A rose by any other name...

Ainsley and Hudson are both going to VBS this week at Abundant Life. They have loved it (although there is an Ainsley story from the 1st and 2nd nights that when I have time I will write down for my other blog). I confirmed tonight another example of something that Hudson and I have in common. This year at preschool it took him a really long time to learn the other boys names, and aside from 1 or 2 he never knew any of the girls names. Like me, Hudson just has a hard time remembering peoples names. I was suspicious last night, and confirmed tonight, that he is just calling any boy he plays with "Jackson" or "Connor." We originally thought Jackson from church was going to go to this VBS and Conner was his best friend at pre-school. So rather than learning the kids actual names, he is just calling them the two names that come to mind easily. I guess that works when you are 5. I think I'm just going to pick a name to start calling people who I can't remember. Will that be a social problem?

Catch-Up

I know, I know... everyone is busy. But I promise, we have been really busy, which is my excuse for why I haven't blogged anything despite 35, or maybe 350, possible blogging entries. So for the two of you who may still check my blog despite the lack of entries, here is why there has been nothing new for quite some time:

• We sold fireworks. Some people go on vacation with their friends. We run a business with ours. There is no family better to hang out with in a parking lot for hours at a time, stress out over fire marshall visits, worry about slumping sales, be happy that we are not selling in Vancouver this year, and generally be hot and dirty with than the Strandbergs. Any money we have made or will ever make is not going to be enough to balence out the fact that our children are now OBSESSED with fireworks and for the rest of their lives will spend way to much money on them. The highlight of the year for us really was that Ainsley spending hours there with us, by choice. She actually got quite good at running the adding machine, counting back change, and memorized tons of prices. Overall, even if we made no money, she improved her math skills by at least 1/2 a grade in 10 days and loved every minute of it. While I'm happy for people to buy fireworks from me if they are going to buy them anyway- I have to admit (and please forget I said this by next summer if you buy fireworks from me) I just don't get it- go light some dollar bills on fire. (and this is where Eric tells me to stop saying that.)
  
• For Ainsley's 8th birthday, Andrew's parents gave her a trip to Seattle on the train with them by herself. (awkward sentence, sorry-not going to fix it). She took that trip in June and had a spectacular time. Hopefully soon I will upload pictures of her trip, she had an amazing time and so did Jim and Arlene. They said that it was so fun to see something through the eyes of an 8-year-old. I need to remember that!
• We have been keeping the medical community in business. We finished fireworks on Sunday, then Monday morning we took all three kids to the doctor for shots (good mom points that I'm not waiting until the week before school to get them caught up! Some post in the past that I'm not going to spend the time linking to records a time when everyone was way behind. We were behind this time also... but at least I got it done!) Of course with our kids there is a story to go with the shot adventure. Hudson and Camden always "shoot" each other and everyone else by yelling "fire!"with play guns, or you know ANYTHING because anything can become a gun if you are a boy. For Camden this has evolved into yelling "fire!" when he is yelling and really mad at something or someone. "Fire" has become the worst word he knows. This has continually evolved into yelling "Your Fired!" at me or anyone else when he is mad. My response is often, "great, I don't like this job right now anyway." He is not a little Donald Trump wanna-be, he doesn't know it has anything to do with an actual job. However, our poor nurse doesn't know this, because of course as she was giving him the shot, you guessed it, he yelled, "YOU'R FIRED!"
• We moved right along from the shots to at 1:30 taking Andrew to have back surgery. He has struggled for 5 months with a back problem that is a re-occurrence of back problems from last year. After trying physical therapy, steroid shots, and rest, nothing has fixed it. So the next step was surgery. It was a 3 hour surgery and when the doctor came out he said that he would have never gotten better. A bump, like a knuckle, had developed on his disk. There was a nerve that was fusing itself right on that bump and that was causing the pain in his back, hip, and down his leg. They chizzled off (ewee-yuck!) the bump and cleaned out the disk. He should fully recover. You never know how God is going to answer prayer because we have been praying the other treatments would have fixed the problem, or make it tolerable so he could avoid surgery. However, if one of them would have worked it would have masked the pain and without fixing it there would have been long term nerve damage. So we feel so blessed he has had the surgery and is now on the other side. He is recovering well, although month 6, 7, and 8 of your pregnancy is not exactly when you would choose to have your husband not able to lift anything over 15 pounds (of course ruling out all of our children and all of the bags that we will be taking when we travel different places this summer) but we will make it!

Okay- I'm tired of writing- and if you have read this your tired of reading and really should get busy doing whatever it is your avoiding right now. Hopefully at some point soon I'll get pictures off my camera and do a better post. Until then this will have to do.

I'm praying for his future wife.

As I was helping Hudson clean his room tonight:

Hudson: Does everyone HAVE to get married?

Mom: No.

Hudson: Good. I'm not.

Me: Why not?

Hudson: 'Cause then I can live all by myself and nobody will make me clean up.

Me: So you want to just live in a mess?

Hudson: Yep. I'll never put my toys away.

Me: Okay, but you have to get married to have kids.

Hudson: Oh. Well I want to have just one kid.

Me: Why just one?

Hudson: Because then I just will have one to tell what to do. And my wife can just clean up the toys.

Maybe we should read Jacob and Esau.

I came home from Bible Study last night and Andrew told me he had witnessed the funniest conversation between Ainsley and Hudson he had ever heard. This is how it went:

Hudson: I'll pay you $20.

Ainsley: What for?

Hudson: If you let me tell you what to do.

Ainsley: For how long?

Hudson: Ummm.... a year.

Ainsley: No way.

Hudson: How about a month.

Ainsley: No.

Hudson: A week?

Ainsley: No.

Hudson: A day?

Ainsley: No.

Hudson: Five minutes?

Ainsley: Okay.

Andrew: NO! Your not paying your sister to tell her what to do.

Ainsley and Hudson: AAAwwwww!

Brothers

Ainsley and Hudson really are good friends. I've been anxiously awaiting the transition when Camden plays well enough that he and Hudson will move on to the friend stage, when they can play and entertain each other. I think we are getting there. Hudson now wants to take Camden with him to the playground and "be in charge of him." How cute is this:

Congratulations Nathan!

Our brother-in-law Nathan just accepted the job as the principal of the upper school (middle and high school) where he teaches at Hope Academy in Minneapolis. Last spring break when we visited we went to see the school and loved it- here is the blog entry from that portion of the trip.

Hope is a great place. It is an inner city school (and inner city Minneapolis is WAY different than even inner-city Portland) that serves a very diverse population. It is certainly not your "typical" private Christian school. Almost all of their students are there on a scholarship of some kind. The children that attend have a sponsor that pays for their education... it is a pretty amazing program that they have started. The sponsors actually come and visit, and are involved with, the kids in school that they support. At least 70% of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunch. Here is their mission statement and vision: (the vision statement actually makes me get tears in my eyes- then again I'm a hormonal mess right now...)

Our Mission

To foster hope in God within the inner-city neighborhoods of Minneapolis by providing children with an outstanding, Christ-centered education.

Our Vision

Believing that all children are created for God's glory and endowed by him with an inalienable potential to acquire wisdom and knowledge, Hope Academy covenants with urban families to equip their children to become the responsible, servant leaders of the 21st Century. Committed to the truth, discipline, and values of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Hope Academy pursues this aim by mobilizing educational, business, and community leaders towards the important goal of serving the children of Minneapolis with a remarkable education, permeated with a God-centered perspective. This inter-denominational school will seek to unleash kingdom citizens who work for justice, economic opportunity, racial harmony, hope for the family, and joy in the community.

Hope's website is: www.hopeschool.org if you want to know more.

Again- we are so proud of you Nathan- and Tennille, we know you can handle it too!

A realization

A few times during the last couple of months I have thought, "why if we were going to have 4 kids did we spread them out so much?" (basically 3 years between everyone) I have focused on how long I have/will have been changing diapers, rushing home for naps, etc. I have also contemplated the fact that I will be 41 when I go to kindergarten round-up for the last time. That is wrong. (by the way- our spacing was actually because I read some studies about how 2 years 9 months is the ideal spacing for siblings so they have the best socialization and language acquisition. I also liked the idea of after nursing for a year giving my body a break of a year off before becoming pg. again. Now I'm thinking- who cares? My kids are all talking well, social, and like my body has had "time off.")

Just now as I was getting ready for bed and brushing my teeth (and yes, it is only 8:30) it dawned on me the positive of the spread. I WON'T EVER HAVE FOUR TEENAGERS AT THE SAME TIME! Ainsley will turn 20 when #4 is still 12.

Some days it is the little things that get you through.

Go Barlow!

I'm going to take this opportunity to publicly brag about my husband. Everyone okay with that?

Barlow won the district tennis tournament today, for the sixth year in a row! Andrew would be the first to say that coaches get too much of the credit and too much of the blame, but really he deserves lots of credit. This was the year that his team was young and had the possibility of loosing a match or two, but they were undefeated in league (I think now it has been over five years since they have lost a league match). Yesterday and today was the district match, and because of some strange tennis rules I don't understand even when you beat every team in individual matches, you still have to get a certain number of points at the district match to win the league title. Barlow got a REALLY bad draw, the details of which I have had explained to me repeatedly and I'm still a little fuzzy on, and during the tournament yesterday one of his players was walking by a post and the post randomly FELL on his foot requiring a trip to the ER. Yet despite these circumstances they still won.

The boys on the tennis team are so fortunate because not only do they have Andrew for a coach, but Randy Alcorn volunteers as his assistant coach. Randy puts in an amazing amount of time and really invests in the kids. Earlier this season he was interviewed for an article for the Bruin Banner (being in a high school newspaper probably not top on the list of important accomplishments for someone who has written books that have been on the New York Times Best Selling List, but you know...) and this is what Randy said about Andrew:

"Probably the best thing is that Andrew Pate is such a great coach. If I didn't think he was a great influence on the kids and had a great attitude it wouldn't be worth it. I can't say enough how much I respect and appreciate coach Pate and what a great person I think he is."

It is one thing for me lavish praise on him, but it is nice to have it come publicly from someone like Randy.

Way to go Barlow... and Andrew. Love you!

That backfired.

I'm a little stretched thin on patience right now. Andrew is on his way home from his second weekend in a row of tennis tournaments, along with his late nights of tennis, this has been a long stretch of not much daddy at home.

So picture dinner tonight. First off, don't judge me for the content of dinner, the vegetables were french fries. And no, I didn't cut up the potato and fry it myself, they were frozen out of a bag. As I was getting something for someone Hudson helped himself to more ketchup, as in lots more ketchup. I turned around in time to see him s-t-i-l-l pouring it out and I told him to stop, which he didn't do immediately. The resulting pool of ketchup was about 1/4 of his plate.

I took a deep breath and said, "you will be eating all of that." He didn't say anything. When he was "finished" with his dinner he brought his plate over to the sink, with most of the ketchup still on the plate. I said, "your not done." He replied, "but my french fries are all gone." I handed the plate back to him, used one hand to guide him back to the table and picked up a spoon with the other hand and put it on his plate. Without anymore words from either of us he actually sat there and ate his ketchup with a spoon. I was gagging as he did it because I'm not much of a condiment person anyway, but I really hate ketchup.

He brought his now empty plate back to me and said, "can I have a bowl of ketchup for lunch tomorrow?"

Win some parenting battles, loose some.

Ainsley

This is a long set up for a one liner from Ainsley, but your reading this blog so you must be trying to kill some time so here goes:

We went to a check up for Hudson's ears and I had to take all the kids. It was at Providence, so we started with a 40 minute car ride. Then we spend less than 60 seconds, no kidding, in the waiting room. Silly me, I thought this was a good thing. If only they would have left us in the waiting room, it had toys and books, and was big. They put us, all four, back in a little windowless room. I figure the room was about 5 1/2 by 5 1/2 because I know I couldn't have laid down in it without hitting my head. This room contained a small seat, the doctors rolling stool, a really big reclining patient chair with lots of lights, a sink with a cabinet underneath, two different garbage cans, and a rolling cart with instruments and 16 drawers. Also- the FOUR of us were in this room. The room didn't even have a swinging door, it was a pocket door because there was no where for a swinging door to open. So, really fun to be in a room where you can't let the kids touch anything, they are literally on top of each other, and silly me, we went through the books and snacks I had brought in the first 10 minutes of the torture chamber.It ended up being 23 minutes in this little place before we finally saw the doctor for our less than two minute consultation with him. When we were on minute 16 (which may not seem that long to you, but I seriously aged 3 years in that 16 minutes) I decided to let the boys finally touch the kleenex dispenser that they were fascinated with because it was mounted on the wall. I hate tissue boxes so we never have them in our house, so it is just magic to them how the tissues keep popping up after you take one. To add to the fun, the garbage can under the box had a foot pedal! Both boys sinuses should be cleaned out for the next 6 months with the amount of nose blowing they did. After 5 minutes and about half the box of kleenex (I should wait and post this on earth day) I pulled the plug on this activity. At that moment Ainsley quits reading the book she has brought (bless her for sitting quietly the whole time) and says, "Don't worry mom, I just looked around and I don't see any security cameras in here, so hopefully they won't charge us for all the tissues."