxed and you can take a break when they seem to need it.

We use the books 'What your kindergartner needs to know' and the rest (What your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc grader needs to know) as a guidance and as core curriculum. For math we use Saxxon math, they have a full method for every grade, we use 3rd grade for Cees, 1st grade for Timmy. This is really easy, they have a lesson plan for every day, so you just follow that. For Timmy we use a phonics program, also Saxxon, kindergarten phonics. Although I think we'll wait a few weeks before starting that again, even when we start, because he has fluid in his ears again and is very very deaf. Kind of hard to learn phonics when you can't hear! That's another nice thing about homeschooling. In cases like this, I can just take a break. In school, he would miss weeks of phonics teaching, because he plainly can't hear it at the moment.

For the rest we follow their interests. They are really into Egypt and mummies at the moment, so we got lots of books about that for Christmas etc. Also the library is a great resource of course. Cees wants to learn more about astronomy, so we are doing an on line course on that now, and we check out books about it in the library. I also have found some great kids astronomy web sites, that he likes to look at. Cees would like to learn Japanese, so we are going to start that up soon too. Haven't got materials yet, just a cdrom, I would like some books too.

Oh, and we also took some Dutch language arts etc books from their school in the Netherlands, so that they can keep up with their Dutch.

I think we have all the bases covered. And of course there are museums, in which there are great things to see and to do. We have a great children's science museum nearby, which we visit regularly.

Homeschooling Questions Answered

>Hi Karen, Wow you are a busy mom!!! How do you find the energy or the
>time for yourself?

They all go to sleep rather late, so tend to sleep in. I often get an hour or more early in the morning for myself.

>When you say home schooling do you teach them yourself or do you have a
>tutor come in?

I teach them myself.

>I know this is none of my business but what made you decide on this
>decision? I'm curious since i don't know much about it and would love to
>know more.

The decision evolved over the years. I read a lot about it and felt that this might be the way to go for our family. I love homeschooling, because the kids are able to work at their own pace and have more time to follow their own interests. Especially Cees is pretty far ahead in most academic subjects, apart from writing (he is not good at fine motor skills) This way I can let him study every subject at his level, instead of at first-grade (what he should be in age wise) or second-grade (what he was in in the Netherlands) level. At the moment we are taking a break, because of the move, but we'll start again soon.

What I usually do is do all school work in the morning. It is amazing how much you can do in one or two hours one-on-one time. Then the rest of the day they are free to do whatever they want (within reasonable limits of course). They have started doing karate, which they like. I want to hook up with other homeschooling families around here, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Still in the process of unpacking and unpacking and unpacking!

There is lots of info about homeschooling on line. A nice benefit for me is that I don't have to get them ready for school really early in the morning :-) Of course the flipside of that is that I don't get the 'time off' when they are in school, but for us it is worth it.

Entropy Always Increases

The whole house is still full of moving boxes and I just don't know where to put the stuff. There is so much to organize, but somehow the chaos always gets bigger instead of less... Oh well.

Hoping that this time I will get real nesting instinct and I will clean and organize the whole house, not holding my breath though :-) Not like I ever got it during the other pregnancies.

Tara's Speech

Just a quick update.

Tara at 2.5yo speaks very clearly and in full or almost full sentences. It is impressive to see how well she is doing in the verbal department. Maybe it proves that she is a girl?

Timmy's Ears

Around Christmas, we noticed that Timmy was getting deaf again. He had his last (third) set of ear tubes last January, but they have fallen out already. So I did some informal tests over the last weeks and yes, we were pretty sure he was quite deaf.

So I called our family practioner yesterday and set up an appointment for today. And yes, he had fluid in both ears. She did a tympanogram and both of them were flat :-( I get so tired of this! So now we'll wait a month, see whether he still has the fluid and if so, be referred to the ENT and most likely end up with his fourth set of tubes.

Also, his weight hadn't gone up at all over the last year. So we are going to decrease his ritalin dose and see what that does. He used to be fiftieth his whole life, until he started the ritalin last year. Now he is 10th percentile, so that's quite a drop.

We have a follow up appointment on Feb 8. Let's hope that the fluid has gone away by then, although with his history, I doubt it.

We are up to six sets of ear tubes between the two boys so far.

Smoke Detectors

We spent part of the night and the very early morning being up and about, wondering why the smoke detector kept going off. Yesterday, I was baking something and I had spilled a little bit of food on a burner and that triggered it a few times. But when the muffins were ready, things went back to normal and it didn't go off any more. Yesterday, we also installed some built in shelves and hubby was stressing out over drilling into an electrical wire instead of a stud.

Then last night, at 2:30am, the smoke detector downstairs went off! The dishwasher was on, so we were wondering whether that had something to do with it. Also of course we thought the screws for the new shelves might have hit something after all. But a careful and thorough inspection of the house didn't reveal anything. The smoke detector had stopped beeping when hubby came downstairs, so after a while, we went back to bed. The moment he lay down 'BEEEEEEP' again.... Back downstairs, new inspection, still nothing seemed to be wrong. So he ended up changing the battery, seeing whether that might be the problem. This seemed to solve the problem for then and he finally came back to bed.

5am. another 'BEEEEEEP' woke me up! Another inspection of the house, still nothing. The smoke detector kept going off though. This time Sander took down this smoke detector and replaced it with another one that was still lying around. This one started beeping with the small beeps that sometimes indicate a low battery, but after a few minutes stopped doing that. After it stopped, we tested it, it worked fine and we went back to bed. We haven't heard it any more.

So I guess the old one gave false alarms, because it was getting old or so??? I don't know how old it is, it was in the house already when we bought it. I am also wondering whether it had something to do with the false alarms while baking yesterday? I had the feeling at night, that it was another false alarm, but I was not going to take that for granted! I felt better after we had installed the other one and that one did not go off. Does anybody know whether smoke alarms do need to be replaced every x years or so to prevent this? I guess there is no sure way to determine whether it is real or a false alarm when they go off? I even considered calling the fire department asking their advice about the smoke detector going off without any clear source, but was hesitant to do so at 3am. I thought that there might be something smouldering behind the new built-in shelves that we could not detect yet. I wasn't sure how to find out about that.

I am also going to buy a fire extinguisher again. We used to have one, but I am not sure where it went with all the moving around and I felt a definite need for one last night!

I am used to being woken up by kids at night, not by smoke detectors! By the way, all four kids slept through all the alarms!!!!!