If you’re wondering why my blog post title sounds familiar, look no further than this – a blog post I wrote about the same subject almost 13 months ago, the original Why I Loathe Fundraisers.  Consider this part two of an ongoing, once-a-year series, I guess.  And the inspiration for part two?  Again, my oldest daughter brought home a school fund-raising catalog, except there were two differences this year:  1)  they seem to have waited longer than the second day of school to hand it out.  I don’t recall exactly when it was given out, but I think it was a little later this year, so that’s good.  2)  I did not go out and ask everyone I know about ordering stuff this year.  I sent an email to the closest family asking if they wanted to order, and then our family decided to order a little something this year – I do want to be supportive of the school.

Let me back up a little bit.  If you’ve read part I of my Loathing Series, then you know that I treated myself to a subscription of US News and World Report, which I can now say turned out to be a bust.  First, the magazine comes at odd times (and it’s STILL coming!) – it came weekly for a few weeks, then I forgot about it cuz it didn’t come for a month or more, then it started coming every few weeks…  I gave up trying to figure out the pattern.  Especially because after 3 or 4 issues, I realized that this is not the magazine for me.  I thought it would be about current events, but it turns out that US News and World Report chooses the most boring news topics to write about – especially politics.  I am a current events / news junkie, but when it comes to politics, it’s difficult for even  breaking news to catch my attention.  During the whole Bush-Gore undecided election story of 2000, throughout the counting of votes, the analyzing of dangling chads, missing chads, dimpled chads, and the entire chad movement, my husband was glued to the news while I could barely force myself to take notice.  So  anyway, after realizing that I was not a fan of this magazine (anyone want me to save you some US News and World Reports?  I won’t think you’re boring, honest!), I realized that I had gotten a magazine appetite whet.  So, for my daughter’s fundraiser this year, we decided to try People magazine for me.  I’ve always enjoyed People; I used to buy it before long flights (back when I used to fly), and sometimes friends and relatives give me their old issues to peruse.  So the other day, we received our fundraiser order in the mail.  Well, this was a nice change of pace –  apparently the days are over of spending an hour on a Saturday in a crowded gym picking up fundraiser orders – thanks to the internet.  Instead of an issue of People for me, there was a voucher in the box.  I just had to choose my magazine (thought I already chose?) and send it in.  Tangent for a minor complaint – if you don’t have internet, you’d have to pay an additional $.44 to send in your voucher without the company even warning you first!  Would it really be that difficult to make it postage paid, I mean, come on!  And now for the major complaint – People magazine was not on the list of choices!  Sure, I could have a subscription to People En Español (my Spanish isn’t THAT good!) or People Style Watch, but I am so not into style AT ALL!  I could not care less.  I barely care about the celebrity gossip in People; I ‘m mostly entertained by their inspirational stories of every day heroes or just quirky things (they once had an article about a lady who turned an airplane into a house for her to live in!  Now that is some cool news and worthy of my leisure time), so what the heck would I want with People Stlye Watch?  Yech.  I feel like they tried to scam me.  I wish I had kept that catalog!  Well, I emailed the company, so hopefully they’ll fix the problem.  If not, stay tuned for Why I Loathe Fundraisers – Part 3!

My son will be 15 months old on October 11, which makes him due for his next check-up with the doctor.  I made the appointment today and found out that all 15-month appointments are made with our pediatric nurse rather than our regular pediatrician, whom we really like.  We like the nurse also, but some of her ideas about health care are a bit extreme for our tastes.  For example, she thinks sippy (sippie?) cups are just about the worst things ever invented.  Her opinion is that a child should be weaned off the bottle around 1 year of age and that he or she should be given a regular cup with just a little bit of water in it.  No juice, nothing but water and milk with meals.  Ok, that’s fine, but once the baby becomes a toddler, the nurse teaches that they should only be given a glass of water at the sink, several times a day.  No bottle, and certainly no sippie cup ought to be carried around the house or elsewhere.  I personally don’t have a problem with my kids drinking (especially if it’s water!) away from the sink or out of a sippie cup – I don’t really have the time to be cleaning up even more spills around here, which is what would happen if my kids didn’t graduate to sippie cups from bottles.  I have three kids who have weaned off of sippie cups just fine.  So anyway, the nurse is nice but can be kind of a stickler about certain things…

And as for the newest milestone – he’s walking!  He’s been walking for awhile now, but before Sunday, it was only a few steps at a time.  Then he started walking with little push-toys, and he was really good with those; he would make push-toys out of things that weren’t even supposed to be push-toys, like my daughters’ step-stools, strollers, etc.  He’s gotten so good at maneuvering the push-toys that he can practically run while pushing, and by now, he’s also great at steering them.  We took a walk today, and instead of putting him in his stroller, I let him push his push-toy down the sidewalk, and he was off and running!  He got so excited that he took a hand off the push-toy, raised it in a wave, and yelled “Hi!” to the kids playing in the schoolyard we passed.  But aside from all of these awesome first steps (pun intended), he really officially started walking yesterday.  Yesterday was the first day he began to take lengthy jaunts across the house on two legs without the assistance of a push-toy.  He was on a roll;  he’d walk over, pick something up, and then straighten up to throw or pass the object rather than flopping down onto his knees and going into a crawl  as he would have done weeks ago.  So, my son is taking baby steps to learn to walk, haha.  But we think that yesterday was a big breakthrough, err, a big step for his learning to walk, and I would bet that by this time next month, he will be walking and running around just like a full-fledged toddler…  wonder what the nurse will say about that when she has to chase him all over the room?

It’s becoming clear to me why little girls think little boys are gross.  They have a point – little boys ARE gross.  Case in point: my almost 15-month-old boy was playing on the stairs today.  When I went to retrieve him, he had taken half of his diaper off, and…  well, I really don’t want to get too technical or disgustingly detailed, so let’s just say that he had gone #2 in his diaper and that it was a precarious situation and made for a difficult maneuver to get him off the stairs and cleaned up without spreading the mess.  Leave it to the boy…

Not going to comment on my now 5-year-old daughter’s ‘painting with poop phase’ she had when she was a toddler –  that was far worse, but just a phase.  Our boy seems to live to get into things he’s not supposed to, whether it be splashing in the dog’s water bowl, dumping the dog’s food (he does each of these activities 2-3 times a day!), wanting to play with wires, throwing food, smearing food, squeezing food in his fist, dumping drinks, playing in the toilet, the list goes on…        BOYS!

But didn’t school JUST start?  And wasn’t the kids’ first weekend a THREE day weekend?  Yes and yes.  But to be fair (pun intended), this 4-day weekend was not planned in advance, well not entirely, anyway.  It began with Monday being Fair Day for the kids – our county fair opens tomorrow, and the kids are off school on Monday to go to the fair and also because many of them have 4-H projects that will be judged at the fair on Monday – that was a planned day off.  So then today, my husband was driving our daughter to school, when he realized he was the only one on the road and at the school.  At least, that’s what he thought -it was so foggy they couldn’t see much of anything…  so they returned home only to find that there was a two-hour delay because of the fog – our phones had been turned off so we didn’t get the early morning call…  So anyway, the 2 hour delay turned into an entire fog day because the dense fog would not clear early enough for the school district to send the buses into the country to pick up the kids.  Fog Day on Friday + Fair Day on Monday = the first 4-Day weekend of the new school year,  taking place on only the third weekend of the new school year!  Luckily our student calender is set up to include 5 calamity days, and in NW Ohio, early morning fog is considered a calamity, I guess!  What will we do when the 5 yearly calamity days are taken out of the calendar since the governor’s plan calls for calamity days to be phased out?  Wait and see, I guess…

And now I have to totally rearrange my day  –  so much for advance planning!  I’ll have to juggle the not-4-kid-friendly errands I have with my husband’s planned business call – keeping 4 kids quiet and out of the way for that?  Good luck to me!  These are the times when I wish he had his own office…  The benefits of working at home outweigh the negatives of him working at an office of course, but on days like these, ugh!  It’s funny because I’m not native to NW Ohio and so both fog days and fair days are new to me – man, would I have loved these as a kid.  As an adult…  not so fun.  Maybe we can have another calamity day later this year when we have nothing planned and we can just sit inside and watch movies and play games all day…  Then, let it snow!

I realized that I hadn’t emptied my camera in awhile, so when I finally did, I found some great pictures!

Told you it was a busy Labor Day weekend!

The girls dressed Charity up like a princess – her blue eye always gets photographic red-eye, but she actually let the kids dress her up!  Wonder what kind of food they enticed her with…

The “baby” has been climbing everything in sight.  Here he is on top of the folding table in the laundry room.  And he’s been running while using his walker-toy; he went right from crawling to running!  Guess it’s time to start calling him a toddler!

Here are all 4 four kids in the same cart at Menard’s…  awww!

And this is the baby toddler’s first time going all the way up in the tunnels at the McDonald’s Playplace – he loved it!

I actually ran out of room in my previous post to talk about my little ones, my non-schoolers, so it’s time for an update!

The baby, soon to be toddler, Christopher (we call him Beeber since that’s what his big sister used to call him) is getting so big and is now probably closer to toddler than baby 🙁
He walks while holding onto things, and climbs onto anything within reach!  He has recently learned where his tongue is, and if you ask to see it, he will stick it out – awww!  He still loves most kinds of fruits; his favorites are strawberries, peaches, pears, and oranges, but he really doesn’t like cantaloupe nor tomatoes.

Disney is just about the sweetest thing imaginable.  Of course, she is still 2, so occasionally she gets loud, whiny, and insistent.  But she is a very thoughtful little girl, and a very unselfish 2-year-old.  Case in point:  the other day, the girls made macaroni necklaces at our church carnival, and a piece broke off of Sammie’s after we got home.  Sammie was launching into a tantrum, when all of a sudden, Disney jumps off my lap and starts to take her own necklace off, saying, “Here Sammie, you can have my necklace.”  I can’t imagine any other 2-year-old capable of such sweetness!  Add that to her little pageboy Buster Brown – as Carol calls it 🙂 – back-to-school haircut, and she is a living doll!  Oh, and I forgot to mention, Disney is much admired by her older sisters for her ability to whistle!

Having the two of them together during the day is so fun!  A lot of busyness and some mild frustration, but only because of the many messes Beeber makes and the fact that they’re both still in diapers.  I really need to work on Disney’s potty-training.  She has her little potty and likes to go in it, but it’s not always a priority for her…  One of the secrets to harmony in a family with more than a couple of small children is divide and conquer.  My children are so much better behaved when they are broken into groups of two or sometimes even three.  It’s really neat to give each sister the chance the be the BIG sister, and Sammie the Kindergartner gets her chance with Disney in the morning before her afternoon Kindergarten, and Disney gets to be Beeber’s big sister while the two older girls at school.  Back to school time is so fun, and my oldest daughter is really excited about attending her first football game Friday night!  I was a little hesitant to let her go; especially after Wednesday evening when I hung out with a pack of 10 seventh grade girls (a new endeavor of ours – we will be leading youth groups on Wednesday nights!  More on that later; I’m still grasping the um, entirety of the situation).  Seeing that my daughter is only 3 years away from the ages of these boy-crazy, cellphone-obsessed, “like”-spewing, makeup-toting ‘tweens tempted me to buy the totally awesome house on the way to Fort Wayne and lock my 9-year-old daughter in the top of the turret!

But I love where I live and wouldn’t dream of leaving, no matter how cool that house is (or how far it would leave us in debt).  The bottom line is, my daughter is a great kid, and I have to learn to trust her to hold her own – she’s not going to be that type of kid!  She acts mature and logical most of the time; helping her little sisters and brother and she deserves to get away from all the little kid stuff in our household to step out with her friends.  Perhaps volunteering with this (insanely girly) group of girls (have you ever noticed that if you close your eyes, you can mistake a group of pre-pubescent girls for a gang of wild turkeys??) will prepare me for what’s ahead with my 4 home-grown tweens and teens.  At least that’s what I’m hoping…

(In case you’re wondering about the title of this blog post…  Poults = baby turkeys.  I have 3 daughters and one son.  Within a decade, my house will no doubt sound something like a turkey farm!)

I will be one of those frantic parents in the Walmart checkout line on the first day of school.  I’ve never been there to witness them myself, but I know they exist; I’ll find out for sure tomorrow when I join them.  Yes, I planned ahead well enough to buy the necessary school supplies, but what I failed to do was to supervise the middle-schooler who was excitedly stuffing her new backpack, apparently ignoring the direction to “pack what’s on your list”.  Not really her fault – like I said, I should have been supervising her more carefully.  But as a result, our 4th grader now has a locker full of 4th grade school supplies AND Kindergarten school supplies (she brought them to school last Friday during orientation), while our Kindergartner has an empty backpack.

We could follow our oldest daughter into her new middle school tomorrow to repo her sister’s school supplies, but I’m pretty sure being the only student whose parents follow her into school (especially with little brother and sisters in tow) could cause her emotional damage beyond repair.  I’ll take my chances at Walmart.

Well, summer is officially over – school starts tomorrow!  I could be like everyone else and say “where did the summer go?”, but for me, it actually didn’t go as fast as I would have thought.  We were so busy; though it was good-busy; not like so-much-work-to-do-busy.  But much fun was had and I enjoyed every minute!  Last week was spent at school open houses and orientations, as well as a training event at our church to allow us to volunteer with our church’s student ministries.  That was an interesting evening – it began with us volunteers breaking off into groups of about 15 and making lines.  We were given a spoon tied to a string which was wound around a “spool” ie, an empty tube of toilet paper.  The first person in the line (me) was to put the spoon down their shirt and pants and give it to the next person who was supposed to put it up their pants and shirt, then to the next person who was supposed to put it down the shirt and pants, effectively “threading” the line of people together.  Kind of strange, I thought, but what’s going to happen once we’re all “wearing” the string???  It was a little scary, but luckily, the threading was the entire ice-breaking activity, and the rest of the evening was pleasantly spent listening to a guest speaker while munching on all kinds of orange snacks (orange was the theme for the evening – I never really thought about how many party snacks are orange before!).

Today we had so many activities and volunteering planned for church that we were on the go from 8:30 in the morning until about 3:30 in the afternoon.  Busy, but it was time well-spent, especially since we finished up the day with Kidstuff (a cute show with a wonderful message for the kids) and then a carnival with LOTS of treats and fun for the kids; they had a blast.  Good thing too – we need to get settled down early tonight in order to get our oldest to school by 7:30 in the morning!!!  She is starting middle school, and yes, to those of you who have asked – she will be switching classes, kind of like the “block” style they had when I was in middle school.  My daughter has a homeroom, but then she switches for language arts and math and perhaps other subjects as well.  And they do gym class strangely – there are 4 classes: gym, music, technology (typing, etc.), and art, and they take one of these 4 classes every day for 9 weeks and then switch to another.  That sounds pretty cool to me!  I would have LOVED it if I only had to worry about gym for 9 weeks of the year!  But, being in middle school also means that she has to change for gym class, poor thing – I remember that aspect of middle school making a lot of kids really nervous.  And at orientation last week, the principal gave us parents a talk about making sure we wash the gym clothes – the kids are getting to “that age”, she said, which prompted me to whisper to my friend nearby, “I’m not ready!”  But my daughter IS ready for middle school, and she seems to be making her way from tween to teen in no time –  UGH!  Poor thing got her first pimple just in time for the first day of middle school, but she doesn’t seem to mind too much, so we’re not making it a big deal.  It’s not like we’re publishing it on the internet for the entire world to read or anything…  But what are moms for?  She can thank me when she’s older and finds this through some sort of google search or something.

Our second oldest is starting Kindergarten.  This is our “difficult” child; our strong-willed one.  Samantha has a mind of her own, and some of the things she says leave us in stitches – others leave us shaking our heads, but we’ll stick to the positives here.  It seems that Samantha has the same Kindergarten  teacher that her sister had a few years ago, and my husband and I are chuckling to ourselves about the unintentional “joke” we’re about to play on our local school system.  We are wondering how many years it will take for word to spread amongst the teachers in town about how much of a…  well, difference there is  between Samantha and her big sister…  No need to go off about it here, like I said, we need to call it an early night, but it will suffice to say that any teacher of Taylor’s who gets Samantha 4 years later will probably be surprised 🙂

I was going to write about the younger two as well, but it’s bedtime already and this post is long enough – that’s what I get for not blogging regularly, I guess, an über-post!

Sometimes Dr. Phil does give good advice.  Among my favorite Dr. Phil advice lines is: “every kid has his (or her) currency”.  Unfortunately, our second-oldest daughter’s (age 5) currency (referring to something that can “buy” a kid; in other words, cheer up a sour mood) happens to be one of the girlie things her parents despise most: makeup.  She is starting to encounter the all-too-familiar plight of being a younger sibling: big sister leaves home bound for all kinds of fun adventures that little sister is not old enough to do; swimming at the pool, sleepovers, girl scout outings, the list seems endless when you’re ‘not old enough’…  It’s hard to be the little sister and to get left behind – I know because I was there!

So anyway, the other day, our oldest daughter left for the pool, and Sammie was really upset she couldn’t go with – but I knew just the cure: makeup!  I had bought a few makeup kits on clearance just after the Christmas season, and since I don’t wear makeup, what better use for it than to cheer up a sad little girl?  We don’t want the kids wearing makeup out in public or to school, and we especially don’t want it leading to an “addiction” – a teenage girl who won’t leave the house without her makeup on, yuck!  But for a special play-treat once in awhile to cheer up a left-behind little sis or two, makeup is just what the doctor ordered and works like a charm!

Because he’s a boy.

The other day, I  was sitting in the living room when some action in the area of my son’s walker (the thing the baby stands in that has wheels on it, allowing them to walk easier) caught my peripheral vision.  I silently watched as he turned around and proceeded to climb up and out of his walker, backed down the front of it, and quietly sat on the floor like nothing had happened.  Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t even put him IN the walker in the first place!  I checked with my husband, and he hadn’t put him in there either, and later that evening it was verified as we watched him do it again – my son had put himself in his walker in the first place before he climbed back out again.  He acted like a pro, so who knows how many times he’s done this, but needless to say, the walker has been packed away before he even used it to help himself walk.  But that leads me to my point – we’ve had 3 girls and now a boy, and we are starting to see the major differences between little boys and little girls;  the most noticeable at this point being that boys climb EVERYTHING! My son can climb before he can walk.  He’s been climbing stairs for awhile already, and the other day he climbed the table in the laundry room, and he can almost climb up onto the couch.  I can’t imagine what it will be like when he CAN walk, YIKES!!!