Bird games

This morning the girls were looking out the window, watching Daddy drive away, when they noticed some birds in the yard enjoying Grandma's callery pear tree. A few of the birds were robins and one of them flew right up onto the deck, which the girls got really excited about because they'd "never seen a robin that close up before!"

They've since been pretending to be a robin (Rachel) and a duck (respectively), making nests on the living room floor and so forth.

Rachel lamented that she has "two wishes: one, [she] want[s] to be Hermione because [she] love[s] Hermione and two, [she] want[s] to be a robin because they're so cool! But [she] can't be both..."

She drew a beautiful picture of their game—she's the robin, sitting on her nest (all seven of her eggs have already hatched into young robins). Miriam's the little duck in the pond. There's a butterfly and a dragonfly in the sky, some flowers on the ground. It's a beautiful picture. She's very proud of it.

She said I could take a picture of her picture and send the picture of her picture to Uncle Jacob but that he can't have the actual picture because she's keeping it forever.

FHE fail

For FHE yesterday we had a lesson on gratitude, specifically on gratitude to the Lord. I filled a brown paper bag with items from around the house (toy food, a picture of the scriptures, a toy animal, etc) and then had the girls pull out the items one at a time so we could discuss how it was a blessing in our lives and how we can show the Lord we're thankful for it.

We told them to close their eyes when they reached in the bag, which Miriam took very seriously. She pulled out the toy pear. We talked about how food helps our bodies grow and that we can thank our Heavenly Father for our food by praying before we eat so that we can say thank you but also by eating responsibly—for example, eating good things that actually nourish our bodies and not wasting food, that kind of thing.

I think it was also Miriam who pulled out the toy elephant.

"I am not thankful for elephants!" Rachel said at once—that day at the Cairo Zoo was a little traumatizing for her—"Remember that one time that elephant tried to eat my hair!?"

"What about animals in general?" I asked.

I'm a pirate!

On Saturday Rachel game with me for the dance practice my mom, sister, and I had. She was asking a lot of questions about it in the car on the way to BYU. We gave her the brief rundown:

It's called Saman. It's a dance from the Indonesian island of Aceh. It's kind of related to Gamelan, which is music from the Indonesian island of Bali. 

Rachel might be one of only a few North American four-year-olds who knows what Gamelan is so she didn't ask for more of an explanation about that. Instead she asked what an island was.

Bookmarks and Arabic

If you look on our bookshelf between Harry Potter 1 and Harry Potter 3, you'll find this:

It's a little booklet that Rachel made so that we know Harry Potter is "checked out" and is in her bedroom instead of on the shelf. She wrote Harry Potter on the front. Or rather, she wrote:

HARR

OPY

TTER

Pizza night

On Friday night, Daddy proposed we make pizza for dinner. He mixed the dough and got all the toppings out. I shaped the dough in the pans and everyone helped put the toppings on—except for Rachel who was busy learning how to type on Andrew's computer (she can do home row at 2.7 WPM—be amazed).

Miriam was put in charge of cutting the olives in the egg slicer, a job she took very seriously. Usually Rachel slices the olives and Miriam puts them on the pizza so she was quite honoured to have gotten a promotion.

Unfortunately, her arms are so short that she could only put the olives in one place so either someone was going to get a whole lot of olives on their slice of pizza or a parental unit would have to rearrange the toppings. We chose the latter option, which Miriam wasn't exactly pleased about.

 But as my grandpa always said, "Life is hard and then you die."

We made Miriam tough out her disappointment.

And the olives were fairly evenly distributed.

And Miriam survived the whole thing!

Hermione Hair

Last night after the girls had their bath I braided their hair—Miriam got four braids and Rachel got five. In the morning after they had eaten breakfast we undid the braids and they were excited to both transform into Hermione for the day.

Bedtime sillies

The girls were certainly on one before bedtime! It took us half an hour to read through five or six verses of scripture—I'm not even kidding. I'm sure my picture-taking falls in the category of encouraging the incorrigible but so often their silliness fell into the cuteness category (as opposed to the super-annoying category) and I couldn't help but run get the camera...a few times. 

In case you think I'm kidding (or don't want to sift through a dozen pictures of my children) just look at this picture:

What is that—Blue Steel?! Where in the world did she pick that up?

February so far

Last night Andrew and I used the movie tickets my mom gave to Andrew for his birthday (five months ago). We went out to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was a terrible idea because I cried the whole time but a wonderful idea because it was such a great story. It follows the life of a little boy who lost his father in the World Trade Center on 9/11 for about a year or so and was absolutely heart wrenching.

My parents watched the girls for us and they got to watch a movie at home. Rachel's always excited when I leave because she thinks other adults will always "definitely say yes" to a movie. She picked out "the all the birds of a feather movie," which the general public refers to as Rio. After that my mom spoiled the girls by reading a full chapter and a half of Harry Potter. Usually one chapter is my limit for a night.

We have a visitor from North Carolina right now—he's visiting his daughter, who is at BYU, on his way home from a business trip. He arrived last night just as we were sitting down to play a game of Ticket to Ride. We never did get our game in but we did get to listen to Reid and Karen and our visitor reminisce about North Carolina. They speak so fondly of it that it nearly makes me nostalgic and I've never lived there—the closest I've been to North Carolina was a short stay in Atlanta, Georgia, with my dad's cousin.

I don't think I would mind if we ended up heading out to Durham for school.

Un-news

Back in November, Andrew had his in-person interview for the PMF. They told us they'd let us know by January 24th. At first I wasn't sure how we'd survive until then because waiting is akin to torture. However, with Thanksgiving and Christmas and the New Year (a little something I like to call 'the holidays' so am in no way offended when people wish me 'Happy Holidays,' just as a side note) we were carried quickly through the rest of November and on through December. By the time January rolled around I had so entirely pushed the idea of the PMF out of my mind that it didn't even bother me. At least not much.

I still had that date in the back of my mind, but only in the back.

We were quite surprised, then, when Andrew got an email last Monday telling him that he was one of 628 finalists to have been selected from a pool of 9,100 applicants. Monday was the 23rd—that's a day early!

In reality he got it late at night on the 23rd so I think it was technically the 24th in DC.

Still. For us? It was a day early.

Harry Potter

Somehow tomorrow is February. I'm not really quite sure how that happened.

We finished reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's [The Philosopher's] Stone this evening. While we were reading, Miriam fished the Mr. Potato glasses out of the toy box and said, "Look at me! I'm Harry Potter! Me has Harry Potter glasses!"