Silliness

I thought I would remind myself how awesome little boys are by posting some of the things that have made me laugh lately.

Elijah pulled the last tissue out of the tissue box then exclaimed:
"Wow! Mom, I found a tissue in this empty tissue box!"

Gabe: "Mom, I think I drank too much water."
Me: "Why? Do you need to use the bathroom?"
Gabe: "No. My throat hurts."

We were at an evening family story time at the library when David John waved me over to where he was sitting. He then told me the following in a voice loud enough for the other parents in the back of the room to hear.
David John: "Mom, there was a booger hanging out of my nose."
Me: "Oh, can I get you a tissue? Or did you take care of it already?"
David John: "I taked care of it. I wiped it on the floor."
The librarian was wondering why all the parents started snickering. I was embarrassed to have to explain it to her when story time was over. Ah, the joys of parenting.


I've noticed Elijah complains a lot when you ask him to clean up. I think part of the problem may be that he is experiencing deja vu. We recently had this conversation:
Me: "Elijah, your plate and cup are still sitting on the table."
Elijah: "No they aren't."
Me: "Yes they are, sweetie. Can you please come put them in the sink?"
Elijah: "Again?!? I keep putting them in the sink and then someone puts them back on the table!"
What is really amazing is that whoever puts them back on the table also gets the leftover food out of the garbage and puts it back on the plate. That is one thorough prankster.


David John started preschool this year. He is generally doing well, although he's been having some issues at the playground. One day he ran away several times, and on another day he had an accident. Since he didn't see any access to a bathroom, he decided just to go in his pants instead of asking a teacher to take him inside. Every day when I pick him up from school I ask him how it went and if he was good. He often says things like this.
"I was very good at school."
"Oh, really? Your teacher said you had a hard time staying with the class."
"That was at the park. I was naughty at the park. I runned away. But I was very good at school."

When Gabe and Elijah were 12-18 months old, we often compared them to Pinky and the Brain. It seemed, to us anyway, that Gabe was always coming up nefarious schemes and Elijah was his willing helper to execute them. I almost laughed out loud this week when I heard Gabe say this to Elijah as they were working on a duplo structure together: " 'Lijah, you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?"

I made lomein for dinner one night, and David John had eaten everything except the yellow bell peppers. We asked him to please try one.
"I can't!", pointing to each piece of pepper in turn, "That one too small, that one too big, that one too skinny, see?"
We made our little Goldilocks take a bite anyway. He actually liked it just fine and ate three more. They were "just right".

Poor Benjamin had a pretty bad diaper rash. Marc looked over while I was changing his diaper and said, "Oooh. Is his bum all broken up?" Elijah immediately became very concerned. "What?!? Benjamin's bum is broken? How?"

I noticed some new scribbles all over the desk in our guestroom. I said, "David John! Did you draw all over this? I am not a big fan." He said, "Yeah. You are not a big fan. You are a little fan?"

I walked out of the kitchen for a minute while the boys were eating breakfast one morning and when I came back there was a loud, heated argument going on. I finally was able to get the shouting to subside and then they explained what the problem was. They had been singing a song with the following lyrics:
"We're marching over the hills, through the rain and the mud and the puddles. We're marching over the hills, and we're going to the school."
David John suggested that the people in the song would then go INTO the school, while the twins were contending that the marchers would go AROUND the school. The disagreement nearly came to blows. Who knew prepositions could engender such passion?

Yesterday morning Gabriel was putting Elijah through a rigorous test of Star Wars trivia. Keep in mind, they have never actually seen Star Wars. They have checked out books from the library, seen some You Tube clips and watched a few of the Clone Wars cartoon episodes with Daddy. Somehow, even with this limited exposure they already have a wealth of Star Wars knowledge. I heard questions like this:
"Who is more than 100 years old?" "Chewbacca!" "Right."
"I am thinking of someone small and green..." "Yoda!" "Good job."
"Who has a blue light saber?" "Um, Anakin and Asoka."
Sometimes, Elijah didn't get it right and Gabriel would get frustrated. (To be fair, sometimes his clues were off anyway.) He would then exclaim things like this:
"Forget it! Don't you know Dooku?"
"Agh! No! Haven't you heard of Boba Fett?"
Oh my, they start so young.

20/20

20 weeks down, and 20 to go for baby boy #5. I have to say, this bump is looking a little smaller than the one I had with Benjamin. Maybe I won't have a 9.5 pounder this time? Please?

Surreal Moment

Some moments in life are just surreal; like when you find out you are expecting your fifth boy or when you see that somehow your toddlers have done this to their picnic table:

For a second I thought I had somehow stepped into a Dali painting. Kids can mess with your brain like that.

The table also made me think of those anti-drug commercials that used to run when I was kid. "This is a picnic table. This is a picnic table on drugs. Any questions?"

The X Factor

We're not sure what the X factor is but, apparently, we don't have it. We learned this afternoon that we are expecting our 5th adorable little boy.
Gabriel is excited about having a whole basketball team, but Elijah said, "Mom! Why didn't you have a girl this time?!?"
Sorry, Elijah, no control over that buddy. That's really more a question for Daddy anyway.
We will have to assume that baby boy Ricks is going to be adorable based on past experience, because he was very uncooperative about getting cute ultrasound pictures. He was a pro about letting the technician look at his heart, measure his bones, you know the important stuff. However, he refused to let us get a profile picture at all and spent a lot of time crossing his hands in front of his face. He crossed his little legs and ankles a lot too.
Here are the clearest pictures we got of our little guy:

Is it possible to be cute and scary at the same time?

Here are two little feet. So far, this baby is far less kicky than the others. Maybe he will be really chill.

These are the hands that kept obscuring his face. He seemed to be communicating that he just wanted to be left alone, or maybe he is just camera shy.

This was the final attempt at getting a profile picture, but instead we got another, as the doctor put it, "Halloween shot". Oh well, we'll be excited to see what he looks like when he arrives in February.

P.S. I think I am living in the wrong era. I would have some serious status right now if I lived in, say, 6th century China.

A Little Nervous

...about moving to Dickinson, ND next year. I keep track of Dickinson weather along with Cleveland so I can kind of know what to expect as we prepare for our move. Today, they have both a frost advisory and a fire weather warning. Say what? Does that sound a little like he** freezing over to anyone else? Or at least like the Robert Frost poem about  the end of world? Who knew our decision to go to ND might turn out to be apocalyptic? And I thought Cleveland had bizzaro weather...

Kaleb's Ohio Adventure

Last month, we were happy to have our nephew, Kaleb, come and stay with us for a week and half. It was nice for him to go somewhere all by himself and it was nice for us to have such a great helper for our four crazy munchkins. I think, over all, he had a good time but there were definitely moments when our boys were driving him crazy. It was also a learning experience for me. Because Kaleb is so much older than our boys, I often expected him to act more like an adult. Ten year old boys are great, but they are still not adults. In fact, I am discovering that boys may not actually become adults until well into their twenties. Anyway, I also learned that ten-year-old boys need to eat a lot. I would generally plan to feed Kaleb twice as much as what my boys eat, and they are no light-weights, and it was still not enough.
I would like to post some pictures from his visit and share some anecdotes. Hopefully this won't embarrass him too badly. :)
The boys were super excited for Kaleb to arrive. They immediately made a lot of noise and climbed all over him.

We went to Wendy's for dinner. Kaleb generously offered to help pay for everyone's food with his $10 Wendy's giftcard. We let him pay for his own only because he was so excited to use it, but we paid for everything else. Eating out was my first clue that Kaleb, while fabulous, is not an adult. He was great about helping the boys and sharing food with them, but he also showed them how they could pretend the ketchup pumps were cannons and yell things like "Fire in the hole!" before launching globs of ketchup into the trash container.

The following evening, we celebrated Kaleb's birthday. We made chocolate cupcakes and lined them up in a big "K" shape with candles.

 We had to have a "party" which meant that everyone had to wear party hats per the twins' instructions.

We gave Kaleb, who is a huge Buckeyes fan, an OSU hat and notebook as well as a copy of Tom Sawyer. After he opened his presents David John whispered loudly, "Mom! You forgot to give Kaleb his other present!"
"What other present? That's all the presents we had for him."
"The one with the toy in it!"
"We don't have a toy for him."
"What?!? But Mom, at my birthday you gived me the Elmo puzzle, the marker book, the Bulan (he means Mulan) movie, AND the drawing toy! That is not fair."
"It will be okay. His mom and dad gave him some presents before he came and they gave him a toy."
He wasn't totally convinced but seem pacified.

We went on several outings with Kaleb and I noticed that Kaleb's main concern in dressing himself was comfort, not societal norms. On one of his first days we were at a park when all the boys got involved in a serious water fight. Unfortunately, Kaleb was wearing his only pair of tennis shoes and they were completely soaked. They were not dry by the next day when we headed to the Great Lakes Science Center. I suggested that Kaleb wear his flipflops instead of wet shoes. He took my advice, but insisted on wearing his socks. I pointed out that socks with flipflops are not expected outside of Utah but he didn't seem to care. Here he is using the binoculars that he fell in love with on the outside deck of the science center. Note the fashionable footwear.

Kaleb also really enjoyed the exotic frogs exhibit and we gave him lots of time to explore the hands-on stuff for older kids while my brave friend Molly and I corralled the younger ones in the kiddie area. Kaleb never seemed to be ashamed of our motley group even though there were plenty of embarrassments to be had. David John chose to pee on the carpet at one point and because it had been so long since he had an accident I was without spare clothing. Since the sign on the museum door read "Shirt and shoes required" but said nothing about pants, we stayed. About that time we went to the splash area on the deck of the museum. David John was sporting his shirt, one of Benjamin's diapers and shoes. He managed to soak his shirt while playing out there and begged me to take it off. I explained to him that he was already missing his pants and there was no way I was going to let him run around in just a diaper and shoes. Several people snickered behind their hands.
Benjamin, meanwhile, was busy taking off his shoes and throwing them into the water. He also tried to climb into the water, but thankfully everything was too tall for him. After I fished Benjamin's shoes out, I turned around to find that David John had his hand up inside a broken light fixture mounted to the wall of the deck. As it turned out, David John had shoved not one, but three plastic alligators up inside said light fixture. Somehow, he got them all out without getting electrocuted.
After that, we went back inside and managed to stay for another hour or so. We only temporarily lost one child. We called it a success.

Another thing I learned about ten-year-old boys is that, to a four-year-old boy anyway, they are endlessly entertaining. One rainy morning Kaleb kept my oldest three captivated with nothing but playdough and stories that typically involved lava monsters consuming entire villages. The playdough made for satisfyingly squishable props, including the villagers. Kaleb also invented a game called "Super Pooper". I won't go through the finer points, but it involved pretending to do a certain bodily function and a lot of running around and screaming.

We had tons of rain while Kaleb was here, but we still managed to get outside during the brief breaks. Molly and her son, Matthew, accompanied us to the Chagrin Nature Center and we went on a lovely little hike to see buttermilk falls. Along the way, we crossed over a large pond which was, forgive the pun, hopping with frogs. All of the boys enjoyed looking for the camouflaged frogs and trying to find the biggest, the fattest, the ugliest, etc. Can you spot the frogs in this picture?

 The forest was gorgeous with all of the water-strewn leaves and the water fall was swollen with all the rain and really loud. Before we went home, we stopped at another bank of binoculars and checked out all of the waterfowl including this huge family of ducks. (Did I mention Kaleb LOVES binoculars?) Also, check out the Cavaliers emblem on the BACK of Kaleb's shorts. I didn't notice they were on backwards until we got home. I guess it's good that I don't spend a lot of time staring at people's bums, but maybe bad that I am so unobservant.

On one of the only sunny days we had, we hit the zoo. This time, I did catch Kaleb's backwards shorts before we left the house, mostly because there were some suspicious drawstrings flapping behind him when he walked. I didn't get any pictures at the zoo because I was afraid to do anything except try to keep track of where everyone was. In addition to my four and Kaleb we also had a 13-year-old, Joey, along for the ride. Oh, and we met up with my friend Tiffany and her four kids. Ten kids is a lot, even if the older ones are very helpful. It takes about 40 minutes to drive to the zoo and most of the way we were regaled with Kaleb's feats in videogaming. Ten-year-olds talk about video games a lot. I found that events in real life were often compared to video games. After the zoo, we hit Kaleb's favorite Cleveland ice cream place- the Honey Hut. Mmmmmm.

Did I mention we attended a lamb roast? It was awesome. I think in Kaleb's mind there was this equation: Dead animal + big fire = Awesome. Also, there was laser temperature checker. Best entertainment device ever.

Kaleb's finaly day in Ohio started out rainy, but we were finally able to hit the beach in the afternoon. Let me mention that ten-year-olds are a wealth of disgusting facts. My boys were riveted with Kaleb's knowledge of all things gross. They learned, "A booger is acid proof. If you had body armor made out of boogers almost nothing could hurt you." The fun fact we learned at the beach was that seagulls pull on each other's tails in order to force their seagull friend to vomit up whatever it just ate. The tail puller then rushes forward and eats the regurgitated food. Yummy! The boys all had a wonderful time, but I think the highlight for Kaleb was when he and Gabe found a half-eaten dead fish in the water (most likely vomited up by a seagull).

We really had a great time with this kid. He is really a sweet boy (that might be the most embarrassing thing I've said yet, but it's true). One thing he really wanted to do while he was here was help with the cooking. He even purchased a pancake mix and some fishsticks while we were out shopping so that he could help out more. He also made ramen noodles for lunch one day. I have to admit that things got a little messier when Kaleb cooked than when I did, but at least he didn't make anything that required chopping. He confessed to me, "My mom doesn't like it when I cut things up when I'm cooking. Probably because I always cut myself a lot. But my dad lets me." Oh, Kaleb. We love you and miss you. Also, we have your shirt. And three pairs of socks.

P.S. You may have to come back, Kaleb. After you made Ramen for the boys they tell me that mine doesn't taste as good. You'll have to give me your culinary secrets.

That Graduation Thing

So, in June this kind-of-a-big-deal thing happened where Marc graduated from his residency program. You know, it was the culmination of three very very long years of really really hard work. (Mrs. R-R, if you are reading this I know you are cringing at the use of "very" and "really". What I mean to say is "three extraordinarily long years of excruciatingly hard work.") We went to the graduation ceremony, I gathered and edited pictures from the event and somehow they have just been sitting in my "to blog" folder since then.
Let us now pretend that it is mid-June and I am announcing to you, the way any decent wife who is proud of her husband should, "Guess what?!? Marc graduated yesterday! Isn't that wonderful? He is just amazing. I even have pictures!"
And here they are:
Before the official ceremony started there was a cocktail hour. During cocktail hour all the attendees had access to hors d'oeuvres, drinks and a photo booth! The photo booth was free and well-loved, especially after some people took advantage of the drinks.

 

Some residents suggested that graduates could post one of these flattering photos on their new office door with a caption reading: "Hi, my name is____, and I'll be your child's doctor today."
I'm not sure how parents would feel about that. Some, I guess, might think the elaborate costumes were there to help their child feel at ease. I imagine it would be much more disconcerting to see the same type of photo and caption at say, the urologist.

Speaking of graduates, here is the whole serious bunch:

Can I just say that we love these people? They have become dear friends, impromptu babysitters, and a fabulous support system. We are extremely blessed that most of them will be sticking around for our final year in Cleveland because they will be doing fellowships or are going into practice in the area. We did lose a few, however and we already miss them. (That means you, Karine and Stephen.)

The dinner and ceremony itself were lovely and we were very happy that Marc's parents could attend with us. In addition to honoring the graduating seniors, the residency program also presents departmental awards and other honors. Marc was pleased to receive an award from the medical students who nominated him as a great teacher during their pediatric rotations. He received one other award which he felt totally undeserving of, so that was a little bit hard for him to walk up and accept. However, he felt completely deserving of his certificate of completion. That is one happy man on that stage.

After the ceremony, we watched a lovely video tribute about the seniors (It was some roast, some toast. Marc's penchant for breaking things was mentioned. For more details, you'll have to ask him.) and then we got to mix and mingle with our friends.
Here is Marc with his proud parents:

Marc and I are with Carla (Marc's co-chief resident this year) and her husband Kevin. I have to say a big thank you to Marc's mom for altering that lovely silver dress so that I could actually wear it. Marc bought it for me online, and it was not made for such a short-waisted person. She truly is a miracle worker.

Finally here is Marc in a picture with the Cleveland Clinic Pediatric Chiefs past, present and future:

 Marc has already learned a lot in his first months as chief and we feel blessed to have this one last year in the Cleveland area. We are enjoying his more lenient schedule and his ability to moonlight as we save up for a house in North Dakota. I truly am proud of my hard-working spouse. I love you, baby. You are a great doctor, a wonderful father and the most amazing husband. Please accept my very belated congratulations.