Slow down! You're moving too fast...

Happy Last Day of September to all who celebrate!

In our family we apparently celebrate by...moving...because today was the day we moved out of the hotel (more or less) and into our apartment and today was the day that Rachel moved into the MTC (missionary training center).

What did you do to celebrate? (If you didn't move, it doesn't count.)

Andrew, Miriam, and I stayed up far too late packing up virtually everything in our hotel room and getting it ready to cart downstairs. Here's a shot Miriam took of our things in the hotel room:

In the morning we alerted the front desk that we were ready to start moving things downstairs. They said they would send up 2 trolleys for us. We reminded them that, uh, we had 27 suitcases between the 7 of us...plus some other acquired goods (like such as a piano and some folding chairs and a dollhouse)...and they were like, "Sure, so...two trolleys."

It took many more than two trolleys. And the porters were—probably fairly—ticked off about it. 

But here's the thing: they don't let you just take the trolleys to use on your own. And they don't really just let you wheel your luggage around the hotel (like barbarians). So they insist on moving your luggage for you. They're just mad about it.

And...I get it. 

I wasn't exactly thrilled by the whole process myself. The past several months have been, in a word, exhausting. I'm ready for things to settle down a bit.

We have prepared a tip for the porters.

Our ward (church congregation) was a wonderful help! Our Relief Society president arranged for five vehicles to help cart our stuff (4 sisters and 1 brother). We probably could have done it in 3 or 4, but five worked well, especially because we squeezed in all our kiddos at the end for a ride to our apartment. They named our group chat on WhatsApp "Heiss Heist," which was perfect (and rather descriptive of what the day felt like). They all win the award for "Ultimate Human/Genius" in my book!

It took us one hot and sweaty hour to load up all our stuff, drive over to the apartment, unload everything, and get it up the elevator and into the apartment (using only the single trolley in the building and by just stuffing suitcases into the elevator).

It was a mess and it felt overwhelming and I honestly wasn't sure if this amount of stuff was going to be absorbed into the apartment (let alone the shipment we have coming—oy, vey!) but after we got started organizing things it started to feel a lot better. We still have a long way to go (we have no bookshelves and about a million boxes of books arriving by mid-October) but things are starting to fall into place(s). 

Good thing I'm, uh, leaving for Austria on Monday??

I'm excited to see Patrick and Hadis but the thought of packing and getting on a plane right now just about makes me cry. But it'll be good. Sometimes doing hard things isn't as hard as thinking about doing hard things, and when you show up to do the thing it isn't really that hard at all—it's just fine. Fun even.

In our family not only do we celebrate September 30 by moving, we celebrate it (and everything) with ✩°｡⋆⸜ 𝓪𝓷𝔁𝓲𝓮𝓽𝔂 ⸝⋆｡°✩

Sounds fun, right?

We're the kind of family that asks each other, "How's your tummy?" whenever there's a big thing coming up because chances are our tummy is not alright. 

Rachel was up texting me this morning (night for her) and I told her she'd better get some sleep...and then proceeded to work and work and work for hours on end...and then texted her this evening (morning for her) to ask her how her tummy was feeling (it's a sign of affection). 

Her tummy was fine.

But it was less fine later in the evening (for me...day for her).

When we called her (around 9:00 PM our time, noon her time), just before she left for the MTC, she told me that at least two people had inquired about her tummy today. 

"Who?" I guessed, "Me...and my mom?"

"Yes!" Rachel said. 

We sang "Happy MTC Day to you!" for her, which isn't a real song...it's just one we made up to the tune of "Happy Birthday" because we needed something to do to break the ice when she answered. And then we had to sing it again because we—unjustly—sang it while Phoebe was in the middle of changing into her pyjamas (because that's when Rachel had the audacity to answer our call). She came running down the hall (wearing nothing but underwear, trailing her pyjamas behind her) crying about how we'd left her out. 

So we sang "Happy MTC Day to you!" to her again, with Phoebe included this time (still not quite in her jammies). 

"Because if you weren't serenaded by a half-naked vocalist on the day you enter the MTC, does it even count?" I asked.

We had a lovely little chat with Rachel, offering her advice like: don't fall, make friends, do things, seek out opportunities, work hard on language classes, eat your vegetables, learn lots, don't ever forget to pray...and so forth.

Then Phoebe called out, "I have one more device for you!" and offered this awkward little nugget: "I really hope there are babies at the MTC so you can move your body in an appropriate way."

We were all a little baffled by this remark and asked Phoebe to expand upon that idea, which she did. After a few minutes we realized that Phoebe had been recalling part of a conversation we had about appropriate stimming—something everybody does. Perhaps you tap your foot, twirl your hair, twist your rings, run your tongue along your teeth...whatever it is, chances are you do something to regulate your body, release little bits of energy, cope with chaos. It's perfectly normal; however, some of our children have been engaging in rather noisy, large, distracting stims recently.

We had this discussion during scripture study the other night (when I just couldn't take it anymore) because Alexander was kicking the leather ottoman in the living room of our hotel with his bare feet, making it squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak...

Gently kicking your feet might be an okay thing to do. 

The squeaking noise was getting awfully annoying, though. 

Gently kicking your feet might be an okay thing to do...but you don't want kick your legs with such vigor that you shake the whole pew at church...or whatever. 

Gently kicking your feet is fine...but how can you do it in a way that doesn't detract from anyone else's experience?

We're all capable of reining in our need to self regulate without causing annoyance or distress for others, right? And by "we all" I mean "in this house" and by "capable" I mean "of working on."

Anyway, during this conversation I had mentioned that I missed having little babies to hold because babies are the best stim—you get to rock them and pat them and in doing so you treat your own little nervous system to that rhythm, but I just can't quite get away with that anymore now that my babies are grown. 

So that was the advice that Phoebe was trying to pass along to Rachel.

All too soon it was time for Rachel to leave (and for us to get ready for beddy), so I told her to "Have fun storming the castle!" 

She's been joking that the MTC is kind of a like a zoo. My mom lives close to the MTC, so sometimes she and Rachel would go for walks past the MTC so Rachel could look at the animals on the inside before going to live in the zoo herself. 

But we realized it is also somewhat like a castle, which made me think about...castles. 

There's a metro stop on the green line called The White Palace or القصر الأبيض (Al-Qaṣr al-Abyaḍ) and while I was riding the train last week I looked up القصر because it sounded like "castle" to me and I wondered whether it was truly a cognate. 

One person (Naveed Islam) wrote specifically about the root قصر to show how many quasi-related meanings can come from a single root word (similar to the way English...and I'd wager most other languages...works):

Arabic works the same way: words from the same root will have related meanings! But sometimes, this relationship can seem very loose. On the surface, many roots appear to produce totally different meanings:

قصر: (noun) a palace; a building home to someone powerful (qasr)

قصير: (adjective) short, opposite of long (qasir)

The two words are from the same linguistic root. They look and sound almost the same. The only difference is an extra letter in the second word to make to make it an adjective. How is shortness related to a palace?

An explanation is that a palace is where its owner’s safety is confined to, where he or she is bound to stay. The palace marks the boundary and thus the shortness of their safety and freedom, outside of which that safety runs out.

On a spiritual level, these two words also link a palace (a symbol of worldly power) to shortness (and ending). Truly worldly strength lasts a short time before it becomes worthless. Like this, the root قصر (qasr) contains meanings of both shortness and a palace.

When I told Andrew about this he equated it to the word "keep" in English (meaning a(n extra) fortified section of a larger castle). Qasr is also the root word for "confine" and even "to keep under control" (according to Hans Wehr). So all of this makes sense, and Rachel seemed to like the idea of entering a castle—of a place where she'd be kept safe (physically and spiritually). And may it be so!

But, the Online Etymological Dictionary (and we all know how much I respect the OED) attests that castle and قصر are, in fact, related through some (seemingly circuitous) borrowing, ultimately from Latin:

Latin castrum in its plural castra was used for "military encampment, military post" and thus it came into Old English as ceaster and formed the -caster and -chester in place names. Spanish alcazar "castle" is from Arabic al-qasr, from Latin castrum.

So perhaps the etymology is a little less poetic than the first explanation I read (what a disappointment) and thus the fact that it shares a root with "short" is more coincidental than anything. This website notes that words that share a root are often (but not always) related.

Anyway, here's Rachel ready to storm the castle (of the MTC):

Because my mom lives so close to the MTC she got permission to walk Rachel there instead of driving there (her original instructions stated that no walk-ins would be allowed and that all missionaries must arrive in a car, but my mom's got wasta and pulled a few strings to make it so, as it were).

It looks like a lovely day for a walk! 

And as Rachel's roommate/friend Hailey noted about Rachel: "“If you are ever worried about Rachel’s well-being, just take her on a walk, she’ll be okay. She’s like a dog! You just have to feed her a bit and then walk around and let her go to bed.”

So this walk was probably good for Rachel—her last day on the outside for seven full weeks!

Here's her last selfie with Auntie Josie and Naanii (they each pulled a suitcase for her, pulling off another great Heiss Heist on the other side of the world):

And at 10:09 PM we got radio silence.

For years we've been telling Rachel, "Get thee to a nunnery!" whenever she's done anything...amiss. And now she's actually done the most equivalent thing she could muster as a Mormon*—she's entered the MTC as a sister missionary. 

Tonight when she goes to bed, we will be leaving our hotel for the last time in our morning!

We're sleeping here one more night because we don't have curtains in our new place yet and the sun rises at like 4:00 in the morning, which...we don't really want...so here's a picture of Andrew playing the game of Hearts with Benjamin, Zoë, and Alexander before bed:

It was a great way to end what was once again a day of big changes for Heisses across the globe!

I can't believe it's October (perhaps in part because it's still quite hot). أرنب أرنب أرنب The world can stop spinning quite so fast whenever it wants to...I won't complain.**

* Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But...for the purposes of alliteration...it needed the /m/.
** I would probably find a way to complain.