Saying goodbye to Rachel

Yesterday was a painful day of waiting. 

The day had come to say goodbye, but the hour was not yet at hand. So we just...went through all the motions of having a regular day...which was really anything but ordinary...and yet was entirely ordinary.

I convinced all the kids to come to the pool with me, in part so I could take our traditional "end of season" pool picture. Although it's not the end of the pool season yet, it is the end of an era:

(Zoë apparently taught Phoebe and Ireland to make peace signs in pictures, so they've both been trying to do it since.)

First day and last day at home with Rachel

A little over 18 years ago we brought our brand new baby girl home from the hospital. We placed her in her bassinet and...

Heiss History Tour (June 11)

It was lovely to be able to walk to church on Sunday morning. Phoebe thought this was a particularly lovely treat, though we typically walk at least a few laps around the church building anyway (since Andrew and Miriam like to arrive early to get the organ all set up, and I don't like lingering inside with the kids that long). Anyway, Miriam played a lovely piece as a "special musical number"; it was fun for her to play for the congregation that heard her first fledgling pieces on the organ. 

BYU Museums (June 12)

It's possible that my sister Kelline was the most excited person to have our family visit Utah. She must have driven down from Layton a handful of times! She came to Zoë's baptism, she came for "museum day," she came to the Heiss gathering, she drove Benjamin and Zoë back after their post-zoo excursion, she drove down to deliver birthday cupcakes and say goodbye—by my calculations, that's a handful of times! It's at least an hour one way, so that was quite a lot of driving that she did for us, not to mention all the fun things she planned for us to do!

On Monday she ended up having a couple of her grandkids for the day (long story*), so she invited us to visit some of BYU's museums with them. We ended up being late (which is quite the feat considering we were staying only 15–20 minutes away and my sister had to drive an hour), so they already enjoyed the Museum of Peoples and Cultures without us. We met them at the Museum of Paleontology. 

Here are pictures of my four youngest kids:

A tour of HBLL

When I said Phoebe had never been to the library, what I meant was that she had never been inside our own little public library. I've always left her at home or, when she was really little, sitting in the car with Rachel while I ran in really quick. 

She has, however, been inside the library at UGA and at BYU. 

Naanii took us on a little tour of the Harold B. Lee Library (the HBLL), showing us all the things that have changed since I was last there—which was a lot! I hardly recognized the place!

Perhaps the most exciting thing right now is this exhibit that my mom put together (with some collaborators, of course) on Provo Pop Music Connections—from the Osmonds to the Killers and beyond. It's pretty cool!

BYU Last Week (Rachel at the Science Fair)

Last week we also spent a day at BYU! 

Rachel won her school science fair project and then won the district science fair again, so she got to compete at the regional level! I had to teach preschool that morning (I only have to teach one more time!) so she rode into campus with her friend Kenzie (whose dad also works at BYU but he doesn't have an early morning class on Wednesdays so he was able to take the girls in when they needed to be there and not hours before). Alexander, Zoë and I went to pick her up.

My mom met us at the MOA and we walked up to the Harmon building together so that we could find her. She was stuck in some raffle meeting (Zoë was super excited Cosmo was there):

My mom had to leave before seeing Rachel, but Rachel says that she saw us from the audience and waved (though we didn't catch her wave).

BYU this week

To really switch things up for spring break, we decided not to go to the pool today and instead hung out at BYU. How is spring break going, you ask? Well, we went swimming on Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. 

Andrew was out of town Thursday through Sunday last week—so our friends April and James invited us to hang out at the pool with them and it was the best idea ever and I'm so glad they got us out of the house. The kids enjoyed it so much that we've just been...going and going and going...even though it's super crowded because it's spring break. 

The worst part about Andrew's trip out of town was that it covered the days that we ordinarily see him the most. Monday through Thursday it's kind of non-stop business over here. So last week we dealt with our ordinary Monday through Thursday horribleness and then Andrew was gone until Sunday night and then we jumped right back into our Monday through Thursday horribleness again. 

So really spring break has been a bit of a dud.

Yesterday was so ridiculous that I didn't even see Andrew at all (at least not technically). He left the house before anyone was up because he teaches an early morning class on Wednesdays. He also teaches an evening class on Wednesdays up in Salt Lake, which he commutes to on the train because we're forward-thinking environmentalists. Last night his train broke down and was stalled for an hour on the tracks so he didn't get home until after midnight (which is technically Thursday, not Wednesday). It was a long day. 

And then he left this morning before anyone got up. 

Miriam had to get to campus for her organ class, so we decided that we'd all just go have a museum day and then leave her there for her class. We met up with Naanii and Auntie Josie, which was fun! We walked through the MOA and then visited the Museum of Peoples and Cultures, which currently has a lovely exhibit on the Middle East with some very beautiful costumes displayed. 

And then we went where the kids really wanted to go: The Bean Museum!

You know it's been a long and trying semester when...

...you pull the calendar up on your phone to see if anyone has signed up for office hours with your professor husband and tell your children, "I'm just checking to see if Daddy can come over a little earlier today."

And by over I naturally mean home because he lives here, duh.

Even if sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

Nights at the Museum

On Friday night Rachel went to a sleepover and the rest of us were itching for something to do so we headed to BYU for their "Nights at the Museum" activity. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, other than knowing that the museums were open extra late, but when we arrived we were handed a paper with a scavenger hunt of sorts. The employee gave us the hook—that if we finished the scavenger hunt by visiting all five museums we would win a water bottle—and the kids (Benjamin, especially) were sold.

Our first museum was the Museum of Peoples and Cultures. In addition to the regular exhibit they also had the back of the museum open and had booths set up with students exhibiting their work. One of the exhibits was on Nabatean pottery from Petra—they have some of the thinnest pottery found in the world and no one quite knows how they were able to make it so thin. It was kind of fun to get to talk with the students about pottery after reading Uncle Patrick's paper on pottery.

Next we hit up the Paleontology Museum, which was by far Alexander's favourite. We really need to take him back there when it's a little less crowded (and a little less past his bed time).

Adventure is out there

Winter has me feeling so bored that I haven't felt like I've had very much to write about (it's also been an insanely busy week; I've spent hours editing papers or helping with science fair projects that I guess I could have been writing), but then I saw these pictures on my computer and remembered that we actually left the house to do some adventuring this past week!

It got so warm, actually, that we even went on our first family walk of the year this week. We haven't managed to go on many (uhhh...any) because our schedule is kind of wonky this semester, with T/W/Th being a marathon of craziness. By the time Andrew gets home it's either hours past the kids' bedtime or late enough in the evening that it's too chilly to enjoy a walk outside (that isn't to say that we aren't ever walking, just that we haven't all been out walking together, which is the definition of a family walk). But we did manage a walk this week and, I suppose, we could count our Saturday outing as a walk as well.

We decided to hit up Patrick Dougherty's exhibit at BYU's Museum of Art. Dougherty is an artist from North Carolina whose work my little North Carolinian children know and love. In fact, they are huge fans of his! He is the man behind the twisted twiggy pathway in the Hideaway Woods at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham where my bigger kids spent many happy childhood hours. 

It was fun to get to watch this exhibit take shape last semester (as we'd walk through the MOA on our way to organ lessons) and we figured it was high time we take the kids to visit it just for the sake of visiting. It was like a little taste of North Carolina, right here at BYU! The kids had so much fun playing a little hide-and-seek in the structures (and it was nice to have such a child-friendly exhibit at the museum).

Here are far too many pictures:

Alex and Daddy

The first Monday of December

Trigger warning: This post discusses a recent suicide attempt on BYU campus.

"Thank goodness November is over! That was an awful month. December," Andrew declared, "will be calm and relaxing and normal. We've got this."

And with that he finished scraping off his car (because although he declared December calm, relaxing, and normal he couldn't exactly put a moratorium on the cold) and headed off into the world for the first workday of December.

I was surprised, about twenty minutes later, when I heard the garage door open.

"Forgot this!" he said, picking up his briefcase and waving it in the air. "So much for a good start to December. I'm supposed to meet with a student in ten minutes but I'm definitely going to be late for that appointment!"

And with that he was off again, chuckling to himself about how he had been the one to upset the calm, relaxing, normal beginning to December.

Little did we know, a calm, relaxing, normal December was not at all in the cards.

Buffets and Bowling

Yesterday the kids and I played a game of bowling on the Wii (and—not to brag, but—I totally won; with a couple of turkeys my score was well over 200) and then they were talking about how fun it would be to go bowling in real life (you know, because clearly we're awesome at bowling (according to the Wii). So this afternoon the kids and I headed into campus to meet Andrew at work for a family date.

We went to the Cannon Center for dinner. The older three kids all chose to have the chicken-fried steak/mashed potatoes/mixed vegetables plate for their main course while we were lucky to get Zoë to eat "fruit poops."

Oh, you haven't heard the fruit poop story? Well that's because I feel like I hardly have time to sit down to write anymore because someone is always crying (stop crying, children, so I can write your histories). 

The short and sweet version of this story is that I do my best to avoid serving my children "sugar cereals," the exception being their birthdays when they get to choose whatever birthday cereal they want. Their most popular birthday pick is Lucky Charms (or whatever rip-off brand is available) so Zoë hasn't yet been exposed to a wide variety of sugar cereal. 

When we went up to visit Auntie Emily's family back in April, we stayed at a hotel that had free breakfast and their little buffet included Froot Loops (or whatever rip-off brand it was) and Zoë was 100% sure that she wanted those. But she was also wearing rainbow pyjamas so she was pretty darn cute with that bowl of Froot Loops. 

"Hey, Zoë!" Benjamin said good-naturedly. "You loop like a fruit loop!"

She turned to him in disgust and snarled, "I am not a fruit poop, Benny!"

April 29, 2018

On Campus

On Saturday I took the kids to BYU to meet up with my mom and sister for the Family Concert Series, which how did I not know about until now?!? I think it's such a great idea—a matinee musical performance geared toward children. 

This month's theme was "Pictures in Sound" and we learned about how composers paint a picture with sounds rather than paint. The first song the orchestra played was the Star Wars theme song and the minute they started playing Benjamin went all slack-jawed (and didn't manage to close his mouth until they had finished playing). The first question of the lecture was something about what the music made us see/imagine/think about. The answer, for most (including Benjamin), was Star Wars.

That one time we went to the museum...

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day we went to the Bean Museum with my mom, brother, and sister. And then I didn't ever write about it because I'm so far behind in life that it's not even funny. But Josie wanted to see the pictures I took with her and Alexander. Unfortunately, none of them turned out great, but that's alright because they're both cute anyway!

Gamelan

Easing back into academia, I attended my first (though unofficial) university class in over ten years this evening. 

I thought that I had arrived a good ten minutes early, but in actuality I had arrived fifty minutes late. 

So, basically, I'm off to a great start. 

Good thing it's a two-hour class!

When we found out that Andrew was officially going to be working at BYU this year I excitedly hinted to my mom that I would love to finally get to play with the Gamelan ensemble. Unfortunately, Alexander kind of threw things off for me last semester.

But now that Alexander is three months old and we have a handy pair of noise-cancelling headphones, we're ready to jump in with both feet:

Sleeping Babies and the Bean Museum

This evening my mom texted me to say that my sister told her about a reptile exhibit at the Bean Museum on campus that Benjamin would probably like, which reminded me that I totally (sporatically) took them there already. I just hadn't blogged about it yet because for whatever reason I'm behind on most—if not all—facets of my life. 

I seriously feel like I'm running after a bus that I've missed.

Fun fact: I have run after busses that I've missed. Often, when I lived in Voronezh, I was able to actually catch up to the bus on the next stop when I did this. Not that I did it terribly often. But there were those mornings, you know, where you just miss the bus and rather than risk waiting for the next bus you book it to the next and just barely make it on. Except in my life, currently, I never barely make the bus. I just keep chasing it stop after stop after stop.

I would blame it on the baby, but, honestly, he's one of those ridiculously easy babies (for now (please, please don't let saying that out loud jinx things)). 

Back when I had my first baby, who never slept, I sought out all sorts of advice about how to get her to sleep and nothing really worked. And then I had my second baby and she was a pretty spectacular sleeper. And then I had my third baby and, behold, grey hairs did begin to spring forth from my scalp because he was not a spectacular sleeper. And then I had my fourth baby and she never slept (and that's hardly hyperbole at all—getting her to sleep was honestly a nightmare for 2.5 years). And then in a moment of temporary insanity I went ahead and had another baby and...he's pretty great so far.

One piece of advice that stuck out in my mind tonight was that to teach a baby to sleep you just put them down when they're drowsy so they get used to going to sleep on their own. 

For about the past decade of my life (aside from Miriam, whose love of sleep has always seemed more like the exception than the rule to me) I have been convinced that there's no way that could possibly be a thing. 

But guess what: it's a thing.

Would-be kidnapper

We headed to BYU for family night last night. We had to go to the library because—confession time—we hadn't gone since before Alexander was born. He's five weeks old now; it's fine.

The kids ran around like we'd released them in a candy shop, grabbing far too many books (we checked them all out), and then we decided we'd stop by the creamery on our way home since I hadn't yet been able to go and the kids felt sorry for me.

Herding a family of seven into The Creamery on Ninth on a Monday, of all days (hey, everybody–it's family night!), proved to be a little chaotic. Let's just say we weren't the only family with a handful of children to think of swinging by the creamery. There were also several FHE groups there. It was, in a word, pandemonium.

As we were heading into the creamery, with Benjamin and Zoë wildly skipping about in front of us (literally screaming for ice cream), we ran into a family on their way out, with their little ones bouncing around in a post-ice-cream frenzy, and soon found ourselves aswirl in a frenetic current of towheaded munchkins.

Parents began frantically grabbing at children, trying to stop their offspring from crashing into store displays, pulling over rope barriers, or running into innocent bystanders; trying to keep the children that should be in the store in the store while also shooing out the ones who were supposed to be leaving.

As I was reaching out to constrain a little boy, about Benjamin's age and about Benjamin's height—I swear he could have been his doppelgänger, I locked eyes with the other mother, who was also reaching out to constrain the aforementioned little boy.

I looked at her in surprise, but she just laughed, nodded her head toward Andrew and said, "He's got yours."

She was super nice about it, considering I was about to kidnap her child.

I guess she knew that with my arms all full of Alexander I wouldn't have been able to keep hold on her little boy, anyway. Plus, she probably counted up my children and figured I wouldn't purposely bring another one home! Who knows? Maybe she also made a mad grab for Benjamin?

It's been over five weeks since we've really tried going anywhere as a family; it's fine. But now that I think about it, maybe it was a little too soon for us all to take on the world...

And that's how I almost kidnapped a child yesterday.

Miriam's baptism pictures

Miriam's eighth birthday is fast-approaching, which means she'll also be getting baptized soon. When Rachel was baptized we were pretty much at liberty to choose whatever date we wanted because she was one of two children from our ward getting baptized that year (and Callin go baptized out in Arizona during summer break, so...she was the only child from our ward to use the font that year). Out here, though, there are so many kids turning eight, not only in our ward but in our stake, that they have to coordinate the use of the baptismal font (and, my little environmentalist heart likes to think, conserve water), so we have an assigned day and time for baptisms.

I finally found out what that will be: November 4th.

Remember, remember, the fourth of November! (Just kidding; that's the fifth).

Miriam keeps saying things like, "I can't wait for October 25th! I can't wait for October 31st! I can't wait for November 4th! I can't wait for Alexander!"

There are a lot of things she can't wait for right now.

Yesterday, while Rachel was at BYU's homecoming spectacular with my mom (seeing Kristin Chenoweth perform live!), we took the children on a little tour de BYU and took enough pictures of Miriam that she was begging us to stop by the end.

She's wearing the very same dress that Rachel wore for her baptism (which still looks brand new because, as my mom pointed out, how often does one (eight-year-old child) actually wear an all-white dress?) and was thrilled to pieces to be able to do so. It's been hanging in her closet since we moved here and she's tried to wear it on multiple occasions but I always make her put it back and change. Because white dress.

Anyway, here are a few several pictures of Miriam in the courtyard of the JFSB:

Rendezvous at BYU

My cousin Eric texted me on Friday afternoon to say that he was in town for the weekend (it's General Conference) and that he and his wife and baby would be in Provo for the next couple of hours, so I hustled the two little ones out the door (leaving Grandpa to meet the girls after school) and headed to Provo. I haven't seen Eric in years—more than five, at least (in fact, this may have been the last time we saw each other). At any rate, it's been long enough that he hasn't met Benjamin or Zoë and I haven't met Jocelyn or Payton. 

Obviously that's been too long for the two of us to go without seeing each other because we kind of grew up together—we're just a couple months apart:

Eric (10 months) and me (1 year)—July 1986

Living here: Libraries and other tales

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that we live here now. Like, for realsies. It's not an extended vacation or visit. We're not going back. That chapter of our life is over. We're here now.

Sometimes that's a good thing. Like when my niece calls to see if she can drop by to play with my kids, or when the mountains are glowing majestically in the morning sunshine, or when my doctor doesn't say anything about my temple garments because, well, he's Mormon, too. 

And then I just kind of smile and think to myself, "This is nice."

Sometimes, however, it's less nice. Like when our friends in North Carolina are on fall break and are all heading to the beach because it's still warm enough to do that and we (a) don't have any fall break to speak of and (b) are entirely unacclimatized to this weather (why so cold?!); or when we go to church and I look around at all the homogeny and realize that no one is going to be belting baptist hymns as they walk down the aisle to bear their testimony this week...or any week; or when we visit the library for the first time and realize (a) how small it is, (b) that it is an independent library, not a branch with loaning privileges at other branches, and (c) we are on "probation" for a few months and can have only ten items (ten items!!) checked out at any given time per family (not per card—per family). 

And then I almost want to start crying and think to myself, "We live here now?"

Yeah, the library was kind of a big one for me this week. I literally almost cried when they said we could check out ten whole items. Like, ten? How do I fuel my family of readers for more than...a day...with only ten books? Gulp.