Alexander at 6 months

Alexander had his six month well-child check yesterday, which went well, and he got his vaccinations which he did not take well (he spent all night feverish and fussy).

He weighed in at a walloping 17 lbs. and 1 ounce and was 26.14 inches long, my biggest baby at six months old (and my smallest (full-term) baby at birth)!

Here are the stats for the other kids at six months (there is no blog post for Zoë because her six-month check was the day after we returned from our visit to Utah for my Grandma Layton's funeral and I just never got to blogging about taking her to the doctor, but I did look up her paperwork (so filing cabinets aren't completely defunct (though I guess I could have just as easily looked up her stats online because Duke's online system is fantastic like that, but I didn't think of that because our clinic here isn't so fancy))):

Alexander: 17 lbs. 1 ounce and 26.14 inches
Zoë: 16 lbs. 13.8 ounces and 26.18 inches
Benjamin: 14 lbs. 13 ounces and 24 inches
Miriam: 16 lbs. even (more or less) and 25 inches
Rachel: 16 lbs. 8 ounces and 27.5 inches

He is certainly growing well (the rolls on his thighs have rolls!) though if he's anything like my other children his growth will start tapering off right about now. And that's fine by me because he's so heavy!

At six months, Alexander is...

Benjamin's kindergarten performance and time with cousin James

Two weeks ago* Benjamin's kindergarten class had their end-of-the-year performance.



It seems odd to me to have all the end-of-year activities so early: the musical and Benjamin's performance in March and the choir concerts the beginning of April. I wondered why for about two seconds before I realized that it's due to end-of-year testing, which has become almost a sacred, silent ritual in elementary schools. As if stressing children out by enforcing strict silence and making them feel like their little lives depend on doing well is healthy for them.

I mean, I understand the reasoning behind testing. It's nice to know the answer to that ever burning question: is our children learning? It's nice to collect data to form policy. It's nice to know who is falling through the cracks and who is getting it. It's nice to try to figure out why.

But stop stressing the children out about it. Stop stressing the teachers out about it.

Just collect your data and move on, without linking scores to wages or other ridiculous stuff like that.

That way we can stop saying "end of year" in March. Because that's just crazy talk.

Anyway...

Gamelan Bintang Wahyu

We did it—baby and I—we survived a full semester of gamelan! It certainly wouldn't have been possible without a lot of outside support, mostly child-tenders: Josie and my mom who took turns pacing the halls of the HFAC with Alexander during rehearsals, Grandma and Grandpa for helping with the kids at home, and Andrew, of course, for making his schedule work with mine and getting dinner on the table and the kids into bed every Thursday and Friday, not to mention my kids being on their best behaviour both when they accompanied me to class and when they were left at home.

At lot goes in to getting Mom off to school, so thinking about ever going to graduate school (a dream that's been on the back burner for the last decade or so) has my head spinning. This was just a one credit class and...oh, boy! It was enough!

(Of course, it's a fine arts class, so that one credit hour translated into four hours of rehearsal every week. Silly fine arts credits. I honestly don't understand why they are the way they...)

Tonight we performed at BYU's Evening of Percussion, which was so fun! We had a dress rehearsal in the afternoon so it made for a bit of a long day, but I went back home with my mom for dinner and to let Alexander nap so that broke the day up a bit. The poor little guy had had enough after dress rehearsal and couldn't believe we were going back to campus for more. He screamed for Auntie Josie the entire time we were performing (which was quite a while because Odradek alone was more than twenty minutes long). I could hear his cries echoing through the halls the minute we left the stage area so I sprinted towards them until I found that little stressed-out pair (Alexander because "where's Mom?!?!" and Josie because Alexander wouldn't stop crying). He was quite happy to see me. 

Anyway, Andrew took some pictures from the audience (he brought Rachel, Miriam, and Benjamin to watch; Zoë stayed home with Grandma and Grandpa). Oddly enough, he sat right in front of my dad's cousin Jolene—she was there to watch her son Jordan play with the Panoramic Steel group. She recognized our kids and said hello to them by name, which threw them off because they certainly didn't recognize her (when's the last time we had a Duggar reunion?—let's do one this summer)!

Anyway, I am in the very back in the middle (behind those tall guys in the middle) and my mom is on the right sitting on the risers...

Morning has broken, like the first morning...

It was a morning not unlike any other morning—full of teasing and screaming and fighting and yelling. And maybe the kids were doing what they were supposed to be doing...but maybe they weren't.

I don't know. I was upstairs sitting on the couch, pumping.

Tangent time: To be honest, I was ready to start weaning off pumping. I mean, Alexander is six months old (or will be on Saturday) so I've been pumping for about half a year now. I've donated 4232.5 fluid ounces (33 gallons (Rachel is doing a unit on measurement so she should know that's 132.25 quarts, 264.5 pints)) of milk! It can be a bit of a burden, but it's a labour of love. Still, it's simply more of a challenge to do with a (fussy) baby on the cusp of mobility than with a sleepy newborn so I'd been thinking of retiring the pumps. But then my friend Joy sent me a message about her sister, who was desperately trying to get her baby to eat. She hadn't been able to nurse him and he'd been failing to thrive on formula (plummeting off his growth chart). He's doing better on breastmilk but he's not quite out of the woods yet.

So he's my new motivation for sitting on the couch pumping...while my children run amok downstairs in the mornings. It's fine. Usually. I mean, they're generally good children.

This particular morning, however, they were overly good. Or, at least, one of them was.

Benjamin had come upstairs and was being all crazy so I asked him to go downstairs to work on his chore: putting away the clean dishes. He actually complied and thundered down the stairs to get to work.

Everything was fine until all three of his sisters started screaming at him at once.

"Benjamin! Benjamin! Benjamin!" his older sisters chorused (Benjamin is a very common refrain at our house) while his younger sister screeched unintelligibly at him.

"You guys!" I hollered from the couch before...

*SMASH*

*clatter*

*howling*

Yoo-hoo unto Jesus!

The most recent hymnal for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was published in 1985 (a pretty easy year for me to remember). The hymnbook prior to that was published in 1948.

Quite a few changes happened between those two publications, but my favourite is the change to How Firm a Foundation, hymn #66 in the brown 1948 edition:

How firm a foundation, ye Saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in his excellent word!
What more can he say than to you he hath said,
You who unto Jesus, you who unto Jesus,
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled?

Feeling Preachy

As he would put it, Benjamin "preached" his first family night lesson today.

For part of his primary lesson yesterday he received a mission call and a name tag and he was ready to head out into the world and share the gospel. He drew a picture of The Book of Mormon and decided he wanted to give it to the bishop, so Grandpa walked him over to the bishop's house to make the delivery. Poor Benjamin froze when the door opened, which is odd considering how talkative he usually is, and eventually, but still saying nothing, held out his drawing to the bishop's daughter.

"It's for your dad," Grandpa explained.

On the walk home Benjamin observed that missionary work is pretty scary but he was going to do his best to overcome his fears, like a good missionary would.

Over dinner he remarked that as soon as he "prepared the gospel" he was going to head out to preach some more. He even planned on wearing his name tag to school.

Not wanting to dampen his spirit, but also not wanting him to think that he really has to go around "tracting" the neighbourhood, we had him give a family night lesson on missionary work today and we talked as a family about how we can share the gospel.

Dying easter eggs (and dying of the stomach flu)

Between sessions of general conference on Saturday we helped Grandpa prune the fruit trees and pile the branches. The kids wanted to make a teepee out of the branches but mostly gave up after tying three of them together, so I did the bulk of the work for them, thinking, of course, that it would provide them with hours of imaginative play over spring break. I would be wrong in this regard, of course, but anyway...

Naanii and Uncle Patrick came over between the second session and priesthood session so they could help me help the children dye Easter eggs (Daddy had gone up to Grandpa Frank's house in Salt Lake to watch priesthood session). It was nice to have some extra hands on...hand.

2018 Easter Egg Smackdown

Ah, the Easter Egg Smackdown, that beautiful annual tradition of fun, mess, and tears! 

This year we had to squeeze in the smackdown between sessions of General Conference. Andrew wasn't around for dying Easter eggs (again) so I called in my mom and brother for backup (more on that later). I wasn't planning on having all the eggs compete (we made a lot because we were going to have a lot of family over for Easter dinner) but Andrew made up the bracket without me present and included every single egg—all 33 of them (minus a few that were too cracked to compete)!

Here are a few of the contenders...

Miriam's BB-8:

Easter Baby

Alexander didn't really participate in the Easter Egg hunt. In fact, like Audrey, he wasn't even very interested in the egg that we handed to him. But he certainly was adorable sitting in front of our daffodils!

Egg Hunting

The Easter Bunny visited us on Saturday, just to make sure we knew it wasn't a joke (since, you know, Easter fell on April Fools' Day, which was also General Conference). The kids found their Easter baskets filled with books and candy (except for Alexander, who got a solitary plastic egg in his basket, which I'm honestly not even sure he touched before one of the other kids took it away from him (it's the thought that counts)). Rachel also got a mini first aid kit in hers, which she was most excited about. She's our super-duper-prepare-o-matic, always getting a first aid kit to carry whenever we go out hiking.

Benjamin was most excited about the George Washington biography in his basket: