Hand towels in the sink

To say I woke up grumpy this morning would be inaccurate. I was grumpy, sure, but I'm not sure that my waking up qualified as such considering the amount of sleep I'd gotten through the night. Benjamin's been fussy—tossing and turning and whining all night—for the past several nights and it's been torture.

Last night I got him to go to bed at around 9:00 and then went off to book club. I grabbed my purse (and nothing else), hopped into the van, and drove down the street. It was my first time leaving the house without my baby in tow since July. I had a lovely time talking to some of the sisters in my ward about Henry Van Dyke's The Mansion. We talked about service and miracles and faith and gratitude. It was perfect and just what I needed.

We finally called it a night and I slowly, slowly made my way home (in the dark...with fogging windows). I was greeted at the door by my fairly desperate husband and inconsolable little boy.

"Why didn't you text me?! I had my phone on my lap the whole night!" I said over the noise that poor baby was making.

"I assumed you were having a good time and didn't want to interrupt you!" he said loudly back.

I quickly took Benjamin from Andrew and quieted him down. It took a while. He was so upset with life that he was flailing and jerking his little body around; he could hardly settle down to nurse and then once he did he continued to grunt angrily to communicate his displeasure.

I had him asleep and back in his bed by 2 AM when Andrew and I slipped outside to watch for meteors. I saw three. Andrew saw the third one with me and then said, "I saw one—let's go back inside now!"

It suddenly got cold here. Like it frosted last night and everything.

It got up to about 70 degrees by this afternoon but this morning it was frosty outside.

Benjamin had gotten up at 3 AM...and 5 and 6 and 7:30. I was wasted.

After I'd changed his diaper and set him down to play with his toys I went into the girls' bathroom to wash my hands and grab some hair stuff so I could do Rachel's hair for school. And I lost my cool completely.

Here's the thing:

When our girls are finished doing whatever it is they're doing at the sink they put all their tools into the sink instead of where they go.

Still so glad

Real quick...because I'm still not finished that Christmas poem...

Yesterday I found Andrew standing in front of my to-do list.

"I'm going to sweep the floor," he announced.

And then he swept the floor, which was kind of unusual. He's definitely a big help around the house. He'll do laundry and scrub toilets and cook dinner and wash dishes. I just happen to do the majority of those things because he's simply busier with other things so the housekeeping and baby bouncing is left on my shoulders for the most part. Not that there's anything wrong with that since I'm the "homemaker" around here. I don't think I've seen him sweep the floor the whole time we've been here (other than extreme cases where something major has gotten spilled).

Once he was finished with the floor he went to my to-do list and crossed that off. He then went outside to get the rest of our pumpkins from the porch stairs and prepared them to be cooked and pureed which is something I've been meaning to do for a while (since it's almost Christmas and the pumpkins were from Halloween). He crossed that off the list (and left me to do the actual cooking and pureeing but all's fair in love and war).

He allowed me plenty of time to work on the Christmas poem, which was another thing on my list.

He praised the banana bread Miriam and I made together (we had six overripe bananas in the freezer and six more on the counter; something had to be done).

And that finished off my to-do list (besides laundry which is a task that should probably be excluded from to-do lists because it's so on-going).

I was feeling so lucky to be married to such a great guy who in his few spare minutes during finals week chose to spend him time making my life blissful but then he updated his facebook status to say, "Ah. Constructive avoidance behavior," so perhaps his sole motivation was making my life easier. Perhaps he was just avoiding everything he should have been doing. I don't really mind because it makes me happy that when he's avoiding his own responsibilities he does so by fulfilling mine.

And when I woke up this morning...after he let me sleep in...the laundry was folded.

I'm officially spoiled.

And I love finals week, but not as much as I love Andrew.

After seven years of marriage (almost...Sunday's our anniversary) I'm still so glad he chose me.

A Pit Stop in Richmond—Treadgear

We only spent an hour in Richmond so I really shouldn't have very much to say about it. At any rate it should take me less than an hour to finish this post, right? It would be ridiculous to take longer to record our time in Richmond than the time we actually spent there, right? This post shouldn't be too long. I hope.

We stopped at Treadgear Iron Works, which is now a national monument it once was the main producer of weaponry and ammunition for the Confederate States. The inside of the museum was kind of lame (in all fairness we'd gone to the Museum of the Marine Corps just hours earlier so our expectations were high) so we eventually abandoned the museum in favour of the great outdoors.

Fort Ward and Quantico

We decided to break up our ride home into palatable chunks, stopping for adventures all along the way in order to keep the kids from losing it in the backseat. Andrew had originally wanted to go back into DC to see a few more things but Blake and Amanda helped me convince overly-optimistic Andrew that doing so would be insane. Weekend traffic in DC is pretty light. Weekday traffic, on the other hand, is not. Instead we drove just down the street to see the Fort Ward park, our very first Civil War site.

It was such a nice day—we were so hot we were peeling off sweaters. This made me very happy. I prefer sunshine to snow any day of the year (including Christmas).

Artwork palooza

In the past I've made a list of everything we managed to remember to be thankful for on our Thankful Tree as I've disassembled it. The girls haven't been too keen on the idea of taking it down, so it's still up. Perhaps later I'll get around to making that list, assuming I can decode everything the girls wrote!

Here are the kids sitting in front of the tree:

Snippets from our time with Amanda

Another reason we chose this past weekend to visit the DC area was to attend our friend Amanda's wedding (p)reception. She brought a boy home to Utah this past summer and we were lucky enough to meet him. I saw her sister a little while later and asked if this trip was the trip—the "meet the family" trip. Emily told me that it most certainly was a trip like that and hinted that a special panda-shaped box had been covertly delivered into Blake's hands so that he could put something sparkly inside to give to Amanda, who has a thing for pandas.

So I wasn't too surprised to hear a little while later that Amanda and Blake were officially engaged.

We stayed at their apartment, where Amanda is living solo until their wedding later this month, while we were in Virginia. Their (p)reception was on Friday, which is why we had to rush to hit the road after Rachel's pow-wow. We arrived just in time for it to start and were pleasantly surprised with how many little friends there for the girls to play with. It was at Amand's bishop's house; he's a former congressman (and Andrew was rather excited about that).

Amanda and Blake's reception was really fun. I was impressed that they planned and put on the whole thing by themselves and it turned out great. I'm sure they're happy to have family helping out with their other receptions—in Utah and Arizona—later this month!

They had a little barbeque upstairs and had games to play downstairs, which is where most of the little kids were hanging out.

Rachel had insisted on wearing her pow-wow garb to the party which I almost felt a little embarrassed about since the reception was in such a fancy home. Downstairs she found a little firefighter to play air hockey with, though, so I stopped feeling embarrassed and felt awesome instead. She was rocking her end of the air hockey table in her fringed pillowcase dress and beaded necklace (we left the headdress in the van); he was trying to best her in his rubber boots and plastic firefighter coat. Andrew saw them and said, "What is this—The Village People?"

I'm not sure the Village People ever had a firefighter costume but it was still a funny joke that our kids aren't cool enough to appreciate yet.

When Amanda came to stay with us in Egypt she told us about a Tauntaun sleeping bag she'd won online. When we came to stay with her in DC she pulled it out for Rachel to sleep in. Originally she suggested the girls could take turns sleeping in it but when Miriam saw it she didn't want to sleep in it, or share a bed with it, or even be in the same room as it. We convinced her to stay in the room, though she made a "princess bed" on the floor even though the futon was plenty big enough for the girls to share. That Tauntaun was too scary for her.

That made Rachel happy because it meant she got to sleep in it every night!

A day in the district

Getting five people ready for the day is difficult; it's a wonder we ever make it out the door with our whole troupe looking decent. By the time we made it into The District it was past eleven o'clock! I was shocked when I asked Andrew the time—Miriam had woken me up at seven o'clock that morning and we'd been bustling about feeding babies, feeding children, dressing babies, dressing children, packing diaper bags, finding shoes for ten feet, folding up a hide-a-bed, making sure everyone was well pottied ever since. It hardly seemed possible that all we'd managed to do was get out the door and take a short ride on the metro by eleven in the morning!

In our defense, we were rather tired from listening to a wild party until the wee hours of the morning. One particular attendee at the party was rather sad and rather drunk and/or high and I suppose a friend was trying to console him when he wailed into the night, "Why me, man? Why me?!" There was much sobbing and incomprehensible mumble-wailing (and loud obnoxious music).

Andrew and I giggled and dubbed him Sad Drunk Man. We couldn't stop laughing; I'm sure the man was hurting but it was such a cliche thing to call out (and we were up past any reasonable hour and probably would have laughed at anything).

Rachel's Pow-wow

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the kindergarten classes in Rachel's school learned about "Indians." Shortly after Thanksgiving (last Friday, actually) they celebrated by putting on a performance for the parents.

They made totem poles and shakers in art class, learned about and decorated their shirt and headbands with pictograms, studied patterns and made noodle necklaces, memorized poems, learned a friendship dance. It was quite the unit.

Getting ready

Here are a few pictures of us getting ready to go to on our trip...

On Thursday Andrew was taking an important call in the office/bedroom/nursery but Benjamin was ready to go down for a nap...so he slept on the bottom bunk (where Miriam usually sleeps). Miriam thought it was hilarious.

Meeting Bridget

We had a very busy and exciting weekend—we went all the way to Washington, DC and back again—we saw many, many things but first I'll share the main reason for our trip up north...