Sweet Oskar

That is my wonderful son, Oskar.  Doesn't he look like a sweet, thoughtful, considerate child?  He definitely is. 

The other day he was talking to me about how much he wishes he could spend more time with his Dad.  I know it's a little hard for the kids to understand - now that Dwight works from home - that he's still not really available during work hours.  So I explained to him that Daddy has to work and that's how we earn money to pay for our house and food and everything else that we need.

Oskar's reply, "But how come you can't be the one to work?"

I take back that comment about him being a sweet boy.

Games to Recommend

We are a game playing family. Before kids, Dwight and I enjoyed playing games - particularly with his family. We would play card games (Oh Shucks, Dirty 13, Rook, et cetera) and board games(Acquire, Carcassone, Settlers of Catan, Balderdash).  It was definitely a favorite pastime when we all got together. But then we got busy (hello!...four children!) \and we seemed to forget about games for a while. 

In the last few years we've gotten back into it though. And it's fun that our kids can play games with us now.  Our game of the moment is "Dominion".  We have three different sets.  Oskar and Annika can both play Dominion...one of them is more competitive than the other but I'm not naming any names.  Some other adult favorites are "Citadels" and for a while we were into "Santiago".  I think those are both a little too political for the kids.  Sometimes my feelings get hurt so I'm pretty sure they'd have a tough time if an unlucky streak hit them.  Plus you need to have some level of poker face for Citadels. We have a couple of highly rated games waiting to try but we never get around to them since we're all still perfectly happy to play these other ones.

Another good game for the kids is "Ticket to Ride".

This weekend we had many rousing games of Dominion with my sister-in-law and father-in-law.

Dominion Cards

Everyone loves the Noble Brigand...not

Playing Citadels with Woodys

And, wandering off on a tangent but can I just mention that my super observant son noticed that in the edge of the cards there is an ever-so-small symbol to denote which set the cards come from.  Uh, yeah, none of us adults had ever noticed that.  He gives me hope for the future of the Engen line. (Hopefully the future has  need for people who are good at noticing tiny little symbols in the corner of cards.)

The Flu

My kids are each taking a turn getting sick, it seems.  It's very bizarre because they're literally going down one-by-one, one after the other.  It started with Kiersten.  It seemed we had finally gotten through the HSP fiasco when one day she announced that she was looking for her dad.  I told her that he'd gone off to play basketball and she said, "Oh, I wanted to see if he would take a nap with me."

First of all that made me laugh.  Dwight definitely has a reputation for sleep in our family.  But after the initial chuckle, I was slightly alarmed that she *wanted* to sleep in the middle of the afternoon.  I offered to let her lie down in my bed while I folded laundry and before I knew it, she was out like a light...for several hours.  More alarm bells were going off.  For the next several days she was a mess.  Her eyes were so blood shot and watery. She had a high fever. I felt miserable just looking at her so I can only imagine how she felt.  But she eventually got over it. When she was still coughing a few days later, I got nervous about the HSP returning so I took her to the doctor,  She shared my speculation that Kiersten had had the flu. 

A few days later, I picked Oskar up from an activity and was surprised to hear that he'd fallen asleep in the middle of it.  I got him home, took his temperature and sure enough - a fever.  He followed Kiersten's pattern almost exactly. I can just copy and paste from Wikipedia's influenza entry for their symptoms, "The most common symptoms are chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, headache (often severe), coughing, weakness/fatigue and general discomfort."  With an apparent flu epidemic sweeping the nation at the moment, it seems a pretty safe bet that they had the flu. 

Another week passes and then Annika comes home, says she doesn't feel well and falls asleep for several hours.  Well now I know the drill. 

Of course now I can't help but wonder if Kardynn will come home after school one day next week and fall asleep for several hours.  Although, I know she fell asleep once for several hours during the holidays so I'm hoping maybe she already had her run-in with the flu and it just didn't hit her as hard as it hit the others.

Hopefully Dwight and I continue to evade this!

Anyway, when the bug hits, they all end up missing several days of school.  When they're sick I don't mind if they sit around and watch TV or play on their laptops.  Kiersten has really gotten into e-mail.  The kids only have a handful of people that they e-mail but Kiersten has been sending those few people a lot of messages in the last few weeks.

One of her favorite e-mail recipients is my Mom.  She's always asking my mom to send her jokes.  Although I don't think my mom minds - particularly when she's traveling. (Mom frequently points out that only one of her four children is good about keeping in touch...and no, that child is not me.)


Mom actually travels a lot and most of her travels are international.  Unfortunately this means her laptop ends up in some sketchy places...like Nigeria.  (It's no coincidence that those "send-me-your-bank-account-number e-mails" are often called "Nigerian e-mail scams".)  Numerous times she's tried to legitimately connect to sites and had them lock her account because they could see she was trying to connect from Nigeria. Nigeria is a seriously hostile environment for your computer. And it would seem that she did indeed get her e-mail hacked the last time she was there because suddenly my kids are getting fake e-mails from her. 

Up until now, we've not had to worry too much about their e-mail accounts because of the small number of people that they exchange e-mails with.  But these spam e-mails made me realize that I needed to have a conversation with the kids and explain about some of the perils of the Internet - specifically viruses.  Because, while I'm jaded and wary, I was certain that my sweet, innocent children would click on any links that came from their grandmother. 

I knew the message had gotten through when earlier this week Kiersten informed me that she'd gotten a flu message from Grandma.

The Bed Fairy

We had a very nice New Year's surprise from Annika.  She had made everyone's beds and left one of these little notes on them. 





(Do not judge us for the fact that the bed wasn't already made.  Or at least don't judge ME.  You can judge Dwight since he's always the last one out of bed.)

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Well, this holiday season is one we're not likely to forget.

This year we decided to stretch the holidays a bit and for the last few days before Christmas, we let the kids open one gift every day. December 23 was one such day. Kardynn picked out a gift from Annika.

She was delighted to unwrap a Hello Kitty makeup/toiletry kit. The girls immediately started to play with it but then they moved on to other things.  They were using post-its and making "beards" and taking turns pretending to be Santa.  We watched several performances of Santa interacting with little girls.  (In this case the "little girl" is bigger than Santa.)

They had also opened a marble run present so everyone took a turn making a structure.

Eventually we encouraged the kids to take showers.  But after a while, Dwight and I realized that it had been quiet for too long.  I went off to investigate and found two little girls locked in the kids' bathroom - never a good sign.

They had taken the three bottles of Hello Kitty nail polish and decided to "highlight" Kardynn's hair.  I only took one photo before Dwight suggested that I was giving the wrong message by taking photos.  So I have no pictures of the ensuing buzz cuts...which probably would have been tricky anyway since I became somewhat emotional watching their beautiful tresses falling to the floor.  But I'm getting ahead of myself, what you can't see here are the additional "highlights" on the sides, not to mention the additional mess of nail polish that was unveiled when we removed the bun.  It was definitely impressive.  That one blue streak, for example, went the entire length of her hair.

 

I spent quite a bit of time reading online about how to get nail polish out of hair and most of the suggestions were for nail polish remover (which I did NOT want to put on my baby's sensitive scalp).  Dwight tried to get it off with water but that didn't do much on the thick glob of nail polish.  We thought about just leaving it, and letting her have multi-colored hair, but that didn't seem like a good idea either.  So eventually we decided to go with the second most popular suggestion on the Internet - cut off the hair.  We had warned Annika that if Kardynn's hair ended up having to be cut off, we would cut off her hair as well.  Initially she was enthusiastic about the idea but when she saw my reaction, as it was happening, she started to get second thoughts.  I'll admit, it didn't really seem like *that* big of a deal until I saw the hair falling to the floor and then it seemed like the worst idea we'd ever had. 

But, hey, it's just hair.  It will grow back.  And on the bright side, I don't think we have to worry about these two putting nail polish in their hair ever again.  Let me tell you that seeing those two girls with their bald heads makes me incredibly grateful for two healthy - albeit mischievous - little girls.