Reverse, reverse!

Last night while the older girls were at mutual and the middle kids were playing with friends, Phoebe and I spent some time playing outside. She'd grabbed an apple while I was tidying things up after dinner and kept on munching it down to the core (which was a welcome change from her usual bite-and-discard-and-grab-another method of eating apples). She took it on a walk around the block and then carried it about as we played at home. 

More than anything, she wanted some time in her car. She's figured out that she needs to keep her feet up if she wants to be pushed around by someone else, and she's figured out how to use her own two feet to push herself backwards (she loves travelling backwards and will often walk backwards just...to walk backwards), but when you're travelling by car, sometimes it's nice to move forwards. 

Fortunately, we live on a rather steep hill and Phoebe discovered that if she goes backwards up the hill, gravity will happily push her down the hill (going forwards). She went up and down the hill several times, clever little girl!

I'm knitting! I'm a knitter! I knit something!

I have been so exhausted since finishing my thesis—like I just can hardly bring myself to do anything. To be fair, since finishing my thesis I went to Canada, had my basement flood, and our family has been sick for about a month. I also finished all the revisions for a paper that was just accepted for publication. I've been reading and researching a bit more to turn parts of my thesis into parts of a book proposal. I have also finished a couple of crochet projects and learned how to knit. Oh, and I'm teaching a ukulele class to a group of middle school boys (and one girl) and am still homeschooling the kids. And (daytime) potty trained Phoebe. And...and...and...

Okay. So perhaps I've accomplished a few things. I still just feel like I could sleep for a month. 

Anyway, Miriam taught me how to knit—and she was a wonderful teacher! She recently taught her fellow young women to knit over a series of evenings. They all made little square swatches that they plan to piece together to a make a little garland to hang in the Young Women's room. So Miriam had had a bit of practice showing others how to knit before she took me on as a pupil.

I was an anxious student because I had tried to learn to knit when I was much younger—around eight years old. Since my mom didn't know how to knit, she had procured a teacher for me, a woman in our ward who seemed to me to already be quite ancient: Sister Laura Vezeau. She was in her mid-seventies and all I knew about her was that (1) she was a widow, (2) she loved music and played the piano for primary, (3) she didn't drive, and (4) apparently she knew how to knit because my mom was taking me to her house so that she could teach me how to knit, too.

For several weeks I met with Sister Vezeau and she did her best to work me through the process of catching loops and yarning over and sliding loops from one hook to the other, and in the end I had a sloppy mess filled with dropped stitches, without ever quite being clear on what a knit was versus what a purl was. We never even got to casting off. 

I think I was quite a depressing student to teach, so slow to catch on was I.

Our own downfall

We are not precisely early risers over here. 

I mean, sure—Rachel and Miriam attend early morning seminary, so they get up early, but they ride with Grandpa (who is one of their seminary teachers), and thus the rest of us—thankfully—do not have to get up early. I know I spend a lot of time fussing about my poor sleepers because...I've had a lot of those. My children simply take a long time to wind down and fall asleep at night, and then also wake up several times throughout the night, but they've also never (or at least have rarely) been the type of children to want to start the day at 5:00 in the morning. 

All this is to say that we were relieved on Tuesday evening to realize that we didn't have to wake up early to meet the construction crew on Wednesday. Full disclosure: Andrew had been waking up to meet them while Phoebe and I slept. So Andrew was particularly excited for Wednesday morning. 

"Hey! I don't have to wake up early!" he said.

And so he stayed up late working. And when Andrew stays up late working, he really stays up late working. He's a night owl and is often most productive at night. As an eccentric professor, this is his...priveledge.

So it was particularly disappointing when, shortly before 7:30 in the morning, we were roughly awakened by the sound of gas-powered motors roaring to life, seemingly right outside our window. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep for a few precious moments more (I even put my earplugs in), but then another motor started up, and another, and another. 

And then there was a rather big thud.

"The neighbours must be having some trees removed," I thought to myself. "But...why start this early?!"

Tree-cutting crews don't normally begin work that early for...obvious reasons. 

Oddly, the thudding continued. 

"It sounds like someone is walking around on our roof!" I mused aloud.

My tired brain slowly came to the realization that someone was walking around the roof. Our gutter/roof cleaning company must have been paying us a visit!

"Aren't they supposed to give us advanced notice?" I moaned.

"Technically they texted me at 6:00 this morning," Andrew said, putting his phone down. 

So thus it was that our day began a little earlier than expected yesterday morning, after staying up a little too late the night before. But I suppose it was the staying up late that was our own downfall.

*****

When we were flying home from Canada, our flight our of Calgary was delayed by about 5 hours, which wasn't a terrible thing in and of itself, but waiting for that flight would have caused us to also miss our connecting flight home. I called the airline and worked things out, but it meant that our departing flight was an hour earlier than originally scheduled (resulting in a bit of a race to get to the airport in time) and our flight back into Atlanta would be a little later than originally scheduled.

So, here we are snarfing some Tim Hortons for breakfast in the Calgary airport (surprisingly inexpensive airport food):

See what I meant? (See: wet cement)

Our basement was finished midway through the day. Andrew went down to verify that they'd done all the contracted work, wrote them out a check, and the workers went on their merry way. 

Phoebe thought this was a very good thing because earlier in the morning they gave her a good fright!

She had enjoyed watching the workers through the window. We talked about how they were loading up rocks to take into the basement, and that they were helpers—that sounds great, right? They were strangers, but they were helpful strangers, and seemed to just be working in the yard. So that's fine. 

And then—while I was upstairs working and the kids were downstairs work and even Phoebe was downstairs playing—one of the men came upstairs to ask if he could use the restroom. There's a restroom in the basement, but it had been cordoned off behind plastic worksheets and a veritable barricade of furniture. I told him that he was, of course, welcome to use our restroom, and showed him where it was (right across the hallway).

Phoebe took this interaction poorly, and I don't blame her.

How do visitors—particularly strangers—usually announce their presence at our home? 

They knock or ring the bell at the front door and then we get to decide whether to allow them entrance or whether we'll send them away. 

Not so today! 

Today a man she'd never met in her life simply materialized in the hallway—the horror!

She was nervous for pretty much the rest of the day, very clingy, very "uppy, uppy, uppy!"

I took her to watch the workers through the window and reminded her again that they are our special helpers and that she doesn't need to be afraid anymore. But...she's just a clingy kid, so that conversation did little to soothe her nerves.

Anyway, let's see...

Here are a couple of pictures Andrew took from the stairs showing the progress of the trench the workers dug in our basement floor:

A day at the park

We took homeschool to the park today. Rachel stayed at Grandpa's house, technically, so it was just the younger five (just). And, boy, were they excited to be there!

They were like, "Thanks for teaching me math, Mom! I really appreciate it!"

A study on curly-hair bed-head

Workers showed up early this morning to dump a (literal) ton of gravel onto our driveway, along with a billion other tools and supplies, so they could start fixing our leaky basement. It was also garbage and recycling day, so there were trucks going up and down the street—beeping, clanging, lifting, dumping, compacting...

Phoebe found this all very interesting.

 

Polar plunge II (the last day of pool season)

On Friday afternoon I took the (healthy) kids to the pool. Miriam was feeling under the weather and, having rallied her energy to fulfill a few obligations in her schedule, wasn't feeling up to going to the pool with us (not even to lounge on the deck). So we left her at home while we headed to the pool to enjoy the very last day of swimming before admitting that autumnal temperatures are really upon us.

Andrew was out grocery shopping when we left (I figured he wouldn't want to come) but texted me to say that he was on the way to join us! The kids were all overjoyed because...dragging Daddy to the pool is quite the trick. He came with us once in May when the pool season opened...nearly drowning Alexander...and hasn't been back with us since. 

It doesn't help that we tend to go to the pool in the early afternoons before the schools let out so we can have the pool mostly to ourselves. Andrew is always having to work...

But Zoë wrote a story that guilted Andrew into taking an afternoon off to splash around with us. It's called Witching Hour and it goes like this:

Friend visits in High River (August 26, mostly)

It's October Eve and here I am finally blogging about the rest of my trip to Canada...in August. To be fair, I only got back a month ago today and somehow September has been a doozy of a month!

On the morning of August 26, we walked to the park to meet up with some friends. Notice the nice wide boulevard between the sidewalk and the road (oh, don't I wish we had those around here)?

Black peaches

"Om-nom-nom-nom-nom!" Phoebe told me.

"You're hungry?" I asked.

"Yuppo!" she said.

She used to always say "yes" (with a little lisp, so more like "yeth") and some times "yup" or (for whatever reason) "bahm." Recently she's added a little "Yuuuuppo!" to her repertoire and it's ridiculously cute. 

"Would you like a snack?"

"Yeah!"

"And what would you like for a snack?"

"Peach! Peach!" she sang. "Want peach! Want! Peach!"

"A peach?" I said. "Well, okay! Let's get a peach for you."

"Black peach," she told me seriously. "Black, black. Peach. Black. Black peach. Black, black, black."

Because there are so many tricky consonants in there, however, all her blacks came out as "blatt" and all her peaches came out as "each," so it was "Blatt each. Blatt, blatt. Each. Blatt. Blatt each. Blatt, blatt, blatt."

"You want a...black...peach?" 

"Yeth!" she said enthusiastically.

"Well, let's...just...see what we can do about that," I said, quite unsure of how I would fulfill such a request.

We went over to our fruit and she quickly found a bag of plums. 

"Blatt each!" she squealed. "See? Blatt each!"

"Oh! You want a plum!" I chuckled at the clever way she'd worked through her little lexical gap. "These are called plums. They kind of look like black peaches, though, don't they?"

"Blatt each! Cut! Cut!"

"Sure, I can cut one up for you."

While I busied myself doing that, Phoebe helped herself to a whole entire apple. She is always getting into something.

Frogs and linocuts

Yesterday I looked into Marshmallow's habitat and she was...acting strange. I alerted Benjamin to this fact and he checked on her, refreshed her water, and found some grubs to see if he could tempt her to eat. She seemed to perk up a bit and was hopping around for awhile. However, when we returned from our walk, we found Benjamin sobbing on the couch. 

Marshmallow had died while we were out and Benjamin was, in Zoë's words, inconsolable.

Rather, she said, "I do not know how to console him. He is too sad for me to console."

He was quite sad, and is quite sad. And that's okay.

I believe it was Alexander who quipped that at least Marshmallow was in heaven now. 

Benjamin rebuffed this attempt at comfort, telling us all that he'd "been to a website about how to help people after their pets die and one of the worst things to say is that they're in a better place so it's okay because it's not okay!"

"You're right," I said. "It's sad and it sucks."

I don't use that word terribly often, and neither did my mother, but I do remember that one time when something truly sucky happened, my mother had told me that there was really just no other word for it—whatever happened had just plain sucked.