Valentine's Day Traditions

It seems to me that holidays are all about kids. (Now maybe this is because in my life these days nearly everything is all about kids!) It’s hard for me to imagine Halloween without children. Or what about Christmas without kids? And, I even feel the same way about Valentine’s Day.

This might not be how other people feel about Valentine’s Day at all. When most people think of Valentine’s Day, they think of romance and love – adult sort of themes – not children. But I don’t find that part of Valentine’s Day to be all that exciting (maybe that says something about my marriage…just kidding!) Celebrating Valentine’s Day in our house is still a kid-centered activity – and it’s a lot of fun (a little tiring too).

I also think that holidays are about traditions. Some of these are traditions from our families when we were children that we are passing on. But often we have traditions that we start in our own families. I wanted to share a couple of our family’s Valentine traditions.

My family lives in Massachusetts. Our families (just counting parents and siblings) live in California, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Maryland, and New York. Obviously, we don’t see them on Valentine’s Day. So, every year the kids make valentines and we send them to our relatives. We go shopping a few days before and choose out special Valentine’s Day paper, stickers, ribbon etc. Then, we spend a few hours creating the masterpieces. The kids have lots of fun. (I usually want to pull my hair out about half way through the project – but evidently I’m not too terribly traumatized because I still do it again the next year.) This year, while Rachel, Taylor, and Sarah Ann designed their works of art and I helped operate the glue gun and cut our hearts, George (my husband) kept Christian (age 16 months) from climbing on the table and eating their projects. Here's a couple pictures of them.









The other thing we do every year is make heart shaped sugar cookies and decorate them. Here are the girls making the dough.




The past couple of years, we have also had a Valentine’s dinner which involves lots of heart shaped and red food. This year, we invited another family over to enjoy the dinner with us. We had some heart-shaped calzones, red strawberries, and red Cherry 7-Up (and a salad – not red). Then after dinner, all six kids (Christian was banned again, although he did manage to eat quite a few m&ms) decorated cookies.There was lots of giggling at the table as the kids read the messages on the conversation hearts to each other. (What would Valentine's Day be without conversation hearts?)

And tomorrow, my husband and I will go out to dinner by ourselves and have a little of the Valentine’s Day celebration without children!

I just can't resist one more picture - especially since I don't have any of Christian here. While I was trying to get things together for our Valentine's Day dinner, this is what Christian was doing.



(This scene - of Christian and the cat standing on the table - is one that occurs about a dozen times a day at our house.)

Hope you all have a happy Valentine's Day!

Snow Days

My kids have had two days of school cancelled and two delayed days in the last week because of snow. Blah. I really do not like snow days. This is not because I dislike my children and don’t want them to stay home. All these “canceled” days get tacked on at the end of June; and a day of canceled school in January (where we are all trapped in the house because of the miserable weather) is nothing like a summer vacation day.


Here's all the snow at our house.


Here are my two daughters "helping shovel" (notice the shovels in their hands) on a snow day last week.

On these snow days, I often get an overabundance of emails from other people who are also stranded at home. Their emails often begin “Since you’re stuck at home with some extra time, maybe you could…” Let me provide a little rundown of my “extra time” on Tuesday.

The day started at 6 a.m. when the phone rang with a prerecorded message from the school letting us know they had canceled school. (Is it really necessary to wake me in order to tell me: don’t worry, your kids don’t have school so you can sleep in?)

By 8:30 a.m., George had left for work (at 7:15 by catching the bus because the roads were too bad to drive), the kids had eaten breakfast, and then immediately Taylor (age 8) had thrown up. Great.

I was determined to do my little aerobic video like I would on any other day, so I optimistically put on my exercise clothes. I wore them around the house for the next hour while I fixed hair, set out clothes, gave Christian (age 15 months) a bath, started laundry, and cleaned up the graham crackers Christian had dumped out and then stepped on. Finally at 9:30 I started my video. I use a system called (don’t laugh) the Firm which involves a two-tiered step. After ten minutes, Christian had discovered (as he does many mornings) how fun it is to climb up and down the step while I try to not step on him. After ten more minutes, he was tired of being ignored and had attached himself to my leg and begun shrieking. I asked Rachel (age 10) if she could play with him for a few minutes. This worked for approximately 90 seconds. Twenty minutes of exercise is good for something, right?

At 10:30 I put Christian down for a nap. The kids had rented a video and so I thought this was the perfect time to work. I turned on my computer. At 10:55, Sarah Ann (age 5) came to tell me she wasn’t feeling well either. Could I take her temperature? Taylor was cold. Could I get him a blanket? I finally sat down again and (no joke) the cat walked across my keyboard and somehow turned it off.

At 12:30 I made a gourmet lunch of pancakes, eggs, and strawberries. Christian (awake again) ate all the strawberries and threw every piece of pancake on the floor. Sarah Ann looked at her food, then went and lay back down. Taylor ate a pancake, then went and threw up.

I was worried if we didn’t shovel before the freezing rain came, we’d be in trouble. So, Rachel and I went outside with shovels while the others stayed inside. I shoveled while Rachel ate snow off the top of the car. After 45 minutes (with me checking on the kids every five minutes), we were about half-way done. Sarah Ann opened the door and yelled “Taylor is throwing up and Christian is calling someone in China.” That was the end of shoveling.

In the afternoon, I helped Taylor with spelling homework, Sarah Ann with coloring homework (in theory kindergarten homework has some higher purpose, but I can’t really tell what it is), and helped Rachel read rules on eighteenth-century etiquette for a social studies project. (She got the idea from an article I published in American Spirit Magazine called Mind Your Manners.) This was followed by laundry folding, dinner cooking, dish washing, floor sweeping, etc. George was home by now and he gave Rachel a trombone lesson (I will refrain from commenting on this). I read Sarah Ann a chapter of “Ramona the Brave” and Taylor and I looked at my favorite book, Lonely Planet’s “The Travel Book” with pictures from every country in the world. Taylor told me his number one travel destination is “a country in Africa with the most animals.”

Bedtime was 8 p.m. I opened my computer again and began going through the emails with tasks for me to do during my extra time. Does answering emails count as work? (Or does blogging about snow days?)

My Thank You Card

About a month ago, I wrote about doing my book talk for my daughter's fifth grade class. I shared a few of their very creative questions.

A while ago, my daughter brought home a thank you card that her class had put together for me. I wanted to also share a few of these. They're great!

First, my favorite one of all:
"I am glad I don't have to live with a cow in my house." (My PowerPoint presentation included a diagram of a typical landed household in Germany in the nineteenth century - which shows that the family and farm animals all slept under one roof.)

"I'm so glad that John didn't get thrown overboard for seasickness." (My great-grandfather, John Albrecht, who immigrated from Germany with his family when he was nineteen, wrote only one sentences about the immigration experience. He said "I know it might sound babyish for a boy of nineteen, but I was so seasick that I begged my parents to throw me overboard and my misery." This really alarmed some of the kids!)

"You're a good detective."
Isn't genealogy work really like being a detective? That's why it's so fun!

"I want to buy that book!"
This makes me smile because the book is not really a fifth-grade book. But hey - I'll take readers of any age!

Then there were a couple that to me really embody why I (and others like me) do this in the first place - why we enjoy so much speaking to others about our families and about how others can find their families.

"After your speech, I've wanted to carry on some Lithuanian traditions! This Christmas we are!"

"I know a few stories about my ancestors, but I want to learn lots more."

This made me feel like my presentation had been a success! I also thought one of my daughter's friends summed it nicely with this comment:

"I learned how hard but wonderful it is to write a book."

Don't you love kids?

A Tale of Toddlers and Grocery Stores

This has nothing to do with genealogy, but I think others might be able to relate my experience.

Tuesday, I took Christian (my fourteen-month-old) grocery shopping with me. Let me give you a quick background: We have a grocery story in our little town that I make quick trips to in order to buy specific things I’m missing. But, this store is a bit overpriced. Twenty-five minutes away is another store: a Super Wal-mart where everything is much cheaper. About every two weeks, I head out there to restalk on just about everything. And when you have four children, this means massive grocery shopping. Basically, I stalk my cart until nothing else can fit in it.

I dread, DREAD going to Wal-Mart. It is crowded, a bit disorganized, and overwhelming. But being the devoted mother than I am, I suck it up and make my trip anyway (only when we are out of EVERYTHING from butter to toilet paper and my husband absolutely CANNOT go). So, off Christian and I went to Wal-Mart on Tuesday with my carefully prepared, long, detailed grocery list.

About one-third of the way into my grocery trip, I realized we had developed a problem. The grocery stack in the back of the cart had now grown high enough that when Christian twisted himself around, he could reach the groceries. As soon as he could grab something – anything – he began his favorite grocery store game: throwing as many things as possible from the cart onto the floor. And every time a new item made a resounding thud on the ground, Christian would laugh gleefully.

This is my fourth child. I am not easily flustered. I tried distracting him. I tried scooting everything to back of the cart. I tried taking things out of his hands before he could throw them (which made him laugh even harder – convinced that this was a really fun tug-of-war game). But no matter what I did, as I tried to choose which spaghetti sauce to purchase, Christian chunked canned creamed corn over the side. Soon, I was not carefully selecting spaghetti sauce – I was grabbing sauce – with mushrooms, the gourmet expensive kind – whatever – as long as it was spaghetti sauce – and shoving it into the cart in an effort to speed up the process.

Before long, our problem developed a new dimension. Whenever I parked the cart near the shelves, Christian began gathering everything he could reach from the shelf and dumping it INTO the cart. As I mentioned before, Wal-Mart is crowded, so parking out of reach of the shelves was nearly impossible.

A few minutes later, Christian became fixated on my pen and grocery list. I was still not flustered, but I was distracted. So, I let him hold the grocery list. Can’t hurt, can it? We turned down another aisle and then one more. I needed my grocery list again. That’s when I noticed that Christian didn’t have it anymore. I went back to the previous two aisles, but it was nowhere to be seen. (I still can’t figure out what he could have done with it….) I was about half way through the grocery trip, and I had no idea what to buy.

We finished the trip quickly, with me doing the best I could to remember what I had meant to buy, and Christian throwing lunch meat, cheddar cheese and granola bars on the floor with amazing speed.

We got to the check-out line to discover there was a long, slow line (surprise, surprise). Christian had had enough of the cart by now and decided he wanted down. I know what happens when you put toddlers down in the grocery line. So, I tried distraction – peek-a-boo with tortillas, guess which hand the green beans are in – but none of it worked. I even tried a pacifier (usually reserved for nap time). He wanted OUT. He screamed loud enough that people around me in line turned to stare at me.

I pulled him out just as my cart reached the front of the line. I tried placing items on the conveyer belt while I held Christian in the other arm – as he kicked and screamed and did everything possible to propel himself down – out of my arms. I found it impossible to pick up food while trying to manage a 24 pound mass of flailing arms and legs.

Now I was flustered. Just a little.

I sat Christian down. He ran behind the cart and began pulling things off the shelf. I pretended I didn’t notice and piled my groceries onto the belt as fast as possible. When I stole a glance back at him, I found that he had stacked teddy graham containers six high, carefully balancing each one.

I paid for the food, crammed the teddy grahams on the shelf, forced Christian in the cart, and headed for my car.

When I got home, I realized I had forgotten to buy toilet paper.

Complaints

Since I recently wrote a post about the things I’m thankful for, it seems only natural to now write a complaining post. Here are my current life complaints:

1) I am sick. I am not deathly, horribly sick, but I do feel lousy. It’s really just a cold – but one of those severe colds, where my head is so fuzzy that I have a hard time forming coherent sentences because by the time I’m halfway through the sentence, I have already forgotten what I was talking about. I have the desire to climb back in my bed. But as you all know, moms don’t get “sick days” like everyone else.

2) Christian (my thirteen-month-old) is sick. He ran a fever of 103 for two days, but actually seems a bit better now. This means, I have spent large amounts of time sitting with him in the rocking chair.

3) My husband is out of town again. This, of course, confounds the problems of #1 and #2 above.

4) I am not getting anything done. Like all the rest of the world, I have long to-do list, but due to #1-3 above, have found it nearly impossible to do anything more than the laundry (wash it at least, it is still unfolded on my living room couch).

5) My computer died a couple of weeks ago, and I have been using my husband’s old computer. It insists on disconnecting itself from the internet at least once an hour. It is making me crazy! (My husband doesn’t think I need a new one – because this one works good enough. My question for him is: then why did he get a new one?)

6) As I am writing this, Christian (who definitely seems better today) has opened the hutch and pulled all the food out, including dumping nearly a pound of spaghetti noodles on the floor.


This is a picture from another day of Christian pulling food out of the hutch.

Fortunately though, there are some positives in life right now to balance these out. Here is my positive list:

1) I am going to Hawaii in less then two weeks! And I am going with just my husband. It is the first time we have gone anywhere without children together since we had children (except to a brief trip to Pittsburgh which doesn’t count because it was for adoption interviews and was stressful). My parents will stay with my kids. I have done absolutely nothing to plan this trip until the conditions described above hit. But now, since I have spent lots of time sitting in the rocking chair with Christian, I have started reading my Hawaii tour guide, and am now so excited I can hardly stand it!

2) I have a radio interview today with a Utah radio station about my book. I can do it here at home. I am going to concentrate really hard so as not to run into the problem described in #1 above in which I am unable to complete sentences that make any sense.

3) My book sold more on amazon in November than any previous month. (But it needs to sell more. December is supposed to be a big month for books. Anyone have a difficult-to-shop for person on your Christmas list? I know just the thing to get him or her….)

4) I feel rotten enough that I’m not even that concerned about all things I'm not getting done. I’m perfectly content to read about snorkeling in Hanauma Bay and kayaking on the Wailua River.

5) My husband comes back tomorrow night. The house can’t completely disintegrate by then, can it?

6) Christian is still happy – now pulling all the pots and pans out. This is the longest he has gone without me holding him since Monday evening. He looks pretty cute in his dinosaur sleeper surrounded by pans and spaghetti noodles.

7) Did I mention that I’m going to Hawaii for the first time in less than two weeks? Even better, my husband has meetings there, so the trip is highly subsidized by his work.


Well, how’s that? I have more things on my good list then my bad list. (Okay, so I may have put Hawaii twice, but I think it’s worthy of counting twice.)

Now the decision: should I clean up the spaghetti noodles or make kayaking reservations? (Or even better, put Christian down for a nap and go back to bed myself…if only….)

The Thanksgiving Tree

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving yesterday. I’ve included a couple of pictures below of our family gathered together for our meal:





We have a tradition in our family that Thursday evening, after everyone has eaten, we gather in my living room to do the “Thanksgiving tree.” I draw a giant tree and then we cut out fall leaves from construction paper. (The finished product is always interesting since drawing is not at the top of my talent list – in fact, it’s not on my talent list at all. This year, I convinced my sister and her fiancé to do the drawing and the cutting though, so the tree definitely took a step up.) Each person gets about five leaves. Then we go around the room and, one at a time, say something we are thankful for and write it on our leaf. The kids take turns sticking them on the tree. The only rule is that you can’t say something that someone else already said. In other words, if the first person says she is thankful for her family, then nobody else can say that.

We always get a range of responses. Some are serious and heartfelt, while others are creative or just silly. Here are some the things written on our “thankful leaves” this year (each line represents one leaf):
trees, plants, fungi, and the environment
air
platinum
clothes, glasses, and bodies
health
increased financial stability
love
wii (this was Taylor of course – see my previous post)
forgiveness
second chances
Central Park
Pumpkin pie

The kids put the leaves wherever they want, which results in an interesting looking tree by the end. Here’s a picture of my children putting their leaves on the Thanksgiving tree.





This year, I have been feeling particularly grateful. For many years, there were two things I wanted more than anything else. First, I wanted another baby. We had three beautiful, wonderful children. But, both George (my husband) and I really felt like there was another little boy out there for us. I get so sick while I’m pregnant (if you’ve read my book, you’ll know a little about that), that it had become apparent that another pregnancy was probably not the right path for us. We began to look into adoption. In October of 2009, our little Christian was born. I was able to be there at the hospital to hold him on his very first day of life. He has brought so much happiness into our family. I am very grateful for him – and for my other children.

The other thing I wanted was to publish a book. In fact, from the time I was five years old, I have wanted to write books. There has never been a day of my life where I didn’t want to be an author. It was a long and winding path, but The Journey Takers was released this summer. It continues to be a long and winding path. However, right before my book came I out, I thought that no matter what happens with it, when I am 80 years old, I will look back on my life and be grateful that this lifelong dream of mine was fulfilled.

So, this year I feel like I really have everything I wanted – at least, everything I wanted that really mattered! I have been blessed.