The Mergenthaler Family

It is a rare moment when the kids find something they want to all play together (without fighting) for a long time. But, on Sunday, they managed to keep themselves occupied for over an hour with their own Primary class in the basement. For those of you who don't know, at our church, the children ages 3-12 attend Primary. Primary classes are divided by age group and meet in individual classes for Sunday School lessons. However, for a portion of time each Sunday, the children meet together for singing time and another collective lesson called Sharing Time. So, on Sunday afternoon while Andrew and I were taking naps, the other children put together their own Primary with stuffed animals. They put dresses on the bigger dolls and placed them at the front to be the adults. The other animals were lined up by size (to simulate different age groups). Each of the stuffed animals had their own name tag. Emily led a lively discussion on the first paragraph of The Family Proclamation. They also...

Some days I feel like I spend the whole day going from one mess to another. Today, while I was cleaning up lunch, Andrew found the playing cards. Less than 10 minutes and 6 decks of cards later . . . . . Ricky tried to blame this on Andrew. It is true that Andrew took the rubber bands off of all the cards and started sticking them in the space between the wall and the moulding. But, when I came in the room, both Ricky and Andrew were running across the room and sliding on the slippery cards. Yes, they had a great time. But, they both had to clean up. While we were cleaning up, I wondered out loud if the half hour of picking up the cards and sorting them into decks was worth the 10 minutes of fun. Ricky's response was, "I'm tired." Me too!

Hint: The first picture says "I." We have a few deer trails (and kid trails) across our yard, so finding a place for the first word was tricky.

I was so proud of myself back in December when I braved the elements to put up our Christmas lights. I bragged about having the brightest house on the block and took several pictures of my work. Well, a lot can change in a month or so. The weather had warmed up to 17 degrees for the high (10 degrees with the wind chill). It was a sunny day and Andrew was taking a nap, so I decided to jet outside and finally get those lights down. I thought, "Taking down lights is definitely easier than putting them up. I'll be out there for about a half hour. No problem." Boy, was I wrong! The snow on the ground was much deeper than when I put up the lights, so maneuvering the ladder was frustrating. Once I got the ladder stable, I climbed up and began taking down the lights. I found that some of the lights had frozen into the gutter. I tried pulling them out, but the cord was so deep, my only choices were to, 1) wait for spring, or 2) start chipping away at the ice. I can't stand to ...

This is my first experience of school being cancelled for cold weather. This morning our outside thermometer read -20, with a wind chill factor of -42. Nobody wants to go out in that!! School was cancelled yesterday because of a big snow storm (and partially because of the extreme temperatures). The kids couldn't resist playing outside in the new snow. I tried to convince them that sunny weather doesn't mean warm weather, but they wouldn't hear it. When they were outside, we had reached our high temperature for the day of 7 (wind chill -15). They lasted about 45 minutes. I managed to trudge out in the knee-deep snow to take their pictures and then went back in. As you can see, I didn't even want to linger outside for better pictures. Today, we WILL NOT be playing in the snow. We will have to go out tonight to pick up Rick from work. He didn't want to walk the quarter mile from his office to the parking garage in these temperatures and I don't blame him! We also ...

Our children say funny things all the time and I try to keep a good record of these things so we can "tell the story" later. For those of you who know our children (actually any children), you know they LOVE to hear stories about themselves. Often, at our house, our children will ask me to tell them a story about when they were little (when did they decided they weren't little anymore??). They usually ask for the same stories over and over--The Mustard Story, The Chocolate Friend and Chocolate Daddy, The Clown, Toothpaste. Anyway, all these stories are written in their journals, but we know them by heart. I always feel bad when we have somebody over for dinner and they have to hear the stories. So, I have another story to add. I'm planning to put this in Makayla's journal (and the "Milk" story in Ricky's), but maybe this post will help me remember. I'm just realizing that "The Toothpaste" story isn't in anybody's journa...

Last night at dinner, we had an interesting conversation. Ricky said, "You know what I learned at school today? Milk makes your hair grow." "Really?" We all replied. Then, Ricky looks up towards his hair. "Yep. It didn't work for me, though." We all had a good laugh. Then Makayla said, "What if every time you drank milk, your hair squirted out of your head." Emily added, "What if you could grow a different hairdo based on what you drink." This is a picture from almost a year ago. Got milk?