Today

Today Rachel finished building the Lego set we gave to her for her eighth birthday, I believe, which Grandma had purchased to harvest mini-figures from when she made Rachel's Hogwarts birthday cake for her fifth birthday. That thing had been kicking around (half-opened) for a long time and though we'd encouraged her to put it together multiple times, she'd never gotten around to it.

Because reading is the only activity that exists in Rachel's world, probably.

On Saturday Andrew threatened to incorporate all the pieces into the big bin of Lego but I insisted that she build it first. So yesterday she started putting it together.

We had to find the instructions online because those had been lost and we had to dig through the big bin of Lego to find a few odd pieces that had somehow been misplaced, but she made some good headway before bed last night and after school today she put the finishing touches on Hagrid's Hut.

She was so proud, and, honestly, so was I!

I don't believe I've ever put a Lego set together, either (I was the main helper in this endeavour) and it was a pretty cool process. I've never been much of a "master builder," if you will. Everything I make is incredibly boring. But Andrew insists, and I've come to agree, that building from a set of instructions can help foster your creativity (especially for those of us who are creatively challenged when it comes to engineering).

*****

This post is 233 words long*

School Activities: 830 words
Little look a-likes: 124 words
In which I fail to meet my quota: 534 words
So much writing: 1326 words

That's a grand total of 2814 words* within a 24-hour period!

It's highly unlikely it will ever become my average but I did it. So that's something.

As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said, "Anything is better than stagnation."

My life is, at times, fairly mundane. I am not a queen, it's true. Quite the opposite, in fact. I do my own laundry, catch my own mice, and sometimes I even have to do the dishes (among other things). Lately I've been so caught up with feeling distraught about the future that I've forgotten that the adventure is now. So in an effort to appreciate the now, I'm going to try to write more (although I do have a few things children vying for my time as well so I'm not sure how much more I'll write because I also have to remember that they are my now; but I don't want to forget our nows then so I still resolve to write more).

After all, "the world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings" (Robert Louis Stevenson).

* Including this footnote and post, my actual grand total of words for the day is now 3048! Eat it, Victoria!

School activities

As I mentioned, like, three weeks ago, Benjamin's kindergarten class had their "Kindy 500" on Groundhog's Day. I already feel a little bit like I'm drowning in life so I didn't feel like making a big fancy car for Benjamin and, frankly, he wasn't terribly into the idea of making a big fancy car, either. 

Evidently I scarred him for life when he decided he wanted to be Thomas the Train for Halloween. How did that scar him for life? Well, I said sure and made him a train costume to wear, like a monster! 

He absolutely didn't want to be stuck carrying around a cardboard vehicle with suspender straps again and made his opinion very clear on several occasions. So we kept putting off the construction of his car until one day I walked into the pantry and saw that one of the snack boxes (from the trip to Grover back in September, I believe) was already a school bus.

Benjamin loves school buses and was kind of crushed when we moved here because practically no one rides the bus, including him. Riding the bus was something he was very much looking forward to after spending the first five years of his life (that's his entire life, by the way) waiting for the bus to bring his sisters home from school every day. 

I showed him the box and asked him if he'd like to personalize the bus a bit for his Kindy 500 car (by putting people in the windows instead of pictures of chip bags) and he said yes. So that's what we did. And he had a blast. And even if his car wasn't as fancy as some (because some families went all out) and even if he was wishing for shoulder straps by the end of the day (I told him we could put some on but it wasn't until the walk home that he agreed they would have been nice), he loved his bus. 

Here he is during their little parade:

Maybe those shoulder straps aren't all they're cracked up to be because he's the only one smiling in this parade...

Little look-alikes

My mom sent me some pictures of my dad as a baby so that I could compare their looks—and they do certainly look to be related, don't they? Alexander's face is a little rounder, but their eyes and noses (and even their smiles) are very similar, I think.

Here they are sitting up:

 

In which I fail to meet my quota

Just to show Queen Victoria that I can do it (not that it's a contest or anything), I'm going to write a little bit more. Not that I know what I'm going to write about. My life is drastically less interesting than hers, I'm sure. Plus she had nine children to write about while I only have five (ha, only).

Still, five children should provide plenty of story fodder (especially since I'm with them all day and night (nursing right now as a matter of fact) and never employed a governess or anything (not that it's a contest, Queen Victoria, but, uhhh...yeah; it's on)). And so I will do what I usually do and fall back on my charming, witty, and attractive children to meet my writing quota:

So much writing

An average of 2,500 words!

That's how many words Queen Victoria* wrote daily. Her journals span nearly 70 years (from age 13 to 81) and total 43,000 pages in 121 volumes!

That's simply amazing to me (especially since I feel I've been slacking in the writing department lately). Journaling is something I've always been rather passionate about.

It's something church leaders have encouraged us to do:

I urge all of the people of this church to give serious attention to their family histories, to encourage their parents and grandparents to write their journals, and let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity. This is a duty and a responsibility, and I urge every person to start the children out writing a personal history and journal.

—President Spencer W. Kimball, April 1978 

President Kimball was an avid daily journaler, though he himself admitted that he only had "thirty-three large, well-filled journal books" in his library by the time he was 85, so it would appear that the queen out-wrote him!

Under the weather

All five of the kids are sick with a cold right now. It's Alexander's first full-blown cold and he's a little perplexed by the way his body has seemingly turned on him. His nose is stuffy so eating, his one true joy in life, is considerably more difficult than it's been in a long time. I imagine that, like the more verbal children have been complaining about, his head aches and his throat is sore. While his siblings have been, for the most part, carrying on with life, Alexander has never been in pain like this before and has been acting like he's dying.

Nearly every time I put him down he curls up in a little ball and starts screaming as if to say, "Don't leave me alone to die!"

I keep telling him that he's going to be fine but he doesn't seem to believe me. So we're just nursing every half-hour like it's going to be his last meal (or maybe he just feels thirsty because his throat hurts (probably that)).

Hopefully they'll all be back to themselves in the next couple of days (just a little bit fatter in Alexander's case (oink, oink)).

The other day Zoë was sneezing all over creation, including Alexander.

"See, this is why your brother is sick," I chided.

"He's not sick!" she denied.

"He is," I insisted.

"Why?" she asked. "I always just 'choo on my arms! I never 'choo the baby!"

Snow Business

Before Andrew left for work this morning he shovelled the driveway, but it kept on snowing so by the time I was sending the kids to school we had to wade through a couple more inches (Grandpa ended up shovelling again later in the morning). I sent Benjamin waddling along with his sisters, dressed in his entire snowsuit. 

I'm pretty sure I was the only mom in the whole school that made her kids walk to school today (in the snow, both ways). 

When we were walking home from school, Benjamin asked me if I'd help him build a snowman, so I said that I would...after lunch, if I could get Alexander to go down for a nap and squeeze in a nap myself then, yes, we could build a snowman.

Unfortunately, although we had both lunchtime and nap time, by the time we got outside the conditions just weren't right for a snowman. While I could pack a good initial ball of snow, rolling it around did nothing to increase the size of the ball. It just wouldn't pack. So a snowman was out. 

Instead we started building a snow fort. Benjamin, Zoë and I worked together until Miriam came home from school (and then Miriam joined us). It was tough work!

Snow!

We finally got a decent amount of snow—somewhere between eight and ten inches overnight (depends on where you step)! And, as luck would have it, it's President's Day (or, if you're me, Family Day) so there was no school today, which meant we got to enjoy the day playing in the snow together.

As much as I complained about missing school every stinking time it snowed when we lived in North Carolina, I do think that having a day (a day, mind you, one solitary day; not wait-until-there-is-no-snow-anywhere-before-going-back-to-school number of days (I swear this particular snowfall would have been a good two weeks' worth of snow days in North Carolina)) to frolic in freshly fallen snow is a wonderful thing. It would have been a real shame if the kids had been in school all day, pining to get out into the snow!

So one day off was nice, but I'm super glad they'll be going to school tomorrow.

 Here are the kids playing out on the swing set together:

Sunday, that one day

Emily and Morgan's original plan was to stay overnight on Saturday and Sunday, but then a big winter storm was due to roll in (the most significant storm of the season) so they decided to head home on Sunday afternoon instead, which was a little bit sad for everyone. We had a fun time playing together on Sunday after church, though!

We played Pie Face and had tickle wars and held lots and lots of babies.

Here are some pictures of us together:

Zoë and Grandma got in a bit of a tug-o-war over Logan