We always knew that we were blessed with our 5 healthy babies, but the reality of how blessed we really were is beginning to sink in.  Our first 4 children were very easy, content, healthy babies, so our 5th child, Luke, has rocked our world a little bit.  He has always been an intense baby; very energetic, playful, sleepless, alert and specific about his wants and needs.  But during the past few months, he’s been sick as well, so the poor little guy is having  trouble being comforted.  We’ve taken him to the doctor a few times, and he’s been diagnosed with bronchitis and an ear infection.  As if these illnesses were not enough, his chest x-rays show he has an enlarged heart.  We are currently praying that this is not a symptom of something seriously wrong with little Luke’s health.  My husband made me promise not to google it since we’ve made a few medical scares in our family worse by scaring ourselves with random internet information.  We are currently waiting for our appointment with the pediatric cardiologist.  Scary stuff.

I will continue to update when I can.  In the meantime, prayers for Luke would be wonderful 🙂

A few weeks ago, our kids were chronically misbehaving.  Our oldest, a tween, was sassing back and saying “no” too much, her younger sister (the “spirited” one) was throwing lots of tantrums and trying to cause trouble with her sisters, and our youngest daughter was constantly upset and insecure about the continuous chaos in the house.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, so one day while the oldest kids were at school and the younger ones were sleeping, my husband took off work for an afternoon of “toy culling”.  This is a drastic discipline measure we only use in emergency situations.  It is time-consuming and intensive labor for the parents, but well worth it, at least in our house.

Toy culling consists of us going into the girls’ room (the three oldest girls share one big room, and our baby boy isn’t yet old enough to cause trouble) and taking out every toy.  We leave the tv, computer with educational games, books, and the clothes and board games in the closet.  Everything else goes – dressup clothes, doll clothes, dolls, stuffed animals, all the little miscellaneous toys that can really junk up a child’s room quickly, etc.  If you have lots of time, you can sort it all by what you want to keep and organize the rest, but we are very busy people and so we just took all their junk and put it in our son’s room for now.  He’s a baby who wakes in the night so he’s still in our room.  When it’s time to move him into his room, we’ll have to clean it out obviously, but for now it was a means to an end of the horrible behavior of the girls.  We leave the board games, and they know that they take one out and put it away when they’re done, just like the books that are left.  If the rules aren’t followed, anything that’s left on the floor in subsequent days gets culled.  You need to check their room everyday, and it’s imperitive that you follow through with rule-enforcing.  And for some reason, this process really works.  I don’t know what it is…  Perhaps a feng shui effect where the much more pleasant ambience of the room and the mucho extra space is what leads to the kids being in better moods and hence, less trouble and more obedient.  It could be the fact that there are less toys over which to fight.  Maybe they’re happier not having it constantly hanging over their heads that they’re going to have to clean their room.  But I don’t care what the reason is, the toy culling has worked wonderfully the 3-5 times we’ve had to set aside a chunk of time to do it.  My kids are now putting their dirty laundry in the hampers that are provided, and their trash is going into garbage cans.  Also, their room is staying clean, and I don’t have to worry about it staying that way because they don’t have anything with which to mess it up!  And, as the behavior improves, they can earn their toys back – you don’t have to spend money to get them any special reward PLUS the kids feel senses of accomplishment = WIN/WIN.  Toy culling proves that less is more, and it helps put a damper on the sense of entitlement that can cloud the good attitude of even a generally well-behaved child.

I think I first read about the method in a parenting column in the newspaper.  I’m not sure which expert gets the credit, but I do know that I highly recommend toy culling!  And oh yes, early December is a perfect time to do this – makes room for the burst of new things they might receive for the holidays!

Maybe not, but this 11-year old has the makings of a civil servant one day.  Upset about speeders, he decided to do something about it.  He dressed up in a helmet and reflective vest, armed himself with a toy radar gun, and stood off to the side of the road measuring the speed of drivers coming down the road.  Let me just post the article for you.  It’s short, but to see a picture click on the link below.  It’s also almost a week old, so you may have already read it.  I just discovered it today, so tough. 🙂

Boy, 11, tracks speeders with toy radar gun

Wed Jul 16, 7:59 PM ET

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Police can’t be everywhere, so 11-year-old Landon Wilburn is on patrol in the Stone Lakes subdivision in Louisville. Landon told The Courier-Journal he used to shout at speeders to slow down — then had a better idea.

Dressed in a reflective vest, wearing a bicycle helmet and armed with a Hot Wheels brand radar gun, he points and records the speed of passing traffic.

The boy also carries a flashlight with a built-in siren.

Subdivision resident George Ayers said he has seen drivers lock up their brakes when they saw Landon clocking them.

Officials say the city will install speed humps in the neighborhood if 70 percent of residents agree and are willing to put up half the money.

 Disney, our youngest-for-now, got into some trouble today.  She went “missing” for about 10 minutes while I was making lunch, so I started thinking to myself, hmmm, she must have fallen asleep somewhere.  So, I went to search for her and found this:

 I went to the store and bought some toilet paper today.  I had it on the stairs waiting to go up, and apparently she found it and thought it would be fun to play with.  It was no big deal, as far as how much trouble toddlers usually get into.  And, when I think about it now, the fact that I thought she was sleeping when she was “missing” really says a lot about what kind of baby, err, toddler she is.  When my middle child was that age, if she went “missing” and the house was actually quiet, we knew there was going to be REAL trouble – and there always was.  Our middle child went through a – how to put this eloquently – a ‘playing with poop’ phase.  She would wake up in her crib, take off her diaper, and paint with the contents of her diaper, all while we thought she was still asleep so there was little we could do to intervene before it happened.  We even had to postphone opening Christmas presents one year because we had a huge poopie painted mess to clean up before we could see what Santa brought.  Good thing big sis was really patient about that one.  Our oldest child, Taylor, was kind of like Disney as a baby – never any real trouble.  In fact, she also had a toilet paper incident – see flashback photo below, note the stream of toilet paper behind her:

So anyway, Disney is a very sweet and mild-mannered child.  In fact, she really likes to play with my glasses and my Chicago Cubs hat, but she will only ask (yes, that’s right, she asks) to play with them when I’m not wearing them.  And unrolling toilet paper is her idea of trouble – for now anyway.  She is nearing 2, so I am anticipating more trouble from her, but so far, this is it.  I just hope kids don’t come in any sort of behavior pattern.  Meaning, our first and third have been exceptionally good, our second is a HANDFUL (putting it mildly), so the fourth would be…

I’m not going to jinx us…  we’re hoping for the best.  I don’t know if I can handle another poop player!

To keep up with both blogs, allow me to post some  more wonderfully hideous titles and synopses.  OR…. lets make it even more fun.  I will give a list of titles and synopses.  See if you can guess which one contains the actual description.

1. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.  The story of a young child who falls into a well and finds herself in another world populated by giant red ants.

2. Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid.  A large man with a Mohawk haircut escapes from a mental hospital and becomes the friend of two rich kids.

3.  Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant,  Hellbound,  Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3.        A horror movie  aficinado takes her fascination too far when she unearths the remains of Dr. Frankenstein, Count Dracula, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I had accepted a grade 1/2 assignment for today due to the trouble I had earlier in the week getting jobs. It’s slightly below my comfort zone because of the 1st grade students. However, had I not taken it I wouldn’t have this to write about! Well, it’s not much of a topic, but it is a little different. Not much really goes into naming kids these days in Western culture. We choose a name usually because we had a relative with that name, there was a role model with that name (such as in the Bible) or we just like the sound of it. Once upon a time, and still in some cultures names carry meaning. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s also not about people who try to change names for special recognition.

What it’s about is why some parents choose to give their kids names that, well, just don’t fit… I once read a story about new guardians who would go to court to get kids’ names changed because their parents cursed them with ridiculous names, like the drug-shot parents who named their daughter Cocaina (guess which was their drug of choice?) or the parents who tried to name their child Friday. The name itself may not be ridiculous, but rather given to the wrong gender. I mean, do such parents regret having the “wrong sex” and give them the name they picked out anyway- like the parents who really wanted a boy so when they had a girl they dressed her up like a boy until she was to start school (and were mystified when she refused to put on a dress for her first day of school)? Of course there are some names that go both ways, at least the shortened version like Chris, Alex, Terry, etc. And I am still getting used to Leslie and Cameron being both male and female names. However, some just don’t work. Can you imagine a girl named Matt or Mike? Or a boy named Elizabeth or Jessica? Well, you may have to have some Hispanic blood to understand this one, but a boy in the class I was in today was named Guadalupe. That’s right. Named after Mary in the Bible as Our Lady of Guadalupe (well, an apparition of Mary, but I won’t split hairs). Apparently a very popular name for girls (click the name for more information). Why?? This is just setting up this boy for future problems with schoolmates. I predict that by the time he is in Junior High he will be going by his middle name, whatever it is, assuming that it too isn’t a girl’s name. I really hope it isn’t for his sake.

Not enough links for you in the above post? Try out these unusual names on Wikipedia. I had forgotten that Nicholas Cage had named his son Kal-El (you know, Superman)!

Last weekend was quite eventful: a wonderful performance of Murder with a Silver Spoon at Orchard Hills followed by a gathering to watch a movie. I have seen parodies and spoofs of the suspense movie The Ring on television almost since the movie was released in 2002. WOW…. it is that old and I had yet to see it?! I have always enjoyed a good suspenseful film and this is definately a very strange one. You really need to pay attention and not drift to catch all of the nuances.

Naomi Watts plays Rachel, a young journalist who investigates the mysterious death of her niece. At the wake, Rachel overhears a group of teenagers discussing a video which a number of students watched 7 days prior to mysteriously dying… all at the same time on the same date. After watching the video herself, Rachel begins to see the exact images which were on the recording. These images lead the investigator on a race against time to prevent not only her death but also those of her young son and his father.

Perhaps the most mysterious character in the film is Rachel’s son, Aidan (David Dorfman). The child seems to have a very eerie connection to the mystery. He draws pictures of people’s deaths days before they occur. It is almost as if you expect him to utter the much quote phrase “I see dead people.”

Several pieces of trivia about The Ring caught my attention. Primarily the fact that the movie is a remake of the recent Japanese film, Ringu. Also, the movie was directed by Gore Verbinski who directed the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy.

The Ring is an intriguing suspense thriller which holds the viewers attention. Although it does have one scene of (I’m sure and would hope) simulated animal endangerment, it is relatively devoid of gore. It is a fairly intelligent mystery.