Horde Momsmanship

So as the mom (suddenly) of lots of kids close in age, I have learned (painfully) a few things.

1) The dull roar just is. I remember when I was a teen, constantly listening to angsty rock music... if I could stand the noise then, I can stand it now. And I have to.

2) Kids have this little heirarchy-- The role of Oldest, Best at ______, Fastest at _______, etc etc etc. Everyone wants to Be the Oldest, in the sense that they want Mom to trust them with responsibility. I've learened, instead of giving all the real responsibility to just my oldest, to instead give everyone a "job" when I need, for instance, babysitting while I am in the next room taking a abath. Loli is the one who watches Squirt, Winna is in charge of turning on the movie, May is going to make sure the house doesn't get messy, and Jaws will find everyone a blanket to sit and watch the movie-- just an example. Giving everyone jobs keeps kids from becoming contentious and resenting each other for being "in charge" of each other.

3) They Have To Clean Up Their Own Messes. It just doesn't work any other way. My house would either be a continuous hazardous waste zone, or else I'd be cleaning all day. Thus: strict enforcement of the policy. yes, you do get in trouble if you aren't cleaning up when mom asks you to. Big trouble!!!

4) I've had to develop a really good memory about "turns." For instance, today when I pulled into the grocery store parking lot I had to remember that two days ago, Jaws and May got to sit in the little shopping cart car, so it was Winna's and Loli's turn this time. This is very very important to kids. Like, so important you're not going to be able to go shopping, you'll have little angry demons pulling on your cart and whining and purposefully ticking the others off and generally making life impossible for you without 'really doing anythign wrong' the whole trip. I call it "being pissy" because I haven't found another, more diplomatic way to describe it. Pissy just sums it up so well.

5) Secret mom treats are now nonexistent. This many kids... there's no way to hide the brownie you bought for yourself because you feel like you need it after "what you just went through." So you have two options: Either buy a brownie for everyone, or admit selfishiness. Eg: yes, this is for mommy. No, you may not have some. yes, I know it's not fair. Too bad. I'm the Mom.

(ha! Nobody turn me in to CPS, OK?)

6) Quiet time, (brief periods, spent by yourself, in a room with locked doors that you can hear pretty well through) is not an indulgence, it's a need. Just every once in a while. a ten-minute break periodically throughout the day. Does wonders for my sanity.... I can recharge and readopt the pleasant, "no you may not tone" instead of continuing in the "wicked witch of the west, I'll get you my pretty, if you ask one more time" direction.

7) I find I love life a whole lot more if I Find time each day to Revel; to take a couple of my kids and individually spend some time just talking to them... even just for a few minutes. Or listening to them talk to you, and allow yourself to well up inside with the joy of their cuteness, smartness, hilariousness, and overall goodness.

8) For me, Humor does a lot for stressful situations. Laughing is much more productive when things are spilled, accidentally broken, or any other thing that happens. But if you don't feel particularly humorous, another thing that has worked for me is realizing the worry/startled feelings my child is experiencing when she/he has an accident, instead of focusing on my own, irritated, weary-of-cleaning-up feelings.

That's all for now. I'm sure there will be many more, painfully-learned lessons to try to gather under my belt in the coming years. These ones have helped...

but the biggest thing has been chocolate. Chocolate really can solve any (small) problem. Anyone have any? Pretty please?

Christmas Music

I'm looking around for a song to perform for my studio's Christmas recital. Often I listen to youtubes of my favorite singers performing the songs I'm considering, to decide which I like best and which might suit my own voice best if I tried it. I came across this.

I think this might be what angels sound like... to me, it's definitely the essence of what Christmas sounds like. It's my favorite Christmas carol, for sure, and you can't get a better, more lyric and expressive soprano... and to have the Motab as backup. Wow. I wish I had been at this concert. Once-in-a-lifetime.

Time for some more political Humor

Facebook is making me politically cranky these days. Everyone is stirred up right now. Face to face, I talk about politics to those I know like to talk about politics with-- people who listen and respond and who I can have a real coversation with. Facebook,though, is something where you get this crazy mosaic amalgam of everyone's thoughts, article postings, society joinings and whatall. And so every day I open my account for a couple minutes to read through what my friends have been doing lately. And I have been finding that people post a lot of email forwards, most of which are Snopes-debunked, and articles from their favorite "pry my weapon from my cold dead hands" or "illuminati bombed the twin towers" society. Yeah. I'd say something like 98% of my facebook friends don't like Obama, and 80% of them Really Hate Obama. Like, to the point where they think he's going to Bring Down the Principles of Free Society and Rip our Beloved Constitution in Two because he's an Evil Socialist Fascist Terrorist Foreign-Born America-Hating son of a gun whose name sounds like the names of two prominent evil people in recent history so we're going to capitalize on that as much as possible.

To this I have a response. A very good response:



Two things.

1) Lol. Seriously, ROFLOL. No... ROFLMBO and ROFLSHUC (that's my own! It means roll on the floor laugh so hard U cry. Do you like it?) Actually it was pretty dang funny. But I liked this guy better during the campaign... he did a better Obama then.

2)Shouldn't the right be calming down a little bit right now?

I mean, as fake Obama said, if anyone should be upset, it should be the Left, right? Right?

Left?

Sorry.

Anyway, this fence is comfortable, as always. But the neighborhood's kind of getting noisy. I might need to buy myself some earplugs...

Holy Halloween Tradition

Oddness.

This week has been just plain disrupted.

In addition to Skywalker needing some time home to recoup from Second-Wave-H1N1 (he was overdoing it at work, and the cough came BACK!! Another tip to add to my previous post) We've had three (almost) Halloweens... A ward party, a voice-class party, and trick or treating. This has been suuuuch a buildup in anticipation for my kids. Crazy. There were those yarn braids (which I didn't JUST do for Halloween, you remember); there was the sewing back together of slightly-ragged DI princess dresses. Every single day since I bought the dresses the girls would ask, "princess dress? Princess dress?" (or in the case of Loli and Jaws, "Mom, when's Halloween? Is it next week? How many days?)

My kids went trick-or-treating together for the first time last night, and they had a ball. I had to wonder, as we walked around in the dark, going from one, sumptuous Park-City lodge-style home to another (we visited my sis for Halloween this year. We don't get up to see them much and it seemed like a good excuse) what they were thinking. Loli taught them the proper Trick-Or-Treating Ettiquite, and it was four flying, sparkly skirts dashing from house to house, and a chorus of husky/supersonic voices every time a door was opened. I wonder, do my bright-eyed children feel the same sort of Glee I felt as a child on Halloween? Are Winna and May too foreign to the concept yet, and is Jaws too young, to fully appreciate the joy that is yearly tradition? Will they be thinking about Halloween occasionally all year long, and then when we come upon the middle of September and the leaves start changing and the air gets that bite to it that somehow makes me want to guzzle gallons of cider, will their minds turn to pumpkins and orange-lit houses and maniacal giggling as timid fingers press a doorbell?

I'm so glad my girls got to go trick or treating. There was a mix up about timing with my family, and for a while I was pretty worried trick-or-treating wouldn't work out this year. I got this terrible sinking feeling, that all I had been promising my kids for a month wouldn't pan out. It's so silly, really. Halloween? Candy? A completely frivolous, non-religious holiday for us folk here in Utah, at least. I didn't realize it was that important to me.

I guess, for me at least, there's something religious about tradition, about family time, about seeing people we don't always see, perhaps. And about Mom and Dad making an effort to create a gleeful, sugar-high-filled, whimsical experience that will resonate in childish memories throughout the year, adding a little more anticipation with each year. As my kids get older, it matters more to them. As they get older, it becomes security... the promise of a wonderful experience, of a day just for kids.

Happy Halloween everybody. I hope all your candy's gone. Because if not, I may be visiting you in the near future... our kids downed ours within two hours, and I didn't get a chance to extract the obligatory chocolate tax that all parents are entitled to. Just a piece of advice: if you know I'm coming, hide the chocolate.

H1N1 (We Won)

We all came down with a "flu-like illness" a couple of weeks ago. I missed a Sunday of church and had a fever for about four days and a horrible chest cough for a few days after, but I think my biggest anguish was mental. Guys, don't google swine flu. They have all sorts of scary, wonderful statistics that will drive you mad with worry. I seriously wondered to myself if I were to not survive, what my husband would have to do. Which is silly.

Pregnant women are a high-risk group, though, and it's looking like a scary percentage of them (something like 3-6 % is what I've read) end up hospitalized with subsequent pneumonia infections, and some have died. Everything I've read and done, though, has pointed me toward treating yourself right and you won't get horribly awfully ill.

Here's what we did:

Because it was too late for Tamiflu by the time we realized we had it, we treated ourselves with some natural remedies and avoided sugars, dairies, and refined flours, all which increase mucous production/and or lower the immune system's response range. The natural remedies that seemed to help the best were:

1) Garlic/cayenne capsules
2) Emergen-C!!! Seriously, a life-saver. I downed so much of that stuff, I was worried I might give myself kidney stones or something, but it seemed to work soooo well. My whole family guzzled it. You can buy a fam-size pack at Sam's for around 20 bucks, which is much cheaper than you can buy it at the normal grocery or health food store. I'm guessing Costco likely also carries it.
3) Humidifier. Be careful to clean it out well, because it can also harbor and spread bacteria if it's not properly cleaned. I put Young Living brand Theives oil in the humidifier and it really seemed to soothe the cough a bit.
5) Peppermint oil on the chest/neck/throat and Olba's Pastille lozenges, to relieve the awful pain of coughing endlessly when your throat is raw as a pulverized steak.
6) Heating pad and/or socks filled with rice and cinnamon/cloves, heated up in the oven at around 250 for half an hour or so. Put on the chest/throat.
7) Sitting UP in bed. honestly... when I was lying down it felt like the mucous pooled more, and that coughing was much less productive.
8) Onion soup. Fry some sliced onions in some oil or butter ( a LOT of onions, like four or five whole onions) and then stew them in vegetable or chicken broth for about 30 minutes more. I added shredded parmesan cheese sprinkles even though it was dairy and therefore, mucous producing... because then it was like french onion soup at a good restaurant.
8) An over-the-counter expectorant, such as Mucinex. Really helped loosen the gross chest crud and helped with coughing it up (though honestly, it was torture for a bit there... endless coughing.)

For my kids, I kept tabs on their temperatures and administered Tylenol if they went above 103 or so.


The stages of the illness seemed to go as follows:

1) Like the beginning of a nomral, bad cold accompanied by the achiness of fever and an actual fever, and a feeling of weak helplessness like there's no way you can get out of bed, even to put away your dirty socks.

2) The chest cough really starts to set in the next day or day after. Also some nasal congestion, for us. Focus on this symptom, because it is the one that tends to make people go downhill, fast, if not addressed.

3) The fever tends to last for a while! It's amazing. I treated it with peppermint oil, which helped sometimes, and Tylenol, which helped when nothing else did.

4) The cough is still with us. And the hoarseness will continue beyond the time when you feel capable of getting out of bed... so when you go out in public people will look at you like you're typhoid mary. Don't worry about it... most sources say you're not contagious 48 hrs after your fever is gone. But still, I brought hand sanitizer everywhere we went and made my kids wash before we went inside any buildings, just to be good citizens.

So we survived! And the way statistics are looking right now, almost everyone will get this flu within the next couple months... so here's what we learned. Hope others can benefit from it. Biggest piece of advice... try not to freak out. Everything I've read said the symptoms to keep an eye on are struggling for breath, wheezing when breathing... bascially the symptoms of pneumonia. Which is what you watch for with any cold/flu, especially in your small kids. :)

Yarn Braids...

These took me (combined for both sets) probably about 16 hrs total to do. That's right.




Winna, before and after.




May, before and after. I didn't follow thru and take a pic of her hair in the bath like I'd planned, so I'm cheating and using an old one that shows the texture/length of her hair with no messing.


BUT they will last (if we take care of them...) for around 8 weeks! I'll have to replace a few here and there, but I shouldn't have to comb out hair for 8 weeks.

Why is this a good thing? Because tightly curly hair is damaged every time you have to run a comb through it. Some hair types won't even grow past a certain length because of brushing alone. So a style like Yarn braids where the hair is kept in a naturally detangled state because it is braided through the yarn, is a beneficial break from styling. Our regimen is... no washing so far. We've had them in about a week and a half. I inspect parts/hairline every day and so far, so good... no stinkies, no dirties. I'll probably run some diluted conditioner through their hair/yarn once every week or so from now on, (now that I'm not so sick I'm not even getting my FLOOR clean every day) and use the showerhead attachment to gently rinse through without damaging the braiding. They'll take a while to dry, we might have to sit them outside in the sun for a while for that purpose.

Just a little interesting piece of info: typical African hair only needs to be washed about once a week, because the oils don't stay like they do with caucasian hair. Black hair does not get oily from lack of washing... in fact I"m hard pressed to put enough oils IN their hair on a daily basis! As opposed to someone like me... if I go two days without shampooing, my hair is like a limp grease mop. Sure you wanted that visual.

The OTHER reason I did these yarn braids is because Halloween is coming up and ALL My girls of course want to be princesses, and May in particular is going to want some fancy updo. So now we have something to work with!!



The girls LOOOOVE being able to wear "siklemajjaja" (that's how it's pronounced, not sure how it's spelled... it means ponytail holders.) They think that having their hair up in a ponytail is the most gorgeous thing ever. It's so cute to see them prance around and play with their long ponytails. I love it.

Amazing Grace--Renee Fleming

Gorgeous song, Gorgeous fiddling, Gorgeous soprano. How much better does it get?

I Love This

I Love Opera, Love Placido, and love this song, and love broadway in general... anyway, I bet there aren't a WHOLE lot of people who find this sort of bizarre crossover as amazing as I do, but I love it. So I posted it. So there.

Ya might wanna watch it with your eyes closed. The visual isn't quite as appealing, I must admit... in my head I picture Natalie Wood from the movie and so seeing this 50-something Italian Opera Diva singing it's not quite such a good comparison. Anyway, Lovely lovely singing.

Effort and Aftermath

Skywalker and I have spent years planning on these events that have lately changed our family so drastically. And as all the fallout begins to clear away and the stress and emotional work begins to lessen somewhat, I am left with a clear vision of my five, gorgeous, smart, loving,absolutely hilarious kids. I look at my family and feel really blessed.

I was just diagnosed with Giardia. It's tough, being pregnant and also having giardia. I'm also stressing internally at the thought of Swine Flu, which is currently hitting all around like the proverbial trucks that everyone describe swine flu to feel like. I feel like our kids are healthy enough, and I am normally healthy enough, and Skywalker's got a system like an ox... normally I don't worry at all about any illnesses that breeze through our way. But I'm pretty sure that half my kids have the giardia. I worry about swine flu, on top of giardia. I worry about the giardia meds... which I still havent' taken yet becuase of all the info I've read about how the meds are not so good during pregnancy. I've said some prayers and am trying to figure out what to do. I've talked the matter over extensively with my mother, who is a natural health enthusiast but also a professional nurse with extensive experience with hospitals, dr offices, medications, and raising a large family and dealing with Hairy illnesses. I keep coming back to the thought that the meds might be necessary in this case for me, especially... PG + Giardia + Swine flu might not be so good. Maybe I should clear up the Giardia as soon as possible so that I just have the PG + Swine flu factors when it hits.

Also there's the thing with the kids... I should have them all tested, but the test is kind of a messy process and difficult. And I'm just putting it off.. my kids seem to be keeping food down and staying hydrated, and the illness is supposed to pass of its own accord in a few weeks in most healthy people.

Anyway, advice is something I have an abundance of... decision making is more tricky.

In the meantime, I look at my gorgeous family and know every single kid is worth all this trouble. Not to mention all of them together.