Out of gas

On Wednesday night we had our ward Halloween party, which started at 6:30. I knew we'd be crunched for time since we had to eat dinner and get all costumed up, especially since Rachel's had a substitute bus driver this past week—which means her bus has been running about half an hour behind schedule. She didn't walk off that bus until 4:30 in the afternoon and—did I mention that's awesome because that used to be her regular time but there was some kid on her route who gets car sick so they reversed the route and now she is supposed to get dropped off at around 4:00.

I think I did a happy dance when I got that letter from the transportation department.

Anyway...

She wanted to play with the neighbours when she got home, so I told her that she was welcome to...until Daddy got home because then it was going to be time for dinner. I expected him home on time because we had this party to get to. But he was late.

I watched the minutes creep by on the clock.

5:05...

5:10...

5:15...

5:20...

5:25...

5:30...

Where was he?! He's not exactly the best at communicating when he's going to be late (eek!).

Pre-Halloweening

Halloween isn't even until tomorrow and we're already laden with candy and have gone out in our costumes three times!

The first time out in our costumes was Saturday night. We went—rather late—to our neighbourhood Halloween party. The flyer said it would go until 8 PM so we went out to dinner with a couple in our ward (who are aching for grandchildren and felt sorry for me being left alone with sick kids all weekend) before donning our costumes and heading over to the clubhouse. But when we got there we found the party was over. Everyone was cleaning up and heading home. And it was only seven o'clock!

No rest for the weary

I can't wait for Andrew to come back so I can get a good night's sleep. Let me tell you about Friday night:

I was up with Benjamin until 11:00.

I cleaned the kitchen and chatted with Andrew before going to bed around midnight, leaving my closet light and the kitchen light on because I'm a scaredy cat.

At around 12:30 AM I wake up because the motion sensor light in our backyard went off. That always, always creeps me out. I chatted to Andrew again (because he was still awake on the other side of the country, trying to finish up a paper) who tried to convince me it was just a deer. Our house backs onto the woods so that's not out of the realm of possibility and in fact is the logical conclusion. But...I'm a scaredy cat. Did I mention that?

I went back to bed around 1:00 AM.

Benjamin woke up screaming at 1:30 AM. I took him into bed with me and nursed him back to sleep. He's sick and teething and miserable but we finally manage to fall asleep.

Boo from Benjamin

Since today is Miriam's birthday it only makes sense that I should blog about Benjamin, right? Of course right. After all it's just nine days before he's seventeen months old (what?! (but only 15 months, adjusted)).

He's still not much of a talker, though we're really working on remedying this. His most consistent word is still "MOM!" which he yells whenever he needs me, if he thinks to talk at all (otherwise he just yells to be loud/noticed).

Since he doesn't seem to be interested in talking, we've been working on signing. The girls have been happily (re-)learning signs in order to help Benjamin communicate. He can now sign his own personal version of dog, bird, all done, more, potty, and fan. There are probably a few others I'm forgetting.

Mostly signing is going great except that the girls are constantly mixing up the signs for 'mother' and 'pig.' I'm not so sure how I feel about that.

Oh, 'shower' is another sign Benjamin knows. Benjamin lives for the shower. He can open the door to the shower by himself and will escape there any chance he gets. He's even asked for "wa-wa" a couple of times after climbing in the shower.



This morning I asked him if he wanted to shower with me and he could hardly contain his excitement. He gasped and looked up at me with bright eyes and a big smile before running into the bathroom and hopping into the shower (fully clothed). He was upset when I pulled him back out but calmed down when I told him that he just had to take off his clothes. He lacks the dexterity to do so (unless you count socks...and diapers) but pulled at his clothes with all his might.

During story time tonight we caught a video of Benjamin saying 'boo!' All three of my kids have enjoyed this Halloween Countdown book. I don't know what we'll do if it ever falls apart!

Clarification

Miriam's speeding through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. In Lesson 13, the book introduced the concept of "stories," however, the story that was part of the lesson was three words long: see me eat. Miriam was not impressed.

"That's not even a story!" she pouted.

We're on Lesson 45 now and our stories are a lot more complicated and story-like. Yesterday we did Lesson 41 and the story we read went like this:

A fish ate a rock. The fish said, "I ate a rock." A cow ate the fish. The cow said, "I ate a fish. And now I feel sick."

This prompted a rather lengthy discussion at the dinner table where many unsolvable questions were posed, not the least of which were why a fish would eat a rock and why a cow would eat a fish.*

While Rachel and I were waiting for the bus this morning (for a half hour) she said, "Oh, Mom, I finished writing that story we were talking about at dinner last night. I just wanted to kind of make the story make sense—you know, clarify it—because it was kind of a silly story. It took like a page and a half to make it good. It's in my journal if you want to read it."

Ther was onese a fish who ate a rock. A cow ate the fish who ate the rock. The cow ate a hors who ate the fish who ate the rock. The cow ate a bee and a fla. The bee ate the fla. The cow ate a pig and a wig. The pig ate the wig. The wow cow ate a bee and a tree! I do know why the cow ate the fish. Do you? The bee ate the tree. The cow ate a cat and a dog. The dog ate the cat. A persan ate the big fat cow. 

The end.

Clarification. Nailed it.

* perhaps the fish was a parrot fish, who eats rocks and poops sand. And perhaps the cow in the story was among the 15% of cows this guy claims eat ground up fish.

Working on costumes

As I mentioned in Miriam's birthday post, we spent all of yesterday afternoon working on Halloween costumes. Miriam's dressing up as Queen Lucy of Narnia. Benjamin's dressing up as a penguin.

Miriam was trying to explain to him about waddling but he just wasn't getting it so she stole his hat so she could demonstrate this skill. He still didn't get it. I told her that toddling is similar enough to waddling that Benjamin would make a fine penguin.

Miriam's (almost) four!

Due to extenuating circumstances we celebrated Miriam's birthday a day early, which meant that I spent the entire day scrambling to get things ready. Miriam and I started on the cake right after breakfast, while Benjamin sat on his chair and watched.

Grandma Sharon

We were sitting in sacrament meeting this morning when Andrew passed me his phone. It was a message from his dad, sent just after we'd finished the sacrament (and received while Andrew was in the hall helping Rachel with her nose): "Sharon has been hospitalized with a serious case of septic shock and will likely die in the next few hours, if not sooner. We will keep you all posted. She was fine up until Thursday. Hospitalized late Friday night and will die today, They are only keeping her alive for Judy to arrive at 1:00."

At the beginning of the month Grandma Sharon had called the family together to tell them she'd been diagnosed with lung cancer, but that the tumour was thought to be contained, and that she'd be having surgery to have it removed. She asked all the Heiss boys to give her a blessing, and they did so. She went through with the surgery and it went wonderfully. Doctors were able to remove the entire tumour and after a few tests concluded that she would have no need of any follow-up therapy (no chemo, no radiation). It was a breeze, all things considered.

She came home on October 11th and spent the next little while recovering. This weekend, I guess, she was feeling well enough to head out to Park City, where she and Grandpa Frank often go to get away from it all, for a post-operation vacation. But Friday night she took a turn for the worse and by last night her bodily systems were shutting down one by one.

Her daughter lives in Louisiana, and had only just gone home after flying out to Utah for the lung cancer operation. We were all feeling so blessed that she'd had such an easy surgery and recovery. And then...this. It was quite the surprise.

I was thinking about her while the choir was singing More Holiness Give Me. I think Sharon embodied this song well. She spent her life striving for more. At seventy-two years of age, she was one of the busiest people I knew!

Frank and Sharon served a mission in Lebanon about ten years ago; they left for their second mission to Germany in 2006 and were terribly disappointed to miss the birth of their first great-grandchild but charmed us with stories of their travels through the region they were over (they were in charge of training Senior Missionary Couples serving in Albania, Croatia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—in fact, they became so well-known in the region that we could hardly attend church anywhere without people asking us if we knew them; even our pediatrician in Egypt (who was a muslim-partner with the church's neonatal resuscitation program) knew who they were). They came home in May of 2008 and we met them at the airport.

Even after traveling for a full day, Sharon was so excited to see her family:

Rachel's giving a talk today

What's really embarrassing is that I'm in charge of scheduling talks for primary as well as sending out reminders and I completely forgot to do so for this week until last night at 11:30 so this morning I was scrambling with my own child to write a talk for primary today. Rachel's topic was how sharing your testimony can strengthen it. This is what we came up with:

In a talk in general conference, President Cecil O. Samuelson said, “teaching someone else what we know [about the gospel] strengthens our own testimony as we build that of another.” If you have two cookies and you share one of the cookies you will only have one cookie left, but if you share the recipe for the cookies then everyone can have more cookies. Like sharing a recipe, sharing your testimony doesn’t make your testimony smaller. It makes it get bigger!
 President Samuelson explained that we gain a testimony when we listen, read, study, or ponder about the gospel and then ask if it is true. When we try to share the gospel by bearing our testimony that makes us think about the gospel and what it means to us, which can help strengthen our testimony.
 In Doctrine & Covenants 1:20–21, it says, “that every man might speak in the name of God the Lord, even the Savior of the world; that faith might increase on the earth.”
 I hope that we can have the courage and faith it takes to share the recipe of the gospel—our testimonies—with others so that faith can increase on the earth.
 I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

President Samuelson's talk can be found here. D&C 1:20–21 is here. And we also thought about using D&C 50:22 (but thought D&C 1 went along with our cookie analogy a little better).

Let this be a lesson to me to be better about sending out reminders earlier in the week.

Paint, Popcorn, Mantises, and other things

Rachel brought home some beautiful pieces of artwork this week. If there's one thing I'm loving about this school year (and I'm not loving one thing about this school year—I'm loving many things) it's that the flow of papers coming home has slowed to a trickle. It's glorious. I mean, we're still drowning in paper over here just not anything like we were before. Those pieces of artwork, however, inspired Miriam to paint.

I let her nag me about it for a couple of days before getting everything set up for her. That way she felt like it was really special, right? Painting is just so messy that I tend to put it off until my children act like I'm ruining their childhood. And perhaps I am.

Miriam and Benjamin had such fun painting together...