I’m borrowing Kristi’s idea from several years back, hoping you won’t notice that it’s a cover for the fact that I haven’t really had anything worthy to share lately. I figure some bullet points of our lives should suffice. And like the last time I did this for the email chain, I can promise you it will all be pretty mundane.

1. By the end of this, I won’t know how to get out of the “numbered list” format. That is because I despise technology and it returns the sentiment. Danny and Isaac can never leave me. If they do, you’ll find me turning real pages, using a typewriter, and stuffing my money under the mattress.
2. Juggling six kids is an act you’d be amazed to see in a circus. Good thing most of my children are too heavy to toss into the air, but it sure gets complicated, exhausting, and at times, fascinating keeping up with their schedules and emotional health.
3. Ellie will begin her career at Chick-fil-A this week. It’s not quite the Allan McDonald’s dynasty, but we’re doing our part to give the chicken empire kids who’d rather do chores for money at work than at home. 
4. The season for guests has possibly begun with back-to-back weekends of company. Unfortunately, neither weekend saw beautiful spring weather and we were forced to watch baseball. I mean, we were forced to watch it in the gray, dank NH April. Thankfully each set of guests were quite agreeable to walk beside us in our busyness and visiting happened more on-the-go than on the sofa. Hopefully our next guests will experience enough May sunshine to bring some with them on their return to Newfoundland.
5. We will be back to a full house come this Friday as Jake returns from his first year away. Isaac is flying down to FL on Wednesday to participate in the challenge of “Will the Brothers Come Back Bonded or Bruised?” while they make the long drive homeward. Prayers would be appreciated.
6. After putting in two more weeks of travel, Danny gets to sleep in his own bed for three weeks before another trip. Since he’ll be gone over his birthday, you can send me whatever presents you would have given to him. Just kidding. Unless….🤷
7. “Anna, where are the snickerdoodle cookies you made?” I asked her, very sarcastically, knowing she hadn’t actually baked them last week like she said she would. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Oh, well, I separated out all their ingredients and put them back.” 
8. Raise your hand if you loathe living in a tech world while you have children. I know this seems an awful lot like my first point, but that one was about my incompetence. This one is about the difficulties technology brings to our family, so stay with me. Now raise your hand if you are reading this from a device right now. See my conundrum? It’s good– until it isn’t. The kids need it, but so often it is misused or abused and the challenge lies in striking the perfect balance of using technology appropriately while leaving time for some fun stuff without the latter use overtaking the first. Who’s got the answers and why haven’t they shared them with me yet?  
9. There’s nothing here because seven eight nine. Can you believe that the number of times my kids roll their eyes at my humor is exponentially more than the sum of times they laugh? My sadness is infinite.
10. This last one is a fact we’re all learning together, since I didn’t even know about it until right now: James hates small spaces while Caleb seems to love them. That’s what Caleb just told me when I asked him what I should write about the two of them. I’m afraid to ask them how they’ve come to know this about themselves. Everyone deserves a little mystery in their lives, right?

And that’s a wrap.

Did you miss me? They say ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, but my motto is usually ‘absence makes the procrastination longer’. A non sequitur and one sentence later, I’ve been feeling a little bit like an ostrich lately. Heavy, flightless, and not good at making decisions. Due to the six circumstances that have given me the title ‘mom’, I’ve preferred to keep my head stuck in the sand this week.

Remember my advice from last time? ‘Don’t have kids’? Yeah, I should have specified by saying,  “Don’t have the female kind. Also, don’t have the male kind.” It’s not like I didn’t listen to those parents in whose footsteps I am happy to follow; I listened, I gleaned, I questioned, I prepared. But you really don’t have any idea until you’re actually in it for yourself, do you?

Having difficulties with teenagers is not new to anyone. It’s a tale as old as Cain and Abel. But how did we go from those sweet-faced, pudgy-fingered, elbow-dimpled toddlers we raised to these cantankerous, hormonal, teary-eyed parents they’ve turned us into? 

I have more questions than answers. I have more prayer requests than humorous stories. I have more roller coaster rides in a day than even a thrill-seeker would wish upon themselves. I have more kids that will someday become teenagers! 

Did you know that ostrich eggs are incredibly tough to crack? Any person weighing up to roughly 250 pounds wouldn’t even make a dent in the shell if they stood on top of it. A saw or some other hand tool is typically used to gain access to the prized yolk. I just think it’s so fitting that while it is hard for any of us to break open the shell, the chick inside has absolutely no difficulty whatsoever cracking the egg and hatching. It seems like there must be something here I can learn from this. If I can just pull my head out of the sand, maybe I can figure out what it is…

To pick up on the roller coaster analogy, there have been some ‘ups’ in the last little while. It’s a good thing, too. Normally I’m terrified of the ‘up’ on the roller coaster because it means that we have to come back down, and that’s the part I really don’t like! However, we don’t think like that with real life events, do we? If things are going well, we’re typically not walking on eggshells, waiting for life to fall apart (especially if that egg is an ostrich’s). Anyway, getting back on track here, Danny and I have been thankful for some successes and joys the kids have experienced recently. 

There have been very high marks on an important test and job applicant acceptances and first-time sports team players and dog-training developments and self-advocating-while-making-big-decisions moments. Yet despite all of these accomplishments and exciting events, none of these kids know how to change the toilet paper roll! Below is photographic evidence of a real scene I stumbled upon in my house, in which there are children, half of whom are teens who should know how to figure this out. 😑

If you need me, I’ll be the one with my head in the sand.

Well, I’ve updated you on the mundane and the extraordinary, and you’ve gotten more posts in this one month segment than you have for the last eleven years so I think my work here is done. However the experiment is to see whether I can keep this blog from living up to its tagline or not and the only way to do that is to constantly update you on the daily shenanigans from the Allans #5, whether you like it or not. 

It’s scary, in a way, to put yourself “out there” on the internet. I can’t see your facial expressions, so I don’t know if you understand my sarcasm or lack of humor or if you are eagerly leaning in for more. There is no give and take in this relationship, not in a real and present way at least. I am giving you my words, but I don’t know if you care enough to “take” them, and I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps it’s the introvert in me that uses writing as a way to communicate, to be heard, without in-person interaction. In my head, I speak fluent English. When I talk out loud, I sound like a three year old for whom English is my second language. Thus the blog is a conduit to my boring brain and I can take all the time needed to poorly share the ongoings of our family.

But enough philosophy! You know what else is as elusive as theoretical thoughts on reality? Ninth grade science, and I’m in charge of teaching it at our co-op. Let me give you a free piece of advice: don’t have kids. Because if you do, they’ll grow up and eventually need to make their way through high school science and if you don’t speak up at your co-op planning meeting then you will have to teach the class no one wants and you will be totally out of your depth, but you know you can’t let the students see your fear or they will run right over you and you’ll develop an expensive habit of buying a drink from Starbucks before every co-op as a reward for dealing with the anxiety, so now you have an addiction on top of your incapabilities and it’s a good thing we only have five classes left. 

Meanwhile, Danny’s work continues to reward him with more airline points and time zone changes. He actually has a two week reprieve from the travel, which is good because he needs the time to detox his wife from pricey drinks. He is eager to begin his Best Buddies training again, racking up distances to make the 100 mile ride across Cape Cod in June seem like a breeze. 

You know what’s not a breeze? Spring in New England. Despite the date on the calendar, spring is the slowest season to fully arrive in New England and he’ll need to wait for warmer weather and the street sweeper before he can get in much outdoor cycling. There is a bright spot on Danny’s horizon though, and he may soon have another title to add to his name. Stay tuned for more on that later.

Also, the kids are fine. 🙂