Kait's back in violin!

Here is a picture of her first lesson with Sandra Wong.

We pulled up at Sandra's house for the first lesson. I knew she had three large dogs but hadn't really put much thought into how that affects a very tiny little house. As we walked in, I got a strong aroma of dog mixed with some kind of incense or something. I grew up on a farm so smells aren't terribly important to me but I do have a very keen nose, especially when I'm pregnant. Kait and Sandra started comparing Kait's violins to see which one was a better fit and I glanced down at Nick next to me. His teeth were barred and his nose was scrunched. I said "Nick, what in the world is wrong?"
Without opening his teeth he clearly said "it STINKS in HERE!" while continuing to scrunch his nose and bare his teeth.
Kait and Sandra were in pause watching the whole thing. I shrugged apologetically and told her I thought Nick was unaccustomed to incense or whatever that smell was. She pointed to an air freshener plugged into the wall directly behind Nick and said I could try taking it out.
When I next glanced at Nick he had the first two fingers of his right hand jammed up his nostrils and with a nasally ring he said "let's go HOME NOW, it STINKS in HERE."
I wanted to curl up and die but Sandra seemed to expect a comment from me, so I said "four year olds just have no filter." To which she laughed.
A few minutes later Nick and Eden went into the next room and Eden came back and said "Mom, you should see Nick, he has his entire head buried in her box of stuffed animals." Sure enough, there he stood bent forward with arms dangling and his entire head stuck in a box of stuffed animals.
Meanwhile, Kait had a wonderful lesson and played twinkle for her new teacher and did everything asked of her with enthusiasm.

Humility

Oh autumn how I love thee! I will say that I can't really understand how we already have illness in our house before it's even chilly and crisp all day but so it will be.
Kait woke up Thursday telling me her throat hurt. I thought maybe it was dry. She ate breakfast and told me now her head and tummy hurt. I couldn't decide what to do so I sent her to school and sent a note to Ms. Baxter asking her to let me know if Kait looked peaked. She told me Kait was rolling along not the least bit sick. I picked her up after school and her eyes had tears standing in them and she was holding her throat. I felt like such a rockstar mom. I babied her all evening and the next morning I couldn't tell whether she was still sick or just wanting more attention. I told her she could stay home but when she saw me chopping apple slices for her math group she was reenergized and decided at the last possible second to go to school. I thought it was a short little bug. Then Jenn picked her up on Friday and took her to gymnastics in Lafayette. She said Kait was happy, high energy, and passed me on 287 as I headed to my midwife appointment. 15 minutes into gymnastics the gym staff called me to tell me that Kait was there crying and saying she had strep throat. I was then lectured on the highly contagious nature of strep throat which I had no idea how to respond to. How do I tell them that Kait thinks the name "strep throat" is another way of saying her throat hurts. Kait got on the phone crying that when she did a backbend her throat started hurting again and she wanted to go home. Jody had finally been able to make it to an appointment, but didn't get to stay for a minute of it. He hopped on his motorcycle, went home to Erie, got his truck and went to Lafayette to get Kait while Jenn sat with her at the gym. She got home, I gave her ibuprofen and shined a light down a very red and pussy throat. Aha, so maybe she had something there with the "strep throat" after all. Why do I always handle childhood illness this way? Poor darn kid. In the mean time, Kait took her continent test on Friday with strep throat and got a big fat 0. How did this happen? Oh, her pregnant, overwhelmed mother/Room Parent Coordinator/She Finds Retro/wife/cook/sock folder can stand for an ovation now... anyway here's how it went as I chopped chicken:
"Kait name the continent where giraffes are from."
"Banana (giggle giggle)"
"Kait, name the continent we live on." "America (giggle giggle)"
"Kait, are you going to study for this continent test?"
"I... don't know.... (giggle giggle)"
"You know what? Have fun on your continent test, if you don't want me to help you study, we'll see how it goes."
Um yeah, so if Mom has no patience, doesn't prepare you and sends you to school with strep in first grade, you might get a 0 on your continent test. I got a note from the teacher. She wondered about Kait's test. I told her Kait had elected not to study and I had decided that was fine so she could see the value of studying when she bombed it. The saving grace is, that Kait's teacher knows Kait's mother very well and tactfully suggested that Kait study over the weekend and retake the test so she can clearly see the value of studying. I took the lifeline.
If I make it to the end of this pregnancy and my three amazing kids are still wrapping their arms around my giant belly and telling me how much they love me and the baby... I'll assume we "survived" this very surreal experience and try to forget all of my "pregnant" moments this time around, there have been so many. I'm pretty sure everyone I know has had to pick me up and set me back on my feet at least once. So, Ms. Baxter took a turn too. That was nice... and humbling.

Some funny stuff to remember

A few days ago, Kait came home from school. She was so excited I thought she would burst. Here's how it went down. "Mom, I have something to tell you that you are probably going to hear about... well actually you probably won't hear about it but I'm going to tell you! Ms. Baxter told me that my handwriting was the best she had ever seen me do and told me to move my clip up. I did two more good things and got to move my clip two more times and I got a BAXTER BUCK!" Kait has handwriting like, well, it's like a four year olds. It's wobbly and large and wandering. I had to write a note to Ms. Baxter thanking her for the positive reinforcement. It seems to take very little to motivate Kait.
The same day, Eden came home with her spelling test results and was proud to show me that she had only missed one thing on her spelling test. I am so pleased with the way she is grasping math, reading voraciously and throwing herself into school with gusto this fall.
Nick was wearing shorts that swim on him yesterday and he would grab the back of them and pull them up. He did this all day and finally at the end of the day he started chuckling to himself and said "Hey Mom, this is kinda funny, when I pull my shorts up like this, I open my mouth like this." He reached behind and pulled his shorts up and stuck his chin out in front of him and dropped his mouth open. It was so funny to me that he realized he must look very funny doing this. I told Jody about it and Eden was there listening and she got a full on belly laugh out of the story. I love the way Eden gets such mirth out of Nick's antics.
The other morning the girls were having their cereal before school and I said "I can't wait for this baby to come out, so we can put that little outfit you got with the little green leaves on it with the little hat and take a first picture." They both agreed that it was going to be wonderful. I said "and it would be funny to just send out a pic to everyone that says, "Welcome Baby Allen" without identifying to people whether it's a boy or a girl. They lit up like Christmas at that idea. Talking about how long they could torture people by withholding that information.
Poor Nick has been the volunteer of the week at Flagstaff this week. He sat in the work room with me while I made about 700 die cuts for the first grade class just twiddling his thumbs and imagining things. After a long silence he would say something like "Mom, wouldn't it be cool if the road was gold, and the school was gold and all of the cars were gold." A little later... "Mom, some people are BIG! Some people are so big... I bet if a person ate and ate and ate, they would get REALLY BIG, like a GIANT!"
And finally, Nick's favorite word appears to be "allergic". Last night he was pretending with Kait and I heard him repeating to her in condescending tones that he is "allergic to carpet." A little bit ago I heard him talking to an imaginary friend saying "I'm allergic to yellow."

As the season changes...

So does my perspective. Suddenly I looked at my belly yesterday and said, I'm sick of this, I want to see this child. This little person who is jabbing my side with his/her heel while sticking his/her butt up like a tower, might have hair right now and I want to know if it's a tow head like the other three. Is it a boy or a girl? What will it's name be? Are the toes just piled together like a haystack like the others? When it's been this long, it's hard to believe that this one might look just like the others. Every two years I cranked out a blonde haired blue eyed jewel... will this one wonder if he/she is even related? I remember being convinced as a child that I was adopted and my parents just weren't telling me the truth for some reason. My fantastical theory was based on the fact that my older siblings were more solidly built and had brown hair and I was a complete waif with pale blonde hair. I was sure that I was not related to them and anxiously waited for the day that Mom would sit me down to tell me where I came from. It never resonated with me that they were a normal size because they ate and I wasn't because I refused to eat. I think my perspective was that parents just told you things like that to make you eat. One day it occurred to me that perhaps there was a picture of Mom pregnant with me, if I were truly their child. I went through every picture album they had and found naught. Sometimes I would ask my mom about all of her pregnancies, little things just to see if she would slip up. If she voluntarily brought up her pregnancy with me I would listen very attentively for any contradictions or evidence. I honestly believed she was spinning a tale to convince me I belonged to them. I think I wanted to be adopted, probably so that my speculations would all be justified. I even came right out and asked Mom and Dad why I had blonde hair and they both always just laughed and said they had blonde hair when they were little too. I didn't believe them because Louis and Ginny had never had blonde hair in my memory. Then finally, when I was seven years old, my longstanding secret suspicion was put to rest. My mom had a baby and THIS baby had strawberry blonde hair and he was a giant baby weighing in at 11 pounds 5 ounces. Absolutely ANYTHING could come out of my parents, I was now thoroghly convinced.
Call me silly, but now that the girls are in school, I don't feel like such a spectacle. Walking around hugely pregnant holding a little boy's hand feels so normal. People assume he's my only child and that I'm overdue. It's a lovely charade, but only until people speak to me but because I am an attention hog. I always correct them and say that this is my fourth child and that I have several weeks left until my due date. It paralyzes most peoples vocal chords but they usually choke out a congratulation somehow.

I read a fairy book today

Nick asked me to read one of Eden's fairy books the other day and it was a real struggle. When a four year old has the attention span to listen to a 75 page book of drivel, you really do have to go ahead and read the whole thing because of the crestfallen expression if you don't. I tried to quit. I finally realized towards the end that half of the battled was me trying to sink back into the couch with the baby compressing my lungs making me feel like I was gasping for air as I read. We went on to read "Oh the Places You'll Go" which was fine because I crouched in front of the couch and I like that book. After that I was done but Nick had arranged 5 more books on the couch in what I suppose he fancied as a compelling display. We read all day it seems. Then Kait and Eden come home. Thank God Eden is reading books to herself but I have to read with Kait for a minimum of 25 minutes and go over all of her sight words two or three times and try to keep track of the weekly homework and monthly homework assignments for both of them. It seems like it would be more fun if I were able to read books about birth or novels by Francine Rivers to the kids instead of the 6,348th reading of "Green Eggs and Ham". I shouldn't really say that stuff should I? Scratch all of that, nothing fulfills me more than reading to my children, reading and reading and reading.
We are in the middle of a perfect family holiday weekend. We have done home projects, let the kids have sleepovers, played clue, roasted marshmallows, scored free tickets to the Rockies game and still plan to squeeze in a bit more! Jody took an extra day off of work and I think he's going to take the girls to school early Tuesday so they can all go to breakfast then spend the morning with Nick and me, then hang with Nick all afternoon while I fulfill school obligations then hit the Valmont Bike Park as a family when the girls get home from school. I wish that were a typical Tuesday for us. It has been the most relaxing, happy weekend in the world. I must go eat my grilled brat.