Maggie Lu is 7!

Maggie is seven.

She's in first grade now.  Mrs. Williams, her teacher followed her up to first grade.  Maggie likes her a whole bunch.  She likes to lead her class' morning meeting.  Give that girl a microphone and she'll use it.  Her teacher sent me a video of her singing Ke$ha while it was pick up time.  I've attached it below because it's amazing.

She's doing all the normal seven year old stuff...losing teeth, learning to ride her bike, learning to read.  She's a fan of Junie B. Jones.  I am too.  I'm hoping she'll like all the same books I did as a kid...Ramona and all things Judy Blume.  D'arcy wouldn't touch that stuff.

She's learning piano at home, and she's taking hip hop dance after school on Mondays.  And I'm finally sending her and Schroeder to swim lessons.  I'm dreaming of a summer where four out of five of my kids can swim confidently.

She hasn't been wearing her fake glasses as often, but now she needs the real thing.  She went into the appointment saying she wanted some kind of print on her frames, maybe leopard print.  She picked out tortoiseshell frames that look pretty close to leopard print.

She really loves some Ed Sheeran, particularly the song Castle on the Hill.  Her siblings hate it and let her know anytime it comes on.

She spends her time weaving potholders, dressing her American Girl, making rubber band bracelets, and drawing.  When I hand out chores, she specifically asks to organize something.  She told me that those kind of chores utilize her natural talents the best.  She'll organize cupboards, bookshelves, and art bins.  Her bed is always made.  She has started to sleep on top of the covers as to not disrupt the order she has created.

Maggie has been doing a lot of stomping this year.  Whenever she gets angry she lifts that foot up and slams it down on the floor.

I've been calling her my basic girl, but since I'm pretty basic myself, I mean it in the most endearing way.

Penelope is four.

Sometimes Penelope will ask me, "How old was I when I was a baby?"

She's not a baby anymore.  She's four.

She's way passed naps unless they are in the car

.  She washes her own hair.  She ditched her crib for bunk beds.  She successfully executed the role of flower girl.  Her hair has grown really long, and she's headed to preschool this fall.

She told me I could cancel preschool, though.  She is super skeptical of all new people, but I really think she'll enjoy it.

She has some favorite things.  Yogrit.  Her favorite food pronounced just so.

I sat down to write this, and Penelope came up to my desk and said, "Granola helps you with running.  And that's good because I'm trying to run as fast as a Cheetah.  That's why I like Cheetahs."

Yogrit and granola go well together.

She likes her bicycle dress and gold skirt.  She ALWAYS wears her red boots.  They turn a lot of heads and get lots of awes.  She decided Julian was her "best brother".  Schroeder seems unphased, but she plays minecraft with both of them.  She likes Coldplay and Moana and Hamilton.  She likes pink. She likes YouTube.

She watches these Baby Alive videos on YouTube.  She discovered she could turn water into juice by drawing with marker on a piece of paper and then putting the paper in the water.  Instant "orange", "mango", or "lime" juice!  Then the baby pees it out immediately.  She spent hours and hours doing this with her doll.

She has been asking for months for a Snackin' Baby Alive.  You can feed it playdoh snacks.  Then, a month before her birthday, she decided she would rather have LEGOs.  So that's what she got, and she spent her whole birthday building them.  She's my first girl who has really enjoyed LEGOs.

We had a little playdate party the morning of her birthday.  Some of her favorite friends came.  She received a beanie boo, which I've recently discovered our this generation's version of beanie babies.

When we went on vacation this summer, she asked me daily, "Mom, do you miss Georgie?  Because I miss Georgie."  Even if all her siblings are at school, she still has that dog.

Tyler & Kelsey's wedding story.

Schroe is eight!

Schroeder is eight.  Eight is great, fingers crossed.

His birthday always falls smack in the middle of spring break.  We've been out of town for his birthday the last two years.  It's been nice, this year, to be home to celebrate.  He asked for a couple of things.

First, he wanted a sleepover.  I said NO.

Then he asked for a Nerf gun battle with some of his friends.  I told him to pick 7-8 to invite.  We planned to have them over to a park, but it was raining.  The battle ended up being in our house, but I was smart and only planned the party to last two hours.

Besides the party, he asked for a watch and a Fitbit.  I was excited that he asked for something other than LEGOs, Pokemon cards, or a video game (although he did receive all of these from his friends).  My parents got him a Garmin Vivofit Jr. and now he is obsessed with counting his steps and timing every activity.  "Mom, we've been in Target for 12 minutes and 35 seconds.  How much longer is this going to take?"

He also wanted Stephen to take him to breakfast at Lincoln Pancake House.

This time last year, Schroeder's reading was just taking off.  He was finishing up a tough school year.  I'm not sure that Schroeder would reflect on it as a tough year, but it was tough for me.  And, although he was practically failing first grade, He had been invited to attend the district's high ability school.  For lots of reasons, we decided to keep him where he was.

His teacher this year has been so kind and patient.  She really sees humor and intelligence in him.  She has encouraged me so much, and Schroeder really digs her.  He isn't just reading, but really loving it.  At Christmas, he suggested I buy him anything by Arnold Lobel, the author of Frog and Toad books.  He is also a huge fan of the My Weird School Series.  The author, Dan Gutman just came to speak at their school.  He picked Alice in Wonderland off our bookshelf the other day, and asked me to buy Charlotte's Web for him a the book fair.  He said, "I love this movie so much, I want to discover the book." Now he's starting to help Maggie learn to read.

But he's still super impulsive.

His kindergarten teacher (who is now Maggie's teacher) found a photo of Schroe on her phone.  She had given him (and his sixth grade reading buddy) some flour and a tray to practice spelling out words.  She turned around a bit later to find them both laying on the ground pouring flour on themselves.  (These pants are navy not stone washed.)

And while he is learning self-control and self-management I'm guessing we'll have moments of ridiculousness like this in our future.  For example, I found a box of Tic Tacs he stole from Target under his pillow on his birthday.

I mentioned in his birthday post last year that his favorite game was chess, although I wasn't sure he actually knew how to play.  I thought maybe he was using pretend rules. Well, he does know.  He played his Uncle Alex at Christmas.  I'm not sure where he learned this.

Schroeder has always had this physical fearlessness.  We took him ice skating for the first time.  He wasn't tentative.  He just went for it.  He fell often, but he fell the way I would imagine a drunk person would, really loosey goosey.  And then he would jump up just as quick and skate on.  He was skating fast and whipping his snow hat around like a lasso.

He finally started to loose some of his baby teeth.  We had an appointment to have the four bottom center teeth pulled because two of the adult teeth were already popping through behind them. Two of them fell out before we had the appointment.  Somehow, this delayed development feels like a pattern for Schroe.

He joined Cub Scouts this year, and I think he looks pretty adorable in his uniform.  He hangs it on the post of his bed.  Stephen saw it on his bed one day and had this image of him preparing and wearing a military uniform.

He has become a big fan of sweaters and hugs recently.  His hair is impossible mostly because he could care less and I care too much but not enough to pay someone to cut it.

When he is stressed or sad, he cries.  And it is so tender and sweet and silent.  His words never betray him, but his tears do.  Julian gets frustrated with it because he doesn't react the same way.  Schroeder doesn't have a temper like Julian does.

Anyway.  I love him.  Plus here are some photos of him on his birthday.  He wanted you to see these Pokemon cards.

Is our house too small? (or is it really too big?)

My mother-in-law asked me a while ago if we planned to buy a larger house.  It was an innocent question.  We have five children who are getting bigger every year.   I felt instantly defensive, though. We already have a large house.  I spend SOOO much of my time maintaining it.  We have 2,504 square feet;  three bedrooms, three bathrooms, three living spaces, one dining room, and one kitchen.  That's eleven rooms.  Our whole family can be home, yet, relaxing in different spaces.  This is helpful to maintain sanity, but sometimes I think it helps me hide from my family.  (I'm kind of crappy at spending quality time with my people.)

I'm aware though, that our house has a lot of shared space, and very little private space.  Our kids have their own beds and their own drawers for clothes.  (Stephen and I also have our own sinks in our bathroom.) Otherwise, everything else is communal space.  I think our culture places a high value on individual, private space which we've kind of rejected.

Not only do I not want anything bigger, I dream of living in a smaller space.

When we were living in San Antonio, before we found out we were pregnant with Maggie Lu, we had plans to move to Portland, Oregon.  We've never been to Portland, but I spent a lot of time online getting familiar with the neighborhoods in Portland, looking for schools and houses.  Housing is expensive out there.  I started to comprehend that to afford a house in the city, we would probably need to purchase something with less than 1,200 square feet.

And I was kind of excited by the challenge.  I was dreaming of murphy beds and transforming spaces for different purposes.  I wanted to design rooms that could be used 24 hours a day.

We didn't move to Portland, though.  We found out that my sister was expecting triplets.  I was expecting Maggie unexpectedly, and we moved back to Indy to be close to family.  We wanted to live downtown, and we could afford more than 1,200 square feet in Indianapolis.  (We bought at the right time, though.  Prices for homes in downtown Indy have nearly doubled since we bought our house six years ago.)

Seven people and a dog live here.  If you divide 2,504 by 7, you arrive at 357 square feet per person.

In America today, the average square footage per person is nearly 1,000.  That's double what it was in the 70's.

So, basically, our house is on the small side considering how many people live here.  At least for the new American standard.

A while ago, I stumbled on the instagram account of our kids' principal.  She recently sold her home and moved to a condo downtown with her husband and two kids.  In her feed, she was sharing about the decision as a means to avoid spending loads of time working on house projects and maintenance.   I don't have a ton of social media envy, but I definitely had a moment of rethinking my whole life.  Why were we living in this big old house?  Yeah, we have a lot of kids.  Why did we have so many kids?

This January, Stephen took D'arcy to the Women's march.  He happened to meet up with some CFI families including the principal, and ended up visiting her condo for lunch.  Guess what I was doing?  Laying tile.  ALL DAY LONG.  I was doing a grueling (for me) home improvement project while he ate butternut squash soup at her maintenance free condo.

To answer my very loving mother-in-laws' innocent question, we have no plans to move to something bigger.  We really LOVE living downtown. We've put a lot of work into our home over the last couple of years to make it functional and beautiful (to us).  I think we would be hard pressed, anymore, to find anything either bigger (or smaller) in our preferred price range around here.  And, in my view, it doesn't make great financial sense to rent.  (We're actually not that far from owning this house outright.)

But, hey, Check out this guys' condo that he shares with his five kids.  http://5kids1condo.com/open-house-a-video-tour-of-the-condo/  This is kind of what (my) dreams are made of.