Rock and roll

DJ had a wiggly tooth causing him all kinds of angst last week. It finally fell out while he was rocking out to his favorite song, "Livin' on a Prayer." He ran in holding it and told me he "danced his tooth out."

Catchin' some Zs Part 2

Our kids are never cuter than when they're sleeping, but they sure sleep in weird ways sometimes. Vacation, in particular, took a lot out of them.

The Wernet family keeps it cool (but not really)

We made it home from another fun 8-day summer trip. I'm not 100% sure if we survived or thrived, but we're all home in one piece and we didn't have to tow the van for once, so we know it was pretty successful! Now I'm on to vacation laundry (less of it, but way dirtier) and all the tasks that seem to have muscle memory attached. For example, emptying water out of the open bag of baby carrots and left over cheese sticks from the melted ice in the cooler carries some serious déjà vécu.

This year we spent most of the week at Aunt Pam's on Gull Lake then headed up north to my Dad's. The word of the week was HOT. IT WAS VERY HOT. Like, sunny and 90s every day. There was no air conditioning. It rained about five minutes total all week. But we could still stay cool Pure Michigan style--wet. We only went inside to sleep and (for me, anyway) prepare food.

Kevin and I later wondered how we could be so tired when we "didn't do anything." No day trips, no parks, no events except the 4th of July parade. Then again, we never really stopped doing--swimming, kayaking, paddle boarding, tubing, playing with neighbors, taking walks/bike rides, building campfires, playing in the sand (DJ and Eddie), avoiding the sand altogether (Mary Cate), playing in the tree fort, monitoring sparklers and poppers. It was an action-packed week even without any structure whatsoever. The last night, we didn't eat dinner until 9:00. The kids were sleeping until 10:00 in the morning. Such is vacation, I suppose.

I asked everyone what their favorite part of the trip was and here's what they had to say:

• Annie - Water
• Nellie - The parade
• DJ - Blowing bubblegum bubbles
• Eddie - Climbing ladders [on bunk beds and the tree fort]
• Mary Cate - She didn't exactly say, but I'd guess something where she wasn't touching water or sand. She seemed pretty excited about taking a boat ride to get ice cream!
• Kevin - Fixing my dad's dock and lawnmower
• Me - Little things, like watching DJ carefully walking Mary down the stairs, taking a walk with Eddie at dusk while he rode his bike barefoot wearing nothing but a Spiderman t-shirt and boxers, and singing songs around the campfire while Annie played ukulele.

And here are some of my favorite pictures:

Hammocking

Trampolining

Paddle boarding

Parading

Chilling

Tenting

Tubing

The neighbors invited the girls to join them on their giant inflatable party unicorn.
They left with flamingo drink holders as a party favor...

Road tripping

Fishing

Eddie, age 4

Strawberry picking

I really wish I could have recorded this interview to capture his voice and many, many stories along the way. Eddie is so fun and imaginative--he's often in his own world of play and entertains himself (and Mary) better than any of the other kids. He's moved on from playing trains ALL the time to being a superhero or a polar bear or a police officer or whatever the cool thing is that day. He really likes Spiderman. We really like Eddie!

How do you feel about being four?  

Snuggly.

What kinds of new things do four-year-olds do?   
Wipe themselves when they go potty, open presents, clean up their toys and clean up someone else's toys but not all of them. And if a kid has to clean up one more of his toys then his mom says to him, "you can leave that out if you want to," and he just leaves it out. Making forts. DJ and me have a fort in the echo room!

What are you most excited about for the next year?
Going to Aunt Pam's house, getting a gun that makes sounds for my birthday, going to preschool!

Who are your best friends?

Annie and Mary and DJ and Nellie.

Who are your favorite people to play with?
Otto, DJ, Nellie too, and Annie, and kind of Mary.

What kinds of things are you good at?

Going on real treadmills, working on real computers, riding bikes, doing new tricks on the swingset.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
A dad. And Mary wants to be me when she grows up!

Why do you want to be a dad?
Because, um, I want to work on a real computer.

What’s your favorite song?   
Like a Spiderman song or the song from Racing Thomas where he's sad and painty.

What's your favorite food?
Strawberries and bananas. Mac and cheese, I love mac and cheese!

Favorite movie?
Star Wars, Avengers, and I think those are all of the movies I like. Oh wait, we do have Avengers movies!

Favorite book?   

[Surprise face.] Do you know why I look like this? Because there's a bench at the library and it has Avengers books on it. But there was no Spiderman on it. Just Antman, Captain America... I wish that Avengers book was at our house.

Favorite color?   
Green.

Favorite place to be?

The library and Papa John's house too, and Papa Mike's house because it has a ladder.

What are your favorite things to do?   
Playing tag and hide-and-seek.

What is your favorite present that you received?
My Ninja Turtle bike.

Is there anything else you want us to know about you?   
No thanks.

Eddie loves to take videos of himself, which I find later and are often hilarious. Here's an interesting one. "Goo goo, ga ga! I'm a baby, and I'm going to destroy you. Bye!"

Reasons to go strawberry picking

I had to think hard about this after I woke up Thursday--the 90 degree day we planned to go to the strawberry farm. In addition to the heat, mud, and spiders, there are so many things that can go wrong when you have a specific task ahead of you in public with five kids plus one niece. (For example, we could follow the elderly farm owner about 200 yards across the field and as he gives us directions I might notice Eddie wasn't there. But luckily maybe he'd dressed himself in a bright green shirt and I could just barely see him a few feet from where we started, calmly picking berries with another family. That's actually what happened.)

So here's a pep talk for my future June self with the top five reasons to just do it.

1) It's so wholesome and old-timey. I'm pretty sure that's why most people go, from what I saw. There was one family with matching straw hats looking like they walked out of a magazine. We didn't look like that. We were a hot, sweaty, sticky mess. But we left happy and loaded with strawberries.

Post-picking slushies. They deserved it!

2) It reminds you of being a kid when every summer, your mom would make you go strawberry picking on Wacousta Road. And there was nothing better than a sun-warmed Michigan strawberry right off the plant.


3) I'm Dutch. Sixteen cups of the best-ever freezer jam, 2.5 gallons of frozen strawberries for smoothies, strawberry shortcake, and all-you-can-eat strawberries for 24 hours x 7 people for $28 in berries is worth it.

The haul.

4) It's a good reminder that although 98.3% of the things I need to do in like are made more complicated and less efficient, there are things that are easier with six kids and strawberry picking is one of them. The child who likes to direct things can direct to her heart's content. There's a built-in snack. And when one kids decides to stay back and hang out with strangers, you can send a big one to retrieve him. Many hands make light work, they say, and occasionally it's true.

5) You get to hear Mary Cate say, "strawbeedies." It's really cute.

On the first day of summer vacation

It sort of feels like this summer picked right up where last summer left off. Here are just a few of the things we did, many before 9:00 a.m.

• Learned to program Eddie's new robot mouse and designed popsicle stick mazes for him to go through.
• Built a million things out of Magformers.
• Colored pictures.
• Mediated no fewer than 50 silly arguments as the kids figured out how to spend a whole day at home together.
• Played with the PJ Masks figurines. Pretended we were PJ Masks characters and fought crime in the nighttime.
• Played on the swingsets for ages.
• Had a Nerf gun fight.
• Made breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, made snacks, cleaned the kitchen, made lunch, cleaned the kitchen. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen.
• Tackled the laundry mountain in our closet.
• Took a walk/bike ride.
• Went to the resale shop, the doctors office to pick up immunization records, and Meijer--gloriously ALONE because the girls stayed with the little kids while they rested.
• Had a water balloon fight.
• Played catch and packed up the softball and baseball gear, not to be put away again until late July.
• Went to the girls' first softball practice and played at the school playground..
• Went for another walk. By the end of the day, I was tired in a completely different way than last-week-of-school tired. I walked upward of 21,500 steps.

[Somehow, the kids still managed to watch too much TV, so Day 2 included making their summer want-to-do lists and engaging in conversation about reasonable screen limits.]

Thus began the Wernets' summer break, bringing with it a steady decline into feral living in which lake swimming and running through the sprinkler count as bathing, bug spray and sunscreen run in our veins, and Annie basically becomes nocturnal.

DJ's maze. He figured out how to code the mouse faster than I did!

Annie's creation, obviously.

Catboy crashed while I made dinner.

A new playground for us!

Mary's picture. Thankful I dug through the marker drawer to find the washable ones.

Saturday = Chores

Me, after lunch: Way to go, guys! You worked hard and now you get the rest of the day to play and relax.

DJ: And you can sit on the toilet without getting your booty dirty!

Truth.

[He was on toilet duty.]