Stats

Last night I asked Andrew to pull together some statistics for my blog. Like, I could tell that my total posts per year had gone down over time, peaking at 539 (in 2008, the year I was raising only one baby and moved to Egypt) and dropping down to 231 (in 2022, the year I was raising my sixth baby and finishing my master's degree). There are many other reasons for my total number of posts dropping over time, especially since 2010—Rachel offered the fact that I've had, like, four babies between 2010 and now (and mentioned that she was going for an absurd number of babies...but then realized that four was accurate in my case) and Andrew offered the fact that we moved from Egypt to, uh, Orem (which kind of dialed back our "excitement" level). 

Still, I wondered whether my post length had increased (it had) and whether that would even out my total word count—like, I wanted to know whether I was writing fewer posts (obviously) but ultimately hitting the same word count annually. The answer is, that my post length is up on average but my word count is trending downward.

Oh, Phoebe!

This morning Phoebe lingered in her pull-up. 

She has been particularly difficult to potty-train, as far as my kids have gone. Probably the second hardest kid (next to Benjamin, who wins the title of Moste Difficult, hands-down). During the day she's really pretty great, but she simply will not consider nighttime potty training.

Alexander was probably the easiest kid to potty train at night. I told him he needed to stay dry and he was like, "Got it. Consider it done."

That child has wet the bed twice. Like, from the moment I took him out of diapers. That's it. 

With the girls (and Benjamin) I would wake them up in the night to go potty around the time they would typically wet the bed so I could intercept them to take them potty before they wet the bed. For example, if they usually woke up at midnight...wet and sad...I would wake them up at 11:00 or 11:30 to take them potty. And then eventually they'd start waking up proactively to go potty at that time, so I'd stop waking them up to go potty. And then eventually they'd just...stop getting up to go potty.

(Oh, who are we kidding? They still regularly get up to go potty in the middle of the night when they need to (and sometimes when they're just bored of sleeping, I guess)).

A beautiful day in December

We got out for a healthy dose of Vitamin D this afternoon. The kids chose Jones Bridge Park. We've been avoiding that park lately because they've been doing so much construction there, but I figured we could check out the progress. Turns out it's still...undergoing some serious construction.

They're redoing the water drainage in the park to help with erosion, since it's right by the river and the river tends to...eat away at it. I guess. Something like that.

Memorized Scriptures 2024

We had 22 scriptures on our list of scriptures to memorize this year and while I'm not sure everyone memorized every scripture, we certainly made a valiant effort. We officially crossed off 19 of them and are still working on 3. Perhaps we'll cross off more tomorrow.

Phoebe the photog

Phoebe has figured out how to take pictures with tablets and phones and things and some of the devices are linked to my account (I don't know how these things work)...so I end up with picture after picture after picture like this on my camera roll: 

A few of our favourite things

We opened our gifts days ago and I'm...still talking about it...

We had quite a stormy night last night—on a tornado watch all night long, but no tornadoes for us (thank goodness)—and the morning was absolutely dreary when we woke up. Things were still drizzling when we went to church, but when we came outside after church the sky was a brilliant blue and you'd hardly know it was the end of December!

Zoë was excited to wear her new (with a heel!) shoes to church. She chose to stand with this holly bush behind her (because it's so Christmassy).

Christmas Train and Christmas Stockings

Phoebe succeeded on sleeping in the basement on Christmas Eve...but only because Andrew went downstairs to sleep with her. She woke up at 2:00 am buzzing with anticipation and didn't fall back asleep until around 5:00 or so. So we didn't get up particularly early. 

Here she is ready to assemble the kids at around 9:20 am:

Silly Rachel stories

Everyone got new highlighters in their stocking (except for Phoebe who abuses highlighters). Rachel pulled out her highlighter and fiddled with it for a while before saying, "This button does nothing! How does this highlighter even work?!"

Family call

Just this morning my family settled on a time for a Christmas call:

11:00 PM CET (for Patrick in Austria)
5:00 PM EST (for us in Georgia)
4:00 PM CST (for Rosie in Oklahoma)
3:00 PM MST (for everyone else in their various locations: Utah and Wyoming and Alberta and BC)

Abra lives in BC so she would have been at 2:00 PM PST but the region she lives in doesn't observe daylight savings (and hasn't since the 70s), so they're permanently aligned with MST (which means that for half the year they align with MST and the other half they're kind of PDT...but also still just MST)). 

But look! We all made it into the very same Zoom room:

We didn't play any games (I think we're planning on doing that later this week), but we did get to chat with one another. Phoebe and Ireland got the same Bluey grocery cart and cash register (and were both thrilled with them). Allen and Brady both decided to shave their heads. Kelline and Allen were both technically at work (Allen driving Uber...but on a break while talking to us...and Kelli waiting in her hotel room in Wyoming for her shift to start). We had little kids filtering in and out of three different screens and some cats curiously visiting in a couple of others. 

All in all it was a wonderful visit! 

Our Best Year: The Phillips Family

Every year I make Andrew a new calendar of family memories to go in his office at work. I started a long time ago when we were young and poor grad students* (now we're old and middle class grad students*...so moving up in the world) and Shutterfly sent an offer for a free calendar. I still wait for those free offers and this year's offer happened to come right in the middle of finals week, basically. 

I was swamped with work, but I still managed to churn out a calendar for him. 

Were the pictures the most carefully curated? Not remotely, but my motto is that any picture printed out is better than no picture printed out. And I was pleased with myself for crossing one gift off of my long list of gifts to procure.

Then it arrived in the mail and I...noticed I made a huge mistake...but wrapped it up anyway...because what option did I have at that point?!

Andrew was already confused by the wrapping job.