Things

I love the coziness of these evenings, when the house is warm and happily humming, the pellet stove burning.  Yesterday I was making up a Facebook status in my head while I was working in the kitchen that went like this:  Pinterest-worthy status - cold outside, warm inside, Christmas music playing on the radio, onions frying on the stovetop, children happily coloring on the dining room table - my heart is happy.  Real life thrown in status - I have a dull constant headache from sleep deprivation from 4 of the 5 children having bad colds that involve bad nighttime croup and coughing until you vomit, and the daughter keeps shucking off her clothes.  ;)

I stayed home today, which was a Sunday, for the second week in a row, as this cold is working it's way down the line of chillun's.  This week it was Zion, Layla, and Caroline who needed to stay home.  Last week it was Israel and Layla.  Layla is ok during the day but coughs up a storm at night.  Our bed has been puked in 3?? times now this week.  But running a cold mist vaporizer helps a lot.

This evening Israel was a motivated little industrious child.  He came up with the idea of having a tea party in the boy's room and asked me if I could move the (very heavy) toybox for them to use as a table.  I tugged at it briefly and halfheartedly for a bit, then declared it a lost cause and not remotely worth the effort.  He thanked me for the bit of progress I had made and then proceeded to pull and wiggle it out more into the center of the room.  Then he found a nice green sheet to use as a tablecloth and he and Zion and Layla bustled around busily and quite delightedly looking for food for their tea party, while their mama cocked her eyebrow a bit Scrooge-ily and was all like, "nope" to requests like, "can we use the red cabbage for our tea party".  Mama has had too many experiences where she is the one cleaning up the leftover mess despite everyone else's most devout and sincere of intentions.  They found some apples and I think some gummy Vitamin D bears and Israel brewed Raspberry Zinger tea for the whole crowd AND popped a bowl of popcorn (his new skill of late) in the Stir Crazy.  They clustered happily around the "table" for a while, the lights dim so that they could properly enjoy Layla's new flickering LED "candle" (a prize for going to sleep on her own lately).

THEN Israel got the idea of connecting the VCR to our old unused TV in the boy's room, which has been sitting there ever since Gabe's birthday party in August, and he found all the cords and rifled through the videos to find the one he wanted and got the whole shebang hooked up and really was quite impressive with all his hard work.

When Tim came home this evening, we all watched Godzilla, with the exception of Layla and Israel who eventually went and enjoyed their TV and popcorn in the boy's room while leaning against the table toybox.  :)