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Okay, I admit it, I'm on a travel theme.   Something about being in a car for 5 days with 5 kids and no hubby makes one think a lot about what works and what doesn't.  In case you are planning any road trips of your own, here are my top tips: 1)  Bring headphones and an iPod/MP3 player for yourself. Sometimes you really need to just drown out the whining and bickering. 2) Don't play "the quiet game."  Everyone hates that game and sees right through it.  If you need them to be quiet a while, just mandate it.  Or see #1 3)  Plan a lot of stops.  A lot. I figure on stopping every 100 miles or 2 hours, whichever comes first.  Looking ahead… [more]

As far as I know -- or maybe inasmuch as it's obvious -- Dear Hubby and I are the only ones on either side of our family (in this generation) to form our family through adoption.  One of my uncles adopted several of my aunts nieces and nephews in my generation but because they lived in the Philippines, I really never got a chance to know them.   There is just not a lot of precedent for how we do things. That said, both our families constantly amaze me.  They have not only welcomed our children with open arms, they've been great cheerleaders and advocates for them.  You can not see any difference in how the family treats my kids verses all the… [more]

When I was a child, we traveled.  Almost all of travel was in the car (as was Dear Hubby's); nonetheless, I saw many National Parks and traveled through a good many states in my short 18 years at home.  When I was a child, I thought four kids constituted a small family! We travel with our kids, five in all.  We started traveling when our oldest was an infant and we've just never stopped.  Everyone thinks we are crazy.  They think it even more when they find out most of our travel is by car. Dear Hubby and I talked a lot about travel before our first daughter came along.  We agreed that in air travel, something is lost.  When our oldest was just a baby, my dad said, "It's good for… [more]

In a ground breaking hour-long investigative report airing tonight, May 1, 2012, Dan Rather rips off the shroud of secrecy that surrounded adoptions for decades.  His report entitled, “Dan Rather Reports:  Adopted or Abducted?” includes interviews with the birth-mothers who say they were coerced, tricked or even forced to surrender their children for adoption. In this day of adoption registries and open adoption and in a world in which pre-marital sex and cohabitation are considered normal, it’s easy to forget about the years in which none of this was acceptable.  In the 1950’s, 1960’s and even the 1970’s, poorly timed pregnancies were shrouded in secrecy.  Young women were sent from their homes to maternity homes or “cradle societies” to live out their pregnancies.  At delivery time, these frightened and often ill-prepared… [more]

We are getting ready for some pretty big travel.  Dear Hubby needs to work, so I am taking my 5 kids plus one extra to see my family 2400 miles away.  Yes, we are driving and pulling our little camper.  My thoughts these days are all about how to get us all there in one piece and still speaking to each other!  Here are my ruminations on getting ready to go:

• Block the week before you depart on your calendar.  It takes me one day per person traveling to get everything ready.   I have already informed "the Bigs" that I will not be driving them anywhere during prep week.
• Two or three weeks out, begin pulling outfits as they come through the wash: 

There are few realities I have had to face.  The first is that I am not nearly as industrious nor as organized as I have led myself to believe.  The second is that five kids is a lot of kids. I thought it might be helpful for other sibling group families or prospective families to know a little of what does work around here, at least right now. These are my Top 1o Sanity Savers:

1. Have a repertoire of "ready recipes," things your family loves to eat that are fast and simple.  Ours includes Fettucini Alfredo or Spaghetti Carbonara, Sauteed orange chicken and rice, and pork-chop rice bake.  Use these when at wit's end.
2. Use your freezer.  When making a casserole, spaghetti

A couple of weeks ago we had the ARD meeting to set my son's educational plan.   At the meeting, we set an uneasy goal to send "The Captain" on to kindergarten next year.  I left unsettled. As the next week or two went by, I began to worry.  The Captain was struggling at school.  He was hitting, fit-throwing and generally  uncooperative for at least part of each two-hour school day.  How on earth could this child succeed at a 7-hour day with "regular" kids.  Not that The Captain is "irregular."  But his little PEAR class (Pre-school Expressive and Receptive language program) has only a handful of 3 to 5 year olds, all with speech deficits and many with  other… [more]

Well, I think it's official.  I think "The Blitz" needs a new name, "Love Bug."  He still is capable of inflicting serious damage in any room without notice, but he is also capable of so much love and joy.  Three is a quirky age. The Blitz is given to tantrums of late, and sometimes these shake my patience to the foundation.  How do you deal with someone who has inexplicably started screaming and thrown themselves on the floor.  Ignoring him was not working; it was definitely making things worse.  That makes perfect sense; he's a smart kid, he knows we can hear and see him, so ignoring him just made him mad as heck.  Now I am squatting down and saying in a… [more]

"The Blitz" turned 3 last week.  I can hardly believe it. This child began life outside the womb at 27 weeks gestation; he weighed 2 lbs. 7 oz.  He was tiny.  I didn't know him then, although it seems as though I've always known him. He went from the hospital (several weeks later!) straight to foster care and his foster parents loved him as their own.  Thus he had the best possible start in life:  two parents who loved and cherished him. He came to us at 10 months, a sweet and joyful baby.  He began crawling at about 11 months and walked at 16 months.  He got his nickname, "The Blitz" because the minute he began crawling, he was as fast… [more]

Our older girls were a set of two; we have a younger set of 3, currently 2, 3 and 5 years old but in reality they are 11 months and 14 months apart.  They have a LOT of stuff.  From the day the kids arrived, their stuff has been an issue.  The three of them share the largest bedroom in the house, but their 3 beds take up more than half the floor space.  We started with a toy sorter; it was disastrous.  In all honesty, I now remember it didn't work for the big girls either and it drove me crazy then too. 2 years into the process, we have finally found a toy system that mostly works and a pretty good laundry system.  The key to both systems is… [more]