It’s a balmy 45 degrees and rainy here in Lebanon, PA. If I’ve learned anything from my 18 months doing delivery jobs, it is that delivering in the rain is the worst. It can only be made bearable by choosing the right clothing and becoming one with your umbrella. So today I chose my old (literally, 3 pregnancies old) faithful maternity leggings, a cropped tee with the ironically embroidered word “staycation” on the breast, my hunter rain boots, and this horribly dumpy thrifted acrylic sweater that worked its way into my heart and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I realized the other day that the thing I love about this sweater is how dumpy it actually is. My lack of care or concern for this sweater makes it one of the most used pieces of clothing in my life. My friend Alena was cold the other weekend and i gave it to her to wear around the campfire. The next day it smelled like Alena and campfire. I loved it. Chris wears it when he’s going into the yard to start the grill. Last week he had it on while he changed the inner tube on his bicycle tire. Normally I’d be like “Hey Hun, you and I both know you’re gonna end up melting the sleeves off that sweater, could you wear something else…?”  But not this sweater. It has earned its keep as the resident dumpy acrylic sweater. I hate the pilling all over it, I hated a poorly positioned belt with loop holes and I finally cut that off.  I guess you could say, I love to hate this sweater. Long live the dumpy, faithful, overworked, overused, under appreciated articles in your wardrobe!
A word on cropped shirts.  You imagine they will work out well while you’re pregnant because, well, they’re cropped. The opposite is actually true. They just kind of sit weird on the belly and draw attention to the fact that you’re a pregnant lady trying to make a cropped t shirt work.  But today, it’s what’s happening. 

I’m 30 weeks pregnant with our 7th child. We always know we want babies. We marvel at people who can decide to end their baby making days. It’s never been a strength of ours…hence #7. People have told me they “just knew they were done…”. Well, I think I might be there. And I think Chris might also be there. It’s little things, like not being able to bend over comfortably, again. Not having tons of energy. Doing the math and realizing we’ll be “the old parents” at some sporting event or choral concert. It’s reconfiguring bedrooms, again. It’s the unsettled feeling of the imminent arrival of another person to be fully and completely and utterly bound to and responsible for for yet another 18 years. It’s having to dismiss the older kids to care for the much needier baby in the family. I like to think of our family as the greatest piece of art that Chris and I have or will ever collectively participate in creating, and THAT helps all these other emotional and physical hiccups pale in comparison to the greater picture. All that being said…

Here we are, week 8 or something of this slower pace of life. Quarantine would be wearing on us much harder if we weren’t enjoying the changing seasons and planting a garden and housing illegal chickens and generally making home our primary focus. Little known fact, I have spent the last 18 months digging myself out of credit card debt. How did it happen? Easy. Real easy. Christmases, small business ideas that didn’t pan out, home projects, NEW BABIES!, retail therapy, and a general mindset that “at some point I won’t be the one bound to the home and I’ll figure out how to make some cash and I’ll change my financial landscape…”. That mindset was fine, for years and years and years, but eventually you just want the mail to stop bringing bad news and you want to know what it might feel like to breath a deep, free breath!
So I’m happy to announce that while the school year brings some minor setbacks in my ability to do “gig work” (“I’ll be back in 20 minutes…I have to deliver a burrito 2 miles away for 8 bucks…”) because my ultra responsible twin teenagers are busy, quarantine has been this alternate dimension of “gig work” busy-ness and overpayment. I was able to cram about 6 months of debt payoff into the last 8 weeks. I’m 1 week from complete financial freedom and I’ve thought long an hard about what I might do with my time and energy after next week. While I still fully intend to continue to pay our van payment every month, I can cut back to about 10% of my current work load to meet that monthly goal.
So I’m pretty excited to take some 3rd trimester walks and read all the books I always read that get me all psyched up to push a human out of my body sans drugs and medical intervention. For me it really is a mindset that takes a few months to build up to.  So, I’ll be eating bonbons and reading Childbirth Without Fear and Spiritual Midwifery and the like and just enjoying the last 2 months of what is really feeling like the last pregnancy I’ll know in this life. A true privilege.
But in the meantime, I also couldn’t help but think about the funnest part of every pregnancy for me (besides the baby I get to have at the end!) and at the risk of sounding go like a shallow person who doesn’t have any “real interests”, I have to admit that I absolutely LOVE to dress the bump. While thrift stores have been LOCKED DOWN, I did go on a wild thrifting rampage sometime back in February, before we took an early March trip to Florida. I stocked up on items to experiment with and skirts that seemed forgiving enough to stretch over a basketball and I’ve supplemented from Poshmark and EBay here and there as my thrifting itch gets too great and I just feel bored with my pregnancy options. I never used to think fashion could be a hobby, and maybe it isn’t…but I know I’m not the only gal perusing Pinterest and instagram strictly because I love to see fabrics arranged “just so” over a human figure. Plus, it has to be the funnest way to forget that the world seems a little impossible to navigate right now.
In other news, I am currently hosting one fabulous Krouse lady! Iris and I have waited 14 years for this. I kind of thought what better way to celebrate the life of our second little lady (among the testosterone of the 5 boys) than to spend the next 10 weeks using this magical space I have on the internet to document the fabulous pregnancy outfits I scrape together with a tiny girl tucked in my kangaroo pocket. Maybe my daughters with be marine biologists and forest rangers (I can almost guarantee Iris has that destiny ahead) and they’ll think I was a silly woman for having so much fun getting dressed while I was pregnant, but ultimately I want to inspire them to invest in what brings them joy, the thing that lights their fire. So whether it be veterinary science or astronomy or fashion design or music theory or delivering burritos, I hope they know that they have been an inspiration to me and I want them to follow their hearts.

I believe that our adult notions concerning birthdays are largely shaped by our childhood birthday experiences. I come from a family of 5 siblings. My mother had a tendency to bend over backward to make our birthdays nice, oftentimes to the point of adding undue stress to everyone’s lives. My father was her equal opposite. While he was always a solid with a $50 dollar bill on your B-day, I also distinctly remember him informing me that birthdays are like assholes. Everybody has one. I fall somewhere in the middle, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Micah’s birthday, May 27th, always falls on one of the busiest weekends of the year. Memorial Day Weekend. Baseball games, parades, picnics, camping. It’s been 10 years, you would think that we would have this figured out by now, but Chris and I pride ourselves on our ability to learn at our own pace…which is apparently rather slowly.
In preparation for Micah’s birthday, I had been probing Chris about gift ideas. Topping last year would be difficult considering we got him the exact 4 items that he asked for despite the fact that we couldn’t afford it. With Chris finishing up nursing school and cutting back on work we are trying to stick to a budget. Knowing that I have a tendency to jump on Amazon and make people’s birthday dreams come true to the demise of our one income budget, Chris was spearheading the gifts this year.
The week before the birthday we pull up to one of Flynn’s (12) baseball games. I remain seated while I decide what to do with multiple sleeping people in the suburban. Chris looks at his phone a moment and then proceeds to get out of the vehicle and approach a car that I don’t recognize. I watch from a distance while Chris performs a shady (not actually that shady, but creative license…) Facebook yardsale Rollerblade transaction. I was slightly impressed. Until I saw them. I know I don’t have to explain to any other moms out there the “constant awareness of the size of your boy’s goon feet” phenomenon. You are the first one to be alerted when shoes are too small and you are constantly on the hunt for future shoes at a decent price because they will most likely be disintegrated under the consistent pressurized force of BOYHOOD! So, really nice rollerblades, definitely too small. Chris argued me on the topic right up until Micah discovered them prematurely in Chris’ vehicle and tried them on. I was right. Insert Micah’s light disappointment [HERE].
I again pressured Chris to just let me have my way with the gifting. He insisted that he had another surprise up his sleeve. And that he did.
Saturday the 26th, the day before Micah’s actual birthday, Chris had all 6 kids while I worked my 5 hours a week at The Square Antiques in Schaefferstown. (This can affectionately be referred to as my weekly vacation.) Being the fabulous dad that he is, he took everyone to the Annville Memorial Day Parade. Afterward, they went and intercepted a gas powered scooter that was once again acquired in some type of backwoods trade. Some old scaffolding for a running motor scooter from a friend. I am falling more in love with my husband with every word I write. He called me at work to let me know it was done. The BIRTHDAY HAPPINESS had arrived! Chris told me the boys were all taking turns and Micah was thrilled. They were presently at our friends’ recreational camp land where we keep a camper parked year round. Multitudes of kids enjoying Micah’s birthday gift with him. My only regret was having not been there to see that initial joy.
I went home after work to prepare Micah’s favorite dessert. Dirt Pudding with gummy worms and flowers galore. When I arrived at camp I was surprised to find that there were no smiles. No birthday happiness. The scooter broke after only an hour. Insert Micah’s immense disappointment [HERE].
“Welp, this Dirt Pudding better be pretty fantastic, cause that’s it!” My words to Chris as I became almost as disappointed as Micah at the sudden turn of events. I softly cried in our camper while Chris and I did a crappy job of spooning dirt pudding into 30 plastic cups. Micah put on a brave face for the next 18 hours (no he didn’t, if he wasn’t sleeping he was frowning) until we left camp with the intention to go home, clean ourselves up and SALVAGE MICAH’S BIRTHDAY!
I think we are finally to the point in our child rearing that we recognize that for every “birthday budget”, there needs to also be an “emergency birthday disaster budget” for when every single thing we planned has tanked hard.
We headed to the Batdorf where Micah spilled and broke not ONE but TWO glasses of root beer. #1 reason our kids only drink water when we eat at restaurants, but it was the birthday salvage! SODA ALL AROUND! Poor Micah. You know when you look at your kid cause you’re like “Are you even kidding?!” but then you can see on their face that they are not, in fact, kidding and they did have two horrific accidental spills in a row. After the second root beer incident Flynn looked at me and said, “I feel like I’m on a roller coaster that I’m really scared to be on right now…like…in my stomach.” Welcome to my life Flynn. After our nerves settled, Micah was presented with a substantial dessert and the combined melodies of the Batdorf staff and his family singing Happy Birthday before we were off to Harrisburg to the trampoline park where we finished the evening with high spirits.
The next day we attended the Lebanon Memorial Day Parade. Micah is a parade enthusiast, so I do feel quite strongly that his birth on this particular holiday weekend was no coincidence. We watched Owen (7) and Flynn walk with their baseball teams in the parade and afterward headed in the direction of my in-laws home in Maryland. We needed to retrieve our daughter Iris (12) who had attended a wedding and was absent from all birthday festivities. My in-laws always make our children feel very special on their birthdays. A cookout, a cake, a gift. They are consistently a source of birthday joy for our kids and it’s nice to know that if we really blow it, hopefully, the grandparents can pick up the slack.
After blowing out his candles Micah was presented with a very large box. He was so excited to tear through the paper. There they were. Some REALLY NICE ROLLERBLADES! Having heard about the rollerblade debacle, my father-in-law went the extra mile and got him a pair from a real store! Once again though, while I watched him pull them from the box, I laid my eyes on them and knew they were too small. Not a big deal, because at least they could be exchanged with the receipt. I, however, couldn’t watch Micah go through one more light disappointment. I went to the bathroom for a moment. When I reemerged I heard Chris say, “OOOO, a women’s size 7.” Micah still left with a smile on his face, knowing we would be taking him to the sporting goods store to exchange his really nice women’s roller blades for a pair of really nice men’s roller blades. And we did, the next evening.
I guess Micah’s birthday has helped to re-shape my idea of “birthdays”. Going forward I believe that Krouse children need to fully expect their birthday to be the single most character building day of their year. While we, your parents will never intentionally fill the day with disappointment, awkward moments and broken gifts, we also admit that we just can’t make any promises. We had you and we’ve kept you around this long so surely you must know our great love for you, but we don’t do well under pressure so please forgive us for all of your past, present and future birthdays.

I’m in the kitchen, cooking for an impending camping trip. Owen (7) is helping tidy up the kitchen. Max (3) is growling and chewing a giant chunk of an everything bagel. I look up from my work to see Flynn (12) rubbing his twin sisters’ feet in the living room. A few moments later I see they have switched and Iris is now massaging his feet. A civilized foot massage exchange. Micah (10) has mentioned to me twice in the last 24 hours that he believes that he has poison ivy. He showed me a red area on his ankle. I made the connection, “He has poison ivy…again…” But then something more pressing than the beginning of our summer-long battle to keep this old familiar rash at bay came up, and I was immediately distracted.

I only remembered his freshly brewing poison ivy later that day when I heard him shout from upstairs,

“So Flynn, do I wash it all off now?”

I then listened as Flynn directed Micah in how to use one of the many poison ivy washes that we offer here at The Krouse Family Poison Ivy Survivors Clinic. No joke. We get it in all the places you “hear about someone getting it..” The eyes, inside the nose, in the ears… and other places. I have some pretty gnarly photos of Flynn and Micah from 2 years ago…and I purposely lost Chris’ “Quasimodo picture,” from the episode when one entire side of his face swelled up to 3 times its size resulting in an oozing slit for an eye. Special times. You wanna know what a batch of poison like that does to a marriage? Abstinence. That’s all. Firm, unspoken, automatically assumed abstinence.

As Flynn bestowed his well-earned poison ivy first aid expertise on his younger brother, it was one of those “failed as a mother while succeeding as a parent” kinda moments. I knew that a less distracted, more caring mother probably would have taken the time to assess, diagnose and treat the child’s condition more adequately. But the parent in me has somehow helped to shape people that are smart enough to care for themselves and still other people who are willing to assist those in need.

Still later that evening, Noah (1) on my hip…my time in the kitchen has not yet ended. Micah hollers from upstairs,

“MOM! Max is bleeding!!” I march to the bottom of the steps, all senses heightened.

“What? Why isn’t he crying?”, I’m more worried than my tone implies.

“I don’t know!” Micah also sounds worried.

“Can I see him…can he come here?”

Micah disappears from the top of the steps,

“Max, come here…mom wants you to go to her…”

I am waiting to look up and behold the bloody toddler.

“Oh wait.” Micah reappears at the top of the staircase, a goofy look of complete relief has washed over his face.

“Sorry, mom. It’s just sauce or something.”

Of course, it’s just sauce. That changes everything. You know what it doesn’t change though? The very real stress that I still had to live through in the 60 seconds it took to discover that it was “just sauce.”

I felt some level of satisfaction that Micah got to live through it with me. He just experienced what most every parenting moment feels like all the time. Most days for me feel like a series of events that possibly include blood but end up only being a smear of some kind of sauce. Moments of screwing up so bad as a parent that I’m sure that no one involved is going to be ok… and then I get to see a glimpse of their sweet hearts, and I’m just glad to be a part of it.

Lately, I’ve realized that I will never be afforded the luxury of feeling like I have it all together or that I’m doing a great job all the time. Most of the children are usually lightly dirty because I couldn’t find 1 of my 10 packages of wet wipes when I left the house, and if you want to know if that’s me and my kids eating a Mexican casserole on a blanket at a little league baseball game with a bunny and a guinea pig, Yes. And it probably isn’t going to end well. But we can all sleep easy knowing it’s just sauce and not blood.

Writer’s block is alive and well over here on Cherry Street. So I decided to take all that lack of motivation and channel it into sharing that which I am holding closest to the heart right now. We all know that just because someone appears to be doing something crazy with some level of confidence, it does not mean that is in fact what is happening. Looks can be deceiving.

So I’m visiting my BFF in Steelton in mid-February. I last saw her in the flesh some five months prior (10 kids between us, we know we’ll hang out in our forties, for sure.) Noah (1yr) and Max (3) are settling in and pairing off with some of her gang. I use the bathroom. When I reemerge she alerts me that my phone rang twice. I look. Chris and The School. I call Chris.

“Hey, you get that message from the school?”

“Nope. I have one though.”

“Listen to it and call me back.”

I don’t know what to think. They’re alright kids so I highly doubted any of the four school-aged ones were causing trouble.

An automated message letting parents know that there has been a “vague, unspecified threat against the school district.”

Now, friends, we were a week out from the last mass school shooting. I know I wasn’t the only “helicopter parent” with that event pretty fresh on my mind.

I listen to the equally “vague” phone message to its end and then return Chris’ call…again.
We are like “Huh.”

“I’m at Mia’s. You think I should head home?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Probably not.”

We’re quiet.

“I’m sure its fine.”

We both know we don’t believe that anymore. That’s what every parent thinks, every day when they send their kid to school. It’s FRIGGIN SCHOOL! It’s FINE! Or was that more like 20 years ago?

Anyway, I chose not to overreact and Chris decided to do likewise, and I hold my breath through maybe an hour-hour and a half long visit with my friend, whose face I miss very much since she moved out of our fine county 3 years ago.

On my drive home I try to decide if I should get the kids or if I should let them in school for the remainder of the day. I choose the latter, but I definitely drove a lap around the middle school and the elementary school. Things seemed normal, other than what appeared to be a few kids being picked up. I went home and hung tough till dismissal.

Upon reuniting with my middle schoolers, they shared that there was a mild hysteria among their classmates. The elementary school did not experience this. I believe the difference between the two could be the number of kids equipped with smartphones in middle school. They’re a great tool, perfect for navigation and communication. Sadly, the information communicated through these devices isn’t always what we parents would hope for it to be. My kids weren’t seeing the Facebook post on the school’s page, so they were only hearing the news from other students. Doors were locked. Kids were denied access to the bathrooms. Apparently, there were even some exceedingly dramatic students, crying, screaming.

This is where I share the part of the story that I could most likely receive judgment concerning. Our kids never went back to school. Yes, we are aware that nothing happened. We know it was just some kid playing a prank. But we aren’t interested in receiving the next message, which could potentially be delivering less hopeful news. There was a time when Chris and I cared a lot more about what other people thought. We cared what our friends thought, what our parents thought, what other peoples friends and parents thought. Those days are in the past.

Every day we are faced with decisions. Hard ones, easy ones, unnoticeable ones. We spent the rest of that week really thinking about what our goals, hopes, dreams, and plans are for our kids. Rather than focusing on the negatives, the guns, the violence, the moral deficiency that is the most likely cause of our nations most significant problems… we decided to bask in the beauty of living in a country where we are free to do as we please with our children’s education. Within the week I reached out to a dear friend and mother of 15 who relocated to Ukraine to serve orphans with her brood. She writes curriculum and sells it on Amazon. She is the most outside of the box thinker that I have ever known. Her business, The Thinking Tree, is helping parents all over the world to feel more equipped for a task that can seem too overwhelming to want to undertake. She hooked us up with some fabulous workbooks, and we aren’t looking back.

I think that what I’m learning lately is that my kids need more guidance than I ever could have imagined. Our current school system has our children separate from us for the majority of the day and when they return we wonder why they can seem awkward or withdrawn. Thankfully my kids are still open enough to ask me questions they don’t know are horrible questions to have to ask. “Mom, what’s rape?”
I’m surprised but don’t show it, and I explain to my 6th graders what rape is.
“Why are kids joking around about something like that?!” my daughter asks with a disgusted look on her face. I don’t know how to respond.
“Mom, today I saw two boys grab the same girls butt…at the same time.”
I’m also without any real answers for my child. I want to just tell them, “Those kids have no parents.” …but the sad truth is that most of them do have parents.

I’ll be the first one to admit how hard being a parent is. I’m on the outs with one of my six children at almost all times, while I discipline them through some crap behavior. Teaching my kids how to be decent people is the most time-consuming task I’ve ever undertaken. It’s SO much easier to hand them a phone or turn on the TV and forget that they basically need molded and shaped 24 hours a day.

Perfect example. Chris’ parents gave him their old tablet for him to use for nursing school. Naturally, our kids use it for their 1/2 hour of gaming a day. One evening while we laid in bed, Chris started playing one of the games the kids downloaded. Bow Masters. He chose his character, a mime… his weapon was a baguette that he hurled through the air at his opponent. Seemed innocent enough. There were some definite math skills involved while you calculated the degree of angle needed to hit your target. It was slightly disturbing to watch the baguette impale the enemy, with the accompanying sound effect. I’m not old-fashioned or anything, so I observed longer… curious if Chris had what it took to win. He didn’t. And after he was hit for the 3rd time by the opposing robots’ sword, we both watched while his mime laid over and bled out excessively. I take that back. I’m old-fashioned. And I guess Chris is too… ’cause that game is gone.

I get it. It’s a game. Cartoon blood. No big deal. But like I tell my kids about their use of the words stupid, jerk, idiot, and shut up…when you’re 18, and you live on your own, you may fill your home with those words and many others. You may play bloody cartoon games. You can make terrible decisions and live with the results thereof. But until then, I’m your keeper peeps. So deal with it.

It’s nice to have our freedoms. It’s nice to have guns if you want guns. It’s awesome that we all have these screens that will show us ANYTHING we want and let us play whatever games we want. It’s great to be comfortable in your sexuality. It’s especially great to decide what’s best for your kid and have the freedom to act on it. I’m not sure what exactly is wrong in our country/world right now, but I’m finding its more productive to focus on what’s right. Here’s to finding hope, my friends. And hey, if you’re gonna do something a little crazy… may it be for your children’s sake.