King Benjamin

We read Words of Mormon for family scripture study last night (which was an interesting juxtaposition for me since I recently finished reading Mormon (poor Mormon is so hopeful in Words of Mormon, but by the time he's writing Mormon he seems a little...depressed)). In The Words of Mormon, Mormon explains that he's going to write an abridgment of the large plates of Nephi and introduces us to King Benjamin.

In fact, King Benjamin is mentioned 10 times in the chapter/book and our little Benjamin could hardly contain himself.

The first person to say King Benjamin was Rachel and when she did he gasped and said, "Sasha just said me!"

Soon Andrew took over reading and started pausing after saying "king" and the girls and I would say, "Benjamin!" and Benjamin would giggle. And it was adorable (even though everyone acted like they were being watched).

Pin the what on the what?!

We don't always have our children teach family night lessons (I taught last week); they've simply been enthusiastic about the idea of teaching lessons (that or one-upping each other, I'm not sure which). This week Miriam volunteered; she worked hard to keep her lesson focused on a central theme and came up with multiple activities ands points of discussion all on her own.

A few things I forgot

This morning Miriam greeted me by saying, "Happy Day-after Mother's Day!" which made me remember that when I walked out of the bedroom on Saturday morning I was greeted with a banner on the floor that Rachel had woken up early to make. It was a lovely surprise.

Pre-baptism pictures

Just before dinner yesterday evening we got Rachel all dolled up and tromped outside to take some pictures for her baptism invitations (sometimes when companies offer me free things I just can't say no—and these free cards expire today so we had to get 'em done).

Rachel had just come home from a soccer game and was sweaty and dirty so I told her to take a shower, but then she was dripping wet so I said, "We'll have to blow dry your hair; come with me."

She followed me into the bathroom and I pulled out my blowdryer.

"You have a blowdryer?!" she asked, amazed.

"Yes," I said. "How else did you think I was going to blow dry your hair?"

"I thought you were actually going to blow on it," she said.

Obviously I don't use my blowdryer very often, but I'm sure I use it at least once a year (maybe)...so it's not like it's a complete mystery. After I finished blow drying her hair I took a section of her hair and put it into a twist.

"Will you do a twist on the other side and put them together in the back?" she asked eagerly, so I did. When I was finished with her hair she said, "This is like elf hair! Now I know what I want to be when I grow up—an elf!"

"You want to be...an elf...when you grow up," I repeated.

"I mean for Halloween!" she said. "Not when I grow up. That would be silly."

She's in the middle of reading Two Towers and watched The Fellowship of the Rings over the weekend so she's a little obsessed with elven culture and all things middle-earth. I was just happy to find a hairstyle that she liked that wasn't a ponytail. She asked me to repeat it this morning for church.

Happy Mother's Day!

I looked through my baby book to see if there was a picture of my mom holding me when I was a tiny baby but it seems she was more often behind the camera than in front of it. I did, however, find this picture of my mom posing with my brother David, about a week before I was born. I paired it up with a photo Miriam took of me posing with Benjamin about a week ago:

Benjamin took one look at it and said, "Wow. Those look same!"

Mother's Day Cards

 Miriam, card-maker extraordinare, has been peppering me with cards the entire week and they are therefore scattered all around the house, but here's one that I found. When Miriam handed it to me she said, "Is this good enough for a blog post?" Yes, my dear. It definitely is...

Door decorating

Today was a crazy running-around-nonstop kind of day. Andrew asked me to cut his hair just before I had to leave for the doctor. I was like, "Really? Now?" He volunteered to start it himself (and did start it himself) as a commitment device. So I finished it for him. Then he decided to convince Benjamin to get his hair cut as well.

"Come on, Benjamin!" Andrew said cheerfully. "Let's cut your hair."

"No, sanks," Benjamin replied calmly. "I don't like haircuts. Them is scary. I will cry."

When I came home from the doctor Benjamin had a freshly buzzed head so Andrew was successful in luring him over to the clippers eventually.

Andrew left for work as soon as I got home and Benjamin and I left to pick Miriam up from preschool soon after that. We came home for lunch, we made an attempt to clean up the house a bit, I rode the exercise bike and washed a nearly-brand-new garbage can we're donating to a family at Rachel's school (an apartment complex nearby burned down a week or so ago and we're trying to refurnish apartments for a few families at our school who lived in the complex and lost everything), and then we gathered up materials to decorate doors at the school and headed on our way.

Here's what we did for Rachel's teacher (one of her favourite colours is pink):

36 weeks: We did it! We did it! We did it! Hooray!

I had my last 17P shot today and everyone who saw me treated it as a capstone event of my pregnancy—cheering and so forth, which I felt was apt, though also a little funny. I mean, I know that I'm happy to be finished with those beastly things but I didn't think anyone else would be more excited than I was. I'm a glutton for punishment, though, and asked for a Tdap since I hadn't had one yet and I'm supposed to get one (I guess it's a routine pregnancy thing now).

Permission to go into labour has been granted. It would be best if we waited one more week, which we probably will considering the injections take about a week to "wear off" (thus the reason for the weekly injections).

In fact, when we were Skyping with my family on Sunday everyone took guesses about when the baby will be born.

Benjamin: May 5 (sorry, buddy—you lost)
Rachel: May 10 (Mother's Day)
Miriam: May 12
Grandma: May 15 (Auntie Emily's birthday)
Patrick: May 17
Naanii: May 18
Josie: May 24
Andrew: May 28
Me: May 31 (because if I don't have my babies super early then I have them two days before my due date, which is June 2)

Basically, no one believes this baby will come in June (I certainly hope she joins us sooner than that (I want a milkshake)). It looks like she could come any time in May and make someone feel like a winner.

School lunch and chicks

It's teacher appreciation week at our school so it's been a bit of a crazy busy week. Somehow or another I've managed to be room parent for the past three years so I'm involved in these things whether I want to be or not. Not that I mind appreciating teachers...it's just that some people get way more into appreciating teachers than I do and therefore this week has been a little crazy. I'm happy I'm not the one organizing everything!

Today I took Benjamin and Miriam in for lunch hour so I could help supervise the lunch room (so that the teachers could go to the lunch hosted by the PTA). They were super excited to go, especially Miriam who is desperately longing to go to kindergarten. She got dressed in her Duke shirt and then dug out Benjamin's Duke shirt as well, so they were quite matchy-matchy.

Volunteering at the school is rather nice now that we've been here for a couple of years because we know kids in a lot more classes and they were all excited to see us (kids from Rachel's class last year's who were divided into all the classes this year as well as kids from church) and it was fun to see them. I wasn't sure if I would see Rachel because she couldn't remember when her lunch hour was when I asked her so I took a stab in the dark and signed up one of the three hours—but it was the hour she had lunch so we lucked out.

And she was wearing her Duke shirt, too!

When she saw her little brother and sister were matching her she rolled her eyes and said, "Seriously?"

That pesky little Miriam, always trying to coordinate everyone's outfits! Rachel was a little embarrassed to be dressed exactly the same as her siblings, but she joined them at the special tables for students with "company," along with a friend, and they had a fun little lunch together.

A family dinner

When we moved out here I never imagined that we'd ever host an informal family gathering. I knew we'd have visitors, certainly, but casual family dinners? I thought those were a thing of the past.

But Andrew has a cousin who lives in Raleigh and we've had them over three times now...which really isn't a great track record considering we've lived here three years. But still.

About five months ago, Andrew's cousin Scott—or, rather, his wife, Angel—had a baby boy and we had never met him so I messaged Angel to see if we could get together for dinner sometime. She messaged back to say that would be great and that Scott's parents (Andrew's aunt and uncle) were going to be in town in May. She originally suggested May 24th but I said I was going to be 39 weeks pregnant then and didn't know that I would up to hosting a dinner, so she suggested May 3rd instead.

It's been on our calendar for quite a long time. And then Grandma asked if she could come that very same weekend, so it all worked out perfectly (and not only because Grandma got to see her brother, but also because she cooked (which meant I didn't have to))!

Angel commiserated with me about gestational diabetes because she had it, too.