And the Race is On!

Nana and Papa left this afternoon from Colorado to come visit us for Christmas. Papa sent a text message with an audio clip of "On the Road Again." It's Papa's signature roadtrip song.

They're already in Texas, about 50 miles out of Amarillo, so the question is--Will they get here before we finish cleaning the house? Factor in that Tabitha, Clara, Gemma, and Violet have made it their personal mission to UNclean every room right after we've finished cleaning it.

Growing Up

This is Zoe in the outfit she wore to the BPA awards ceremony tonight. She didn't win any awards, but I'm certainly proud of her for participating. She bought the skirt with her very own babysitting money. I'm proud of her for that, too. Those shoes? They're mine. Zoe, Eve, and I all share shoes now, which is pretty neat, except when I can't find my shoes because one of the girls is wearing them.

Jingle Bells, Questionable Version

Gemma has spent most of the evening playing with an Alphabet Learning Center. At the bottom, it has a little keyboard with ten keys, numbered 1 to 10. Juliet told Gemma that she knows how to play songs, and proceded to play a fairly accurate version of Jingle Bells. I was impressed, and asked her if she'd just figured it out. She proudly explained that her music teacher had taught it to her (dashing my sudden dreams of having a musical prodigy for a daughter...oh, well). "I'll have to ask her to write it down tomorrow," Juliet said. "All I can remember is..." and then she began to sing: "666 666 67456." She's been walking around the house for the last half-hour singing, "666 666." It's such a good thing that I'm not superstitious!

In other news, Juliet made the highest grade in her class the other day on a practice FCAT test. We're all very proud of her! She may not be a musical genius, but she can read well!! Oh, and she can dance and sing beautifully, so maybe she is a musical genius after all. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. :)

The Next Faulkner

Not just brains, but looks and personality, too. She's the whole package, baby!

Sophia, who just turned ten, is becoming an amazing little writer, thanks, I'm sure, to her predilection for reading. Anyway, this is an anecdote Sophia's fourth grade class was assigned to write as FCAT practice (gotta love the FCAT). The teacher had the principal read the paper, and he asked Sophia to read it on the morning announcements (which is now broadcast to every classroom via television, unlike when I was in school). Without further ado, here is Sophia's beautiful anecdote, without any editing at all.

I looked up. Hovering over us was a cart. Suddenly, it dropped. My stomach tightened. My siblings sqealed. This would be ride of the night. It was Mt. Everest. We got there two minutes later. "Here we go!" He shouted, clamoring into the cart. A second later, I was plunged into darkness, a deep, writhing darkness. Were those eyes over there? I didn't know. We were heading towards a white, blinding light. I blinked. Suddenly, we were sliding into the darkness. When the darkness enveloped me, I lurched forward. I was falling...and suddenly, the ride was over. For Now!

Look at her spelling and use of commas! Notice the verbs and adjectives she uses: hovering, tightened, squealed, clamoring, plunged, writhing, enveloped. Yes, I'm very proud. I'm going to take this to work and show it off to my fellow secondary English teachers. In fact, I can think of a lot of tenth graders who could learn from this. :(

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Well, it's that time of year again. This season is riddled with stress and worry. There's so much to do and not enough time. That's right...grades are due. At the end of every grading period, I wonder why I decided to major in English. Why couldn't I be a math teacher? Grading must be so easy for math teachers. 452...correct. 32.5...correct. 19 3/4...wrong. Not so for poor English teachers. I've got mountains of papers to grade, and there simply isn't enough time to give each student's work the in-depth criticism it deserves. It gets irritating to find the same mistakes over and over and over ad nauseum, even though I've told them over and over and over how to avoid comma splices and misplaced modifiers. Of course, there is a bright side to grading papers. I really get to know my students through their writing, which is a definite advantage over math teachers. Right? *sigh*

Saint Judas by James Wright

When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

Violet, Gemma, Clara, Tabitha, Juliet, Sophia, Eve, Zoe

and the flowers they planted.

Thanksgiving Prep

We're busy, busy, busy today doing all our baking for tomorrow. Rob outsourced our pie baking to Village Inn, but we still have cookies and candies and bread to make here. I didn't let him order our pumpkin pies, though, because we have a recipe for a pumpkin-pecan pie that everybody loves, except me and Zoe. We don't like pumpkin pie at all.

The girls had a blast kneading the dough for the whole wheat honey bread we're baking. Gemma was excited to try it until I put flour on her hands. Then she got very upset and had to rush off to wash her hands.

Our menu for tomorrow includes, of course, turkey and ham, stuffing, Nana's famous fruit salad, corn, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with turkey gravy, this bread, cheese, olives, honey roasted almonds, snowball cookies, triple nut toffee, and the pies (apple, cherry, and pumpkin). Yeah, we're a little heavy on desserts. So?

Thanksgiving Vacation...Not!

I've spent my first *official* day of Thanksgiving break hanging out at home, looking up Christmas crafts to do with the kids and coming up with ideas for our Christmas picture for Christmas cards. It's been a very relaxing day, which I really needed after yesterday's drama and trauma (Clara's eyelashes are still glued together, but she can open and close her eye with no problem, so my hope is that the gum will eventually wash out on its own). At 6:45 pm, I was sitting on the couch vegging and Rob had run to Subway to get dinner, when my cell phone rings.

"Hi, Ms. S., it's Jeff from your English class."
"Hi, Jeff. What's going on?"
"Well, we're all just sitting here in class wondering if you're coming tonight..."

Yikes! No, I'm not coming! I had completely forgotten that the community college is NOT out for Thanksgiving break until Wednesday. I doubt the students were upset that class was cancelled, but still.

I called my mom for comfort again. She called me the absent minded professor and told me to write a book.

And a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night

So I decided to take a long, hot shower to try to relax after a hard day of killing pets. I'm getting ready to climb in when there's a banging at the bathroom door. I usually don't lock the door when I take a shower, because I hate it when the kids bang on the door. But tonight they have three friends spending the night, and I still like privacy outside of the family.

Me: What? I'm fixing to take a shower!
Sophia: Mom, do you want to know what Clara did?
Me: No.
Sophia: I think you need to come out here.
Me: WHAT did she do, Sophia?
Sophia: She can't open her eyes.
Me: WHY?
Sophia: She put gum in her eyelashes.
Me: Get your dad. I'm getting in the shower.

Of course, this just ruined my shower. I had to hurry through the shower, and I came out to find Rob rubbing on her eyelash with a washcloth. I did a quick google search and found a website that said melted milk chocolate would dissolve gum on eyelashes. Worth a shot. I put a piece of my special chocolate bar that I'm saving for a day like, well, today, on a Scooby Doo plate and put it in the microwave. I stood up on a chair to watch the chocolate to make sure it didn't melt too much. Suddenly, the microwave started making all these popping noises. Earlier today, Eve put aluminum foil in the microwave, so I assumed she'd broken it and that explained the noises. Not so. I opened the microwave and grabbed the plate. It was fire-hot and burned my finger. When I got a pot holder, I looked at the bottom of the plate: Do not use in microwave. Great. The chocolate wasn't really melted, but it was soft. I put my finger in it to wipe it across Clara's eyelash. No, I'm not retarded. I've just had a very bad day. Yes, I burned my finger again. When the chocolate cooled, I put it on Clara's lashes and hid out in Sophia and Juliet's room to call my mom and get some comfort. While I was on the phone, Clara wiped the chocolate off, so I don't know if it actually would have worked, and I wasn't willing to sacrifice any more of my special chocolate to find out. I put a gob of peanut butter on her next, but that didn't work. I've sent Clara to bed with gummy eyelashes, and I'm wondering if we're going to have to take a trip to the doctor's office tomorrow.

My parents are coming for Christmas. I'm really looking forward to that. Days like today will still happen, but I'll have my mommy and daddy here to see me through. Rob's not much help. He's just like me--just trying to survive parenthood.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Today started out well enough. I had to repot some plants today, so I bought eight different flowers yesterday, marigolds, begonias, snapdragons, for the girls to plant, too, and keep on the back porch. We had a lot of fun repotting everything.

Rob worked in the garage. He got it all cleaned out and was able to pull the Mercedes in so he can start working on it someday. I'm not sure what he's going to do when we get everything out of storage.

The girls and I got the house pretty much cleaned up, except for a few big piles of clean laundry that now live in my bedroom. The plants look great around the house. I even got a yucca cane potted and put in place by the front door. It's very pretty.

Everything was rosy and pretty and efficient.

Then it was time to clean out the hermit crab tank. I discovered that two of the crabs that had molted died in the process. I'm not sure why. Everything seemed to be going fine. Eve and Sophia helped me put the crabs in one bucket, and the crab stuff (their coconut huts, extra shells, driftwood, etc.) in another bucket. We put the crabs on the table and I put the crab stuff in the pot to boil, since there had been dead crabs in the tank. Then I took the aquarium outside and cleaned it out really well with the hose. When we came back in the house, it smelled like fish. The two pots on the stove were boiling, so I took them over one at a time to the sink and washed everything in them with dish soap to make sure I got rid of the dead crab smell. Well, when I got to the bottom of the second pot, I found one of the crabs. I don't know how, but we put him in the wrong bucket and then into the pot of boiling water. I feel horrible. Rob thought it was kind of funny, but that crab was a pet, and he was actually my favorite one. His name was Nemo. (He's the only one I could keep track of. I knew which one he was even when he switched shells.) So now I'm feeling all guilty and horrible. I didn't pay enough attention for just a few minutes, and I boiled the crab. SOOOO, I'm back to feeling the way I did when I first brought Zoe home from the hospital. Somebody's going to figure out that I'm not qualified to take care of hermit crabs OR kids, and they're going to come take them all away.

Hmmmm. There's a thought.

I know I'm going to have nightmares tonight about boiling pets. Like Alexander would say, it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day! RIP, Nemo.

PS-Keep in mind that only Zoe and Eve know about this, so don't spill the beans to any of the middle or little girls! They'd hate their evil mommy forever. Does this kind of remind you of Fatal Attraction?

Twilight

This coming Friday night, Rob and I are taking Zoe and Eve to see the movie Twilight. Zoe and I have both read the entire Twilight series, and Eve is on the second book now. It's really fun to be able to read the same books as the girls and share the excitement of reading with them. Children who read have so many advantages over children who don't. I know that, as an English teacher, it's my job to say that, but it's really true. After about a month into the school year, I can tell you which students are "readers"--that is, they read for pleasure--and which aren't. The readers understand what we read in class, and don't struggle much with the more difficult texts. They are better writers: their writing is more complex and has more details. They can spell better than non-readers, and they have better grammar, because they know from experience how words and language works. Possibly most importantly, the readers can think critically. They don't just believe anything they're told. They think it through for themselves and decide what makes sense and what doesn't. I can't get much past them. All this, and nobody had to sit them down and TEACH them how to spell, write, or think. They learned it all on their own while feeding their imaginations and travelling through worlds different from their own.

My three oldest girls and Tabitha are avid readers. Juliet is a more reluctant reader, but I'm doing everything I can to get her reading. I've found that when I've read a book, she's more interested in reading it because it gives her something to talk about with me. I love reading. I especially love reading literary fiction (The Poisonwood Bible, anything by Flannery O'Connor, My Antonia, Tess of the D'urbervilles, etc.) and some "pop" fiction (I think Jodi Piccoult would fit in this category, but I find her stuff pretty "smart;" books by Michael Crichton and John Grisham). However, I can also enjoy reading kids books. I read the Uglies series and all the Harry Potter books with Zoe, Eve, and Sophia. Right now, Juliet's supposed to be reading a book called The Gift of the Pirate Queen, but she hasn't even begun. So this weekend, I'm going to read the first few chapters and every once in a while, I'll mention, in general conversation with the family, something that happened in the book, and how interesting I'm finding it. Betcha anything that Juliet also starts reading the book this weekend, and, if I keep reading it, she'll probably finish it by the end of Thanksgiving week.

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps by Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

From A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, published by Houghton Mifflin. © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

I love this poem. It's not sad, but it made me cry the first time I read it. It's moving. I'd love to teach it to my Advanced Placement students, but I don't think they'd really get it. I think you have to have children to appreciate this.

My Dream Car!!

A 1986 Mercedes-Benz 560sl. I've always wanted an old Mercedes, and I got an amazing deal on this one. It needs new brakes and it's got a bad rust problem, so now it's Rob's new hobby. All I need now is a name for it. The Suburban is Kesi (don't ask why), and the Mercury is Sylvie (short for "the silver bullet"). My first car, the one my parents bought me for my sixteenth birthday, I named Trilby. I don't remember why. Doesn't this look like the perfect car for a professor? :)

Friday Night Fun

School Dance

Tonight, Zoe and Eve are going to their first school dance. I took them to Kohls to buy their outfits. Zoe tried these red skinny jeans, sparkly t-shirt, and vest. When she let me look, I was amazed. She looked like a teenager. Which, of course, she is. But still. Eve chose white skinny jeans and a purple sparkly shirt. She looks cute, but not quite like a teen yet. She still has that coltish look about her. Very sweet. I don't know how Zoe suddenly went from colt to teenager. This time next year, no doubt, I'll be saying the same thing about Eve.

Movie Night
Also tonight, Rob is taking the six little girls to the elementary school for Family Movie Night. Fun, fun. I don't know how, but they convinced him to take them, and I convinced him to let me stay home. Do you realize what this means? It means that I WILL HAVE THE HOUSE ALL TO MYSELF for a few hours tonight, at least. That never happens. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. Probably grade papers. *sigh*

Game Night

Let the Good Times Roll!
Gemma, Brianna B., Clara, Gracie, and Violet
try to play Uno.
Now that the kids are getting older, their social lives seem to be taking off. It seems like every weekend, several of the girls go to a sleepover or a birthday party or to the movies with a friend, and some of the girls have a friend over to spend the night. A few weeks ago, after spending an entire weekend running the kids around to all their social engagements, Rob and I decided to make the house a more fun place for the girls to be. The theory is that our house will be so much fun, the girls will never want to go anywhere else. So we bought some chips and cookies, and Eve and her friend Brianna K. made fudge, and we invited the neighborhood kids over for Game Night. I didn't count, but I think there were about sixteen kids in the house, and Gracie and Mason's grandma came over for a little while, too, which made it more fun for me to have someone to chat with.

John, Ashley, Brianna K., Eve, Zoe,

and Sophia at the Scrabble table.

Tabitha and Juliet playing Perfection;

Tanner eating a cookie;

Robbie and John playing Jenga.

Ashley, Brianna K., Eve, Zoe, and Sophia

playing Scrabble.

Juliet and Mason hitting the snacks.

Violet, Gemma, and Tanner

concentrating on Perfection.

Magic Kingdom

Magic Kingdom

Left, l to r:

Tabitha Grace, 7

Eve Josephine, 12 (almost)

Violet Octavia , 2 1/2

Juliet Mae, 8

Sophia Rose, 10 (yesterday)

Clara Lucille, 6

Zoe Marie, 13

Gemma Isabel, 3 1/2

Below, Clara in the tunnel at Tom Sawyer's Island

One perk of living in Florida is going to Disney World whenever we want to, thanks to the annual passes Nana bought for us last Christmas. Unfortunately, the passes are getting ready to expire, and I'm not sure if we're going to renew them. If we don't, we'll get Sea World passes. We've never been to Sea World Orlando, but we loved Sea World in San Diego.

You'd think that going to Disney with eight kids would be very stressful, but it's not so bad. This last visit from October was the best ever. Magic Kingdom was practically empty. We didn't have to wait in line for any of the rides.

Our visit was extra fun this time because Sophia recently brought a book called Kingdom Keepers home from her school library. After she read it, she convinced me and Zoe to read it, too. It's about these kids who have to stop evil from taking over Disney World, and it gives us some "behind the scenes" glimpses into the Magic Kingdom. The three of us had fun looking for certain things we'd read about and trying to find the fire station. I wanted to go today, too, since it's Veterans Day, and the girls and I didn't have school. But Rob has a side job (setting tile) going ,so, since I'm home today, he's off to finish the job. Maybe next weekend...

Below: Mommy and the six oldest girls on Splash Mountain.

Gemma and Violet waiting for sisters and Daddy to get off a ride.