How the kids reacted

"I think we have a name for the baby," Andrew announced in the car on the way to church yesterday.

"What is it?" the girls chorused.

"It has a Z in it," Andrew said.

"Eliza!" Rachel cheered.

"Elizabeth!" Miriam squealed.

I may or may not have been slowly poisoning them against Andrew's name choice (not that it was difficult since Elizabeth was on the list of names that they had suggested).

"No, it begins with the letter Z," Andrew said.

"Zy'meria!" Rachel exclaimed (there's a girl in her class named Zy'meria).

"Not Zy'meria," I said.

"Then what?" the girls wanted to know.

"Zoë," Andrew said.

"Zoë?" the girls said, trying out the unfamiliar sound in their mouths.

They weren't quite sold on the idea at first. But I think they're coming around to it.

Benjamin, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be a fan of the name at all.

"Can you say Zoë?" I asked him.

"No," he replied.

"Well, that's going to be the baby's name," Andrew told him.

"How 'bout not Zoë," Benjamin said. "How 'bout girl name? How 'bout...Puppy?!"

"Puppy...?" I asked. "That's the best girl's name you can come up with?"

"Es! Puppy!" Benjamin said. "Baby name Puppy!"

In spite of that excellent suggestion, we'll be sticking with Zoë for now.

A name for the baby

I'm about 22 weeks along so it's about time we settled on a name. I was 22 weeks when we picked out a name for Rachel. I was 22 weeks when we picked out a name for Benjamin. We were rather ambitious when we picked out a name for Miriam, settling the matter by 16 weeks.

Naming children is seeming to get harder and harder the more we carry on with it. I liked nothing until the first week of January when we were sitting in fast and testimony meeting and I looked up the name Eliza on my phone. Though I generally do my best to pay attention and make my children do the same, we were in the middle of a really weird testimony about "seeing fifteen murders with my own eyes, watching people drown in their own blood..." and other seriously weird stuff that I was both happy to ignore and happy that my children were also engrossed in other activities.

(Disclaimer: fast and testimony meeting isn't always that weird)

Anyway, I was looking up Eliza and Andrew leaned over and said, "Oh! I like the name Eliza!" And then he saw one of the suggested names by Eliza was Amelia. "Oh! I like Amelia better!" he said.

And I liked both those names, too, but I still wasn't quite sure about them.

The Purple Slide Park

We stopped at the "purple slide park" after preschool for a bit of a pre-lunch romp. The swings here are so low to the ground that even Benjamin could get on by himself (if he'd try). Miriam was boldly jumping off the swing, which was probably alright as long as she doesn't try it on our swing set (because our swings are much, much higher off the ground).

Nesting: They just might fit

The baby and Benjamin won't have to share a room for a while (because the baby will be in our room) but we got him a new (to us) toddler bed so that we could reclaim the crib, anyway. The toddler bed goes where the piano used to be. The piano is now in front of the fireplace because we never use it (the fireplace, not the piano).

I made a few other small changes and made the kids help clean up the toys and we're finally to the point where we can call this room livable. The baby will be in the dark bed (we just have to put the crib rails back on) and Benjamin will be in the light bed. The dresser has a couple of empty drawers that are reserved for baby.

Busy days

I've been a little obsessed with a contest Auntie Em entered lately (and that might be an understatement). She's trying to win a trip to the Bleeding Disorders Symposium in St. Louis this March and she's been clinging—just barely—to first place for the past few days.

This morning when I first checked she was four votes ahead. Right now she's about 70 votes ahead. And I'm still a bit nervous even though there're only an hour until voting ends. Winning this contest would be so wonderful for them and though it's a "free" trip, I have to repeat the adage that nothing in life is free. This contest has been a lot of work! I really hope they win!

Here's the picture in the contest—it's my adorable nephew, Gavin, wearing a shirt that says, "I love someone with hemophilia":

Goals: looking back and looking forward

We did fairly well on our bucket list for 2014, though we didn't manage to complete all of our goals. That's okay because we have 2015 to look forward to!

Cheer and Sleep

Benjamin had a hard time falling asleep last night. I fell asleep on the couch listening to him complain from his bed. He read books. He zoomed cars across his pillow. He kicked his wall. He threw all his stuffed toys and blankets out of his bed. He made annoying sounds with his mouth.

I woke up when he started screaming, "Mom! Mom! Mom!"

Moments before Andrew had been in there to show him that it was actually very, very dark.

"Me see sun! Outside mine windy—a sun! Time a wake up! Me see sun!" he'd been calling out. He hadn't been too happy when Daddy showed him just how very dark it could be...because it was night.

Andrew and I went to bed about half an hour after Benjamin fell asleep. I just couldn't stay awake any longer and with cheer on Saturday mornings and church at 9 AM we don't really have a good day for sleeping in anymore, which is fine. It just means we also don't have a night we can stay up irresponsibly late anymore, either. Our children are really going to miss having free access to the television those mornings.

This morning Benjamin woke up when the alarm went off but seemed to not want to get up, which was fine with me. He's got a croup-like cough again (yes, seriously; it's either again or still—I can't even tell because I swear he's been coughing since...October?) and he and I were up quite a bit between the hours of 2 and 6 AM. I didn't want to get out of bed either so I nudged Andrew until he got out of bed.

Benjamin got up and tried to follow him out of the bedroom.

"Not you," I growled from the bed. "You lie down and go back to sleep."

He ran back to his little mat/nest on the floor and cried, so I pulled him into bed with me and reminded him to close his eyes until they stopped opening and his breathing got heavy. Then I went ahead and fell asleep again, too. We didn't wake up until 9:30.

Andrew took the girls to cheer (only Miriam is in cheer but Rachel really wanted to see what it was like), but as it turned out the basketball teams they were supposed to cheer for didn't show up (either of them) so instead they just practiced for an hour. This was probably for the best because they'll be cheering for a Duke women's basketball game in a couple of weeks but have only had two practices this year. They needed some extra time to nail down their routines.

A twenty-minute project

This morning Andrew brought out a shelf we bought ages ago to put up beside Miriam's bed. Ever since she started reading her bed has been full of books and it kind of needs to stop, but we've been a little slow in getting it put up.

"Today's the day," Andrew announced. "Do you want to find a stud while I get the drill?"

Sure. Yeah. Sure, I'll just find a stud. Because finding studs is easy.

I started hitting the wall with my knuckle, listening closely for any change of sound. Nothing really stood out to me. We've measured walls before so we could guess where the studs were but this time Andrew said, "Why don't we just get a stud finder? How much can they cost—like $20?"

He started getting ready to go to the hardware store and I said, "Why don't you take some of our Christmas money and get a power washer, too? Because I was looking at rental prices and, frankly, we can buy a machine with the same money we'd spend renting one a couple of times."

Andrew agreed this was a good idea. We have so much gross build up on our play set that our children have been refusing to play on it and—let's face it—life is better when they're out playing on it. We also just...we live in the south. Lots of humidity, lots of pollen. Things get yucky, fast; our swing set isn't the only thing that needs a good power washing.

Soon Andrew was home with a power washer.

"We should set it up right now!" he said.

"Right now?" I asked. "I thought we were going to do Miriam's shelf. All the tools are on her bed and..."

Ice ice baby

Yesterday morning the schools were on two-hour delay because of some ice we got on Tuesday that melted on Wednesday but roads were still a little wet on Wednesday night so school was on two-hour delay on Thursday morning.

I understand that ice can be dangerous, but also I think southerners go a little crazy avoiding it because other things are dangerous, too. Icy roads are attributable to approximately 580 people, annually. Accidental gun deaths, meanwhile, claim around 600 people (and that's just accidental deaths), yet 41% of North Carolinians own guns.

It's like this quote by Dean Obeidallah, "That’s the same reason we don’t see many stories about how to reduce the 30 Americans killed each day by gun violence or the three women per day killed by domestic violence. But the media will have on expert after expert discussing how can we stop these scary brown Muslims from killing any more Americans despite the fact you actually have a better chance of being killed by a refrigerator falling on you.... I’m not saying to ignore the dangers posed by Islamic radicals. I’m just saying look out for those refrigerators."

And if that's too hyperbolic of an example, consider that 2876 people are killed in car crashes annually because of rain.

That's right. You're four times as likely to get in a car accident and die due to rain than you are due to icy road conditions. And yet there's no public outcry when school buses are zipping along during a torrential downpour (or worse just after a torrential downpour (because wet roads (and otherwise clear weather) are responsible for over 4000 deaths annually)). I'm just saying...

I understand that ice is dangerous (and I hate winter weather as much as the next person) but talk about straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

Southerners think ice is terrible because the media explodes whenever there's a snowflake in the forecast. Rain, on the other hand (which—did I mention?—causes far more deaths on the road than ice) doesn't make people bat an eye.

Basically, don't accuse me of wishing all school children dead when I mention that I'm baffled that school was cancelled for a day and a half because of a thin glaze of ice. A thin glaze of ice, mind you, that melted before the first day was over (because even at 8:00 that night it was still above freezing).

Also, the very same weather conditions (freezing rain or, as was the case on Tuesday, "light freezing drizzle mist") can happen pretty much anywhere. It's not a southern phenomenon. Trust me—click here to read about this one time we had the exact same weather in Utah. It's a funny story. I promise.

That tangent aside, Thursday morning found me scrambling to iron out the brand new kinks in my schedule so that I could get to the doctor's office.

A couple of stories I forgot to mention

We pulled up to the sidewalk in front of my parents' house on Christmas day, parked, and unbuckled the kids from the car. Benjamin bounded out, took a few running steps toward the lawn, slipped, and fell flat on his face in the snow.

Fortunately he landed in the snow, rather than on the sidewalk (which had been shoveled).

Unfortunately he was not impressed by the cold, fluffy stuff that cushioned his fall. Since he'd just come out of his carseat he didn't have his coat on (just a sweater), so he was all sprawled out, facedown in the snow, without a coat. The snow was at least six inches deep, so he left quite the impression with his little body.

I quickly pulled him up to his feet and Andrew carried that poor screaming child up to the house where everyone had a good laugh because they'd all been watching through the window (or from the porch) and as sad as it was it was also quite hilarious.

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It was quite cold and windy the day we flew into RDU and I don't know if it's related to how bumpy our landing was but, uh, our landing was really bumpy—so bumpy that the overhead bins started popping open.

Our overhead bin didn't pop open, thank goodness, but a guy two rows ahead of us took the landing with his arm held up over his head, trying to keep the door closed to prevent the suitcases from flying out. And that wasn't the only bin to pop, either!

So when the flight attendant got on to give their congratulations-we-landed-and-are-alive speech and got to the part where he said, "Use caution when opening overhead bins as the contents may have shifted..." the whole plane pretty much burst out laughing because obviously the contents had shifted quite a bit!

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And now I think I'm really officially caught up from our trip. Unless, of course, I think of anything else I forgot to write down...