Halloween- Just a few

Last year, Halloween turned out to be rather confusing because of Hurricane Sandy having just come through our area. This year, we got a better taste of what Halloween is like in our neighborhood. Almost everyone participates! It was great! Jack had a swimming lesson at 5:30, but Justin had been working from home, so I left the other kids with him to get ready. Jack and I rushed home after lessons and found that Noah, dressed adorably as a Ninja Turtle, had fallen asleep in his chair. I guess he has to wait until next year to say "trick or treat!" Thanks to "Sew-Nya" for Alexander and Jack's penguin costumes. I didn't get many pictures, but here they are:

Pumpkin Picking

For years, our family picked pumpkins and apples in October at Larriland Farms. Two years ago, we ran short on time and visited a closer farm in Frederick. It worked, but we missed our tradition. Last year, we visited the silliest pumpkin patch I'd ever seen. This year. we hopes to find a farm that could come closer to what we had liked about Larriland. At the recommendation of a friend, we tried Frecon Farm. It was great. It wasn't overly commercial. They had both apples and pumpkins to pick, and the pumpkins were actually growing from vines, not artificially placed in a field of grass. The kids had an excellent time choosing their pumpkins and apples and I think this is a place that we can feel good about returning to next year.

My Most Challenging Homeschool Challenge

Yes, I know that was redundant and repetitive.

At the beginning of this year, I homeschooled for about three weeks while living in a hotel. I juggled two different levels of instruction. Three, if you include my eager little Kai guy. I homeschooled in a state I had just moved to and with very little in the way of a support group. I basically created my own curriculum and all my lesson plans using an eclectic mix of resources. I homeschooled a child who is advanced in some areas, like math concepts, reading, and creative thinking, but who drags his feet if asked to write more than a couple of sentences and struggles to spell on a level anywhere close to his reading level. I homeschooled another child who learns very differently from his brother and I adjusted daily back and forth to each child's style. Some of these challenges weren't really all that challenging, like being in the hotel. Or maybe I'm just getting to the point where I am far enough removed from it that I've painted those days with the forgiving paintbrush of nostalgia. Some of the challenges were more challenging, like adjusting to homeschooling while also adjusting to our new lives in a new state. None of them, however, could beat out my most challenging homeschool challenge: Noah.

Noah, you say? The baby? But he's not even homeschooled.

No, but he's home!

I'm going to give myself the credit I think I deserve and say that juggling the three older kids is not easy, but it's something that I have a fairly good handle on, most of the time. In some ways, it helps that there are three of them, because when I need to work one-on-one with a child, there are still two left to entertain each other. Of course, that often leads to the need for policing or, if nothing else, an enormous mess which I later have to police the clean-up of.

But you can't juggle a baby. You could try, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be too long before someone complained to the appropriate authorities. We started our school year in August, when Noah was four months old. We'll be finishing up in June, when he's fourteen months old. Babies those ages need near-constant attention. They often literally leave you with no free hands. And free hands happen to be kind of helpful when you're doing just about anything, homeschooling included. Noah tends to need a nap just at the most inconvenient moment, and has never, to my recollection, taken a nap lasting more than half an hour in his crib. He wants to crawl on me while I read to his brothers and attempt to steal the book and rip its pages out. He cries if I don't hold him in my lap, even if I'm trying to do a science experiment. He would like to eat the watercolors and the crayons and the base one hundred blocks and the atlas and pretty much anything he can get his  mouth on. He has no appreciation for folk tales or multiplication or why the Statue of Liberty is green. He doesn't know, or care, what sound /R/ makes.

Noah is my most challenging homeschool challenge. He is, however, cute....

 

 

It's possible to homeschool with a baby around. But, I'm assuming (and hoping) that it's easier not to. Maybe by this August he'll be able to refrain from eating any school supplies.

First Snow!

This morning we awoke to find snow falling beautifully and steadily. The boys have been waiting for a snow for what seems like forever... well, probably since last winter! We were really excited to experience winter in our new house. We have a mostly flat yard perfect for rolling snowballs and making snow angels. The snow wasn't quite deep enough for actual snowman-making, but the kids had an absolute blast. I took Noah out in the Ergo carrier. Kai, Noah, and I went inside after about half an hour, but the big boys stayed out for probably two and a half hours! Yay, snow!

Leaves!

We have a LOT more leaves to rake here in Pennsylvania than we did in Maryland. It's a good thing I can count leaf-raking as Alexander's PE! It's good exercise for me, too. Fortunately, not many leaves end up in the back yard, so we just have to keep up with the front yard. I think we're approaching 30 bags collected so far this season with more leaves still on the trees!

Finally, Mom let us play in the leaves!

I think we own four leaf-bearing trees.

 

Summer Vacation: Part Three, The House

We are lucky. The kids and I arrived here on a Saturday. Justin came up the next day, Sunday. We gave the realtor the go ahead to have the pictures taken of the house and it was listed that Thursday. That very first day, we had a viewing and that couple placed a bid that Friday! It took a couple of back and forths, but we ended up with a ratified contract. The very first couple to look at our house, on the very first day it was on the market, bought it. So yeah, we are lucky. Well, let's not give luck all the credit, either. We did our research and priced the house perfectly. We (mostly Justin) worked our butts off to get it staged nicely. And Justin might disagree, but it is my honest opinion, after looking at a dozen or fifteen houses up here in PA, that I don't think there was even one of them that was staged as nicely as our house in Frederick was.

In fact, I was getting pretty discouraged looking at houses here. We looked at soooo many online in the weeks leading up to our move and in the time before we were first able to go look at houses. I should say, too, that we moved into our hotel having only the vaguest idea what area we might actually settle in. Justin had heard that one area was nice, but it was out of our price range. We initially considered New Jersey, but decided we really wanted to be somewhere between Philly and my dad near Allentown. We slowly, slowly started narrowing down the areas based on price, commute, and other factors. We did some driving around, but even that is tough with the kids. It is hard to pick a place to live when you know nothing of the area. Then, when we finally seemed to settle on an area, we were disappointed in the houses we were seeing. We just weren't seeing the perfect house. Some were out of our price range and STILL not something I'd buy, or they were in our price range but dumps, or they were beautiful and priced right but in a really weird location. Some of them looked great in pictures but turned out to be awfully strange in person. I am pretty sure we almost burst into flames in one house...

I was starting to think that we might really end up having to rent for a while, only because we couldn't find a house we liked! It seemed a shame to rent for that reason alone. Finally we saw this house, I'll call it "Irish." I had seen it online and requested to see it in our first batch with the realtor, but it wasn't available for viewing and we sort of forgot to circle back around to it until much later. I kept looking at it online. The kitchen was pretty darn ugly. It had the same cabinets as our ugly hotel! And that orange paint on the wall... yikes! But it was priced low enough that we could hope to save up to finish the basement. The neighborhood was great. The commute seemed reasonable. The layout of the house was just about perfect. It had a great yard. So we finally got an appointment to see it. I had put a lot of hope into "Irish," looking at the listing over and over again on my phone. And when we walked in, we were relieved to see that it looked the same in person as it did online. The kitchen was still ugly, but we can deal with some aesthetic issues. So, we put in our bid. Again, a couple of back and forths (and at least one frustrating misunderstanding) and again we had a ratified contract.

The house is not perfect, but no house is perfect. We can make this house our own over time. We can take care of it and improve it and become comfortable in it. We better, because they can pull my lifeless body out of this house in a hundred or so years. I am not ("do you hear me, I mean it") going to move next time.

So here we are in our new house in Pennsylvania, truly starting our new lives. We really like our new neighborhood. The kids are having fun in the new yard and love scootering around the cul-de-sac. We've been given gifts and warm welcomes by the neighbors. We still have a long way to go in terms of making meaningful connections, but that is the kind of thing that can only come in time. At least we're home.

Summer Vacation: Part Two, The Suite Life

During those first few week after we made the decision for Justin to accept the new job in Philly, it seems like we hardly had a second to talk to each other. I was forever taking the kids here or there to get them out of the way so that Justin could work on the house. Then when we got here to PA, Justin was immediately working long hours. He traveled almost immediately. And at that first hotel, there was the added problem of no bedrooms, so once the kids were asleep we had to be super quiet so as not to wake them up. The main floor bedroom opened to the living room, and the second bedroom was upstairs in the loft, which was open with a half wall (the one I was afraid they might throw themselves over). We solved that one problem a week in by moving hotels. The new hotel wasn't as pretty, but it had separate bedrooms, and that was more important to us.

We lived in that hotel for two and a half months. All of the kids grew one clothing size. Alexander lost two teeth. Kai quickly seemed to forget that we had ever lived anywhere else and insisted that the hotel was our house. We were on a first name basis with most of the staff. It did actually start to feel a bit like home, if only in the sense that when you get "home" after a long day of whatever, you have that sense of comfort and relief.

There were perks to living in a hotel, but even those perks came with a cost (not a financial cost... the company was paying for our stay). Yes, we had a daily maid, but that also meant that not just one, but at least two people were coming into our "home" at totally random times every single day. One guy would come for the dirty towels anywhere between 8:30AM and 11AM. The maid never came at the same time. Sometimes it was 9AM, sometimes 4PM. I also had to depend on other people to do things for me that would have been easier to do myself, if I had had the tools or resources needed. For example, I had to wait for them to take out my trash, even thought it always filled up more quickly than they could empty it. And when Kai spilled popcorn all over the carpet or Noah puked on our sheets, I had to either call and ask for help or deal with it in creative ways. I did like it when I timed it just right, went out with the kids for a while on our "full clean" day and came back to a magically clean suite. Mmmmm, I do like the smell of a freshly bleached bathroom! Justin and I joked, though, that a maid who doesn't do dishes or laundry is practically useless to us!

And then there were the meals. We really were quite lucky that the hotel offered free hot breakfast every day and dinner three times a week. The downfall was that it meant that my children dined in public ten times a week. I often felt like an exhibit at the zoo, the way that people looked at us. To be fair, I got complimented almost every single day on how beautiful my boys were, or how cute, or how funny, or how I was doing a great job handling all of them. For some reason people seem to be pretty chatty at hotels!

We did have some summer fun amidst the chaos of relocation tasks. The kids and I found several fun playgrounds. We took walks around our hotel grounds, played with sidewalk chalk, and were able to visit the pool a few times. There was a Chuck E Cheese not too far away that we enjoyed. The kids made forts pretty much every single day. We got lots of visits from PopPop and his blocks and puzzles. The kids were also allowed way too much TV and video game time, but we all survived with sanity somewhat intact. Everyone had some meltdowns as we all adjusted, but I guess that is to be expected.

I realize how incredibly lucky we are, especially with the housing situation... and I guess that can be another post.

Our Summer Vacation: Part One, The Journey

For the past few summers, we've had a Summer To Do List, filled with fun and meaningful activities that we try to accomplish over the summer. This summer, we had one main goal, with about a bazillion little "to dos." RELOCATE. New job, new house, new city, new state, new health insurance, new doctors, new dentists, new friends, new license plates, new drivers licenses, new grocery store, new everything. Okay, so we didn't change our names...

We told the kids it would be an adventure. The details are already getting fuzzy. We made the decision to relocate on May 29th. Noah was six weeks old. Three days later we had our first meeting with our realtor, who would help us sell our house. Some of my MOMS Club friends managed to throw together an extremely touching going away party for me (thanks, T!) and a couple even got me the sweetest, most meaningful little gift that I treasure (thanks, K and S!). Justin and I (mostly Justin) scurried around prepping the house for sale, doing repairs, putting stuff in storage, and staging. Just two and a half weeks after making the decision, the kids and I left for Pennsylvania, with me crying all the way out of our Frederick neighborhood.

In order to use the space of the van wisely, Alexander and Jack rode with my dad, who was helpful enough to be escorting us up to the hotel where we would be living temporarily, for up to three months while we waited for our house in MD to sell. I had Noah and Kai with me, along with most of the selected belongings that we had chosen to bring to the hotel. Justin was going to stay in MD for an extra day to finish staging the house without the hurricane we call our sons ruining it at every step of the way.

I think we were probably three quarters of the way there when I got separated from my dad. I went through a yellow light I didn't think I could stop for, and he got stuck behind. My van was driving really weird, oddly sluggish. It kept getting weirder and weirder. Eventually it got to the point where I was on the highway, flooring it, and only going about 40 mph. The people around me were not amused. I was not amused, either. There were jersey walls and construction all around. I had very little idea where I was and I had my two little babies to think of. I was way too nervous to just stop on the highway, even though I was very nervous that the van would just STOP, and there I'd be in the middle of the road.

I managed to make it to the exit that I needed to take to get to the hotel, but I was scared to keep driving. I pulled into an empty parking lot. I couldn't even see the street signs. I debated getting the kids out and walking down to look at the street signs, but I don't think I even had the stroller with me and there were no sidewalks. I didn't feel safe. I honestly did not know what to do with myself. I called the hotel to ask them to let my dad into the room if he got there first. Then I called Justin for advice, but he didn't pick up, busy painting and fixing up the house as he was. There were so many issues with calling a tow truck (not knowing where I was, not knowing how I'd get myself and the kids to the hotel), that I wasn't sure that was the best choice. Eventually, I decided to see if the little rest the van had gotten while I thought about things had done it any good. I had figured out with the help of my GPS that I was only about a half mile from the hotel (I could have walked there, but again: no stroller, no sidewalks, two babies). I tried out the van in the parking lot and it did seem a bit less sluggish, so I decided to give it a go. I managed to get to the hotel, check in, and take the kids up to the room.

Where I discovered that we had no bedrooms doors. And a scary loft that I thought my kids might throw themselves over. And that my dad wasn't there yet. I couldn't really even unload the car because of Kai and Noah. I finally talked to Justin and he told me to just chill. Just sit and wait for my dad. So I did. He got there about a half an hour later, having gotten lost and stopped to ask for directions I think twice. He was nice enough to unload the car for me, and stay overnight with us until Justin got there. He even went and picked up some groceries so we could actually eat. 

The next day Justin arrived in the afternoon and we got the van dropped off at a nearby mechanic. The day after that, he started his new job. And there we all were, living in a hotel in Pennsylvania, KIND OF starting our new lives.