My funny valentine

Zoë made pancakes for dinner on Friday evening—picking one of Daddy's favourite foods to celebrate his homecoming. But she made them special by drawing little hearts on them for Valentine's Day.

Grown ups come back

After a long week of Daddy being away, we sure are happy to have him home again! Here are the kids eating some wafer cookies from Thailand that Andrew brought back to share with the kids:

Although Andrew has never been to Thailand, he has partied with people who have. 

Thus the cookies.

Theory of Mind

A few weeks ago Andrew gave an FHE lesson that involved us learning about theory of mind and watching a demonstration of the Sally-Anne test. In this test a girl named Sally places a marble into her basket and then leaves the room. While she's out, Anne takes the marble from Sally's basket and puts it into her own box. 

He paused the video mid-demonstration and asked everyone where they thought Sally would look for her marble first—noting that we should please hold our answers until...

"In the box!" Phoebe (and Benjamin!) blurted out.

"No! In the basket!" all the other kids said. 

"Hey!" I reminded them as they all squabbled, "Dad said to wait to give your answers."

"No, it's okay," he chuckled. "I mostly wanted to see what Phoebe would say...but the fact that Benjamin gave the same answer is, uh, revelatory." 

Sunday, Sunday...

Andrew's been out of town this week, which has been...a lot. But that's okay! He's almost home and then life can get back to normal for a little while. 

On Saturday evening, our neighbour texted to ask if their son could come hang out "tomorrow" from around 1:00 until around 4:00 because the mom of the family had a work thing and the dad of the family had to leave for a trip and they just...needed a safe place for a few hours. And I said that was fine. We love having this little boy over—he's just the sweetest thing!

But for some reason I put it down on my calendar for Monday since Monday was on my mind as the day that our daddy was leaving on a trip...or something. 

So I was a little surprised when I got a text at 12:55 asking if we were ready for little J to come over. 

I was like, "Oh, no! Was that today?! I thought it was Monday!"

Luckily, we were only about five minutes from home, so we made it in time for our neighbour to leave and J had a wonderful time at our house...along with just about every other child on the planet. 

The reason we were so late coming home from church is because we were organizing all kinds of kid swaps. Zoë headed home with Kate, while we had a passel of teenagers planning to crash our house for an afternoon of D&D. I knew about two of the teenagers, but was surprised when another one stopped by with her little sister. 

They knocked, opened the door, and let themselves in.

"Oh, hi!" I said. "Ummm...so Zoë isn't here this afternoon."

"She's not?!" said the younger sister of the pair.

"Unfortunately not. She went over to Kate's. But you're welcome to stay and play anyway," I said. 

"I guess I will," she said, "Because my dad already drove away..."

She seemed to have a good time, even though the teenagers told her she wasn't allowed to hang out with them. She hung out with the little kids and kept them all happy, so it kind of worked out great!

So we had nine kids over. 

By the time parents were coming to pick up their kids, we had moved outside to play, which drew all the neighbourhood kids out of their houses as well. I think we ended up with 13 kids playing in the cul-de-sac.

We played kick-the-can and kick ball and four square, ran races, rode scooters, had pogo stick contests and all sorts of good fun. 

Here's a picture of some of the kids...from Monday, actually...playing on the leftover chalk lines from Sunday afternoon's play:

Bedtime unicorns

We are trying to be consistent about putting Phoebe to bed, but we are also exhausted pretty much most of the time. So sometimes when Phoebe sneaks into our bed I simply...pretend to stay asleep. That way I'm not giving her permission to be there, but I also don't have to get up and deal with all the tears and trauma involved in tucking her back in. 

Last night she had a bit of a rough night. She wet the bed for the first time in forever and it was the strangest thing. I walked into her room to put away a sweater and she sat bolt upright in bed.

"Mom, you know what's kind of strange? My pants feel a little bit wet," she said without so much as a minute of hesitation. 

This in itself was odd because the other night (Thursday, perhaps?) she woke up just as I was heading downstairs for a close-to-midnight run (I have the workout schedule of a champion) and she called out, "Mom...Mom...could you...uhhh...did you...uhhhh...do the...uhhh...the...uhhh...the...uhhhh...the...uhhh..."

"I think you should go back to sleep," I encouraged. 

"Okay. But...uhhhhh...did...uhhhhh...did...uhhh...did...uhhh...did you do the....uh...uhhh...reading thing? Uhhh...did you read to the kids?"

"I did. I finished reading hours ago. Everyone is in bed. It's the middle of the night."

"Okay...uhhhh..."

She just could not spit out a sentence! But last night she just sat up and started talking like she'd never been asleep.

"My pants feel a little bit wet."

Gardening Club

We had our first day of Gardening Club today! A bunch of families rented out a garden space together in our pool's community garden and the lady in charge said she'd give gardening lessons to the kids every week or so, to talk to the kids about how to tend their plants and use what they grow. She's been running the garden for about 15 years now so she knows what she's talking about!

That's nice because...I don't!

They also put a nice deer fence up this winter. It's about 12 feet tall and has a lovely gate, so our produce has half a chance at surviving until we're ready to eat it. Our deer population is so plentiful right now that the city is talking about doing a cull of sorts. 

Anyway, today the kids weeded our plot. Here they are after the job was done:

Groundhog Day (and other nonsense)

Phoebe was so excited that today was hedgehog day (I mean groundhog day) and I meant to do some fun activities with her...but it ended up being a much busier day than I had bargained for. But she had a lot of fun creating her own mythology around what groundhog day means. 

According to Punxsutawney Phil, we're getting six more weeks of winter, but these kinds of prognostications mean very little when you're this far south. 

Our county had a digital learning day while we continued to recover from the weekend's snowstorm. 

And our friends in Durham have had kids home from school since January 23rd! 

I think everyone's aching for life to go back to normal. I hear they're even protesting against ice in Minnesota. So that just goes to show how much people would like the winter weather to pack up and go home. And maybe it should.

Phoebe was actually terribly upset when she looked out the (sunny) front window and saw no snow because she had eaten a big salad with her dinner last night (of her own making). Andrew had made some delicious pizza and we had salad fixings on the side, but Phoebe created a huge salad for herself, which she mentioned looked like a bowl of ice cream, with sprinkles on top (all kinds of peppers that she cut into small pieces). 

There's some inside joke about getting a large bowl of ice cream...if one has had a large bowl of salad...between Andrew and his dad. So they joked about that and then Phoebe was like, "Ice cream...sounds like a good idea."

We don't typically have ice cream in our freezer, though, so I told her she could lick the snow if she wanted to.

She did not want to...because it was dark. 

I told her she could lick the snow in the morning, but then there was no snow left in the front yard!

So we checked the (shady) back deck and there was still snow out there so she licked it before breakfast...to celebrate both her large bowl of salad and groundhog day (or hedgehog day or whatever funny animal day we were calling it...quizzically something to do with both snow and shadow...what is this nonsense? She had no idea but was more than willing to play along).

*****

Guest Lecture and Home Church

This morning Andrew braved the "treacherous" road conditions to drive me to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. I'm sure the roads were icy somewhere, but I think we saw two little patches of ice the whole way, so we made it to our destination just fine. 

I was so nervous about delivering this lecture, but Andrew reminded me that my audience was there not to tear apart my arguments but to take something away from what I said. They were there to listen and learn, not judge. 

A tiny snowman, a bigger snowman, and other snow fun

We're never quite sure how winter storms are going to go here. 

We were supposed to wake up to snow, but we didn't. And nothing was really cancelled yet, which felt logical given the acute lack of snow. But then Grandpa started getting worried about the potential sleepover he'd planned with the kids when it started snowing up at his place. So we adjusted those plans, which Phoebe found agonizingly disappointing. 

But then I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing here! 

"What are we doing moping about inside?" I asked. "It's snowing!!"

"It's not sticking," the kids moaned.

"This is Georgia!" I reminded them. "This may be as good as it gets, so if you want snow you'd better get out there!"

That actually cheered Phoebe up quite a bit. She stopped fussing and started getting ready to head outside. It was only lightly snowing and there wasn't much sticking around to speak of, but Alexander managed to scrounge up enough to make this tiny snowman (that Uncle Patrick said looked like a duck):

Same vibes

It snowed today! 

We got an unimpressive dusting this morning, which was a little bit of a disappointment since the forecast said we should wake up to an inch or more. But then we got more in the afternoon, which was fun. 

Alexander was outside most of the day, and some of the pictures I got reminded me of him when he was a tiny baby boy (January 2019)...