Lest you misunderstand...

In case I dismayed anyone with my less than enthusiastic post about being pregnant, I'd like everyone to know that I am not unhappy about having a baby, it's just the pregnancy I am dreading. And it's not about anything vain like getting fat. I always lose the weight, it's not that hard if you are a food nazi like I am. In fact, if someone called me up and said Hey, we have extra babies around here, would you like one? I'd say Sure, give me a girl please. I love babies. It's just being pregnant that I can't stand. The agonizing nausea and unrelenting aches and pains. If someone called me up and said Hey, I'll give you a gazillion dollars to be a surrogate mother. I'd say No way, Jose. The only way I can bear the thought of being pregnant is knowing I will get a baby out of it. I mean look at these faces (they are not all mine by the way), how could you not want one? If only it really was the stork that brought them.

Five reasons I'm happy to be pregnant even though it was unplanned and (initially) a nasty shock.

1. This is the LAST time.
2. I can say I've gained and lost ~150 lbs in my life. (The final # remains to be seen)
3. It might be a girl.
4. It might be a boy.
5. I LOVE throwing up. Really, it's so fun.

Stay tuned for my next list: 1001 reasons I wish I wasn't such a bone head about birth control. Just kidding. Sort of.

Five Things I Love About Eliseo

1. That the first thing he does when he comes home from school is take all his clothes off and run around in his underwear.
2. That he is so brave at the dentist.
3. The way he plays equally well with his older brother or younger sister.
4. That he always calls me Mommy, never Mom.
5. That he loves the game "Guess a number between one and a hundred."

Five things I love about Lily

1. The way she says "pretember" and "myselth."
2. How she thinks I am so great at playing Barbies and My Little Ponies.
3. The yellow ring around her pupils.
4. The way she can sleep in until 10am.
5. The way she thinks her brother, Eliseo, is so cool.

And here are the photos that were supposed to go with Alma's post yesterday.

Five things I love about Alma

1. He doesn't call me mama, he calls me mamamamamamamama.
2. The ultra betrayed and crushed look on his face that he gets when Grant scolds him.
3. The way he looks exactly like a Teletubbie from the back when he wears a certain pair of blue fuzzy pjs.
4. That his favorite toy is a little mouth sized glow in the dark rubber duckie with a Frankenstein hairdo that his brother got in a Halloween grab bag. And that he can find that thing no matter what obscure dusty corner it is in.
5. The way he never cries or fusses and always sleeps through the night.
6. Um...just kidding about #5.

Mmmmmm. Grubs.

So, Grant was chopping wood yesterday and he found a little colony of hibernating grub worms. He brought them in to show everyone and I suggested throwing them to the chickens who I figure are in desperate need of real nutrition, it being the dead of winter and all. But Grant thought WE were in desperate need of nutrition and decided to fry them up and eat them. The boys were excited, Lily was skeptical and, believe it or not, so was I. They turned out to be.....delicious! The aroma and flavor was exactly that of roasted pine nuts. In fact, I hardly got a taste because the kids chowed them too quickly. Lily being the biggest hog of all. Grant had to go back to the log and dig out some more. Some of you may want to disown us as friends and family members after this post, but I promise you, if you were able to eat one of these tasty morsels without knowing what it was, you would ask for another.

-2 F

Um, that's been the temperature recently. I hate my life. The one bright spot in my cold, cold existence is that the water pipes to the washing machine are completely frozen so at least I have a real excuse to slack off on that chore. If anyone needs me I'll be huddled in front of the fireplace dreaming of Taiwan or moving to Southern California.

Please comment on my blog!

Mom, Dad, Don, Carolyn, Eileen, Rachel, Felipe, Andrew, Blanca? I know you guys are out there. You're my family, don't even think about lurking! Tell me how cute my kids are and how witty my posts are-I need validation here. Speaking of validation, spread my blog address to anyone who might be interested. As many of you know, I am less than faithful about keeping in touch with beloved friends and family (translation: I'm lame) so please help me and spread my site to kingdom come. My ultimate goal is to have people that I dearly loved in my past such as college roomies and old boyfriends (Melanie, Karen, Debbie, Andrea, Kristie, Ghadeer, Rula, Jayd, Thayne, Matt are you guys out there?) to miraculously find my site, tell me off for being so lame, and then be my friend again. Even if you don't know me and found my site because you googled "lunatic" leave a comment. I'll love it.

Here are the kids playing happily in the snow. I'd like everyone to know how much courage it took for me to step away from the fireplace and actually outside for one minute in order to photograph them. I officially hate snow. I used to think that I just mostly hated it (e.g. when it gets dirty and icy) but that I did like it as it was falling softly to the ground. Nope. Not anymore. Even as it is falling softly to the ground all white and innocent I can only envision its sinful future of yellow urine spots, film of car exhaust grime and hidden icy patches like a million banana peel booby traps. Does anyone see any life analogies here? Did I ever mention that it never snows in Taiwan? Or that in Taiwan right now it is probably the season of smooth, white, firm daikons, sweet and crisp cabbage and probably ultra yummy green guavas and bell shaped lian wu? I am sending eternal thanks vibes to my favorite lovely guava vendor lady who always threw in another jin or two of slightly bruised but still extremely edible guavas into the sack of guavas that I actually paid money for. However, even as I cry about being separated from the bounty of a climate that doesn't freeze I still enjoyed watching the kids have so much fun. They have wanted a snow like this since we came back from Taiwan. In fact, it was one of the first things they said when we stepped onto American soil back in June of 2006, "Mom, where is the snow?" Lily was the first to discover how to make a ball big enough for a snowman. The boys had a snowball fight that surprisingly didn't end up in tears. And when they were finally cold enough to come inside I had an internal struggle about whether to be Type A Good Mom or Type B Good Mom. (Type A Good Mom wants to make her kids happy in the short term and feeds them junk food and Type B Good Mom wants to make her kids happy in the long term by ensuring strong bodies and vibrant health for their future). TAGM and TBGM are constantly arguing on my shoulders like the angel and devil on The Emporer's New Groove (there may be a few other similarities between me and Cronk, but if you know any please don't point them out!), so it's nothing new. And this time TAGM won and I actually made them some hot chocolate. (Okay, I used raw goats milk and seriously skimped on the sugar, but my sugar-starved kids loved it anyway). It was a good day.

Friday

So, after my big production of opening up my blog, I haven't done a thing since. I was hoping to have some pictures to make my comments more relevant, but the reason there are no pics is because I took one on Christmas morning and suddenly the card was full, after what.. three years? Now we have 3 years worth of pictures to transfer to discs and store them in a safe place (I think I'll send them to my dad) before it's safe to erase the card and start over again. Anyhoo, here is an update of the kids and life in general w/o pictures.
Eliseo is constipated-gross-but was very brave about taking his castor oil this evening. Actually, he didn't make even the slightest fuss about it. So there is another perk to making your kids take cod liver oil all the time--they don't fuss if they ever have to take castor oil. Thanks to Eliseo's ailment, the poo jokes are flying left and right at our house. All initiated by Grant, of course.
Rune is still hooked on Goosebumps books. I don't know what he'll do when he reads through all the volumes available at the library. He loves to give me the blow by blow of his books and there is apparently no short version. The account can take well over a half an hour to fully expound upon. I feel guilty that I don't have the slightest idea what happened in any of the books because I'm always tuned into my own thoughts and activities while interjecting the occasional "uh-huh" "that's weird" "Holy cow!" Actually, I have this goal to really listen to him one of these times, with eye contact and everything, and use the opportunity to teach him to express his thoughts articulately. I mean, like, have you heard kids these days? They can't, like, get out what they want to say. I mean, they try to, like, say something, I think, but it's so, like, drowned with a ocean of likes that you can't, like, understand what they heck it is. I so want my kids to have like-free speech!
And, onto Lils. She has officially entered the age where she is computer addictable (i.e. she cries when I tell her to get off and it's the first thing she asks to do when she wakes up). So she is now officially timed to 30 min/day just like the boys. Those first days of enforcing the rule are always so difficult and full of tears but worth it in the long run. Besides computer she loves to "pretember" (pretend). Lately, she is either a cat, with a really high pitched meow, or a dog, with a really high pitched bark. And in either case she adopts a sort of chimpanzee kind of run. The other day she waxed really creative and ran into the kitchen where I was washing dishes and says, "Mom, pretember you're the mom and I'm your kid and Alma is your baby." That was one of the easier roles she's given me in her long-standing pretember game!
Then there is Alma. He's the only one of my kids that didn't go through a totter/fall down stage for several weeks when learning to walk. He just got up and started walking. One day he was crawling and 2 days later he's walking everywhere. I love this stage because suddenly everything they do is so purposeful. He systematically empties everything he can out of the bottom cupboards in the kitchen and drags the things somewhere else. All with an air of doing something really important that needs to be done. We are in a constant war of take out/put back that he usually wins.