I keep wanting to write in this blog like it is journal, forgetting that the whole world could delve into my thoughts if they wanted...
Another week! I just read a very interesting book that John found at the dump (a great red neck place to shop!). It is a fictional book written in the sixties based on the way Denmark handled WWII, particularly the Nazi attack on Danish Jews. I lent it to my father-in-law, who is Danish, to read otherwise I would post the title and author (of course, I forget :) but the book is well worth the read. I knew so little about any of the more intimate realities of the war for the Danes and I found the book very interesting. They managed to get most of the Danish Jews out of Denmark to safety in Sweden before the Germans could round them up and send them to concentration camps. And the Danish Red Cross kept such a close eye on the Danish Jews who were found and sent away to concentration camps that most of them survived. There was no looting of any of the Jews homes or possessions. In fact, the government took car of their homes, sometimes even their pets and their plants! It is really an incredible story and it made me wonder what it was about their culture that guided them to act in such a way? The book was fairly horrible in it's realities but the beauty of almost a whole culture coming together to protect people they considered to be Danes, just the same as they were and worth risking their own lives for out weighs the awful descriptions.
On a family note, we are getting some answers about Jacob's continuous coughing....I took him to the hospital yesterday and they outfitted him with puffers and are refering us to the pediatric athsma clinic. And I wondered....why did I avoid this? I think, to be brutally honest, I didn't want Jacob to be labelled as someone with asthma because it may hold him back unneccessarily. Kind of terrible... Today, he was almost completely over his cough! He has never gotten over it this quickly before. So, on the athsma journey we go! Thankfully Uncle Kris is going to be a great role model for him as someone with athsma and allergies who hasn't let it hold him back! Also, Mikaela performed in her school musical this week at horizon stage. I'll try to post a little video for Grandma if I can make it work!

During this blustery spring evening I am sitting here with my tea in a quiet house pondering all the thoughts and activities that have happened in the last few days. The blizzard outside makes me think of the storms in "The Little House on the Prairie" books where the wind is blowing the snow so thickly and wildly that you can't see two feet in front of you! But the lovely drops of moisture on my windows fill me with joy as that means that the extremely thirsty ground is finally getting some relief. Though it is hard to believe that this morning it was beautiful, sunny and warm!
We celebrated Easter this year in a wonderfully low key way. We had a nice meal together on Good Friday and than on Sunday we had a fire and a wiener roast outside for lunch. We hid 7 little Reese's pieces Easter bunnies for each kid down by the trampoline. It was just enough of a treat that they were satisfied but not too much that the candy lasts until the next holiday!
Another very exciting event in the life of Jacob was his decision to purchase a light sabre with some of Grandma's Christmas money. After several different trips to different stores and some studious research, he decided on a blue one that made all the authentic sounds (with batteries :). Low and behold, John managed to fix the old light sabre we had bought at a garage sale last year by rewiring it and so now we have two working light sabres! Thus, many light sabre battles have ensued in the past few days and I'm finding it to be quite a humane weapon as it keeps the kids relatively far from one another and they don't seem to hurt each much! Bonus! Jacob was quite funny when he told John during one of their epic battles,"DAD, it is really RUDE to cut off some one's head!" I agree, extremely rude. Jacob looked pretty cute on Sunday and I wanted to take a picture....but I didn't :( He decided he wanted to wear his white button down shirt with his tie, his black jeans, and his spiderman runners! And mom forgot to comb his hair.... so there he was in all his finery with his hair sticking up in the back of his head! Oh well.
This week I spent Wednesday making a meal for a family from our school who just lost their baby. It has been kind of strange and sad because there were three of us moms pregnant in the school and the other two have both lost their babies, one at 19 weeks gestation and the other at six months. I am the only one still pregnant. And every time I see them I think of how hard it must be for them to see me still pregnant and how hard it will be to see me with the baby, if all goes well. The mom that I brought the meal to showed me some pictures of their little boy. He was so incredibly tiny and yet perfect. His tiny little head with a little wisp of hair, his fingers with their little fingernails....The kids have had a lot of questions about why the baby died and if that could happen to our baby so you can tell that they are thinking about it.
Mikaela has her school musical performance next week so I got to be part of making the costumes and the practicing today during my teaching day! It is really neat to hear her singing the songs around the house getting all excited about performing. It reminds me of the excitement that being part of musicals always gave me as a kid....And it is cool to hear from other parents how beautiful her voice is and how good she is at remembering the words and actions to the songs! And I am just glad to see that her memory works for something.....certainly not spelling or grammar. But hey, if I put the spelling and the grammar to music, maybe she would remember it!
She has been doing remarkably well with our first sojourn into journalism for language arts. She wrote an article in the third person about being scratched by the cat last week and she really enjoyed it! I was thinking afterwards that journalism would be a career that would really suit her extroverted, curious personality.
Who knows?

After an eventful week, we are having a blissfully uneventful weekend. Just working on the house, kids playing and fighting in turns....church yesterday and tommorrow....nice and quiet. I've needed this, a chance to regroup after a hard week.
A highlight was I took Mikaela and Jacob to Beaners this week for the first time to get their hair cut. I have been hearing about it for a while from many other moms and I've been fighting going there becuase I didn't want to "cave"! I mean, what is wrong with the 10$ cut at the mall? But I finally took them becuase Jacob wants to grow his hair to his shoulders and it really needed cleaning up so that it can grow that long somewhat nicely. And Mikaela hasn't got her hair cut since she cut it herself when she was 3 or 4. They loved their hair cutting experience! They got to pick a vehicle to sit in while they got their hair cut and they watched "The princess and the frog" while getting it cut. And Mikaela got glitter in her hair! Her smile almost stretched off her face!

On Wednesday Mikaela had an experince that made her decide that she definitely DOES NOT want a dog! One of our neighbors dogs, a black lab, got out and came up to our place while the kids were outside playing. Mikaela was worried about the cats because she knew that they hate dogs. So she went to get one and I went to pick up the other. Just as she picked up Catty, the dog ran towards her and Catty freaked out and scatched her face trying to get away. It was very scary for her and one of the scratches was deep enough to make me wonder if it would need stiches or not. We were able to see a doctor in Onoway (on his last day before he retires:( ) and he cleaned it and put steri-stips on it instead and it seems to be healing pretty well. But she was very self concious about it thinking it made her look like she had a white mustache and everyone would laugh at her. Traumatic day for her and I, though for different reasons.
Last night we decided to have a special dinner for Easter complete with some decaf coffee for Mikaela with whipping cream in it! Her excitement knew no bounds! She got to drink "real" coffee!