Phoebe, sweet Phoebe

This morning, Phoebe brought me a paper that said: "Phoebe, sweet Phoebe."

Technically it said:

PHOEBE
SOET
PHOEBE

Vanil (no-laa)

Vanilla is a word that will always make me a little bit angry. 

When I was in grade five we had individualized spelling lists (I've told this story before) of misspelled words that were pulled from our writing. I tended to write a lot and also wasn't afraid to use words that I wasn't quite sure of the spelling for, so I had some rather tricky words on my spelling list. Or perhaps I simply felt the words were tricky because they were words that I clearly already found to be tricky (having misspelled them in the first place).

I had this one friend who would purposely write as little as possible and very slowly and carefully so as to select only the words which she knew she knew how to spell. In that way she avoided spelling tests in the first place. 

Clever? Perhaps. 

But I couldn't write that way. I wrote furiously, passionately, filling page after page with copious script, using the most lavish words I could think of. I wrote some very purple passages, I'm sure, and I had a spelling list as extensive as my little vocabulary could muster. 

I took risks. I spelled a lot of things wrong. 

Where my friend would write "yummy" I would try out "delicious" or "scrumptious" and...I'd probably leave out an i or something. Onto the list it would go! 

And that's fine. 

I just then had to learn how to spell those words, which, again, was fine. It's not like it's outlandish to have to learn how to properly spell scrumptious. I was fine. 

But I also was forever telling stories about words. 

Infantilizing and Brachiating

Rachel held Dean for a quite a while at the ward party. He is, as I've mentioned, a rather chill baby and is happy in most any position (as long as he is being held at all times, if you please). So for a while Rachel was walking around with him held vertically, like this:

Granted—this picture is not at the ward party. This picture is from Rosie's house. But you get the picture, right? Dean was held upright, vertically, perpendicular to the ground.  

Meeting Dean

We finally got up to Tennessee to meet our newest cousin Dean! It was a whirlwind trip—and kind of chaotic with the Nashville Marathon, which Austin ran with his sister Hallee—but we were so happy to get to visit with Rosie and her family and to be there for Dean's blessing.

Phoebe has been so very excited about meeting Dean...and then spent most of her time playing with Oaklyn and Ireland. But that post isn't about that. It's all about Dean!

Here's Phoebe with Dean (he has two sisters right around Phoebe's age and has learned to be a little nervous around kids that size):

Graduate Awards and Recognitions Event

 

This past December I was awarded the Carol J. Fisher Award for Excellence in Research (in memory of Hugh Agee) and today was our awards banquet so I got to receive the award there. I'm two years into this program now, which means I've spent about five years in the department as a graduate student...with a few more years to go before I'm finished!

A.C.T. now!

Today was my last full day of classes (I technically still have a class on Thursday but it's not a full day), which means I have no readings left to do. On the one hand that's nice because now I can just focus on getting my writing projects finished. On the other hand it's kind of unfortunate because I don't have a "productive" way to put off the writing that I need to do (and, um, it's kind of a lot of writing). 

So instead I'm writing this!

This morning, Miriam and I were walking from the parking lot up to Aderhold and she was saying how relieved she was that she didn't have anything to worry about (just rubbing in the fact that her semester was over, I guess, while mine is so painfully lingering). 

"Except for my ACT score..." she said with a pout, then screamed, "I GOT MY ACT SCORE!"

Because at that exact moment she got an email telling her that her ACT score was in.

Sometimes it feels like we live in a sitcom. 

There's a snake in my...wall!

A big ol' rat snake periodically uses our back porch as its shedding grounds. Sometimes we see it around and sometimes we only find its ecdysis. Today we were...lucky...enough to find both.

Andrew texted me while I was in a meeting to tell me that...there was a big ol' rat snake slithering up the side yard. The kids encountered it on their way to the trampoline. 

By the time I got out of my meeting it had taken refuge in the bush beside our garage...and Benjamin had found its long ecdysis on the back porch. As you can see, it's at least three feet long! 

Other Music News

I forgot to write about Rachel's choir concert! 

It was a Tuesday night (March 31) so Miriam and I watched half it in on our commute home from Athens and then watched the rest of it in Andrew's office. 

Andrew took a bunch of screenshots but I honestly don't know where I put them...like...they're on my computer somewhere probably...but I don't know where precisely (and should be writing actual papers so I'm not going to take the time to find them now). I got to attend Rachel's concert in person in December, which was wonderful, but I think it's so nice that streaming events like this is "normal" these days because I don't think it always was (or at least not so quick and easy to access). 

Here's a quick view of Rachel:

I zoomed in on her below in case you need help finding her (she is in the second row from the back, third girl from the right):

Anna Lapwood at UGA

I don't even know how I got a ticket to Anna Lapwood's concert, honestly.

We were so excited when we saw her on the list of performers on UGA's docket for this semester. I marked the first day of ticket sales on the calendar and Miriam and I were both poised and ready to buy the minute the portal opened. 

But somehow the show was completely sold out—like, immediately. 

It was rather disappointing. 

But life moves on.

We planned instead for Miriam to head out to Utah with Grandpa, intending for her to hang out with Rachel until the semester was over (Rachel comes home on Thursday)...

But then I was talking with someone on campus about Miriam and Anna Lapwood and they were like, "Seriously—her show is sold out? She can't be that famous!! You should check again."

First of all, Anna Lapwood is that famous. 

But, second of all, there's no harm in trying, right?

Sun letters, moon letters

We recently finished learning all the letters of the Arabic alphabet and now are moving into other little details of the language. One of the benefits of learning a foreign language is the opportunity to look at your own language from a different perspective, which can help you to understand why your first language works the way it does. 

We've spent the past couple of days looking at the difference between sun letters and moon letters. A sun letter causes the "al-" prefix (meaning "the") to assimilate with itself. So, for example, in Arabic "sun" is شمس (shams) and "the sun" is الشمس (al-shams) but you actually pronounce it as ash-shams because "sh" causes the "l" to assimilate. In Arabic "moon" is قمر (qamar) and "the moon" is القمر (al-qamar) and in this case it really is pronounced al-qamar because the "q" doesn't cause the "l" to assimilate. 

When Andrew learned about these they felt somewhat arbitrary to him but slowly began to feel intuitive. 

When he initially taught them to me he spouted off this arbitrary list and I was like, "Yeah. No way am I ever going to remember that."

Like, I knew al-noor changed into an-noor and a few other things that could help me remember but mostly I was like, "There has to be a reason for this, a pattern of sorts." 

Of course, I never bothered to actually determine the pattern because, well, learning Arabic wasn't precisely top-priority in my life (I was busy surviving infants and toddlers). But, when I was teaching it to the kids the other day and I presented them the list of sun and moon letters, I said to myself, "Okay, let's figure out why! There has to be a reason..."

So, here's the list from Wikipedia:

Sun letters	ت	ث	د	ذ	ر	ز	س	ش	ص	ض	ط	ظ	ل	ن
	t	th	d	dh	r	z	s	sh	ṣ	ḍ	ṭ	ẓ	l	n
	/t/	/θ/	/d/	/ð/	/r/	/z/	/s/	/ʃ/	/sˤ/	/dˤ/	/tˤ/	/ðˤ/	/l/	/n/
Moon letters	ا	ب	ج	ح	خ	ع	غ	ف	ق	ك	م	ه	و	ي
	ʼ	b	j	ḥ	kh	ʻ	gh	f	q	k	m	h	w	y
	/ʔ/	/b/	/d͡ʒ/*	/ħ/	/x/	/ʕ/	/ɣ/	/f/	/q/	/k/	/m/	/h/	/w/	/j/

They explain this all in the article there, as well, but we didn't read that initially. We just read what was in the textbook, which didn't explain anything about why sun and moon letters exist, simply listing them out. And that's fine.