Category Archives: katie

05.30.08
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The Road to Omaha

Next to the Omaha zoo is Rosenblatt Stadium: home of the NCAA Men’s College World Series. In front of the stadium is a sculpture called “The Road to Omaha” which depicts cheering young men who are, apparently, happy about progressing to this event.

My children pose with the victorious team.

I wonder if I’ll get get to go to Omaha to see one of my own boys play? Wouldn’t that be nice?

Here are Billy and Katie. Maybe Katie will go to the Women’s College World Series which is held in Oklahoma City. We almost went to Oklahoma City instead of Omaha last weekend.

This great shot was taken by a friend. My little slugger.

Fritz loves to pitch. He’s not bad either. He actually can throw strikes, much of the time.

This picture is for my mother-in-law. My husband’s side of the family has a genetic defect that has them all stick out their tongue when they’re concentrating. I do not do this. My husband does it. All my kids do it. Bizarre.

Baseball is over. Piano is over. I opted to wait until we move to do swimming lessons. We finished the California Achievement Tests today (!!!!!). We seem to have all sorts of appointments for doctors, dentists and orthodontists over the next week or so, but that’s it. Two weeks from tomorrow, I’ll be homeless again.
05.23.08
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Daughters

Tomorrow, the boys are going to the national cemetery to place flags at the headstones. I spoke with the kids about honoring the dead, and, in particular, for remembering those who fought and died for our freedoms.
As we drove by the cemetery, the kids noticed that some graves had flowers.
“Mommy, we’ll put pretty flowers on your grave,” said Jenny.
“What kind of flowers do you like best?” Katie wanted to know.
“Whatever you see that is prettiest,” I told her.
It really won’t matter to me. I’m just happy that their little hearts are already committed to making my final resting spot beautiful.
05.20.08
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Time with Daddy

Here on post, the Knights of Columbus host three wonderful events: a father-son pancake breakfast in the fall, a mother-son pancake breakfast around Mother’s Day, and, their most popular event, a father-daughter banquet in the spring. (Another group sponsors a mother-daughter tea in the spring.)

Bill took Katie and Jenny to the formal event that included dinner and dancing. He wrote about their evening here. This photo came in the mail a few days ago, and I just noticed that he had scanned it in.
Dancing with Jenny.
It’s a good thing he didn’t have Mary along too!
04.25.08
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Katie at Bat

Billy and Katie are on the same coach-pitch baseball team: the Orange Dragons. Their first game was yesterday evening. Billy is a solid player and has last year’s machine pitch experience to build upon. Plus boys naturally like to play with balls and bats. I’m not being sexist; this is merely based on observing two girls with older brothers who will set up “house” or “school” with each other and friends and their stuffed animals and dolls in the same yard where the boys are assembled wearing their favorite team colors as they try to decide whether the Cincinnati Marlins will play the Washington Braves or the Atlanta Nationals.

Peter, who is not yet three, has played more ball than my girls.

So, I was concerned that Katie would be like most girls I see who play ball and are clearly one of the weakest members. It’s not that I want her to be a great player. But I want her to have fun. And she won’t have any fun if she can’t hit the ball. And one bad season could make her unwilling to try again the following year.

Happily, I watched her get a hit each of the three times she batted. She was forced out at third one time, but she was able to score the other two times. Good for her! She was clearly pleased with her ability.

Now I just need to work on her fielding ability.

What remains to be seen is if her enthusiasm continues post-season. But I’m willing to bet that the dolls and the tea sets will once again dominate her time come June.

04.22.08
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The art of digital photography

The best thing about digital photography is the ability to take lots and lots of pictures and merely delete the bad ones. If you have kids who want to express themselves through this medium, you won’t have to pay a ton of money to discover two dozen blurry shots of stuffed animals.

This is Pink Puppy. I fear Pink Puppy will one day accompany a certain daughter on her honeymoon.

Every so often, a kid takes a shot that makes me laugh. I’m pretty sure Jenny is the photographer here. I think kids will ham it up differently for each other than for mom.

Love the eyes.

So what if I have to download 30 or 40 pictures…of pictures…

…to get to the one good one? It’s worth the time.
Aloha!
02.15.08
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It’s not the screaming I mind, it’s the pain

I brushed and combed Katie’s hair this morning. As usual, I was as gentle as I could be. As usual, she cried crocodile tears and screamed and whimpered and yelped her way through the ordeal. I know I was the exact same way when I was her age, and I remind myself of that the entire time I brush her hair. It’s the only thing that keeps me from being completely disgusted by her behavior.

This evening, after dinner, she asked me, “Mommy, when you had Mary, did you scream the way I did this morning when you brushed my hair?”

“When I had Mary it hurt much worse than having your hair brushed. I screamed much more than that.”

“Oh. Then I’m not having children because I don’t like to scream.”

This is fine for now. Should she get married, though, I’ll be sure to explain everything she needs to know about epidurals.

01.12.08
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Crop that

If I could take a snapshot of my homeschool morning, it would have been the moment that I squatted in front of Katie eyeball to eyeball and listened to her recite “Foreign Lands” by Robert Louis Stevenson, gently correcting her here or prompting her there as she worked her way through the whole thing in her perky, smiley, cute way.

Of course, that photo would have been cropped.

Perhaps I could selectively expand the frame to include Jenny in the next room engaged in a solitary game of her own design or the baby sleeping peacefully in her bassinet upstairs. If I smudge away the uncleared dishes, the clutter, and the mud on the floor, it would still be a lovely shot.

Omitted from view, or at least from hearing, would be the two older boys, distracted from their assigned tasks and engaged in a very loud discussion right behind my head about some extremely important topic like the significance of the Passover meal and the symbolism in the parting of the Red Sea, or, perhaps, noted geographical features of the Southwestern US, or, possibly, the wisdom of bringing a light saber to a blaster fight.

But definitely, definitely, I would need to photoshop a smile on Petey’s face as he perched on my knee complaining wretchedly about some thing, some anything, that is going horribly awry in his two-and-a-half-will-I make-it-to-three year old life.

Somehow, though, Katie and I managed to tune all that out for one minute as she chirped out her poem and I listened intently, then smiled, and said, “good job,” and moved on to see if there was anything that could be done to please the toddler.

This is “how I do it.” One minute at a time.

10.28.07
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Amateur photography

I’m turning on comment moderation until the spammers get tired of me deleting them and find someone else to annoy.

My 3 year old neighbor “borrowed” his mother’s camera and got this shot of Katie. Pretty good, I think. Of course, he has an advantage in perspective, being only 3 1/2 feet tall.
08.23.07
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Pool School

Hooray! Today is the last day of swimming lessons. I look forward to doing school in the mornings and having my afternoons free to do really important things.

Like nap.

I have been hauling books to the pool and having the kids do some work while they waited for their siblings to take their lesson. The young ladies who run the desk have been learning about Lief Erikson and getting a review on addition and subtraction. The other moms with tots running around and their older children safe in classrooms likely think I am nuts. But they smile friendly smiles, so it doesn’t matter.

Billy’s lesson ends just before 11 am when lap swimming begins, so often various adults begin filtering in and sign in at the desk right where we sit. The other day, I read an Aesop Fable to Katie called The Hares and The Frogs. She randomly picked this story out of our Fable book, and I had no idea what it was about. After I read it, she drew a picture in her blank book to go with the story, and then her assignment was to retell the story to me, and I would write down what she said on the page with her illustration.

Just when we got to the retelling part, an older man came in to do lap swimming. There was no attendant at the desk right then – just a sign that said she’d be back in 5 minutes. So he waited. And he listened to Katie tell me this story:

All the hares think all the other animals are their enemies. If they all run away, they will drown themselves. All the hares went to the pond. They saw frogs jumping in like they were drowning themselves. One of the hares said, “Stop! It doesn’t matter whoever you are. Don’t drown yourself. Somebody has it worse.”

Taken completely out of context, I really wonder what that man thought about my 6 year old’s story. Yes, sir, for school today our first graders will be discussing the pros and cons of suicide…