The Kirkmans: Spiders, peppers, things breaking, and more

Caleb loves Malachi

Malachi at one month

Malachi in Daddy's ACUs

The past two weeks have just flown by in a blur of changing diapers, bathing kids, feeding baby, and other kids, trying in vain to sleep, and cooking, cleaning, and helping kids with homework. I asked the kids to help me remember what happened the past two weeks, and this is what we came up with. When Grandma Stevens was here we found a huge spider, tarantula sized (it scared everybody), and Grandma killed it! Then I called and got pest control to come out a spray for spiders. On Saturday, the 24th, we went to pick up our bountiful basket, but I ended up going to the wrong site, and the site I had clicked on online was about an hour away, so I thought I was going to lose my basket. We headed to the Golden Corral for Betsy's birthday breakfast. As soon as we got there, the bountiful basket people called and said they would wait for me to come get the basket, so I dropped off Grandma and all the kids, but Malachi, and went and picked up the basket. I got back to Golden Corral to pick them up, and Samuel and Joseph came running out. Joseph tells me that Samuel ate, 2 helpings of pudding, 2 pieces of cake, and had been drinking from the chocolate fountain!!! I looked at Samuel and sure enough he had chocolate all over his face and shirt. I could tell that Samuel was starting to go a little crazy from the sugar, so we got everyone in the car, and drove home, and Samuel took a nap. The nap helped, but Samuel still had a rough day, but we made it through. We went to the America the Beautiful park hoping to play in the splash pad area, but the water wasn't on. The kids had a picnic lunch and playing a little bit, but it was quite hot, and with no water to play with, went back home. Grandma and I cut up a bunch of hatch chili peppers we got in our basket, and they were really strong. We both were coughing, and hands tingling and burning, and everything we touched on our face started burning for a long time, it took two days for the sensations to finally stop. I learned to wear gloves the next time I'm cutting up peppers. I threw away the peppers we cut up, I thought something was wrong with them.
I made it through our first Sunday with no Grandmas with no major incidents. We didn't arrive early enough to sit in the soft benches, and Samuel refused to sit in the hard chairs, so we sat on the couch in the foyer. During sacrament meeting I gave Caleb and Samuel each half a granola bar. Caleb said he wanted the whole granola bar, and Austin said "you're too little to have a whole granola bar". Caleb said "I'm not little, your CRAZY" everyone laughed and Austin said "Mom, you should put that on your blog", Caleb said, "I'm not a blog, you're funny." Then Caleb took off his shirt and ran around the foyer. Silly boy.
This week was the week for things to break. The couch legs broke off, two bikes broke, pieces of the refrigerator kept falling off, the shoe tree fell and broke twice, and the girl's bunk bed broke. I also put together my new stroller, well tried, some of the screws won't fit through the holes, and I can't figure out how to fix it yet. I was able to fix everything else, but the bunk bed was not safe anymore, all the welded parts started coming apart. (not good), Austin almost fell out of the bed once in her sleep, and Caleb fell off the ladder, when it came apart. I took the beds apart, and completely rearranged their room, to make everything fit. I had almost all the kids helping to lift and move stuff, but we finally finished.
We went on several "Caleb Hunts" this week. Caleb loves to sneak out of the house, with one of the other kids, and then go hide. When I discover he's missing, I call all the kids together, and usually a couple neighbor kids join us, and tell them we're going on a Caleb hunt. We all search for Caleb, and find him hiding in some random small space. He grins and tries to run and hide again as soon as we find him, but I take him inside and talk to him about only playing hide and go seek when we tell him it's time to play. Once he was in the neighbor's back yard, hiding behind a chair in the corner, another time he was hiding in the corner of another neighbor's front porch, another time he was in the garage.
My parents are paying to have someone help me clean my house once a week, until Travis comes home. The lady is awesome, she came on Tuesday, and cleaned from about 10-3, and did an amazing job. My house was so clean, the kids came home from school and kept running through the house, exclaiming how awesome it looked, and how clean their rooms were. Now obviously it didn't stay that clean, but it has been a lot easier to keep it fairly clean, and the kids did the chores on Saturday without any complaining (well except for a little complaining from Samuel and Joseph)
I started teaching piano lessons again this week, I have just three students right now, and maybe one more starting next week. It worked out really well, two of them are homeschooled, so they came while the older kids were at school. Caleb watched a movie, and I held Malachi while teaching.
My friend, Leslie and I took two boxes of tomatoes, and made a bunch of spaghetti sauce to freeze on Thursday, it was nice to talk to her for a while and get some more spaghetti sauce. We also went out to dinner the week before, while Travis' mom was here, and we had a great time laughing and talking.
I started doing some dancing on the Wii, and when I turned it on Caleb started singing "body rock" and dancing. He was pretty funny. There is a Justin Bieber song on there "Beauty and a Beat" and has the lyric "body rock" in it, and Caleb picked up on that. I lost my camera again, but as soon as I find it, I'm going to try to video tape him.
Friday night we went to a Deployed Spouses potluck dinner. The theme was "breakfast" so we brought crepes. They told us while we were there, that if our kids had to go to the bathroom, we needed to go with them, since a few weeks ago they had left it a mess. I realized how sleep deprived I am when, Samuel and his friend Leighton had to go to the bathroom, and I took them to the men's bathroom and then followed them in. There was another boy, probably about 10 years old, in there, and looked quite shocked to see me in there. The kids had a good time laughing at my blunder.
Caleb has gotten clingier and clingier, he won't go to childcare, and has a hard time with nursery, or being dropped off at anyone's house. I have free childcare hours, but I can't even use them, because Caleb freaks out if I try and take him there. He won't let anyone do anything for him except for me. He also started coughing yesterday, and got worse today, so we stayed home from church.
These are some pictures I took with my phone during the past month.