Saying Miriam

For the past twenty months or so, Phoebe has avoided saying Miriam's name. 

Please note that Phoebe is twenty months old. 

She said Rachel's name first—either Achie and Acha. Benjamin is Buh. Zoë is Zozo or Dodo or a sound somewhere between the two. Alexander is A'duh. 

Miriam has been "No!" or "That!"

It got to be so that Miriam felt a little targeted by Phoebe's seeming refusal to attempt saying Miriam's name. Andrew swears she's said Mimi (or MeMe or some other similar sounding thing) a few times to him, but she has never called Miriam anything to her face. 

Last Sunday, however, Miriam was up on the stand and Phoebe stood up on our bench in the middle of sacrament meeting, pointed to Miriam and hollered, "MIMI!" loud enough for the entire congregation to hear her!

Miriam was so proud!

And Phoebe has called her Mimi ever since (so for an entire week now). 

Today I stayed home to do zoom church with the little kids because Alexander and Zoë both have a terrible cough (though no fever, and no other symptoms). Phoebe had a wonderful time pointing out Miriam and Daddy on the screen during all of the songs, and then about lost her mind when Grandpa got up to say the prayer!

I knead this to be over!

The kids and I were sitting at the table having lunch and discussing Shakespeare (we're reading A Comedy of Errors at the moment) this afternoon when we heard Andrew say from the kitchen, "Alexa, how much time is left on the timer?"

We knew he had dough proofing in the oven; he'd planned to make pretzels for dinner. 

His pretzels are the best.

"You have two minutes remaining on your ten minute timer," Alexa told him.

"UGH!" he moaned. 

Everyone at the table exchanged looks. It's not usual for Andrew to be so emotional.

"Pretty sure you'll survive two minutes," I said, my voice dripping with fake sympathy.

"But I'm so tired!" he huffed. 

Everyone at the table exchanged looks again. Because literally what was his plan at...noon. Nap time?

Now, this is rich coming from a lady who treasures an afternoon nap with her toddler nearly every day. I see that. But, like, seriously, Andrew doesn't usually nap in the middle of the day. And would two minutes really throw off any napping plans that he evidently had? 

He can be so weird sometimes!

*****

Sunday outfits for Phoebe

I will start this post by once again stating that I should be working on my thesis right now (I really need to get a presentation pulled together), but instead I'm going to blog a little bit about my baby. Because, you know what, babies grow up, and master's degrees can wait. I mean, technically I have a hard and fast deadline, but I mostly know what I'm going to say, I think...I just need to create a powerpoint.

Anyway, starting in July we started attending sacrament meeting at our ward building, fully masked, of course. We attended weekly before, just from home (which honestly is probably more work than going and just sitting in a pew). I won't talk about my feelings about the pandemic because they are too large for this platform. I will just briefly share a quote often attributed to Krishnamurti: "it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." The sickness of society I see is our unwillingness to find solutions to our problems; instead we accept whatever ills as just the way things are. They're not the way things have to be, but we're too tired or scared or broke to do anything differently (even when what we're doing is what is making us tired and scared and broke). 

That didn't really explain anything, but that's okay. 

The point of this post is Phoebe, who hasn't spent much of her life getting dolled up and now finally is getting dolled up. I mean, I put her in dresses when I could, but in all honesty, dresses are frustrating when you're crawling around, so we just had several months where she didn't wear dresses. Now she's wearing dresses every week and it's fun to dress her up. 

Here she is with a barrette in her hair—the first and only time she's let me put something in her hair (and left it in longer than 0.3 seconds):

Hearing voices

The other night at dinner, Rachel asked Benjamin to please stop talking so much (or at least speak in a quieter voice) and he said, "You sounded like Mom just then!"

Rachel shrugged her shoulders with defeat. She's more or less accepted the fact that our voices and speech patterns are...very similar. Sometimes we can't hardly tell each other apart when we hear a playback of ourselves conversing (say, for example, if Alexander happened to record a clip of us, which is not unusual—he loves recording people). Just last week my sister Abra called to wish Rachel a happy birthday and I said, "Well, you're on speaker and I'm handing the phone to Rachel because I'm currently pushing the stroller up a big hill..."

She proceeded to have a lovely conversation with Rachel about her cat, about life, about the storm we'd just had. Then she said, "Well, I just wanted to call to wish Rachel a happy birthday!"

"Thank you!" Rachel said, somewhat confused about why Abra was talking about her in third person. 

"You're welcome??" Abra said, equally confused. "Can I talk to her?"

"You've been talking to her the whole time!!" I laughed. "I told you I put you on speaker and handed you to Rachel!"

"But she sounds so much like you! I thought you were doing all the talking!"

So Rachel is aware that our voices are, at times, indistinguishable. And sometimes you just have to accept such things as facts of life. Rachel has done so, and thus gave her defeated shrug when Benjamin pointed out that she sounded just like me. 

Zoë, however, wheeled around and chided Benjamin: "BENJAMIN! That is sooooo rude!"

Now, was it rude that Benjamin said Rachel sounded like me? Or was it rude that Zoë assumed it was rude to think that Rachel sounded like me? Or was it rude when I told Grandpa (Reid) this story at dinner he said to me, "Well, you sound exactly like your mom, so..."

False Alarm

I read somewhere once that a verbal fire alarm is better than one that simply beeps at you. I can't remember where I read that now, but I think the idea of it was that it can be hard to wrap your head around what's happening in a true emergency situation. The verbal cues can be enough to help you snap out of your shock and jump into action.

When we moved into this house none of the fire alarms were active. That is, most of them were completely absent and the ones that were present had no batteries in them (the batteries weren't dead...they weren't there). I could hardly sleep at night until Andrew brought home a big pack of smoke detectors from Costco. 

The ones he got are actually combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. You can program them to announce what room they're in. And...yeah...now we have a detector in every room. 

We know they work because we test them somewhat regularly—most recently when Andrew was browning the pork chops he'd just taken out of the sous vide. 

"Warning! Warning! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Smoke detected in...dining room! Evacuate...dining room! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Warning! Warning! Smoke detected in..." began the smoke detector in the dining room. Then...

The High Museum of Art

On Friday we took a field trip to the High Museum of Art to see the Samurai exhibit that has been running this summer. 

It will be there until mid-September and if you haven't gone to see it, you should...because it is pretty spectacular!

Rachel's Birthday Balloons

Rachel put this lovely dress on her birthday wish list and then, after church, when I had her pose while wearing it, she did this:

Shelley and Rexburg (June 20)

Our first stop on our trip back home was at Aunt Emily's house!

And, yes, you read that correctly—our first stop was Emily's house. That means we drove the whole way to Emily's house without stopping once. This was rather incredible because historically that drive hasn't always gone that smoothly for us. According to Andrew's data, that 3 hours and 31 minutes was one of our longest stretches of driving the whole trip!

The kids were so excited to hop out of the car and into the arms of their cousins! Here are a few pictures of us playing outside:

Aunt Linda's Strawberries—and other stories (a guest post by Zoë)

While we were in Utah, we picked strawberries with Aunt Linda. Her strawberry patch was by her front door. We could tell they were ripe, because the ripe ones were red. Phoebe only picked the green strawberries! That’s not good, because the green strawberries aren't ripe strawberries! Aunt Linda also has a strawberry rock. It fooled Phoebe! I think it’s to trick deer, chipmunks, and other animals that would try to eat the strawberry plants. Aunt Linda has a strawberry bucket that we put the strawberries in, and then, after we picked all the ripe, red, juicy ones, we brought the strawberries inside, and cut them up. 

Here are some pictures of me standing in Aunt Linda's strawberry patch on the Sunday after I got baptized:

Conrad visits (June 14 & June 19)

My Uncle Bruce took our family out for lunch at the Cannon Center on June 14 (Uncle Patrick's birthday!). We had quite the time finding our way there because all the regular routes are under construction and we didn't know how to get into the pedestrian walkway around the construction, though Uncle Bruce knew the way and helped us find it so we could get back to our cars easier.