I finally got around to taping a note pad to the refrigerator, so people can let me know when we run out of stuff, and I can buy more. So this is what I get: 
SALTED butter YES! pencil lead red beans Salted Butler Salted Butt you’re a butt -yes-
And here I thought that butt was the one thing we had plenty of. Also worth noting: some of these items are in my husband’s handwriting.
“Keep that tree up until Epiphany!” they keep saying. “It’s still Christmas, you know! Don’t take down that tree yet!” they keep saying. They are imagining something like this:
(Photo Credit Anthea Sieveking , Wellcome Images)
O, Holy Night!
Whereas what hulks in our living room is more along these lines:
Oh, holy crap.
Epiphany, you’re on your own.
We never did find out what Wish Bear was so angry about. I thought she looked magnificent.
Our founding fathers didn’t die face down in the mud of Vietnam only to see my children struggling through the night with only Mary Janes, Good and Plenty, nameless lollipop blobs, and Bit-o’- Chicken to sustain them, like I did when I was a kid. Those were dark times. We can do better.
Halloween is in eight days. So far, I have (a) ordered one light blue hoodie from Ebay and (b) yelled at everybody. Since we have to come up with nine costumes — or 17, really, since the older kids always pick a trick-or-treating costume that would be inappropriate for school, and so we have to come up with a second costume that won’t trigger an automatic lock-down. Thank goodness we’re terrible Catholics and quietly ignore All Saint’s Day, except for going to Mass, or we’d be looking at eight days to find 27 costumes.
Anyway, here is something amazing: printable paper masks of animals and other creatures from Wintercroft Masks. You pay a small sum, download a PDF, print it out, cut and assemble, and then paint them if you like. Very nicely designed, and the guy says they are structurally quite sturdy. Check out the lion:
You can see he spray painted it gold for a neat Tron Lion effect, but you could also do a more naturalistic style, or you could make it kind of stylized and tribal. Lots of possibilities!
Same for this one. Very effective with just plain white and black, or you could go for a dia de los muertos effect.
Here’s a tiger:
which could also easily be a leopard or adorable kitty cat, depending on how you decorate it.
There are lots more. It says it will take you two to three hours to assemble the masks. If you click on the individual pictures in the gallery, you will see strange and hilarious vignettes of people wearing the masks in odd settings. No shipping costs, no shopping, and you can still consider it semi-homemade. Love it.
Oh, so if you’re wondering, here are our kids’ plans for Halloween (and yes, the big kids are dressing up. I don’t care). From youngest to oldest:
PIC “now I have a machine gun ho ho ho”
I am torn about this one. Yes, it’s an easy costume. And yet . . .
And what are we going to do about the school-appropriate costumes? I think they will all just have to be paper foxes, and like it.
As imagined by my nine-year-old:
My husband pointed out that, while the older kids are almost always gentle and patient with Benny in real life, they jerk her around a lot in their art. Whoop, there she goes!
Back in the spring, I said to myself, “This is the year! This is the year I’m going to plant one of those glorious sunflower bowers for the children.”
PIC sunflower bower
“This is so simple, even I can’t screw it up!” I thought. “They can pretend they are fairies living in a flower fairy home, and it will be a Nice Childhood Memory Guaranteed!”
So, we chose some seeds that become hardy, mammoth flowers, we picked a sunny spot, measured out a generous circle, dug, fertilized, planted and watered faithfully. Several months later, behold the magic:
Yarr.
ON THE OTHER HAND, we have this wild mint patch outside the living room and dining room windows. Anyone who has wild mint knows that it smells nice, but how tenacious it is, how it spreads like crazy and chokes out anything else that wants to grow. Above this mint patch, I hung a birdfeeder, which was immediately mangled by an animal which I refuse to believe was a bear. The seeds spilled all over the place, and now look what it looks like outside that window, all by itself, without me doing anything besides refusing to think about bears:
The outside view:
And the moral of this story is: YAY FLOWERS! The end.
All right, YOU catechise this, if you’re so smart.
For the older kids, in 7th, 8th, 10th, and 11th grades, I give up. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant to say out loud. What I meant to say is that we haven’t found either EDGE or LifeTeen to be a good match for our family, and every time I try to read something aloud to the kids, or do a pre-packaged curriculum with them, something happens to capsize the whole endeavor. It’s some combination of the kids being in three different schools, and me and my husband working four different jobs, and the kids having this dumb idea about having social lives, and me falling into a prenatal coma around 6:00 every night, that just makes it difficult to keep up with the diligent inquiry into beginner’s theology that I always imagined enjoying in the soft quiet of evening with my older kids. And no, we can’t do anything in the car. I don’t want to explain why. We just can’t.
You really do want to check them before they leave the house. Not that there is anything wrong with an actually quite balanced and hearty meal consisting of ham, carrots, apple sauce, an apple, yogurt, and …
bread-and-butter balls. “It’s just something I invented,” the kindergartner mentions casually.
And then we have this meal prepared by the third grader:
who is willing to face the day knowing she has peanuts, two cold waffles, and a bag of tuna lurking in her cubby. Yeah, I checked her bag before she left. I added some green peppers and kissed her goodbye. Because we all know that sometimes all it takes to make a day go bad is the wrong kind of lunch:
1. Get a milk crate, find a strong clothes hanger, force the arms of the hanger through holes in the sides of the crate, and force the hook through a hole in the top.
2. Put a screw in the wall. If your husband is watching, use a stud finder first. Hang the hook on the screw.
3. Ta-dah!
You now have somewhere in which to keep your best toy ever so your baby sister doesn’t get it. You can also keep things on top. This is not the sturdiest shelf in the world, obviously, but sometimes it’s the best you can frickin’ do right now.
[This post originally ran at Faith and Family Live in 2010, when I was pregnant with #8. I’m on my way to Virginia for the Summer Soiree at Mary’s Shelter! If you have a prayer to spare, maybe send up one that my ears don’t get too plugged up on the plane? It’s hard to talk into a microphone when your ears are plugged up! Usually I take Sudafed, but this is a no go for this stage of the pregnancy. And also please pray that I don’t cry on stage for any reason. I don’t even know why I would, but pregnancy increases my cryability about 900%. Most of all, please pray for a successful fundraiser for this wonderful organization that helps so many women and children. Thanks!]
One of the best parts of being pregnant with my eighth child was that I never woke up in the middle of the night, panicking: “How can I do this to [current youngest child]?”
True, I woke up for a thousand other reasons, most of them involving my internal organs. But it was a huge relief to finally realize that having a new baby is not bad for the current baby.
How I used to fret about this! The whole nine months, I would worry about how we would all get along, how the soon-to-be-supplanted youngest would adapt, and even whether I could love the new baby as much as I loved my firstborn. (I did.)
But everyone else seems to think that a new baby is bad for the other kids. Dozens of times, I’ve had strangers peer around my enormous belly to coo at the toddler, “Aww … now you won’t get to be the baby anymore.”
Thanks, lady. Thanks for informing my child that she’s suffering. Luckily, she doesn’t know what you’re talking about—and neither do you.
Here is what really happens when we have a new baby at our house:
First are the immediate benefits: my mother reads them books until she goes hoarse. My husband fills the house with steak and ice cream and and blurts out things like, “Pick out any toy you want, kids!”
Then they get to visit me at the hospital, which has an elevator, and the nurses stuff them with popsicles and muffins, and everyone raves over how well-behaved they are.
Of course it’s not all sunshine and buttercups. With childbirth, I magically transform from a third trimester exhausted zombie into—ta dah!—a postpartum exhausted zombie. Instead of having no lap to sit on, I have an extremely tender abdomen, and I’m constantly nursing the infant who DOESN’T WANT YOU TO SIT ON HER, OH MY GOSH, GET OFF, GET OFF!
Still, everyone loves the new baby, everyone is amazed and enchanted, and they all want to help. The girls want to pet her, and the boys want to guard and protect her. (If that’s a sexist statement, then life is sexist, because that’s what happens.)
“Look at her little tiny feet, feel her silky hair! Ohh, Mama, I can feel her heart beating on the top of her head.”
Then follows the second week, when the toddler suddenly realizes that the baby is … staying. In this week, everyone is crying, everyone has a rash, everything we own is wet and smelly, and if I had the mental wherewithal, I would be able to form a complete thought such as, “Another baby? What were we thinking?”
This stage lasts for about five weeks, actually.
But then the 6-week marks comes. At six weeks, no one can remember life before baby. She smiles, she’s trying to figure out how to laugh, her belly button is no longer scary, and she clearly likes us. The older kids can hold her while I shower, and the younger ones have figured out how to sit next to the baby without sitting on the baby, so we can all read Katy No-Pockets together for the 923rd time.
Yes, sometimes they feel left out or envious. But more often, they fight over who gets to hold her. The middle kids discover that they can be allies, rather than rivals. The youngest one relinquishes Family Baby status with visible relief, and starts to pursue a more exciting goal: being one of the gang. She generally has a language explosion a few weeks after the new baby is born. And if you want to see a proud, pleased and confident toddler, tell her, “Uh-oh, the baby is crying!” and watch her pop a pacifier in the baby’s mouth. Hero!
And she still gets to be a baby—just not the baby. I still rock her and sing “Baby Beluga.” Or one of the older kids will rock her and sing “Baby Beluga,” and that’s good, too. Because one day, I won’t be here, and the kids will only have each other. They are getting used to caring for each other, and care engenders love.
My seven siblings and I email regularly, visit when we can, pray for each other, nudge each other to go to the doctor, recommend books and movies, proofread each other’s writing, understand each other’s sense of humor, and share the same childhood memories, good and bad.
A woman once told me that she’d decided not to have a second child, because she “couldn’t do that” to her son. Couldn’t do what? Live? Love someone, and be loved? My parents gave me seven allies in a hard world. Change and loss will happen anyway—better to have the good company of brothers and sisters when it happens to you.
