I feel like our children have been particularly funny lately, but that I've been slow to blog about things because I've been busy stewing over my graduate school application. So I'm going to drop a few stories here, without a lot of context, for posterity's sake. If you follow me on Facebook, sorry for the repeats, this is practically verbatim from my posts there.
First, from this evening's scripture study (2 Nephi 16 (see also Isaiah)):
Rachel: What’s a seraphim?
Andrew: Seraphim is actually plural. “Im” in Hebrew is like “een” in Arabic. It’s a plural marker.
Rachel: Then what’s a seraph?
Andrew: It’s an angelic being.
Miriam: Then what’s a sans-serif?
Andrew: Completely different thing.
We had the missionaries over for dinner last night and before they left I asked if they would help Andrew give Alexander a blessing of healing. He hadn't taken a single step the whole day, but didn't seem to be in a grave amount of pain. And as wonderful advanced as our medical system is, I just didn't want to go through all the hassle of meeting with our primary care doctor to get a prescription to get an x-ray and then go back to discuss things with the doctor and so on and so on.
Especially because I wasn't 100% sure it was broken. In fact, I was rather confident in the other direction. If I had thought it was broken we would have rushed in immediately (as we did with his arm...and his leg the last time...and what is with this fragile child?!).
Obviously it was bothering him, but not severely. (I mean, severely enough that he refused to put weight on it but not so severely that he was in constant tears.) Mostly I just wanted some peace of mind. And so we gave him a blessing.
Andrew blessed him that his leg would heal quickly and without lasting consequence, that he would start walking again soon, that we'd know when to take him in if he needed medical attention, and that he'd continue to be the joy to our family that he is.
I was thrilled this morning when I walked on him dancing in the kitchen with the kids! He was limping around in pathetic little circles, but he was happy and bi-pedal, if only for a moment! Then this afternoon at the playground I carried him around for a bit and then put him in the swing because he hadn't been doing much walking and reminded me frequently throughout the day that his leg still hurt, but he surprised me by asking to get down so that he could play!
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Bam," he said, which means 'yes' for whatever reason.
"Okay," I said, hoisting him out of the swing. "I don't know what you think you're going to do. Scooch around on your bum, I guess. There's not much to do if you can't walk..."
But he surprised me again and hobbled around doing quite a bit of everything:
And I was finally able to exhale.
Now when we ask him how his leg is he says, "Still hurts but I'm feeling better."
I'm hopeful he'll have an even better day tomorrow.
Today it was not rainy so we went to the park for a while in the afternoon to get out some wiggles that we've been bottling up for far too long and while we were walking we noticed the odd silhouette of these tree branches:
We stared up at them for several minutes, wondering if the tree was diseased somehow, making its bark peel. Or perhaps it had some sort of fungal infection. Or...
We found a small branch on the ground and examined it for a closer look, but still couldn't quite put our finger on what was going on. It seemed like the growth was part of the branch but also different from the branch (Miriam described it as "foamy," but I've since seen it described online as "corky"). I pulled out my phone and used an app to help identify it. The app quickly recognized it as "winged elm," a plant indigenous to the south. Its Creek name is Wahoo (which the kids loved learning).
I've since been wondering if there's a bit of poetry (or a story) in this tree, being stuck on the ground but wishing so hard to fly.
I read the last three chapters of Elijah of Buxton to the kids this morning. Usually we read one chapter (sometimes two) but this morning we couldn't help ourselves and we gobbled the whole thing up.
And I cried like a baby, which confused Benjamin again. He's at the age where he was frustrated with Elijah's inaction because he's not old enough to know that it's much harder to walk the walk than it is to talk the talk. In the end Elijah does act, but in a much smaller (but still very significant) way than he originally dreamed up.
If I'm not mistaken, Miriam was tearing up a little, herself, so at least I wasn't alone in my crying this time.
There was a speech in the middle of the book that the "growned folks" make to welcome newly freed slaves into the settlement, which made me cry, and even though I knew I'd be hearing it at the end of the book and had already read it aloud it made me cry again. But then we were laughing just a couple of lines later when Frederick Douglass gets his "revenge" on Elijah.
And that's pretty much how the book went. We were laughing and crying the whole way along.
I read the last three chapters of Anne of Green Gables to the kids tonight. Usually we read one chapter (sometimes two) but tonight we couldn't help ourselves and we gobbled up the whole thing.
Having to read aloud about Matthew's death was difficult. I've never had to do it before. I bought these books when we lived in Durham but never got around to reading them aloud to Rachel and Miriam (though they've since read the Anne books (or some of them) to themselves). Reading that part aloud was tough, though now that I'm reviewing it in my mind I can't pinpoint the exact parts that made me cry. It was just all so beautifully put.
When I read the line, "It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it," I knew I was doomed.
But "the tears don't hurt me like that ache did," though they did concern the children quite a bit. Zoë kept asking me if I was sad because Matthew died or if I was sad for some other reason (and could I please stop crying?). Benjamin tiptoed out of his room with his beloved "Lamb-y" and tucked him in beside me to help me feel better before running away and jumping back into his bed. It was very sweet.
I have spent the past 2+ years protecting my baby from the world. And by "the world," what I mean is...his older siblings (specifically Zoë and Benjamin). They are just...not careful...with him.
I'm a lot less nervous about them hurting him now than I was when he was a tiny, helpless baby and they were doing things like tipping over the pack'n'play to roll him out so they could play with him and things like that. Now that he's bigger he's able to fend for himself a little better (and Benjamin and Zoë deserve everything he does to fight them off) and is better able to communicate his desires with cries of, "Go away! Leave me alone! Don't touch me! I want Mom!" instead of just suffering in sweet baby silence.
Still, they're just not gentle with him and he's still so much littler than everyone that I worry.
Yesterday the three little kids went outside together and I was fretting about what to do because I don't like the baby to go outside without a more responsible person with him and I had a couple of things inside that I needed to attend to. Instead I was watching out the window while the children played.
"He'll be fine," Andrew said, coming upon me at the window. "You're all about free-range parenting."
"Not with my two-year-old!" I said.
"Let him explore."
"They're not careful!"
"They're somewhat responsible."
"They're not remotely responsible. I mean, I guess they'd tell me if he got hurt but that's the problem: he's going to get hurt."
"Kids get hurt all the time. He'll be fine."
"I'm going to get one of the girls to watch him for a minute..."
"Oh, but they're playing so nicely and he's just right in the backyard he'll be..."
Our conversation was interrupted by a piercing scream.
Yesterday morning we went to a friend's house to practice the girls' song one last time before Sunday. We had planned to walk because they only live half a mile away from us, but the morning got away from us and we found we weren't quite ready to leave the house when we needed to so Andrew dropped us off on the way to take the boys grocery shopping.
Zoë was so excited to be included that she leaped out of the van. It was a rather impressive leap, too—she cleared the curb and everything! She crashed on the landing but picked herself up off the ground and started leading her way to the front door. We were cutting through the grass* to get to the front door and Zoë made it about two steps before she slipped—I wouldn't say it was an icy morning but it was frosty (and what is frost, if not ice)—and slid down the hill to the front door on her behind.
We had a pretty good practice and then said our goodbyes and headed out the door for our walk home.
"Hold my hand," Rachel ordered Zoë the minute we stepped out the front door. "You're going to trip and fall."
"No!" Zoë said. "I don't want to! I won't fall!"
"But the stairs are slippery," Rachel cautioned (and they are—not with ice but with moss (things have been so wet that it seems everything in our world is frosted green right now (I have a feeling power-washing season is coming up))). "Hold my hand."
"No!" Zoë repeated. "I won't fall."
"Suit yourself," sniffed Rachel. And then she herself tripped and landed sprawled out spread eagle on the lawn.
Alexander came in from outside complaining that "everyone says I'm in the way, but I'm not in the way" and I was struck by a sudden desire to read And You Can Be the Cat to him, poor boy. He was rather upset about it and continued to whine about it in the cutest little fashion for several minutes.
He is not in buh way! He is not in wuh way! He can not say /th/.
Benjamin claims to have slept in this box last night:
I honestly couldn't say for sure whether he did or not. It doesn't look very comfortable to me, but evidently it's comfortable enough that he spent a couple of hours reading there this afternoon, for which I'm extremely grateful. It's been terribly rainy this week (this year, really) and we've had a bit of cabin fever, so I was happy when he decided to settle down with a good book (or several; he prefers to read more than one book at a time, so you can see he's got a Percy Jackson sequel on the floor behind him but he's reading something different, and is also in the middle of a Who Was? book and has another book or two downstairs that he's reading).
Remember how I said that I really didn't want Alexander wetting my bed and that was the whole reason we were keeping him in diapers at night still?
Well, last night when Andrew came home from work I hadn't quite managed to get all the kids ready for bed yet (we were too busy playing UNO), so he got Alexander ready for bed. He was sure to put a pull-up on him and then told me, "This time he is really, truly, honestly in a diaper."
So I tucked him into his own bed and then in the middle of the night when he came to find me I very trustingly pulled him into my bed and in the morning was very, very sad to find that Alexander had peed in the night for the first time in...weeks...probably. Mostly this was sad because that "diaper" Andrew had put Alexander in was a swim diaper.
