Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Random tidbits
Sunday, July 21, 2024
Rachel is 17!
Somehow—almost impossibly—Rachel turned 17 today.
She (and Miriam) had a game night with friends last night (so it was like a birthday party but without her having to be the very center of attention, which she doesn't particularly enjoy) and Rachel woke up to a flurry of texts from her FSY friends.
Later in the morning she and I solidified her schedule for next school year. She'll be doing a full course load at BYU-Idaho and is particularly excited for a sewing class we found—Apparel Construction 1.
Grandpa brought the kids home around noon. We opened presents soon after they arrived. Phoebe has actually been pretty okay with birthdays this year. I mean, the first few were upsetting, but she's realized that her turn is coming and rather than being upset by the ongoing anticipation she's chosen to be increasingly excited for when it's her day.
When she wandered into my room at midnight—soon after I'd finished wrapping Rachel's presents—she said, "Oooh! Are these presents for me?!"
"No," I said. "They're for Rachel."
"Oh," she said, slumping. "Okay."
She perched right beside Rachel the whole time:
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Home with Phoebe
Tonight Phoebe and I had the house all to ourselves (which is a rather unusual thing).
Alexander, ZoĆ«, and Benjamin went to Grandpa's house for a sleepover (Darla is in California helping with her new grandbaby so Grandpa is lonely). Rachel and Miriam had planned to have a bunch of friends over to play games this evening, but they usually play games outside and it ended up storming quite a bit so they decided to head over to the church to play games instead (Andrew went to provide adult supervision, but the church was bustling with activity—a group was there playing soccer and another group was doing something else—so there were plenty of adults around...our teens just took one of the bigger rooms that weren't being used).
So, yeah, Phoebe and I were left alone together.
She was a little gutted that she wasn't invited to sleep over at "Gampa-Dala's" house. She packed all her most important items in a little backpack and was all ready to go...and then we crushed her dreams.
There are just a few benchmarks she has to meet before she can be considered for a sleep over. Things like (1) sleeping in her own bed, (2) ditching overnight pull-ups, (3) not panicking whenever Mom or Dad can't be with her. Simple things like that. Once she understood that Mom wasn't going to "Gampa-Dala's" she was much more okay with the idea of staying home.
She got to watch Daniel Tiger while I cleaned the kitchen. And then we had some music time and reading time and drawing time and playing time before getting ready for bed.
"Here’s the deal—" I told her. W need to start getting ready for bed, so it’s time to tidy up."
"Sure hope kids are ‘kay!" she said.
"You…sure hope…" I echoed with a snicker.
"…kids are okay, yeah," Phoebe finished before sighing a big sigh. "Wonder what they’re doing right now…" She sighed again. Evidently she was starting to feel lonely without them.
Anyway, here she is drawing a picture of "my kitty, my Waffles":
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Cute Phoebe Stories
Monday, July 15, 2024
Watermelon, Sunflowers, and Pollinators
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Definitely sick
Friday, July 12, 2024
Sick, no...healthy, no...sick, no...healthy, no...sick!
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
I can't imagine a more beautiful thing
We planted corn this year.
I don't think we've tried corn since we once tried it in North Carolina..and things didn't work out well for us. I think a big storm came through and flooded our garden and all our corn fell over and...that was the end of that.
Things went much better this year. Our stalks grew nice and tall...and then they got tassels...but I saw no silks anywhere. So I was a little worried we weren't going to get any ears of corn at all. But then my silks started appearing and I began instead to worry about pollination. We went out and did some hand pollinating, but I honestly think the tassels were simply too far spent to have that do much good.
Still, we got a couple of lovely (little) ears of corn:
Saturday, July 06, 2024
Hermes
Benjamin got his hermit crab—Poseidon—about two weeks ago and we've been meaning to pick up a friend for it ever since...but life has just been so...busy. Andrew and I have a lot of work projects and swim team was coming to a close and Alexander had pneumonia and the girls are off to FSY and...I dunno...getting to the pet store just felt a little hard.
But then yesterday we were driving home from the road race and I hopped on Facebook and saw that someone was giving away a full hermit crab set up—the tank, the crabs, everything. So I said we were interested and...the next thing I know we're bringing home a 20-gallon tank stocked with three new friends for Poseidon (they said it was four...but we only found three crabs and the, uh, remnants of a fourth).
Benjamin was over the moon!