We Be Loyal Scouts

As of today I'm officially a den leader. I just printed out my Youth Protection Training certificate (which, by the way, claims to be "suitable for framing" so you might just see it on my wall...or not) and I feel like I'm completely jumping into the fire. We have a "pack meeting" on Tuesday and a "den meeting" on Wednesday. And we had two committee-type meetings today.

I'm completely out of my league here. Not only have I never been through scouting but I grew up watching my brother go through the Scouts Canada program, which is a completely different system, dutifully sewing on his badges and longing to join the boys on their adventures (they did really cool things; and I only sewed his shirtsleeves shut a handful of times, but that was only because most of his badges went on his sash and not on his shirt).

We were sitting in our meeting this afternoon discussing the 2011 budget and the topic of belt loops came up.

"We'll continue to buy badges and beads for all the boys but we won't be supplying belt loops anymore. They're just too expensive, so we'll have to let parents know that they will have to supply belt loops for the boys if their boys want to earn them."

The whole time I was thinking, Why don't they just put belt loops on the pants in the first place?!

Black Socks

This morning we were on time for church. Barely. Still, let's give credit where credit is due.

We. Were. On. Time.

For some reason our children can wake up bright-eyed an bushy-tailed on a Saturday morning at, say, seven o'clock in the morning, but on Sundays we literally have to drag them out of bed—usually by 8:00 in the morning, sometimes later. I have kind of come to think of them as natural alarm clocks, but they've recently been rather defective, waking up when I want to hit snooze and sleeping in when I need to be woken up. And climbing into bed with us.

We only have one other alarm clock that does that.

I woke up this morning at around six o'clock and thought I was paralyzed—I tried to turn over but couldn't move. It only took me a moment to notice that I had a child resting in either nook of my arms. (I don't even know how these things happen). I had Andrew help me move them back into their own beds and then we went back to sleep until our alarm (the one on Andrew's iPod) went off shortly after 7:00.

Both of us were dressed before we even woke the girls up.

"My socks don't match," I commented to Andrew, "but I don't care because I'm wearing my boots to church so no one will see them."

Blueberries, blueberries....

One of Rachel's favourite YouTube videos is this one:

She likes to say, "Blueberries, blueberries..." in a demented voice and then hit her face on anything nearby. She will also sometimes say, "Cucumbers, cucumbers..." or "Cereal, cereal..." or anything else if we don't happen to have blueberries around. We don't often have blueberries around, actually, but we do have blueberry yogurt.

The girls split a blueberry yogurt the other day and they were getting quite silly and creative with it.

Antigone

On Wednesday night I went to see Josie play in Antigone.


Antigone is a difficult story to portray; asking a group of high school students to pull off a Greek tragedy centered around incest, death, and tyranny is a lot to ask. There were some deep and disturbing themes that were unavoidable but overall they did a great job. It was an interesting interpretation to be sure, with puppetry and voice-overs and odd things like that. Josie was in the chorus, which was an incredibly awesome chorus, if I do say so, myself. And I do.

At one point in the play, Antigone explains her motive for flouting the law by burying her brother. It was an interesting explanation, one that I think naive, but perhaps that is what Sophocles was going for:

Yet am I justified in wisdom's eyes.
For even had it been some child of mine,
Or husband mouldering in death's decay,
I had not wrought this deed despite the State.

I Believe in Lasterday

Time is a concept completely lost on children. I think that's part of the reason life is so frustrating for them. Like most children her age, Rachel has been working on understanding time but she just can't quite get it.

If I tell her, "We're doing that tomorrow," she inevitably asks me, "Tomorrow-today?"

Tomorrow-today? What is that even supposed to mean?

"Tomorrow-tomorrow," I tell her, "As in you have to go to sleep and then wake up. That tomorrow."

I think she thinks tomorrow simply means "later" so she is wondering if we will be doing something later today. But then sometimes I think she thinks today means "now" because if I tell her that I'll do something later she'll throw a fit, demanding that it be done "today."

Forget trying to tell the child to "wait five minutes."

The concept of yesterday is equally lost on her. Just the other day I caught her asking Grandpa what he did "lasterday."

Lasterday I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner and Rachel wandered into the kitchen wearing nothing but her skivvies. She had been wearing a t-shirt over a leotard over some pants and apparently had to take it all off to visit the bathroom.

"You need to put some clothes back on," I instructed her, "It's too cold to run around in your underwear."

"I know, Mom, but I was wondering if I can put on my jammies. It's getting dark outside and I am getting a little sleepy and we already had dinner, so is it almost bedtime?"

"Sure, you can put on your jammies." I'm not going to say no to that one. "And it is almost bedtime but not quite. We'll have story time after I finish the dishes and then we'll get Daddy for scriptures and prayer."

"Is that how you tell time?" Rachel asked.

"Is what how you tell time?" I asked back.

"Well, because it's dark then it's almost bedtime," she said.

"Oh, sure, that's almost how you tell time. But not quite."

As competent as I am with earthly time, I know I am as incompetent as a three-year-old when it comes to heavenly time. I'm sure this makes me seem impatient, and perhaps a little whiney, when I pray.

"Hi. It's me again. I know I just asked lasterday for this blessing but if I could get it tomorrow-today instead of tomorrow-tomorrow, that'd be great."

No More Molars for Miriam

That's a plea.

Please, let's take a break from teething.

Miriam is not good at dealing with pain. She wakes up every few hours and has been, consistently since...November? October? I can't really remember. All I know is that I haven't had a good block of sleep in months. First it was her front teeth. Then I discovered her top molars, which, by the way, haven't made it all the way through yet. Yesterday I was feeding her and she stopped eating, let out an painful, angry yelp, and started slapping her face.

"What's wrong, baby?" I asked.

She nodded her head.

She always nods her head when she's asked a question—any question—so a certain Grandpa of hers has taken to asking if she's a poor, neglected child, to which she always answers with a curt and solemn nod of agreement. Sheesh.

Nothing was obviously wrong on the outside of her mouth so I forced her to let me feel around inside.

Her bottom gums were badly swollen.

More molars are trying to break through, this time on the bottom.

It will probably be a few days, at best (a few weeks, at worst), until they erupt.

I may as well give the child an IV of Orajel.

Last night we gave her tylenol, which helped her sleep mostly through the night (she only woke up twice between midnight and seven) but Rachel was having a fitful, nightmare-filled night and the sump-pump was going and Miriam had turned the speakers in our room on and my cellphone was interfering with them and making that awful noise. With all that going on I don't think I slept a wink.

I'm ready for a good night's rest.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like a good night's rest is ready for me.

Silly Girls

I’ve been accruing a rather large number of undocumented photographs on my camera. Mostly they are just of the girls being silly.

Miriam has been getting stuck a lot lately. This evening she was crawling around on Rachel’s bed. When she decided to sit down and have a rest she fell off the bed and wedged herself between Rachel’s mattress and her crib. (As you can see she wasn’t too upset about it).

Midway Ice Castles

This afternoon we went on a trip (or a fwip, as Rachel would say) to Midway, Utah. Midway isn't particularly far away but we were getting out of Orem to do something entirely fun (instead of the errand-running we usually try to fob off as an adventure). Emotions have been running high in our household lately, particularly in the three-year-old population, so it was doubly nice to get out of the house and out-and-about for a while.

Her mood improved immensely when she learned that we were going to see a castle!

An ice castle, that is.

Hit by a parked car

I usually go running at night after the kids are in bed—but only at the track where it is warm, well-lit, and dry. Thursdays are the most difficult day to go running because Andrew gets home just in time to have scriptures and prayer as a family before we tuck the girls in and hope they go to sleep. Then I'm out the door.

Last night I was waiting for Wendy, my running partner, to pick me up so we could go to the track and I was chatting to Andrew while I waited since I hadn't seen him all day. He said something about the weather.

"It must be pretty warm out," I casually remarked. "It's raining."

"Yeah, it's raining," he agreed, "But it's cold."

Wendy drove up and I said goodbye to Andrew and blew kisses to Rachel, who was still awake, and headed out the door. The deck was wet with rain but it wasn't icy so I figured the driveway wouldn't be icy, either. 

I was wrong.

I'm terribly funny

"You're a tortfeaser," Andrew told me last night.

"Um, what?" I asked.

"I'm just practicing my vocabulary. A tortfeaser is someone who commits a tort. A tort is some sort of injustice done to someone, either deliberately or through negligence. So that," he explained, lightly punching my arm, "would be a tort."

"And would this be a retort?" I asked, punching him back.

Sometimes I can be really funny.

"I wonder if tort shares the same root as torture," I said (it does).

That got us on the topic of torture which eventually led us to discuss terrorism, which is something we've been discussing at length recently, trying to determine whether the recent attempted-assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and massacre of onlookers could be classified as terrorism or not.

Terrorism as it stands is a fairly new concept. Its usage skyrocketed after 9/11 but it's still a rather shaky, ambiguous term so it's hard to say if any "isolated incident" should be considered terrorism or not.

"I wonder if terrorism is really a word of mixed origin," I mused, "Perhaps it is most commonly used to describe acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims because it uses the Latin root terror and the Arabic root ism. That gives you terrorism: something done in the name of terror."

Andrew thought that was clever.

Sometimes I can be terribly funny.