Halloween fun!

Last night I took part of the family to dinner. Morgan and Hannah were spending the night with their dad, so we only had five of the kids with us. So after dinner I was waiting at the cash register, and a waitress approached a nearby table. I heard her ask the man who had just come into the restaurant a couple of times if her needed a menu. I kinda glanced at his table, and realized at once what was distracting him. He was staring across the room at the table where Alex was with the kids. The waitress asked the guy how he was doing, hoping to gain his attention, and her replied at once. "I'm doing a hell of a lot better than that guy! He's got five kids!"

So of course I had to say something. I went with, "Actually we have seven kids, two are spending the night somewhere else." The man sort of laughed and said wow or something, followed by "You know what causes that don't you?!" Alex had joined me by that time, and he laughed and I answered "Yeah we know! We should be ok now, we finally got a tv for the bedroom!"

After that the waitress asked about the triplets, and admired Sidney. As we left both the waitress and the man made comments about how I must be a patient woman, and how they couldn't handle that many kids and so on. The waitress did tell me that I had really well behaved children though. I always like hearing that from waitresses because I know they see a LOT of kids, and it's not something they are expected to say.

Today we took the kids to Wabash, the college I practically live on the campus of. The kids brought home fliers last week about free pumpkin carving on the campus mall, and the kids really wanted to go, so I took them.

Our sidewalk is now lined with 6 pumpkins, and Sidney's pumpkin is waiting to be carved, along with one each for Alex and I.

Before we went to Wabash we went to a costumed birthday party. Sidney was one of three babies at the party. He was of course a monster, and there was a 5 week old pumpkin girl, and a seven month old devil boy. The cake was awesome and decorated like a graveyard with candy corn fencing, a black licorice tree, chocolate gravestones and candy bones and spiders.

I haven't been feeling well today, I hope that I feel a lot better later, I had hoped to do something fun tonight.

Thanks for reading!

Kelli

Life choices!

Hello again!

 Look at this! Writing two days in a row! How crazy is that?!

 Monday is Halloween! I'm very excited about that because it's my favorite holiday! I was fairly disappointed at first because part of the family would be gone on Halloween with Morgan going with her friends and Braydon and Stormy going with their mother, but it turns out that we all had the custody guidelines mixed up so Braydon and Stormy will be with us after all. I've known for a long time that Morgan wouldn't be with us this year. For years now 14 has been the magical age we have told her she would be allowed to go with her friends on Halloween instead of going with the family.

 I've been trying to work my way through the stuff on my DVR. Since school has started, I've been so busy that my DVR has been close to full for quite a while now. I even had to reluctantly delete the seven episodes of Jeopardy that my friend Christopher was on to make room. Of course after I deleted them Alex told me there was a way to transfer them to a hard drive. Thanks Alex!

 School is really kicking my ass this year. I had to drop a class already because it just wasn't working for me, I have a feeling it will work out better when I take the same class next semester. Spanish class is going well so far. A lot better than it did the last time! Math class is borderline. Sometimes I know what is going on and the math comes easy, then it gets really difficult again. I'm holding on to a C in that class though and that's good enough to move on the the next level if I keep it until the end of class. I'm holding onto a C in Chemistry as well, but I'm completely lost in that class. I don't know if I'm cut out for Science, which is seriously disappointing since Forensic SCIENCE was what I wanted a degree in.

So I'm in the process of rethinking my end goal. My original college goal, back in high school was broadcast journalism, but I think that's a career you have to start earlier in life than 6 months shy of 35 years old. So I'm not sure what classes to sign up for next semester, because I still don't know what to do with my life! If you have any suggestions, let me know. As long as it's not anything that's working with children, I found when I worked at Head Start that I was so done at the end of my work day that I had very little patience for my own kids.

I would LOVE a job with food, but that's really not a practical career choice in this town. I would love nothing more than to join my friend Laney's cake business (as she's offered a few times) but that would require the family to move to South Carolina, and that's not so practical either.

Well, thanks for reading!

Kelli

Long time, no see!

I know, I know, it's been a while.

I find it a little humorous that the last post I wrote was about how my English professor (at the time) suggested that his students write on a daily basis (Hi Mr. Brewer if you show up here!), and then I follow that advice up with not writing a thing for the next 10 months.

In my defense, things have been fairly crazy in my house since then. I'd like you to meet: Sidney Gene Livengood!

He's wearing his Halloween costume here. He is a monster (obviously). He is quite adept at snarling and growling so the costume is very fitting. He is five months old, and by far the easiest of all the babies I've ever had. To be fair, individually the triplets were great babies, but the fact that they ganged up on me all the time makes them fall under the category of difficult babies. Morgan was just a crazy baby. She was so active, not to mention the whole sleep apnea thing. No one likes it when their baby forgets how to breathe while she sleeps. Sidney only cries when he is hungry. That's pretty much it. The rest of the time he is either asleep, or happily playing. He smiles so much!

I'll update more on the happenings of my life tomorrow, hopefully. I intend to try this writing on a daily basis thing.

Thanks for reading!

Kelli

Taking a joke too far?

Today in my English class, my professor was discussing the concept that most people can write, it just takes practice. He jokingly mentioned that one could even write about their toaster. Of course in my mind that set off a chain reaction, so today as my first blog entry in a while, you will get to know way too much about my toaster.

Now many people when they hear the phrase toaster, have an automatic vision of a box shaped object, likely to be white or silver, with slots on top that the bread fits into. Now anyone who knows me, knows that the average two slot toaster that you might have the vision of in your head, isn't going to work for this house, or this family. There are eight of us in this house, soon to be nine. Assuming we all had breakfast at the same time, it would take forever for me to make toast in a two slot toaster.

Before I tell you all about my current toaster, I feel like I can't tell you without describing the death of it's predecessor.

It was probably much like the toaster you imagined. White plastic shell, two slots on top, wide enough for a bagel. When I bought that toaster, there were only six people living in my house, and toast seemed much more manageable then. It lived happily in its home on my counter, providing us with toast and various toaster pastries in its all too short life. The demise of this toaster was very confusing at first. It took us a while to figure out what happened to it.

One ordinary day Morgan was being quite helpful and decided to make toast with breakfast. She dropped the toast in the slots and pressed the lever down that magically turns the bread into toast. Moments later the kitchen filled with a horrible smell. I told Morgan to stop using the toaster and throw the half turned bread away. I meant to check it out later and figure out the smell, but I puzzled over it in the back of my mind for the rest of the day. Later that afternoon, Alex walked into the kitchen for an unrelated reason, and promptly discovered the source of the smell. He caught my strange cat Bean hovering over the toaster...relieving himself into it. I'm still confused as to how my cat was not electrocuted. We disposed of the toaster, and took Bean to the vet. She said he had a bladder infection, and that cats will relieve themselves in unusual spots when that happens, but that she had never heard of a cat using a toaster for that purpose.

After that we were toasterless for a while. We wanted to make sure Bean was cured before we released another toaster into the house. We also took a long time debating over the type of toaster we wanted. Two slots was obviously too small for our rather large family, and four slots didn't appeal to me either. We ended up deciding on a toaster oven.

Our toaster oven has been good to us. Providing us with toast and other toaster items, as well as giving us a quick way to have some pizza rolls. But sometime in December some friends called with a very serious request. They wanted to borrow the toaster oven. Now a casual friend might have gotten the immediate no, but these weren't casual friends. They are the couple with kids the same age as ours, couple with the same interests, couple we love to hang out with, couple we always have fun with, couple we trust our kids alone with, best friends couple. You can't say no to them unless you have a really good reason.

So I sent my toaster off with them. They used it to make us really awesome Christmas presents, so I guess it was a good trade off.

But you know, I think I had the urge to make toast more times when it was gone than I ever did while it was here. Isn't that the way things always work?

A couple of weeks ago, They called, wanting to return it, I was about to leave the house so I had to say no. My friend informed me that my poor toaster had been in her trunk for a couple of weeks, and had been whimpering out of loneliness every time she opened the trunk. I felt bad, but I still left.

They were finally able to return the toaster over the weekend. We went to their house for dinner, and they had Morgan put it back in my van, and you know, I haven't thought about it since then. Until my English professor mentioned toasters today. That's when I decided that I needed to tell you the tale of my toaster. Well I guess this was closer to a tale of two toasters.

Thanks for reading.

Speech Class

One of my required classes for my degree is a speech class. I think most people panic at the thought of that, but I loved speech in high school, and even joined the speech team, and earned a couple of awards. So while I still get the jitters before a speech, I still love the class. Recently we were asked to give a narrative speech. We had to tell a story, and share what we learned from it. This was the story I shared with my class.

I’m sure that you have all felt the frustration of setting an object down and finding that it is nowhere to be found when you return for it, it’s happened to all of us. Most of the time, though in this situation more than a minute or so has passed before you return for the item.

The story I plan to share with you today isn’t about a lost set of keys, a wallet, or even a cell phone. The object I lost was a person.

As some of you know, I have six year old triplets at home. Life with them has never been dull, in fact, every day has been a chance to learn something new.

On one typical day when my triplets, Eric, Josh, and Hannah were around 7 or 8 months old, I left them playing on the living room floor while I went to the restroom, and to get something to drink. I was alone in the house at the time, other than the triplets.

We had spent months perfecting the baby proofing of my living room. Every single area of escape was covered by a baby gate, because every time we thought we had it perfect, they outsmarted us, and escaped. There were even occasions where they worked as a team to escape. We were pretty confident with the latest configuration though, because we hadn’t had an escape attempt in a month.

So when I left the room that fateful day, I was positive that nothing major would happen while I was out of the room.

I was of course, wrong about that.

When I returned to the living room, I did the head count that is just second nature to me now, Josh, Hannah, and… um. Where was Eric? My first instinct was to check the front door. It was still locked up tight. I checked to make sure all the gates were up, and they were all secure. I stood in the middle of the room just looking around.

I even tried calling his name, and asking the other two, but no one answered, since they hadn’t learned to talk yet. I ran to their bedroom, wondering if I had forgotten to get him up that day, or maybe just forgot that I had put him down to nap (I was still pretty sleep deprived at that point in time). The bedroom was empty too.

I rushed back to the living room, thinking that maybe he would have reappeared by then, and he hadn’t. I checked their toy basket, all the corners of the room and even under the couch. I even pulled out the cushions, as though there was some chance he had fallen through the cracks like the remote does. I searched every inch of that room twice. Understandably I was becoming quite frantic at this point.

Finally, I looked over at Hannah, who was sitting by my entertainment center patting one of the closed drawers and giggling. I stared at her for a moment, and then it occurred to me that she probably had a reason to be giggling at the drawer. I should explain that this drawer at one time was home to part of our DVD collection, but they had figured out the baby lock almost instantly and torn apart several DVDs, so we emptied the drawer. It was usually stuck partly open because of the baby lock but in my frenzied search, I had failed to notice that it was closed tightly.

I pulled open the drawer, momentarily slowed down by the baby lock since they had figured it out before I even had the chance, and looked inside to find Eric, sleeping soundly. I picked Eric up, and just as soon as I moved him out of the way, Hannah slammed the drawer closed and giggled like mad. I assume this is what happened to poor Eric. Eric, is a very calm boy, even to this day, and hardly ever gets mad at his sister (even when she throws up on him, like she did Saturday night). So rather than cry in the drawer, like any other child might, he just accepted his fate, and took a nap.

So what I learned from this experience is thatwhen you lose something perhaps it wasn’t lost, maybe someone just hid it from you, and as a bonus lesson, I offer to you this advice “never trust your sister”.

I got an A+ on this speech, but beyond that, I got to share an adorable memory of my crazy triplets.

I'm telling!

I am so very tired of the tattling. It's not needed tattling. There's no point to it. Each of the six kids tattle at least 40 times a day. According to my math, thats approximately... a hell of a lot of tattles. Here's how it works:

"Mom (or Kelli depending on the tattler), Emma's standing in the middle of the bedroom looking at my toy."

"Mom, Braydon said we have to go to bed later."

"Mom, Hannah won't look at me when I talk to her."

"Moooom, Josh touched my toy when I left it on the floor for ten minutes."

"Mooooooooooom! Eric said that my shirt is red and it's orange, so he's LYING!"

"Mom. Morgan is making faces at me!"

We've tried everything. Earlier in the year we tried sending every child in the house to time out when someone tattles. That was lots of fun when we had friends over. But their parents didn't mind since we got the idea from them. Boy were those boys pissed when they realized that was the rule here too. :) But we had to abandon that when they started tattling just so the sibling they were mad at had to go to time out. They were willing to stand there too just to screw with the others.

After that we moved on to the I don't care response. But I don't care is pretty harsh so we went another way. When child A tattled on child B, the punishment was that child A had to go give child B a hug and a kiss. Of course that didn't work. They giggled at that, and then used it as a way to make their sibling hug them when they weren't in the mood.

So I'm not sure what the next attempt will be.

Maybe the tattles will stop when they find me in the fetal position in the corner mumbling and ripping my hair out.

I doubt it though, they'd probably just go tattle on me to Alex.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share your ideas!

~Kel

Blanket forts, they rock...

This week the kids have been obsessed with forts. A few comforters and the bunk beds become hours of entertainment. They have had a pirate ship, a club house, and a stage among other things, and they haven't been fighting very much at all, which is just fabulous.

At some point in the last few days one of them took a package of, well they are called chenille twists now, but in my childhood they were pipe cleaners. I've been ignoring this because they have been having tons of fun with them, and being really creative. I've seen a headband with a bunch of hearts for antennas, necklaces, bracelets, and Josh brought me a handful of blue ones that he turned into hearts for me.

We have a lot of stuff planned in the next week. We are going to the zoo, and probably lots of swimming, since it's right in the back yard, and the city fireworks on Saturday, and a 4th of July party at my house on Sunday. I'm really excited about it, Alex's mom got us lots of fireworks to set off, and I love hanging out with my friends!

I think that's all I have to say today. Thanks for reading!

~Kel