Will work for ice cream

I've been looking for a new way to motivate my dear children to pull their own weight around here. We had a way that worked...for a month a half...until the holidays kicked in and then we gave up trying for a while because there was too much going on. Last night I jumped on pinterest—something I haven't done in ages—and found some cute ideas for chore charts.

I took the ice cream idea from here (but I just made my own instead of printing it) and the chore cards from here. I put it together when the kids were in bed and showed it to Miriam first thing in the morning. One of her chores for today was "get dressed" and for the first time in a long time we didn't have to argue about it (she lived in her pyjamas when everyone was sick and apparently that wasn't a habit she wanted to break). After she got dressed she ran and grabbed the broom so that she could do another chore. She finished 5 out of her 6 chores before lunch!

Where the grickle grass grows

My friend Geri posted a little Valentine's Day craft she made and I thought we could make that! It's cute, elegant, colourful, festive, easy. Yes, we could totally do that!

So a couple of days ago after Rachel was home from school we sat down to make some pompoms together. And then we went out and collected some sticks and glued our pompoms on the ends of them (using white glue, which worked just as well as hot glue, I think). And then Rachel declared, "I know what we're making—we're making Truffula trees!"

And just like that my vision of a cute, elegant, colourful, festive, and easy craft lost the adjective 'elegant.' It was now just a cute, colourful, festive, and easy craft.

The girls turned it into a Dr. Seuss habitat—complete with Barbaloots, Humming Fish, Swomee Swans, and The Lorax, himself. (As well as some Harry Potter themed Truffula Trees (ra! ra! Gryffindor!))

At home with Benjamin and Miriam

Now that we're all feeling better (not 100% yet but certainly better) we've been having much more fun at home together. Here are some pictures from the past couple of days for our grandmas to enjoy...

Miriam and I worked on patterns while Benjamin was napping. She made up her own pattern—it goes pink, purple, pink, purple, pink, purple...purple, pink...pink purple, etc. She only noticed her mistake when she was "reading" her pattern to me.

Gardening

Saturday—the day after our horrific "snow day," mind you—we went outside to do some yard work. We started out wearing sweaters but soon we stripped those off and worked in our t-shirts because it was warm enough for that. (Now ask me how much I'm enjoying my winter. Very much).

It's kind of strange to need to do yard work in the winter. Shoveling snow seems like a perfectly normal winter chore for me. Weeding the flowerbed does not seem like a perfectly normal winter chore for me but that's what we were doing on Saturday anyway.

We started with just pulling up the grasses and wild onion that had tried to take over the plot this summer. And then we thought about how much we wished the bushes weren't there—a half-dead juniper and some ghastly ornamental grasses, that kind of thing—and how much we wished to have a flower garden or a vegetable garden or both. So, with our landlady's blessing, we ripped those bushes out.

Andrew grabbed a shovel and started digging down by the roots of a bush—not a juniper or the ornamental grass clumps but just some blah-type bush—but the soil's been so moist here and the bushes weren't very big so I decided I could probably pull up a few while he was working with the shovel.

I grabbed the bush by its stem, rooted my feet into the ground, gave it the ol' heave ho, and yanked that bush right out of the ground.

Rachel's jaw dropped open.

"Whoa, Mom!" she exclaimed. "That was amazing! Dad, did you see that? Did you see what Mom just did?!"

"That's what you get for marrying a cowgirl," I said to Andrew, flexing my muscles.

We sometimes joke that I'm a cowgirl because I grew up in southern Alberta where cowpokes are aplenty. But it's only a joke—I'm not really a cowgirl.

One Eno

Due to it being Martin Luther King Jr. day—or at least the "uniform Monday" we celebrate his birthday on—there was no school today. We had a very lazy morning, which was wonderful.

Benjamin slept from midnight until 9:30 in the morning on Sunday. He didn't do so well Sunday night, though, and I was up with him several times. Miriam came into our room at around 6:00 this morning and when Benjamin woke up to nurse she enthusiastically greeted him with a "Hiya, Benja-Boy!"

"No," I told her flatly.

She threw herself facedown on the bed and sobbed dramatically. Andrew carried her back to her bed where she fell asleep until around 9:30 when she woke Rachel up. My visiting teachers were due to arrive at 9:40 so we quickly got dressed and sat the girls down with some cereal. Benjamin didn't wake up until shortly after 10:00. That's how slow our morning was.

It was such a nice day that we later decided to go on a little hike, even though Rachel's been running a low-grade fever... *sigh* I thought we were over being sick.

I had quite the time convincing Miriam to get ready to go. She put on a dress first thing this morning, naturally, and it was my duty to convince her to put on something better suited for hiking.

"You need to put pants on because we're going hiking," I told her.

"What!?" she asked excitedly. "Okay. Are we moving away from this place?"

"No...we're just going hiking," I clarified.

"But Hawaii is very far away!" she felt duty-bound to explain to me.

"Hiking," I told her. "Not Hawaii!"

"Oh," she said.

So she went and put on a pair of tights under her dress. If we were just going outside to get the mail or wait for the school bus this wouldn't have been a problem but we were going hiking so I pulled out some jeans (pink ones!) and asked her to choose a pair to wear. She wouldn't.

"You can wear this pair or this pair," I said holding up the jeans for her.

Miriam said, "No."

"Come on, they're both pink! You love pink!"

Miriam said, "No."

"Just choose a pair," I said shortly, my patience quickly running out.

Miriam said, "No."

"Don't be a pill," I sighed.

"Why not?" she asked indignantly. "Those are like pilgrims! Pilgrims aren't bad!"

"You're wearing this pair," I said, making the decision for her. "Let's get them on you and then you can find a pair of socks and shoes to wear."

Miriam wandered over to the shoe bin and selected a pair of pink socks with a lace trim and her white church shoes.

"Not those socks!" I reprimanded. "Those are Sunday socks. We're going hiking—choose regular socks."

"But I like these socks," she sniffed and then made the excuse that "no other socks have a match!"

"Your drawer is full of socks," I observed. "Choose a different pair."

"Okay. I will just put these ones on," she said, getting ready to pull on the pink lacy socks.

"Don't put those on!" I growled.

"Why not?" she asked innocently.

"Because we're going hiking!" I said, exasperated.

"Hiking?" she asked. "I love hiking!"

Finally...finally...she chose a pair of regular socks and her pink rain boots (which are fine enough for hiking in my book).

Eventually we made it out the door and to the Eno River State Park and hiked out to the suspension bridge, like we did last time, but this time we kept going and hiked Fanny's Ford Trail as well.

A pair of socks

A couple of years ago I took the girls to the Bean Museum on BYU campus. We'd come into campus with Andrew so we parked where he was parking and then unloaded the stroller and walked all the way up to the museum. It was chilly and rainy and once we were there I noticed that Miriam was missing one of her socks.

I was rather upset about this not only because it was chilly and rainy and my baby now had bare feet but also because I really hate to lose things.

We looked for Miriam's sock in the museum but didn't find it so before we left I pulled into a corner and announced that we were going to say a prayer about Miriam's sock.

"About a sock?" Rachel verified.

"About a sock," I nodded.

We said our prayer and discussed how we are so important to Heavenly Father that even the littlest details of our lives are important to him. I wasn't sure what kind of miracle He'd turn our missing sock situation into—answers to prayer come in many forms and I'm often (pleasantly) surprised by the method Heavenly Father uses to give me exactly what I need.

To say I was expecting to find the sock would be an exaggeration. Finding the sock would have been the most obvious solution but there were many other ways to answer our prayer. We could have lost Miriam's other sock (two missing socks is better than one because there's no painful reminder that you lost something), I could have been blessed with peace (so that I wouldn't continue worrying about the sock), I could have come home to find that someone had left some hand-me-downs on our front porch (and a pair of socks could have been inside). See? Lots of ways to answer a prayer.

After we'd said our prayer I recited the adage that my mother would recite to me (and her parents would recite to her...and so on): Pray like everything depends on the Lord. Act like everything depends on you.

If we were going to find the sock, we'd have to look for it—I doubt the sock would snake its way across campus to us if we had just prayed and sat there—so out we went to retrace our steps.

As we were walking past the Marriott Center we found lying, on the sidewalk, a soggy little baby sock.

Miriam's sock, 2010

Snow Day

Last night it snowed.

By mid-afternoon yesterday it was still in the balmy 50s and we got a phone message from the school superintendent calling for a snow day. It did get a little chillier by the time the sun went down and by the time we had dinner it was raining. We put the kids to bed, looked out the window, and got them back out of bed. It had started snowing...ish.

We knew we couldn't postpone an opportunity to prance around in the snow this far south, so decked out in pyjamas and boots the girls pranced around the porch.

Miriam twirled around and repeated, "I can't believe it! I can't believe it! I can't believe it!"

Rachel kept yelling, "Snowball fight!" and flinging handfuls of slush at no one in particular.

Some churchy stuff

Last month I was extended a call to work in the primary of our new ward here. I almost burst out laughing the minute I heard what it was. I had been so nervous about it because when I got the phone call the counselor of the bishopric asked to meet with both Andrew and me, which could only mean that it was a presidency calling. Andrew and I spent the whole week hypothesizing about what it could be. Finally, I got to meet with the counselor and find out what it was.

"We'd like to ask you to be the primary secretary," he said. "Is that a calling you feel you can fulfill?"

"Yes," I said, trying my hardest to remain my composure and not snicker out loud. "Yes, I do."

That settled it. I shook hands with the counselor and he called Andrew in (to ask if Andrew would be willing to support me in my calling).

"So, what is it?" Andrew asked when he came in.

"Don't laugh," I warned him before spilling the beans. "Primary secretary."

"That's...that's great," he said, pulling the corners of his mouth down into the most serious-looking ridiculous grin he could muster.

You might be wondering why this is so funny. Let me spell it out for you:

Damage Control

Yesterday I started a load of laundry because I had no clean nursing pads left. Benjamin's not been nursing very well—he's been nursing more often but for shorter duration—this past week and it's wreaked havoc on my milk supply. That load never got switched over to the dryer because life happened (and I spent all morning at the doctor's office and forgot about it).

It was raining when we went to the bus stop to pick Rachel up. We're taking care of our neighbour's cat while they're on vacation and so I decided we'd go straight from the bus stop to the neighbour's house since I didn't want to have to get Benjamin and Miriam all bundled up (in...sweaters) to go outside twice. I shared my plan with Rachel as we made our way up our street.

"Right now?" she said excitedly—she's thrilled to be taking care of a pet even though we've never once seen hide or hair of this sweet, incredibly shy kitty—and prepared to dash across the street. "One, two, three!" she counted, looking to the right. "One, two, three!" she counted, looking to the left. "One, two, three!" she counted, looking to the right again.

I hate it when she does that because she doesn't actually look. She simply counts and thinks that alone is enough to protect her from oncoming traffic, as if it's some secret code that generates a forcefield around her. Every time she does it I emphasize that counting is nice but looking is what's actually important. I'm not sure she'll ever get it. *sigh*

So, she took off to the neighbour's house, full speed ahead and... Oh...did I mention it was raining? It's been raining so much that the rain has no where left to go. The water table is apparently full so the rain is puddling up on the lawns instead of soaking into them, which has turned our entire neighbourhood into one big swampish bog (complete with snakes, frogs, and turtles (thank goodness it's January and not July)).

Rachel made it safely across the street but her feet went out from under her the minute she hit the neighbour's lawn. She skidded a few feet before falling flat on her back.

Shoo flu, don't bother me

So many things happened today; it's all kind of a blur.

I remember waking up this morning after I'd gotten Benjamin to fall asleep in my arms for an entire half hour and saying to Andrew, "I can't do this! I can't do this again!"

Benjamin's been crying for about five days now, nearly non-stop. Something had to be done. I can't pull another all-nighter.

Technically Andrew was supposed to go to campus for a seminar today before his class but instead he called the doctor and made an appointment while I held the wailing baby. I spent the morning at the doctor's office with Benjamin and Andrew spent the morning at home with Miriam (but he also wrote a paper so it wasn't like his morning was a complete waste).

We had several doctors milling around Benjamin within minutes of arriving at the clinic. It's like there're a couple of medical schools in the area and a surplus of doctors hoping to get some experience or something. Three doctors listened to his chest with a stethoscope. Two doctors looked in his ears with the otoscope. They listened to him cough. They asked a million questions.

They came to the conclusion that it was probably the flu and he'd probably be alright if they just sent him home with a tamiflu prescription but that it might already be pneumonia so they'd better take some x-rays (just in case).