Yesterday marked our four year anniversary and we’re all just as silly as ever.
While Andrew was at school Karen made a banana cake—which was really just banana bread in a cake pan since we don’t have any loaf pans. He came home and hurriedly wolfed down his dinner before deserting us in favour of homework (the semester is over now, so hopefully that won’t happen again for a while).
“Oh, but there’s cake!” I said.
Andrew peeled off the tin foil covering the pan and peered inside.
“What kind?” he asked.
I finished knitting Miriam’s stocking while Grandma was in South Africa (using the knifty knitter loom since I don’t actually know how to knit). Now all I have left to do by Christmas is embroider her name on it. That’s going to take forever—so long that by the end of it I’ll probably be wishing we had named Miriam a much shorter name, like Sue or Jill or Liz.
Miriam is so bald in front that I feel like I need to feminize her bald head somehow. I had Rachel’s hair in barrettes by this age—her hair was so long I had to clip it out of her eyes. Miriam has a lot of hair, it’s just all in the back…so we pretty up the front in other ways. So because I don’t have many headbands to pass down from Rachel’s babyhood (due to her need for barrettes) and since I had so much yarn left over, I decided to make matching Christmas headbands for the girls. I think they turned out pretty cute, for my first try.
(The headband pattern can be found here, the holly leaf pattern can be found here, and the holly berries are just a magic circle.)
Our branch Christmas Party was on Saturday evening. We were busy getting ready for it all day—we were participating in several numbers in the talent show, decorating and “hosting” a table, and providing donuts for dessert.
The donuts were Andrew’s idea since I had signed up to make cookies, anyway, and he was too busy to prepare much of anything for the talent show. So I told him he could make donuts.
“That’s my talent!” he said, as if he were just discovering some spiritual gift that they had neglected to mention in D&C 46.
This morning we battled our way onto the metro during rush hour to make it to the embassy to finish the paperwork for Miriam’s American birth certificate and passport.
On Sunday evening I dragged the girls out to the Maadi Community Choir Christmas Choral Concert. We left a little late so I told Rachel we had to hurry. I didn’t have to worry—the minute we were out the door she informed me that hyenas were chasing us and we had to run or else we would die. A little morbid, yes, but at least it kept the pace up.
When Daddy came home from school on Monday Rachel initiated a snowball fight with him.
She is a great thrower but not the best aimer so Andrew was able to teach her the playground chant “missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss me!”
When I was in grade four I was a lunchroom monitor for a younger class. We had the option to sign up to be lunchroom monitors at the beginning of the year, so a bunch of my friends and I (Sabine, Jennifer, Lindsey, and I—I’m pretty sure, anyway. I have a picture of us somewhere) decided to take advantage of that.
Since there wasn’t a cafeteria in our school each class ate lunch in the classroom at their desks. Our teacher, Mr. Low, stayed in the classroom for the first part of the lunch hour and then would shoo everyone outside to play for the duration so that he could have a bit of a break from us. The benefit of being a lunchroom monitor was that no one shooed you outside.
This was a particularly useful privilege in the cold winter months, unfortunately we moved in December so I didn’t have much opportunity to use that privilege.
I put Miriam down on the bed while I was getting dressed today. She should have been perfectly safe—she was a foot away from the edge of the bed, resting against the footboard,* kind of like this:
