Our Family Tradition

My little Becker family has a summertime tradition.  I didn't realize it was a tradition until this year, when Troy said, "We need to build our yearly sandcastle.".  Could it be?  Did we really make a sandcastle every year.  Well, let's see.  

That is the castle from 2006.  We made it to Pensacola, FL before Orry came along.  (Troy and I also made a castle in 2005, but we weren't married and I don't have a picture to show you, so does it count?)  

And that is 2007's sandcastle.  That year we went to Destin, FL.  Orry was somewhere between 10 and 11 months.  Here's what he looked like:

He didn't particularly like the ocean.  But he didn't dislike it either.  When kids go the ocean for the first time it is pretty amazing.  It is such a vast thing to behold.  I can understand the excitement that is mixed with fear as the waves break over their shoulders.  The feeling that they could just be swept away into that big sea...

Now our journey takes us to 2008 and Korea.  That sandcastle was built by Troy and his brother, Trent.  We were in Yang Yang, South Korea, looking at the Sea of Japan.

Here we are when Orry was two, Isaac was a wee little 4 month old, Troy was less bald, and I was rocking a "new mom for the second time" haircut.  This was before we learned that Koreans preferred that we called the Sea of Japan the East Sea.

A year later we were still in Korea.  This time we journeyed to Donghae to build a sandcastle.  And here you can still see the East Sea.  

In 2010 we moved to Houston, TX.  Looking back, it was a good move to make in regards to this family tradition.  Now we live about 1 hour away from Galveston.  So here we are in Galveston, making another sandcastle. 

It was a great beach trip because Orry got over his fear of being in the water.  Isaac was thrilled to jump right in and I think this encouraged his older brother a bit.  

Another reason that it was so great was because we brought our newest addition along for the ride.  (Well, we couldn't just leave her home alone...)

And that is our sandcastle from today.  It was a lovely time filled with sand, sun, and salty water.  

Annie didn't like the sand or the water.  But she did like getting her beach pose on.

Troy was the work horse.  I was the baby monitor.

Isaac kept his shirt on for "swimming".  He sure loved the water.  He loved getting it in his mouth and then spitting everywhere to try and get it out.  

And Orry.  Well, Orry was busy showing the babes where the beach was...

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

How was Orry's first day of school, you ask?  

I really don't know.  I can, however, fill you in on what I know for sure and what I think I know.

He woke up really early.  So early that he asked me why I was waking him up at night when school was tomorrow.

He got ready in a timely manner and even had some extra time to watch a little bit of TV that he never gets to watch because he's never up that early.  

He got on the wrong bus this morning, but made it to school just fine despite his mother's mistakes.

He didn't wet his pants or get in any fights since I didn't receive a single call from the school.

He came home an hour later than I imagined that he would.  I don't even want to talk about this most hellish hour that I spent waiting for his bus to arrive.  Grrr...

When asked what he did today, he said that he watched three movies.  ???

Other things I gathered from various questions were that he ate a good lunch in the cafeteria, slid down a slide, had so many options for friends that he didn't make any, learned about sitting "criss-cross applesauce", and only had to pee while at school.  

I left an encouraging card in his bag.  (Remember when we made those cards?)  He knew that if he missed me, he could just read the card and know that I was thinking about him.   His reply when asked if he read the card was, "No, because I didn't miss you.".

And maybe you are wondering how I did on this most momentous day. 

I didn't cry a single tear.  I was a little sad, but a little glad as well.  I was so busy with the other three kids that I hardly had time to imagine all the worst case scenarios that might befall my little angel.  

I kept busy by making him some delicious soft pretzels for his after school snack.

I was incredibly excited to see his shining face when he emerged from the bus.  

It was a good day.  And I am exhausted.  We will turn around and do it all over again tomorrow.  

Oh, and before I go.  How was Troy's first day teaching 10th grade Geometry?  Well, I don't know that either.  But from what I could gather, his feet were really tired and he has a class with over 50 students on the roster...  Do tell Troy.  We are dying to know.

Getting Rid of a Rat's Nest

I have a love hate relationship with my hair.  I love that I have hair.  I'm thankful for that.  I'm also thankful that I have thick hair.   I have a lot of options when it comes to hair styles because I have so much hair to play with.  Not that I style my hair.  Styling my hair was left behind years ago.  Other things that I love about my hair are that it is strong and long.  I can go almost a whole year without getting my hair cut and my ends won't split.  Keep in mind that I'm not styling it, so I'm sure that helps.

But like I said, I have a love hate relationship with my hair.  My hair is neither straight nor curly.  It lives in a wavy purgatory.  I hate how thick my hair is.  It is impossible to blow dry my hair without breaking a sweat (You try to blow dry your hair for an hour without sweating.).   And even if I managed to not sweat during the blow dry, I will definitely sweat when I go to iron it out since my hair is so frizzy.  Living in the hot humid South doesn't help much.  Currently I'm in a hair rut.  Ponytails, buns and braids are in a constant rotation.

I spent a lot of my childhood wishing that I had different hair.  I wished that I had blonde hair and red hair.  I wished that it was curly.  My mom would curl my hair when I was younger and my hair was finer and thinner. It was pretty straight back then and it wouldn't hold curls very well.  As I got older I longed for the hairstyles that I saw in magazines.  With high hopes I would go and ask the hair dresser to make me look like the glamorous women on those magazine.  Many a time I was disappointed by the end result.  Many years would go by before I realized that my hair is just different and some styles, beautiful as they may be, don't work well with the hair that I've got.

I wish I could say that I've come a long way with my opinion of my hair.  I have come a short way.  I embrace it.  I put up with it.  One day I'll be able to devote time to it.  Time that it deserves.  For now it's on the back burner.  On the front burner, however, is Annie's hair.

Girl has got a hot mess of hair!  Her hair is quite cute.  It is getting longer and it is fine and curly.  But lately her hair has not been so cute.  In the mornings she wakes up with this:

wowsers!

And to be quite honest, I don't know what to do with it!  I've brushed it.  That doesn't help at all.  I've put it into little pig tails, but I only feel like I'm covering up her hair, much like I cover up my own hair.  So on a quest to help her have more good hair days, I sought help from my Facebook friends.  I got a lot of great responses to my plea for help.  But I was incredibly blessed when my curly haired, hair stylist friend, Rachel, gave me some great tips and step by step procedures to help maintain Annie-cakes cutie curls throughout the day.

One thing that I wasn't doing was conditioning her hair.  Another thing I was guilty of was over washing her hair.  So we will start to space out the washings and replace some of them with good rinses and conditionings.  Today we went out and got some natural conditioner with argan oil.  During bath time we tried it out.

What a world of difference!

Another crime I was committing was brushing her hair with a brush.  I should just use my fingers to brush it out.  And finally, I got a smoothing serum to put on her damp hair after the bath.  It's made with coconut milk and smells like summer (I love coconut smells for this reason alone.).  And here's the end result:

So pleased!!

She already got her first compliment.  Orry said, "Annie, your hair looks like gold!".   Score one for the girls!

I hope that Annie grows up loving her hair.  She's got a great head of hair so far and I'll do my best not to mess it up!  I'll love her hair, no matter what she does with it.  But I really hope I can encourage her to love her hair for what it is.    

My World is Changing

My world is changing.

My sweet 5 year old, whom I have nurtured at home since birth, is leaving me to go to school.  I'll be putting him on a bus and sending him off to learn.  Today I realized that I will have no contact with him for the whole 8 hours that he is gone.  I guess, in this case, that no news is good news, but no news sure does make a mother lonely.

My world is changing.

Gone are the days of sleeping in.  7:30am will seem like a luxury when I have to start getting out of bed at 5:45am.  But breakfast has to be made.  Children need to be dressed.  Lunches need to be packed.  Buses need to be caught.

My world is changing.

Late nights of staying up until midnight or later will be a thing of the past.  No more late night movies or sewing parties.  Bedtime will come so quickly and I will happily succumb to the fatigue that will inevitably come over me.

My world is changing.

But I knew this day would come.  Some days I wished that it would hurry up already and get here.  Others days I relaxed and enjoyed the seemingly endless amount of time I had to spend with him.  We've been prepping him for this day for years now.  Teaching how to read and write.  Teaching him how to treat others with kindness.  Helping him to remember his manners and to share with others.

My world is changing, but change is good.

Sending Our Love

My resolution this year was to write more handwritten letters.  I always get a giddy feeling when I receive handwritten letters and I wanted to pass that along.  After telling my idea to Troy, we decided to make it a family affair.  Every Sunday would be devoted to drawing pictures and writing letters that we would then send off to our friends and family.

Like many of my resolutions, I started with a bang and as the year has worn on my enthusiasm has fizzled.  But I am determined to keep this resolution alive.  So today I staged an intervention.  A card making intervention.

I gathered the supplies.  Card stock, glue sticks, paper scissors, a ruler, stickers, magazine cut outs, and crayons (to name a few).  And as a family we started creating some one of a kind cards to send out over the next few months.

There is a certain someone's birthday that is happening in a few days.  So for her, I made this one:

"We hope you have a "WHEEL-Y" happy birthday"

We are also expecting a new baby next month:

Annie made this one for you, little baby Boudreaux!

And we know a couple of kids that are having birthdays in October.  So the boys made these:

Two candles for a sweet little girl

And a special dinosaur joke for a handsome little man

Some undetermined, but still very special, person will get this gem:

Thinking of "mew"

Hopefully this activity will reignite that spark that we had only 8 months ago.  Hopefully we can finish mailing all our friends and family in the four short months that are left in this year.  Hopefully I can keep coming up witty phrases...  There are many more birthdays and holidays before the year is up!

Chewing the Fat

At the dentist's office, not the GI's office

As many of you already know, Isaac was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis back in October of 2010.  Currently is doing well and we just had a follow up appointment on Friday to check on his progress after he came down off the steroids.  He's having healthy bowel movements and is not complaining about any pain.  If you saw him you would think he's a normal three year old living a happy life.

But if you looked at his chart, you would notice something a little off-putting.  He hasn't gained any weight for almost a year now.  He hasn't lost any weight either, so that's good.  He's just not getting over the 29 pound mark.  So now that we have his disease under control, it's time to address the issue of his weight.  We've been instructed to put him on a high calorie diet.

Some things we are going to do are put him back on whole cow's milk instead of almond milk which is naturally low in calories, start to mix a little bit of olive oil into his meals, feed him meat, give him more peanut butter and cheese, and start supplementing with Pediasure or Carnation Instant Breakfast.

As an adult it is strange to think of a diet with few restrictions.  Fat is the best way to boost calories.  It's a good way to get the most calories out of the least amount of food.  As an adult who tries to make good, healthy eating decisions for my family with the hope of raising them with good food habits, I balk at the idea of a high fat diet.  But alas, it is what we are going to try to help Isaac gain some weight.

Annie also could use some extra poundage.  She just had her 18 month check up.  She's at the top of the curve in height, coming in at over 32 inches tall.  But she is at the very bottom of the curve for weight, only weighing 20 pounds.  I feel that some of that is genetics.  I was pretty lanky as a child, also staying close to the bottom of the growth curve as far as my weight was concerned (my head circumference was another story).

So here's where I need your help.  I need some good snack ideas!  Here is one that I found on our travels in Austin.  Apple smiles.  We don't like red apples so we used green and we really like chocolate peanut butter so we called ours "monster smiles".  But I need more ideas for good, healthy-fat filled snacks (does that make sense).  I'm incredibly opposed to buying store bought snacks like Little Debbies.  I just don't like all the artificial ingredients added in there.  But maybe you know of some store bought snacks that are natural, healthy, and high in calories and would save me some time.  Otherwise I might have to make these more often:

Mini cake donuts dipped in dark chocolate with sprinkles

One of the challenges I will face is making sure that the kids get the calories, but that the grown-ups do not.  So I think snacks are a great way to help boost the calories of some but not others.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks ahead of time for your ideas!!

Repurpose!

Repurposing has got to be hands down my favorite of the three R's.  Wait, repurposing isn't actually one of the three R's.  Let's see.  There's reducing, reusing, and recycling.  Well, it should be one of them.  There should be four R's.

There are two dish towels inside each hot pad.

I can see how you could lump repurposing into the reuse category.  After all, when you repurpose something, you are reusing some or all of its parts.  But it's more than just reusing your shopping bags or reusing your plastic containers, it's finding a different purpose for your stuff.  My kiddos old cloth diapers have found new purpose as cleaning rags.  My old kitchen towels have found new purpose as hot pads.

I love the challenge of repurposing.  I asked Orry what he thought one of Daddy's old work shirts should become.  In my mind I imagined it would make a cute stuffed bunny, but he said it should make a scarecrow.  Good idea.  We'll have to implement that plan this fall if our pumpkins make it that long.

Pass me a cloth napkin! 

The other thing I love about repurposing is being able to keep using things that you really love.  I have a top that I got in Korea and I love it for that reason alone.  The bottom edge started to fray and instead of just boxing it up and looking at it longingly for the rest of my life, I repurposed it into a dress for Annie.  It's far from the cutest dress I've ever seen, but its sentimental value sure gives it a boost.

I am far from being the expert at repurposing.  Most times I just donate the things I don't want or don't have a use for anymore.  But I want to challenge myself everyday to think of new ways to use old things.  I also want to challenge my kids to do the same.  So let's get our creative juices flowing!  Leave some comments with ideas for ways to repurpose or ask for some inspiring ideas for something you have lying around.

Here are some links I found to help us get started:

• http://www.craftynest.com/category/repurposing/

• http://www.younghouselove.com/2009/02/waste-not-want-not/

• http://trash2treasure.wordpress.com/category/repurposing-ideas/

• http://simpleorganic.net/refashion-repurposing-t-shirts-and-more/

Let's have fun creating a cleaner world!

Recycle!

I hate throwing away things that can be recycled.  I hate how much garbage we can produce in a day and I hate knowing that a lot of the things that fill our trashcan can easily be recycled.  But for the past year I didn't recycle. Our neighborhood doesn't have a recycling program nor does it have a recycling center nearby.  So day after day I threw away our juice bottles, our metal cans, and our paper and cardboard.  Shameful.  I know.  So I decided to change.  

Deussen Park

For the past few weeks I have been collecting all of our recyclables.  I had a bag for plastics, a bag for metal cans and aluminum, a bag for all our plastic grocery bags (which I never did throw away, instead I periodically took them back to the grocery store for recycling), and a bag for paper and cardboard.  I told myself that I would find the nearest recycling center and I would drive there with a car full of trash and sort it out myself.  So after these few weeks, when our small kitchen was being overtaken by recyclables, we loaded it all into the van and set out to find the recycling center.

Troy had gotten directions from Google maps and we set off.  When we got to the place where the map said it should be, we were disappointed to find that it wasn't there.  We drove around a bit more, checking out the surrounding area and found a nice park and recreation area.  We decided that we needed more help and used our mobile shout out to call our sister-in-law Nicole for better directions.  With the new directions in hand we set out again, confident that we would find it.  After about an hour of driving, we gave up.  We still couldn't find it.  But we did get rid of our recyclables.  We sorted them at the local (where we were at the time) middle school.  After all the emissions we generated, our good deed of recycling hardly made up for it.  But don't fear.  We are not deterred.  We are still going to collect our recyclables and give it another shot.  Maybe we'll have better luck finding another recycling center.  

The main reason that we go though so much trouble to do these things is because we want our children to be good stewards of the Earth.  We want them to grow up thinking that recycling is something that you just naturally do.  In order for that to happen, we have to do it.  Our actions speak louder than our words sometimes.  My children will grow up thinking that cloth diapers are normal, that cloth napkins are normal, and they may not even know what a paper towel is. They will hopefully grow up with the great habit of recycling.  And I love that idea.  

Don't let other dinosaurs suffer a similar fate!  Recycle!!