My 100th Post - and a giveaway! (Horns blowing, streamers flying)

The kids are spoiled, and the blame lies squarely on the people we see in the mirror every morning. This was an interesting weekend, with a lot of attitude from 3 out of 4 kids - I'm not naming names, but the Princess was in rare form, the Hot Mess seemed to devolve 3 years, and one of them seems more and more to be approaching the wicked teenage years - WOW I'm not looking forward to more of that...

Remember Bob the TV timer? Each kid got a block of time to use on the TV, and after time was up Bob would shut off the power? The kids hated Bob, until they figured out how to work the system - they were using all their time to play Lego Playstation games together - when Jason's time was up, Sarah would put in her code, and so on, until they were all still sitting there for hours on end.

Well - we've woken up to that, and will be making some changes - Bob allows you to block out specific hours during the day where it won't turn on - I'd already programmed it so they couldn't turn the TV on before school during the week, but I think we'll be adding blocks for after school and weekend hours as well, because between the four of them that thing seems to be on all the time again, and they've forgotten how to play without it. And when Bob time is up, they want to play games on the computer, or my phone, or as Jason puts it, "something electronical".

Evie I don't mind so much - Evie's busy with activities to the point where she doesn't really have a lot of time to sit and watch tv, and even if she is, she usually has a drawing book in front of her or she works on her cross-stitching, but Evie's also always been that way about tv - rarely would she just sit and stare at it. Evie's also happy to go outside and play, whereas the others? When I do get fed up and shoo them all outside, more often than not I turn around after 10 minutes and the younger 3 have disappeared back inside on me - Sarah doesn't like to be 'too hot'; Sarah and William get annoyed by bugs, and Jason wants to be wherever Sarah and William are.

I'm trying to turn over a new leaf be better about planning things to do with the kids; on Saturday they painted fall pictures for the frames I have in the kitchen, and on Sunday we went the farmer's market to pick out pumpkins for carving later; then we came back and painted the little pumpkins from the pumpkin patch last weekend.

This is a challenge for me, because I find dealing with the four of them similar to trying to stuff cats into a bag. Tracking them all down and getting them into shoes and into the van to go anywhere can sometimes take forever, and with projects Sarah and Jason can still demand a lot of help sometimes, if they don't think they can or don't want to do something themselves - happily, that wasn't the case this weekend, Jason painted some fabulous watercolors and painted his little pumpkin green, all by himself :)

Matt was really frustrated with the kids on Sunday - he finds Sundays rough because he heads into the office on Mondays, which means catching the bus at 6am, which means leaving the house at I-have-no-idea-what-time - I'm always asleep :) So he has a hard time relaxing on Sunday afternoons because for him the weekend is over and he's ramping up to an early bedtime and Monday morning. We had a long discussion about how no, the neighbor's kids are NOT like ours and that's how they're able to go everywhere and seemingly do everything together with no strife. I pointed out that our kids are mostly well-behaved in public, and that I'm sure people wonder how we manage it all - no one sees what goes on behind closed doors, and yes there's a reason why our windows are usually closed (stinkbugs and fruit flies being only a part of that...)

We're trying - that's all you can do, really, right? Try to be the best person and parent you can, while still maintaining a sense of self; I'm all too aware, as Evie turns 10 this coming Sunday, of how swiftly time flies - it always hits me at this time of year as we celebrate all the kids' birthday from late August to early November, another year has flown by - and we won't always be dealing with little-kid nonsense - the BIG KID NONSENSE is just down the road :)

I'm just happy for moments like these, where everyone pretty much gets along, and enjoys each others' company - and I have pictures to prove it actually happened :) Happy Monday!