A blog about Kyle and Rebecca's family
We made some dinner to take to Debby, and so we got to meet baby Rexton tonight! He is so little! The kids really enjoyed seeing him, and Kyle and I got to hold him. Debby also asked us for advise on how to wrap him, so I showed her a cool way of making a baby burrito, that my midwife showed me after Lydia was born.
My group of Girl Scout Juniors are working on earning their bronze award, which is kind of a simpler version of the gold award which they can earn when they are older, and is the Girl Scout equivalent of the Eagle Scout award for boys. The bronze is a 20 hour service project that the girls do as a troop. In a couple of years they can earn their silver awards which is a 50 hour service project done in small groups of no more than 4. Finally they can earn their gold award which is a 100 hour (or two 50 hour) service project(s) that they do on their own.
We had each of the girls submit at least one project idea, along with a basic plan of what we would need to pull it off, and in the end we didn’t select any of the plans the girls turned in. One of them had suggested that we organize free hair cuts for poor people, but that isn’t a sustainable project, because you cut the hair once and eventually it will grow and need to be cut again. Somehow as we talked about that, other ideas came up and the idea of doing a Locks of Love drive was presented. This would be more sustainable, since girls would come and have their hair cut for free, and we would send the hair to Locks of Love to be made into wigs for girls who lose their hair due to medical issues. So that is what the girls decided they wanted to do.
Being the leader, and having long hair, I of course let them cut my hair to donate:
Tyra was at the event with me and the rest of our troop, and Kyle brought the rest of our kids by to check out the bake sale and craft sale that we were also having. The girls thought that would be a nice way to provide opportunities for people who don’t have hair long enough to donate, to help Locks of Love with the cost associated with making wigs.
One of Tyra’s friends from church came to donate her hair, and that started Tyra off, begging us to let her donate her hair as well. So Kyle took the kids home and washed their hair so that they could come back and donate it. Tyra, Dinah and Chloe all donated their hair.
Lydia’s hair isn’t long enough to donate, so she is the only girl in our family that didn’t get a hair cut. Tyra, Dinah and Chloe were all so very excited to get their hair cut though. Personally I am afraid of having their hair so short. I don’t own a curling iron and if it starts flipping every which way, I’m not going to know how to fix it. This also means no more braids or pony tails for awhile and Chloe is simply adorable with her hair in a set of french braids. As for myself, my hair was long enough to begin with that I was able to donate the required 10 inches (minimum) and still be able to have long hair. Here we are with our new dos:
My sister had her baby today! How cool is it to have 11-12-13 as your birthday!
He wasn’t due until December, so he is a few weeks early. But he decided that this was going to be the day and here he is. He seems to be doing just perfectly.
Ethan is well on his way to earning all 20 Webelos activity badges, and one of the few that he has left, is the Aquanaut. This one is proving to be the most difficult to sign off, because in order to do so, Ethan needs to know how to swim. I took him to the pool at Debby’s condos to try to teach him to swim myself, but the problem with that is, when do I have time, without the rest of my kids, to be able to take just Ethan to a pool to teach him how to swim? So we went once. And I’ve kind of given up hope of that working out and we have signed him up for swim lessons at the Lehi Legacy Center.
Today was his first lesson. I dropped him off, but couldn’t stay because his lesson started at 4 and Girl Scouts starts at 4:30, so I had to get right back home. Kyle met him at the Legacy Center after work, so he got to watch the lesson.
Ethan spent a lot of the time holding on to the side of the pool, even though it’s shallow enough for him to stand up in. Hopefully he will get over that and actually start swimming soon. He only has two months left to learn how to swim, and pass off the Aquanaut in order to earn all twenty badges. No pressure. 😛
Argh! Well I have finally broken and decided that it is time to banish the kids from the basement. They have not been taking care of it. They don’t keep their rooms clean. I have been finding scribbling on the walls. They have been snitching food from the storage room, which resulted in us putting a lock on it. Then they kept stealing the key so they could get into it anyway, which resulted in us changing the lock to one that requires a real key, instead of just one of those stick things that you put in a hole and turn the thing inside with. I have been wearing the key around my neck so they can’t get it. I have also found raw egg downstairs. Egg slime on the storage room door, and on the floor in the laundry room. Egg shells on the floor of the bedroom, and in dresser drawers. They have been climbing on the book case in the family room, which is causing damage to the holes that hold the pins that hold the shelves up. Tonight they pulled the last straw!
I originally had the idea to move the kids out of the basement back in September. They haven’t been taking care of it for longer than that. I was in a rage, ready to just take all of their stuff away so that all they were left with was beds in empty rooms. But I didn’t know where to put all of their stuff. The garage is still full of the stuff we moved out of the basement so that we could get it finished, so there is no way all of their stuff is going out there. Then I had the thought to just move the kids back upstairs and put a lock on the basement door to keep them out of there. Kyle came home from work and we discussed this option. Kyle brought it up with the kids. He gave them the option of losing everything and coming upstairs to sleep again, or that they could get their rooms in order. I knew that they were going to choose the latter option, but that they weren’t actually going to do it, but Kyle gave them the option and they picked and I had to wait it out a bit. I did also feel bad about making a change like that, that particular weekend because it was Dinah’s birthday. I felt like it just wouldn’t be right to do something like that on her birthday.
Back to tonight: I had a dentist appointment the day after Halloween and since I was in town, I decided to go clearance Halloween shopping after my appointment. I got lots of cool stuff! I got a giant pumpkin bucket for $3! I had been checking it out every time I was at that store all October, and they had a couple left and it was now on clearance so I just had to get it.
I got some more Mr Potato head style pumpkin decorations. I got Ethan a costume for next year, since I know that the Kangaroo costume is the only costume that we have that is anywhere close to his size and it’s borderline too small for him this year. I also got some pumpkin carving kits. Not because I wanted the pumpkin carving tools really, but because I wanted the books of carving patterns. So all of this clearance stuff came in the house and ended up on the living room floor in piles, needing to be packed away for next year. Before getting it packed up I needed to get all of the stuff we used this year gathered up and ready to be packed up too, so all the clearance stuff had to wait. Since the Halloween buckets were downstairs we decided to move the clearance stuff down there to wait for packing. Then the kids started messing with it….
Tonight it became a problem. The glue on the carving kits wasn’t very good and a couple of the packages came open. The kids then decided to start playing with the carving tools. I don’t know who started it, but the most dangerous tool ended up being the very sharp poky needle-like tool. Someone got a hold of one of those and started stabbing the book of carving patterns, and the tool then went missing, and that was it. As soon as I found out what was going on I went down there and sent all the kids upstairs to sit on the couch. I went around gathering up their pillows, and I came upstairs and asked Kyle to go downstairs and take the doorknob off the storage room door and put it on the basement door. There was then lots of wailing from the kids. They did not want to be banished from the basement, but they did not want the responsibility of taking care of it either. And I just couldn’t allow them to be down there while that tool was missing. That is a safety issue that I just could not risk.
We aren’t going to move their beds upstairs tonight, which means they will be sleeping on the hide-a-bed for a while. And I’ve got lots of stuff to move out of the office before we can even think about bringing the beds back up. So the transition will be a gradual one. The kids have been informed that they will have to earn back access to the basement by showing that they can take care of the space upstairs, so we will have to see how that goes.