Just so lucky

I've been going through Rachel's schoolwork and admiring how nicely she's growing up. Her handwriting has matured so much this year, as has her sense of the world around her. I'm just so lucky to have her as my daughter! 

Here is her essay about why she's "just so lucky":

I am just so lucky because I have 3 siblings to play with and help take care of, and a mom and dad to take care of me and my 3 younger siblings. I am also lucky because my dad works to make money, and that my mom can stay at home and help us with homework and edit Dad's papers, and take care of baby Zoë so Zoë doesn't have to go to day care. I am also so lucky that my dad cooks dinner, so our family can have enough food to eat. I am also lucky that my parents were sealed in the temple so that our family can be together forever. I am also lucky that I could be baptized and given the gift of the Holy Ghost. I am lucky that I have friends and a house to live in and an awesome teacher and a good president right now. (If Donal Trump becomes president, I am going to be so mad!) I am lucky we live in a free country. I am just so lucky!

100/3

As it turns out, our new mass cane plant wasn't quite as "expensive" as I thought because Andrew surprised me by bringing home not one but three plants from Yulya (thanks, by the way). It can share its burden of guilt with its comrades: a rubber tree (ficus elastica) and some sort of unknown succulent that we've since classified as an Epiphyllum anguliger (also known as: fishbone cactus, epiphyllum ric rac, moon cactus, or queen of the night).

Our house is suddenly feeling quite jungly, having gone from five houseplants to eleven in just a couple of weeks, but I'm excited to try my hand at keeping them alive. I still have to decide where I'm going to put them all to keep them out of the reach of babies (already we have had a few fistfuls of dirt joyously flung on the floor), but hopefully they'll all find suitable homes soon enough. 

Good morning!

Let me preface this story by saying that Zoë, a terrible sleeper under the best of conditions, is currently in the process of cutting her 1-year molars. So naturally she screamed until 2 am. She has a bit of flair for the dramatic. Staying awake happily until 2 o'clock in the morning is one thing. It's tiring for me, sure, but, like, whatever. Screaming until 2 o'clock in the morning is a horse of a different colour. It's tiring and nerve frazzling, and just...yeah.

So Zoë and I were still sleeping at 10 o'clock this morning. Not that we'd slept straight through from 2 am to 10 am (ha! puh-leeze!), just that we were still asleep at 10 am after the last time we'd gotten up because we were both so exhausted from all the screaming that happened in the night that getting out of bed at 7:00 or even 7:30 seemed impossible. So we just didn't get out of bed.

Andrew put the girls on their bus, as he's been doing every day this year because—I'm not even kidding—this baby will be my undoing (I can feel my sanity peeling away). He fell asleep on the couch accidentally (when he should have been leaving for school) but that meant he was able to intercept Benjamin when he got up. So Benjamin was given breakfast and a show, which meant he had no reason to come and pounce on me.

So Zoë and I were still in bed when my phone started buzzing (at half past 10) with rapidly incoming texts.

*Buzz*

*Buzz*

*Buzz*

*Buzz*

*Buzz*

I grogily fumbled for my phone. The last text Andrew had sent was still lingering on the screen. "Good morning!" it said.

"Holy cow! We really slept in!" I thought, noting the time stamp of his message. Then I unlocked my phone to look the other messages and, suddenly wide awake, thought, "Holy cow! What happened?!"

The other four messages were pictures of Andrew's adventurous morning. He'd gone to pick up a mass cane plant from a friend who recently graduated and "backed up incorrectly" when he was leaving, completely misjudging where the driveway ended and the ditch began.

Sax-o-what?

"On the bus," the girls began their story, "Florencio kept saying the s-word over and over again."

"But not the one that rhymes with spit," Miriam clarified.

I suppose Andrew and I looked a little mystified because she added, "The one The Doctor calls the TARDIS."

"Oh!" I laughed. "Sexy?"

"Is that a swear word?" Rachel asked. "Or just a bad word?"

"Well, it's not a swear word. It's not even necessarily a bad word, but it can be an inappropriate word."

"Like, Florencio was saying sexy instead of Lexi," Miriam said.

"That would definitely be an inappropriate use of the word," I said. "It's a bit more of a grown up word, so really I don't think elementary students have a reason to say it at all."

"Except, like, sex is another word for gender," Rachel said.

"Yes," I said. "But that's different from the word sexy."

"And sex!" Miriam said. "Like the nickname for sexophone! Instead of saying sexophone you can just say "He plays the sex!'"

Knock, knock. Who's there? Boo. Boo who?

This morning was my second week getting all the children off to church by myself. I'm sure that as it becomes the norm I'll stop writing about it every week. But I'll go ahead and indulge myself for the second week in a row because this morning all the kids cried and I wrote about it on facebook and now everyone wants to know why all the kids cried. And by everyone I mean all two of their grandmothers...so probably 50% of my readership.



Benjamin was probably the first to cry, but he cries over everything so I expect him to cry over everything. He cried (for the first time) when I told him to get out of my bed because he was being too wild. He likes to snuggle in bed with me and Zoë in the morning, but snuggling only lasts for three seconds or so before he starts body slamming us. And then I usually say something like, "Get out of my bed!" and then he says something like, "I'm just snuggling!" and bursts into tears.

The next person to cry was Rachel.

"Is it fast Sunday?" she asked.

"It is," I said and then, seemingly out of nowhere, she erupted at me with all this emotion.

See, Benjamin got a box of "birthday cereal," the kind of cereal that's more fit for dessert than for breakfast and which we only buy for birthdays not everyday use. This year he got a box of Star-Wars-themed Lucky Charms (or something like that; it has cereal and marshmallows). He opened it on Saturday morning when she was having breakfast at a friend's house instead of at home, ergo she missed feasting on the usually-verboten cereal.

"Now I'll never get any of it!" she wailed at the end of her rant.

Book of Mormon Stories (for the laaaadies)

At the behest of my sweet son, I'm going to be brave and talk about gender-inclusivity in church songs once again. I suppose he didn't ask me to write a blog post, per se, but on the way to church we were singing Book of Mormon Stories and he requested "a verse about Mary!"

"There's no verse about Mary," I informed him.

And then I thought, "There's no verse about any woman. That's...lame."

So when I came home from church I started composing a few verses about women in the Book of Mormon. Due to historical incident (ie. men controlled the narrative), there aren't many named women in the Book of Mormon, but here are a few verses that I came up with (I admit they could still use some tweaking):

Benjamin's four!

Because Andrew is amazing he got up this morning (with Benjamin, who was so excited to be four he had to tell the world bright and early) and assembled four pans of enchiladas (one for our family and three for others) so all I had to do was stick them in the oven this afternoon (in addition to decorating a cake for Benjamin, which I'd baked the night before). With my morning much less cluttered, I decided to take Benjamin to the Museum of Life and Science, because that's one of his favourite places to go.

He was very interested in building today, so we spent quite a bit of time at the KEVA planks:

Splash pad!

After school we did a few chores before getting ready to head to the pool. Unfortunately, the pool was in the process of being closed down just as we arrived (a fecal matter incident) so we left feeling rather dry and dejected, so I surprised the kids with a visit to our local splash pad instead of heading home. They had a great time!

An interview with Benjamin

My friends have been putting this little interview up on Facebook. Filling out things like this on Facebook is totally not my jam, but I started asking Benjamin the questions and he started answering them so I figured I would put them down here...

What's your name? Ben Thomas
How old are you? Uh, three.
When is your birthday? I can't remember it. Soon. I think when Mimi and Rachel come home.
How old is Daddy? I don't know.
How old is Mommy? I don't know.
What's your favourite colour? Rainbow
What's your favourite food? Tortillas
Who's your best friend? Luke
What's your favourite show? Octonauts
What's your favourite movie? Star Wars
What's your favourite song? Babies are in Love with Carrots* 
What's your favourite animal? Giraffes
What are you scared of? Darkness
What makes you happy? Going on a boat
What makes you sad? Babies attacking me
What do you want to be when you grow up? A long neck**
Where's your favourite place to go? Museum of Life and Science and the pool
What's your favourite thing to play with? LEGO stuff
What's your favourite job to do? Clearing the table off
What's your least favourite job? Cleaning my room

* Really it's Donkeys Are in Love with Carrots but he prefers to sing about babies rather than donkeys for whatever reason.
** Yes, like the dinosaur.

More on today

This morning Benjamin decided to make a birthday card for Rachel. It's birthday season at our house right now so you can pretty much choose anyone to make a card for and it would be appropriate. He was so proud of getting all those letters in there!