The Puppies Venture Out

It was such a beautiful day today that, after we got home from our church service, Jeff opened the door and, for the first time, let the puppies tumble out into the big bright sunshine!  (An appropriate soundtrack would be "A Whole New World" from Disney's Aladdin.)  ;-) 

They romped and played--with Willow and with us.  Sweetie pies, all.  :)

 The picture below shows Willow with Jubilee and Oliver.  I was just snapping pictures quickly and didn't even pay attention to who was in what photo, but I'm glad to have this one because those two puppies have always reminded me the most of Willow.  Jubilee is the brown and white part of Willow, and Oliver is the black and white part (although he's showing more brown as he gets older).  :)

That's probably Koda under Jeff's chair; but unless I see the tip of the tail to see if it's white, I can't tell for certain if it's him or his big sister Mystery.

 Sheva checked out my feet...

 ...then forsook me to go over to Shav.  :)

I love this series of photos of David with "his" puppy Mystery.  :)

 I'm sorry, Sofia; I can't pick you up right now, although I know you would like me to!

 Tobin with "his" puppy Oliver.

 There is so much to see and smell and touch and taste in the great big world!

When we finally put the puppies back into their enclosure, they were so tuckered out that even when Tobin went in to be with them, they slept on.

 Dear tired little puppies.  :)

With more warm days in the forecast, we're looking forward to more chances to let them explore the great outdoors.  :)

Cuddles with Benjamin

Sometimes I say to one of my older children, "Will you please hold Benjamin while I...put some wood in the stove/switch the laundry/take this casserole out of the oven/answer the phone/give this food to the puppies/something similar?"  And they very willingly hold out their arms for their littlest brother.  But many times, it goes the other way: they ask me if they can hold him--or as is happening more often these days, they just hold him!  I put him down in the bouncy seat and find him in David's arms.  I set him in the swing and turn around to discover that Tobin's got him.  I place him on the couch and put pillows around him to keep him safe, and then Josiah picks him up and holds him.  It's a delightful situation to be in.  :)

I will never grow tired of seeing my children lavish love upon each other.  

Nope, never, never, never get tired of that.  :)

Weighing the Puppies

That sick bay picture I posted yesterday?  If I had waited until evening, I could have included David and me in it.  Yes, that horrendous stomach bug that started with Tobin very early on Sunday morning has now been passed from him to Shav and then to Moriah, then on to David, and lastly (for now) to me.  We're a sharing bunch around here!

I haven't fully recovered my strength yet, but wanted to quickly post the stats of our puppies' latest weigh-in.  Before the sickness hit me yesterday evening, I helped Jeff weigh all the puppies at one month and one day of life.  It confirmed what our eyes and our arms had already told us: they are really growing.  :)

 Because they've gotten big and wiggly enough to not stay very well on the scale, we put a plastic bowl on it first and then plopped them in that.  It worked OK for this time, but next time we'll probably have to use a bigger container.  :)

 There were a few surprises.  Bolt, for example, has been our big guy all along; but yesterday he had dropped to third in the rankings!  The brown twin-looking puppies, Koda and Mystery, had surpassed him.  Princess is still the lightest, and Jubilee isn't much more.  Sweet little petite girls.  :)

 So here were the results, in birth order:
1. Princess - 4.4 pounds
2. Bolt - 6.0 pounds
3. Oliver - 5.75 pounds
4. Mystery - 6.1 pounds
5. Redemptress - 5.1 pounds
6. Koda - 6.6 pounds
7. Sheva - 4.7 pounds
8. Sofia - 5.0 pounds
9. Jubilee - 4.6 pounds
10. Judea - 5.4 pounds

Previous puppy weigh-ins are here (at two weeks and a day) and here (at three weeks and a day).

Wordless Wednesday {Our Sick Bay}

Lessons of 2016 #2: Don't Stop on the Dissonant Notes

"Hey, Mom," my son David called to me today, "Could you come listen to this piano piece I'm playing?"  I complied, proud of him for going ahead and learning new pieces, even when I don't find the time to give him an official lesson for weeks or even months.  Despite my good intentions, piano lessons for my boys repeatedly fall to the bottom of my to-do list...and then fall off the list entirely!

David started playing the piece, then stopped in the middle.  "Is this right? It doesn't sound good," he said, playing a C with his left hand and a D and F with his right.

"Keep playing," I urged him.  "Those notes are dissonant; but if you go on to the very next set of notes, you'll hear them resolve."  And sure enough, he then played a C and E with his right hand, which sounded beautiful with the C in his left hand.

His mistake--that pause on dissonant notes to question whether they can possibly be right--is one that I very clearly remember making when I was a child, learning to play the piano.  I'm sure that 30 or so years ago, when I asked my mom the question of whether the notes were correct, she encouraged me to keep playing to hear the resolution, just like I did with David today; but instead, sometimes I would linger on the dissonance, camping on it to make sure I got it right, repeating the notes that sounded so sour in the ear rather than moving smoothly on to the sweet ones.  "Is this really right?  Surely I'm doing something wrong!" I must have wondered.

I walked away from the conversation with David, leaving a (hopefully!) smarter musician in my wake, and having my own thoughts stirred by what we had talked about.  Oh, not really about notes on the piano, but rather about experiences in life.

You see, just as a piano piece has moments of dissonance that challenge the ears and leave them longing for something more pleasant to come along, life has moments of dissonance that challenge our whole beings and leave us longing for something more pleasant, something easier, something that doesn't make us wonder, "Am I doing this right?  Because this feels really hard!"

I've had some moments like that recently.  It's not that anything very terrible has happened; and in so many ways, I am living the dream of how I wanted my life to be.  Compared with what many other people face, the dissonance in my life is NOTHING.

And yet, it feels hard.  And sometimes my face is probably just as wrinkled up in a grimace as dear little Benjamin's is in the photo below as he played with Sheva and Sofia today!  ;-)

The dissonance, so to speak, in my life comes from temporary things like three of my kids being sick with a stomach bug during the past few days, and Josiah's participation in a speech and debate tournament last week which added a number of challenges to our family's schedule, and the 10 (adorable, I might add) puppies we have in our house that require care from us until they're ready to move on to their permanent homes.

But what's more, there is still a fair amount of lingering dissonance that comes from the adjustment to having a new baby; having six children means having a lot of needs that arise and necessitate time and attention from me.  My overarching fatigue adds to the dissonance, no surprise there!

There's a clashing sound in my head from my tasks that rush past in a never-ending flood of items on my to-do list; the discouragement that beckons to me every single day is a harsh dissonance in my internal song.

Sometimes I chide myself; after all, I am supremely blessed and shouldn't complain about a thing!  I'm not dealing with a serious illness, neither am I watching one of my children suffer in that way.  I have a loving, supportive husband who is my favorite person in all the world (the dissonance comes from the fact that we find it hard to carve out plentiful time for just the two of us).  We have a pleasant home and all the material comforts we could ever need.  Our children are an amazing blessing...and the list goes on.  With so many good things in my life, why should I hear any dissonance?

And yet, I do.  We all do.  And that doesn't mean I don't feel humbled and grateful for all the blessings I've been given, because I certainly do!  But even still, from time to time (and truthfully, every day), I land on the dissonant notes and think, "Is this right? I think I did something wrong! Surely the song isn't supposed to sound like this!"

I was reminded today, by my son's question during his piano practice, that it's so important to refrain from stopping on the dissonant notes.  Of course I understand the need to, from time to time, pause to analyze what notes are being played to ensure that they truly are the correct notes.  But then the next time the piece is played, keep moving!  Trust that the notes that don't sound lovely are preparing the ear to fully appreciate the beauty that is coming.

And how do I apply this to my life?  Simply this: when the music of my life grates in my ear and makes me wonder if I'm messing everything up, don't pause for too long.  Keep moving.  Understand that one phase of life--in my case these days, an energy-demanding, caring-for-many-needs, constantly-fighting-against-being-overwhelmed, having-a-to-do-list-the-length-of-the-Nile phase of life--is just that: a phase!  When a morning comes along that challenges me so much that I think I'll surely notice more gray hair on my head the next time I get close to a mirror, remember that the afternoon is coming, and it may be so peaceful (nap time and quiet time help a lot with this!) that I'll find myself able to accomplish more tasks than I could have imagined in the interruption-laden morning.  When a period of sickness strikes, remember that wellness will return--and how joyful we will be then as we consciously appreciate our good health!  When a week or month shows up with a crazy busy schedule, remember that months of relaxation and free(r) time are up ahead.

Life won't always be this way.  The hardships I struggle against now will someday fade into the background; and yes, I realize that new hardships will come to replace them.  But new joys will come as well.  The dissonance will resolve.

For now, the key is this: don't stop on the dissonant notes!!  :)

For Lessons of 2016 #1, click here.

Feeding the Babies

I never did get the hang of nursing a baby while I was lying down.  You might think, after six babies, that it would be second nature to me; but it does not and never has felt comfortable to me, in part because I've always been afraid I would fall asleep and roll onto the baby.  And so I sit up while I nurse my baby (and regularly fall asleep while he's drinking, but sleeping while sitting in my rocking chair to nurse him feels so much safer than sleeping while lying down with him); and once in a while, I even nurse him while I'm standing.  But never while I'm lying down.

Willow, on the other hand, was a pro, from the very beginning, at nursing her babies while lying down.  As a matter of fact, the very day she gave birth, she was so skillful at lying down and nursing that she could even do that while the last few puppies were being born.  Talk about multi-tasking!  ;-) These days, however, she very, very rarely lies down to nurse her munchkins; but tonight while she was on the porch with them, they didn't let that stop them.  ;-)  Now that they're old enough and big enough and strong enough to latch on while she's standing up, they are on her every time she comes around.  Like it or not, Willow has learned to nurse while on her feet.  ;-)

 In other feeding-the-baby news, I have not yet started Benjamin on rice cereal or any other food; and I'm in no great hurry to do so.  We'll get to that eventually (which is very, VERY different from how I was with Josiah...with him, that whole first-time mom thing made me so eager to get to the baby-food stage that practically the minute he turned four months, I was shoving rice cereal in his mouth, like it or not).  ;-)  But we did take a little step in the direction of baby food for Benjamin.  Jeff carried our highchair up from where it had been residing in my dad's basement and put it in our kitchen.  I figured that even if I didn't need to feed Benjamin baby food for a while yet, he could still enjoy sitting in it, particularly when the family is gathered around the table eating together.  Sitting in the highchair puts him on the same level as us, and I was pretty sure he would enjoy being up that high so he could see the action and be a part.

 I think he's pretty happy about it.  ;-)

Hello, House!

It's not just the title of a children's book (although Hello, House! by Linda Hayward is a very fun book to read to little ones...who doesn't love a good Brer Rabbit tale?).  :)  Today "Hello, house!" was what went through my head time after time as I went about my day.

You see, after three and a half days of being gone from my house except for a little time to sleep at night, I discovered that I was enthusiastically greeting each room of my house as someone might greet a loved one whom they haven't seen for a while.  I was so glad to be at home!  

It wasn't my intention to spend ALL day here, since today is Sunday; but when Tobin had a VERY rough night last night with some kind of stomach bug, I knew he was in no shape to go out today, so he and I and Moriah and Benjamin stayed home from church.  (As an aside, Tobin came to me this evening and said, "Normally I weigh 51 pounds, but I just weighed now, and I'm 46."  At his age and size, five pounds is a significant amount of weight to lose in less than 24 hours - yikes!  But I'm not worried about him.  He had definitely perked up this evening, reminding me of how quickly stomach bugs not only arrive, but also depart--thank goodness!)  That gave me the opportunity to begin to catch up after the whirlwind of a week we had, so I went from room to room, doing this task and that, and all the while I was thinking, "Hello, house!"

Hello, Benjamin's room!  How nice for him to be able to have a nice long nap here, after the short interrupted naps he had been having for the past three days!

Hello, my room!  My goodness, the dirty laundry has piled up here, cast off at the end of long exhausting days when not a drip of energy remains.

Hello, kitchen!  Hello, dishwasher that has been loaded and unloaded by Jeff's hands much more than by my hands this week!

Hello, laundry room!  Hello, clothes bin rack that collapsed one of the days while I was gone at the tournament and was put back together in a stronger way by Jeff.

Hello, living room!  Hello, woodstove!  I haven't been around to have many fires in you this week, but it sure feels nice to have one this evening!

Hello, house!!

And hello, puppies!  I missed being around them and taking lots of pictures of them this week, but thankfully, today gave me the chance to remedy that.  ;-)

Moriah chose to carry Judea around this morning...

...mostly because Judea had been the squawking one out on the porch.  She quieted down with Moriah.  :)

And this evening, Jeff got out a paintbrush and used some paper from the newspaper office and started painting a puppy.

Bolt was the model for this painting...

...and he took his job seriously.

Doesn't it look like he knows what's going on and is posing??  ;-)

After Jeff finished his painting...

...he let each of the kids take a turn painting something which made for a happy, creative Sunday evening--the cherry on top of this wonderful, relaxing, I-am-SO-glad-to-be-at-home-again February day.  :)