Passive-aggressive prayers

Alexander has reached the stage where it's always his turn to say the prayer. Even if it's not his turn to say the prayer there's a good chance he'll be praying aloud along with whoever's turn it is to pray (which is good because it means we've moved past the stage where he'd beg for a turn to say the prayer and then would just sit there in absolute silence while we prayed for him).

Today he "stole" two prayers by diving in and praying when it wasn't his turn at all, but his sweet siblings are mostly good sports about his naughty prayer-stealing ways. Only Zoë really gets upset about it.

A few nights ago (it really could be about a week ago now because I think it was the first night my mom was here last week) Zoë was asked to say family prayer for the evening. Everyone was kneeling down reverently, except for Andrew (who hasn't quite gotten to a full kneeling position with his knee yet) and Alexander (who was, for unexplained reasons, lying on the floor with his nose mashed into the carpet), so Zoë began her prayer.

"Dear Heavenly Father," she said.

"De-enly-fa-ah," Alexander mumbled into the carpet.

A poem for the first sunny-all-day day in March

The sky is blue today
And the wind is blowing,
Shooing away the last
Grey days of winter.

The sky is blue today
And the wind is blowing,
Scattering leaves that have
Clung to trees since autumn.

The sky is blue today
And the wind is blowing,
Stroking each sleepy blossom,
Ushering in the newness of spring.

The sky is blue today
And the wind is blowing,
Staving off the blazing heat
Promised to us this summer.

Very Big Things

With a lot of encouragement and help from Andrew (thanks for the encouragement and for taking the little ones grocery shopping so I could have some alone time), I did two Very Big Things today. First, I finished and submitted my writing sample—the very last requirement for my grad school application (aside from soliciting letters of recommendation (technically they've all been solicited; they simply haven't all been fulfilled)). Second—and probably more emotionally monumental thing—I cut my baby's hair!

Andrew wanted me to buzz it all off but I simply could not, could not part with all his baby fluff, so I buzzed the back and sides and used scissors on the top. Here he is before:

Farewell to Naanii

The morning my mom left I finally broke out my actual camera to take a few pictures because although my cell phone camera takes fine pictures I'm never quite satisfied with the quality of them. Unfortunately, I didn't check my camera settings and it was set all wonky so the pictures ended up just as fuzzy as a phone picture, which I'm rather sad about. But here are the pictures we took on Thursday morning, anyway...

My mom got up early to say goodbye to Rachel before school (we let the little ones sleep in because they had gone to bed a little later than usual after all the excitement of having cousins over the night before) and we took a picture to compare their height because Rachel is getting close to being as tall as Naanii:

Borrowing babies

My (second-) cousin and her son (my children's third-cousin) came over to visit while my mom was here. We weren't sure we'd be able to see her because she recently revealed that she is, at long last, expecting again and has been so terribly ill. But she was having a good day so she came to hang out and we had a lovely visit (me, my mom, and I) while the kids ran wild around the house.

Late in the evening, while I was making some grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids (because we'd completely neglected dinner), Alexander was hanging around in the kitchen and my cousin's son was kind of shadowing him. I tried to make some small talk with him, asking him if he's excited to have a baby at his house (he is, by the way, completely thrilled about it). Then he approached Alexander and said, "Hi, baby. Can I try holding you?"

Alexander looked him up and down, giving his request careful consideration, and then lifted his arms up. So little G. picked Alexander up and carried him around the house for a few minutes and it was the most darling thing ever! Alexander doesn't look particularly pleased here but I know he enjoyed it because he went over to G. several more times and latched onto him (and when Alexander said his bedtime prayers he was thankful for so many things—Daniel Tiger, and Naanii, and G).

What sweet little cousins!

More outside time

Today's forecast (much like yesterday's and tomorrow's) was rain, rain, rain. But, mid-morning when the rain suddenly let up we decided we had better head outside for a quick walk around the block to cure us from our cabin fever. So we did.

Playing at the park with Naanii

After coming home for a quick lunch, we got ready to hit up some playgrounds with Naanii. Today will likely be the only sunshine-y day we have with her. Our forecast for the coming week is rain, rain, and more rain (what a surprise (we've gotten about 19 inches of rain so far this year already (making us, so far, much wetter than Seattle (honestly, with an average of about 50 inches of rain per year, we usually out-rain Seattle but they've also had a particularly wet start their their year))). Anyway, we knew we had to soak up this sunshine while we had the opportunity, so we spent the afternoon playing outside.

This is just a cute picture we took before leaving for church this morning. Zoë did her own hair and Alexander had to copy her. When she said, "Isn't my hair beautiful?" Alexander said, "Isn't my hair b...cute?" He doesn't like to copy anyone verbatim, though he does like to borrow sentence structures. He's a walking, talking thesaurus.

The spinning thing

We discovered this playground about a month ago and were immediately drawn to "the spinning thing," a thing we've seen at multiple playgrounds around the city, but a thing that hasn't worked anywhere but here. We weren't quite sure what to do with it at first but we were pretty sure it was not this...



That's Zoë using it completely wrong back on February 5. We're pretty much pros at it now. At least, Miriam is. Here she is spinning right on past her goal of 20 rotations (and then past 25 rotations because Andrew couldn't get it stopped in time so she ended up with 26 rotations (kind of a weird number)):

Stake Conference

Unlike how things went down at our multi-stake meeting this morning, I'll go ahead and spill the good news first thing: we're in a new stake but we get to stay in our meetinghouse (at least for now).

Our bishop cautioned us to leave early to get to the building because he assumed it would be super crowded, but as it turns out we were in an overflow building and the actual conference was held in a different meeting and broadcast to ours, so we would have been fine leaving the house at least twenty minutes later than we did. But, oh well. We were there in plenty of time to pick out seats and sit in them for a half hour before the meeting began.

When it finally started, the sound wasn't piped over the whole speaker system in the building and so we had to rely on the muffled broadcast sounds coming from who knows where (the computer?). At dinner I said something to the effect of, "I've discovered I have some sort of sensory processing issue and I cannot filter out extra noise very well. So between the poor sound quality and all the chaos of a congregation filled with children I have no idea what was going on..."

And (spoiler: my mom is here) my mom said, "What do you mean 'discovered?' I've known that for years!"

"You have?!" I asked.

"Yes."

Huh. Well, my mom may have known this about me, but it's something I'm just discovering for myself over the course of being a mom (and being married to Andrew). Too much extra noise and my brain just switches off trying to compute anything that's going on. So I can't really tell you much about what happened in stake conference. I did listen long enough to learn what stake we're in—and that we did switch stakes. Our ward borders five stakes so this whole thing really could have gone in any number (assuming n=5) of directions.

Even more tripping

It must be leap year because we're just tripping left and right this month!

We were out walking one fine morning this week—likely the only fine morning on the radar (it's still been so wet and rainy)—and Benjamin and Zoë were racing around picking all the wildflowers they could see. They gathered a lot of purple—with henbit, johnny-jump-ups (wild pansies), and wild violets—some white chickweed blossoms, and a few bright yellow dandelions (a cold-weather weed for us).

Here's Zoë showing off her little bouquet mid-walk: