And now for something completely different!

Last night we waited to have dinner until after my class. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It depends on how the day goes, who is making dinner, and the level of everyone's hunger. My class gets out at 6:00 so it's not like it makes for a super late supper, but sometimes we like to eat earlier. 

Anyway, Zoë made dinner all by herself while I was in class. She greeted me precisely at 6:00 to tell me so.

"Mmmmm," I said, sniffing the air. "Smells like spaghetti."

"Well, it's not spaghetti!" she said. 

"Oh!" I said in surprise (because it really smelled like spaghetti). "What is it?"

"Something different!"

"But what?"

"You will just have to find out!" she sang, practically dancing out of my bedroom/office.

I followed her downstairs and found a steaming pot of...cavatappi...on the table. 

Cavatappi is a noodle shape. 

So essentially spaghetti.

And it was delicious.

Wild Robot

Rachel and I left the house...when it was still dark...to spend the day on campus...on a Saturday...because I had a meeting for the Georgia Children's Book Award. It was a long day!

When I got home, Zoë happily chirped that the books she'd ordered had arrived and she'd already finished reading Wild Robot and that Daddy said we could have a movie night to watch it tonight even though no one else had read the book yet. 

Phoebe and Daddy had spent the day in the kitchen making pretzels (each one got a kiss from Phoebe, but don't worry because after the kiss they were boiled and then baked) and some, like, babka or something (almost cinnamon rolls, but not quite), so the house smelled delicious, and anything sounded good for dinner after our Friday evening YOYO fail. 

I came home from the meeting carting a wagon full of books—library books that I'd checked out and kept away from the kids so I knew I'd have them all for our meeting, and a couple extra books from our meeting that I was able to take home. And then Andrew was nice enough to run to the library for me to return some books that were due soon and to pick up my holds that were expiring soon, while I took the kids out for a walk to stretch our legs and our eyes, even though all they wanted to do was sit around and read. 

They're like little book vultures.

YOYO*...oh, no.

Our dishwasher broke this week (because...why not?). 

Was I grateful for that dishwasher? Immensely. 

Was it my favourite dishwasher in the world? Not remotely. 

So when we got an estimate for how much it would cost to fix it versus how much it would cost to simply get a new machine...guess what we went with. 

Is that environmentally friendly? I honestly don't think so. 

Do I know why manufacturers make machines that aren't easily repairable? Absolutely not.

I mean, I understand that it ultimately means more money for them, but it really feels like it would be better for everybody if these things were simply...easy to repair. 

*****

We're about a month into the semester and things are heating up. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is once again an absolute marathon. 

The dishwasher broke on Monday—and for once not after I had touched it last (both the stove and the washing machine died after I touched them last but the dishwasher is not on me!). 

On Tuesday (my long day on campus), Andrew ordered pizza for dinner.

On Wednesday we had leftovers.

On Thursday we had leftovers.

On Friday our new dishwasher was delivered and installed and...we had leftovers.

Razzle Dazzle

Phoebe got into one of her favourite things last night—Zoë's purple lip gloss. She figured that if that purple sheen was that dazzling on her lips, surely it would be dazzling everywhere! 

Do *YOU* have a billdew?

In my mail preview I saw that we were supposed to get a letter from BYU-Idaho today. Usually that's because we've missed some charge on Rachel's account. Here's the thing: we pay tuition because it's pretty obvious when that is due, but then sometimes her courses will have textbooks that they will automatically charge us for her to use...at random points in the semester. Like we will check and check and check...and then we'll forget to check for charges. And then they'll charge us and send us a letter in the mail saying, "Hey! Pay for your textbooks already!"

It's fine. 

So I walked down to her room and said, "Hey, do you have a bill due at BYU-I?"

And she goes, "What's a billdew?"

And I was like, "You know...like...when you have a bill that you have to pay at a certain time and..."

"Oh!" she said. "I thought you were talking about a thing called a billdew. And I was like, I don't even know what that is..."

And I said, "I don't know what a billdew is either, but this does not bode well for sending you out into the world..."

"Hey!" she said.

I thought I did, I thought I did...

Today there was a copy of The Little Engine That Could in a "Little Free Library" we passed while out on a walk, so we took it home with us. On a very technical level, I believe that we have a copy of this book in our house somewhere, but I don't know where it is off the top of my head and I haven't read it to the kids in years so it's possible it didn't move with us...or...at any rate, we haven't read it for a long time.

But we read it today and then the kids wanted to get out one of our felt board games (that are typically reserved only for sacrament meeting, to keep them novel and entertaining on Sundays). The kids know the back side of this felt board because it's The Three Little Kittens and I sometimes sing that to them for a bedtime song, but I guess they've kind of been in the dark about the significance of the train part. 

Not that they haven't ever played with the trains—they definitely had—they just didn't realize they could have been retelling the specific story of The Little Engine That Could. My bad.

I thought I had read them this story. I thought I did. I thought I did. I thought I did...

But for sure I have now.

A-B-C-D

Phoebe made me a bookmark during reading time this morning. It's a picture of Luna (the neighbour's dog), obviously. You can tell because of the legs.

We're reading Codename Kingfisher by Liz Kessler, but my thoughts are only tangentially on the topic of the book (which is a holocaust story). Or perhaps they are precisely on target, but also tangential. 

Because everything looks the same, everything feels normal. Until it's not. 

All homemade (except the stuff that isn't)

Last night Rachel was cleaning her room when she came across a UFO (an UnFinished Object), which she decided to take a few minutes to finish. It was a hat she had started during General Conference...in October...of 2021. 

She's standing over my shoulder as I type this and would like to say that in her defense she started it then, put it down, and left it down for 3+ years before picking it up again. 

I suppose that's an excuse.

At any rate (and the rate in this case was incredibly slow because it took her 3+ years to do so) Rachel has finally finished the hat!

This morning Zoë helped Phoebe try on all our most recent handmade items (hat and sweater by Rachel, scarf by Zoë):

As Rachel put it,  Phoebe looked very Dobby-esque. Phoebe also requested pants and socks. We'll have to work on that.

In other news, Benjamin's new sweater arrived today. 

Free money

We finally redeemed the gift certificate Zoë for the spooky story contest. The last time I used this particular bookstore was when Benjamin won the spooky story contest a few years ago, so I was surprised to find that my gift card balance was $50 instead of the promised $25. 

I did a little digging into our account and found out that when Benjamin and I ordered his books—and I have a distinct memory of this—I had used my credit card to pay the little bit he went over. It's really hard to hit exactly $25 when spending a gift card and the total in his cart came to something like $28 when it came time to check out. So I was like, "That's fine. I can pay $3 to get him these books."

That's where they get you with these gift cards, isn't it?

They doubly got us, though, because when I went to check out I somehow overrode the gift card payment and payed the whole thing with my credit card. We've just had $25 sitting at the bookstore for the past couple of years!

So Zoë picked out her $25+ of books (remember—it's very difficult to hit that $25 precisely) and I thought, "That's fine. I can pay a couple of bucks to get her these books." 

But then I looked at my total and it told me that we still had a good $20 left to spend on books!

It really was like finding free money! 

So we stuck a couple more books in our cart...and still ended up paying a couple of dollars using my credit card. BUT this time I was sure to actually apply the gift cards as well. 

I think I'm most excited about Wild Robot. We haven't read it yet (or watched the movie) but I've heard excellent things about it. It is always, always, always checked out at the library and I haven't jumped into the hold line yet. I've been putting holds on so many other things lately—for both my class on Race, Class, and Gender in Children's Literature and for my job with the Georgi Children's Book Award—that I just...haven't bother putting this on hold, especially knowing that we'd only have it for three weeks with no hope of renewing...but also that so many different people in our house want to read it that we'd need more than three weeks with it to let everyone read it. 

So I think this was a wise purchase.

This evening at dinner

For some reason, Andrew mentioned that Costco sells elk antlers...for dogs to chew on. This got Benjamin very excited, but Andrew told him that he was not going to buy any for him. 

"It's not like the entire antler," Andrew said. "It's just pieces of elf antler."

"ELF ANTLERS!" the little kids all squealed. 

"Ugh. Wrong continent," Andrew moaned.

"WRONG CONTINENT?!" the kids howled. "Where do you think elves live?!"

"Wrong consonant! I swear I said consonant!"

"You did, in fact, say continent," I solemnly informed Andrew. 

"This is like cannibalism!" Zoë exclaimed. 

And thus ensued a long conversation about (a) Andrew's knowledge about which animals live in the south pole and which live in the north pole—he gets them confused sometimes and (b) the hierarchy of humanoid creatures in The Lord of the Rings and who is okay with eating who and (c) how this translates back to our own realm regarding humans, elves, and apes. 

Apparently elves outrank humans. Orcs are fallen elves who don't necessarily outrank humans but who definitely would eat humans. But in our world humans outrank elves, so we could eat elves, but only if we were fell humans.

Andrew was laughing so hard he was crying.