My dad's Christmas memories

I found a long-forgotten project on my computer the other day, a collection of "family lore" surrounding the Christmas holidays that I pulled from my own blog and from the blog Reid used to keep and from my mom's blog. I had some good stories. Some touching stories. Some funny stories. Some this-is-how-things-were stories. But I'm missing several perspectives. 

Tonight when I was talking to my parents, I asked my dad to share some Christmas memories from his childhood. Some of them I actually remember hearing, now that he reminded me of them. I'm going to write down what I remember of our conversation here.

First, you should know that my dad has five brothers (and a sister). You should know that the first handful of boys came one after the other—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like firecrackers.

Here's a little scrapbook page of the oldest four (for some reason I have it in my mind that this was my Grandpa's scrapbook):

Hosting

My sister Josie arrived this evening! 

I set up an air mattress for her in the basement. And also set up a couch cushion bed for her in case the whole air mattress thing didn't work out. And told her that a third option was a futon in the girls' room, which I didn't set up because Rachel had already gone to bed. 

Miriam was going to take the futon and let Josie have her bed, but then she broke her arm and didn't want to give up her comfy bed because sleeping has been hard enough as it is. 

But the futon is a third option. And if none of those options really sound good then we can kick Alexander out of his bed and steal his mattress to put on the floor downstairs.

So many comfy options!

"I'll be fine," she insisted. "My years in Young Ambassadors really taught me that I can sleep anywhere."

She loved her touring days, but they were grueling and the accommodations could sometimes be...less than accommodating. 

Mount Rushmore (June 22)

The drive from Devils Tower, WY, to Mount Rushmore, SD, is only 2 hours and 20 minutes (130 miles or so). Alexander, who had been feeling find at Devils Tower began wilting at Mount Rushmore. 

It's been so long now that I can't quite remember which of the children got sick when. Phoebe got sick first. On a Sunday? I feel like it was on a Sunday. Was it on June 18th? Andrew ended up going home from church early with her because we realized part way through sacrament meeting that she had a fever. She was a miserable baby all day Sunday, but woke up feeling better on Monday. 

Zoë was the next child to get sick. I can't quite remember when she got sick, but her illness followed the same trajectory as Phoebe's. She felt sick for a day and then felt better. She must have been sick on Monday because I don't remember her feeling sick while we were traveling and we were counting our lucky stars until Alexander started feeling sick at Yellowstone (June 21). 

At first he attributed his feelings of malaise to breathing in vapours from the geysers and things, so he kept saying that he wanted to "get out of here," away from all the steam. Now, granted, "toxic gases may accumulate to dangerous levels in some hydrothermal areas"so he his assumption wasn't necessarily unwarranted. But everyone else seemed fine, so we were pretty confident it wasn't toxic gasses (and we didn't spend a ton of time at any particular hydrothermal area). 

But, boy, that steam was just blowing into his face and stinging his eyes! And that sulphur smell sure was giving him a headache!

It took us an embarrassing long time to realize that he had, in fact, spiked a fever and was downright miserable. (Fortunately, all our activities were outside, so we felt we were giving others plenty of fresh air around us). 

He was so happy when we finished dragging him in and out of the car at Yellowstone and let him have a big, long rest in the car while we drove through Wyoming!

The next morning he was feeling much better, as we assumed he would be (if his illness followed the same course his sisters had experienced), and was running and climbing all over everything at Devils Tower. As I mentioned, however, he began to wilt at Mount Rushmore.

Here we all are standing in front of the monument (you may also note the thunderstorm gathering behind the hills):

 

Prescriptivism vs. creativity, or Joseph vs. the sheep

I spent several hours this week preparing little craft kits for my primary activity girls. We have one more activity this year and then all of our 11-year-olds will be heading into the Young Women program, so I had Andrew deliver the kits to my girls with a little print that I made (of a wood block carving that Rachel did of the nativity) with a note for each of them. I did not include instructions for the craft, but I did email the parents that we'd be meeting together next week to put the craft kits together...

One of my girls got rather excited about things and put the craft together on her own and I was blown away with how she pieced it together. The craft kit was, I thought, rather puzzling, so I didn't expect the kids to try putting them together on their own (my own kids thought the figures of Mary and Joseph were keyholes), but this little girl found a way to use every piece and I'm just so impressed with her creativity!

Here's how my model project turned out (which itself deviates from the original idea):

No good can come from bad

I have a million other things to write about but I feel like today would be a good day for Flashback Friday to end its hiatus (it's Monday, though, so perhaps we'll call today Memory Monday) because I've been searching through the archives and though I referenced this story in passing I never really told the story.

Certain current events, however, have made this story seem even more harrowing than I think it felt at the time. I was terrified and angry at the time, yet also felt this sense of control because what was happening felt too ludicrous to be allowed. Surely the border control officer was joking. The very idea was laughable; no one in their right mind would allow it. So of course it couldn't happen, wouldn't happen.

And it didn't happen. Not to me.

But apparently it is happening!

And perhaps I'll talk about that a little bit, but first, the story:

In 2009 we were living in Egypt—a full-blown dictatorship at the time—and my friend Jaehee (a Korean citizen) had to exit the country in order to renew her visa. Since her husband and my husband were both in the middle of their master's degree programs and couldn't take time off of school right then (and, as American citizens, had the option to renew their visas without leaving the country), I told Jaehee that I would be happy to go on a trip out of the country with her. Though I didn't have to leave Egypt to renew my visa, either, I'm always up for an adventure!

We researched the safest/easiest/cheapest place for two women—and one toddler, because 21 month-old Rachel would also be joining us—to fly to and settled on Greece. So we booked our tickets, arranged some hotels, and jetted off across the Mediterranean Sea for a wonderful Hellenic holiday.

But...the tomatoes...

When Andrew was much younger than he is now, he and his sister Katherine were sent out to clear out the old tomato plants from the garden. Now, forcing siblings to work together can yield several results: they can turn the task into a game and have a lot of fun working together, they can fight with each other and get nothing done at all, or they can turn the task into such a fun game that they get nothing done at all. From my experience, the last two options occur most frequently.

Andrew's not a very high-conflict person, so on this occasion, like many times before, he managed to turn cleaning up tomatoes into a game. Unfortunately, this game fell into category three and instead of ridding the garden of tomatoes, Andrew and Katherine made things worse. They started throwing rotten tomatoes at the house.

And, boy, was it fun!

Car jobs

Growing up, I was no stranger to long car rides. We seemed to travel between BC and Alberta and Utah quite a lot. My children, who are on their fourth drive across the country (once when we moved out, once to visit Utah, once driving back from Utah, and…now), probably feel the same way.

They are well conditioned.

This, however, is Zoë’s inaugural long-distance car ride. She and I flew to Utah and back the summer everyone else drove (and I flew out with Benjamin when we moved out here and I’m flying out to Utah this time around—I’m just always hugely pregnant or have a brand-new baby when we make these trips, what can I say?). She needs to be trained in the art of sitting in the car all the livelong day.

And who better to teach this art than a big sister?

Flashback...Wednesday: Cycling

Rachel's been asking a lot of questions about human biology lately, specifically about female human biology. With any luck she has a few (to several) more years to go before her menarche, but we've begun talking about it openly anyway so that by the time it arises she'll (hopefully) be comfortable with...it.

Perhaps not comfortable because of it, but comfortable with the idea of it.

WARNING: Much discussion of blood/menstruation follows...so...you've been warned.

Marbling Mania

Monday was a rather drizzly kind of day. I taught swimming lessons in the morning and we got poured on. A little rain means little when you're planning on getting wet anyway. Just as we decided to finish swimming the rain started letting up...but then it started thundering. We were able to go to the museum on the afternoon, which was good because my arsenal of quiet indoor activities was nearly depleted and the kids needed a good romp around. When Tuesday ended up even more rainy I thought I might pull my hair out.

But then I saw a picture a friend had posted of her son marbling some paper and *presto!* a bicker-free afternoon commenced. (Thanks, April!) The method they were using seemed a lot more involved (like, they had an actual tray of liquid, which seemed less than ideal with Benjamin around) so we went with a method that I used in my childcare class in high school—shaving cream! Which, by the way, we happen to have quite a lot of.

Every time Andrew comes home from grocery shopping he seems to bring home a can or two. "They keep giving us coupons!" he claims. "Great! But, hypothetically speaking, we're moving in a year. How much shaving cream can you use in one year?" I keep asking.

As of Monday we have one less can to use. Not that I'm counting down to moving...but we seriously have so much shaving cream stored in our bathroom. It's getting a bit ridiculous.

Anyway, I guess it's technically shaving gel, which meant we had to lather it up ourselves, which the kids didn't mind thoroughly enjoyed. Ideally this project uses actual shaving cream, which I guess comes out pre-lathered. Confession: I've never exactly used shaving cream...so...

Once our shaving gel was nice and foamy we added some food colouring, swirled it around...

OBX: Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills

I had to look this up because I was super confused about it. We left Fort Raleigh (the lost colony) and put "Kitty Hawk" into our GPS because that's where the Wright Brothers made their first flight, right? So we're driving down the road and the GPS is telling us we still have several more miles to go when we see a sign for the Wright Brothers monument, so we ditched the GPS and turned down Wright Memorial street. We weren't even in Kitty Hawk yet! We were still in Kill Devil Hills.

As it turns out, Kill Devil Hills didn't exist when the Wright Brothers took to the sky. They were just out in the middle of nowhere and had to walk four miles into Kitty Hawk to send the telegram telling their family that they'd done it. Kill Devil Hills didn't spring up until the 1950s.

Kill Devil Hills claims to be "the birthplace of aviation," while Kitty Hawk says it is "first in flight." I suppose they're both right. And wherever we were (Kill Devil Hills, it turns out), we had a fun time at the Wright Brothers Memorial.

It was so windy (it's always windy--so windy that in October 25, 1911 (exactly 98 years before Miriam was born) Orville Wright managed to float in a glider for over ten minutes (he took off into the air and then just hovered there because the wind is that full of lift (and his glider design probably helped a bit, too))) and we couldn't find a picnic table around so we decided to picnic in our van. We put the backseat down and the kids sat there and ate before going to check out the museum (which I missed because I stayed behind to nurse Zoë).

Here's a picture of the monument and in the lower righ-thand corner is Grandpa with the three older kids:

NOT a snow day

The kids had an early-release day scheduled for today already, but now they're coming home even earlier. This time we're not expecting snow. We're expecting this:

Scattered thunderstorms in the morning, strong thunderstorms in the afternoon with damaging winds, large hail, and possibly a tornado.

Grade Three: Just fine

I was putting some finishing touches on my presentation for Relief Society Meeting on Thursday, which included taking some pictures of my old journals. It also included me reading entries to Andrew from my very first journals and laughing until I couldn't talk anymore. And hyperventilating because I'm supposed to talk for fifteen minutes and how am I supposed to do that?!

In my journal from grade two I was blathering on about something and mentioned that I was writing a whole lot and even went so far to accuse myself of being a chatterbox. "You're not," my teacher (Mrs. Matsumoto) had written back. Man, I spent half that year counting down how many pages I had left until I filled the book. It made reading consecutive entries rather humorous.

But then I found my journal from grade three and it's a little less funny. There was a lot of serious stuff that happened this year. I suppose there was some serious stuff that happened the previous years, but I was oblivious to a lot of it.

Mon. Sept. 27th

On Sunday my sister left for albrta. Yesterday she got to my grandma's and grandpa's house. And she gave me her room until she comes back, wich is in December. My brother David said that I got the biggest good-bye present. On Sunday morning she left at five o-clak, so my mom got me up at five o-clak to say good-bye. And now I have three choses to sleep. In my (both) brother's room because they have a bunk bed and they both sleep on the botom bunk. And my sister Abbi's room because she has a bunk bed and in my other sisters room because she gone unil Dec.

And then I talk about big life problems like conflicting birthday parties and football games (I guess we went to one of my cousin's football games?! I have no recollection of this) and how tragic it was that Halloween fell on a Sunday and we couldn't go trick-or-treating because my mom said "thier is getting to much vilins." But, phew, it was okay because we ended up having a ward party at the church where we had supper at 5:00 and stayed up until 8:00 playing games and watching movies.

Mon. Nov. 15th

On Thursday I got a wiggly tooth. And I backed cookies. My big sister had her baby but she gave it up. And the poeple who adopted the baby told my sister a story. She said, "When I found out I could not have a baby I cryed. I said a prayre and asked that sombody might come and vist me and your baby was that girl, only she was a grown up. The frist time I went to go adpet a baby it was not her. The secondt time it was your baby and it was her."

In response my teacher, Mrs. Robertson, wrote, "It must have been hard for your big sister."

I must say, Rachel has better handwriting and spelling than I did when I was her age. Seriously. I was a terrible speller. But I think my teacher let it slide because she thought my family was crazy because wait until you hear this next entry...

(click bait)

Halloweens Past

I have a handful of childhood Halloween pictures in my possession, which I'll share here.

The first is from 1988; I'm three years old. My parents took me to my big brother's kindergarten class party. I dressed as a genie. My dad is wearing my hat so that it wouldn't fall off and get wet while I was bobbing for apples.

The worst kind of award

Next month I'm giving a fifteen minute talk on keeping a personal history, so to prepare I hauled down my box(es) of journals from the attic (and, no, Mom, I don't have a big copy of that particular baby picture of me that you asked about), which means that I'll probably start up some Flashback Fridays again (though I'm also seriously considering NaNoWriMo this year so that means my blogging will likely suffer a bit).

But for now, here's a flashback for Wednesday because I finally found this picture I was looking for for ages (to show to Andrew for some reason that I can't remember now and then simply because I couldn't find it).

Whenever people tell me I'm skinny as if it's a compliment I kind of cringe because, frankly, it's not something that I really like about myself. I'm freakishly skinny. 

The picture I have of myself in my brain is not that skinny. Not in an eating-disorder distortion way, just the same way I feel when I hear a recording of my voice. I'm always like, "Is that really what I sound like?!" And that's kind of how I feel when I see pictures of myself. "Is that really what I look like?"

Not every picture makes me think that, but sometimes pictures are mind-boggling.

I used to be a swimmer. I still can swim but I mean I was a swimmer. I used to live at the pool. 

Swimmer. S-W-I-M-M-E-R. Swimmer.

And then I grew up a little and stopped because "mens."

Anyway, when I was little I was on a team called the PoCo Marlins. At the end of the season we all got awards. Our coach had cut ems out of wood and had painted them all purple (our team colour) and then made up awards for everyone. Abra's was something to do with water polo. She had a pretty little mermaid sitting on one of the peaks of her em. It was spray painted gold and in my eight-year-old mind it was the most enviable trophy of all trophies. 

David's award was Number Man. His em had numbers painted all over it. He knew all his best times and all his friends' best times and all his friends' friends' best times, all off the top of his head. His award was cool, but not enviable (sorry, bro).

My em was just as tall as everyone else's but it was about half the thickness. It was just plain purple—nothing ornate about it at all. 

Every boring detail

I've always been interested in stories from the past, which is why I suppose I've become the de facto family history guru of my family (a brave move considering I have no idea what I'm doing). Historical fiction and biographies are by far my favourite genre. Sometimes a nice fantasy is...nice...but I'd far rather escape into history than into another realm.

Once when I was younger my mom agreed to send me to my aunt's house for a couple of weeks so I could hang out with my cousins, eat way more popsicles than was good for me, and work on the farm. My mom drove me down from High River to Raymond so that my aunt could pick me up from my grandma's house, except she wasn't able to make the trip the same day my mom was so I ended up having to stay overnight at my grandparents' house by myself.

And I was terrified.

My grandpa was scary and my grandma was boring and their house was so quiet and there was a large portrait of some old ancestors above the fireplace in the basement that really creeped me out.

When my mom left I sat on the stairs and cried, making my grandma feel terrible, I'm sure.

25 week belly

Some people, like certain sisters of mine, have been hinting about a belly shot, which is something I just haven't gotten around to this pregnancy. I don't know why; maybe it's just a forth pregnancy thing. Like, I'm pretty sure I just look about as pregnant as I did with everybody else...except maybe a little more pregnant. Today at church people kept saying things like, "Oh, look! You're finally starting to show!" and I was like, "Uh...starting?"

I didn't wear yoga pants under my dress to church, in case you were wondering

Bronto Trail

It didn't rain today so we were finally able to check out Wescott's Bronto Trail for family home evening.

Towering LEGO towers

We had the Snells over for dinner a few weeks ago—my brother served with Brother Snell in Brazil many years ago and now he (and his wife and kids) are in our ward in North Carolina (small world)—and they told us about the old dinosaur trail by the Museum of Life and Science. The old brontosaurus still stands—a derelict sentinel—along what was once the dinosaur trail but is now just part of a park. We haven't ever found it, but the Snells have. And we need to because...

...I believe—though I'm not certain—that it's this dinosaur.

Good lesson, bad presentation

When I was fifteen my family moved from High River, Alberta, Canada to Orem, Utah, USA. I had a relatively lonely summer until the school year began and I had the opportunity to meet some people, not the least of whom was a charming (and slightly awkward) young man named Andrew.

I was in a drama class that year that was fairly miserable. I made at least one friend in that class (thanks, Kristin (and Tammy, who moved in later in the year)) but everyone else seemed determined to torment me.

People would steal my homework from the inbox, copy it down on a fresh sheet of paper with their name on it, and throw my copy away (and once when they were really dumb they just erased my name and wrote theirs in my place, which is when the teacher finally believed me that it was happening because it was finally so obvious of a problem it could no longer be ignored).

They teased me about everything from being Canadian to having glasses to being skinny to getting good grades to "losing" my homework to...crying in class.

That was a cold, hard day in November, though our story actually begins in Canada, years ago, when my family moved to High River and became friends with another family at church. They had a boy a year older than my brother David, a boy my age, and a girl around my brother Patrick's age. Their parents got along well with our parents and so it was that we became family friends.

A couple of times we had the oldest boy overnight when his parents went out of town (the other kids would stay at other friends' houses). He actually came with my mom to check on me that one night I was babysitting and heard a banging sound in the house because he just happened to be staying at our house that night.

The girl would eventually join me in the Young Women's program at church, but was a few years younger than me.

The boy my age—Craig—was in my Sunday School class as well as some classes at school. I don't think we were ever close friends (because cooties) but we certainly spent time together and saw each other several times a week for nearly five years. He was pretty good friends with Patrick, though.

We'd been down in The States for about five months—putting us squarely in November—and were in the middle of dinner when the phone rang. I'm not sure who answered, but they informed my dad that "it was for [him]."

"Hello?" my dad said. "Oh, hi, Glen! How are things?"

Nancy Newt Needs Naps

When I was in kindergarten we learned an alliterative verse for each letter of the alphabet that we'd chant every single day. There were twenty-six of them (obviously) but I can only remember two.

My name happened to be featured in the verse for the letter N, which was (as you've probably gathered from the title of this post), "Nancy Newt needs naps."

Now that I'm a mother I have come to enjoy both naps and newts (in that order because naps are way better than newts) but as a five-year-old I found this verse rather offending. First of all—Nancy Newt?

Not anything elegant like Nancy Nightingale.

Not anything interesting like Nancy Narwhal.

Not anything exotic like Nancy Numbat.

(Yes, I'm reaching here—Numbat sounds too similar to Dumb-bat so it wouldn't have worked at all. There aren't really many creatures that begin with the letter N. Naked mole rat? I don't think so).

It had to be Nancy Newt—a slimy creature, the pet of witches, lover of dark and scary places.

And then there's the whole nap thing. I'm pretty sure I began shunning those long before kindergarten. I loathed how my babysitter would make me take a nap because I was "so little" while she'd let my brother (who was "only" 2.5 years older than me (as if that even makes a difference when you're 4)) and her son (who was my age only properly proportioned (ie. he maybe didn't look like he was 2)) play outside. I could see their long shadows dancing through the curtains while I sat in bed and seethed at the ceiling. Naps were lamer than lame.

Nancy was not a newt and Nancy certainly didn't take naps!

I came home from school and outraged complained to her mother, who took it up with the kindergarten teacher, who was in her last year before retirement and—although kind enough—was rather set in her ways. When my mom suggested changing the verse in some way—Nicholas Newt, for example, could be the one in need of a nap, or Nancy Nightingale could nibble...nectarines—Mrs. Thornton was aghast.

"Change the words?" gasped Mrs. Thornton. "But I have said it this way for many, many years!"

"But have you ever had a Nancy in your class?" my mom might have asked (because I am totally making this conversation up).

"Well, no, but I simply couldn't change the words now. I have said them the same way since I very first began teaching," likely when dinosaurs were still roaming the planet. "Nancy should be honoured to be in the poem. We say it every day!"

"That's part of the problem," my mom might have sighed before continuing her explanation, because not only was there a vain repetition of my name every single day at school there was also a girl named Allison.

Allison and I did not have an amicable relationship.

Everyday Allison would be sure to sit close to me—not too close but just close enough—and then she would leer in my face and scrunch up her nose as menacingly as a kindergartener can as she chanted, "Nancy Newt needs naps!"

One day—several days into the school year since we didn't get to the letter N until after we did the letters A through Z (with one new verse introduced every day during the first few weeks of school)—I decided to get my revenge and when it came time for everyone to gather on the carpet to recite our alphabet verses I made sure to sit as close to Allison as I could—but not too close, mind you.

My revenge cut fast and cold (as revenge is meant to be served), coming on the very first letter of the alphabet.

"Allison Alligator eats apples!" I hissed at mean ol' Allison.

And do you know what Allison did? She told on me. She went and cried to the teacher about it, about how it hurt her feelings, about how mean it was.

And do you know what happened to me? I got in trouble because "changing the words to the verse was wrong."

The proper verse, in case you were wondering, was "Ally Alligator eats apples."

That wasn't the only time I got unjustly punished in Mrs. Thornton's class, but Mrs. Thornton wasn't all bad. She did knit little stockings (big enough to hold a small candy cane) for every single child in the class for Christmas, so...that's a redeeming quality, right?

Anyway, it took me awhile to get over the whole Nancy Newt thing. And it's possible my family still teases me about it.

Whatever, I'm so over it.

I'm nearly-a-quarter-of-a-century over it.

I'm my-girls-found-a-newt-today-and-I-didn't-even-write-an-800-word-essay-about-it over it.

Ahem. So, perhaps I'm not as over it as I thought. But my girls really did find a newt today.

A Red Eft (juvenile eastern newt)