Miriam is 14!

 

October has been a rather busy month, and Miriam was rightly particularly worried about the week of her birthday. Last Sunday the youth had their Worldwide Testimony Meeting. Miriam played the piano for that at our building. We also had to be at the stake center earlier in the day for a musical rehearsal. Miriam and I both participated in Women at the Well, a musical production by Kenneth Cope, and although most of our meetings were via Zoom (so we had a number of Zoom meetings to attend), we also had to get Miriam together with the soloist she played for.

That performance was this Sunday. Miriam played Daughter, Arise. I was a narrator.

Miriam (and Zoë) also had their fall festival for piano on Saturday, for which they both had to play a number of memorized scales and pieces. 

Also, we had our ward Halloween party scheduled for Friday night and a multi-stake dance scheduled for Saturday night. 

Also, the youth were in charge of games for the ward party, so on Tuesday night they were supposed to meet to continue preparing for their game stations. Last week they met and made monster posters to go over the corn hole game and talked about other activities they could do—like doughnuts on a string and things like that. 

Instead, they had their own little Halloween party this week because for some reason our ward party was moved from Friday night to Saturday night. They announced this on Sunday and...it caused a bit of a stir because everyone had already planned out their weekend with the ward party on Friday evening. There was some discussion about whether or not the youth should "sacrifice" attending the dance in favour of running games stations at the ward party, but I told my older girls that was ridiculous and encouraged them to go to the dance. 

Serve others...and don't be a doormat. 

Like, there are only a handful of youth in our ward. It's good for them to get out and mingle with other youth in our church who aren't in our ward. If the conflicting dates had been a question weeks earlier, I might have encouraged my girls to be of service at the ward party, but...to have the rug yanked out from under them mere days before the dance, when they'd all been excited about their costumes and everything? I don't think so. 

They're still kids and kids get to be kids. 

Anyway, we had all of that going on the week of Miriam's birthday...plus Miriam's birthday. And the fact that we were just moving the girls from Grandpa's house to our house. And the fact that we were still due to get our carpet installed. In fact, the carpet was scheduled to be installed on Miriam's birthday!

(Unfortunately, the installers' van broke down so they weren't able to make our appointment and rescheduled for the following day. Miriam is still counting it as her most expensive birthday gift, however).

Here she is standing in her freshly vacuumed room that has a real ceiling, fresh carpet, an actual closet, and a door. It's like a real room!

Yakety Yack

Rachel spoke in church today...finally. She was supposed to give a talk in June, I think, but we were going to be in Utah, so they rescheduled her for a bit later. But then they spontaneously changed around our stake presidency (a member of the stake presidency, who was from our ward, had just submitted mission papers and was being released so he and his wife could go on their mission, and another person from our ward was called into the presidency), and this reorganization meeting just happened to occur the week Rachel had been rescheduled to speak, so her talk was postponed once again. 

So, yes, finally this week was the week she had to speak in church.

You'd think with so much notice she'd have had her talk ready well in advance, but no. She wrote it at midnight after coming home from a multi-stake youth dance in Athens (Grandpa drove the girls and a friend out there, and we are so grateful). 

She had had a lot of time to brainstorm about her talk, though, so it was easier to write than if she hadn't even been thinking about it...but still!

Here's her talk (she read it all in about 2 minutes flat, so she was really zooming through it):

Ugh

The past three weeks I have been filled with horror watching the news coming out of Israel and Palestine. The attacks of 10/7 were unconscionable, horrific, abhorrent, disgusting, and absolutely condemnable. I mourn with Israel and for Israel for the senseless deaths that occurred that day. Their resulting fear, anger, and grief are both palpable and understandable. 

However, I also must unequivocally condemn their retaliation against a nation, who is not a nation, whose only army is not an army, and which is full of people—fully fledged humans, not some animal-human hybrid—who have no where to flee, and whose import (and export) of food, water, power, and aid is controlled by the very people who wish them harm. 

The footage I've seen coming out of Palestine is disturbing to say the least. 

I've heard it said that "On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis...in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day.  That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy." 

I agree that an atrocity of that scale is mind-numbing, but I don't think we can stop doing math there. 

I mean, if we are going to do the math, let's do the math!

Orange you glad?

The thing about setting goals, in my opinion, is that the best time to start is now (not next week, not next year). So in that spirit, I offer the following story of Phoebe, who is forever getting into food (and everything else, for that matter). 

She recently learned how to operate the water and ice dispenser in the fridge, for example, so while she's somehow always been able to coerce several people to give her a drink of water (and ice!) and thus end up with several cups of water sitting out all over creation, her independence has exacerbated this issue. We now have cups of ice/water sitting out all over creation. I have tripped on cups on the stairs, in the middle of the hallway. They've been knocked off stools and counters and benches. The child goes through as many cups as she possibly can. 

So thank goodness her siblings have figured out the "coaster system." We don't use the coasters because we care about surfaces so much, but because using a dedicated unique coaster helps everyone else remember which cup they've been using. So everyone else uses one cup per day and Phoebe uses...20 or so. 

The solution here might be to own fewer cups, but I digress.

Frivolity and fritters

I think I'll attempt NaBloPoMo this year, to help me get back in the habit of sharing stories more regularly. I never imagined I might fall out of that habit, but also feel like I sort of have. Not entirely, of course, but just a little bit. So many other things are eating up my time, so many things are weighing heavily on my mind. Like, for example the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the war between Russia and Ukraine, tonight's mass shooting in Maine. It can be hard for anything to hold a candle to the news sometimes. 

This is a picture I took of Zoë on October 16; she and I had gone outside to entertain Phoebe and I was feeling like my entire life was frivolous (given the news), while also a pretty big mess. But we had a fun time blowing bubbles together.

I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of footprints...

The last thing our contractor did this week was paint the exterior boards he had to replace on the side of the house. Evidently he spilled a not-insignificant quantity of paint on the ground, which Andrew knew about, and which Andrew warned the children to keep away from. 

I'm sure you can see where this story is going.

For the record, I did not know about this spill or I may have done more than warn the children to keep away from it. I also may not have done much more...we've been so exhausted this week, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on the basement. 

On Friday night the girls—who are finally back at our house after spending three weeks at Grandpa's house—had a fire night with their friends. When their friends went home, Andrew and I roped them into helping us finish putting carpet in the unfinished portion of the basement. They weren't terribly happy about this, since they had planned on showering and going to bed, but they were good helpers nonetheless. 

In order to put the carpet down we had to move furniture, roll the carpet padding out, roll the carpet out, move furniture onto the carpet we had just rolled out, roll the carpet padding out, roll the carpet out...until the room was carpeted. 

Although the carpet was more ore less rectangular, there was more cutting and taping involved than I'd like to remember. We must have put the carpet padding in sideways or something because we had to cut so much of that. Anyway...

Waste not, want want

On Thursday we attended our co-op. 

Phoebe went to nursery with Rachel for the first hour and did fairly well, but one hour is about all she can handle in there. She refuses to go to nursery alone and needs to be with momma. 

(Interestingly, today she played with Zoë for somewhere along the lines of nine hours while we were working on the basement and she did just fine without me. Of course, they had unlimited snacks and TV and trampoline time, so it felt like a party. But still...)

So she comes to my second hour class—Holiday STEM—with me. I'm one of three co-teachers (in addition to the head teacher) in that classroom, so it's not like my presence/attention is 100% necessary and I can easily split my energy between the students and Phoebe. 

Because we're so close to Halloween and it's a holiday STEM class, the activities were all centered on Halloween. We did some apple-themed activities in September and some leaf-themed activities last time we met. I think it would be neat to see some other holidays factored in there because I know we had, like, Sukkot at the beginning of October, and Diwali is coming up in November. But, I get that while we're a non-denominational group we are also a de facto Christian group. Personally, I think some awareness of other religions would do us some good...and thus the reason for my thesis...and perhaps PhD. 

Evidently I should suggest a world religions course for our kiddos. 

Anyway, we were doing Halloween-themed STEM activities and one of the projects was to figure out how to stack candy corn to see how tall of a tower they could make. The kids were very excited about this—because candy—and kept asking whether or not they were allowed to eat it. 

To be fair, I'm pretty relaxed about these things and probably would have shrugged and told them to make their own choices. But the mom in charge was like, "Oh, goodness, no! You've all been touching them! They've been on the table! They've been dropped on the floor! They're filthy! We'll throw these away and I will give you some clean candies—if your moms allow you to have sugar—on the way out the door."

So that's what happened.

Moving furniture

October has been a whirlwind. We've mostly been keeping busy moving furniture and moving furniture and moving furniture.

First we moved everything out of the girls' room and away from the wall in the storage room so the basement could be waterproofed. When the drywall was up in the storage room we started to piece the storage room back together, though it's still quite a cumbersome mess since all the stuff from the girls' room is in there as well. 

Last night Andrew and I moved all the furniture in the LEGO room so that we could lay down the old carpet from the girls' room in the LEGO room (we can't reuse their carpet for their room because the footprint of their floor has changed—they have a closet now and we had to take out some of the built-ins). And then we moved the furniture back onto the carpet we just put down. And then we moved all the furniture from the "main room" into the LEGO room so that we can repaint in there. 

That doesn't sound like a lot once it's all written out. I think what's overwhelming is knowing we have to move everything back to where we ultimately want it (and need to finish putting carpet in the LEGO room).

Alexander is 6!

As I may have mentioned, Rachel and Miriam have been staying at Grandpa's house while we've been under construction over here. It's given us a little taste of what life might be like in the next five years or so, with both those girls grown and gone. And, really, it hasn't been so bad...but only because they're still close enough to come home for dinner.

They'll be happy to be back in their own room (soon), I'm sure. 

The last couple of nights, Rachel has stayed late working on Alexander's birthday cake, requiring rides home (to Grandpa's house) in the wee hours of the morning. I drove her home on Thursday night. Andrew drove her home last night. 

It's really kind of a strange dynamic we have at our house lately.

But Alexander's cake turned out beautifully. He requested an owl-shaped cake, which he felt would be a challenge for Rachel, who prefers to make round cakes. It would help her expand her skillset, he told her—help her grow in ways she didn't think she could. 

And it was a challenge that allowed her to explore several new techniques. 

Anyway, when Rachel and Miriam turned up at the house this morning, Alexander took one look at them and said, "PRESENTS!"

So that's what we did.

Miriam had helped wrap presents one evening when she was here late and we had them set out in the music room the last couple of days. Alexander mentioned that he decided for his birthday he might like to have some presents and I said, "Too bad. I don't think we have any of those."

"Can't I just have those presents?" he asked, pointing to the stack of presents.

"Oh, those presents? I guess so," I said. 

Here he is ready to open presents this morning:

A wee hike

We had planned to go hiking this week, but instead we're just hanging around at home while our house is being prettied up. Today our contractor worked on the roof because rain had been leaking through the roof, running down the walls, and pooling inside the walls downstairs. 

Our roof was disclosed as "new within 5 years" in our paperwork, but apparently the previous owners just slapped new shingles on top of the old shingles. The old shingles were already old and tired in this particular "valley" of our roof and the new shingles were (according to our contractor) installed poorly—they bent them rather than overlapping them at an angle...or something...which compromised their integrity from the get-go. So, anyway, the new shingles soon cracked, the old shingles were cracked and no one thought to put any flashing down in this corner, so the wood was all rotting away. 

But! It's fixed now, so all the rain water we're getting tonight (and we're getting plenty) should be running off the roof instead of inside our house. 

Tomorrow they're fixing some of our siding that is rotting (in this corner where all the rainwater was leaking through our house instead of...not) and they'll be putting up drywall soon. And then we can paint and get new carpet and stick the girls back in there. 

And then we can go hiking. 

Today I just took the kids to the park and we did a very little walk there. Rachel's taking geology this semester and she's supposed to go out and identify rocks. This week she's supposed to be looking for sedimentary rocks. I'm not sure we found any...but maybe we'll be able to sneak away for a hike this weekend. 

Here are the kids all balancing on a log for me: