Me and Mine

Me

I prefer to stay nameless. I like my privacy and everyone else's so I won't use any names or post any pictures of people on my blog. I'm not even on Facebook. But I do love to write so I'll give you as entertaining a description as I can. I also love to sing, paint (and not just artistically, painting a house will do), talk, read, play games, and learn new things. I love to teach my children, I love homeschooling, I love curriculum, and I love to plan and make lists (although execution is not my forte). As far as my education goes, I got a BS in fisheries of all things because I like being on boats and I like fish but I also studied Greek (not the language, just Greek philosophy, literature, mythology, etc.) and economics in college. I was getting ready to go to law school just before I got married but decided against it since my husband had yet to start his college education. Now I don't really care about being a lawyer. I'd rather spend my time raising my children, looking forward to grandchildren, writing books, and learning to do all sorts of other things. My biggest problem is that I only have 24 hours in a day and only one body to do all the things I want to do and I just don't have the time or energy for it all. So I get frustrated and a little depressed sometimes. But that's o.k.

My husband

He's a bit of an absent-minded professor. He gets super focused on one thing and won't let it go until he either has it or he finishes it or he gets distracted enough to move on to something else. I learned early in our marriage (going on 18 years next month) that he tends to cycle through hobbies. For a while he'll be obsessed with cameras, then R.C. cars, then working on the house, then ham radios, then guns, then back to cameras and the cycle will start over. Since we've had kids, he doesn't have time for hobbies but he tries to squeeze them in whenever he gets the chance, much to my irritation. He's a good man though. He's loving and ingenious and handy. He loves his children, even if he forgets they're there sometimes, and he's a good provider. He did go out and buy a car while I sat in the hospital with our  5-hour-old sixth child. But it was a car I liked, and I had crashed his car twice so I was o.k. with that.

My children

Since I'm not using names, I'll just identify them by their age so you know what stage of development I'm dealing with as I describe their antics.

15yr. old girl-she's got all the attitude of a typical teenager, except, she's been that way since birth! She has a can't do attitude about anything she doesn't want to do and I often write "Extreme Obstinance" in the spot for medical conditions on permission forms I get for her. She's a talented artist, though, and is aspiring to become an animator and she loves animals. We have a lot of interests in common so regardless of her attitude, we get along rather well.

13yr. old boy-he's a chip off the old block. He's just like his father but more so because he has a lot more time to tinker and invent and research. He's been working towards going into Electrical Engineering since he could walk. Some of his first words were "clock" and "lightbulb." We own very few flashlights because he took them all apart when he was three. His knowledge of physics has surpassed mine by far (it wasn't very good in the first place) and he's always handy for fixing things or doing those jobs his father doesn't have time for.

11yr. old boy(going on 12 in two weeks)-he's our ultimate gamer. He loves video games, board games, party games, solitaire games, anything that takes strategy. He's our family chess master. Sometimes he sits for long periods of time, just thinking. When he was younger I would find him staring at a layout of army men. When I asked him what he was doing, he would say he was planning the battle. He loves to work on scratch and hopes to be a programmer like his father some day. He's also sweet, sensitive, social and working hard to become a good piano player too.

10yr. old boy-he's the practical one. He is a lot like me. He's thinking about his career with regard to how much money he can make and how much schooling it will take. At the moment he's settled on being a doctor but he's considered being a dentist and a business owner too. He's always the one who gets going on his schoolwork and finishes his chores early so he can have free time sooner. He loves his little sisters and gets along with all of his siblings better than the rest.

7 yr. old boy-he's our dramatic one. He loves to talk, philosophize, argue, and question everything and everybody. He's going to be our lawyer. He's very smart (heck, they're all smart) and thinks, talks, and moves at hummingbird speed. He has a hard time controlling his emotions but he's also more aware of other people's emotions and motives than most kids his age. He also plans to be president someday and with his tenacity, he might very well do it.

5 yr. old boy-he was once called the Destroyer but is now called the Creator. He waged war on us during his terrible-twos and horrible-threes and cost us thousands of dollars in damages and almost ruined us (thank heavens for sturdy, unflamable, cherry cabinets). We don't eat toast anymore because of him and all of our toilets have resealable rings in them (no more wax rings for us). We also don't have a functioning lawn mower (the 13yr. old tried to fix it but he was only 11 at the time and was unable to get all the dirt out of the gas tank) but this led to us talking my father-in-law, who lives with us, into buying a mowing-deck for his tractor. The Destroyer almost broke that too, a week after the fire. He now spends most of his time making things from whatever he can get his hands on, scrap paper, foil, plastic wrap, toilet paper tubes, egg cartons, scraps of wood, soup cans, etc. He's a great little kid, even though he still has the temper of a volcano.

3yr. old girl-she is our reward baby. We were done after our sixth child because I couldn't take the chaos anymore but a year later felt impressed that we needed to have two more babies and that at least one of them would be a girl. It seemed unlikely after I had five boys in a row and looking at my husband's family history, girls born from the male line in the family were extremely rare. But we decided to have faith in God and go for it and we got her. She was an angel baby, blond, blue-eyed, and happy as can be. She stayed that way until she hit two and then she experienced true sadness for the first time in her life and she didn't like it. Since then she's had her moments. She has a scream that resembles a super villain's sonic screech, it actually paralyzes us, but deep down, underneath that three-year-old temperament, she's a sunny-dispositioned sweetheart with a head of corn-silk ringlets that would shame Barbie.

18mo. old, a.k.a. the baby-she is our bonus child. She's that extra girl that helps even the scale around here. Eight kids was that tipping number that sent me over the edge so she's going to be our last. She takes after my father and has had a look of disinterested disapproval since she could open both her eyes and focus on you. But she has the cutest smile and plumpest cheeks when you can get on her good side. She's like the opposite to her closest big sis, with dark hair and a dark complexion, but she has a lot of hair like her big sis, and seems to be just as taken with Disney princesses. She's quite the little rascal and loves to eat, everything, foil, whole oranges, things still in their wrappers, dry rice (I found her shoveling little pudgy handfuls of brown rice kernels right out of the bag in the pantry today), paper, those little puff balls for crafts, just about anything. But she loves her big brothers and sisters and is so absolutely adorable.