Than having to care for sick kids when you are a sick parent.  Ok, so there are plenty of worse things, but this is one of my least favorite things about daily life, getting sick at the same time as my kids.  The hits just keep on coming – is it December or what?  (in case you aren’t aware, this is in reference to my family’s annual dose of uncanny bad luck that seems to show its ugly face every December)

This time around, it’s a nasty stomach virus, which means loads of extra laundry and some very crabby kids.  The two little ones were up all night last night, and even though Hubby was the one who got up with them, I was still awakened all night, so neither of us got much sleep.  Today was a take-it-easy day, and somehow I found the energy to get through it while being sick and on little sleep.  I’m slightly concerned about the little ones being kept up all night again because it’s the night of our oldest daughter’s birthday party, and we have 8 screaming, shrieking 5th graders running around the house.  But they seem to be having a blast (while us sickies keep our distance), and that’s what matters.  Now I just have to figure out how to talk them out of wanting to watch Twilight Eclipse, which in my opinion, does not seem appropriate for a bunch of 10 and 11 and one 6-year-old.

In a way it stinks getting sick on the weekend- there goes any chance we have of a fun family outing tomorrow, and I’m going to be really upset if I have to miss teaching my Sunday school class on  Sunday morning – those 1st graders are adorable, and we have so much fun together every week; I really look forward to seeing them.  But on the other hand, getting sick on the weekend means that Hubbydoesn’t have to worry about missing work, so that’s a positive.

Well, here’s to hoping that we are well soon and that there is some way that the rest of the family (2 left standing) does not come down with this.  I guess if there was a weekend in December for the whole family to come down sick, this was the best one.  We have my daughter’s birthday party, but nothing that involves travel like the weekends in the rest of the month.

Take care of yourself and your family in this, the lovely month of December!!

Our 4-year-old daughter Samantha is having her first sleepover tonight.  She’s been here when her older sister had friends sleep over, but tonight it’s her friend, just for Sammie.  Four years old is a little bit young to have a sleepover.  And tonight is the second sleepover in a row since older sister Taylor had a friend sleep over last night.  I don’t usually condone two sleepovers in a row because that would make for a very crabby Sunday.  But this is a special sleepover.

Sammie’s friend, Hannah, is an extraordinary little girl.  She was born with a condition that made her spine grow into her brain.  My daughter knows her from preschool, and then she was invited to Hannah’s 4th birthday party – that’s where we learned of her condition.  In the weeks after the party, Sammie called Hannah to see if she could come over and play, but Hannah could not – she was scheduled to have brain surgery in early December, but it was postponed because she suffered a seizure and was also diagnosed with asthma.  Then she underwent the brain surgery just before Christmas, and Sammie called her to see how she was doing.  For an entire week after the surgery, Hannah was bedridden and in constant pain.  She couldn’t come to the phone, much less go anywhere to play.  Now she’s feeling better, although her symptoms are starting to reappear.  So crabby Sunday, shmabby shmunday – my kids are having 2 sleepovers in a row.

Hannah’s recovery wish was to sleep over at Sammie’s house.  And even if it involved a 4-year-old with a double sleepover, what parent would be able to refuse Hannah’s wish?

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!

Our first ground-sticking, hill-sledding, angel-making, sidewalk-shoveling snow of the year is here.  And why not – it’s already December 6th!

I slept in this morning, which is more than I can say for my poor husband.  Ironically, last night, he was all gung-ho about staying up late.  He’s like, “And we can stay up late because the kids have been sleeping in lately – nothing to do tomorrow until later…”  And he was right – the two littlest ones have been sleeping in lately – until today, of course.  We stayed up really late last night thinking the kids would sleep in, but WRONG!  They woke my poor husband at 7:20 in the morning today!  Myself, I didn’t stir until 9:30ish, and I was lolling out of bed when WHOOSH!  The door to our walk-in bedroom closet flies open, and it is snowing into the closet!  Turns out, the closet window was not locked, and so the winter storm had pushed it open, which pushed open the door to the bedroom, and all of a sudden, we had a winter storm in our house!  ‘I guess we’re getting some snow,”  I thought as I pushed the window shut, closed the door, noticed the baby was still sleeping and climbed back into bed.  A few minutes later, and WHOOSH!  It happened again.  “Wow, we’re really getting snow!”  I said to myself as I noticed the ground was already blanketed when I shut the window the second time.  This time, I manipulated the frozen lock until it was shut so we wouldn’t have to experience the WHOOSH effect again.  Well, that’s a heck of a way to wake up, especially twice.  Besides, it was late enough and time for me to contribute to the daily household stuff.  Once downstairs, I checked weather.com, which informed me that we were forecasted to get 1-2 inches of snow during the day, and another possible inch at night.  Immediately we began making plans to go sledding, especially since our 4-year-old had been waiting for this all year.  Well, it took us all over an hour to get ready.  And that didn’t even include lunch.  We dressed everyone in 2-3 layers, and then we realized we should probably have lunch before we tackled the sled hill.  Seeing how difficult it was to unravel everyone from their winter clothes enough to find mouths to insert the lunch, we munched on a few pieces of lunchmeat before heading to the sled hill.

Well, the baby wasn’t happy on the sled hill – and before I get all kinds of nasty comments, YES he was bundled intensely!  2-3 layers, then a snowsuit, then a fleece bag-like thingie, then a few blankets, and my husband and I built a little tent-like thing around his carrier…  But he IS a July baby, and I have a theory that people are best suited for the season in which they were born, so…  no sledding for the little guy.  Or for mom, for that matter.  I got down the hill once though, and it was lots of fun – much easier climbing the hill this time than last year being a few months pregnant!  Although I was disappointed about only getting to go down the hill once, after that I got to sit in the warm car and catch up on my newspaper reading in peace and quiet after the baby fell asleep, so that was nice.  And after sledding, since we had kind of cheated on lunch, we treated the kids to Pizza Hut because for some reason, they like to eat there.  And every time we’re set to go, I realize I don’t like it, but I think I’ll be able to find something – but I was wrong again!  I just don’t like Pizza Hut!  Well, their iced tea is pretty good…  but their buffet sucks, and so now I’m headed home with 4 exhausted kids and I’m all hepped up on iced tea…  But the rest of the afternoon went surprisingly smoothly and we even let our daughter have a friend over – providing her mom drove her here so we wouldn’t have to venture out in the snow again.  When the friend’s mom got here, we were chatting about the snow, and we were all dumbfounded about how much we were supposed to get.  Usually, the weather channel will over-forecast us.  If they say 1-3 inches, we usually get a ground dusting.  Today, they say 1-3 inches, and for most of us, it snowed from the time we woke until well after the sun set.  We waited until it was finished to go out and shovel, and by then it was dark and we had gotten a few inches.  Now I see on the news that we could get a few more inches…

But anyway, lots of fun today, and all without calling an official Snow Day!  Can’t all major snow falls be on Saturdays?!?