How Does Your Garden Grow?

Miriam has been excited about being in a musical at school since Rachel's first musical, back when Rachel was in grade one. She loyally attended Rachel's second grade musical last year, and enjoyed watching Rachel's musical twice this year (once during school and once for the evening performance) and just a few days later it would be Rachel's turn to watch her.

But then the musical was postponed, as I've mentioned, which was an enormous disappointment for Miriam. Her excitement, which had been mounting daily, suddenly came to a grinding, screeching, anticlimactic halt. She'd have to wait to get her chance to perform?! And not only that, but she'd have to wait until an undetermined date—TBD!

Her excitement plateaued for a while, but soon began climbing once again.

After so many weeks of waiting, I was beginning to wonder if her little body could contain any more emotion. She made it all the way to seven weeks after the originally scheduled event all in one piece and was, needless to say, thrilled to perform for us tonight.

Andrew had taken Benjamin out (to use the bathroom, maybe?) and caught a picture of Miriam in the hallway. She opted to ignore him...

All that glitters is not gold. This carrot also glitters.

Rachel's Wax Museum

Last night Miriam said family prayer and was sure to pray a lot about the first grade musical—that it would go well and everyone would remember their lines and songs and so forth. When she finished her prayer Rachel caustically (and nervously) remarked, "Thanks for mentioning the wax museum, Miriam!"

Sarcasm runs deep in these waters. Miriam, you see, had made no petition in her prayer about the wax museum.

I assured Rachel that her wax museum would be fine and that she could pray for it to go well in her personal prayers and that I would pray for her, too. (And we talked with Miriam about how we should try to remember to think about others in our prayers, especially when we're saying family prayer).

The wax museum went on without a hitch.

We had a little bit of trouble leaving the house this morning and arrived at the school around 11:25 instead of 11:00 (the wax museum was from 10 to 11:30), but we were able to find Rachel and listen to her give her little speech a few times as well as visit a few of her friends. It was a fun little outing for Benjamin and Zoë, though by the time we got there the kids were getting a little tired of repeating their speeches since the entire school had come by to visit their museum already!

Each of the kids had a little "button" in front of them that you had to press to activate their speech. It was very cute and Rachel did very well.

Here's Rachel dressed up as Amelia Earhart:

The most beautiful carrot on the block

The days of walking into the store and exiting with a giant piece of florescent poster board are, apparently, over. Either that or I don't know where to find it! We looked in the school supplies section of our friendly neighbourhood grocery store. They had plain white poster board, and a few other colours but not what we needed. For this project we needed orange (and I wasn't about to try to colour a project that size orange).

"Staples," Andrew said as we gave up hunting through the rack.

So yesterday after I took the children to the dentist (no cavities—yippee!) and after we stopped at the museum to play for a bit (because why not; running them back to school (at 3:00) seemed pointless and I had them all with me) we ran to Staples to look for orange poster board.

For an office supplies store they were sorely lacking in the poster board department.

Power Point must've usurped poster board's throne at some point in time...

We finally found their rack of poster board. Everything seemed to come in packs though. And I didn't want a pack of poster board. I wanted one poster board. And I wanted it to be orange.

I could buy a pack of white poster board.

I could buy a pack of poster board that was neon yellow on one side and neon pink on the other.

I could buy a pack of poster board that was red on one side and green on the other.

Oh, look!

A single piece of poster board for sale...with balloons around the edges.

No thanks.

A single piece of poster board for sale...with a rapidly dandruffing glitter boarder.

Not for my worst enemy.

I sighed with defeat.

But then! A glimmering sparkle of something orange caught my eye...

Books

Last night we had a post-activity-justification family night. We hadn't darkened the library's door for far too long and we had to exchange our books for new ones. Andrew didn't get home until nearly seven, which made for a rather late dinner and an even later trip to the library, but it was fun to be together (the library is one place I don't usually visit by myself with all the kids because 4 children + 3 bags of books = not enough me to go around) and pick out new books to read. When we got home it was definitely bedtime so as we pulled into the driveway Andrew said that we'd go in, have scriptures and prayer, go over our family calendar, and that would be it for family night. No lesson, because bedtime.

So I paraphrased D&C 88:118, "Seek ye wisdom out of the best books of learning and all that."

Boom. Lessoned.

You'd think, after how many years of being at BYU that I'd have that scripture nailed down. That particular scripture is on the wall of the landing of the staircase between the third and fourth floor of the Harold B. Lee Library. My mom has worked on the fourth floor for the past fifteen years or so. I trudged up those stairs to her office every day when I was a student (both to visit her and because I worked on the sixth floor so...) and continued to visit her nearly every day after I had graduated and was working on campus as an actual employee (we'd often go for lunch break walks or I'd just stop to visit for a few minutes while waiting for Andrew to finish up on campus (because we've only ever had one car)). Anyway, I have read that scripture a billion times; I should be able to quote it verbatim, but I've never sat down and formally committed it to memory so I can't.

I just finished reading Still Alice by Lisa Genova. And I think I failed like half the memory tests she put in there—the "remember this address" test and the "remember this list of random words from the dictionary" test. Seriously. When she got to the part where Alice was trying to recall this information I was always like, "Aw, man! I can't remember either!"

But I'm pretty sure I don't have Alzheimers. I think I'm just overtired.

Zoë at 11 months

This year has flown by! Already I'm worried that I didn't savour Zoë's babyhood well enough. With three other kids to look after it's difficult to know if I'm giving any them the attention they need. While I'm happy to know the difficult moments are passing just as quickly, it's hard to know that childhood is fleeting. These babies are growing up right before my eyes.

Zoë turned eleven months old yesterday. I'm not sure I've ever quite caught her turning a month older on the actual day she turns a month older. I'll never be one of those moms who takes a picture of their baby with a sticker on their onesie declaring how many months they are. Obviously. But here's Zoë at around eleven months "with" her cousin Maren (who is around a year old). They're both learning how to balance:

Benjamin's first family portrait

Benjamin was born a fighter. Once he decided he was coming there was, literally, no stopping him (believe me, we tried). As a little preemie in the NICU he refused bottles and pacifiers alike (even with coaching from an occupational therapist). He could roll over before he'd even reached his due date and I think the only reason it took him so long to crawl or walk was because his head was too big for him to hold up. He hardly babbled until he was 18 months old; I was sure he was suffering from a speech delay, but he finally started talking (and hasn't stopped since).

Potty training him has been the worst.

Getting him to do anything that wasn't originally his idea is...difficult.

He's a bouncing-off-the-walls, pooping-in-the-corner, talking-much-too-loud, always-getting-into-mischief kind of boy.

Would it surprise you to learn he's resisted learning how to draw/write/colour? It's been quite the uphill battle. For the longest time all he'd do was scribble—and I was excited about those scribbles!

Now, scissors? Those he learned to use early on.

A good "project" for Benjamin involves cutting up paper and then taping, gluing or stapling those little pieces back together in haphazard fashion. And then cutting it up all over again.

Occasionally he scribbles on the paper before cutting it, but very rarely.

During sacrament meeting while his sisters create colourful, full-page masterpieces, Benjamin can be found twisting the ward bulletin into a "lightsaber."

To sum up: Benjamin is not interested in writing.

This morning when he brought me a piece of paper and asked if he could draw on it I, of course, said yes. I always (usually) encourage him to write/draw/colour when it's his idea because it so rarely is his idea. I was even more excited when he brought me his picture for praise and it was actually a picture!

He'd drawn our family! From left to right is Daddy, Benjamin, Zoë, Rachel giving Miriam a piggyback ride, and Mommy.

After the musical

We been slowly readjusting to life post-musical. On Saturday Zoë and Daddy were suffering from burnout (and rightly so since we'd been out late for the musical the night before and were destined for another late night that night as well) and had a bit of a sleep-in together:

How someone so small can take up so much room in the bed I will never quite understand!

Knock on wood

Last week Benjamin stayed dry three nights in a row. Three nights, people!

"Maybe he's finally finished potty training," Andrew remarked casually.

"Noooooooo!" I howled dramatically. "You said The Words! Now you've jinxed everything and he's going to wet the bed and then not stay dry for another month all because you said The Words!"

So, of course, he's back to regularly wetting the bed because he was on a three-day fluke, not a three-day streak. 

But speaking of flukes, I had the most fantastic fluke last night: Zoë slept in her bed, alone, from around 11:30 pm to around 1:00 am. 

First of all, this is the first time she's gone to bed before 2:00 am in weeks, and the first time she's gone to bed before midnight in months. 

Second of all, she let me put her down in her own bed. Her own bed, people! She hasn't slept in her own bed in...ever. She even woke up and looked around and then decided going back to sleep was a fine thing to do. Of course, I ended up sitting beside her with my arm draped over her for about twenty minutes because every time I tried to leave she'd wake up to shoot me a killer look, but eventually I was able to leave her side and she stayed sleeping. 

FHE x 3

Tonight for FHE we went to the stake centre to help strike the set—the final nail in the coffin of the musical. I should probably do a final blog post on the production (and I'm sure I'll get around to that eventually). Right now we're feeling relieved that it's over but are also missing all the action.

Rachel cried herself to sleep on Saturday night. I had to remind her that we had this FHE planned for Monday, and she has a stake Activity Day Girls activity on Saturday, and we have a little cast party in a couple of weeks—all wonderful times to see her new friends. She was really mourning the end of the show.

She took a shower after we got home on Saturday and left me a note in the shower thanking me for making her try out and do the musical. Side note: is there anything more rewarding as a parent than that? Side note #2: Andrew got this "AquaNotes" thing that he saw because he always has such great ideas in the shower, and while he has written down a few ideas of his own it's mostly been used for the girls and I to write notes back and forth on (which is fun and, though not its intended purpose, useful in its own right).

Anyway, Andrew wasn't 100% sold on attending this cast FHE since we've already invested a billion hours in the musical and he was sick of driving to the stake centre and all that was planned was cleaning up the big mess our cast had left behind. But the girls were both adamant that we attend, so we did. And we had fun helping clean up our big mess. I'm always amazed at how many hands make light work—a lot more people showed up than I'd expected (yes, treats were promised; we brought cookies) and it felt like no one did very much but all together we dismantled the set, cleaned the stage and gym, and packed up everything in an hour and a half. Quite remarkable!

We came away with a few souvenirs: my socks from Me Ol' Bamboo, a tray from Toot Sweets, our head shots, a copy of The Suppression of Children Act, and a bamboo pole, among other little trinkets.

Here's Zoë doing her best impression of the bamboo dancers:

Conference

Yesterday in Relief Society we talked about the most recent General Conference. Someone mentioned that we should focus on getting what we need to get out of conference, rather than watching it and thinking, "Oh, I hope So-and-so is listening because they really need to work on!"

Being introspective rather than judgemental is certainly important when it comes to matters of the spirit, but I had to laugh because one of my most touching parts of conference was listening to President Uchtdorf's talk on Sunday morning and thinking, "Oh, I hope So-and-so is listening because they really need to hear this!"

And I was filled with hope that, perhaps for the first time in years, they were listening.

So-and-so sent me an email recently that said, "I know nothing about genealogy (mostly because I suck and am just now trying really hard to be a good person) but our ward has a goal to submit a name to the temple. Can you help me?"

I've been thinking about So-and-so a lot (more) since that email. I don't think I've helped them much with genealogy because I've never actually had much success in finding long-lost ancestors. Most of what I do has to do with stories more than line-work, and I think that's okay because it's still turning my heart to my fathers. (Though, don't worry, So-and-so, I am still slowly sifting through our family tree searching for a name for you...but I make no promises).

Anyway, I've been thinking about So-and-so and how much I don't believe that they suck.

Elder Uchdorf's talk spoke to me, personally, assuring me that my faults aren't unforgivable. His words were so sweet and hopeful that I found myself hoping that So-and-so was listening, too, and finding them sweet and hopeful as well:

As I pondered the history of Dresden and marvelled at the ingenuity and resolve of those who restored what had been so completely destroyed, I felt the sweet influence of the Holy Spirit. Surely, I thought, if man can take the ruins, rubble, and remains of a broken city and rebuild an awe-inspiring structure that rises toward the heavens, how much more capable is our Almighty Father to restore His children who have fallen, struggled, or become lost?

It matters not how completely ruined our lives may seem. It matters not how scarlet our sins, how deep our bitterness, how lonely, abandoned, or broken our hearts may be. Even those who are without hope, who live in despair, who have betrayed trust, surrendered their integrity, or turned away from God can be rebuilt. Save those rare sons of perdition, there is no life so shattered that it cannot be restored.

The joyous news of the gospel is this: because of the eternal plan of happiness provided by our loving Heavenly Father and through the infinite sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, we can not only be redeemed from our fallen state and restored to purity, but we can also transcend mortal imagination and become heirs of eternal life and partakers of God’s indescribable glory.

This talk goes hand-in-hand with one of my favourite talks from last April, by Elder Brent H. Nielson:

All of us fall short of the glory of the Father (see Romans 3:23). All of us need the Savior’s Atonement to heal us. All of us are lost and need to be found. This revelation that day helped me know that my sister and I both needed the Savior’s love and His Atonement. Susan and I were actually on the same path back home.

 I don't know how to tie this up neatly with a bow right now because I mostly want to pull my hair out (Zoë screamed until 2:00 in the morning, was up several times in the night, and has now been screaming for about four hours today and I don't know what's wrong with her and since nothing seems to be (she's fed, changed, not running a fever) I've trapped her in the living room because I can't hold her right now so she's just...screaming) so I suppose I'll just say that no matter how much you think you "suck" you—and I—are still 100% redeemable.