Our unscheduled morning adventure

In the eight years since we moved into this house, the house next-door on the north has had three owners. The first were a married couple, Jehovah's Witnesses, burned all their trash even plastic because they didn't want to pay $6/month for trash collection. The second was a divorced man. His wife and kids still live less than a mile away. But he remarried last summer, and sold the place to the new couple, Jim and Cathy. (Not sure on her spelling.)

Jim and Cathy are both archaeologists. Jim mainly telecommutes, though Cathy still does quite a bit of field work. Though they moved in last August, it's really only been in the last three or so weeks that we've met and been talking to them. The lovely spring weather has brought us all out of our homes and made us all friendly. I have no idea why we didn't see much of them from August until winter kept us indoors.

Jim just knocked on the door, saying their eight-month-old chocolate lab pup Dawson (gorgeous dog!) was in our back yard and asking if he could go get him. I told him of course, and as soon as Jim got down the steps off the porch Dawson jumped through the shrub and started jumping me affectionately. Jim and I thought we had him, until all the kids came bursting through the door and Dawson saw his chance. He ran through the open front door and into the house. He frolicked with the tiny ones in the living room for a few seconds before bolting (when he saw Jim enter) into my bedroom. It only took 60 seconds for the kids to flush him out and Jim to get control and pick him up and carry him home, but it's more excitement than we usually have during math and grammar. :)

Age arithmetic.

Libby just pointed out that this is our lucky four-month window for ages, because:

Macklin is 1+1
Kyrie is 2+2
Ethan is 3+3
Jackson is 4+4
Libby is 5+5
Christian is 6+6
Emma is 7+7

Given that we had an every-other-year thing going on it isn't too mind-blowing, but it still is pretty cool. :D

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Here's the irony:

Our water heater is small (for a family of nine, thirty gallons doesn't go far at all) and ancient (so it isn't very efficient, we don't really have 30 gallons of hot water). Plus we only have one actual shower (the other bathroom has only a tub). So we have to time our showers carefully so that we're not all getting in each others' way and so that we have enough hot water for everyone.

So 8:00 a.m., after I've made breakfast, while the kids are eating, is my sacred shower time. No one showers at 8:00 but me. Emma wanted to shower this morning, but she knew she couldn't do it at 8:00, or even before 8:00. Mom is not a happy camper when the hot water is all gone at sacred shower time. (And Emma does, somehow, use all the hot water. She's always last in the shower queue for that reason.)

But I hadn't been jogging yet and so decided to get school started, jog while everyone was doing math or something, and then shower. So neither Emma nor I showered before school.

Fast forward to lunchtime: I decide, after making lunch and doing some tidying, "Now's a good time to go hop in the shower!" I haven't jogged yet but it is freezing outside, chilly inside even, and snowing, and at the mo' I'm just not inclined. So I skip off to my bathroom, and what do I hear? The shower. Emma beat me to it.

Sigh. So now I have to wait another hour or so for the hot water to regenerate—I'm absolutely longing for the day when we can replace that ancient hot water heater with a tankless—and I have to sit here cold, stinky from my morning workout, hair all askew and unkempt. Growl. And sigh.

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Unhappy, not depressed

Attention American voters: would you like a magic mirror that shows what will happen if Liberals and their policies take over your state or our nation?

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html

A treatise by a British doctor about why evil flourishes and grows within mankind. An eloquent condemnation of socialism and Liberal political philosophy, despite the fact that it only is one man's experience (practicing medicine within the British penal system).

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Meet the Piggle-Wiggles.

From a real-life Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle: Stopping the Bossies

I'm always instituting strange and unusual consequences around here. Having seven children at home all day every day gives us a lot to deal with. I try to find natural consequences for behaviors as best I can, because if the consequence doesn't follow naturally from the behavior how are they supposed to learn?

So yesterday before school even started at 9:00 a.m. I heard a lot of bossing, ordering, and mother henning going on, and I'd had enough. "For the rest of the day," I declared, "anyone who bosses someone else will have to obey that person tomorrow. Whatever they say." Now of course upon retrospect whatever turned out not to be true. We had to exempt school work, but that's not important right now. Suffice it to say that Emma has to obey Macklin, Christian, and Libby today, Jackson has to obey Ethan, and Ethan has to obey Kyrie.

Ah, but it doesn't stop there. The same rule is in effect today. So while Christian and Libby get to have their whims obeyed, if they deliver their decrees bossily ("Come tidy my room!") then tomorrow they have to obey the people they boss. So we're learning the difference between a command, between enforcing your will on someone else, and a request. ("Please will you come tidy my room?")

I'm wondering how long it will take to stamp out bossiness. Weeks? Days? Here's hoping it's correctable.