Not so adventures of the St. Clair clan...

It's exactly a million degrees outside right now, and even still....sometimes a girl's got to bake.  I couldn't silence the retro craving I was having for chocolate revel bars.  On the upside, it only took my oven 90 seconds to pre-heat to 350 degrees.  It was already two-thirds of the way there.  I love chocolate and sweet things.  Even in the heat.   Speaking of sweet things.  These girls have not been.   They are spending copious amounts of time in baby jail.  We're trying to set them straight early.  I wasn't prepared for the fighting to start so young.  Or the climbing on basically everything.  The newborn stage was mentally exhausting because of the sleep deprivation.  This stage is physically exhausting because they are on everything, into everything, and doing it all in two different directions.  Also, Carter basically hasn't stopped crying since the day she was born.  So there's that.  Lor...

I'm on the edge of my seat, waiting for something.  I don't know what it is.  I feel a strong urge to share our space and to serve others in someway, but I don't know exactly how.  We have kids, projects, and obligations, and yet... I was listening to an interview of Amy Grant the other day and ironically she was saying something similar.  She also had a great quote, "The real lesson for me has been to let it come to me because I have wasted a lot of energy throughout my life chasing things that weren't really mine to participate in."   That resonates with me.  I have jumped into things in hopes of blessing others, but it was at the expense of my own family.  I get stressed, and grumpy, and don't give them the time and energy they deserve.  So I'm waiting and wondering how God might use us and the blessings we are enjoying.   In the meantime, we are working on a giant garden, egg laying chickens, meat chickens, and whatever else we ...

 Remember the kids at school who were so cool because they could flip their eyelids inside out?  It was like the coming of age in the second grade.  By third grade they were mesmerizing the rest of the class by shoving thumb tacks through their callouses.  In the fourth grade, they were able to whistle by blowing on a piece of grass between their thumbs.  I'm pretty sure those kids grew up to be movie stars.  Somehow I missed the boat.  Bad jeans...highwaters actually.     I thought I'd give my kids a leg up by teaching them the joke about "see" food.  That was a mistake.  I should have seen  that coming. Ha. Ha. Ha.  Please don't laugh, it will only encourage me.   Our kids don't have much hope in the cool department.  Have I mentioned this before?  Their dad had the nickname "Pineapple Head" in high school, and well, I was wearing Little House on the Prairie dresses up until the ninth grade....

The child who made me a mother, is also most often the child who makes me not want to be a mother.  We go rounds.  I love him hard, but boy oh boy.  There are moments when I don't like either one of us.   We recently had a camping high, followed by a hard  post-camping crash.  If it takes three days to recover from a two night camping trip, we are going to either have to camp longer or not at all.  It's been ugly around here.  And it's also been precious.  How do they do that?!   Between bouts of me carrying a screaming fifty-five pounder to his room and depositing him on the carpet, I've also witnessed what will surely be a sweet relationship between him and his baby sisters.  They loooooove him.  Nobody makes them laugh like he does.  They mimic his every move.  This week they all played race cars together.  I'm not sure who had more fun.  I'm going to pull the Mom-card, and say it was me.  Watch...

Once, when the boys were like two and four, I let them put a couple of dozen stickers all over my face and hair.  They liked that I was playing with them, and aside from having to peel stickers off my eyelids and hair later, it was ten minutes of bliss.  My job: sit down and have some of my own thoughts while they happily practice peeling and sticking - no fighting, no one asking for food, no bottoms needing to be wiped.  I'm in.   Yesterday, with four kids all piled on my lap at the same time, I considered using Amazon Prime to get a quick sticker delivery.  I needed a minute.   You don't realize before having kids, how much they own your body.  I mean, there is the whole pregnancy thing, obviously.  And nursing.  I'm talking in addition to and after all that.  I always have a kid or more trying to climb up my legs to be held.  If I sit down, sitting next to me isn't close enough.  If they can reach my hair...it's go...

 Ever wonder if an alligator lizard can swim?  Me neither.   "But it's an alligator lizard, Mom," my son insisted.   I responded, "Yes, but it's a lizard. "   I'm so boring.  The boys didn't trust my intellect in this.  They had to perform an experiment.  Turns out alligator lizards can not  swim, but chickens still like them.  It also turns out, I didn't have to teach science last week.  Check.   Another fun science fact we learned recently: plants that have been sprayed with an herbicide shouldn't be ingested.  In fact, random wild plants shouldn't be put in your mouth at all. Especially thistles.  Even if you are thirsty.  Even if Bear Grylls suggested they are a good source of water when you are lost in the wilderness.  You live in a house with running water.  We did some Googling of poisons and I got a quick science lesson of my own after that one.  On the upside, they did...

 If your kids aren't annoying you at least occasionally, then they probably aren't doing childhood right.  Ours are winning at childhood.  Actually, we came to the conclusion the other day that if they are annoying you all the time, then you probably aren't doing parenting right.  And when I say "you," I mean "we."   We weren't enjoying our kids recently, and we wondered if that meant other people were also finding them unenjoyable.  It made us finally pause and take a long hard look at what was bugging us about our kids.  We felt like we were in a perpetual state of irritation.  Once we made our list, and it was lengthy, we noticed a theme: attention.  Our kids were begging for our attention with every behavior.  It was annoying, but it was our fault, and it was fixable.   We started putting down phones and brooms and laundry and giving undivided and intentional focus to our kids throughout the day.  It wasn't a huge...