One more picture just because I liked this one so much. Avonlea wanted one of her and Tabitha just because they were matching, but Tabitha was being so uncooperative this time. Usually, Isaac is the problem, but today it was Tabby. Anyway, she wasn't cooperating about the picture with Avonlea until I offered her a piece of candy when we were all done with pictures. Wow! Amazing how a little bribery will bring out a smile.

Here are the rest of the pictures. I have to say, trying to get all five kids to look good in the same picture is pretty much impossible for me.

Here are some pictures of the kids in their Easter clothes. Those of you who live near me, may be surprised that I got such sunny pictures on Easter Sunday, but of course, I cheated and made the kids get all dressed up today when the weather was nice so that I could take pictures.

I cannot tell you how excited Isaac was to have a tie like Daddy. He talked about his new tie all the time for the week and a half between when we bought it and Easter. Then, yesterday when he saw it sitting on my dresser, he grabbed it and hugged it. I wonder if he'll still like wearing a tie by the time he's twelve.

This one of Avonlea got cut out of the last post somehow.

One day the girls discovered that I still had an old prom dress and my wedding dress in a box in the closet. They put them on, wrinkles and all, and took turns between being the bride and being the bridesmaid. I even dug out my bouquet so that they could throw it. :)

painting pictures

Here are some purple walls in the kitchen. I love how the color looks with the trim. These pictures aren't the best for seeing the color, but I promise, it's great in person.

Here's Norm up on the wimpy ladder painting the kitchen. We ended up getting a better ladder later because I couldn't really reach the top of the walls on this one.

Here the kids pose in front of the newly green living room walls. I thought I'd taken some better pictures of this, but I guess not. Still, you can see the colors.

I don't know why I even pretend that I'm going to keep up with blogging. I often think that something that happens in our lives would make a good blog post, but then I just run out of minutes in the day, so it never gets written. Of course, if I liked writing more and reading less, that might help, too. :)

For April Fool's Day, someone replaced my children with look alikes who are so helpful and obedient that it only took me minutes to recognize the substitution. I should, perhaps, mention here that my own kids are actually quite helpful and obedient, but it's just not usual for them to do jobs without being told, and it's pretty common for them to need to be told to do something more than once. The substitution may have actually occurred as early as last Friday when Elisabeth asked to do an extra chapter of math and Felicity asked to read extra for history. Then, Monday evening, Felicity voluntarily caught up the extra math chapter so she was with Elisabeth again and she vacuumed without being asked to. On Tuesday, Felicity did several more chapters of math without being told to. This morning, Elisabeth and Avonlea got up and began sorting the clean laundry so that they could put theirs away before I was even up. Then, later, they were cleaning one of the upstairs bathrooms bathrooms without being told to. I don't know what's going on around here, but I like it. :)

I'm also enjoying my newly painted kitchen. This weekend we're working on the family room, so when that's done, I'll post some pictures. The kitchen is a really dark purple, and I really love it. I know some people (my parents) are a little skeptical about how this can possibly be a good color for painting the kitchen, but I promise it's great. The family room will be green and both room swill have valances made from coordinating fabric. The kitchn will have a floral print with purple flowers and the family room will have green and purple stripes than match the colors in the floral. I'm so excited to have this done. We've lived with the flat builder paint for six and a half years, so almost anything would be a good change by now. :)

budgeting

So, Norm and I are big Dave Ramsey fans. We actually did a lot of what he teaches even before we'd ever heard of him, but we had kind of fallen off the budgeting bandwagon for a while. When I started listening to him in the car whenever I had errands to run in the afternoons, we became inspired to begin budgeting again. The kids have really been very cooperative about the whole thing by not whining and asking for things that we tell them aren't in the budget. It helps that at this point we have some room for fun things in the budget, but, still, they've been great about it.

Today, I took them shopping to get some things for each other for Christmas. I started out with Avonlea. She and I had talked about how much she could spend (which wasn't much) and agreed that I would pay half and she would pay half out of her spending money. The first three gifts were easy and under budget so that she actually had a little extra for the other two if she wanted, but not very much. Those two were harder, and we walked around the store for a while looking at things. Over and over she would look at something and see the price and say, "That doesn't fit my budget." I loved it! I kept feeling tempted to tell her she could spend a little more, but I didn't do it because I think that the lesson in not spending more than you have is more valuable than any of the presents she could have bought. Later, I headed out with both Felicity and Elisabeth. Both of them bought all their presents with their own money this time, and they both decided how much to spend before we entered the store and stuck to it. Christmases past have usually involved spending Mom and Dad's money for presents for each other with only a loose price limit, so this was just so great to see. And I even think that the recipients will all like their gifts.

In other great news for today, I cleaned my room! I usually like to keep it clean (just because it's one of the few rooms that doesn't get messed up again in five minutes), but it had gotten pretty cluttered. It's hard to retreat for a few minutes of rest at any point in the day if my room is at all messy. So, today I took a break from the Christmas preparations and renewed my retreat. I didn't relax at all today, but I feel so much more relaxed just because there is one clean room in the house!

exercise your brain

Growing up, my identity really centered around the fact that I got good grades. "Smart" was who I was, and it was a big adjustment for me when I finished college and became a stay at home mom and no one cared anymore what my GPA was. Sometimes I still like to do little quizzes and games to make me feel smart, and according to this website, doing things like that can help keep your brain fit. Of course, as I play some of these, I realize that I'm not as smart as I used to be. :)

scriptures and prayer--twin style

Today Isaac was saying the blessing on the food. Well, let me back up and say that Isaac has been excited about Christmas for about two months now--ever since the subject came up as Christmas things began to appear in the stores and I started to ask the kids what they might like for Christmas this year. He's been begging for a Christmas tree all this time, and one of his most frequent things to say has been, "Christmas not yet." Well, yesterday we finally got the tree out. It's not decorated yet, but it's prelit, so it still looks Christmassy with the lights on. So, today, here's what Isaac prayed (remember, he's supposed to be blessing the food), "Dear Heavenly Father, please bless the Christmas tree and....bless the Christmas tree...." I whisper, "Bless the food." So he says, "Please bless the food and the Christmas tree. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen." Do you think he likes the tree? I wonder what's going to happen when we have to take it down!

Tabitha wanted to "read" from the scriptures tonight. We have an extra set that she likes to call her own, so she gets that out, opens it up and begins, "And it came to pass..." so far so good. Obviously, she's been listening some of the time when we read scriptures. "And it came to pass that there was a guy...and he had an eye and he had another eye. And it came to pass that this guy had another eye." By that point we were all laughing so hard that she stopped "reading" to see what was so funny. One of the girls suggested that she meant the letter 'I' instead of the word 'eye' because she recently learned to write 'I', but, even though she kept pointing at the page when she said, "eye" I don't think she was looking for the letter 'I' because the scriptures she likes to call her own happen to be written in Japanese. They're Norm's old missionary scriptures. It might be a while before she can really read them. :)

Elisabeth made this delicious apple pie for Thanksgiving. She truly did it almost entirely by herself. I can never decide if she's going to be a great musician, a great linguist or a great cook when she grows up. :)

Here's Felicity with her great facial mask on on her birthday when I did her facial and her nails. I'm sure this picture will be a favorite for years to come.

Here you can see her hair. It's hard to see the highlights because they're subtle. They just make her hair look a little bit lighter really. She likes it though.

Once a month blogging

You know how some people do once a month cooking? I think I should try once a month blogging. That would mean that I am right on time since my last post was exactly one month ago.

We had a really quiet Thanksgiving here. It was just us, and it was so peaceful. I did spend a lot of time cooking, but we ate and had things cleaned up by about 3:00, so then I had the rest of the day free to do other things--mainly enjoy our families current obsession: Stargate. We've now finished all of the SG-1 series, including the two movies and have moved on to Atlantis. We've had such a busy time this semester with so many classes and lessons, that I felt especially thankful for the time I got to spend with Norm and the kids.

I have to say, I just love having a babysitting age daughter. It is such a joy to me to be able to go to the store without taking five kids along. I think I may survive raising all of these little crazies after all.

OK, Tabitha has long been known in our family as the shyest kid ever. When she and Isaac were babies and I would take them shopping with me, everyone would want to look at them just because they were twins. Isaac always totally ate up the attention, but Tabitha would start screaming the second anyone looked at her. But now all of a sudden, she's so chatty with everyone. She is still shy in some situations, but she'll talk to more and more people all the time, and when she talks, she really talks. I mean, she wants to tell you the story of her whole day--or what she imagines her day to be, sometimes it's a little bit hard to tell. The truly great thing about it though, is that she has the funniest facial expressions and gestures when she talks. She's obviously trying to imitate the rest of us, but my facial expressions look really funny on her face.

Avonlea is one of the most flexible kids I've ever seen--especially through her back. She has now taught herself to do back kick overs and she can make her feet touch her head while bending backwards. She is just learning so much in her tumbling class this year. I wasn't too sure how much she would like going to tumbling since both of the older girls dropped it this year, but she's doing great with it. If she wants to keep doing it, I may have to move her to a real gymnastics place instead of a dance studio that teaches one tumbling class.

I hate trying to come up with an ending for blog posts and emails and letters, so this one is just ending...right now.

A long, long time ago my friend Siouxsie tagged me to post the fourth picture from my fourth folder. Here it is, a picture of Isaac and Tabitha right before their first birthday. It was really blurry, so I sharpened it in Picasa, but I'm not sure how great it looks. Still, you've gotta love this classic twin action. I mean, how often do you get to see one baby crawling over another sleeping baby? I'm only surprised by which one is sleeping and which one is crawling. :)

So, after telling me more than once that I'm just paranoid about putting our kids' names on the internet, what was Norm's response when I told him that I was using real names? "You should make your blog private then." Yeah. Right. Like I'm the only paranoid parent in the house. I'm still debating what to do. Since I update so rarely, I hate to make things any harder on the few people who keep reading. ;) Google reader, which is great for keeping track of sporadic blogs like this one, doesn't give updates on private blogs. I hear that I can make it so people get email notification of updates, but that requires me to figure out something I don't already know how to do, so I'm not too sure about that.

Felicity is now officially in Young Women's. Today was her first day not to go to Primary. On the fourth Sunday in our ward, the Young Women have opening exercises with Relief Society. In the past, I've noticed most of the girls sitting with their moms, so I was looking forward to having her sit with me today. Of course, today, it was suddenly completely uncool to sit by moms. All the girls were sitting in a couple of rows together--no moms to be seen except for the ones who happen to be YW leaders.

For her birthday, one of Felicity's friends gave her two John Bytheway DVD's, so she's been watching those today, which is a big step up the spiritual ladder in our Sunday viewing. I mean, Blues Clues isn't all that inspiring. (I don't mean to imply here that Felicity still watches Blues Clues--that's usually on for the twins.) Anyway, she watches this whole video about how to get more out of church, and when I ask her what she learned from it, she tells me that she learned that John Bytheway is really funny. Hmm...I'm pretty sure there was more in there than that. When I pressed her, she said she learned that we should enjoy church. That's a bit closer, but I think maybe she should watch it again. Since I'm sure she's planning on watching it every Sunday until the rest of us beg her not to put it on again, that shouldn't be a problem.

In honor of Felicity turning 12, she and I had our hair highlighted together for a little mother/daughter date. I was looking for something that she can do now that she's older that I wouldn't have let her do before, and this is what we came up with. We also did a facial and manicure at home and put on the little bit of makeup that she's allowed to wear at this point. I'll post some pictures, but her hair doesn't look a ton different, so it's hard to tell in the picture.

It's time for an update. First off, since it is so confusing trying to remember who all the kids are by their initials, and since my husband and friends tell me that I'm just being super paranoid, I'm going to go ahead and use the kids' first names. I hope I won't be sorry about that, but most of the blogs I follow use real names, so I'm not totally crazy--at least not about this. :)

So, this month Felicity will turn twelve. Her best friend just had her birthday and has now moved up to Young Women's, so I'm having time to adjust to the idea that Felicity's turn is coming. I don't think I'm old enough to have a daughter in Young Women's. I guess I should have thought about that when we were deciding to have a baby twelve and a half years ago. Somehow, when I was 21, I just didn't think, "Hmmm...if I get pregnant now, that means I'll only be 34 when this baby goes to Young Women's or Young Men's, and 34 just isn't old enough for that." Oh well, I guess it's just another case of 20/20 hindsight. Really, it's fun to see Felicity growing up and finding her talents. She's been writing a lot. Today she was working on her book about what you should not name your children. Two of the names she had in there went together: Gluey and Papery. Some people in my family will know what that's a take off from. Anyway, I was surprised by how funny her writing was. Some of it didn't make a lot of sense, but most of it was really fun to read. I'll have to get her permission to post some of it. She also recently started violin lessons which she is really enjoying. I'll admit that I was worried that she wouldn't want to practice, but so far she's doing well with it, and she's hardly ever screechy.

Elisabeth is enjoying learning to play both piano and cello. She started cello last March and is making rapid progress. Her teacher is always very complimentary about how she's doing. Her piano is taking off as well, and she's almost ready to pass where Felicity left off, so she'll soon be the most advanced pianist in the house. She loves to talk to anyone on the phone, but most of all to her cousin Rachel. She also loves to get letters and cards and is always writing one to send to someone.

Avonlea has finally gotten to start piano. She's wanted to for a while, but I put her off until this year because I didn't feel like she was really ready. She's the only one of the girls doing dance/tumbling this year which feels odd. I'm used to taking kids to two or three classes a week at the dance studio. She just lost her first top tooth a couple of days ago, so now she has that cute little smile. Of course, we had to rehash a little Junie B. Jones when it happened. "Good news folks, there's still a little pink on the cup." Unfortunately for Avonlea, who loves Junie B., she couldn't take her spit cup to school for show and tell since she doesn't go to school. If you haven't read any Junie B. Jones, I have to recommend that you do so. We laugh and laugh at those books all the time.

Tabitha is so cute and funny. She has a few words she doesn't say right. She still callst toothpaste "pooptaste." She has a couple of cavities, so we have needed to teach her to spit out her toothpaste and start using a fluoride toothpaste. She's been using one without fluoride because she still swallows it. Anyway, the search has been on for a toothpaste flavor that she likes because if she likes it, brushing is easy, and if she doesn't like it, brushing turns into a WWF match. She loved her old strawberry Tom's of Maine pooptaste. It took a couple of tries to find something else good, but I think I've finally got it. Tabitha likes to sing her ABC's now and can do them all right except for that horrible LMNOP part. She sings it ending with the "next time won't you sing with me" part, but whatever we do, we can't sing with her the next time. She'll start back up and if anyone joins in, she stops singing and orders us not to sing with her. She has to show off her ABC skills every time, and no one else better upstage her. :)

Isaac also has his funny words. For instance, he loves peak-a-butter sandwiches. He'd eat them every meal. Also, when you get a drink he doesn't "want a pissy cup." Yeah...I woudn't want my orange juice in a pissy cup either. :)One day at dinner, he took a baby carrot from Felicity's friend who was here. He sunk his teeth into it without biting it all the way and then said, "I like it, I love it...I don't want it." And then gave it back. The girls thought it was so funny that they go around quoting him. I cut his hair a couple of weeks ago and got it too short. Luckily, that means that about now, it looks right and it will be a while before I'm desperate enough to give him another hair cut. I'm starting to think that little boys should have long hair just so no one has to cut it.

I am about to fall asleep as I type, so I'm done for tonight.

school choice

This blog http://homeschooledtwins.blogspot.com/2008/08/hilarious-take-on-school-choice.html has link to a clip about school choice from one of my favorite British comedies, Yes, Prime Minister. I think anyone who wants to talk about politics should really watch that show and its companion Yes, Minister. It puts things in their proper perspective. :)

"I don't want to eat Daddy."

The other day, I. was asking me for a "peekabutter" sandwich. For the layman, that means peanut butter sandwich. I told him no because we were going to go meet Daddy for dinner soon. He started yelling, "Noooo. I don't want to eat Daddy." Of course I told the girls about it and they laughed. By the time I told N. about it, I. was well aware of what story I was telling and started laughing before I even got to the funny part.

Incidentally, I think I'm going to start calling the boy twin IN on here for his middle and first initials. It's just too confusing to me to call him I. because it looks too much like I'm using the first person pronoun instead of his first initial.

I think I am the most pathetic blogger ever. Google reader is such a great thing so that people can see when I actually bother to post something here.

For those of you who thought the "pony and cheese" was gross, you're going to love what T. uses to brush her teeth: pooptaste. That's right, we don't give her toothpaste, so she has to use her own special pooptaste. You'll also love to hear that I. puts on his swimming soup to get in the water. Yum!

The twins just turned three a week and a half ago. Tonight when I was visiting a friend who just had a baby, I was reliving some of those great moments from the early weeks of their life: like feeling like a mother cow with them both nursing all propped up on my extra large nursing pillow. A couple of times every night I would have to get myself all propped up in bed with a bunch of pillows behind me and a baby on each side of me and a couple of receiving blankets or cloth diapers handy. Next, position the nursing pillow. Then put one baby on the pillow. Carefully reach for the other baby. Latch one baby on and use the blankets or cloth diapers to position the head. Do the same with the other baby. Wa la--hands are free to hold a book to stave off middle of the night boredom or to eat a snack to stave off middle of the night starvation. Funny how both of those things only happen when you have to get up to feed babies in the night. I remember being hungry all the time, so I got in the bad habit of eating cookies or pop tarts because they were quick and easy.

A couple of weeks ago our ward's culinary arts group made homemade raviolis. As we were rolling past out, one sister was telling me how she loves her lasagna that she makes with homemade noodles, so I was inspired to give it a try and today was the big day. I must admit, the lasagna was really good with homemade noodles. E. had a blast rolling them out. I actually didn't do very many myself--I just scrambled to find places to put them so that they wouldn't get stuck to anything. My big question for myself is: was it good enough to be worth all that work? I think the answer will depend on how good the leftover noodles that I dried and put away turn out to be. If I can make enough noodles at once to last for a long time, it's worth it. If I have to do this too often, it's not. I have several recipes that I really like fresh noodles for, and I would save a lot of money doing this over buying the refrigerated ones at the store.

Boys

It is so funny to watch I. imitate his daddy. Today, N. was out in the yard poisoning fire ant hills. He would walk around studying the ground, stopping occasionally to examine a spot to see if it was an active ant hill. I. trotted along behind him, stopped when he stopped, and bent down to see the ant hill in question. Over and over they did this as I watched from the porch swing. It was so funny to see the grown up mirrored in miniature. I swear I. even walks like N., and he loves to be outside "helping" Daddy all the time. Poor boy, stuck in this house full of girls all week. :)