Summer Staycation: State Parks

We won’t be going on a summer vacation this summer. Doug’s work schedule makes it hard for him to get more than a day or two in a row off, so traveling isn’t on our list of things to do this summer. However, we live in the gorgeous state of Maine and have decided to visit as many State Parks as we can (Maine is big; we won’t be heading up north) this spring and summer.

Ever since we moved from our home with a swimming pool to our home in the middle of the woods, we’ve purchased a State Park pass. This $70 pass can be used at each and every one of Maine’s 48 State Parks and Historical sites and is worth every single penny we pay for it. This year we also got our hands on the State Park passbooks for the kids; each of the 48 parks and historical sites have a page or two in the book and you get to use a stamp to prove you visited the site. After a certain number of visits we can check in with the park rangers and the kids can earn little treats.

Over Memorial Day weekend we checked into our first state park of the year, Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park, in Freeport (not far from LL Bean and that big boot!). I’ve never been to this state park and I’m a native Mainer! The park is home to gigantic osprey nests, tide pools to find crabs, and trails for hiking. We took advantage of the gorgeous weather and visited the ocean first. Caveat: I am terribly afraid of heights, and of falling, and so I found myself a cozy spot and the kids and Doug did all the walking around on the rocks.

The ospreys nest high up in the trees, on an island that was across the water from where we were roaming. We were so fortunate that they opted to give us a little show.

The kids loved exploring along the rocks and searching for crabs, seashells and whatever other wildlife they could find.

After we had a small snack we decided to try out one of the easier walking trails (never take two five year olds on anything other than easy trails, trust me) and were overwhelmed with the number of ladyslippers we found along the way, in pinks and whites. Ladyslippers are endangered around here, so to find so many of them was such a treat.

I even got the kids to pose for me (not an easy task with four kids, ever) for a couple of shots.

Since Freeport is only about 40 minutes from our home, I’m pretty sure we’ll head back to this state park again soon.

Sickness. And Sports.

I had so much fun participating in Momalom‘s Five for Five and thought for certain I’d get back on the blogging horse. I enjoyed coming to this space every day, thinking and writing. But then real life threw a kid with two bouts of strep throat back-to-back in my face, together with 3 other kids with some flu bug that just won’t quit, and my blogging time went back on the back burner.

When I haven’t been dealing with sick kids, I’ve been at baseball fields and I have to tell you, I love it. All four kids are playing this season~Meg’s 2nd year of majors softball, Drew’s first year of player pitch, and Annie and Izzie’s first year of t-ball. Meg’s settled into her role as catcher, a job she shares with 2 other girls on her team. She’s eleventy-billion feet tall and has a great arm.

Drew has pitched in two games and caught in one so far this year. His team is made up of 7-9 year olds and he’s such a good little player. Maybe he’ll take after his big sister and like being behind the plate.

Annie and Izzie had their first t-ball game Friday night and it was a ton of fun. Annie is a switch hitter (for those of you who don’t know baseball, it means she can hit either right or left handed; it’s rather uncommon).

Izzie likes to prance about in the field, but she’s all business up at the plate.

Coordinating the schedules for four kids playing sports is challenging (to put it nicely). This coming Wednesday all four of them play, at the same time. At different fields. As Doug is Drew’s coach, he will stay with him; I will have to drop Meg at her field and then stay with the twins for their game. We should be able to catch the end of Meg’s game since t-ball is only an hour and softball takes at least two hours to complete on a weeknight. I finally put all four schedules together on a calendar for my mom the other day, then had a good cry. It’s not fair to have to pick and choose who I get to see play when they have conflicts. Since Annie and Izzie are only 5, staying at their field is the right choice. With everyone being under the weather I’ve missed two of Meg’s games and one of Drew’s in the past week. While the kids are pretty good about the overlapping schedule issue, I do hate hearing one of them needle me with “you haven’t seen me play lately.”

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the rain that just started this morning carries on through the day so that Annie and Izzie’s game gets postponed, as Annie is sick and Izzie has a terrible cough (the end result of this bug). I’d rather they both be able to play instead of just one, and I already wasn’t going to be able to attend as Meg has her final chorus concert of the year tonight and that’s where I’ll be. It’s the price I pay for having four involved, active kids. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you have multiple kids in sports or other activities, how do you balance it all?

Just Write (11)

The Map (yes, Dora’s map) is talking in the background. I rarely let the kids watch tv during the day, as it always leads to horrible behavior when I have to turn it off. I used to let them watch tv to buy myself a little quiet time, but it lead to so much stress when their show(s) was over that I stopped allowing them to watch. Today it’s rainy and Annie and Izzie each had several immunizations to prepare for their upcoming kindergarten screening, so I relented. Whether it comes back to haunt me waits to be seen.

I want to be more of a “yes” mom. I want to say yes to occasional tv or cookies for morning snack. I say no so much of the time; “no you can’t wear a sleeveless dress to play outside in the 40 degree weather”, “no, you shouldn’t color on the walls”, “no, you may not play on your iPod for another 20 minutes”. I have found that when I relent, my kids find a way to ruin the nice thing I did for them and it makes me wish I’d never said yes. If I give in all the time, how is it a treat? Not one of them sees that point of view, so I have days filled with whining and begging.

But today, Dora and Boots are chatting in the background while I type, the washing machine and dryer are going and my girls are happily snuggling with their bears. In a few months there won’t be anyone at home during the day to ask for cookies for morning snack or a little tv, so maybe I will relent a little bit more often. Maybe being a “yes” mom every so often isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Linking up with Heather for another Just Write post.

Five for Five ~ Listening

I may be a day late but I’m completing the final day of Momalom’s Five for Five. The topic is Listening.

I spend many hours a day wishing for my kids to stop talking all.at.once. Their words get jumbled all together, so when Izzie is really trying to tell me that she wants pancakes for breakfast I’m not hearing her but I’m hearing Drew talk about Pokemon. I haven’t yet made the kids realize that all their talking over and around each other causes me to tune them out. I ask them to speak to me one at a time, but it’s a process we’re still trying to work out. The constant need to talk all at once leaves us all a little frustrated.

At night, though, when they’re all in bed, I listen for their voices. I force Doug to watch the tv on a lower volume, in case one of them starts to cry or coughs or whimpers for me. I listen for little voices calling for me to find a lost stuffed friend or to give a hug because of a bad dream. I listen for footsteps running down the hall to the bathroom or my bedroom, or clunking down the stairs. There is no tuning out at night, only tuning in.

My days are filled with their cacophany of words and I spend time trying to sort through them and give each child their due, but at night I can tell each little voice and footstep without any effort at all. I’m always listening to them, even when they’re asleep.

Five for Five ~Age

Today’s Five for Five topic at Momalom is Age.

Age: the length of time during which a being or thing has existed; length of life or existence to the time spoken of or referred to.

Eleven. Seven. Five. It’s hard to believe that my children have only existed for such small lengths of time. Haven’t they always been here? Twenty one; the length of time my husband has been a part of my life. Thirteen; the length of time we’ve been married.

The years blend together, filled with new homes, tiny socks, hockey sticks, books, papers, favorite stuffed friends, tears, smiles, hugs. First birthdays suddenly morph into 11th birthdays, first wedding anniversaries become tenth and almost fourteenth. The tiny socks become bigger, little ones fit into the clothes of their older sister, transporting me back in time.

Forty. My husband’s age and almost my own. We’re older, more gray, a little thicker around the middle than we were when we first met at 19. We’ve grown up together, celebrated births, deaths, built our forever home, fought, loved, cried, laughed. He’s still Doug, I’m still Kristin, despite the gray, despite our age.

We’ll all keep growing older, but I think that I’ll still be surprised at how little time seems to have passed. I’ll look around and Meg will be off to college, Drew to high school and the twins to middle school and it will still seem so much just like today. Eleven. Seven. Five. Twenty one. Forty. The numbers won’t matter much, as long as we’re still us.

Five for Five ~ Pictures

Today’s Five for Five theme on Momalom is Pictures.

I have years of pictures in various places in my house; in frames, in precious scrapbooks, on my computer. I’ve set my computer’s screensaver to be a slideshow of pictures that span eleven years of our lives. At any given time I can see a photo of Meg on the day she was born, or a picture I just took of the four kids recently. I often find one of my children sitting at my desk, watching the slideshow as it plays out their life, our lives.

I make scrapbooks of the pictures, although my work on them is slow and so very behind. Meg is the only child with a baby album, although each child has an album purchased and embossed with their names and dates of birth on the cover. My albums are chronological in order, so that I can see our family’s progression over the course of the year. Kids with no teeth become kids with teeth and then with no teeth again. Winter leads into spring into summer into fall and back into winter in the course of an album or two. The pictures tell our story, one year at a time.

I have a large framed picture of my kids right above my head. Meg is 7, Drew is 3 and Annie and Izzie are just over a year old. Izzie wasn’t yet walking when the picture was taken, and in the picture she’s trying to get to me by crawling over Annie, with an impish grin on her face. The kids have asked why we haven’t taken them to update the picture; after all, 4 years have passed since that picture was taken. I can’t bring myself to update this picture, despite the fact that Annie hardly has any hair and now has the most beautiful smile, despite the fact that Meg may have the same smile but she wears glasses now and is so grown up looking, despite the fact that Drew isn’t a little boy, despite the fact that Izzie, while still impish, won’t be crawling towards me in an updated photo. There is something special about the moment that picture captured, something that I don’t want to replace. Not yet anyway.

Our pictures, no matter where I find them in my home, are tiny glimpses into the big picture of our lives. They capture just a sliver of our days, yet they mean so much to me. They capture our big and small moments, they show how we’ve played and rested and grown. They tell our history, one small shutter click at a time.

Five for Five and Just Write ~ Words

Linking up with the fabulous ladies at Momalom and the wonderful Heather at The Extraordinary Ordinary for Five for Five and Just Write today.

My days are filled with words from the moment I get up until the moment I go to sleep at night. I have my daily “just eat your breakfast and go get dressed” words for my three younger kids and my “do you have your clarinet/homework/gym clothes” for my oldest. I have my work words on Wednesdays, when I switch off my mom hat for a few hours and put my paralegal hat on, words like “probate and corporation”. I have my youth sports organization words, like “schedules and board meetings”. What I’m missing are “me” words.

Of course I don’t really know what “me” words are. I think I just feel like my words are used every day for so many other people, in good and bad ways, and they don’t directly apply to me. I keep my “me” words in my head, letting them swirl around among the words for others, and they tend to get lost. I’m hesitant to share my words, partly out of fear of rejection or criticism, and partly because putting them out there makes them real. It’s much easier to keep my words to myself, despite my desire to use them more.

There’s the issue of course~to use my words or keep them to myself. It’s a battle that rages in my mind all day long. When I’m busy with the kids or work or my other responsibilities, the battle rages less. When I’m alone in my car, or folding laundry however, the battle kicks into high gear and I have to force myself to concentrate on my task at hand. I have an old friend who told me that when her thoughts, her words, got to be too much for her, she’d picture an empty basket that she’d fill with the most troublesome words and thoughts before she went to bed at night. My husband says I over-think things. In a way I do over-think them because I’m so unwilling to share my thoughts, my words. The me words just stay inside.

I need to come here to this space more often, to put my me words out there. I’m sure I’ll still be hesitant to put them all out there, but some is better than none. Maybe in time more and more of them will find their way to this space.

Five for Five ~ Change

I’m linking up with the fantastic ladies at Momalom this week for Five for Five (see the button on my sidebar). Come join us!

I paid my final preschool tuition payment today. The final one after 3 kids and 5 years at our favorite preschool. It was such a find for us, having just moved to our tiny town in the woods and seeing an ad in the paper about this age-appropriate preschool that took kids who weren’t potty trained and could start at age two and a half. I never visited, just called, talked to the wonderful ladies who’ve since become my friends, and signed Drew up. I told them I just wanted him there to socialize, that I had newborn twins and he needed to be with kids his own age. He could write his name by November of that year. He spent 3 years there, and Annie and Izzie are finishing up their 2nd year in a little over a month. My kids have changed and grown so much since they first started at this wonderful preschool, and even bigger changes are on the horizon for Annie and Izzie as they move to kindergarten in the fall. They’ve been talking about staying at school all day and riding the bus and being big kids, just like their older brother and sister.

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I ran into a friend at Drew’s school today while I was there volunteering. She spotted him in his classroom doorway, waiting to head to lunch, and commented on how tall he was. I joked that of course he had a hollow leg, since he’s tall and thin but packs away the food. I look at him, with his boy face and freckles that just sprouted on him for the first time, and see very little of the baby boy he used to be. He reads to me now, thinks math is the best subject ever invented, plays on a baseball team with 4th graders, and that boy is just so far removed from the little chubby faced boy who ate Cheerios out of the box in his high chair. I’m pretty certain I’m going to wake up tomorrow and he’ll be asking for the keys to the car.

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Meg’s sitting on the couch with the laptop, working on a school curriculum fair project. She’s muttering to herself about how the “l” on the keyboard isn’t working right but how cool the final project is going to be. I’ve been called in once to view the beginning of the presentation. I steal glances at her when she’s working on her homework, brow furrowed in concentration. School and homework are her job and she takes them on with such seriousness and passion. I try to picture her in a few more years, as a high school student, and then college aged, like my nieces. Soon the phone calls from girlfriends will be replaced by calls from boys. There will be formal dances and requests for makeup and rides in cars with friends. I can see the change coming, but I’m still holding on to the right now.

Just Write {10}

Meg’s taken to writing notes on our large wipe-off calendar on the wall next to the computer. Some days the notes revolve around what she’s happy about, or include a picture. Yesterday’s note related to what she’s learning in 5th grade science right now~ “Who knew that amoebas are jelly-like inside? I did!” Her love of knowledge is infectious; I love seeing her dig into her homework and watch her get excited for the projects she gets to work on. She’s becoming more confident standing up and speaking in front of her peers and I’m working hard to get her to be proud of being a good student, instead of being embarrassed by it. She’s already more confident than I was at her age, but she’s still nervous about the “smart” label. Fortunately, she’s friends with a group of girls who love school as much as she does, so she doesn’t feel so alone.

She and I have talks about my time in school, usually when we’re alone. I tell her bits and pieces about how I was bullied in school, even though it wasn’t called that back then, because I was smart. I talk often about how she needs to be proud of her hard work at school and not let anyone make her feel bad about herself for being a hard worker. I think there was always a part of me that wished that I wasn’t smart, so I could have blended in more instead of standing out, and I don’t want her to ever have those feelings. It’s girls like Meg who will rule this world and I want that for her so very much. She knows in the back of her mind that she’s an example for her little sisters (and brother), despite not wanting to be. I hope they’ll follow right in her big footsteps.

I’m joining Heather again today. Won’t you join us?

Stream of Consciousness

I’m watching Annie and Izzie out on the front “lawn” (term used loosely as it’s just patches of brown grass for another couple of months), riding their bikes. Annie decided a couple of weeks ago that she was going to learn to ride Drew’s old Spiderman bike. Said bike no longer has training wheels, but she didn’t care. She learned in about 30 minutes, all by herself, and now goes careening down our driveway like a madwoman. She hasn’t yet learned to stop, so she either crashes or just turns uphill a little to slow down. She’s a very determined little girl and I like to think that she inherited that trait from me. I’m certainly going to tell everyone that she did.

It’s chilly today, despite the sunshine. We ran out of oil last night so we have no heat or hot water, just another consequence of being too busy all the time to remember to check the oil tank. After a flurry of phone calls this morning the oil man is on his way, and I’m dreaming of being able to wash my hands in warm soapy water so I can warm up. The other consequence of being too busy is that laundry isn’t done and I’m stuck wearing a short sleeve shirt and lightweight sweater today. There’s something to be said for being busy and not bored, but there’s also something to be said for finding balance. It turns out I’m not good at finding balance.

I came home from a hockey association meeting the other night to the babysitter telling me that Meg took a softball to the mouth at practice. My first instinct was to feel horribly guilty that I wasn’t here to take care of her. But then I thought some more about this and realized that I can’t always be there to take care of her, and I can’t always protect her from everything. Her coach got her an ice pack and she took care of herself just fine. I’m trying to raise all my kids to think for themselves and be able to take care of themselves, so maybe I’m not doing so badly after all.