Breaking in

I suppose we needn't have worried about the rain. 

We went for a walk this morning so we could be sure to get one in before it stormed, but it didn't really start raining until this evening so we had plenty of time. Before we left we emptied the tent of all the kids' stuff—foam pads, sleeping bags, pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, flashlights, water bottles, books—and then dragged the tent under the roofed portion of our deck so it could dry off properly before folding it up. 

It had already been sprinkling a bit. That's why we wanted to be sure to get a walk in!

We've been having that funny sort of weather where the outside feels exactly the same as the inside, and it feels as if the portal between those two worlds is malfunctioning. There should be some sort of shock—an icy blast, a wave of heat, a thick lick of humidity—but recently there's been nothing. It's just been...nice. 

We walked around the block. Well, Rachel, Miriam, Benjamin, and I walked around the block. Phoebe rode in her jogging stroller, feet resting on her snack tray, giving off regal vibes, as if she's being carted in  a palanquin. Alexander and Zoë rode their bikes. 

They arrived home first, of course, and found that the code box for the garage door was malfunctioning again. So they ran up the street to meet us, begging for the keys so they could get in the house, open the garage door, and put their bikes away like the responsible children that they are. 

Our garage code box has been on the fritz. A temporary solution seems to be to replace the batteries, but that solution only lasts a matter of days before the box stops working again, so clearly there's something deeply wrong with it. We're therefore conditioned to bring our house keys with us whenever we leave the house. And today was no different—I grabbed my keys to take along with us, just in case the code box decided to malfunction...even though it worked yesterday.

"Good thing I brought my keys!" I said, handing them off to Zoë. "Remember—put it in flat side down, turn to the left to unlock the door, return the key to the neutral position to remove it from the lock."

"Got it!"

Miriam's audition

Miriam had an organ audition this morning, which I just looked up the meaning of because the word "audition" has been confusing me since she started to do these things. I mean, she's not really auditioning for anything! Paul K. Fox offers some clarification on the meaning: there are three levels of evaluating music students and "audition" is one of them. It's not as intense as being adjudicated (a word that I would be more likely to quickly associate with performing music for a panel of judges); it's one step below a formal adjudication. 

So, Miriam had her organ audition this morning. Grandpa took her for us since Andrew needed to be on campus and I...well...there are reasons Grandpa is helping Rachel learn how to drive. Plus we had our septic tank friends over again so I had to be home for that. Plus I have, what, five other kids at home.

Anyway, she played very well. Her organ teacher, who was allowed to be present for the audition, took this video for us:

Rabbits and cucumbers

I don't even know how long we've been playing "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit," but it's been years—regularly, it seems, since at least 2014. We just try to be the first one to say "rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" to everyone else on the first day of each month.

Sometimes we do it by text, such as the time I texted "rabbit, rabbit, rabbi" to Andrew in 2018. 

Sometimes we shove papers under doors or leave drawings on the whiteboard for the kids to wake up to (such as this one from December 2022):

Math, driving, ice cream

Zoë still has not developed a rash, so I'm hoping this means we're in the clear and dealt with her brush with poison ivy appropriately. If she could tell you one thing about this week, she'd probably tell you that she finished her math book (and celebrated by dumping her pencil/bookmark out (because she proudly used the same pencil as a bookmark in her workbook the whole time she had it)). Nothing too exciting happened when she finished beyond that—she just got another workbook to go through. 

In more exciting news, Miriam finished her math book as well! 

This is a bit of a bigger deal because this means that—after a few little hiccups along the way—she finished her entire course (whereas Zoë had just finished with a section of her course). She's now starting on "Intro to Counting and Probability," which she's excited about because it's just a teeny little course book, so she thinks she'll finish by the end of the school year and be ready for geometry in the fall. 

Rachel took her learner's permit test yesterday and is now...learning to drive...somehow. This feels like a bigger step toward independence than a lot of other things. I offered to take her to the park yesterday afternoon to let her drive around the parking lot, but she declined. She thinks it'll be better for her if she sticks with driving with her dad and grandpa. She's probably right. 

Andrew had her drive from the corner of our street to our house, and then they took a little trip over to Grandpa's house. I think Grandpa is taking her driving later today. She's afraid my anxiety will rub off on her, I guess.

In other news, she's continuing to cook up a storm in the kitchen. She made ice cream last week, but not just any ice cream—gooey buttercake ice cream in homemade waffle cones:

Trinity Church and Poison Ivy

This morning Miriam had a rehearsal at the Johns Creek United Methodist chapel, where she played on the organ that used to be in Trinity Wall Street Chapel, so of course we were still singing Hamilton songs at the dinner table. Technically Hamilton never saw this organ—since it was constructed in 1846—but Hamilton was buried at the Trinity Church Cemetery, so perhaps his mouldering ears snacked on a note or two. Probably not. But we sang about Hamilton, anyway. 

At the dinner table, specifically, we broke into a lovely rendition of Aaron Burr, Sir:

Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?

That depends, who's asking?

Where's Daaaaddy?

This afternoon we we talking about different fabrics because Miriam has become obsessed with textiles. She is constantly inspecting what everyone's wearing and declaring whether it's stockinette or garter or cable or jersey or satin or woven or...

She happened to have on a satin skirt and was telling us about how the weave is looped over the weft in a certain way and...things like that. Satin feels silky, but is not silk. 

This led to Andrew explaining what he'd recently learned about silkworm factories. Apparently they boil/kill the silkworms in order to harvest the silk without damaging the fibers (because the silkworms chew a hole through their cocoon in order to exit). It's a little controversial these days (though, to be fair, silkworm soup is a...byproduct...so it's not as if all the silkworms go to waste...I guess). Enough silkworms are left alive to mate, and then the process starts all over again (since silkworms have evolved to be 100% dependent on humans for their survival—they can't find food, they can't fly, their only instinct is to mate, and then they die).

Andrew the Optimist

Yesterday morning—before the library had even opened—I was verbalizing my personal itinerary for the day to Andrew. 

"I need to go to the library," I said. "But I think I have time to shower first. And then I need to get started on my prospectus revisions and..."

"Oh, before you shower," said Andrew the Optimist, "We should move things around in the basement real quick and pick up those cabinets from my dad!"

A few things you should know:

(1) Reid recently had his kitchen renovated, including having new kitchen cabinets installed. It looks lovely! And the old cabinets were just sitting there, begging to be used. 

(2) Andrew is the optimist in our house. I'm what he would call a pessimist, though I prefer to call myself a realist. When we have our "Project Saturdays," he'll make a grand list of 8–10 things to accomplish and I'll say, "Cool your jets! You can pick two items...maybe three...though we might not even get through one..." 

I don't know if it's because we're inefficient project doers or what, but sometimes I'm right. Though, to be fair, sometimes he is. Most often we probably land somewhere in the middle, accomplishing more than I thought we would, but less than he dreamed we would. I can't say whether it's better to be a pessimist realist and be pleasantly surprised or to be an optimist and be mildly disappointed.

Though Andrew isn't someone who gets disappointed often. He just is happy with what he accomplishes and moves whatever he didn't accomplish to his next to-do list. So...that's the optimist in him, I guess.

Going Mythological, A New Toy Box, and a Girl and her Kitty

Alexander has been on a roll lately with his little sayings. He was talking with Benjamin and Zoë about things no human alive today has ever seen—dinosaurs and dragons and unicorns and the like—and they were trying to convince him that some of those creatures are extinct while others are merely mythological. He got all mad and insisted that extinction isn't real at all, that when a creature goes extinct they merely "go mythological!"

It's a lovely parallel form to "go extinct."

*****

In effort to tame Phoebe and all of her...stuff...and because I've wanted one to go behind the couch for a long time, I bought a storage bench. It was already on sale, which is why I was looking at them (well, technically I was looking because I was up nursing Phoebe late at night and ran out of course readings...so turned to window shopping), but then I noticed that they had a "warehouse" one available that was being sold as "used," but which was "new," just in a damaged box. It was way cheaper, so I bought that one, and now we have a lovely little toy box behind our couch (that says on the bottom "not intended for use as a toy box").

A me fail and a mom win

Today I officially (??) turned in my thesis proposal and then took the kids to the park to get some good, ol' fashioned fresh air after spending the last couple of weeks cooped up sick. I told the kids I wouldn't make them go running...yet...since some of them are still feeling a little sluggish, but since (a) we're sure we don't have COVID and (b) because no one has any fevers or active coughs, we did feel a walk outside and some time at an empty playground couldn't hurt anyone. 

We stopped by the little free library and grabbed some stories to read between games of tag. 

Phoebe has become demandingly independent recently, screaming and squirming to be put down so she can use her own two feet instead of being carried. When we arrived at the park there was no way she was going to allow us to strap her into the stroller, so we played at the park before going on our walk.

When the kids started their game of tag, I was initially pushing Phoebe in the swing, but then Alexander was it and no one would let him get them, so I joined in and let him tag me, and then played around with the kids for a while. And then I stopped playing to push Phoebe in the swing some more. 

Keeping everyone happy is a real balancing act!

Lego-nary and Potentially Cleaning Things

 Last night for FHE we played "Lego-nary," which could definitely use a better name. It's like "pictionary" but with Lego instead of pictures. We just paired up and spent 8 minutes putting together a Lego interpretation of a scripture story (with pictures for inspiration) and then we had to guess what story each pair had made and then each pair had to share a retelling of their story. 

It went well. Everybody loved it. Everybody made awesome-looking scenes...except for me and Phoebe. Our team underperformed, but that's okay.

Here's team "Daddy and Zoë" with the story of Jesus cleansing the temple: