We have duly partied for Kirsty's 50th birthday! KC and Lissa and I did the decorations this a.m. while everyone else was at church. Actually it was truthfully mostly KC and I but Lissa put in her 2 cents worth from her queen bee place of sitting in her high chair and watching. KC really feels punky with his cold or whatever it is and stayed in his PJ's all day, but despite that wanted to "party" with all his little heart and soul. His only real heartbreak was that I would not let him help decorate the cake. In fact, I wouldn't even let him be in the kitchen with his streaming nose and yucky cough while I was doing the decorating. But he eventually decided he could make his card for Mom while I did that and this compromise worked well. The cake in question is a from scratch chocolate two layer cake with raspberry filling and home made frosting. I am told it is to die for. I am allergic to chocolate and have never in my life eaten this cake though I have made it millions of times. Sadly I am deficient in 2 keys cooking areas. Pie crust and frosting. This means Kirsty made the frosting for me before she went to church but I did the decorating!

The dining room always looks festive when we decorate and Kirsty said what she loved was that we made her feel like she had a spring birthday when she has always felt a bit down about the fact that she didn't. I was going to try and post some more pictures of the way things looked, but I am not particularly facile with technology. See that nifty blank space between the paragraphs? Well that was where I WANTED to put the pic of the butterfly and flower mobiles that hung from the light fixture. Picture them, a promise of spring, twirling in the breezes (our house is drafty folks!) Next to that picture was going to be the full out picture of the dining room table with all the place settings. You can at least see the pic at the top with the napkin rings Robbie made.

Ah that empty spot? That was for the picture of the giant balloon we put over her chair. We filled it up with a helium tank and the coolest thing was that you could record something in the balloon. From my kid's perspective the fact that then you have to bash the balloon to make it say "happy birthday" was a double bonus. Lots of balloon bashing going on.

Lots of party horns. Yummy Chinese food for Kirsty and I. She is a traditionalist and always orders the same thing. General Tso's chicken. Chicken or pork fried rice. Me, I order something different everytime. Today I tried a dish called vegetable chow ho foon. Wide rice noodles with lots of yummy veggies. I had a spring roll with it and ordered some tofu veggie soup so I would have something for lunch later in the week. Not that we can't make soup but I have never been able to really replicate good chinese tofu vegetable soup.

There are invisible pictures here of happy children who are not eating chinese food. Wise parents do not destroy the party mode when their kiddos totally loathe a particular style of food. (laugh) I did vegetarian chicken for them, rolls and carrot sticks. Periodically they would take a break from eating and blow their horns out at each other. Even Chet adores party horns. He did so well too holding it together.

Kirsty loved her gifts, mostly jewelry from the kids and I. She also got a gift certificate for make up from her favorite store from Chet and light up knitting needles from me. I saw these at a craft store and though I don't knit, they just seem so incredibly cool. When we go camping she likes to knit and it is sometimes hard to have enough light for her and not disturb sleeping children. Now she should be set even in a power failure! :-) Someday no doubt I will figure out how to add pictures throughout a post. For now, words are sooooo much easier!

Getting Ready to Party

Saturays are always special. They are "my" day with the kids as Kirsty works. We all love it, and we always get to stop by and visit for an hour or so with Kirsty as well. Today in addition to our regular errands of shopping and banking and post office and the library we had an added stop. Dum de dum dum. . . IPARTY! When we stood in the grocery store and I told KC we had to go to Iparty he began to literally rhapsodize about the store. "oh Iparty, I just LOVE Iparty . . . they have so many cool things there. . . remember the party horns? Oh and Ooma do you think there will be balloons too?" I reminded all of them that the purpose of iparty for us today was to get ready for Kirsty's birthday. Technically she turns 50 on Monday but we are celebrating tomorrow. She is somewhat ambivilent about the age thing so we opted not to go with banners of the age, and all the gew gaws that are out there to commemorate 1/2 a century. Instead, the kids picked (and I really do mean kids picked) a butterfly theme. I think honestly that this is so beautiful and cool. The colors are a delightful palette and truly I think Kirsty is at a time of transformation in her life. What better symbol for that than a butterfly? So we have lovely butterfly plates and napkins, a coordinating tablecloth (but not the same pattern as we all thought it made the plates just blend in too much to the table.) We have a garland of butterflies and flowers. We had a 15 minute pow wow on candles. Yep, 15 minutes. I kid you not! With the exception of the fact that KC was briefly entranced with rubber ducky candles, my kids really get the idea of themes for holidays and celebrations and were very particular about the candles and the colors tying to all their other choices. Kirsty says this is because i am not just a parent but a deeply frustrated soul of a party planner buried in the normalcy of being an office manager. LOL She may have a point. I LOVE to celebrate. Life is short. I have known good people who didn't have the times they thought they would. My grandparents. Kirsty's mom. Friends. I don't want to waste times to have joyful memories. Thus the love of parties. At any rate, we are duly armed with a lovely plan for the day, a helium tank and and I have made her cake. Tomorrow I frost and we will decorate and then after church we will have a big feast of Chinese food (K's fave and something of a birthday tradition for her) and then cake and festive fun. If I am lucky I will remember how to post pics!

Pellet Stove Woes

We are both very lucky and very unlucky. How you ask, can one family be both simultaneously? Well because last Sunday our house didn't burn down. Our pellet stove seriously malfunctioned. What resulted in called Back Burn in pellet stove jargon (and which actually sounds like the title of a B level action adventure movie to me!) Said back burn evolved when the auger in the pellet stove jammed and the pellets burned in a core up through the hopper. Luckily my wife got the pellets out before full combustion and thus, our house is still standing and thus we are very lucky.

However. . . yesterday pellet stove tech arrived to assess the damage to the stove. To say it was severe is an understatement. The back burn essentially melted the interior of the stove and it is not repairable. It is an 8 or 9 year old stove at this point. The cost of all the parts would outweigh the benefits of simply replacing the stove. Except that I don't have a hefty chunk of change sitting around the house just waiting for me to stimulate the economy with a big purchase.

Our house is a very old Victorian. It actually wasn't even insulated till we sided it about 20 yrs ago. It is still very hard to heat. New windows would help but I refer loyal readers to the last sentence of the previous paragraph! :-) Additionally the configuration of our home regarding windows and air flow patterns makes it very difficult to find a place where a pellet stove can be located so that it can adequately provide heat the to the 3 rooms that need it the most. These rooms are our living room, front hall and our work room. Our work room is farthest from the stove and gets only a bit of heat but it is enough to get by. The front hall and the living room benefit the most. Pre pellet stove days we could never get our living room above 55 degrees on a cold and windy winter day. (5 to 10 degrees outside with breeze) We essentially don't heat the bedrooms on the second floor. The gas furnace does the other downstairs rooms.

The narrow footprint for where we can place a pellet stove is the thing that makes it pricey for us. We basically have 2 options that will fit there safely and meet code. The first is a product by Thelin Co. This is the stove that just died on us. It looks like an old fashioned parlor stove which is nice as far as the style of the house goes. And it is skinny where most pellet stoves are wider so it accomodates that dinky area well. Another option would be a pellet stove put out by a company called Harmon. They look cool, very high tech--which sometimes scares me though as in my experience the more high tech the more there is to go wrong . . . They can hold a whole bag of pellets which the Thelin can't. That would be cool. But they load from the bottom and a review I read on line said this could make them more prone to a fire. Nearly been there done that, so that is pretty much enough for me. Also the back up system to provide enough juice for the stove to run in a power failure is fairly expensive and complicated. Would cost almost as much as a generator. On top of the cost of a new stove, that is fairly significant to me as well.

I actually wish we could just have a woodstove. K and I had one back when I lived in a small town when I first left home. Woodstoves run in power failures quite nicely! However the downside is that they are also quite messy and there is the whole hot stove issue with young children. The plus side of a pellet stove is that there are only 2 places on the entire pellet stove that are hot on the exterior and I can safe guard the kids by gateing the whole hearth area, which I do. But with a pellet stove, I don't have to worry if a toy landed on the top of the stove etc. With a wood stove, I would. So I guess i have to hope for a kicking tax return and not too cold weather from now on!

Shhhh the house is quiet!

Yes, absolutely still! It is a beautiful sound. The kids have been stir crazy lately. I think it is the late winter thing going on. Recently it has been too cold to be outdoors (today there was wind chill again making it 4 below or something like that) and yet there is the feeling of being on the cusp of the change of seasons. Spring in theory isn't far off. I see the change in animal behavior both in our pets and in the wild ones we watch out of doors. They feel the change and are friskier. Alas so are my children and they evidence this by contests for jumping off the couch, dropping dominos on one anothers heads and loud, loud (did I say LOUD???) voices. In something like 4 or 5 weeks I will once more be able to temper that energy with walks and play after supper out of doors. I keep saying that to myself. I need to believe it. I need to vision it. Because till every last little demon----i mean child----fell asleep tonight it was bedlam.

Much of it is I think that our winter pass times are somewhat old hat now. We have done copious quantities of arts and crafts. Pretty much you name the medium, and we have done it. And done it more than once; partly for the fun factor, partly to subtly give opportunities for further creative mastery and exploration. And sometimes, just because I didn't know what else to fill the hours with till bedtime! LOL We've done glitter glue, painting, relief painting, stencils, foam art, markers, crayons, cutting, glue. . . I assure you the list is endless and the messes have been mostly happy and fun. But now, they are less fun. The attention spans shorten as the little bodies yearn to be leaping and running about. Sigh. So we play football in the front hall, have basketball contests into buckets and boxes and race matchbox motorcycles. But I know it will be better with the change of the season. It always is.

Added to the mix is the fact that KC has not been sleeping well lately. A few nights of bad dreams (usually involving monkeys; don't ask me why monkeys are scary as I have no idea!) I think in his mind his solution was to make himself stay awake longer. Of course in my experience, when one has bad dreams, they are typically worsened if one is over tired. Which is pretty much what happened to him.

But all week he has made himself stay awake until 9 pm at which point I would take him upstairs to bed with me and sing him to sleep. I can't honestly go up sooner than that as I have to do my piece work stuff. Usually he falls asleep on the couch about 8 p.m. or so and I just carry him up when I am done, but all week he has come into the work room with his crayons and done art on the floor by my work area, assuring me he has "just one more picture to make." In the morning when I get up at 5:45 a.m. he has been popping up like a little spring ready to start the day. Now i need to explain that all my alarm does is literally make a soft click. It is set to play classical music but I am afraid of wakening the kids so I have the volume all the way off. So really there is no noise to wake KC or Lissa. And that means the only thing wakening KC is his fear of bad dreams if he is in the room alone. Sigh.

Tonite we talked about the bad dreams and the monkeys--do you know how hard it is to talk about monkeys being scary with a straight face???? And I assured him over and over that I would keep him safe always, even from monkeys. He fell asleep on the couch at 7 p.m. I hope it worked and his sleep is sweet and happy. I hate it when my kids don't sleep happy.

Rob had a lot of sleep issues for a really long time. His I understood as really scary things did happen to him in the dark and/or when he was sleeping. And he saw creepy R rated movies when he was 4 and 5 years old. He would waken in the night screaming literally. Or worse, be screaming and yet not awake. Later, he would sleep walk when stressed or over tired, which petrified me as our bedrooms are on the second floor. I had a door chime on his bedroom door for years. It would not waken him, but I would hear it and be out of my bed before he would get to the stairs. Thankfully, over the years this seems to have gotten a lot better. So I know KC's will also, especially as his fears are more developmentally appropriate and not the result of trauma. No R rated movies with killer monkeys have been on Channel 2's PBS playlist! :-)

Meanwhile, I am like a kid in a candy store with the house being quiet and the kids all abed at the same time. I saw a movie; a WHOLE movie. I finished watching the tv show I taped and saw in 10 minute increments all week. (I won't watch anything adult when the kids are up; I either have totally G stuff on or I just play music) And I had time to write a blog entry. Talk about living large! :-)

Music Class begins again

KC's other music class (the one we found before we found the one down the street!) just started up again and yesterday was his first lesson back with Miss Patty. He was soooooo excited. I came home from work and he ran up and excitedly told me that she played tango music. "I just LOVE tango music" he said as he danced all around me. The funny thing is that when he was an infant, the 2 CD's I played the most when I fed him were my Bob Marley CD and a CD of some spanish music. They are both faves of mine, but reggae and spanish music have become some of his favorites as well. Obviously all those people who talk about how much music is imprinted into our kids and its benefits to them are totally right.

I am also celebrating because I don't have a headache today! Yippee for me! :-)

I am sick of this headache

OK enough all ready. I solemnly promise not to eat any more ice cream. x my heart. Pinkie swear. Will that do it? See, I am allergic to dairy. My only real dairy obscession is ice cream and a bit of cheese. I can moderate the cheese pretty easily. The ice cream is harder. It is nice to have a scoop after the kids go to bed. And literally, it is A SCOOP. not a big ole cereal bowl, I am moderate. But my head doesn't care.

I started getting migraines when I was about 19. Didn't really know why and they became a familiar and unpleasant part of my life. To be sure, there are multiple triggers. Stress, illness, interupted sleep, missing a meal can all contribute. But the sneaky one that does me in the most is the dairy. I found out in my 20's that many adults who had a dairy allergy as a child manifest this allergy in the form of migraines as an adult.

I actually eliminated all dairy from my diet for a few months and saw amazing results. One would think that this would make an intelligent human being keep it that way. But no, one forgets the pain. One has a scoop of ice cream and nothing happens. So one gets careless. Or foolhardy. Or something. And then there I am. With a pattern of having a scoop of ice cream nightly and a pattern of having a migraine every 4 to 6 weeks. Usually they only last a day or two . Two being average. lately they have been more of the 3 and 4 day variety which leads me to decide that I really have to kick the ice cream habit. Today the headache is a little better, but after a bad one it sort of has residual pain. Not really the migraine, just the after shocks as it were.

I suppose too, that if I would take heavy duty drugs like Imitrex and similar ones that I could perhaps get medical relief more quickly and easily. But they also have really substantial warnings about the potential for cardiac issues and heart disease runs strongly on both sides of my family. Hmmm, risk a heart attack to get rid of pain? Nope. So I take aspirin and tough it out. When it gets real bad I bump up to the big leagues and pop an excedrin. It doesn't stop the pain but I can usually continue to function with it. With 4 kids and a job and a half, I need to function. Most importantly my kids need to see me function. They tend to freak if they think I am not. Freaking is not good. :-)

I will say that when I reflect on the whole pathetic icy mess I have gotten myself into it makes me more sensitive to people with other food issues or substance issues. In most regards I am the very soul of moderation. When I decided to quit smoking there was no back sliding. I just quit. From a pack a day to zero in one smooth step. Now admittedly I could not afford both food AND cigarettes (being a struggling college student at the time) but I still did it. I don't drink to excess. I am a vegetarian and really LIKE vegetables! By and large overeating has never been an issue for me. I have worn the same pair of shorts for 21 years. Really. There is a pic of me in the shorts at my niece's first birthday and she is going to be 23 this summer. I still have the shorts; they still fit and I still love them. But like many people I am flawed enough that i keep going back to something that clearly has a negative impact on my overall well being. The temporary enjoyment of that scoop of icecream can make me feel ill for days. Kind of stupid really.

Sunday excitment

I woke this a.m. and came down early with KC. Our pellet stove seemed to be out but there was sort of a vaguely smoky smell to the air. Like maybe it had just gone out, or like maybe there was something amiss. I am not real pellet stove savvy. My solution was to send KC upstairs to waken Kirsty and tell her. She is the pellet stove guru in our house. She eventually came downstairs and said yes, the pellet stove had gone out. Likely the ash pot needed cleaning and she would need to clean the stove and re-start it. I didn't think much about it. The boys and I got ready for church and we left.

When we got home Kirsty met us at the door looking quite shaken. Apparently all with the stove was not as it had seemed at first glance to her. The smoky smell had persisted and she had investigated further. Apparently the impeller gizmo had jammed and pellets were burning inside the hopper of the stove as opposed to in the fire box where they are supposed to. She had unloaded the pellets (which was wise as you are removing the flamable material, but also risky as there is a chance of quick combustion if air hits it just right in the offloading process) Luckily for us she got the pellets out and all extinguished and there was no combustion. There is a nasty ash smell to the house; I have vinegar around to try and sop up that smell. It has to be pretty strong if I can smell it because I am not known for having a good sense of smell.

We will call the company that services the pellet stove tomorrow and hope for a quick and easy fix. Our house is very hard to heat without the assistance of the pellet stove and it looks like more cold weather headed our way. But I am very grateful that I arrived home to my family safe and well and my house standing. It could have been a lot worse.