Summer Summer!

Next week is the end of the school year. Normally, that wouldn’t really affect me because, like most people, I’ve always worked year round. But now that I’m in a school, I get the same days off as the kids. Which mean…summer vacation!! I get to spend all day with my kids for three whole months! We can play and go on walks and go to the pool. They have my undivided attention- and will whine. And drive me crazy. And fight with each other constantly. Hmmmm, maybe I should rethink this…

Anyway, I do think I need to have a plan. A schedule- so we’re not just spending the whole day in our pajamas watching Ninjago. I’ve been researching this a little and there are so many ideas! Pinterest is a black hole from which I’ve emerged several hours later. But my basic outline is this:

7-8am- Wake up. Make and eat breakfast. (Fingers crossed and prayers said that they sleep in till 7am)

8-11am- Play outside. This could mean going to the park, going for a bike ride (if Ezra ever decides he wants to start riding his bike and not just sit on it), playing at the water park/ clubhouse pool, or some combination thereof.

11-1pm- Get back home and clean up. Make and eat lunch. Watch the newest episodes of Blaze and Paw Patrol. (You may wonder why I keep saying make AND eat meals. My kids are very enthusiastic about telling me what they’d like to eat- it’s the actual eating, that’s the challenge. A couple bites and they’re done. I tried telling them they wouldn’t grow big and strong if they didn’t eat. The reply? “But mommy, I thought you wanted me to stay little forever!” Check and mate.)

1-3pm- NAPTIME!!!!! Wonderful, blessed words.

3-5pm- Craft time. This means I have to attempt another visit to Michael’s. The scene of The Dark Incident. I know better than to get a whole huge bag of something to re-use. I tried that with beads when we were going to make necklaces. I’m still finding beads in the couch, in the fridge, in the pantry- wherever Ezra can reach. Lego building is included in this time so I foresee myself building lots of ships and buildings for the boys to totally destroy in five minutes. But they love it and I love them, so I suffer through.

5-8pm- Make and eat dinner. Baths. Clean up. Probably more television, not gonna lie. I’m going to really focus this summer on getting the boys to be more responsible and take on some additional chores. They like to use the hand-vac and broom already, but actually cleaning up toys is like pulling teeth. The little ones get paid quarters when they help and that’s a pretty good incentive, even if Ezra has no idea what to do with the money. He collects it in his backpack and then runs around the house jingling madly.

I’m sure I’ll improve on this schedule as the summer wears on, but if I can just keep to a loose routine, I think we’ll all benefit. I didn’t really include Micah in this because he’s already got his summer lined up. He plans to bounce from one relative to the next, gracing us with his presence for a week or so at a time. If you have any better suggestions for summer schedules, please let me know!

With Love,

Susanne

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m not a fan of cooking. I mean, I can cook. I managed to keep Micah and myself alive when we were on our own for a few years. But it’s not my favorite activity. Chase and I have an agreement. He makes dinner, and I clean up. Before you think he’s getting a raw deal, you should see the number of dishes that man can use for one meal!

Anyway, what I prefer is baking. One year back in high school, I won so many blue ribbons at the fair, I lost count. Fresh bread, pies, cakes, you name it. But my favorite thing to bake is chocolate chip cookies. And mine are the best you will ever have.

 

I learned this delicious skill from my grandma. She was a sweet, southern lady and she could bake anything! She even made fruitcake taste good! I remember sitting in her kitchen when I was little and she’d always have a cookie jar on the counter full to the brim with chocolate chip cookies. And if those ran out, she had bags of them in her freezer. She never used a recipe- she just had it all memorized. That’s how she taught me- and I’ll never reveal what’s in them. I love making cookies for my family and they remind me of those priceless memories in grandma’s kitchen.

She’s up in heaven now, and I guarantee Papa and Jesus are asking her for some of those amazing chocolate chip cookies.

PS- If this post made you hungry, here's a couple of recipes you should try from the judges of my favorite baking show. They're pretty yummy and super easy to make with the kids.

Duff Goldman's Andes Mint Cookies

 

Nancy Fuller's Peanut Butter Blossoms
 

Lorraine Pascale's Cookies and Cream Fudge Brownies
 

With Love,

Susanne

At Least It Wasn't Blood...

Full Disclosure- this paint incident is from a different day, but the result is the same! Paint-covered, messy child!

Have you ever made plans that, for once, you didn’t want to cancel, and then something happens to make you second-guess yourself? That was my situation last evening. I was going out for a crazy girls night with a friend. (It was actually just pedicures and a new ear piercing, but we’re moms and we deserve to sound cool sometimes!) Anyway, I was looking forward to getting out and going all the way to Naples for a couple hours.

But when I told Cayden that big bro was going to watch him and Ezra for a little while, his big brown eyes teared up. He would miss me twenty-hundred and he didn’t want to be left all alone! Obviously, Ezra, Micah, and Dara don’t count. I hesitated. Because I just had a feeling. Spider-Mom? But then I dismissed it- they’d be fine. Cay is super dramatic- no idea where he gets that from. I went over with Micah again the list of things they were not allowed to do. This included ninja fights, sword fights, lightsaber fights, lego fights, dinosaur fights… basically all the fights. I did not, however, mention using the oven or painting, which came back to bite me in the you-know-what.

Blissfully unaware of the chaos to occur, my friend and I merrily headed off to our grown-up date. Everything was just peachy for almost an hour. Almost. Then my phone started ringing. And not the phone call ring- the FaceTime ring. That’s never a good sign. I pressed the button and was confronted with a confusing sight- my back porch. At least, I thought it was my back porch. It certainly held similarities. But it was red. And a mess. And red. Micah calmly showed me the damage. The little boys had found paint and decided their big playhouse on the porch needed an update. They proceeded to paint the entire thing, followed by the patio furniture and cushions. In red paint. As if that wasn’t horrific enough, they covered the row of windows lining the house in chalk drawings of the family. Then scattered the painted patio cushions all over so they wouldn’t touch the ‘hot lava’ of the chalk-covered floor stones. Oh, and they hadn’t forgotten themselves in the painting process! I was literally speechless. It looked like a scene from a horror movie- complete with happy little chalk people/outlines.

I recovered enough to take a deep breath and begin my motherly rant of, “You are in charge! You are supposed to be watching them!! Where were you during all this???” Now let’s keep in mind that Micah, for all his almost teenage-ness, is a wonderfully good kid. The kind of kid who tells on himself regularly because of his tender conscious. So he totally deflated my righteous anger bubble when he told me he had seen cornbread mix in the pantry. Knowing it was my favorite, he had been in the kitchen totally focused on attempting to make cornbread as a surprise for me when I returned home. How do you get mad after that??

I returned home later that evening with much trepidation. I almost got back into my friend’s car and insisted we head over to the brewery for a drink. But I figured they’d had several hours to do their worst, I shouldn’t give them any more time for destruction. I walked inside and there were happy screams of ‘mommy’s home!’ No matter what they’ve done, that is my favorite thing to hear when I’ve been away.

I cautiously looked the boys up and down. Perfectly clean. Down to the pajamas put on correctly. (Cayden has a habit of putting his shirts on backwards and his jammy pants on inside-out.) Micah proudly marched me out to the porch for an inspection. To be fair, it was dark and I didn’t want to look very closely, but it appeared that all the paint had been scrubbed off and the windows sprayed down. We caught a lucky break that Ezra can only reach to the middle drawer and grabbed the washable paint.

 All in all, I was really impressed with Micah. He cleaned the entire mess, lectured and scolded the littles, successfully made delicious cornbread, bathed and dressed the boys, and got them somewhat settled down. He did better than I do most days!

And, in true Micah fashion, he successfully negotiated for a raise and bonus after noting my appreciation of his skills.

With Love,

Susanne

A Dark Fairytale

Once upon a time there lived a princess named Suzanna the Amazing. She lived in a small kingdom on a warm, sunny coast.

One day she was finishing up at her office when her husband, Chaseton Little Sleep, arrived with their two princes, Ayden Paw Patrol and Espn PJ Mask. Chaseton protected the kingdom at night and only slept for a couple hours each day, so he sleepily said goodbye to the family and headed off to keep the peace. Suzanna and the princes decided to stop at Michaels of the Crafts on their way home.

This was a risk on the princess’s part since little Ayden was currently wearing big-prince underwear, and still learning to go in the potty. But Chaseton has brought the prince’s royal diaper bag, which, she assumed would, of course, be packed with all necessary items. How the winds of fate do blow.

The royal family arrived at Michaels and had a debate over who would ride in the store-carriage. Ayden insisted upon being treated as a big boy and big boys did not have to be pushed in a store-carriage. They stayed with their mothers and didn't run off. Two minutes later, he had disappeared into the next aisle as Suzanna browsed. Then she heard the noise. Mothers know that sound.

Ayden sheepishly popped around the corner, leaving a trail behind him. He thought he just needed to fart, he explained in his loudest voice- but what came out was far messier. Faced with this challenge, and Espn’s shrieks of outrage over being ignored, the princess decided the best course of action was to head for the royal carriage, clean up the prince’s wardrobe, then return to deal with the rather large, um, droppings.

But alas, fate was not on her side. The diaper bag, while containing an impressive amount of snacks and toys, held no wipes, diapers, or extra clothes!! What to do!?

With little choice, but a few silent choice words for Chaseton, Suzanna stripped the prince down to his socks, wiped him off as best she could with a shirt and her spit, and set Ayden on a ziploc bag as protection for the royal carriage-seat. By now, both princes were in hysterics, and Suzanna was close to joining them. Did she go back inside and try to clean up the mess, dragging a screaming baby and naked screaming toddler with her?

With a last apologetic look at poor Michael of the Crafts, she fled the scene of the crime. With luck, employees would assume the carnage was caused by one of the many roving dogs people of the kingdom insisted on carrying around. She would never again return.

And because of this, they had no place to get their holiday craft supplies and were not able to properly decorate the castle for Christmas.

The end.

***Please note that this is a fictional story and any similarity to persons alive or dead is a mere coincidence. And if you don’t believe that, then the names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved- both guilty and innocent***

With Love,

Susanne

How Florida Categorizes Hurricanes

As a nearly-native Floridian, we generally view hurricanes a little differently than most. I assume it’s rather like the northerners who laugh when the south shuts down over a sprinkling of snow. Here’s my personal view:

 

Category 1- Hmmm, it’s raining a little more than usual this afternoon.

 

Category 2- While grocery shopping, add a couple cases of water to the cart. I also add some snacks that are designated ‘hurricane supplies’, but who are we kidding? Those get eaten long before the rain starts.

Category 3- Buy extra batteries for the flashlights. The kids proceed to burn through all the batteries while playing hide and seek with the flashlights. *My* kids also break the flashlights pretending they’re light sabers and having an epic battle.

 

 

Category 4- Stock up on ice, drinks, and steaks. Spend the time grilling out and toasting the hurricane for giving us time off work.

 

 

Category 5- Realize we may not have power for a week and panic about how to entertain the kids. Haha, just kidding..kinda. But if your husband is a first responder and will be gone the entire hurricane (pre, during, and post), he will insist you evacuate. And you have to take the kids.

Next time I’ll relate my Hurricane Irma evacuation experience. We ended up heading to Atlanta, along with half the population of Florida. Cayden still talks about it. Although he confuses Orlando and Atlanta, and refers to both as Atlando.  

With Love,

Susanne

And They're Off to School!

Warning: this is going to be a mushy back to school post wherein I reminisce about how quickly the boys are growing up and sing their praises.

Disclaimer: I’m writing this while they’re all sleeping peacefully, looking like angels. Had I written this three hours ago, it would have gone much differently. At that point, they were all yelling and crying. Micah got hit with a light saber, Ezra ran in circles screaming because he didn’t want to share Legos, and Cayden decided to throw the Legos at Micah to ward off a light saber retaliation. 

Micah Brock started 7^th grade this week. He’s halfway through middle school! Which is practically high school, nearly college, and soon he’ll grow up and move away from me. But he did ask me to drive him to school, which gave us a few minutes to discuss the coming year. He’s most excited about taking robotics. Hopefully this, along with the after-school coding class, will help him in his dreams of being an engineer. 

Seventh grade is going to be more challenging than he’s used to. For example, by next week he has to come up with the idea for and begin planning his science project. In addition, he’s learning Spanish- which will be a great asset here in Southwest Florida. But with half the kids in the class already knowing Spanish, he’s going to have to actually study to keep up! I’m so proud of this kid- he’s had a lot of challenges in his short life, and yet he works hard and keeps a good attitude. He’s great with his little brothers and I know he’s going to be a good role model for them.

Moving on to my little Cayden. That child is a handful and a delight. He’s so outgoing and sociable, it’s hard to believe he’s my kid sometimes. But when he wants something, he goes full force at it. There’s a martial arts studio by our home and every time we drove by, Cayden said he wanted to do karate. He started practicing at home (sometimes on poor Ezra), and talking Chase into ‘teaching’ him. We finally enrolled him this week and the kid’s a natural. He’s fast, strong, and agile. I’m glad he has an area to channel all his energy and wear him out before bedtime. 

Since Cay’s birthday is September 9^th, he missed the September 1^st deadline for VPK. His school moved him up with his friends, but I hate that he’ll have to remain behind next year when they all go to kindergarten. Florida doesn’t allow waivers or exceptions, so he’ll be one of the oldest kids when he does go to real school. I guess that has its advantages, but if I’d known this would be an issue, I would’ve insisted on being induced a week earlier. 

Finally, my baby Ezra. He’s a mama’s boy and wants to do everything Cayden does. Everything. Over the summer, Cayden’s school had a little petting zoo and the director invited Ezra to come for the day. He got to wear a uniform just like Cayden, pack a lunch like a big kid, and go to school instead of taking a nap. After that, there was no turning back. He wanted to go every day. And look at that face- how could I say no? He’s done amazingly well interacting with older kids and is always happy as a clam. No tears when I leave- just a hug and off he runs.  

Enjoy those little moments!

With Love,

Susanne