Scammer!

Turns out the guy who wanted Bramble Jam cd's and songs sent to Australia is a scan artist. A shout out to any potential scammers out there: Google yourself and see how much of the world already knows you are a scam artist!

The Bramble Jam

J had a request last night from a guy in Australia who wants to order a Bramble Jam cd and was unsure about shipping. So are we! He's looking into those costs and meanwhile encouraging the guy to buy the album as MP3s. Who knows?! The Wiggles got so big here, maybe The Bramble Jam will get huge in Australia!

The Bramble Jam was also added to a kids' radio podcast playlist called Saturday Morning Cereal Bowl. If you do podcasts and you have kids or just enjoy kid friendly music, you can check it out at:

http://saturdaycerealbowl.podbean.com/

And here's a little blurb on a Boston music website. Be sure to scroll down til you see The Bramble Jam.

And if you have no idea what The Bramble Jam is or why I'm posting about them, you need to check out http://thebramblejam.com/ too!


So get up and move those boots!

Spring Fever

So much for spring. That was yesterday, and it was nice. Today it is snowing again.

But, I finished a spring-y outfit that I tried on Cupcake in order to show it off. It might be a gift for a toddler friend or maybe one of the first things I actually sell. The whole time she was modeling it for me she was saying, "Brrrrrr, Mommy!" so she didn;t want to wear it for long. That means it's still clean.

a pile of thoughts

No photos to accompany this post because it is just a collection of random things to share.

First a quick story about my awesome friend Shari who is really like a sister since she is Bertali's mom, and our agency thought we were sisters, and we never corrected them since it helped to convince them to allow Shari & family to adopt Bertali even though they had other families waiting for referrals. All that is beside the point right now, but I wanted to share that Shari and her nine year old daughter just returned home from a medical mission trip to Guatemala. Shari and the Guatemalan doctor saw 700 patients in four days! They were an eight hour bus ride outside of Guatemala City in the middle of nowhere and there was no clinic so they set up their stuff, which was also really limited, in a building that has just been built to open as an orphanage soon. Lots of people walked for many, many miles to come see them for medical help. Most complained of stomach pains and most had parasites. My favorite story from what I've heard so far about her trip was about one man who started walking at 3:30 in the morning and walked for six hours to come see this medical team. His complaint? Sore legs!

On that note, Cupcake has been loaded with ailments lately. The imaginary or blown way out of proportion kind. Her communicative language is still so limited that she doesn't have a very complete repertoire of adjectives yet, so she tells me "My knee full." And I say, "Your knee is full?" And she says, "Yeah, my knee full. Hurt lot." Then she runs or skips on her merry way to climb up our playset or the like. It reminds me of The Spark whose favorite descriptor is "burning." As in "I'm burnin' hungry" and "I'm burnin' tired."

I think we've decided to stay here for the next few fall semesters since we really love our Montessori school, and if we give up Cupcake's spot (still crossing our fingers that Princess Eee will have a spot by next fall), we won't get it back. It is an amazing all day kindergarden program, and the kids all leave there ahead of their peers, so we want to make sure Cupcake and Princess Eee, if possible, go through the whole program there. So, unless the lead teacher retires before then which is possible, but we are really hoping she waits a few more years, or we come up with such an amazing opportunity that we cannot pass up and makes it worth paying for the spots to hold them til we return, we'll be here for the most part until Cupcake heads to first grade. That doesn't mean we are not planning a shorter term adventure, however. Like maybe the month of December.

I am gathering some thoughts on Princess Eee and her transition, etc. since tomorrow marks six months home together. I will try to post about all of that then.

Weekend in Maine

We had a very relaxing long weekend in Maine. It was rainy, but since we were there to just get away and be together without any snowboarding agenda for the first time since Thanksgiving, it didn't matter to us that it rained a lot. Here are a few photos from when it wasn't raining...

The brothers knocking the dust off of #1's boat, Asiago, that he finished building last summer.

Cupcake on the beach. The wind was cold.

At the dock waiting for our Whole Foods grocery order to be delivered. Definitely one of my most favorite parts about being in Maine- emailing my grocery list and having it show up the next day all boxed up and rolled off the ferry.

Fishing from the big dock. No fish in sight, but a good way to kill some time waiting for the grocery boat.

Friday was a nice, sunny day.

Zippy is seven!

Chocolate peanut butter cake. That's my boy!





Cool Magic kit. Thanks, NC Cousins!

A better week

This week so far has certainly been better than last. Everyone got to go to school each day and dance, music, gymnastics. Even a few playdates with friends mixed in. Phew. And snowboarding competitions are done except for Nationals in April, so this weekend we are very excited to all hang out together. Tomorrow is Zippy's bday, but since he really wanted to go to Maine, it will be very low key. He requested a Reeces Peanut Butter cup cake which is baked but will be frosted and peanut butter cupped once we get to the island to avoid any mishaps. And he wants pizza as per our usual Friday night fare and he gets to pick the movie for Friday night movie night. He already decided on a snowboarding movie. We'll try to get some photos of the birthday boy turning seven and post 'em from Maine.

For now, here are two that another snowboarder dad took of my guys last weekend:

Zippy in the boardercross course, no competitors in sight:


#1 out in front:

mostly better

Not to leave you all hanging, we are mostly all better. Thank you for all the encouraging and sympathetic comments. Four of us did catch the stomach virus. Three did not, although I s'pose that could still be up in the air. Pink eye is gone. It is lovely when there is medicine for an ailment and it actually works. And we are still nit picking. Between me, J, and our babysitter (have I mentioned that we LOVE our babysitter?!) we picked through Ali's hair three times today. I think we won't be done with lice until we scan every single hair on her head which considering the sheer volume there, might take weeks, months, years. We'll see if she's all clear tomorrow for school, but I'm not holding my breath. The other girls will hopefully be good to go. Far less hairs to examine. And me...no one tells a person they cannot go buy groceries at the store if she has nits. J is going to pick nits for me again tonight while we watch the Oscars. Yes, we still have tv- since the Oscars were scheduled only a week after the winter Olympics, we left the cable on through tonight. Makes nit picking more fun anyway.

Since the boys had all recovered in time, they did two days of boarder-cross this weekend, and I think ended up with 6 golds between them. Next weekend, Zippy's birthday, they are taking the weekend off! No snowboarding for a whole weekend. We are going to Maine at Zippy's request for his b-day. Then they'll be back on the snow for the remaining weekends of the season.
Here they are with some pals today (#1 and Zippy are the back two kids):

EP265: Extreme Parenting 265

A similar offering to Extreme Parenting 101 but with added challenges such as both parents throwing up all day as well.

What a day!

Extreme Parenting 101

Everyone is home today.

#1 has nasty pink eye.
Zippy has been throwing up on the couch all morning.

And there were nits in all three girls hair again this morning.

#1 has prescription eye drops. Zippy is sleeping it off on the couch. And all three girls have fabulous smelling hair now since we loaded up their heads with coconut oil which will remain on until Saturday. We hope the yummy coconut oil will suffocate all remaining nits so we can finish combing them out and be DONE with lice. The next step, if not, is Ovide which we will pick up at the pharmacy tomorrow since they had to order it. We will have it on hand in case the lice enjoyed their coconut bath and will be back for more. The Ovide is nasty stuff. Flammable and vapor harmful. Just what we want to rub all over the girls' heads after shelling out at the grocery store for all organic food and beauty products to keep them pesticide free.

Oh, and then the central-vac broke.

still thinking

I have no new photos to post. We are still here, busy thinking of adventure. Our small handy dandy camera is broken and likely to cost almost as much to fix as to replace so that is at a stand still. Our good camera is big, and I'm less apt to have it on hand when a good photo op arises. We have The Spark's rescheduled b-day party this Saturday, so I will try to take some party pic's to post.

We have had some good brainstorming conversations at the dinner table with all seven of us contributing. Cupcake announced during a discussion about the various activities that make each family member happy, "HOCKEY!" And she said it clear as could be. Oh dear. I hope she wasn't serious. Zippy has been talking about it too, and it simply does not fit in the schedule with snowboarding. Not if we ever want to do anything as a family again in the winters.

Back to our quest to shake things up...maybe I'll post a poll. I probably should not do that, however, since I know I am a person who stops wanting to do something as soon as someone tells me to do it. No, I have never wondered where #1 gets that trait from. But maybe I'll throw some ideas out there, and y'all can vote and then not get your feelings hurt when we decide to do something totally different and in complete disregard for anyone else's suggestions.

So far the list would go something like this and this is without Cupcake's addition of hockey: Start a childrenswear design business, move to China, live at the beach in Maine and take more design classes at Maine College of Art, take a job-y job in an office working for someone else with very limited vacation time but a nice paycheck and health insurance and other educated adults to converse with, help build treehouses in Vermont, lobby for more international/multicultural education in our NH schools, homeschool the kids, write a book together, travel the world, go on a project with Firefighters Without Borders, live in Steamboat, Colorado for a year where they have two halfpipes (!) AND horses, spend the fall in Costa Rica learning to surf and again with that book idea, go to law school, sail up or down the east coast or hey, around the world since this is just a brainstorming pie in the sky list in the first place.

That freedom for something new coupled with the fact that trying to get lice out of a house this size with this much stuff and the kids (girls at least) missing school b/c of the lice has given us a new perspective on 1) having the kids out of school and just being with us and 2) realizing that we really do not miss anything that has been tied up in a giant black garbage bag for the past three weeks. Okay, two things have been missed, but I am too scared to open the bags when I think of putting all that crap away somewhere and that there might be dead lice all over the stuff anyway. I promise to at least rescue The Spark's unicorn softie and our king sized pillows which make reading in bed much more comfortable. The rest of the stuff is just stuff. We have not missed any of it. The unicorn and the pillows are the only two things that anyon ehas even asked about in the last three weeks. And vacuuming this house as much as one must when trying to rid a household of lice is a full time job. And we have to yell all the time because this house is too damn big for anyone to really hear anyone anyway. If there wasn't enough room to really gather speed when moving through a home, then there wouldn't be as much need to constantly remind the kids to slow down, stop running through the kitchen when I'm about to open the oven that has just baked a lasagna at 400 for almost an hour, and stop playing chase because when they play chase, Princess Eee always ends up crying. They get going fast in this house, and she is the least agile of them all not to mention the least tough physically, so they all know that she will be the first down with the most tears in any indoor game of chase.

Plus, we are both dreamers and we want our children to see more of the world, to know by experience that this is one round planet full of all sorts of people in all kinds of colors, with all sorts of beliefs and customs, and our way is not always the better way. There is so much to do.