This Big Family

A while ago I wrote a post about the funny questions we get asked because we are homeschoolers (here). You readers obviously really enjoyed that because that post has been one of my most popular posts ever posted since my blog began!! Anyway, I thought it might be cool to post about some of the funny questions we get asked because we are part of a big family. It's kind of similar to the other one, but still different. :D

"Ten of you? Are you sure?"
(No, actually I can't remember.)

"My aunt/uncle/grandparent/parent/sibling/close relation/distant relation/friend/acquaintance/business partner/workmate had a family with (anywhere from about 5 to about 15) children."
(It's funny how people always come up with someone they know who has a big family, too. :D )

"What sort of vehicle do you drive?"

"Do you fight with each other / Are you well behaved / Do you get along well?"

"Do you all go to different schools?"

(Usually spoken to Mum or Dad) "Can you remember all their ages and birthdays?"

"How old is the oldest / How old is the youngest / What are the names and ages / What is the age gap?"

"Ten! That's so cool. You must have so much fun together."
(Yes, that is quite true. I feel sorry for people in smaller families because I know how awesome a big family is!)

"You must have a maaaaassive house."

"How does your Mum do it?"
(With lots of prayer... )

"What's it like being in a big family?"
(What's it like being in a small family?)

"No, don't bother telling me all their names. I won't be able to remember them."

"Imagine the massive family reunions you're going to have when they're all grown up and married!"
(It's going to be awesome!!!)

"Do you have to share a bedroom?"

"How do you cope with the laundry/dishes/housework?"
(That's what kids are for!!)

"Don't you wish you didn't have so many siblings?"
(Not on your life!)

"Do you have to do chores?"



Are you part of a big family? Do you get asked these sorts of questions?

The Cat one and the Magic one

The Great Peg Wars

The Great Peg Wars. What are they and how did they start?

It all started quite some time ago, when certain younger members of our family discovered it is fun to sneak up behind someone and secretly clip a peg (the kind you use to hang up your washing on the line) onto someone's clothing without them noticing. Yup, that's fun alright.

The idea has often been rediscovered in our family. Sometimes you will be walking quite innocently through the family room when you see someone running away out of your peripheral vision. So you put your hand to your back or go find a mirror... and guess what? There is a peg stuck there! No prizes for guessing who the culprit was!

This evening (I'm writing this on Sunday evening) we decided it would be fun to do it in an organised fashion. So we each armed ourselves with 5 pegs (except Caleb got 6 because of his arm impediment), switched off the lights and then proceeded to rid ourselves of our weapons by attaching them to the clothing of other players.

The rules were simple. If you had a peg attached to you, you were under strict obligation not to remove it. If you managed to rid yourself of all your pegs, you called out STOP and the game discontinued. Then all players would reveal the number of weapons they still had in their possession and count up the number of pegs attached to them. The person with the least number of each was the winner.

It sounds so simple. But it wasn't. Dodging and twisting in the dark when there are three assailants coming at you from three different angles while trying to affix pegs to people (but the pegs keep falling off them because you didn't stick them on properly) is not as easy as it sounds. We had a lot of fun though. It's a cool game. You should try it.

Limericks 101

Limericks are awesome!!

I really enjoy writing limericks. They are actually surprisingly difficult to make, but once you get the hang of it it's not too bad.

Here are some examples of limericks. They are mostly quite well known ones.

There once was a young lady named Bright

Whose speed was much faster than light

She set out one day

In a relative way

And returned on the previous night

-Anonymous

There was a young lady of Niger

who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They returned from the ride

with the lady inside,

and the smile on the face of the tiger.

-attributed to Edward Lear and William Monkhouse

A painter, who lived in Great Britain,

Interrupted two girls with their knittin'

He said, with a sigh,

"That park bench--well I

Just painted it, right where you're sittin.'"

-Anonymous

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were imprisoned, so what could they do?

Said the fly, "let us flee!"

"Let us fly!" said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

—Ogden Nash

So, how do you write a limerick? 

Well, you start off with a first line. That's always a good idea. The last word should be one that you can rhyme with easily [e.g. flue, Bright, smile, dot etc.] Keeping the first line to around eight or nine syllables is a good idea. Ten or more can get messy.

So here's my example first line. 

A king renowned for insanity

Now we need a second line. The second line needs to rhyme with the first line. [e.g. flue/do, Bright/light, smile/while, dot/not etc]

First and second line smushed together:

A king renowned for insanity

Across the broad reach of humanity

Great! It's coming along nicely! The next thing we need are third and fourth lines.

These lines should rhyme with each other, but not with the first or second lines. They should be complete different rhymes. 

Here we go:

A king renowned for insanity

Across the broad reach of humanity

Instigated this deception

(Which was an awful misconception)

Now we just need to think of a last line. This fifth line should rhyme with both the first and the second.

A king renowned for insanity

Across the broad reach of humanity

Instigated this deception

(Which was an awful misconception)

To feed his egregious vanity.

So there you go! We have our limerick! (Yes, I did write that limerick while I was doing this blog post. Do you like it?)

Let me know in the comments how yours turned out. :D I can't wait!

A + A

Here's another awkward and awesome post for you guys.

By the way, all the 'awkwards' and 'awesomes' are not just thought of on the spur of the moment. I build them up over a series of days or weeks until I have enough to post them. :D


Awkward:

- When you're tired and you can't think of the right word to say so you just make up a completely new one and hope the other person doesn't notice. (They noticed.)

- When you're emailing a friend about something you feel strongly about (and they hold the opposing viewpoint) then they email back and give you a massively amazing argument that you can't refute, so you just leave the email and don't reply and wish you knew what to say!

- Being asked to play the violin for people, then stupidly choosing a piece that you haven't practiced enough but sounds really amazing if it works. You guessed it, I botched it up. That's what I get for not picking an easier piece that I can play better.

- Telling someone you are super excited about something and not being sure if they share your sentiments. "Um, so are you excited too?" "Yeah, I guess so." Whoops!

- Not being able to find something... so you hunt around for about twenty minutes and then you discover after all that looking that it was so close to where you were in the first place and if you had raised your eyes just a tiny smidgen then you would have seen it on the shelf above you. -_-

- Answering questions about being in a big family. "How big is your house?" "What's it like with all those siblings?" "How does your Mum cope?" "Do you fight with each other?" "Wow, homeschoolers are so smart. (seriously, what do you say to that one?)" "Do you help with the running of the family?" "Do you actually help cook?"  "Are your siblings annoying?" "What time do you get up in the morning?" "How does it work?" Etcetera.

- Conversations around the dinner table. They can be quite hilarious. :D

- When you answer the phone and the other person says "Hi, it's me" and you haven't got the faintest idea who 'me' is. Then you decide the person is your friend so you start chatting brightly until you stop for a breath and 'me' buts in and tells you who they really are. It was my boss.

- That awkward 'standing around moment' at someone's house while you're waiting for your parent to pick you up.

- When you are hoping against hope that you will be given permission to do something awesome.... then your 'permission' is "We'll see." Well, at least it wasn't "No".






Awesome:

- Being super excited about something that is completely awesome!!! :D :D :D

- Feeling like you should pray for someone, so praying for them and finding out a couple of days later that they were going through a really hard time just then. God's timing is amazing.

- I've been told I use too many exclamation marks. !!! I don't particularly care though. Exclamation marks are awesome. Perhaps I should reduce them just a little, however...

- Seeing Jana's face light up when she sees the 15 candles on a birthday cake.

- Sponge cake and whipped cream.

- Being able to finish heaps and heaps of your law course in a surprisingly short space of time and feeling really happy. :)

- Finding out you've won first prize in a competition. That's a pretty cool feeling.

- Looking with satisfaction on a clean room. Ah, the joys of housecleaning.

- Remembering songs you used to sing from when you were a little kid and going around the house singing them... then all the siblings who hear you who remember those songs join in, too.

- Filling up an entire page in your diary with Kilroy doodles... I've got the bug bad!

- Psalm 16:11



That's all for now folks... have a great day!

Who Was Kilroy, Anyway?

Have you ever seen any version of this popular graffiti image anywhere?

Kilroy. The cartoon bald head with that massive droopy nose and those big eyes peering over a wall. Those famous words: "Kilroy was here."

We (the children in our family) found Kilroy's signature one morning, sketched on the pad beside our telephone. Under interrogation it transpired that Dad had left Kilroy's signature to see what us kids thought about it. We had actually never heard of it before. So I set off on a hunt around the internet to Find Out About Kilroy.

Here's what The Straight Dope has to say about Kilroy and his appearances.





"Kilroy was here" emerged during World War II, appearing at truck stops, city restaurants, and in military boardrooms. However, the first appearances seem to have been on military docks and ships in late 1939.

"The mischievous face and the phrase became a national joke," according to author Charles Panati. In theory, he was a soldier, probably American, who travelled all over the world scrawling his immortal phrase. Clearly, the graffiti were scrawled by thousands of different soldiers, not a single one named Kilroy.

During the Forties, Kilroy was everywhere. Panati comments, "The outrageousness of the graffit was not so much what it said, but where it turned up." He cites the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Marco Polo Bridge in China, huts in Polynesia, and a girder on the George Washington Bridge in New York. There were contests in the Air Force to beat Kilroy to isolated and uninhabited places around the globe.

The appearance wasn't always of GI origin, although it was largely tied to the military services. More than once newspapers reported on pregnant women wheeled into the delivery room, with the hospital staff finding "Kilroy was here" written across their stomachs. Panati says, "The most daring appearance occurred during the meeting of the Big Three in Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945. Truman, Attlee, and Stalin had exclusive use of an opulent marble bathroom, off limits to everyone else. On the second day of the summit, an excited Stalin emerged from the bathroom sputtering something in Russian to one of his aides. A translator overheard Stalin demand, 'Who is Kilroy?'" SDSTAFF Mac suggests Panati is a better storyteller than a scholar, though.

There has been much written about the origin and proliferation of Kilroy.

In December 1946 the New York Times credited James J. Kilroy, a welding inspector at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, with starting the craze. Usually, inspectors used a small chalk mark, but welders were erasing those to get double-paid for their work. To prevent this, Mr Kilroy marked his welding work with the long crayoned phrase ("Kilroy was here") on the items he inspected. The graffito became a common sight around the shipyard and was imitated by workers when they were drafted and sent around the world. As the war progressed, people began opening void spaces on ships for repair, and the mysterious Mr Kilroy's name would be found there, in sealed compartments "where no one had been before."

There are other origin stories, but they're less credible.






So, yeah. Did you find that interesting? Our whole family has gone Kilroy-crazy. Kilroy now has his signature across almost every piece of paper (and some other items, too) in the house. Who cares? I found that history so interesting! There's something so fascinating about Kilroy and his cartoon picture, anyway. :D

Don't Put Up An Umbrella

An umbrella is big and curved and has a spiky thingy protruding out the top. It has a handle coming straight down from the top on the inside, then curving at the bottom at the place where your hand goes. It keeps off the rain. It also keeps off the hail, too, if you have a good umbrella!

I use an umbrella. I use it to keep off the rain and to keep me dry underneath.

In our spiritual lives we can use umbrellas, too. But in this case it is not good - it is bad.

God loves to be with us and talk to us and have a wonderful relationship with us. :D However, a lot of the time we can tend to put up umbrellas over ourselves so God can't get in. He's up above the umbrella and he tries to come down and talk but we're so completely covered by the umbrella that we can't hear him. There's even a menacing spike on top of the umbrella just to try and keep God away!

God sends the rain. He sends his living water and showers of blessings down on us... and what do we do? We put up our umbrellas so none of it will reach us. Now and then a 'hailstone' (that's God trying to get through to us) will pierce the top of the umbrella and break the cloth... or the strong wind will turn the umbrella inside out... but what is our response to that? We have the rip in the cloth repaired immediately or we start using a different umbrella that is stronger and will keep the wind and rain and hail off better.

Let's not put our umbrellas up. Keep them furled, swinging lazily on your arm. Or better still, leave the umbrella at home. Let's walk out in the rain and let God speak to us and have a relationship happening. Let's splash in the puddles and enjoy it. Why trudge through the rain with umbrellas up so God can't get through to us?

Don't put up an umbrella.

Warm Hugs Tag

Who's seen the movie Frozen??? I have! It's so cool! Especially Olaf. What's not to love about Olaf? <3

Anyway, here's a tag from Eve's awesome blog, Eve of Womanhood.

Rules:
❅ Follow the blog(s) that tagged you (optional)
❅ Post 2 or more pics that include your fave characters, books, TV shows, movies or lyrics from songs (they can also be your own edits or pictures).
❅ Tag 5 or more bloggers and tell them.
❅ Answer the 10 questions the blogger that nominated you has written, related to books, characters etc.
❅ Create your own questions having to do with the same thing.

I've already followed Eve's blog. :D So here's the rest of the requirements.
I'm using Frozen pictures because... well.. this is obviously a Frozen-inspired tag. Besides, I love Frozen. Especially Olaf. He's so cute. Wait, did I already tell you that?!?

So here are Eve's 10 questions with my answers.


1. If you could live in any Disney movie, which one would it be?

Frozen would be pretty cool. To be honest, I can't remember watching many other Disney movies! I've seen The Chronicles of Narnia and Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins and maybe one or two others but that's basically it.

2. What is your all time favorite book?

Ooh.... now we're really getting into it! I've always really loved Frank Peretti's book Piercing the Darkness. That is the second book in the series, the first is This Present Darkness. I love lots of books though and it's really hard to pick just one!

3. Is there a book you've read that you hated?
Now this is tricky! There is one series in particular that I didn't necessarily hate, we discontinued reading those books because of inappropriate content.

4. If you could live in any book world, which one would it be?
The book world in my imagination.

5. Elsa or Anna?
Anna. If I could choose any position in a royal family it would be a Princess that wasn't directly in line to the throne. That's Anna. She is fun loving, happy and doesn't have the responsibility of a queen. Anyway, I just like Anna.

6. Least favorite Disney Movie?
The ones I've seen all seem pretty good.

7. Potterhead or Whovian?
Pass on this one sorry :D

8. Favorite Disney song?
Do You Want To Build A Snowman? [From Frozen, just in case you wondered.]

9. If you could be any Disney character for a day, who would you be?
Mary Poppins would be pretty cool! Or Sven. :P

10. Favorite quote from movie or book?

You can't help loving (since we are on this Frozen theme) "Some people are worth melting for." by Olaf from... you guessed it.... Frozen!!




If you want to take part in this tag then please answer the following questions.

1. Name one book you really, really, really, really recommend.
2. Olaf or Sven?
3. Favourite movie series
4. Do you snack while you read/watch movies? If so,  what is your favourite reading/movie snack?
5. What is one really embarrassing moment that has happened to you?
6. Favourite Frozen song??
7. Fan of buttery popcorn?
8. Favourite movie quote
9. Do you ever fall asleep reading books?
10. What makes a good movie?

I've Done Them All

I know... I've posted this before. But it's still just as true now as it was then.

I am only one

I am only one, but still I am one.
I can't do everything.
But I can do something.
Because I can't do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do.
-Helen Keller