Good books

In the very last chapter of The Magician's Nephew, when all the loose ends of the story are resolved and good has triumphed over evil (for the time being), C.S. Lewis remarks, "When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better." This resonated with my soul today and brought to mind a number of scriptures:

• D&C 122: If thou art called to pass through tribulation...above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou...that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.
• 2 Nephi 2: ...thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow.... Nevertheless..., thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain.
• Job 13: Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.... He also shall be my salvation...
• D&C 121: ...peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.

There are others, I'm sure, but that list will do. The point is that mortality is full of trials and tribulation, but also bounteous blessings and joy. We need to experience the pain to appreciate being healed. Reading this today was a good reminder that sometimes the toiling may seem to last indefinitely, but that eventually it will be over and it will be worth it and it will all be okay.

This is my second time reading The Chronicles of Narnia. My cousin Craig introduced them to me on a drive down to Utah from his family's farm in Grassylake, Alberta. He had them as book-on-tape (which is an antiquated term since even "back then" they were technically book-on-CD and of course nowadays they'd just be on some sort of iDevice) and was somehow shocked that I was not familiar with the story. With my mother being who she is, I now find myself wondering how this series slipped under the radar. At any rate, he put on The Last Battle and tried to explain the backstory to me whenever I'd get confused. 

I didn't read through the series, though, until I married Andrew. We read them on our honeymoon while we trained and planed around Europe. I finished the series before we got back to the States. He must've been working on something else before starting because he didn't finish them until we were escaping the heat in our hotel room in Dubai eight months later (he had to take a break from C.S. Lewis in order to complete a semester of school and a study abroad in Jordan, which was a little time consuming).

The day we get ready for Sunday

We slept in a bit this morning but were still able to make it to the planetarium in time to see the Sesame Street show: One World, One Sky. Miriam was a little nervous about going back to the planetarium last night until Andrew assured her there would be no black holes.

"Thank you, Daddy!" she said, giving him a big hug. "Thank you for not taking me to a show with black holes in it!"

It was a pretty fun show. Benjamin and Miriam seemed to enjoy it a lot more than the Magic Treehouse show (which was a tad scary for them, I guess). Benjamin even followed a few cues—he would point at the "sky" when we were asked to point to any shapes we saw in the sky and so forth. We also learned the Chinese word for star: xīng (星).

The show was originally made for the Beijing Planetarium and so Elmo introduced us to a friend from China who showed us that the night sky is the same there as it is here. We also got to visit the moon.

We stopped by the library on our way home for the end-of-summer-reading party. Unfortunately, we arrived just in time to catch the tail end of the party. They were already busy throwing pie at the librarians, which did look like fun, but we spent our time making fairy wings at the ravaged craft table. We were fortunate to snag two of the last three wire frames (though there was still a box of hangers so I suppose we could've made our own) and the girls each chose a pair of nylons to stretch over the frames. Then we eked out enough glue to get the wings a little damp before I flipped them over and rubbed them on the table, which was covered in glitter though all the bottles were empty.

We found two bits of elastic, which we used on Rachel's wings. For Miriam's wings I used some discarded bits of nylons that I found in the garbage can (that was full of fairy-making refuse, not anything gross) to tie her wings on. Both girls were pleased with the result.

Just an ordinary day

I had a nice long list of things to do today but all my plans were thrown awry when Andrew put his puppy dog eyes on and begged me to cut his hair. Suddenly my kitchen was transformed into a cheap barbershop and both my boys ended up with second-rate haircuts (because even with seven years of haircutting experience I'm not too skilled with the clippers). After haircuts I had time to do some laundry and pack a lunch before Benjamin, Miriam, and I headed off to Rachel's school.

They eat lunch at 11:00 in the morning, which seems so early to me! Rachel eats breakfast by 7:30, has lunch by 11:00, and then has to wait for six (or, more conceivably seven) hours to get her dinner. I make up for it by packing a somewhat large snack. 

Rachel loves it when we visit her school and her classroom has an open door policy. Her teacher is so welcoming to parents and younger siblings alike. Not that we go all that often. She's been in school for four weeks now and we've visited twice. Today we only intended to stay for lunch, but her teacher was like, "Why don't you just come on down to the classroom for a while?" So we did. 

The kids get their lunch recess before lunch, which seems so backwards to me (but as long as they get it, I don't mind). After lunch they have some quiet time in the classroom—the lights are off and they're free to read, write, or rest. Some kids put their heads down on their desks (I assume they were resting), while other students quietly busied themselves with paper, pencils, crayons, and books. Miriam pulled a chair up to Rachel's desk and tucked into some earlier readers while Rachel buried her nose in Ninjas in the Night (a Magic Treehouse book, in case you couldn't tell). 

I wandered around with Benjamin helping kids sound out words and oohing and ahhing over various works of art. Everywhere we go, everyone seems smitten with Benjamin—he's quite the charmer.

When rest time was over, I rounded up the little ones and we said goodbye to Rachel and headed home for our own rest time.

Step in time!

Benjamin and Miriam were happily playing together in the living room. They were building towers and knocking them over. Benjamin can build a tower a whole two blocks high (not city blocks, mind you—that might actually be impressive—just two block-blocks). A two-block tower is far less exciting to knock over than an elaborately constructed castle so Benjamin was always drawn to her towers like a magnet. 

This made building frustrating for Miriam. She kept moving her building location—from the floor to the stool to the couch, and so forth. This made knocking the tower over frustrating for Benjamin because he kept having to get to wherever Miriam was building.

At one point she'd just been squawking about him knocking over her tower again and I explained that that was the danger of playing blocks in the living room with the baby on the loose (rather than in her bedroom with the door closed) and told her to move her tower-building to another location. She decided she'd move from the stool to the floor. This left Benjamin standing at the stool when where he really wanted to be was on the other side of the living room with Miriam.

He let go of the stool and, with his arms reaching in front of him, he lifted up his little foot and took his very first step. His face took on a panicked expression—walking is wholly unsafe!—and he quickly dropped onto all fours and made his way across the floor to knock over Miriam's tower again.

Eventually their fights about blocks were ended by the introduction of a new toy: the train Grandpa Frank made. Benjamin happily loaded it with blocks and pushed it around, which left Miriam free to build towers as tall as her heart desired.

My beautiful children

How peppy I feel in the morning is directly tied with how well I was able to sleep the night before. Last night left me feeling relatively unpeppy this morning so we had a bit of a quiet day, which was fine because Benjamin and Miriam weren't feeling too alert either. We're all trying to finish off this cold we have.

We did a lot of reading and a little bit of playing while we waited for Rachel to come home from school. We checked out several Eric Carle books from the library. Miriam requested that we read "The Hungry Little Patter-killer" because that one's her favourite, but we also read The Very Busy Spider, which involves several slovenly farm animals tempting a spider to abandon her work. Benjamin thinks animal noises are hilarious right now and loves when we read stories with a lot of animals for that very reason. He seemed to attempt to mimic a few of the animal sounds, specifically the dog and duck.

Later, when we were having lunch, Miriam tried to quiz him on his animal sounds.

"What does a dog say?" she asked him.

He stared at her without making a peep.

"No!" she said. "That's what a giraffe says, silly boy!"

She's a silly (though clever) girl, herself. She was nattering on and on all day today.

"Did you know that giants can eat people? Yeah, they can. Because you know that in Mickey and the Beanstalk there were giants in that world. But I think they're only in Mickey's World. They're not in this world, so we'll be okay. This world is...Heiss World. And there's lots of things in Heiss World. Like, Mary Pope Osborne is in Heiss World, I think. She lives in New York and that's close to Florida so, know what? I'm going to write her a letter. I'm going to write Mary Pope Osborne a letter right now!"

And she did. And she drew a beautiful picture of a tree with a treehouse and a cardinal.

"Does Mary Pope Osborne know what cardinals are? Does she know that they're red? Does she know what red is? What about blue? Does she know brown? Orange? Purple?"

I assured Miriam that Mary Pope Osborne was a very well-educated woman who knew much about many things, including all the colours of the rainbow.

Today was an early-out day which meant Rachel got home a couple hours earlier than she normally does. Benjamin went down for a nap right before we were due to meet her bus and she and Miriam disappeared into their bedroom moments after walking through the door. They had big plans to make the best bit of fan mail Mary Pope Osborne had ever received.

"Benjamin's sleeping and the girls are playing together so nicely. I think I'm going to take a nap. You can just keep working," I informed Andrew. I had a wicked headache and just wanted to sleep. Sometimes Andrew will clear out of the bedroom for me so that he doesn't disturb me but I was so tired that that wasn't really a risk today.

When I woke up my head felt better but the house was just as quiet as it had been when I had lain down an hour previously. I got up to check on my unusually silent house. Andrew was busily working away on his computer, which is where he usually is during the day since he's been working at home this summer. Rachel was reading on her bed. Miriam had been having all sorts of fun but had fallen asleep in a fort she'd built under the desk (her walls had fallen down by the time I found her), and Benjamin as still snoozing in his crib.

Tell me again how awesome I am

For family night we went to the PTA kickoff at Rachel's new school. We had a hot dog dinner, gave the girls each a quarter so they could buy ice cream for their dessert, and played so hard that our evening got cut short due to blood gushing out of Rachel's mouth. It was (basically) a good evening (even if we did put Rachel to bed with an icepack).

Here are a few quick pictures of Benjamin trying out the big-kid playground for those of you who visit the blog solely to look at pictures of my cute kids.

Benjamin was a huge hit at the playground. Random girls kept picking him up and taking him places while he was crawling around. I met a kid in grade five on the top of the play structure while I was following Benjamin up and he said, "Aw, he's so cute! I can't believe he's playing on this playground!. It's for the biggest kids in the school. He probably won't see it ever again until he's in grade five like me and then he won't even remember that he played here as a baby!"

Benjamin's got a death grip on those chains, don't worry. I had to pry his fingers open one by one to get him to let go:

My own personal mechanic

Yesterday we drove to church and everything was fine and dandy but when we got into our car to come home, things were a lot different...and hotter. In fact, our car was blazing hot, having just sat in the sun for three hours. Andrew turned on the A/C to help cool things down a bit but that only served to fan the flames, so to speak. Hot air was blasting in our faces because the air would only blow if it was on full force.

"Turn it off!" I pleaded with Andrew. "It's so hot!"

"No," he said. "Moving air feels better than stagnant air."

"But it's blowing hot air," I pointed out.

"It'll cool off," he insisted.

Five minutes later, when the air was still as hot as ever is when he finally turned off (and left off) the air and unrolled his window instead. And it was so much better. It was quite obvious our air conditioner had encountered a problem.

Within minutes of arriving home, Andrew had diagnosed the problem, figured out which part to buy, where to get it, and how to install it. He also figured out what's wrong with our clock—it's never had a backlight and we always found this to be irrationally irritating. "Who designed this dashboard?!" we wondered—everything else glowed at night, just not the clock. Sheesh.

And this has been a problem since we first got the van (when the engine of the black car exploded all over the highway). We've been feeling angry about that clock for two and a half years!

Turns out, there's simply a tiny little ($1) lightbulb back there that had burned out.

(Heartfelt apologies to the designer(s) of our dashboard who we may have cursed aloud during late night excursions (like this, "Curse you, dashboard designer!").

This morning Andrew loaded the girls into the van (leaving me and Benjamin sleeping because Benjamin screamed until 5 AM for no apparent reason and didn't sleep soundly after that), dropped Rachel off at school, and then took Miriam to RadioShack (for the lightbulbs) and to AutoZone for the A/C part.

Half an hour and $80 later and we had ourselves a working van!

More of this week

Benjamin's been discovering more and more secrets about our house. All the cupboards are full of things?! We keep food in the fridge?! All these boxes are full of toys?! Why didn't anyone ever tell him this!?

Around our garden

I've been so slow to post things lately so these pictures span about a week.

On July 25, we were happy to find an intact Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Most of the others we've seen fluttering about our garden have been missing their tails.

Gratitude

You know you are a dancer in your heart when you hear there's going to be a "salsa demonstration" at the monthly Relief Society meeting and you're shocked when you walk into the cultural hall (late, of course) and find yourself in the middle of a cooking class.

Seriously. I had to do a double take before I sat down.

It was a good class though. The sister who taught it made guacamole, and four different kinds of salsa. And my visiting teaching companion also brought guacamole and some salsa that she'd made. Magie, my visiting teaching companion, is from Mexico and the other sister is also well qualified to comment on authentic Mexican cuisine (though I don't know her very well so I'm not sure entirely where exactly she's from—that's what you get when you're in primary).

The dancing came after we'd finished sampling the salsas. Magie and her husband did that salsa demonstration and then taught everyone the basic steps of salsa dancing. I've never actually gone salsa dancing, so it was fun to learn. I was glad there was dancing because I had been feeling a little silly while sitting through that cooking class.

And I'm glad I had Benjamin there with me to be my partner. He had fun, too.

It's always fun to get together with these women. We have such a great ward; I love all the women from the still-in-high-school girls to the young mothers in my stage of life who sit on the floor with me to eat chips and salsa because Benjamin couldn't handle life any other way to the grandmas who volunteer to babysit my children so that Andrew and I can go to the temple (a sweet sister came right up to me and told me that she makes an excellent babysitter because her grandchildren live too far away to spoil and that she gets off work at 5:00 so I'd better keep her busy because her husband works out of state and she gets lonely (and she doesn't know this but she was a real answer to prayer because babysitting is something Andrew and I still haven't got figured out yet).

Today (and every day) I'm grateful to be a part of The Relief Society. This month's visiting teaching message is about recognizing our blessings and giving thanks for them. "It is easy for us to become mechanical in our prayers of gratitude, often repeating the same words but without the intent to give our thanks as a gift of the heart to God. We are to 'give thanks...in the Spirit' (D&C 46:32) so we can fell real gratitude for what God has given us," counsels President Eyring.