no time

This post-every-day-for-a-month thing has made certain that I don’t have time to blog. Just typing that sentence I heard Trixie and Gloria scream at each other and had to go sort it out. Twice.

I have to choose each night between solitude and sleep. Even if I do choose solitude I’m in no shape to blog; I write things like “Home day kids played me go sleep now” and even more incoherency.

Not that I’m better than that now, either.

The toilet was faking and was actually still broken. It was fixed, briefly, this afternoon but is broken again now. It’s usable but really slow, and the guys who temporarily fixed it today are coming back to try to fix it better tomorrow.

Bede has been having a really tough time lately, for reasons unknown to me. He’s been sensory seeking and very easily upset. In the past, these times have presaged periods of intense developmental growth for him so I think that might be what is happening now. In any event it’s difficult for all of us but especially Bede. I hope it passes.

Faith is really enjoying the Warriors books. They’re full of war and angst and love – with cats. Like Watership Down. Abby spends most of her time drawing and making things out of cut paper. Gilbert is growing up but still has many little boy traits. He wants to play sports. Trixie and Gloria are delightfully themselves.

That’s all now.

gosh

Today the bathroom pipe was clogged in such a way that the entire system was backed up: sink, tub, and most importantly, toilet. We have one bathroom for eight people,  so it’s more than just an inconvenience. Sean fixed it.

Sean also had a job interview today, wow! I am simultaneously excited and filled with dread at the idea of Sean working fulltime outside the house. On the one hand: money. On the other hand: no husband. Bede, Gilbert, Trixie and Gloria have never had a daddy who leaves every day. But interviews aren’t job offers, so I’m trying not to be anxious. Much.

Oh would you look at that, the pizza is ready.

Do they dare?

Today I rediscovered (as in, found it behind a bookcase) one of my favorite books as a child, The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. I loved it as a kid and remembered lingering over the illustrations. My kids love it just as much as I did, and Gloria is quite put out that I’m not reading it to her for the ninth time.

Amazon is currently running a sale on Dr. Seuss books – buy two get one free. Some other Extreme Favorites here at the Gleeson abode are Go, Dog. Go!, Big Dog…Little Dog, and Fox in Socks. I love these books!

OMG WATERS OF MARS

DW4169, originally uploaded by feebeeglee.

The suit, the orange suit! SAME ONE.

AAAAA THIS REGENERATION IS GOING TO KILL ME DEAD.

(click for embiggened angst and great, really great hair)

massive yarn sale

Michaels has a CRAZY yarn sale this week. Among other yarns, Patons Classic Wool is $2.50 a skein. Holy sheep, Batman, I am so there. Lion Fisherman’s is supercheep as well. Hot diggity!

This anemic post is brought short to you by Insistent Gleeson Children numbers Five and Six.

Where is Club Penguin?

My children adore Club Penguin. Our home is festooned with drawings therefrom, and one of Gloria’s first words was “puffle.”

Today we deduced where Club Penguin was likely to be. It has trees and other plants, so it can’t be part of Antarctica proper. According to Wikipedia, the southern tree line maxes out around 55 degrees latitude, so we decided that Club Penguin must therefore be one of the thousands of islands located north of Cape Horn, which is around 55ish. Can’t be too far north though, because it has a standing iceberg and year-round glacial ice.

Faith is currently working on her drawing of a predator for the island, a cat or catlike creature that is as yet unnamed. We’ve decided puffles are like neon-colored lemmings, with tiny near-invisible legs and paws.

(lemming)

(puffle)

There Are Cats In This Book

That’s the name of Bede’s favorite book. Have I discussed this before? I don’t think I have. It’s a REALLY GREAT BOOK. Did you like The Monster at the End of This Book? Then you’ll love this book. Bede acts it out constantly, redraws it with other beasts and beings (There Are PIXAR Lamps In This Book, etc) and it has given us a whole new world of bridging scripts upon which to drape deeper meaning. Abby has drawn several semi-sequels and derivative works. Faith still chuckles at it, at age nine. Trixie and Gilbert love it too.

Go buy it immediately. If you hurry, you can get it hardcover at bargain book price – $6.80. Go on, go!

i can’t heeeeaaar you

Today was too short! I didn’t manage to get many of the things I planned to do, done. I don’t quite know what took the time away. I think it’s the darkness coming so much earlier.

I’m all boiling with thoughts on adolescence and social development. Especially in an online environment. As regular readers of my blog will recall, Faith adores Club Penguin. The tenor and overall culture of the game has been changing in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in the last year, and it is much more schoolyard than before, with all that implies. Faith finds it more and more difficult to simply “play” on Club Penguin due to the polarized and often mildly predatory nature of boy/girl interactions. Tonight I showed her the beauty of the Ignore feature and I hope it helps. Lord knows it has made many message boards and Facebook more tolerable for me.

Hi, how are you doing today?

Today I left the house with no children!

I’ll just let that sink in a bit.

My mother and I went to the fabric store, the drugstore and the thrift store. We emerged with fabric for Christmas presents, some toys, and winter pants for Gilbert and Bede.

I was universally assumed to be a store employee everywhere we went. I like to think it was the air of calm I have in situations where I dont have six children clamoring about my feet. Anything is easy when you’re a Mother Alone; all the effort I usually expend in keeping my ducks in a row was just there for the taking. But… it was mostly due to my attire, no doubt: blue dress shirt, tan cords and Chucks. Instant non-personhood. Thanks for calling B. Dalton Booksellers, this is Phoebe.

Have you ever answered the phone at home like the one at work? Heh.

Challah!

We baked challah today.

It’s unbelievably good.

Bede approves.

Vaccination plans

No, not pig flu. Very unlikely to get that one. The other lot.

We selectively vaccinate on a very delayed schedule. We don’t start til seven at the earliest, for one thing, and we don’t get any that the kids could just as easily decide to get for themselves later. That gives us DTaP, inactivated polio, MMR, and varicella. I’m really hesitant to get the MMR vaccine (specifically the rubella component) and the varicella vaccine because both are human fetal cell vaccines, so I’ll keep waiting on those, but I need to get the other two for the >7 Glees.

Finding a doctor in the Oklahoma City metro who

a.) takes our poor people insurance and
b.) is accepting new patients and
c.) won’t harrass me for our vaccine choices

is turnng out to be damn near impossible. We have been going to the family practice we were defaulted to when our old doc closed shop a few years ago and we have never seen the same doctor twice. It’s the training clinic for the Resident-O-Matic of Saint Anthony’s Hospital here and the physicians are uniformly young, pleasant, and, well, inexperienced, I guess is a nice way to put it. And I don’t mind that, honestly, but between that and never getting to establish a history with the same doctor I’m tired of it and I want to go somewhere else. Which is turning out to be difficult, QED.

More phone calls tomorrow, I expect.

Halloween costumes

IMG_1349, originally uploaded by feebeeglee.

Trixie is a fairy, Abby is a bad fairy, Faith is a cave girl, and Gilbert is SuperBoy. Gloria and Bede didn’t ToT because Bede didn’t want to and instead they handed out candy with me.

Gloria tells us how it is

Gloria was awake very late and was chatty due to falling asleep for an hour at 9PM.

I videoed her.

Here you go.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/feebeeglee/4052451590/

representing my day

Gloria gives it her all.

Bede threw scores of leaves and called them flying birds.

Gilbert steps up on the logs. Best play structures ever.

Gloria hopes for a pull. She sat there optimistically for a good five minutes…

…and Faith obliged her.

Abby and Faith also looked for a dirt fairy, in the style of Five Children and It.

Trixie was delighted by everything.

Gilbert was too. He saw a rainbow!

Sometimes it’s all so beautiful I have to close my eyes.

I’m Phoebe Gleeson, and this is my perfect life.

A story in four parts, by Bede Gleeson

Bede made this little vignette today while we were carving pumpkins. It stars Buster and Babs Bunny, of Tiny Toons.

Buster and Babs Bunny, in Halloween costumes(?)

They see pumpkins, wow!

They go to the pumpkin patch (they seem to have left their costumes.)

And then a pumpkin explodes! Ewwww!

-FIN-

NaBloPoMo is November

I did it one year and really liked it. I’m doin it again. I’m tired of fast food Facebook. It tastes great, satisfies momentarily, and leaves you wanting more vapid, empty knowledge. I’ll still be checking it, but I’m going to try to blog more meaningfully here instead of just posting a status update on Facebook.

So. National Blog Post Month. I’ll be posting every day in November.

Who’s with me?

we got a scanner

Abby Art 2, originally uploaded by feebeeglee.

Abby’s cover for her book, “5TH SEASON QUEST”

Click to embiggen.

domesticity

In the last 24 hours I have finished knitting a sweater for Beatrice and started one for Gilbert, hung many loads of laundry in the lovely St. Martin’s summer we’re having, homeskooled the Monkeys Six, and baked two loaves of bread.

Golly I love this time of year.

Bede’s speech: October edition

Y’all liked these last time, so, here’s a few more.

Upon seeing one plate of regular and one of silver dollar:
Uppercase pancakes and lowercase pancakes!

Watching me wind yarn with a ball winder:
It’s zoetrope on your yarn!

Climbing a wrought-iron spiral staircase:
Bede! Climbing on your DNA!

After writing his name in the style and colors of Google:
BedeGleeson! Advanced Search! Language TOOOOOLS!

Hello, hello

I was wondering, if you don’t mind, could you leave a comment? No content necessary – a simple “yo” will suffice. I’m curious how many people read me from a feed reader, or from the Livejournal feed.

I know it’s a pain in the neck. Pretty please? No pressure to be either witty or relevant, just say “hey”.