Leaps tall buildings...in a single bound

I pulled the laundry basket out of the children's closet and started going through pockets, removing things that shouldn't go in the wash: a half-eaten granola bar, a chewed up piece of gum spat into a wrapper, a bowtie, a kleenex, a bouncy ball... 

I suppose I'm lucky there were no living creatures in those pockets.

Alexander followed me into the room. He climbed up the foot of the bottom bunk and flipped over the rail onto the mattress, one of his favourite things to do. And then he noticed that there was no chair stuck in the staircase leading to the top bunk. Grandma thought that stairs would be safer than a ladder, which I suppose might be true for the child on the upper bunk. For the baby of the family, however, the stairs have been somewhat of a nuisance. 

Huh. Stairs not pictured. They're just to the left of the frame

That's not true. For the baby of the family the stairs have been a boon. Every baby has loved climbing those stairs, an easy way to the forbidden danger of the top bunk. 

Those stairs have been somewhat of a nuisance for the parents of those adrenaline-seeking babies.

Putting Miriam in a box

Every month Miriam has a family project due at school, which I sometimes love and sometimes don't. I rather enjoyed helping her make a timeline of her life, for example. But designing a cereal box for a book report was...meh. This month she had to decorate a shoebox about herself and it was pretty fun to work on together (though not as fun as her timeline, in my opinion).

Here she is with her finished project:

Books, books, books

It's National Children's Book Week.

Our library chose to celebrate by quizzically cancelling their regularly scheduled story time in favour of "special" story times, which meant that when we went to the library for story time this morning I had some rather disappointed children on my hands because there was no story time.

Weird flex, public library, but...okay.

They're going to have a special "Princess Story Time" on Wednesday (and later in the week they will have "Dinosaur Story Time") but that's during preschool and I'm teaching this week so we're going to have our own special story time. In fact, I went through the trouble to find a whole lot of call numbers for stories around a certain theme (spoiler: we're on the letter Z and Zoë has been dying to have a pyjama party with her friends (after seeing her siblings have pyjama day at school) so we're going to read books about sleeping and snoring because ZZZZZZZZ).

When flattery falls flat

Last night we stayed up way too late packing.

Andrew put his hands on my head and smoothed my hair out.

"Yup," he said. "I would still love you if you were bald."

"Why...thank you," I said. "That really means a lot since there's a decent chance I'll wind up with cancer some day and will have to do chemo and lose all my hair."

Then he pushed my hair forward so that, unbeknownst to me, it made a little poofy wave of hair.

"I would still love you polygamistly as well," he said.

"Wait...WHAT?!" I asked.

"I would still love you polygam...oh. Oh. OH! Okay. Yup. Now that I say it again I can hear that was not the best thing to say. But I made your hair all poofy like polygamist hair, see? I would still love you even if you did your hair like that. No intentions of polygamy."

We laughed until we cried. This man is so bad at compliments.

Promontory Point

We took the kids out to Promontory Point this morning so they could see where the east rails (the Union Pacific) met the west rails (Pacific Railway) in 1869 (with the 150th anniversary being held next month). It's a two-hour drive and the kids were golden. Rachel sat beside Alexander and kept him happy, the other kids read and looked out their windows, and there was hardly a harsh word spoken (though tempers flared every now and then).

I don't remember why Rachel is sitting on top of the van:

In the back of my mind I think I see Andrew hoisting her up there, but I'm really not sure. I was busy corralling the other kids.

Meetings and partings

We got a very exciting text message from Uncle Jacob this morning: Baby Dean was on his way!

He was born at a quarter to noon via an emergency cesarian section. His heart rate kept dropping with each contraction, never rising back up to where it should be in between, and then he went into complete distress so they performed an emergency c-section and dislodged him from the birth canal and did a little neonatal resuscitation to get him pinked up and squalling. It was an intense and traumatic few minutes, but both mom and baby are doing fine now.

6 pounds, 2 ounces, so just a teeny little thing—and cute as a button! And just one day shy of being born on his brother's half birthday!

We can't wait to meet him!

My time at the hospital today was a little less thrilling. I joined my mom in Ogden to visit with her best cousins/friends growing up: Marie and Margaret. Marie is here from Ohio because Margaret is dying, rather quickly.

Alexander at 18 months (part II)

We're slowly checking off our "final things" in Utah and Friday was another one: Alexander's last well-child check. I made a mental note to ask for his updated immunization record so that I could have it handy when we find a new doctor in Georgia. I forgot the development questionnaire on my desk. But one can't be expect to remember everything, right? So we went over those questions orally at the doctor's office instead.

Things like, "When your child wants something, does he tell you by pointing to it?" Yes.

"When you ask [him] to, does your child go into another room to find a familiar toy our object?" Yes.

"Does your child imitate a two-word sentence?" No.

And, frankly, if he's like Zoë he very well may never directly imitate speech. When we first moved out here, cousin Riley was such a little parrot and would repeat anything you asked him to, but if you asked Zoë to repeat something she would give an icy stare and say, "No."

And then she'd say whatever was on her mind.

I don't think (fingers crossed) that Alexander is quite as stubborn.

He will parrot anything Benjamin says, for example, but only single words so far. He will also repeat anything that sounds remotely exciting. For example, we went for a drive today and the kids saw cows out their window and Alexander was chanting "Cow! Cow! Cow!" right along with them because, as we all know, seeing cows out your window is one of the top ten exciting things on a car ride.

Of course, Alexander has a bit of a "fronting" issue (which we're absolutely not worried about at this point since he's only 18 months old), so he was yelling, "Tow! Tow! Tow!" as he pointed out his window.

Popular like me

Miriam came home from school absolutely crushed due to some friend problems at school (which are now "fixed" because her friend said she was only "joking" and I honestly don't understand how some people can be so cruel, but Miriam is a very forgiving person and is willing to go back to how things were, which I might take issue with (forgive, yes, but have an honest dialogue about how incredibly hurtful the behaviour was) but we're moving in a few weeks so I don't have to worry about this behaviour turning into an abusive pattern in their friendship).

So Benjamin asks, "Why don't you just be popular?"

Calling on her knowledge of internet memes, our Meme retorted, "It's not that easy, Ben! One does not simply be popular."



"It's pretty easy for me," Benjamin said. "I'm the most popular kid in my class!"

"You are not," Miriam sniffed.

"I am!" he insisted. "I'm the most popular for being off-task by reading when I should be listening."

"That's...not...what popular means," Miriam said, suddenly starting to cheer up.

By this measure, Benjamin is rather popular in our house as well...

Sticks and carrots

Alexander calls Andrew "Daddy," which, as a multisyllabic word, is a rather high honour considering nine short long (very long, very exhausting) months ago Alexander decided he didn't like anyone but Mommy. He now will (sometimes) choose to go to Andrew and will allow him to do things like change his diaper and get him ready for bed (without screaming through the entire process).

Thinking about how nice it is to be able to pass Alexander off sometimes almost makes me choke up, which means the last several months of being The Most Loved Person in Alexander's world hasn't been entirely easy.

He's still incredibly clingy and hardly lets me get anything done with his constant desire to be held. But, I think we'll make it through this season of life.

My current worry is how we're going to get Benjamin through his phase. It's a doozy.

Whenever he gets caught doing anything naughty he just shrugs and says, "I was tempted," a classic the-devil-made-me-do-it-move. The problem is that he is tempted a lot and I just can't keep my cool through all of it.

Today he was wild after school, as he usually is, and he ended up spilling pretzels all over the kitchen. And I mean all over the kitchen. So just imagine the few pretzels you're imagining because you're sure I'm over-exaggerating, and then multiply that several times and spread it all over the kitchen and there you'll have it.

I heard the mess happen and could tell it was an extensive one, but I was upstairs nursing Alexander (who—have I mentioned?—is one clingy, demanding baby) so I decided I'd sit this one out. Benjamin is nearly seven years old. That's plenty old enough to know how to tidy up a kitchen mess of their own creation.

"What happened?" I called down the stairs.

"Spilled some pretzels!" Benjamin called up to me.

Some? SOME? Sure.

"Pick them up," I called back down.

"I will!" he assured me.

But when I went downstairs to check I found pretzels all over creation.

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Easter baskets and egg hunting

The kids were excited to find their baskets on Easter morning, though they were good little children and waited to get into them until I came downstairs (the very last person of all). 

Here's Zoë, thrilled with her little chocolate bunny:

Benjamin with his America-approved (ie. meh compared to the original) Kinder Surprise Egg: