Check ups

We took the girls to the doctor for well-child visits last week, even though we did well-child visits before Benjamin was born so that we could get Rachel's kindergarten shots done because we didn't know how long it would get us to get insurance sorted out when we got here (apparently it took us until November). I suppose Miriam was due for her three-year-old well-child visit, anyway, so it was actually good timing to take her in but they gave Rachel an appointment as well so that she could be an "established" patient in the clinic, which makes getting a sick-child appointment easier, I guess.

Our clinic is amazing. We walked into the lobby and just stood there, staring at the walls. The whole clinic was covered in a mural of animals—camels at the pyramids, penguins in Antarctica, monkeys swinging from trees, butterflies chasing each other through the sky. It was beautiful.

We felt pretty lucky to end up with such a great clinic since I basically chose blindly. The clinic some of my friends recommended wasn't receiving new patients so this was the other close one so I chose it. When the receptionist asked if I had a doctor I'd prefer to make an appointment with I just said, "A nice one?"

We got one!

The poppies...

It's Remembrance Day! Or Veteran's Day! Or Armistice Day! Or Poppy Day!

Or...at least...yesterday was!

Whatever you happen to call it, Rachel had the day off school today because of it, but we began celebrating it yesterday. I don't know why it's not a huge deal here like it is in Canada—where we learn about it in school, have bulletin boards decorated with poppies and white crosses, have assemblies devoted to remembering fallen soldiers and promoting peace, have a moment of silence, have city-wide devotionals...

I suppose Americans spend too much time fighting about whether November should be filled with butterball turkeys or jolly old elves to devote much time to remembering war (and hoping for peace).

I happen to rather like Remembrance Day! Yesterday the girls and I wore poppies to church.

Only a precisionist would understand

The bus pulled up at our corner on Monday afternoon and instead of bounding down the stairs of the bus with a smile on her face and her hair flapping wildly behind her, Rachel shuffled slowly out of her seat, down the aisle, and out the door. Her lips were trembling and tears were welling up in her eyes but she was trying very hard to remain poised.

"Are you alright, sweetie?" I asked the inevitable ice-breaking question.

"No!" she wailed. "I have to show you something. Something terrible!"

She dropped her backpack on the ground and sank to her knees. Fumbling with the zipper for a few seconds she eventually managed to calm her nerves and open her backpack. She pulled out her daily folder and thrust it at me.

"I lost an eagle!" she sobbed.

I looked at "today's" date. "A little too chatty," it read. "Lost 1 eagle."

"Oh, baby. It's okay..." I started.

"No, Mom! It's not!" she interrupted.

"It really is though. Look, do we have to do this on the side of the road or can we move this conversation inside—maybe calm down, get a snack, talk it over?"

The Cameron Craze

"You'll never get in," Reid told us when we first declared our intention to attend Duke. He wasn't talking about academics, though. He was talking about sports, specifically basketball.

Andrew had boasted that we were going to go to a Duke basketball game, but going to a Duke basketball game is nearly impossible. People camp out for tickets to the formidably famous yet ridiculously tiny (let's call it...cozy) Cameron Indoor Stadium. Tickets are like gold and the fans are so intense that they have their own Wikipedia page.

This week Andrew got an email announcing that the first game of the season would be a "family night" and that their graduate student association had purchased a number of tickets and all we had to do was get in line early enough to beat the crowd and we'd get in the game for free, so we picked Rachel up from school instead of letting her bus home and headed off to campus.

We had to be in line by 4:30, as per the emails instructions, and we got there around 4:15. The line was virtually nonexistent but it did get long as we were waiting. I think everyone who was in line got into the game, though.

Once we got our wrist bands and knew we'd be getting into the game, the first thing Andrew did was call his father to gloat.

Teething

When we went to the girls' doctor appointments on Thursday Benjamin tagged along.

"And how old is this little guy?" the doctor cooed in Benjamin's direction.

"Five months," we answered.

"And teething," she observed.

I wonder how she came to that conclusion.



Perhaps it was because Benjamin's entire fist was wedged into his mouth. It often is.

We've got *mmmm* ants in our pants!

Few people reading this blog will recognize that theme song. Sometimes being a not-too-foreign foreigner makes life awkward. For example, there are times when I will hum a tune of a television show (that was on the air for eleven years, mind you) and no one around me will have the foggiest idea what I'm referencing (because I'm surrounded by Americans who grew up watching American television). I imagine it's similar to how growing old feels, only I made it to that special place before my prime.

Anyway, we fortunately do not have ants in our pants, but we do have ants in our pantry! We have been battling them for many moons now and I'm really not sure whose side is winning.

Life and Science

Yesterday Miriam, Benjamin, and I went visiting teaching. Ordinarily this is a solemn affair, a sit-quietly-and-don't-interrupt affair, a don't-touch-that-it's-not-yours affair, a yes-yes-we're-almost-finished affair. Not that the ladies I visit teach are grumpy or hoity-toity at all; it's simply that visiting teaching is an adult thing to do (which means that children find it very boring).

I've been lucky here, truthfully, and have only gone visiting teaching while Andrew's been home during the day so he's kept Miriam. I don't know if that's really luck since the only time I get the car (ie. am forced to drive it on my own) is when Andrew is home and if he's home then what's the point of taking all the kids with me when I go out? There hasn't been one...until yesterday.

One of the ladies I visit teach suggested that we meet at the Life and Science Museum this month instead of meeting at her home. She has a pass that's good for six people—we filled the quota with me and Miriam, my visiting teaching companion and her daughter Gwendolyn, and the two ladies we visit teach...and a baby for each of us (but babies don't count against the pass). It was a rather relaxing visit.

We just wandered around the museum, following Miriam and Gwendolyn around while we visited.

Miriam was especially excited about the space ship and, oddly enough, the sunscreen exhibit upstairs. The spaceship is understandable because you can actually climb inside and play around.

One Hundred

A few weeks ago Rachel rushed off the school bus absolutely beaming.

"Something exciting happened at school today!" she gushed.

"What?" I asked.

"I made the hundred club!" she managed to squeak out. "And I'm the only one in it! I'm the first one! I did it! I have got to tell Dad!"

Being the member of such an elite club is no easy feat—and, no, this isn't some club she invented to inflate her ego. The "hundred club" is a classroom club invented by Rachel's teacher. To get in said club you have to write the numbers one through one hundred in order after finishing up your worksheet at the math table during "centres."

I watched this in action when I helped out in her class a while back. That day the kids had each been given a little container of tiddlywinks that they had to count out and then draw on their paper. Rachel finished the task quickly and easily and then got to work on the back of her paper—that day she wrote all the way up to fifty (following a hundred chart). But she was bound and determined to get all the way to one hundred and was so proud when she did it.

We've been working on counting by tens at home, which had Rachel confused for a while due to a little speech quirk of hers. I'd call it a disorder but she's only five; I have a hard time saying that five years olds have speech disorders unless it's rather severe (like the case of my cousins' children who suffer from apraxia) because five year olds are simply five years old—they're still babies! We're required to send in an extra change of clothes to school, including underwear, because kids are still wetting their pants. If you suck your thumb, wet your pants, and can't say your own name correctly you're on the caboose of babyhood, the cusp of childhood. That's a completely different thing from having a speech disorder.

Be that as it may, we've been working on correcting Rachel's quirks, specifically when it comes to numbers. As I said, we've been working on skip counting by tens to one hundred. Last week we turned on the macarena and I taught the girls the dance while we counted by tens. It took Rachel about thirty seconds to understand the concept of skip counting to one hundred (we're still working on the dance part). The problem, though, is that she says thirty and forty completely the same and this confuses her.

"Ten, twenty, forty, fifty..." she'll say. Or, "Ten, twenty, forty, forty, forty, fifty..."

Alive and Laughing

I have a few topics for posts kicking around in my brain but unfortunately I'm so exhausted right now that my tongue keeps tripping over simple words like "lingonberry" and "empanada" no matter how often I've been forced to repeat them in conversations—and today that was a lot! So instead of blogging about something different I'll select a topic from my regular blogging fodder: my daily life.

Our story begins with this little one, who opens his mouth like this every time he sees me. I used to think it was the camera but, no, it's just me. He thinks that every part of mom is edible and if he just opens his mouth wide enough something yummy will drop inside.

Happy Everything Day!

It's 11:45 PM on election night and guess what we were doing? If you thought we watched the election results, you're probably right...but only kind of because we don't actually have, like, television. Instead I mixed up some pumpkin bread, Andrew pulled up a website (NPR, maybe) that was tracking the election, and we streamed some more of the West Wing. To prove how irresponsible we are, or perhaps merely to help cool our nerves, we watched three episodes right in a row—up to the episode where President Bartlett is reelected president.

We turned off the show and checked the election results just in time to watch the president win Wisconson, passing the 270 votes he needed to be reelected president.

It was kind of wild to watch two great wins right in a row!

But you didn't come here to hear about politics, I'm sure, and as luck has it I have a very non-political and very happy story to share with you all: we fixed our van!

Andrew was pretty frustrated after he tried to take the door apart on Saturday. Of course we arrived home with only an hour to spare before nightfall so his time was limited. We didn't have the part we needed to fix the van, anyway, but he was feeling like van-fixing was a little out of his realm. I didn't blame him because even van-driving is out of mine.

He tried desperately to fix the van on Sunday—he took it into a shop so they could look at it but they told us that they didn't have time and to come back in a couple hours later. He returned a couple hours later only to be told that they didn't have the part either. He came home feeling morose.

"Thwarted!" he said, "In all my attempts to break the sabbath!"

So we did the only thing we could do: we bundled up in coats and hats and blankets and drove to church with arctic winds blowing through our window.

That might be a bit of an over-exaggeration. I have to admit that of all places to have your window break, North Carolina in November isn't a bad place. It's chilly but not freezing and though it rained while our window was out of commission it didn't storm hard enough to rip off the garbage bag that we taped over our window.

I asked a few of my friends around here for recommendations on car shops since the place we went to quoted us $300 to fix the window regulator. That was going to be a hard bill to swallow.

Did I ever mention that we spent every penny we had moving out here? That we didn't buy any groceries for the whole month of September because Andrew only gets paid once a month...on the last day of the month...and he didn't get paid in August? I don't know if you've ever tried to move and then not stock your refrigerator; it was an interesting experience, that's for sure.