Sunday Afternoon

We had a rather busy day at church today. Andrew gave a talk in sacrament meeting which had Rachel rather nervous all morning. She was worried he was going to tell an embarrassing story about her since she'd overheard him mention temper tantrums while telling me about his talk. In the car she asked if I had written his talk for him and when I answered that I hadn't she asked if I had at least read over it to make sure it was okay. I hadn't. It was a surprise for all of us—but he didn't say anything too embarrassing and, much to Rachel's relief, only mentioned temper tantrums in the most general of terms.

He spoke about the Plan of Salvation, and more specifically that we're supposed to depend upon the Lord in this life but that we're active players. We have to do things and can't just sit around being good. He quoted what's somewhat become our family motto: Let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power. We have the power to do things and therefore should cheerfully do them—even if it's a job we dislike (for example, unloading the dishwasher (that's where the temper tantrum example came in play)).

It was a good talk.

After sacrament meeting we wrangled all the kids off to the primary room and then Andrew took Benjamin while I fulfilled the bulk of my primary obligations. Then I took the baby while he taught priesthood.

We were both pretty tired when we got home. We had a quick lunch/snack and then I took a quick nap before we skyped with Grandma. We managed to squeeze in a walk before talking to my parents, which was lovely. Rachel brought along a little butterfly she'd made and she and Miriam scouted out different flowers and helped the butterfly drink the nectar. Rachel began composing a spring song, which she finished writing at bedtime. I'm not sure of the tune, but it goes like this:

Spring is coming! Spring is coming!
Easter is coming, too!
Shout hooray! Shout hooray!
There [are] Easter eggs!
You love Easter! I do, too!
Miriam loves it, too! Do you?

We stopped by the park to play for a while. Some might consider that breaking the sabbath but I don't; not today. The girls have been fighting so much this week that I think being out and about and playing nicely together was a far better way for them to keep the sabbath than sitting at home trying to get along would have been. Besides, Rachel served her siblings by pushing them in the swings and helping Benjamin down the slide. Serving others is a great way to keep the sabbath!

(The next time you need to rationalize something, give me a call. I'm a pro!)

Here are my swing-loving children:

A picture dump

This week has been a little crazy but we did manage to have some happy moments. For starters, my mornings often began with this view:

Morning catastrophes

Benjamin was still sleeping soundly when it was time for me to get ready to go visiting teaching. I was braiding Miriam's hair and thinking about having to wake that poor sleeping child up when my phone rang—it was Kim seeing if Miriam could come play with Claire. Miriam was very happy about this prospect so she finished getting ready to go while I woke Benjamin up and... Wow!—did he ever stink!

He had pooped sometime in his sleep and it was smeared/caked all over little bum. This is the first time that's ever happened in his life (post-NICU). He never wakes up poopy. Of course, he never sleeps either...so that could explain why he never poops in his sleep.

So, I started scrubbing his bum. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. It was really messy.

Then I sat him on his potty so he could go pee. He did. And then he dropped the mirror he was playing with and lunged for it, falling off his potty and tipping the contents all over himself and the floor because I had chosen that exact moment to let go of him and put the stinky diaper into the pail (that is within arm's reach from where his potty is). He's usually okay sitting on the potty by himself. But not today.

I finished cleaning up that mess and, with some help from Andrew, got the kids all loaded into the van.

I dropped Miriam off at Claire's house but couldn't get the GPS to work. I tried everything but ended up calling Andrew in tears. So he drove me. It's not that getting there is even complicated—but I'm so tired and I hadn't nursed the baby yet so I was in serious amounts of pain and I was running late and I was too stressed out to drive myself. I just like having that friendly electronic voice remind me to put my blinker on—it's my security blanket for driving.

Andrew sat in the driveway reading while I did my visiting teaching.

I returned to the van with Benjamin and Andrew tried to turn it on but...it wouldn't start. He had run down the battery because he'd flipped on the air conditioning when he got too warm (I told him that next time he should maybe take off his coat, which he was still wearing...with the air conditioning on. He agreed). So Kathleen had to come out, back her van out around us (because we'd parked behind her) and onto her neighbour's lawn so that we could jumpstart our car.

Fortunately it started.

So now I'm home, Andrew's off to school, Benjamin's sleeping, and I just got word from Kim that she wants to keep Miriam for a while longer (we'd originally said she could play until 1:00) so it looks like I'm due for a nap...hallelujah!

Lent

Somewhere, somehow, Benjamin picked up on the idea of lent. And what did he decide to give up this year? Sleeping. He went completely cold turkey.

The problem with fasting or giving something up is that we, as humans, feel a little emptiness—be that in our schedule, our heart, or whatever—and want to fill that void with something else. Ideally, fasting should allow our souls greater communion with God. Sometimes, however, it only brings about an increased desire for a Sunday afternoon nap.

Benjamin is no different from you or I and so he also needed to counterbalance his act of penance. He did this by bingeing on screaming.

We've been having a slightly-less-than-awesome week.

My sweet mannered little boy has refused to be out of my arms and when I've managed to hand him off or put him down he's howled incessantly...unless gazing directly into my eyes. Naps, if they happened at all, were short milk-induced trances. Bedtime was midnight (or later, whenever he'd stop screaming and pass out from sheer exhaustion) and our nights were interrupted by fussing and screaming and crying. Benjamin and I got our best sleep late in the mornings when we had the bed all to ourselves, cuddled up together, and completely worn out by not sleeping a wink the whole night long. We were surviving on a couple hours of sleep each night at best.

It's been an exhausting week.

Factor in Rachel and it's been a horrifying week.

I don't know what it is about Rachel but she's an energy-leech. She can't help it; she was born that way.

Just cleaning off my desk

I had a stack of school papers on my desk a mile high but sifting through them and getting rid of the worksheets and colouring pages and so forth trimmed the pile down nicely and I found there was only a couple week's worth of school work. I really have to keep on top of these things or we start drowning in paper (think of the trees!).

They've been studying weather at school, which has meant checking the weather forecast daily with Rachel. She's very quick to point out when the weathermen/meteorologists are wrong, so perhaps she needs to read this article about how complicated weather forecasting is before she casts any more stones. Here's a picture she drew of a rainbow.

Rainbows come after storms.

A boy and his tie

My friend Lindsay recently had a baby—third boy in a row (though the oldest is a girl). Rachel treated this as some sort of travesty when she found out the gender.

"Is the baby home?" she asked while we were on our way to deliver dinner.

"Yes, but we won't ask to see it. It was a preemie-born like Benjamin so we have to keep it extra safe from germs."

"I know," she sighed. "What's its name?"

"Timothy."

"Timothy!?" she repeated in disgust. "It's a boy?! They already have two boys. They should have had another girl."

My friend Kim just had a baby—third girl in a row (though the oldest is a boy). Rachel treated this as if it was just as it should be.

Kim's getting ready to move so she's offloading a lot of stuff. She brought over five garbage bags of little boy clothes that had just been sitting around in her attic for the past, oh, eight years, waiting for another little boy to come along and need them (but no little boy ever came, though three girls did). I dug through them and found a few treasures, like this lovely Sunday shirt:

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!

A sunny snow day

This morning fat, fluffy snowflakes were streaking down to the ground—they didn't stick, though, because the ground was far too warm to allow for that. Yesterday was beautiful! It was our first snow day, which is a sign that winter is coming to an end (was it ever here?). The year-round schools used up one of their snow days earlier in the season but as luck would have it the traditional-calendar schools already had that day off so when Friday rolled around (a "teacher workday" or "PD day" as I grew up calling them) we were free to enjoy the glorious sunshine.

We set up a visiting teaching playdate at the Museum of Life and Science. I drove there all by myself and parked (in approximately the farthest parking spot) on the first try. While we waited for our friends to show up the kids ran around this planter. We waited for a full half hour before everyone got there. The kids ran around the planter the entire time. I do not know why they aren't that easily entertained at home.

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!