Katara International Hunting & Falcons Exhibition

It was Alexander who saw the advertisement for the Katara Falcon Exhibition on the metro. He tried to tell me about it on the train but sometimes the train is just too loud to hear him speak (not because others are talking but simply because the metro is moving fast and that creates a lot of noise). So when we got out of the metro he gushed out all the information with syncopated, breathless excitement: "Falcon festival! September 8 through 12! At Katara! Free admission! Can we go?"

Ingrown hairs

The first thing you need to know is that I pulled out an epic ingrown hair the other day. 

It wasn't the kind of ingrown hair that knows its confused and grows into a tight little spiral, having obviously been doing its best to find its way out—the kind that sort of sproings out of your skin triumphantly, being just as pleased as you are to have finally corrected its course. 

No, it wasn't that kind of ingrown hair. It wasn't sensible.

This particular ingrown hair was an ingrown hair that was suffering severely from the Dunning-Kruger effect, a "cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people [or hairs] with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their ability." 

Yes, this ingrown hair put undue confidence in its non-existent navigational skills. It was forging its own path, certain it was doing A+ work when really it was failing abysmally at the one job it has. 

This hair had grown about an inch long in a relatively straight line just under my skin...which rather explained the constant itching of my ankle that I hadn't been able to satisfy in recent history. 

So I took a pin and punctured my skin, looped the hair up, and tugged it out with tweezers. 

As one does. 

It was very satisfying. 

So I had to tell Andrew all about it when he came home and naturally had a rather nosy audience of bystanders (read: children) listen in as I related this tale. 

This raised some questions about what, precisely, an ingrown hair is. Before we could even explain it, though, Alexander said as if he had solved a great mystery, "Ah-ha! So that explains why I sometimes get hairs in my mouth."

We quickly disavowed him of that notion (that any hairs he found in his mouth were simply ingrown hairs from the top of his head that decided to sprout in his mouth instead of into the sunshine) and explained what ingrown hairs actually are. But...that's a pretty funny thought!

Feeling hot, hot, hot!

Grandpa and Darla shared a humorous story about adjusting from pounds to kilos, which resulted in the delivery of far too many sweet potatoes. Today I share a humorous anecdote about adjusting from Fahrenheit to Celsius...

This one involves Alexander and an air conditioner. Here's a picture of the kids waiting to eat the Oreo (adjacent) moon cycle they made as part of their science lesson:

County! County! County!

 

Swimming is an interesting sport because we spent approximately 15 hours at the pool over the past two days (5 on Saturday and 10 on Sunday) to watch our three children swim a collective grand total of approximately 5 minutes.

It was certainly a marathon...for the spectators!

Fortunately, they do allow swimmers to leave after their last event and they always schedule relays first (at regular meets they are last) which meant we got to leave "early" after Zoë's relays. Still, it was a lot of hours at the pool!

I took this top picture because it shows our coach (Amy) as a child swimming for Gwinnett county and now as an adult coaching for Gwinnett county. There are 5 coaches featured on this slide for the same reason (and there seemed to be multiple slides of this nature). Such a thing is unfathomable for me (I currently live 2221.66 miles, as the crow oryx flies, from where I first joined a swim team) but is apparently the reality for many people. The Census Bureau claims that in the United States "nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles," while this Pew study claims approximately 40% of people remain in the community within which they grew up.

Anyway, Andrew and I were both surprised by how many coaches in the Gwinnett county swim league were also young swimmers in the league.

Summer of Stings

After Phoebe got stung (which was shortly after Zoë got stung) this summer, I ordered a big pack of sting relief pads. It's really just gauze soaked in lidocaine or something, but at least that's something. 

Andrew thought it (re: the box size) was overkill because the kids don't get stung that often, but I was like, "At the rate we're going this summer we're definitely going to need these!"

Cut to today...

I had just finished feeding the kids an early (3:00) dinner so they could be ready for their swim meet later this afternoon (when they prefer to subsist on junk food) and they went outside to let out some energy. 

The peace and quiet of the house was interrupted by some other-worldly screaming. Andrew and I made some mad-dashes from various corners of the house to get to the front door to see what could possibly be happening out there and met Phoebe leading a weeping and wailing Alexander to the front door. 

A bug landed on the back of his head and he had the audacity/instinct to reach back and scratch where it landed. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom...ba-da-BOOM! That nasty creature administered a double dose—one for his head and one for his finger.

Stings and things

Another swim meet is in the books!

Here's Alexander, doing very well on his breast stroke (he ended up in third place overall, which is pretty cool—I think he got third last week, too):

Zoë had a bit of a harder time this meet—her goggles kept coming off on her entries (which was tricky and difficult) and she had some hard events (a 100-IM and a 50-fly, for example), plus she moved up an age group and is on the smaller side of things this year. But I'm sure she'll find a good stride soon enough! It's good to be challenged.

Life moves pretty fast: Swim meet countdown

The summer swim season has officially begun!

We had our mock meet last night, which means we only have five weeks of swimming left the season (minus the county competition). Swim meets have always marked the passing of summer, but this year their passing (which hasn't even truly begun because we, uh, haven't had an official swim meet yet) feels a bit more ominous because it's also more or less counting down the time we have left here in Georgia. 

We. Have. So. Much. To. Do. 

But last night we just sat for a few hours and watched the kids swim.

Our competition pool (which isn't our pool but is a pool within our cooperative swim team...we take turns practicing at our pool ad at this pool) got a new deck addition this summer, which is nice because the past couple of years they haven't allowed us to put children on that side of the pool so we had to clump all the kids on the other side of the deck and put the other team out on the parking lot...and neither place was particularly suited for this purpose.

We're glad we don't have to do that anymore. The new deck is much nicer. And "I'm kind of liking the jail situation we have going on," Miss Julie, our team manager, joked. 

We call the area the kids hang out the "bull pen" anyway, and it honestly is rather helpful having it be an actual pen rather than having the kids sprawl out all over whatever nook or cranny of the deck they can find!

Visible Mending: Death to the Death Star Pants

During the April 2025 General Conference, I did some "visible mending" on a pair of Alexander's pants. I actually turned a hopelessly ruined pair of pants into a pair of shorts and used some of the cut-off part to make patches for a less-ruined pair of pants. 

You can see how awful the ruined pants were at his seventh birthday celebration (2024):

I wasn't sure Alexander would like my handiwork, but he did! He dubbed them his Death Star Pants and wore them a lot, though it took me a while to locate any pictures of him wearing them...first I found many pictures of him wearing his cutoffs.

Here he is wearing the cutoffs at Rachel's graduation:

Resolutions

I recently had a discussion about resolutions with a friend, who said she doesn't make any (or encourage her children to make any) because if she wants to do something...she does...but that she doesn't feel the need to "be more" simply because it's a new year. Or something like that. 

On the one hand, I agree that it's important to feel valued for who you are in any given moment. But on the other hand, I think it's nice to have scheduled moments to contemplate who you are, where you are, what you want to be. 

At church, the sacrament is an example of a "temporal landmark," a time dedicated for contemplating my life—to consider whether I've misstepped or misspoke or misbehaved—and a time to begin anew—to recommit to living life a certain (higher) way. 

Not because I'm not "enough" as I am, but because I have such potential to...do and be...better.

The dawning of a new year offers a similar (but different) temporal landmark. And while I think goals can absolutely be started at any time, our brains really like these moments of "newness." We like the turning of the calendar page, the beginning of a new week, of a new year. We like anniversaries and birthdays and first days and...we just like landmark events. Setting goals in conjunction with a temporal landmark is shown to improve success/progress.

So at our house we talk about goals at the beginning of every year (and then have check-ins throughout the year), not to shame but to encourage. Doing so at the beginning of the year helps us be more mindful of those goals throughout the year. 

Alexander started a hat at some point last year. I don't know when. It was months ago. He'd knit a few rows and then put the project down for...weeks...and then knit a few rows...and then put the project down for a few weeks. It would lay forgotten on his dresser or on the staircase of his bed or behind the couch...

One of his resolutions was to finish his hat, and he approached that project with fresh determination, knitting row after row after row until...

Syllable, syllabus, crescendo, credenza

I'm in the process of organizing all my course readings for next semester (it's a doozy of a semester—I'm going to read until my eyeballs fall out). Alexander came up beside me and began reading over my shoulder.

"Is that how you spell syllable?!" he asked in shock.

"Syllabus," I said. "A document that tells what the course is going to cover."

"Oh," he shrugged and ran off. 

*****

He has so many little confusions and I keep meaning to keep a list of them to share and keep forgetting to do so. Perhaps in the future I will be better. For now I will tell you that we were looking for Alif Baa the other day, a text book for learning the Arabic alphabet, which we had misplaced. Alexander was the one to find it.

"It's right here on the crescendo!" he called from the dining room.

Credenza.

He consistently mixes up those words. 

He's cute.

Wus that this year?

I have been remiss in writing down all the funny things Alexander has been saying lately. He's been trying to showcase his rich vocabulary...but has been coming up with slightly wrong words. 

For example, if Phoebe tattled on him for something, he might says she was "extravagant" when what he meant to say was "exaggerating." 

I had a running list of these darling mix-ups in my head...but, of course, my brain is like a sieve and this list has tumbled right out of it. I will be more diligent about keeping track in the future (not to mock—but because it's very, very cute). 

I texted Alexander a picture of himself as a baby, standing by the Christmas tree, pantsless, and using a fly swatter to reach of and tap the ornaments that I had told him not to touch. It's not touching if you don't use your fingers, see?

Buda-Pesth? Budapest? 1935? 1989? What's the difference?

We recently finished reading Dracula, published in 1897, the opening scene spilling us into Buda-Pesth (still hyphenated in Dracula because the city had only recently been created, remember, "on 17 November 1873 from a merger of the three neighboring cities of Pest, Buda and Óbuda").

Today the children gave their reports on Romania (Benjamin and Alexander) and Hungary (Zoë) and we had a Zoom call with my friend Amanda, who currently lives in Bahrain. 

Bahrain has little to do with Romania or Hungary, but we're looking into Middle Eastern countries right now and thought it would be fun to chat with her about her experience. I had the kids write some interview questions and then we woke up this morning to workshop them a bit before the interview. Many of their questions were yes/no questions, so we worked together to create "open-ended" questions and wrote our revised questions on the whiteboard.

Five minutes prior to the meeting I went to open the Zoom room. 

"No internet connection," my computer told me. 

After a few frantic moments, I messaged Amanda from my phone to tell her that...we had no internet...and to give me 15 minutes or so to drive to the church (the library wasn't open yet). 

So we called her from the church. And by the time we made it home whatever hiccup our internet was having was over. 

Primary Program (and Phoebe's first talk)

We had a long full day of church-related stuff. Thankfully I got to have a nap in the middle of it all. Some notes:

• yesterday was "Donut Day," also known as the anniversary of Karen's death; Grandpa brought some donuts over for us
• this morning was our primary program; Grandpa and Darla came to watch; Elder Fish of the (tenth quorum of the) seventy was there
• then I taught primary as normal; the entire stake primary presidency was there, along with the stake president
• Andrew stuck around long enough to have a temple recommend interview and then took Phoebe home because she's not entirely healthy still
• I had a temple recommend interview after primary
• I took a nap
• We went to choir practice
• Miriam drove me to the stake center for a stake leadership meeting

All in all it was about 12 hours of church-y stuff, so a very church-y Sunday, indeed. 

I made a slideshow that told all the kids when their part was coming up, and had all the songs in order and everything. And then I had a complete brain meltdown before one of the songs and couldn't remember the time signature or even feel the beat of the song somehow and realized that I've probably never actually conducted that song in my life, in spite of having spent the past 11 months teaching it to the kids, because I've only ever done the actions and...it was a bit awkward. But we got through it just fine...more or less.

Next time, I'm going to make a note of the time signatures for myself just to give my brain a break. 

I just...completely forgot how to conduct for a minute there. And I didn't have any music up there with me because I don't use music in primary. I just...sing along with the kids...sans music. So I fumbled through a few bits, but that's okay.

It went well. We had about a dozen kids there and they sang nicely and said their lines just fine. 

Zoë was in charge of helping the Sunbeams, specifically because we knew Phoebe wasn't going to let anyone else help her. She said, "Jesus loves us all the time, no matter where we are. How can you show love to someone else, just like Jesus does?"

Then she prompted Phoebe to say, "I can show love to others by drawing them a picture."

The other Sunbeams said things like "share my monster trucks," and "give a high five," so she was very much on theme.

Alexander's baptism (and the ward trunk-or-treat)

There's this page in the book I Spy a Nephite (which you can borrow on the Internet Archive if you, like, me only own Where Have All the Nephites Gone?—or worse! If you own none of Pat Bagley's search and find books) which I felt like we were living today! 

This particular page is of a wedding reception. There's a pile of gifts on stage (including a canoe-shaped package) beside a little chamber orchestra. There's a bouquet toss going on, a wedding line, a buffet table, streamers and bells and...a basketball game. As it turns out "somebody made a mistake in scheduling the ward cultural hall."

To be fair, scheduling our building is particularly tricky because we have three units in the building across two stakes. So putting things on the calendar is a bit of a gamble. For example, we booked the church from 9 to 2 today...but when we showed up there was a suspicious number of cars in the parking lot and the door to the church was propped open. 

We went inside and found that one of the other wards was decorating for their Fall Festival this evening. The cultural hall was all decked out in Halloween decorations. They'd even put up a big ol' display directly in front of the doors to the baptismal font. 

Andrew explained that we had a baptism today and...

The lady in charge basically told him he'd have to schedule the building like everybody else and pick a new day for his baptism. 

He said that we...weren't going to do that, that we had booked the church. 

She said that was impossible because she had booked the church. 

They both pulled out their phones to show each other that they had each booked the church. And, indeed, they had each booked the church. Further, Andrew informed her, there was to be another baptism after this one...so...

Eventually the lady decided she could give us one third of the cultural hall, that her crew would move all the decorations into the other part of the gym and...that was kind of them because it meant that they had to undo some of their work (we really couldn't have their display in front of the baptism font). 

And then I just had to kick the missionaries out of the Relief Society room (where they were having a meeting). 

And then we were able to set up for Alexander's baptism. 

Baptism Announcement, Service Activity, Birthdays, Lost Teeth...and more!

I just pulled Miriam's cake out of the oven. 

We did a horrendous singing to welcome her birthday this morning, but we'll sing to her properly over cake and candles tomorrow. 

We left for Athens early this morning so we could paint CASA's (Court Appointed Special Advocates) porch and shutters, clear their gutters, trim their bushes, and so forth. I'm the service chair for our graduate student organization, but honestly Bekah did most of the planning. Her sister is on the board at CASA and when she heard we were looking for volunteer opportunities she quickly came up with a list. It worked out very well. 

We had 22 people sign up and 19 people attend. We had doughnuts and chicken-biscuit

So we spent the morning cleaning and painting. Zoë was working the crowd, getting to know everybody. She lost a tooth and told everyone it was Miriam's birthday. There were congratulations and birthday wishes all around. It was a big day!

Then we went stopped by the botanical gardens to take some pictures of Alexander so I could make his baptism announcement...which I finished just a few minutes before pulling the cake out of the oven. 

He has paint on his arms and holes in his shoes and could hardly stay still for a picture, but I think that speaks volumes about his heart and direction. He's dirty from service and his soles have been worn out in following a good course.

At least, that's what I'll tell myself. 

Alexander is 8!

Someone was giving away an expired gingerbread house on the Buy Nothing Group and because it had some autumnal vibes, I figured it would be a great way to ring in this season of gratitude. So for FHE on Monday—Canadian Thanksgiving—we put it together (and worked on some leaves to add to our thankful tree). We were very lucky that the kit came with seven distinct pieces to decorate (two roof tiles, four walls, and a chimney). That meant everyone got something to decorate! The instructions also suggested decorating the pieces flat and then putting them together, which for some reason I have never thought of doing...but it did make the whole project much less crowded.

Here's everyone working on their pieces...

Benjamin did a side wall and worked very meticulously on his vines and things:

Recent silly sayings

Benjamin has his first swim meet today (on his year-round team). Andrew's taking him because it's all the way in Newnan and will be a whole day affair. 

Andrew grabbed his shoes out of the shoe closet and then went to sit on the stairs so he could put them on. While he was sitting down, tiny little Phoebe sneaked around him and started walking up the stairs.

Luckily Andrew was gently settling himself on the stairs because he didn't see Phoebe sneak past him and...sat on her. 

"Okay, wow," she said in disgust. "I'm, like, trying to go up the stairs."

Like, how incredibly rude of him!

Sisters, sisters!

I was helping Alexander fill out a survey to be spotlighted in primary and he breezed through the first half, confidently answering questions about his favourite primary song and where he was born. Then he got to the really difficult questions, like, "How many brothers do you have?"

Just kidding. That question was easy for him to answer. 

"One," he said, quite sure. 

"And how many sisters do you have?" I asked. 

"Uhhhhhh..." he said, absolutely perplexed. "Does Rachel still count?"

"Yes, Rachel still counts! Why wouldn't Rachel count?"

"Because she's far away..."

"She's still your sister though, so..."

"I guess so..."

"I...more than guess so..." I said. "She's definitely still your sister."

"Okay, let's put down four."

"Sounds good. Four sisters it is."

Is it bad that he's halfway through his math curriculum already? Probably...

 "Is it cheating," Alexander asked. "If I write down the word PEMDAS on my paper? Because I have a question that involves parentheses, multiplication, and addition and I just need to be sure that I remember to do everything in the right order..."

That is not cheating, actually. 

"It's just that we didn't learn PEMDAS this unit..."

Testing is cumulative. You are allowed—encouraged, required—to call on prior knowledge. 

*****

"I have a slight problem with this question because it wants me to find out, like, what is 15*6 and 4*15 and so I did that! I said 15*6 is 90 and 4*15 is 60 and I added those up and I got 150. But then I remembered that this test is focusing on the distributive property and I could have solved this much faster if did 15*10, which is 15(6+4). So I just hope it's okay if I did it another way even if it is slower and takes more work. And it should be okay because this question also wants me to find out what 9*6 and 9*14 is so that I can find out the difference between those two answers, because I'm really trying to find out how much more money one of them earned than the other one. So if I go straight to 9(20), which is 9(6+14), for the second part, then I used the distributive property to get to the answer and it will still count, right?"

Medicated Kindness

Phoebe was fine, fine, fine, fine fine yesterday.

Then she got a little runny nose.

Then she lost her ever-loving mind. 

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). 

*****

It was a long night.