Good morning Mr. Sunshine

Much earlier than I thought such a thing might have happened, Alexander has started pushing toy cars around. He loves things with wheels!

This morning he wouldn't stop driving his car around to have breakfast, which meant that I got to play the role of roadway. Anytime he dropped his car (or if I ever tried to take it away) he'd stop nursing so that he could retrieve/find it.



He also cruised along the entire length of the bed this morning without falling over. In the past when he's tried walking along the furniture either his top half would get over ambitious and he'd reach too far (causing him to tip over) or his bottom half would get antsy and he'd start bouncing and jumping (causing him to tip over). Today he just walked along the the bed like it was normal.

Mischief managed

Summer vacation will be over in three weeks and I finally screwed up enough courage to take them all to the public pool just a few weeks ago. I wouldn't have batted an eye at taking them to our neighbourhood pool back in Eno Trace, but a public pool is an entirely different matter. A public pool is so big and it's difficult to have your attention (and limbs) be pulled in five directions at once (especially around water; I can never quite relax when I'm around water with my children).

But it really ended up being just fine. There are paid lifeguards at the pool, so that's a nice backup (though they're just kids themselves!). Rachel and Miriam mostly went off on their own because they are big enough to swim on their own and go on the slides and that sort of thing. Technically Benjamin is big enough to swim on his own (though he's not big enough for the slides yet) but I don't like him getting too far away (unless his sisters know that he's their swimming buddy for a given amount of time). He's really a pretty good little swimmer and the pool really doesn't get very deep, so that really only left me with Zoë and Alexander.

I was holding Alexander and Zoë was paddling around nearby while Benjamin was diving down to the bottom of the pool ("to the Mariana Trench!" he told me). Suddenly Alexander started screaming bloody murder.

"I didn't mean to do that!" Zoë said, visibly surprised.

"What didn't you mean to do?" I asked, quickly checking to make sure nothing was horribly wrong with my baby.

"I didn't meant to do that," she repeated.

"What did you do?" I asked.

She simply hung her head in shame.

"Did you...bite him?" I asked after wracking my brain for a minute.

"Yes," she admitted. "But I didn't mean to!"

"Where did you bite him?" I asked but I never quite got a solid answer from her so we did a few laps around the lazy river while I soothed the poor baby. It was only when I was drying him off at the end of our swimming session that I found the bite mark on his arm—it lasted for days.

Later Miriam was giving Benjamin a ride on her back and their heads collided and he split his lip open. Oh, and Zoë got a bloody nose, too. I can't even remember how she did that!

But no one even came close to drowning so I'll consider that run to the pool a success.

Make it sew!

Not last week but the week before, Grandma signed Rachel up for sewing lessons from a young woman in our ward. She had four one-hour lessons, finishing up with her project (a skirt) on her birthday!

She wore her skirt to church today and looked lovely doing so.

Grandma took the big girls out to the fabric store so that Rachel could pick out this material for her skirt and to help pick out quilting fabric for Arwyn and Alexander's baby quilts. She said they were in fabric heaven, which I totally believe. They were in awe of how many beautiful (and how many nerdy (Doctor Who, Harry Potter, etc)) fabrics there were. 

Hopefully there will be more sewing in this house in the future!

Pizza Party at Red Ledges

We went out to Red Ledges for a pizza party picnic this evening and this time we knew exactly where to go to find the arch (and everyone laughed about how difficult it had been for us to find it the first time we came). We set up our picnic right below it and the kids wolfed down their dinner so they could go play. Dinner went relatively smoothly. Only one piece of pizza ended up on the ground (Gavin dropped his slice before he'd even taken a bite) and I only dropped, like, three cups of water (so it's a good thing we weren't at home or I'd have been mopping up water all evening).

Rachel's 11!

Despite all my protestations, Rachel turned 11 last Friday. We saved the real celebration for the next day (July 21) so that Auntie Emily could attend, since she so rarely gets to come to family gatherings, but we went ahead and opened a few presents on her actual birthday (because sitting around watching people open books is somewhat boring). She mostly got books, which probably comes as no surprise.

When she opened The Confidence Code for Girls, Andrew excitedly blurted out, "It's peer-reviewed!"

Rachel thoughtfully acknowledged this with an, "Oh, awesome!"

And Grandpa just about died laughing over how nerdy our family is. But that's okay. Rachel has been going through the book, doing the exercises in a little notebook (and I have noticed that she's been more open to taking risks, so that's nice).

Grassylake: The farm (July 1)

I wasn't 100% sure I was going to add a trip out to Grassy to our itinerary until Patrick told me that Michelle was going to get there on Sunday. He and Josie had gone up to the farm early so that they could help with the bees (my cousins raised bees over the winter this year so they could set them out to pollinate their crops—so they had to assemble all these little bee house-tent things) and everything seemed really busy so I didn't want to impose or anything. But Michelle was my tipping point. We had to go the farm now (and I was very happy about that because the farm always feels like home).

Blah, blah. Monday, Monday.

Let me start by reassuring you (or myself) that we're going to be fine. We're hurtling on to the end of this cliff (Andrew's contract ends in August) and, all our hopes and dreams effectively quashed, soon we will nestle into Plan B (which honestly is probably more like plan Q by now) quite comfortably.

Once we figure out health insurance, that is.

We will soon be kicked off our current employer-based health insurance plan and only then can we browse the marketplace for a new plan. We can't set up new insurance before our old insurance ends so there will necessarily be a gap in coverage. I have been trying to tell myself that it will be fine. We're generally healthy people.

And then Alexander spiked a fever of 103°F this morning, reminding me that even generally healthy people still need to call their doctor every once in a while.

But I'm sure we'll figure all that stuff out.

We have adjunct work lined up for the next year, which will provide an income stream trickle (we'll be taking a major pay cut), and we have a roof over our heads (thank goodness for Andrew's parents), so we'll be fine.

On Monday we got word that Andrew was, yet again, not going to get a job he'd applied for. He was, we were told, at once over-qualified and under-qualified for the position. How that is even possible is beyond me (in short, we were told: his research/publication record was too stellar for an R2 school and he didn't have quite the amount of teaching experience they were looking for).

Not getting this position was a little soul-crushing. Devastating, even.

It was our final hope of having an actual job for next year.

Pioneer Day

Part of the reason I wanted to be all caught up on our Alberta trip posts was because the last thing we did before coming home was visit with Auntie Emily and her family in Idaho, which would have been the perfect segue into talking about Emily's visit to us here in Utah, right? 

Unfortunately, I have not yet finished writing about our Canada trip and Emily is already here!

So I wrote about meeting up with her in Idaho and now I'm going to write about Pioneer Day (because I may as well be timely about something in my life). 

Last night for family night Emily and her kids went with Grandpa to help supervise Sarah's visit with Riley, so we took the kids to Pioneer Village in Provo, specifically to see the Haws' cabin (but also to see the rest of the village, of course). I think the schoolhouse was everyone's favourite place because (although I took no pictures) we got to play with stilts and climbing bears and so forth, which was quite a lot of fun. After we'd finished playing at the school house we went through the rest of the village, trying to find everything on the scavenger hunt paper we'd received at the front gate.

Here's the blacksmith shop (where I wouldn't want to work in July...it was hotter than hades in here):

Hell's Half Acre (July 3)

We spent the night in Idaho Falls on July 2nd. It was quite the rush to get down there after leaving the Canada Day parade in Raymond, but we made it around 10:30 at night...except we made it to the wrong hotel! Apparently there are two Best Westerns in Idaho Falls and we'd set our route to the wrong one. The other one was just down the road, however, so the lady at the desk gave us directions and we were once again on our way.

"Cotton Tree Inn. Cotton Tree Inn," Andrew said. "We're looking for the Cotton Tree Inn."

"There it is!" Benjamin squealed. "It's behind us!"

"No, it's not," Rachel seethed (her patience was just about gone at this point in the trip). "Shut up!"

"No, it's right there!" Benjamin insisted. "Cotton Tree Inn! Dad turned left and he should have turned right!"

Thank goodness for little readers! Benjamin had indeed found our hotel and we got checked in as quickly as possible so that we could get our little brood into bed.

They were all excited for hotel breakfast in the morning (fruit poops! DIY waffles!) before setting out to meet Auntie Emily and her family for a little pit stop at Hell's Half Acre (the rest stop at mile marker 101 on I-15). Or at least at what used to be called Hell's Half Acre. Now it's called the "Lava Trail System," which is a much more boring name. But whatever it was called, these little cousins were excited to get together again.

Auntie Emily with Maren on her lap, Rachel with Zoë on her lap, Gavin, Benjamin (with his arms pulled into his shirt because it was a little chilly for our taste), and Miriam

Playing at the Sheep River (June 30)

My wonderful cousin Heather is doing us the favour of living in her parents' house with her family of seven for the second year in a row simply to make us feel better about living in Andrew's parents' house with our family of seven for a second year in a row (or it could be she's doing it because the economy sucks and even though her husband has a full-time job (as an airline pilot) their family can't yet afford to buy a house (let alone import their vehicle from the states (they moved up to Alberta from Texas last summer)). 

Anyway, her parents have a sizable house (large enough to squeeze in a family of seven at least) that backs onto the Sheep River, so she and her children spend a lot of time exploring in the woods and playing on the river bank. We followed them to one of their favourite spots and then watched in sheer panic as Sadie led Miriam to us along the bank (they'd decided to take a different way to get to the river, which was quite high and swift due to spring runoff). They made it without falling in (which would have been perilous), thank goodness.

Where we were, the river was a little lazier, or at least shallower.

Anna, Taya, Zoë, and Cecily