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Monday, March 18, 2024

St. Patrick's Day and Primary and Organ and Stuff

 

Today was St. Patrick's Day...and Sunday. Alexander was very excited about this combination of events (he had trouble keeping both feet on the ground).

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Green Day

Alexander is terribly concerned about his lack of green church attire and the fact that St. Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday this year. He absolutely did not want to get pinched but just wasn't sure what he was going to wear! It was a real conundrum. 

So I joked that Miriam could make him a tie really quick since she's our resident seamstress.

To my surprise/delight she said that she would! So we looked up a few patterns and she was less than impressed to find out that a necktie involves very little machine sewing and a whole lot of hand stitching. I told her that I would do the hand stitching if she would do everything else—all the cutting and ironing and machine work. And we had ourselves a deal (though to be fair I ended up doing a whole lot of the ironing)!

This little project soon became two green ties (one for Benjamin and one for Alexander, since neither of them have green church attire, while the girls have plenty of options when it comes to skirts and dresses and things). When Miriam saw how much green fabric she had left after making the ties, however, the project ballooned into two green skirts (one for Zoë and one for Phoebe) and two green ties (one for Benjamin and one for Alexander).

It took us longer than we thought, but we managed to finish it all in one day (and it cost us nothing because it was all fabric I picked up from our Buy Nothing Group). We also learned a lot!


Early morning egg hunt; late afternoon nap

This morning I took the kids to the primary Easter egg hunt at the church. Phoebe, our homebody, wasn't sure she wanted to go until Alexander and Zoë told her that the eggs we'd be looking for had candy inside. As it turns out, the eggs didn't have candy inside, but Phoebe had a lot of fun, anyway. 

She probably had the most fun out of everyone, actually.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Turtles and worms

Zoë finished her grade 3 math curriculum last week (she's been doing challenge problems from this year and previewing next year's lessons this week). Despite being in kindergarten, Alexander is on track to finish his grade 1 math curriculum next week. And miraculously, Benjamin is only a week or two behind his goal to finish his math curriculum by the end of April, which means he's in good shape to finish by the end of May. 

The girls are working hard on their courses through BYU-Idaho and ASU. 

And we finished reading The Tragedy of King Lear today. 

Zoë learned about Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and pointillism in her French class at co-op on Thursday. They used q-tips to make a pointilism-style painting in class and then Zoë came home and got all set up to continue painting. She painted all afternoon, making a large and beautiful painting of the Eiffel Tower...

...which she gifted to Grandpa before I could take a picture of it.

He came over for pie after playing pickle ball with Darla. Yesterday was Pie Day or Pi Day or whatever (March 14, 3.14) and we've been celebrating all week! 

Benjamin just happens to be learning all about pi right now, so he was particularly excited for Pi Day. 

On Thursday we had quiche for dinner (made by Miriam) and a peach-cherry-berry pie (made by Rachel) for dessert. 

Running and nursing and things

This morning Miriam texted me to say that if we wanted to go for a run we should probably go earlier in the day, since it was supposed to "start thunderstorming around 10ish." But because I like to live on the wild side, we didn't end up leaving for our run until 10ish. 

We only did a short run, with the storm nipping at our heels and, honestly, I made pretty good time, coming in at 8:59 for one mile (remember that I'm slow, so this is a decent time for me right now). And I didn't really feel like I pushed it or anything (like earlier in the week when I ran an 8:30 mile...and then went on to run a couple more miles, which felt brutal after running my first mile so fast (like a genius)). 

*****

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Violets

 

It is spring and the violets are here.

My children offer them
like currency—every petal
says "I love you."

There is no "not," only yes, do.


They are rich and set
flowers in their hair, fumbling
among golden wisps and curls.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

In which I eat a thousand cakes and Benjamin poops rainbows

When Phoebe gets up in the morning she likes to sing nursery rhyme games: 

  • Round and Round the Garden
  • This Little Piggy
  • Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake
  • Itsy-Bitsy Spider
  • Five Little Monkeys
  • Little Bunny Foo Foo
You know, things of that nature. This has replaced her nursing time because...she hasn't nursed at all in a couple of weeks now (so I think we're done with that stage of life)...but she still needs some extra special cuddle time before she's ready to face the day. 

Yesterday when we woke up, she wanted to play Pat-a-Cake (this morning she wanted me to sing "How Much is That Doggy in the Window" so she could do a lot of barking and panting because she also likes to be a puppy in the mornings). She must have felt badly about slamming her head into my nose or something because she kept stuffing me with confectionery!

The following is a transcript that I wrote down on Facebook (is it cheating to just plop it in here? I don't know...my time is limited and I don't want to reconstruct this conversation in prose form at the minute):

Dangers of co-sleeping: Parental version

There are known dangers to co-sleeping, though there are also ways to ensure co-sleeping is safer than it would otherwise be if you took no precautions. But who has studied the dangers of co-sleeping to parents?

Nobody. 

It's all about the babies. Blah, blah, blah. Babies this, babies that. 

Nobody ever mentions harms that can befall the parents!

(Note that this is very tongue-in-cheek. I love babies (obviously, I hope) and I think their safety is important. While I admittedly have done a lot of co-sleeping, I have always taken precautions to avoid SIDS. But for real though...what about me?!)

Last night Phoebe climbed into bed with us at...some point in the night. I don't know when. But I know that I helped haul her onto the bed and settle her into her spot—right in the middle. 

She fell asleep fairly quickly.

Or perhaps I was the one who fell asleep quickly and was simply unaware of any shenanigans she was pulling (sometimes rather than simply going back to sleep she's a little bed bug, quite the bother). 

But I'm pretty sure she settled down right away and committed to going to sleep. 

So there I was, serenely sleeping on my back, with my cherubic toddler beside me, and dozing daddy on the other side of her. All was well with the world and then...

*POW*

Monday, March 11, 2024

In which Phoebe gets to snuggle a "little" puppy

Darla invited our family over for dinner this afternoon. We got to meet her mother-in-law, who was just wonderful, and try pork ribs, which was a little bit intimidating for us. We've never had ribs before, but I think we did an okay job with them—Zoë ate her ribs and then ate Alexander's ribs and then finished off Miriam's ribs, so she at least earned an A+ at rib eating. Phoebe really like the pineapple. Grandpa, quizzically, enjoyed the sweet potatoes. 

Darla had served up a dish of sliced...root vegetables (let's say). There were definitely potatoes in there and then some orange somethings that many of us assumed were carrots. But they were not carrots. They were sweet potatoes. And Darla really didn't try to hide this fact. On the contrary, she was quite open about it (much like the pumpkin soup incident at our house last month).

When Grandpa dished some potatoes and "carrots" (which were really sweet potatoes) onto his plate, Darla said, "I can't believe you're putting that on your plate!"

He just chuckled about it...because where else would he put it?!

Later when it came out that they weren't carrots, he felt a little hard done by. But, he survived them and somewhat liked them, so I think this really means that he...likes sweet potatoes. He doesn't want to admit it, but they're not half bad!

I think Phoebe's favourite part of the visit, however, was Titus, the dog.

She spent the first several minutes of our arrival nose-to-nose with Titus, telling him, "You're a good dog! You're a good dog! You're a good dog! You're a good dog!"

We weren't sure whether she was just enamored with him or whether she was trying to convince herself—and the dog—that they could be friends.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Running

My big kids aren't home right now. Rachel took herself, Miriam, Benjamin, and Zoë to a games night at the church. Andrew and I stayed home with the little kids. 

This isn't Rachel's first time driving by herself. She's been driving to pick Grandpa up every morning since Wednesday, and driving back home from his house alone. On Wednesday after driving Miriam to organ (with Grandpa sitting as navigator), Rachel decided to take her car on a drive to the church, just to rip the bandaid off. 

She also drove herself to co-op on Thursday so that she could leave after teaching the nursery class. 

And then this evening she took her siblings to games night. 

So basically, Rachel can drive to church independently. And that's a great start!

*****

Benjamin, Miriam, and I have been running quite a bit since the fall. At first only Benjamin and I were going, but then Miriam made running a goal of hers for her psychology class?? So she had to start running with us. 

But the thing is that she hates running (or so she says). 

Any time I push her, she pushes back harder breaks down sobbing.

"Let's only run one mile today," she'll say.

"Let's go for two," I'll say.

Next thing I know she'll be hyperventilating and bawling her eyes out while running...up the driveway. 

It was driving me nuts because it's not even like I run very fast. I don't. And I know this because today I took the kids on a 5k run and my time was 32:29 (they actually rolled in after me), which felt like a decent run.

But, back in 2010 my time was 24:42 for the same distance. That's pretty fleet!

Granted, that was a race pace and the runs I've been doing recently are just little training runs...and a few things have changed since 2010: I'm, ya know, older. I've birthed four more children. And I've put on a number of pounds since then (believe it or not).

But also, I more or less ran that 5k race cold. Like, I went running a few times after we moved back from Cairo and then I was like, "A 5k—why not?!"

I've been running for months now...with a rather significant break in December/January when it was cold and we had company and another significant break in February when we had COVID. So we're just starting up again after that.

Anyway, all this is to say that a 30+ minute 5k still sounds slow to me...and yet it feels hard (though part of what might be so hard is dragging the kids across the finish line).