Ramblings: Awaking from a six month siesta. Parte Uno.

I'm sneaking back on here for a moment with a post of my intentions to pick up writing where I left off. Actually, that's too overwhelming since my last post was in MARCH and it is now OCTOBER. Then, I had a 5 month old baby. That round-faced, fat-rolled baby is now a chattering, hat-loving, still-chubby-but-slimming-down-by-the-day crawling machine.
Oh, and he'll be ONE in five days. I'd like to say that I've been keeping track of everything that's been going on in the last half of a year so I could put it on here eventually...but I didn't, so I probably won't. SUE ME.

My kids probably will sue me one day. The charge: Failure to accurately and appropriately document major life events during formative childhood years. GUILTY.

How abouts an abbreviated version---Come on, it's for the children.
March/May-ish
-We dragged the family down to Florida for Spring Break where our besties, the Kemps, met up and put up with our circus-of a family. We had a blast. Maddie zip lined and did a ropes course that was about three stories high without missing a beat. Alex got one flight up and almost wet himself. But eventually he manned up (after extreme taunting from Dad) and did a few high ones. Sorry, I only have video of it and my technology is uncooperative tonight.

-We contemplated building a house. Searched for land for many weeks trying to realize Jeremy's dream of putting all these dang boys to work on "some land" in order to keep them out of trouble. An aside: I feel the need to point out that Jeremy and his brother grew up on a HUGE piece of land, were required to do LOADS of work everyday to keep them busy, and STILL managed to get into more trouble and life-threatening situations than most people could dream of. Boys=trouble, land or no land.

 -Found some land and almost bought it. Then, a couple weeks later we accidentally found a house for sale that was enough house to house our giant brood. (Did you enjoy the usage of 'house' as both a noun and a verb? I thought so. You're welcome.)

-Jeremy, Trace, and I were able to travel to Washington to meet up with almost all of his siblings to celebrate the life of our little niece, Angelica , at her sweet funeral.  It was a gut-wrenching experience, but also a really special glimpse of how her short life here touched so many people.

-Bought aforementioned house, and spent June making some significant and insignificant changes--added a room, retiled, recarpeted, added cabinetry, repainted, etc.

-The twins turned five and begged me for a party at Chuck E. Cheese. I submitted and they, with about 12 of their friends, partied the afternoon away with that giant, creepy rat. The party ended with all of the parents lapsing into insanity at the ticket counter while the kids tried to decide what ridiculously worthless crud they wanted to exchange for their tickets.

June-ish
-I packed. Alot. And then packed some more. With five kids home all day "helping". I decided that for my sanity and the prospect of actually selling it, we would NOT list the house for sale until after we had moved out. Mostly. We left each room with furniture and stuff that wasn't absolutely necessary for us to take.
July
-We celebrated Maddie's 8th birthday by moving. Umm, did I mention that it was JULY in TEXAS when we moved? Basically, it was hotter than the devil's armpit. Alright, I'm just guessing on that one.  I have no actual, first-hand knowledge of sweaty satanic armpits--I'm just assuming it would be one of the sweatier body parts, of course excluding the hairy lower back/upper hiney portion because that is just disgusting to think about.
Maddie is still holding it over my head that she didn't get a birthday party. Uhh, didn't the slurpees I brought you guys that afternoon SCREAM par-tay? Probably not. They were melted into syrup before I got the car door open.

-We had Jeremy's family reunion in New Hampshire the week after we moved. It KILLED me to pack suitcases when my brain was in full-on UNPACK mode. I could barely stand leaving things so undone and disheveled, but we loaded up and flew the freakshow on a week-long journey to New England. That could and should be a whole post of it's own. Maybe it will...more to come on that.

This is what CRAZY on an airplane after four hours and no nap looks like:

-Things we discovered on that trip:
1) The only thing hotter than moving in Texas in July, is visiting an entire geographical region that doesn't (for the most part) have central air conditioning during a history-making HEAT WAVE. We spent an entire afternoon in the air-conditioned public library. All 20 of us.
2) Sleeping on the third floor of Jeremy's sister's house, even with 3 fans on us, was, according to Jeremy "hotter than when I lived in Tanzania." Trace's baby monitor read in the upper 90's at midnight.
Everyone had a great time, despite the melting of the majority of our brain cells, although I don't think it will be on anyone's list soon for future reunion destinations. At least not in the summertime. But it was almost worth it for the seafood...I had a to-die-for lobster roll right before this picture on the beach--which was taken right after Aidan threw a rock directly at Maddie's head while aiming for the waves. We couldn't figure out why she just started screaming.

3) My gallbladder hated me and decided to attack one night (for the first time ever) while we were staying in a Residence Inn in the middle of nowhere, NH. Luckily, there was a hospital within 15 minutes, they had GOOD drugs, and we were able to rouse a bleary, but willing, Uncle Peter to drive over and sit with our abandoned and unconscious brood at 3 in the morning.
4) When gallbladders hate you, they try to kill you. Like, really, really make you want to die. Curled up, vomiting from the pain, in full-body sweats, stabbing chest and back pain, want to die. I thought Jeremy might kill me on the way to the hospital because he was driving so fast.

Our tiny townhouse from 2000-2003

5) Alex either fibs or has a miraculous memory. After a day in Cambridge and at Harvard to see where we lived while Jeremy was in law school and where Alex was born, he claims to remember his days as a newborn in the tiny townhouse and fabulous snowball fights in snowstorms that neither Jeremy or I can recall.

Some of the Fielding grandkids with G & G--Boston

6) Boston was an awesome place to live and we didn't take full advantage of our three years there with only one kid. Alot easier to travel and explore in small numbers.
7) Oh, how a decade or so can change you.We had one of those surreal, out of body experiences standing in line at the Harvard Law bookstore waiting to buy about $4000 worth of t-shirts and junk with our 5 incredibly sleep-deprived, hot, hungry, and LOUD kids and thinking back to the eleven years before when we stood at the very same cash register and I was pregnant with Alex.  And we thought life was crazy then. HA!


Stay tuned for parte dos...