Category: Max

Max

With all the adorable girliness going around these days, it’s hard for a guy to get his photo taken. But we found Max, and he is just as adorable as ever! He is 6 and in kindergarten. He loves playing Mario on the playground and buying milk when he takes his lunch. He has just discovered bionicles, but he has always been a big builder. He can out-build any of the other kids with Lincoln Logs any time.

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Here is a sample of his handwriting these days.

And just because it has been so long and I inundate this place with baby pictures, I thought I would share one of Max.  Here he is all dolled up for Easter, at about 2 years, 3 months.

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Smoothies for a bedtime snack

I hate the whole bedtime snack thing. The kids just ate an hour ago and can’t possibly be really hungry. It is just another of their evil schemes to postpone bedtime and possibly consume more sugar.

But tonight the bedtime snack was a healthy one, blueberry soy milk smoothies. Here you see Max with his snot and dirt encrusted face gleefully digging in.

Kids update, Early 2011

And now to catch you up with the rest of the family!

Paisley and James are navigating early adulthood’s bumpy waters, neither one took us seriously when we told them we weren’t paying for college or a car and now they have to figure those out on their own.  But they are around a lot and still love to be with the little ones and spend time with the family.  So for all their mistakes, they seem to have the basics of family love figured out.  Paisley lives about 5 miles away and is over often.

Posy (15) has been paying attention to how things have played out with P&J and is working very hard in school and hoping to get scholarships.  She is even saving for a car.  She works hard with the youth group (and has a bit of fun there too), sings in the choir for the evening Mass, and is planning to go on a mission trip to Mexico in February.

Ben (13) is a comedian, we switched his school this year and it was perfect for him.  Praise God!  He is blooming in his new environment.  He has great friends, good teachers, and is smarter than is good for him.

Tessa (8) is a sweetheart.  Every week several people come up to me and tell me how she went out of her way to brighten their day or say something nice.  She really knows how to lift people’s spirits.  Around the house, though, she can be a bossy little know-it-all.  But it really is just because she wants things done properly in the best way for everyone.  We’re working on more diplomacy around here.

Max (6) lives on his own little musical planet.  He has learned most of the beatles songs inside and out, he figures out songs on the piano, and he loves to play video games.  We have to limit his screen time because he gets very emotional when he has had too much.

Lily (3) is a firecracker and a half.  She is outgoing when she wants to be, never plays with toys, is always in my face about something and is FINALLY weaned.  She was recently diagnosed with asthma as well and is finally not coughing at night.  She and Molly are inseparable.

Molly (1) my fussiest baby by far.  She has been a bit of a puzzle medically, with allergies, reflux and asthma, all sorted out except the asthma.  She seems to be verbally delayed, but has very good receptive language skills and excellent sign language.  So for now she tested out of services.  She also won’t eat solid foods.  She is smart as a whip, and stubborn as a mule.  She is a serious baby, and saves her smiles for when she really means it.

This crew keeps me hopping every day, running people here and there takes up most of my time, and laundry and cooking take up the rest of it.  But we have a great family and James was recently quoted by our priest in a homily about large families.  He said something to the effect of there is always enough love to go around, and even if they don’t have the stuff they might want, the love multiplies and keeps everyone happy.

Our older kids like to be around the younger ones and will spend time with me and my husband on purpose.

So I have a feeling that somehow, we will all make it through this alright.  🙂

Zoo Week in Review

This past week was a busy one – but then most weeks are – this just had a different flavor of busyness.  There was a storm that blew through the city and dropped a little rain, leaving the air with a cooler feel and the skies darker.  Around here, things just felt stormy as well.

A few tidbits:
There is almost $4000 damage to our van from the recent hailstorm here, but everyone has their car in the shops already so we are waiting a week or two to send ours in.  At least it wasn’t totaled.  Some of our friends found themselves car shopping once the insurance had a gander at their cars.  For now we are just a big gray golfball, hurling through the city.

We endured a fair bit of drama from Ben’s school this week. It seems that my jokester son and a couple of his friends had tried to reach out and include a child they judged as lonely, which can aparently get a person in trouble for “Bullying”.  The school conceded that it was probably more like “Pestering”, which, knowing my son, is not so far out of his league.  To me, Bullying encompasses threats, fear, and physical harm.  Pestering, on the other hand has more to do with unwanted fart noises and other 13 year old boy jokes.  So after many hours of discussions, phone calls, written accounts, emails, and commiserating with other parents, the issue is declared DONE and we can all move on.  But it sure ate up a lot of my week.

My birthday was this week!  (I’m not 40 yet.  That’s all I’ll say!)  A few years ago I managed to finally give up my childish idea that my birthday should be a national holiday and just came to expect a normal day with a few nice surprises in it.  And so it was.  Mostly.  A friend brought me chocolate, my mother in law gave me a little money to spend on myself, and Paisley stopped by with a chai latte and flowers.  Jay took me to lunch and got me more flowers and a card.  (Lest you think that was all he did, he also schlepped all around my favorite mall with me last Saturday and got me a nice pair of shoes.)  So my day was going along swimmingly until I opened my email.

In my email was a notice from the older kids school (yes, the one I was already having issues with this week) informing the families that they had selected a new campus.  Yay for them, Boo for me.  This new campus is two and a half times further from us than the current one.  I already spend 2.5 hours per day just in getting my kids to and from schools and the thought of extending that…  Ugh.  How can I look at my younger children, learning about the world and developing their bodies and tell them that they have to spend 3-4 hours per day strapped down in the car?

For this and other reasons, this just would not be a feasible arrangement for us.  So I proceeded to freak out entirely. (Which involved crying for about 2 days.)

Since then I have calmed down quite a bit, and all is not settled with this move for this school.  There is still quite a bit of time before I will really need to panic (or otherwise figure out what to do) and I am resolved once again to let the future be the future.

In other news around here, Molly has added in several baby signs.  She signs: nurse, eat, drink, dog, thank you, cat, bird, more, shoes, and I think she has done all done and blanket at least a couple times too.  She has grasped this concept that she can communicate with us so readily that she wants to be able to tell us more.  She will fling her arms around trying to tell us something, but she can’t figure out which sign to use.  Then there was grocery shopping. Because she can tell us what she wants now, she is more likely to get it, so she got so frustrated when we walked through an aisle with lots of cups and she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t give her a drink when she signed it over and and over!

She also really likes baths and was on a mission to get one today.  She fell into the (empty) tub once, and then later managed to remove her diaper and try to climb into the toilet while Posy was in the bathroom curling her hair.

Molly also experienced her first oreo cookie today.  I hoped she would get all chocolated and gross, but she was a pretty dainty eater.  She first removed the top cookie, proving she is a genius, and licked at the filling a little.
 Molly's First Oreo

She decided she didn’t like that a whole lot, so she scraped that off the bottom cookie and just worked on eating that part.

Molly's First Oreo

Finally, she got to the cookie part.  She made a little slobbery mess with it, but not too bad.  I guess the real mess with have to wait for her First Birthday Cake.  (Two more weeks!)

Molly's First Oreo
In other news Max and Tessa got rave reviews at their teacher conferences, although Max’s teacher said he has a hard time remembering not to sing all the time.

Jay hurt his back again, and has been hobbling around in pain all week.

And I managed to mess up the garage a little more in and effort to clean the garage.  Which I know sounds counter-intuitive, but is really progress.  I have to dig out all the clutter-infection to clean the wound so to speak.

And that, if you can believe it, is just a small sampling of what went on around here this week.

Some weeks are like that.

Sometimes it is a doozy of a day that can get you, sometimes it is a whole week. I have been extra busy mostly because of a week I had last week – it started of with a bang. Tessa came home from school with a fever the bloomed into full blown croup, and by the end of the day Max had it too.

On Wednesday the littles were still sick, nothing new there. But then James was hit by a car on his way to school! Talk about a heart stopping phone call. Thankfully, he was the one who called me – laying in the street, waiting for the paramedics, he called me. So I knew he couldn’t have been too hurt. Still, I rushed over there and saw my poor baby in a lot of pain, being loaded into an ambulance. After a short stay in the ER, we discovered that he is very bruised and has a hairline fracture in a lumbar vertebra. There isn’t a whole lot they could do for that, just tell him to get lots of rest and not jar his spine around.

Thursday began bright and beautiful with a visit from the vomit fairy. Three kids down with that one. It was a short virus though – only about ten hours. But still… little people who cannot understand that we puke in the toilet or a bowl can make a HECK of a mess.

It was interesting to discover that Max had some kind of vomit sensor for Lily. He would say, “Mom, Lily is going to throw up!” and 30 seconds later, I kid you not, Lily would fountain up her stomach contents. By the end of the day I learned to listen to him when he said that.

While it sounded like a horrible week, it was an easy week to focus on the good and to be thankful. James accident could have been so much worse in so many different ways. But he is fine (if sore) and the kids are all well again.

More Maxisms

While riding in the car earlier today Max asked if he could tell us a story. It was kind of hard to hear the story with the air conditioner on (and since Max sits in the 3rd row) but we could tell it was about a little boy and things he was doing.

Jay: What is the boy’s name?
Max: Penis-boy
Jay: (trying really hard not to laugh) Maybe we should think of a different name…
Max: No
Jay: How about Peter?
Max: No, I like Penis-boy.

Ahem.

Then, later on we were shopping at Lowes. Max saw a big jacuzzi tub. He started throwing an all out fit because we wouldn’t buy it on the spot. He actually continued with it for quite a while after we left the store. Throwing a fit because we wouldn’t buy him a new bathtub… never heard of that one before.

Maxisms

This morning he came up to me and told me, “Somebody said cake!”

The other day he noticed that Jay was about to go out back and do some yard work.
Max: I have to go outside and get my boots on!
Jay: Are your boots outside?
Max: No.

New words:
Ski-spool (Preschool)
hoppy-tocko (Helicopter)