Valentine's Day fun

We had quite an exciting week-long Valentine celebration. My sister Kelli sent a box full of crafts and treats and Grandpa sent some fun craft supplies for us as well. We've been dipping into those packages during this mostly-drizzly week; it's kept us from getting cabin fever. 

Here are the kids with some little fuzz-ball critters from a craft kit Auntie K sent:

Bee sting #2 for Benjamin

In my defense, Benjamin had been complaining about a stiff neck for several days in a row already, so when he began to complain at the park that his neck hurt really bad and he just wanted to go home, we all kind of ignored him. Because there was no moment of him shrieking in pain. He'd just occasionally stop playing to complain about his stiff neck (by hid own admission, he "must have slept wrong") but then something exciting would call to him—jumping off that ledge, climbing up that tree—and he would run off like nothing was the matter.

His neck was still plaguing him at bedtime, but he so often gets out of bed to complain that he can't sleep because _______ just doesn't feel right. 

• His left nostril is stuffy.
• He has a hangnail.
• He stubbed his toe earlier in the day.
• He has a headache.
• His neck hurts.
• He ate too much for dinner.
• His ear keeps folding funny.  
• His tooth is too loose.
• His eyes are sore.
• His left butt cheek hurts (that was what he came in to tell me just right now).

So I said what any caring mother would say:

• The best thing for it is sleep.
• Why don't you put it to bed?
• Try to get comfortable.
• I love you. Goodnight.

This morning when I met him at the breakfast table I just about panicked, however. Benjamin's neck was visibly swollen.

"What's wrong with your neck?!" I asked.

"I dunno," he said. "Hurts a bit. I think I slept wrong again."

"No! I think you got stung by a bee!"

Park day

On Saturday we had snow. Today we had a high of 21°C (69°F), so we had to spend a few hours at the park this afternoon. We took along a picnic lunch and some bubbles and had a great time. 

Here are the kids playing with bubbles:

Golden Shovel Poetry

For Black History Month, we're focusing on poetry. This morning we listened to Amanda Gorman's TedTalk as well as her poem 'The Hill We Climb,' then we did some reading in some books I'd gotten from the library—anthologies of Black poets, as well as stand alone collections by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Nikki Grimes, and others. We each shared a poem we'd read that we liked. And then, because I like to do my lesson planning somewhat spontaneously, I based our writing exercise on Nikki Grimes' book One Last Word, since that's the one that ended up in my hands.

Each poem of hers is a Golden Shovel poem, which she explains means that you take a "striking line" from a poem (or a poem in its entirety) and write the words down on the right side of your page, and then write a line that ends with each word to form an entirely new poem, like an acrostic...but different. 

Fry Bread and Hail Marys

Alexander woke up at 6:00 in the morning on Saturday and refused to go back to sleep even for a little while, so I got up with him. Benjamin and Zoë joined us shortly before 8:00. 

We had a full morning of stories and fun. Zoë particularly enjoyed the book Fry Bread by Kevin Maillard. She loved the poetry of the story and returned to it several times over the course of the morning. She was a little emotional and kept having outbursts while we were playing (with the magnet tiles) and would escape to the music room to center herself by reading this book. 

"Fry bread is food," she'd read and then take a deep cleansing breath before reading the rest of the words on the page. 

Then she'd take another deep breath, centering herself with her eyes closed. 

"Fry bread is shape."

Deep breath. 

This girl is very good at melodrama. The only thing wrong was that she believe the magnet tile "base plates" had been unfairly distributed. But this story...was calming...so I'll take it.

At the end there's a recipe and Zoë immediately wanted to know if we could have fry bread for dinner. I'm...not the chef in this house...so I said we'd have to talk to dad about his dinner plans. 

A-L-E-X...

I usually have a million samples around of Alexander's artwork, but for some reason I can't find much of anything at the moment (it's recycling day tomorrow...), which means I don't have his signature on hand, which is too bad because the way he's learned to spell his name has been absolutely wonderful. 

He started out signing everything in his binary code: 01101010

I figured that he could at least learn how to write his name, since all my other kids learned how to write their names by the time they entered Sunbeams. Just because he's the last doesn't mean we have to baby him (maybe). So we started working on his name.

Just ALEX.

Only he could not figure out that A. He consistently wrote H instead.

So I told him that we'd make a little anchor point for the top of his A. We'd just put a little dot on the paper and then we'd draw two lines coming down from that dot. Then we'd draw our line across and—tada!—we had the letter A. 

He loved that trick. 

He loved that trick so much that the anchor point became the focal point of his A. He would draw a big, swooping, swirly circle...then drop two lines down and cross them. It was cute and hilarious but eventually (just the other day when we were signing Valentines) that...well...it was an unnecessary part of the letter A and the real goal was to have no circle on the top at all, but just two lines connected like a little triangle. 

So he's been doing better at making his anchor dot smaller (he just can't quite give it up).

Some creativity

There's been quite a bit of creativity happening at our house lately. I don't have pictures of everything, so I'll just share the few pictures that I do have. 

First up is Benjamin's original composition for the piano. The assignment I gave him came from Faber's primer level piano book and it was to play the "musical question" and then "make up a parallel answer of your own by changing measures 7–8" of the song (and then, further, to "make up a contrasting answer" to the same piece). Somehow he interpreted this to mean that I wanted him to create his own piece of music using the ideas of parallel and contrasting melodies, which...I mean...I'm not complaining:

It took him forever to work out the musical notation and I'm super impressed he stuck with it. 

Boogey Man

When I was in grade four we moved from Vancouver (a moderate oceanic climate) to Calgary (a continental subarctic climate).* It was certainly different from what I had grown to think of as "normal." So cold. So snowy. I wasn't sure winter was ever going to end.

This was my first time really being The New Girl, though it certainly wouldn't be the last. We'd moved before, but that had been before I started school. I went from kindergarten through half of grade four in the same school (it was a wonderful school). Our neighbourhood school in Calgary was "too full" to take us (that's what I remember, anyway). Patrick got to finish up his kindergarten year there (at Deer Run Elementary), but David and I had to be bussed out to Alice M. Curtis. We weren't the only children in the neighbourhood who bussed out. My best friend Nadia, who was only my best friend outside of school because we weren't in the same class and...that mattered for some reason...bussed out as well. 

For some reason I sat by a girl named Krista on the bus. She was is my class (was probably my best friend in school), was very nice, and taught me a lot about winter. One thing she taught me how to do was to make pictures in the frost on the school bus windows. (It is not unusual to see busses driving around with the word HELP written on the frost on the windows, but don't worry; the children are usually fine). We would scrape little drawings and things into the frost with our fingernails (rather than melting the frost with our fingerprints to spell a big, bold HELP signal like the older kids). This was all fine until one day I scraped a little too hard a little too fast and somehow worked a frosty little icicle sliver up under my nail bed. It was shockingly painful, but as quickly as the alarm bells went off in my brain, the frost melted (essentially pulling the sliver out). I applied direct pressure the rest of the way to school and then asked for a bandaid. It was surprisingly painful for quite a long time, which you'd know if you've ever gotten a sliver under your fingernail before. 

All this is to say that I sympathize with Andrew—really, I do—despite all my teasing. 

The other day he got his own unconventional sliver under his fingernail (which hurt like the dickens) when he noticed that someone (which is to say no one because no one knows who could have done it) had wiped a big ol' booger on the wall. 

I will take a quick minute to note here that I grew up calling such "nose stuff" boogers (BOO-gurs) (but also "nose stuff") while Andrew calls them buggers (BUG-gurs),** something my Canadian grandma would be horrified to hear (but which, alas, is a very common thing to say in the United States). I've worked on him, but it's such an ingrained pronunciation that he still uses it. I did, however, win the...uh...fart...battle. I grew up not saying that word and whether Andrew did or whether he didn't, we ameliorate it at our house, usually with "toot" or "gas." Alexander prefers the word "air," though he's the only one who uses that particular word for that particular bodily function.

I will also note that by the time Andrew found the booger on the wall, it was rather...crisp. 

Fossilized, really. 

So it's possible that none of our children were guilty of wiping it on the wall above the couch, directly beside the light switch (even though there's a tissue box on the end table). It's possible it's been there since prehistoric times (so you're all off the hook, children). 

Whatever the case, Andrew decided, the other day, to scrape that disgusting ol' booger off the wall with his fingernail. That booger was so firmly affixed to the wall that Andrew found he needed to use quite a bit of force to remove it. That booger was so well-dried it could have been used as battle armour. And when Andrew finally dislodged it from the wall it lodged itself right up under his fingernail, which is possibly the worst, most embarrassing way to get a fingernail sliver that I've ever heard of! 

Andrew was in excruciating pain. He complained about his finger for days. 

And we lovingly checked in on him, as families do, but also mercilessly teased him about it...as families do. We're still teasing him. Every time he goes to scratch or blow his nose at least one person warns him to be careful up there...might be dangerous...

Poor man.

* As defined by the Köppen climate classification system.
** Andrew would like to clarify that he pronounces it like book. Buuh-ger. "As one does the buuh-gie, a little dance." To which I said, "Yeah, I say BOOgie. BOOgie WOOgie." So we disagree. And I still think it sounds more like buh-ger than he thinks. And, honestly, 

New shower

It's been a battle to keep this house dry from the very beginning. Within a month or two of moving in we realized that three of our four bathrooms were leaking. We've been using stop-gap measures to keep things from completely falling apart but we finally decided to pull the trigger on our master bathroom when I sneaked into the office closet to eat a snack and saw that our ceiling was *this close* to falling apart. Our stop-gap measures were no longer...stopping things. 

So we had a contractor come in to fix things up for us. He sealed off our room, making us feel a bit like we were living in ET's plastic tunnel. But it kept things nice and tidy.

Melancholy Minecraft

I reached some sort of breaking point in this pandemic (and surrounding political climate) where all I want to do is cry. I'm not sure if my immigrant children's literature class is adding to that, but reading books like Other Words for Home and Everything Sad is Untrue just have me in tears. But other things do as well.

We were trying to play a game the other night, but the problem was that I didn't really want to play because I had a billion other things to do and Andrew wasn't really paying attention because he had a billion things to do as well, but we were both trying to be good sports and play anyway. But then I got frustrated and expressed my frustration and some teenagey members of our household got annoyed that I got frustrated and refused to talk or look at me and Andrew wasn't helping diffuse the situation because he was busy thinking about data and so I put down my cards and announced I wasn't playing anymore...because why should I stick around to play a game where no one is talking to me? I have other things to do, thanks. And then the teenagery people stormed off to the basement, slamming as many doors as possible and Andrew was left sitting at the table like, "What?"

So I had to collect myself and go talk to the teenagery people. 

One revealed that, like everything, it was more than the game. It was that she was so lonely. She didn't make friends at school last year. We got split off the ward where she had quickly made friends. And then got split off from the stake they were in. So now they feel like they are on another planet. And her one friend in our ward just told her that her parents are divorcing and she's moving to Utah with her mom. And we haven't gone anywhere or seen anyone in a year. And none of her friends understand this and they're all really bad at writing back to her. And she doesn't even have any cousins because she was born in what we call "the cousin hole." And...she just didn't want to have any tension in our house but then there was because I got frustrated (which, like, testimony to me that I don't get frustrated very often, I guess). And...

So I told her that her Utah friends are dumb. 

I mean, they're amazing kids. Rachel has always picked the most amazing people to befriend. She's good at picking people. But they're just so naive. "They have no idea what it feels like to miss everything," I told her. "They only know what it's like to miss you. But they still have everything, so while they do remember to think about you sometimes...it's not everything for them. You miss everything. And that's harder. And they don't get it."

They don't.

At least, a lot of them don't.