This is Halloween

"You're going to be here in the morning, right?" I asked Andrew last night. "Because I can get the kids ready for school and out the door on a regular day just fine, but I'm not sure I can do Halloween on my own."

My children have never worn their Halloween costumes to school before. Their old school(s) did a "Mathquerade" event every year...after school...and well before Halloween. 

While getting my children into costumes before school seemed like a hassle I'd prefer to not to experience, I was happy that this year we were invited to a grand total of zero costume parties before Halloween: no trunk-or-treat or ward party, no school parties, and the one Halloween party didn't require costumes (score). And why did that make me so happy?

Because...who has two thumbs and finished making Halloween costumes last night?

THIS GIRL!

Truthfully, the older girls put their costumes together pretty much on their own (just a little bit of guidance on my part), Zoë landed a lovely hand-me-down costume, and Alexander wore a little monster sleeper, so it was mostly just Benjamin's costume I had to worry about.

Andrew assured me that he'd be around in the morning to help with the kids—and thank goodness for that because little miss Zoë stumbled out of her room feeling cranky and...never quite got over that.

Here she is having some morning snuggles with the A-Team (Alexander and Andrew):

Eating skillz

As pleasant as Alexander has been the past few weeks, let the record show that he can also lose his patience at times. For example, when it comes time to eat Alexander is pretty sure he should get to eat right away and can get a lusty cry going if you (read: I) don't feed him right away.

We tried doing some tummy time the other day, which is always a little bit hard for Alexander. He thinks that if something is touching his face he should probably eat it.

"Hello, favourite blanket. Are you food?"

Reading

Several weeks ago Benjamin came home with a printing worksheet (as he does every Monday) and one of the words he was supposed to write was "tat."

Tat?

Like what exactly?

Tit for tat? Rat-a-tat-tat? That's a sweet tat?

They seriously couldn't come up with any other word for him to practice? Like...that?

Turns out tat wasn't so bad because just a couple weeks ago one of the words he had to write out was "hag."

Seriously?

Miriam's Birthday

Miriam's birthday celebrations began on Friday, October 13, when we joined her for a special birthday lunch at school. Zoë and I picked up Benjamin and then found Miriam in the cafeteria. Just as we were cleaning up, Rachel's class came in for lunch so we got to see her for a couple of minutes as well. (Rachel is wearing that yellow badge because she likes to go in to volunteer in the special education classes (that's her pass); I think it's so cool that the school encourages kids to volunteer with their peers).

Here are my four out-of-the-wombies together:

Thirteen

On Friday evening Andrew was invited to an intimate professional dinner of sorts and, as his wife, I was invited to attend as well. This caused somewhat of a dilemma for us because, well, we have a two-week old baby. It's not entirely professional to show up at a professional dinner with a baby in tow but I wasn't about to leave my two-week-old with a sitter (even if the sitters were my mom, sister, and niece), so it was either (a) the baby comes with us, or (b) Andrew goes alone, which also presented an awkward problem since we knew everyone else was bringing a plus one.

Andrew decided he would somehow diplomatically ask about bringing the baby along without jeopardizing his professionalism. Because you can totally do that in Happy Valley.

Luckily we know one of the other couples at the dinner fairly well. They said to of course bring the baby, and, just to make sure we felt entirely comfortable, mentioned they'd be bringing their baby along, too. Their baby is 13 months old.

So, we got to dinner (at Bombay House) and found our company. The couple we know was there with their baby, and another couple was already there as well. The unknown couple looked up at us.

"Uhhh...that baby looks significantly younger than thirteen months old," said the man.

"That baby looks significantly younger than thirteen weeks old," said the woman.

"This is Alexander," said Andrew. "He is thirteen days old."

"Well, no wonder you wanted to bring him with you!" said the woman to me. "And congratulations on getting out of the house. I can't believe you came...thirteen days..."

"Truthfully," I replied, "Getting out of the house—and leaving our four other kids home with a sitter—is probably more relaxing than it would have been to send Andrew to dinner and stay home with all five kids by myself."

Our friends have only the one baby so far, but the other two couples also had five children so they totally got it.

Alexander at two weeks

Now that Alexander is two weeks old, I have some statistics for you. He just had his two-week check up on Friday and is doing great! He's very nearly 7 lbs. (he was 6 lbs. 15.5 oz) and is already 19.7 inches long (which seems like he's grown a ton but when they measured him at his two-day mark he was already 19 inches long, which makes me think that he wasn't quite "stretched" right at birth because what kind of baby grows a full inch in just a couple of days?!). The doctor was impressed that he has already surpassed his birth weight.

Though he's still pretty skinny (just look at all that skin he has to grow into)...

Postpartum walking

Just a few days before Alexander was born we went on a walk to the train tracks and for the very first time (that we had all the kids with us (Andrew, Zoë, and I walked along beside one while the other kids were in Grover)), a train came by. You guys, these tracks are pretty active. We can feel (and hear) trains rumbling by all day (and night) long (I joke that if there's ever an earthquake we won't even know because we'll just figure it's another train), so you'd figure that we'd have the pleasure of watching the trains go by more often than we have.

At least, I've figured it.

We've walked to the train tracks several times a week the whole time we've lived here. I've taken the kids to the little park by the tracks and we've camped out with picnics and outside activities just waiting for a train to come by. One little boy in particular (ahem, Benjamin) has been hoping to see a watch a train go by with all of his little boy heart. Yet every day he remained disappointed.

He was over the moon when we walked past the tracks at just the right moment. He stood at the fence and jumped for joy the whole time the train was passing. It didn't take long—it was just an engine and a caboose, the shortest train in history—but it was a rather thrilling moment for him.

After the train passed, he ran around and gave everyone a big hug.

"He waved at me! The engineer waved at me!" he told everybody.

Well, yesterday, I took the kids for a walk to the train tracks again and this time they saw an honest-to-goodness train—complete with 32 cars—which was way more exciting than the first train we managed to spot.

Laundry days, laundry nights (where would I be without my husband)

I'm currently in the middle of doing the laundry. 

But let's be honest: it's not very often that I'm not in the middle of doing the laundry. It's like I started doing laundry once, years and years ago, and have just...never stopped. So in that regard, I suppose doing the laundry is akin to Pringle's potato chips. But only in that regard, really.

Anyway, last week when I was, again, in the middle of doing the laundry, Alexander accompanied me into the laundry room because sometimes he needs to hide away from his older siblings (and be directly in Momma's eyesight). Besides, who doesn't love a baby in a laundry basket?

Achoo

I feel like this month has been a bit of a whirlwind of activity. So we figured we may as well bless Alexander on the same day Miriam gets baptized to both complicate and simplify our lives. It complicates things because it's one more thing to plan for (the fact that this is stressing me out is probably a sign that I need to step back and stop worrying about details) but it simplifies things because it consolidates the craziness into one day rather than two. 

And if there's anything I need in my life it's one less crazy day!

So once this was decided upon and the bishop's blessing was given (at Miriam's baptismal interview), I went ahead and made an invitation to send out to the family. 

I may have been in a slightly irreverent mood (Alexander and I were skipping church anyway because we're rebels (oh, and he was, like, a week old)) and came up with this while everyone was at sacrament meeting (planning, naively, to take a glorious two-hour nap afterwards...but instead they sent Zoë home to hang out with me because she had a cold and was too drippy to attend nursery, so no nap for me). Anyway, I think his invitation is slightly hilarious.

Miriam's baptism interview

There are several instances where a Mormon will meet with their bishop (or branch president or other ecclesiastical leader) and have an interview wherein they answer a series of questions. For example, there's tithing settlement (which occurs annually), temple recommend interviews (biennially), and baptism interviews (usually once, sometimes more, a lifetime).

The questions are more or less set (the baptismal interview questions, for example, are published in "Preach My Gospel") so the interviews aren't...surprising. Our family has a bit of a running joke whenever anyone meets with the bishop for an interview. We'll remind them that the answers are yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes, and yes. Whether or not our yeses and nos align with actual questions is irrelevant; we still think we're funny.

Miriam met with the bishop for her baptismal interview this past Sunday.

At lunch we were joking around with her, asking her whether she had "passed" and whether our little cheat sheet (Y, Y, Y, N, Y, N, Y, Y) had helped her.

"Actually, no!" she said, not quite catching on that we were all kidding. "There weren't any questions like that at all! It was more like...incomplete sentences."

"The bishop gave you a fill-in-the-blank interview?!" Rachel gasped. "That's rough. My interview was yes/no format."