Living Unabridged

Posts from Living Unabridged this month:

• Free for Summer: Stop the Summer Slide
• More Than Flashcards: Everything You Need to Know
• Life in the NICU: Unabridged Emotions

Words on Wednesday posts:

• Two Sorts of Days
• The Art of Successful Living

What's Been Happening:

Obviously, not a lot of blogging. But there's a good reason for that and here he is:

He arrived one day after his due date, on June 2 at 9:15 AM. Labor and delivery went well and relatively quickly but a problem with his lungs meant we ended up spending four days in the NICU. (You can read more about that here: Life in the NICU.)

So that was a crazy start to June, to say the least.

We got home on Saturday, I rested on Sunday (meaning: went nowhere and did nothing) and then Monday was VBS at our church. The baby and I made it to all five nights but it was hard. Friday night we had some family come in to visit but by Saturday all the baby and I wanted to do was sleep (and eat), so we did. Not a very exciting visit for the family who had traveled to see us, but I know the cousins had fun anyway.

Philip and I celebrated 16 years of marriage on the 19th by...doing pretty much nothing. We plan to go out to dinner tonight because my parents have invited the kids for a sleepover. The older kids didn't get to spend the night with them when the baby came and for about a week they kept their backpacks packed, so that they would be ready for a sleepover should the chance arise. We live near enough to my parents that the kids get to see them every week, but a sleepover is rare, so this is a matter of excitement around our house.

We celebrated Father's Day by having some family over on Sunday evening. The kids gave their dad and my dad cards and gifts (candy, snacks, cream soda). The gifts that I had ordered hadn't come in yet. (Times like these really make me regret not paying for Amazon Prime, which I'm sure is Amazon's nefarious plan.)

Now we're gearing up for a week of church camp in July. OK, Philip is gearing up. I'm trying to stockpile sleep (it's not working) and figure out the logistics of getting us all there whilst taking along a month old baby (we'll make it work).

What I've Been Reading:

Mysteries. Lots and lots of mysteries. And I didn't read anything the first week in June, because despite spending four long days at the hospital, the NICU is just not conducive to reading.

What We've Been Watching:

We finally got around to watching most of the first season of this. (And it does bring back memories: we bought our own fixer-upper about a year and a half ago. Of course, we're not "finished" yet and we don't have the budget that a lot of these folks have, but it's still fun to watch the transformations.)

We, along with everyone else, are also watching:

We're a little ahead of the PBS schedule, so we've seen about four of the episodes. I'd call it "People Making Stupid Decisions While Wearing Period Costumes and Looking Fantastic" but my husband likes it, so we'll keep watching, at least for now.

We also saw the first episode of:

Very soap opera-ish, but you don't find many shows set in WW1, so I'll watch at least a few more episodes. (And by "soap opera" I meant that in a Downton Abbey way, not an "As the World Turns" or whatever.)
I'm not sure I can recommend this one, per se, because it definitely has some "not safe for children" scenes and content, but it was moving and ultimately redeeming. And it had a great child actor in it who managed to be adorable without being annoying.
Somehow my husband didn't realize this was a musical. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have watched it if he had known. I did know but Sondheim has never been a favorite of mine. This movie didn't change that opinion. It's like the perfect post-modern musical: there are no standards and each person has to decide what's right or wrong for themselves. (Except giants. Giants = always bad. If you think that doesn't make sense, don't blame me, blame the writers.) We decided against letting our girls watch this one.

After watching this one, we decided the girls could watch it too, but then we realized they haven't seen any of the museum movies so we'll have to get the first two before they can see this one. (There's some rude humor and slapstick kind of stuff for those of you who watch out for that sort of thing.)

On our anniversary, when the kids realized we weren't going out, they decided we should watch a movie and that it should be a Jane Austen movie (the older two girls decided that part). Our ten year old was agitating for Pride and Prejudice, probably because she knew it would take two evenings to watch it and would thereby stretch our movie night into TWO movie nights, but we chose Emma instead, thinking the younger girls would enjoy this frivolous adaptation a bit better than some of the deeper options. Gwyneth Paltrow gets on my nerves but Jeremy Northam is the best Mr. Knightley. (Plus, I don't actually own the other adaptations, although I need to watch the Romola Garai version again sometime.)

We took the whole crew to the movies last Saturday and watched:

I highly recommend it. It's great for the whole family, but I do think it's aimed higher than young kids. (Not that there's anything they shouldn't see, just that the jokes and content will go mostly over their heads.) I have more Thoughts on this movie, but maybe I'll save them for another blog post.

And doggone that Pixar, this one made me cry. I mean, actually cry, not just get choked up a little bit. Very few movies manage to do that to me. (Or maybe I'll blame it on "just had a baby hormones".)

Like I said, I highly recommend it. (But allow me to vent here: it cost $55 for our family to go see this - and that's just tickets. We didn't even buy any food or anything. That is RIDICULOUS. We used some gift cards, of course, but still. A kid's ticket at the movie theater closest to us costs $6.90. We get season tickets to live performance plays at our Children's Theatre for less than that per person.)

What did you do, watch, or read in June?