We have never seen that girl so grumpy. She didn't quite know how to communicate that she just wasn't feeling well so while we were at Grandpa and Darla's she just...kept asking to go potty. She should have just found a quiet corner to curl up in because in reality she was just miserable.
There was a lot of screaming and crying.
When we loaded into the car to head home she requested that we put on "Everything is Awesome," which we did, and then she fell asleep before we even left the neighbourhood.
She woke up shortly before we got home and cried because she thought we were going home...which we were. I guess she just had been hoping we'd be there already.
She definitely had developed a fever by the time we got home. Andrew gave her medicine and put her to bed while I did a video call with my sister Kelli and her grandkids (she went up to Alberta to visit them for the 4th—Scarlett is a year older than Benjamin, Rowan and Arthur are both around Alexander's age).
To be fair, there was no announcement about the ward breakfast in the email that was sent out three days ago. The attachment was included on the email dated June 24. And, yup, I didn't see it.
We put the breakfast on the calendar because it was announced over the pulpit (and because we knew we had one every year). To that end, the breakfast is always at the same place and swimming has always been tolerated but not encouraged (and in fact is more often discouraged).
We showed up without swimming suits. All the other kids were in the pool.
(How did they all know?! I imagine an announcement was made in RS or something.)
We sat on the sidelines listening to nauseating patriotic music and—for my part—feeling incredibly stupid and underprepared. I had a bad-ittude.
And then he caught a respiratory thing that has been lingering and lingering and lingering.
Last night when he was saying goodnight he casually announced that he couldn't hear anything out of one ear (isn't that weird? But it's probably fine. I love you, goodnight!).
Yeah. So, we decided we needed to take him to the doctor in the morning.
We have this game called "Flushin' Frenzy" that my sister Kelline sent to us a few years ago—right in the middle of COVID lockdowns. She thought we'd get a kick out of it. And we did.
The kids still like to play it. Rachel has catlike reflexes when it comes to grabbing that plastic poop in midair. No one can ever beat her.
This afternoon I decided we should embark on some "spiffy up" projects.
Rachel will be leaving for college soon, which will cause a domino effect of sorts in the bedrooms. Perhaps musical chairs is a more appropriate analogy. Either way—we'll be switching up who's bunking with whom.
"I'd like you guys to help me decide which board books we should keep and..."
"Okay!" Phoebe said. "No problem: All of them."
"But surely we don't need all of them."
"We do! I don't even know how to read yet! I need the book about the trains. I need the book about the little farm animals. And just...we need all of them, okay? 'Specially the book about the trains."
So apparently we're into trains right now.
And it's too soon to be getting rid of board books.
When we went to clean the church this morning we accidentally stumbled upon another ward's "Dads and Doughnuts" activity...so the church was filled with dads and doughnuts and children. They invited us to join them (and we did, from the sidelines). My kids weren't terribly upset about getting "second breakfast" before pitching in to clean.
The church has been filled with strange messes, some of which we've known about and some of which took us by surprise. One surprise was that someone had spilled a carton of chocolate milk in the chapel...and then just...left it...fermenting in the carpet. Super awesome.
Some of the messes we knew about were: a urn/flower arrangement delivery box left over from a funeral that happened months ago that has been sitting in the chapel. Some banker boxes that someone left in the hallway (again, months ago). I made the unilateral decision that these were destined for Rachel to pack her college stuff in.
I threw away some things that our co-op left behind (again, months ago now).
And I finally put a poster up in the YM room that had been put behind the piano in the YW room (again months and months ago).
It can be difficult to keep the church uncluttered when so many units are in there because no one wants to throw away anything that belongs to anyone else. But...given the unclaimed nature of these things...I don't think they were going to be claimed any time soon.
So, it took us a while to get through with our cleaning, but it was a pretty good morning.
*****
When I got Phoebe dressed this morning she was still in a bit of an early-morning daze so I was helping her pick out her clothes (which she ordinarily does on her own).
"Do you want pants or shorts?" I asked.
"Shorts," she said.
"Okay, here you go," I said, handing her a pair of blue and white striped shorts.
"Thanks," she said, "But I want to wear my high tide shorts."
"Your high tide shorts?"
"Yeah! They're right there!"
She meant her tie-dyed shorts. And then, of course, we had to find her "high tide" Grogu shirt to go with it. Here she is in her "high tide" outfit:
She was delighted to see Rachel and Miriam (she hasn't seen them since Sunday night because they've been at camp...and then even when they were sleeping at our house they were coming home after Phoebe went to bed and leaving the house before she woke up so she didn't even realize they were "home"). We were happy they were home to help us clean the church!
She delighted us on the drive to the church by singing "Once There Was a Thunderstorm" (to the tune of "The Wheels On the Bus"). She had sung the first verse last night at dinner and you should have seen us all lean in as she got closer and closer to the last line of the song because no one was sure what she was going to do to resolve her song. She simply fell back on the traditional ending for "The Wheels On the Bus."
Here's her song:
Once there was a thunderstorm, A thunderstorm, a thunderstorm.
Once there was a thunderstorm... All through the town!
So she sang that in the car for us and then went seamlessly into a secret second verse:
The thunderstorm made the power went out,
The power went out, the power went out!
The thunderstorm made the power went out...
All through the town!
Did she past-tensify too many of her verbs? Absolutely. But that's okay.
I recorded her singing it later and she corrected her over-past-tensification to say "the thunderstorm made the power go out."
It was fun to listen to her improvise this little autoethnographic ditty about her experience last night.
As the evening progressed, it became clear that our 40% chance of thunderstorms had increased to about, oh, I'd say ninety-nine-pointy-one. When the storm hit us, it was raging: the thunder was loud, the lightning was constant, the rain was...wet. Our power flickered a few times in the midst of everything, but it didn't go out until after we thought we were through everything.
We'd just gotten Alexander and Phoebe into their jammies and were about to gather for scriptures and prayer when...everything went dark. It was still light enough outside that this wasn't a huge deal, but Phoebe thought it was the best thing ever!
Andrew posted online about a swim meet the other day and someone commented on his post something like: "Lord, if I have but one day to live, let there be a swim meet, because those things last forever!"
With two swim meets this week, it has felt like this week has been at least two weeks (three swim meets within eight days).
Add in the girls going to YW camp, a heat wave, the girls being sent home from YW camp, daily swim practices, class, work, and everything else...it feels like we've lived an entire lifetime since last week.
Oh, and Benjamin had his woodworking camp this week as well! It was every afternoon from 1 to 5. And I think everyone had a good time—from the youngest boy up to the oldest teacher. Here's Benjamin when I dropped him off on the first day:
We were driving home from Benjamin's exhibition evening at Woodcraft. Grandpa met us there and took Zoë and Benjamin back to his place for a sleepover. Alexander is feeling exhausted from the late night at the swim meet yesterday, so he'll be staying home this evening. The older girls are finishing up their last day of camp activities. And, of course, Phoebe was with us.
"That cloud looks menacing," Alexander observed.
"Yeah!" Phoebe agreed. "Dad, is it going to rain?"
"It might."
"Before you said it was going to rain!" she objected.
"No, I said there was a 40% chance of rain, which means that if we lived this day over 100 times, it would rain on 40 of those days," Andrew explained.
"What about ninety-nine-pointy-one cent chance?!" Phoebe asked, which is a sure sign you're being raised by a statistician of sorts (not that Andrew is a statistician by trade, not precisely...but he teaches stats and that's pretty close to the same thing).
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