Valentine Exchange (and a poem on Executive Orders)

Not only did we have the excitement of getting a bearded dragon to contend with this morning, but we also had to walk Luna (which we usually don't have to do on Wednesdays, but needed to do this week), and we had to walk her early because we had to get to co-op early for the Valentine exchange that we had beforehand. 

It was a busy Wednesday...and then got busier with piano for Zoë and organ for Miriam, and activity days for Alexander and Zoë, and a temple trip for Benjamin, Miriam, Rachel, and Andrew. Luckily it was just as crazy for our friends the Fitzes—they dropped their youth off at our house and Andrew drove all the youth to the temple and they picked up Alexander and Zoë for activity days since they're the activity day leaders, which left just me and Phoebe at home. On Tuesdays we hardly see each other at all, but on Wednesdays we are stuck together like glue, Phoebe and I.

We haven't participated in a Valentine exchange since exiting the public school system, so I was sorely out of practice. We signed Valentines for Family Home Evening on Monday and it was a real slog, let me tell you. Approximately 30 children participated in the Valentine exchange, which meant my four co-op children signed approximately 120 Valentines between them. It was...taxing. 

But I have to say—we came away with a lovely haul. 

I remember feeling like a bit of a curmudgeon about Valentine's Day back in 2019. To be fair, that was our first Valentine's Day after Karen passed away...and Valentine's Day is her birthday...so none of us were feeling super pumped about Valentine's Day.

But also! The. Amount. Of. Candy. my kids came home with. It was absurd!

Not so in our homeschool group! We had a few rice krispy treats, some muddy buddies, an orange...some erasers...stickers...pencils... Our family put a little frisbee in each Valentine box (they were leftover from the Anderson family reunion...in 2015...so I figured it was a good time to finally offload them). It was a lovely. I mean, a few candies here and there might have been okay. 

But nobody needs 10 boxes of conversation hearts. 

Anyway, I'm just saying, we ended up with different things at this Valentine exchange than I imagined we would. And it was lovely.

One little boy even crocheted a little whale for everyone. He made thirty of these things! And they were a huge hit. Everybody loved them. And he felt so happy that he was able to spread so much joy (even if his fingers were aching). Here's Phoebe with her whale:

Valentine's Day

"Mom, will tomorrow be special?" Benjamin asked me before bed last night. "Or will it be just an ordinary school day?"

"Well," I told him honestly, "Valentine's Day is always just an ordinary day. It's not, like, a federal holiday or anything like that where we get time off, so everyone will be going to work and school and..."

"No, I mean, like will we be exchanging valentines or getting candy or anything like that?"

"Did you make valentines to exchange?" I asked. 

"Well, no...but..."

"Then we'll see. For now, good night."

Now, I already knew that Andrew had picked up some candy from the store. And I had collected a few items from our Buy Nothing group to give to the little kids. I even splurged and got a set of books on bushcraft for Benjamin. I set all these things out before I went to bed, along with some poems I wrote for each person in the family, which is a sometimes-tradition for me. 

My friend Kathy introduced me to the idea of sometimes-traditions (Kathy was a linguistics major with me at BYU (at any rate we took multiple linguistics courses together) and she ended up marrying one of Andrew's friends (they'd served missions in Italy together); she's also an author). Anyway, she posted pictures of some gorgeous gingerbread she and her girls created this Christmas of Hogwarts Castle and the Hogwarts Express and...it was truly phenomenal. I think technically they did it in the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. 

But she explained in her post that it's only a sometimes-tradition because it isn't possible to pull of a stunt like that every year. Making gingerbread from scratch, agonizing over templates, piecing everything together, spending the time to decorate it just so. It's a lot of work! 

So some years they do that. Other years they just throw some graham cracker houses together (that was us this year). Other years they forego gingerbread houses altogether. 

And I think that's just fine. Some traditions are rather complicated and if you need to take a step back for whatever reason in order to simplify your life, well, that's just fine. 

Valentine Limericks II

Five years ago, I wrote some Valentine limericks and decided last night that I'd write another set. It's almost like a tradition...that occurs every five years...

They're not great but they're what I came up with while I was in the hall waiting for Zoë to fall asleep (until, like, midnight) last night.

Valentine's Day fun

We had quite an exciting week-long Valentine celebration. My sister Kelli sent a box full of crafts and treats and Grandpa sent some fun craft supplies for us as well. We've been dipping into those packages during this mostly-drizzly week; it's kept us from getting cabin fever. 

Here are the kids with some little fuzz-ball critters from a craft kit Auntie K sent:

Valentine's Day and Karen's Birthday

This was a busy (and rather dichotomous) holiday for us, abounding in revelry but not without sorrow.

I was in charge of three Valentine's Day parties this year, which was a lot and had me feeling rather stressed out. I knocked the preschool party out on the 13th. Since I had the preschool kiddos last week as well as this week, I was able to stretch a project out over two weeks. I had the kids cut some hearts out of salt dough last week and this week we painted them (we did that first thing in the morning so that they would have plenty of time to dry before it was time to go home).

Limericks

On Wednesday night I was finalizing a limerick writing activity for Rachel's class Valentine celebration. I don't know that they ever got around to finishing their limericks because our party was cut short by the assembly and their morning was cut short by the fire "drill" excitement so they were having a crazy day. Whatever the case, getting ready for this activity sure got me in a limerick-y mood. I started composing limericks in my head throughout the day as I dealt with Benjamin and Zoë and when I had theirs mostly finished I figured I should write poems for everyone else, too. So I did. 

I made little bookmarks out of them and busted out a few books for them to enjoy tomorrow. 

Andrew doesn't get a book. He gets the little set of kitchen gadgets.

Valentine mail

Getting the mail has been rather exciting the last couple of days. Yesterday there was an envelope in the mail for Rachel and Miriam and today there was an envelope for Benjamin and Zoë, each containing valentine cards and a little bit of spending money. The kids were thrilled to get them and were very excited about the pictures Bumpa drew for them.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day started bright and early with me taking the kids to a basketball game Miriam was cheering at and Andrew heading off to a scout merit badge training session. Benjamin's been looking forward to this basketball ever since we mentioned it during calendar on Monday at family night. Usually Andrew just gets up and takes Miriam to these Saturday morning games so we just don't mention the word "basketball" and Benjamin has no idea what he's missing. He loves basketball.

Anyway, before I even got out of bed Andrew said, "Oh! I can give you your present now!" and he opened the drawer of the filing cabinet.

"You didn't even wrap it?" I asked.

"Nope!" he said, completely unashamed. "Here!"

He tossed me a box and I didn't even have to open it to know what he got me—because he didn't wrap it. It was a pierogi mold!

"You're not going to cry?" Andrew asked.

"No. Have I ever cried over a present?"

"No."

This has been a goal of his since we got married. He's done some thoughtful things—just not anything that would make me cry.

With dinner plans underway in my head, I forced myself out of my cozy bed and headed to the breakfast table. We managed to make it to the basketball game on time and Miriam did a cute little Valentine's Day cheer at half-time (and regular cheering throughout the game).

There is beauty all around when there's

Tonight for Family Home Evening we set a goal to show more love to each other—and to try to notice when others are being loving to us—this week. Hopefully that will promote some harmony in our home. We'll see...

We also sat down together at the kitchen table and got valentines ready to send out to our family. Here's the damage we did:

1 birthday card
10 hand-written notes
11+ kid-made valentines*
25 store-bought valentines

...all for 33 relatives. We stuck to great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And I think we even managed to get everything in the appropriate envelopes. As an added bonus I finally sat down and started a spreadsheet to hold everyone's addresses so I can stop asking for them (or hunting them down in old messages) every time I want to mail something. I've been meaning to do this for years now but I only ever think of it at Christmastime and things are always a little too busy at that time of the year to actually do it. But February? February's not so busy.

I totally had time to do it in February. Why didn't I think of that before?

V-Day, Paddy's Day, Snow Day

Today is St. Patrick's Day so what better day to talk about Valentine's Day, right? I'm only a month (and three days) off. To be fair, Andrew was a little late delivering but that was only because it snowed on Valentine's Day and we were "snowed in." As luck has it we're "snowed in" again today (there's a three hour delay for school tomorrow) so it's even more appropriate to reminisce about Valentine's Day.

Here's all the snow we had this afternoon:

They cancelled soccer practice for this

Thawmageddon!*

This afternoon Andrew posted a link to some geeky valentines so I followed the link and then sent him the "I love you more than free wifi" one with a special note telling him that I was happy to be "snowed in" with him again today and playfully joked that our relationship would probably survive even if we had to live without internet for the day.

A few short hours later we heard a tremendous BOOM. Our friendly neighbourhood transformer had blown. The power was out, essentially forcing us to live without internet for the afternoon.

We survived. But just barely.

It was actually a lovely day—high fifties; clear, blue skies; brilliant sunshine—we headed outside to splash in the puddles since that's basically all that's left of "the worst snowstorm to hit the area since 2002." Just to remind you, that storm was raging through Wednesday and Thursday. It is now Friday.

Behold the terrible aftermath:

Don't Eat Peed

So, Valentine's Day ended up being a little lame. Andrew had some big papers due this week so he spent a lot of time writing and I spent a lot of time editing and we both spent a lot of time asking the girls to go play. On Wednesday night Andrew said, "Phew. Twenty-five pages of writing—finished! I have a ten page paper due tomorrow but I'm not going to worry about that right now."

"Wow. Things have changed since we were lowly undergrads, haven't they?" I sighed. "It used to be that a ten page paper would stress you out for the whole semester and now there's a ten page paper due tomorrow that you haven't even started and you're not even sweating bullets."

Why? Because ten pages is the new "one paragraph."

We did a little Valentine's Day fun on Monday for FHE and again on Wednesday night while Andrew was at class. On Thursday Miriam and I had some Valentine fun and made what I'd hoped would be a yummy Valentine's Day meal. She and I slaved over perogies—we even made them heart shaped!

Valentine's Week

We used to have a container of toys under our "tv" stand but the lid didn't stay on tight and the toy sets (Littlest Pet Shops) were full of choking hazards so we moved that box of toys into the girls' bedroom. That left under the television completely open—which meant Benja-boy could roll under it and get at the cords—so when we saw these little boxes on sale for 50 cents each we picked up a couple to stick under the tv stand, hoping to keep Benjamin from going under there.

Now one of his favourite past times is pulling them out so he can play with them.

Valentine's Eve

After dinner and homework and chores I turned on some Valentine's Day tunes (not really because I don't think those actually exist...but it was some random "CD" on Spotify called A Kid's Valentine's Day Party or something like that and had a bunch of old love songs sung by kids) and we had an impromptu dance party in the living room. I will never be able to listen to Hooked on a Feeling with a straight face, thanks to a mime routine my friend Leslie did in one of our theatre classes in high school.

When we were finished dancing around like lunatics, we settled down to play Don't Eat Pete! The girls caught onto the rules of the game quickly and loved it. The first couple of rounds were a little crazy because Rachel cleared the board twice in a row without getting Pete while Miriam picked Pete on her first guess twice in a row. It was a crazy!

Valentine's Day...finally

On Valentine's Day eve Andrew invited me to go on a mystery date with him on Saturday, for Valentine's Day. He put "date with the most beautiful woman in the world" on the calendar and he wouldn't tell me what the date was...for about an hour...before he caved and told me because he can't keep secrets.

Valentine’s Day 2010

This year for Valentine’s Day we resurrected our tradition of making heart-shaped pizza. I was trying to remember why we hadn’t done it last year—but last year was the Chili Cook-off, so that explains it.

I do love me some V-day

We went grocery shopping today and brought along the camera just in case we happened to see anything interesting, because you never know, right? Well, it happens to be Valentine’s Eve so of course we ended up something interesting since Valentine’s Day is fast becoming one of the most-loved holidays in these parts (despite all the naysayers) if decorations are indicative of preference.

Just a few days ago the flower shops bordering the tracks by Midan Digla were ordinary flower shops. By today, however, they’d erupted into a sultry display of Valentine pomp and fluff and stuff.

Invisible Chili and the Newlywed Game

For Valentine's Day our branch had a chili cook off. It wasn't exactly my idea of a romantic evening, but it sure was fun. The priesthood was in charge of cooking the chili--the women weren't even allowed in the kitchen. There were some pretty good entries, but Andrew's was above and beyond them all.

I can’t believe we didn’t win. Clearly the judges were either stupid or not fit for their position since they weren’t overwhelmed by the piquant taste of the Emperor’s New Chili.

Andrew even had to get up and explain why his chili was the best. I don’t think he would have entered if he knew he had to do that.

We weren’t really smart and sat behind the pillar, so Carolee and Melissa went up to the stand so that they could watch everyone give their presentation. Rachel decided she wanted to be one of the girls.

Here are some of the entrants:

Andrew with the Emperor’s New Chili; Dan with a sweet chili that had some Welsh name that took him like 5 minutes to say and that I have no hope of transcribing here (Dan is Welsh); Patrick who entered Adam’s Chili (he “found” the recipe in some Joseph Smith papers); and Eric, who served up Toro something-or-other (beef with salsa).

Dan won the popular vote. Harri won the most flavorful. Patrick won for the best presentation. All we got were a few laughs, and a big round of applause. But that’s alright because we did win the “Newlywed” game.

I had to fill out a card with questions and Andrew had to guess what I put down. The McCallisters and the Levanans also participated. The questions were a little off the wall, and very similar to the survey about my father-in-law that his co-worker put up online.

1) What is your spouse’s sign?

2) What was your first date together?

3) What was your first fight about?

4) If your spouse was a superhero, what would they want their superpower to be?

At the end of those questions we were tied with the McCallisters with 2 points each (although, technically we didn’t ever get to answer the fighting question because Patrick was holding our card when Harri answered and he gave our answer away) so we had to do a tie breaker question:

5) If your spouse was a shoe, what would they be?

Both Linda and Andrew answered that one correctly so we had to have another.

6) If President Obama’s stimulus package involved giving $10,000 to each person, what would your spouse buy?

Both Andrew and Linda got that wrong, and since we didn’t want to go into triple overtime we decided that we were both winners. Melissa will be making us cookies. Melissa makes some good cookies, so I’m excited.

Andrew got 3/6 questions correct about me. Do you think you can do better?

A Valentine's Day Slumber Party

Andrew's happy. I got his watch fixed for Valentine's Day. He broke it in May 2006 when he was trying to haul our luggage off of the bus at al Funduq Select. It was about time we fixed it.

He gave me a yoga block and strap. I guess that makes me an official, and fully equipped, yogi. Except that I don't have a mat yet. I have a feeling that will be arriving on my birthday.

So I got him a watch strap and he got me a yoga strap. Were we on the same wavelength or what?

And keeping with our tradition we made a heart shaped pizza. It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. It stretched out when I peeled it off the counter and I forgot to prep the pan so it stuck pretty badly.


We had just gotten it into the oven when the real fun began. Matt and Bonnie dropped off Amy so that they could spend Valentine's Day alone. We were excited to have two babies for awhile. I learned a lot and I think I will be forgiving myself for not keeping my house cleaner. Rachel is a very...demanding...child, to say the very least.

Let's just say that Amy cried and it sounded like the whimpers Rachel makes when she's asleep. That's how loud and demanding Rachel is.

She also is a little bit dominant. Definitely an "alpha-female" if I've ever seen one. The first thing she did when she saw Amy was decide they should talk so she promptly removed Amy's pacifier to allow for better babbling. Don't worry, Bonnie, she didn't stick it in her own mouth (because Rachel doesn't take those things). She just threw it on the floor and started clawing away at Amy's seatbelt. We decided we should help Rachel get Amy out before she knocked the car seat, and both of them, to the floor.


While the pizza cooked, Andrew and I encouraged Rachel to be gentle and tried to make sure she didn't accidentally dismember Amy. Rachel really needs to learn to be gentle if we're ever going to have another baby. And with how rough she is, the sooner we start her on that, the better. Starting now she might just be ready for a sibling when we are, although I doubt it. She's a rather aggressive baby.

Here she is using Amy to push herself up into a standing position...yikes! We nixed that idea pretty fast.


She doesn't try to be mean, I don't think...she just doesn't know her own strength. Believe me. I can't tell you how many times I say "soft" and "gentle touch" and "don't pinch mommy" every day. I say them often. She can play nice though when she wants to.

See? Playing nice.

It helped when we stuck them both in car seats although Rachel kept reaching over in the car to pull on Amy's handlebar while we were taking the babies to visit our parents for Valentine's Day and to wish Andrew's mom a happy birthday. We gave each family a copy of our first photo book, One Thousand Words: In the Beginning... and picked up some yummy cookies from the Heisses.


We stopped off at my family's house first and decided to pull a little trick. I walked up to the door with Amy in her car seat and Andrew hid behind the corner with Rachel in hers. I rang the doorbell and Josie busted through the door and started yanking on the car seat and asking if she could "take her out." Then she looked inside and her excitement died.

"Who's that?" she whispered, absolutely puzzled.

And then Andrew came around the corner with Rachel. It was pretty funny.

When we got home we got the girls ready for bed and let them fool around in their jammies for a little bit. I promise that Rachel isn't a bully--she doesn't mean to hurt people and we try to tell her to be gentle. She just hasn't grasped the "nice" concept yet. Perhaps we need to limit rough housing to between the hours of 4 and 5 PM. She certainly does like to wrestle, but I think it is more out of curiosity than an actual desire to cream the other child.

This is my hand, Amy. Hand.
And this is my foot!
Being nice (look, look! She can be nice!)

Amy seemed to be okay with everything until Rachel decided to bite her...or kiss her...I think this was technically a combination bite-kiss which doesn't hurt as much as a true bite and is a little less slobbery than a true kiss.


That's when we decided that we should feed them.

Rachel got fed first. Bonnie's motto may be "neediest baby first" but mine is "loudest baby first." I can't stand the screaming. You can hear Rachel from outside when she's really on one and Amy seemed content enough to kick around on her back.

I started Amy's bottle warming while I nursed Rachel. Andrew wasn't so keen on feeding Amy (he's always been wary of mother's milk and since this was foreign mother's milk, he was doubly so) but eventually caved in and fed her and I daresay he enjoyed himself in spite of the occasional drip.

Rachel let out one little cry before she fell asleep. She was so exhausted (beating up Amy took a lot out of her, I guess). Amy fell asleep pretty quickly, too. It was actually a quieter night than we've had in a long time. Amy kept Rachel entertained, eliminating the need for our song-and-dance routine. I should get cleaning the kitchen now. For a minute I was wondering why I hadn't done that yet...but then I remembered: although I didn't have to spend my time amusing Rachel, my time wasn't freed up because I had to put on my referee hat. A mother's work is never done.

Not like mom's...

I did end up getting Andrew a present. Triominos! I have great memories of playing that as a child, so of course when I saw it I thought that Andrew would like playing it, too. It's kind of like dominoes, only triangles.

That got Andrew and I to talking: we really do want everything to be just like in the house we grew up in. We're just lucky that we grew up in homes with mis-matched furniture, otherwise we'd be one of those ridiculous couples who think that we need brand new furniture the minute we're married. We're really okay with hand-me-downs. It's more the small things. Like triominos.

I really like my can opener because it's just like the one we had for all those years while I was growing up (until it was replaced by one of the same brand because someone left the originals too close--on is too close--to the stove burner. But I won't name any names: *cough* David *cough*).

And Andrew likes to keep the sheets in storage bins under the bed, which is really a great idea because it frees up so much shelf room and, really, how often do you need to get sheets out? Once a month or so? Not really worth it to have in the closet for all that time when it could be under the bed not using up useful space.

We like to just do little things just like mommy and daddy. Which is kind of funny because so many people spend their whole teenage years rebelling against how mom and dad do things.

I'm sure that Andrew and I had rebellious years, but I think our rebellious years were fairly mild compared to some. It just makes me wonder if people who really "didn't like" their parents way of doing things grow up to crave that life style?

We always tell Sarah that she's going to be just like her parents and it just about makes her throw up. I'm pretty sure she will wake up one day and realize that she just punished her child in the same punishment she had gotten when she did the exact same thing in her childhood. But I guess I'll never know that.

***

Anyway, today was Karen's birthday, so Andrew gave me the assignment of buying her a gift while I was looking for his gift. This proved more difficult than I first thought. I discussed it at lunch (a Valentine's Day Potluck) with my mom and Cyndee, Andrew's boss: the "mother-in-law gift dilemma."

We all decided that a CD would be a good choice, but Andrew's family already has a large collection of music and I am not so familiar with it that I know for sure what they already have. We thought we would go with Enoch Train, a group that my mom's boss's husband (Daron) plays in. We went to their concert together last year (me, my mom, Josie, Andrew, and his mom).

I couldn't figure out how the CDs were arranged in the bookstore and they were playing really annoying and loud music in that section of the store so I couldn't handle it. I gave up on finding their CD.

I went to plan B: a book. I browsed through row upon row of books but I just couldn't think of a book that Karen wouldn't have.

I looked at art prints. I looked at games. I looked at clothes. I could settle on nothing and was beginning to begrudge the fact that Andrew had dared to give me this assignment. What was he thinking? I can't even shop for him, let alone myself. How did he expect me to come up with a good present for his mother?

I stumbled upon a sickly sentimental series of gifts called, "Eat your peas." I looked at a book that they had...it was disgusting. Curly handwriting scrawling across page after page in this book saying things like, "I love you!"; "You mean the world to me!"; "You're great!"; and "Don't forget to take time for yourself." This went on for 200 pages or so.

Not only was I getting dizzy from reading the poorly designed book, I was starting to gag from reading all the fluffy sentimental statements. I mean, had they been real quotes I think I might have been able to take it, but, "The first thing I thought of this morning was you!" and "I'm so lucky that you're my mother!"--give me a break!

I settled on a magnet made by the same company with one of their slightly less sentimental sayings (after all, no one likes peas that much anyway, so I thought a spoonful would be better than a plateful) and bought a card to put it in.

Still a little cutesy, but a mile less cuter than that book *shudder*.

*****

I'm sure in 15 years, Andrew will get me the same magnet because it reminds him of his mother's house. That's okay though because it has one of those quotes that makes you feel good about yourself.