Am I...better than everyone?

Last night Phoebe was having trouble going to sleep. 

I had gone to the church with Miriam so she could practice the organ and record a piece for an organ advent calendar she's participating in. We didn't get home until after Andrew had started putting Phoebe to bed. He thought for sure he had succeeded in getting her to sleep, but the minute he went downstairs, Phoebe sneaked out of bed and ran across the hallway to our bedroom to say goodnight to me. 

I tucked her back into bed. 

She got up again later for something else. And then something else. And then something else. 

She even got up, climbed the bookshelf, grabbed the (child-proof) bottle of melatonin from the top shelf and helped herself to (what she claimed was) a responsible dose (and, yes, got reprimanded for it, even though evidently she needed a dose to fall asleep that night). 

When Alexander went in to bed she was still awake. 

He came in to complain about her because she had climbed into his bed and wouldn't get out. 

I put her back into her bed.

She climbed into his bed again.

He came in to complain again. 

So I pulled her out of the top bunk and carried her downstairs. 

If she wasn't going to sleep, she could work.

This one got lost in the archives...

(A post from September!!)

On Auntie K's last day here, she took Alexander out to dinner at Medieval Times and it turned out to be the best outing anyone chose (and they all wished they had chosen it as well). It was, in fact, Kelli's suggestion, because Alexander didn't know what he wanted to do.

To be fair, we don't do things with our kids like take them to restaurants or stores or play places or anything like that very often. The pool? Absolutely. The playground? It's free, so yes. Hiking? Again, it's free. Museums? Yes, of course, especially if we can get a cheap membership. But, like, "fun" stuff? Not so much. 

(I've actually come to realize that I'm not a huge fan of fun...or at least not the things that a lot of people seem to consider fun.) 

But Medieval Times did look pretty fun! 

Alexander came back with paper crowns, a light-up sword, flashing cups, and so many stories! There were horses, there were knights, there were falcons, there was jousting, there was sword fighting. They had an incredible evening (and I'm still trying to get Alexander to write about it).

Here he is showing Phoebe some stuff that they saw:

Joke books, part II

Phoebe is still claiming to have a "joke book" to share when what she actually has is a "joke." Of course, I'm using the term "joke" very loosely. If you've ever heard a four-year-old author their own joke, you know what I mean. What I mean—and I say this with love—is: they're often not very funny.* 

The other night at dinner Phoebe announced she had a joke book for us and launched into the most mundane little story.

"Once upon a time, Mom had to go to campus. But then she came back."

No laughter. 

"And she put down her bag and she said, 'I'm home.'"

No laughter.

"Why is nobody laughing?" she wanted to know.

"Well..." I said regretfully. "I'm not sure we understand how this is funny..."

"Oh, that's because that was only the first chapter," she said. 

So this really is a joke book. 

"Chapter two. Let's see..."

Let's just say her punchline never landed, poor thing. 

* This is not to say that they're never funny! Children this age are routinely hilarious, though most often unintentionally so. But there was that one joke about the dead goose that Alexander came up with when he was younger that we still tell to this day! 

Q: What does a dead goose say?
A: Haunt! Haunt!

Meow, meow, meow, meow, then we shall have some pie

Thanksgiving has come and gone. We had a wonderful dinner with Grandpa and Darla and Darla's brother Georgia and his wife Laurie. All the food was delicious. Laurie brought buns and sweet potatoes, Darla made turkey and ham and beans and stuffing and berry salad. We did pies.

And cranberry sauce.

In fact, Miriam made 10 cups of cranberry sauce. She hand-grated the nutmeg. She zested oranges. It smelled divine. 

We left it in our fridge at home.

Luckily, Darla had a jar of cranberry sauce on hand.

After we'd had our dinner, Darla ran to her kids' house for Thanksgiving. We were explicitly not invited...but, like...meh. So Darla went to Thanksgiving Dinner, Part II. We had dessert and visited with George and Laurie. 

Andrew and the kids made so much pie. I...worked on my presentation for next week, tasted the cranberry curd, and showed Miriam that putting all the cranberries into a bowl and shaking them in the sugar would coat them much faster and less...sticky-ly...than rolling them around individually with her fingers. 

Benjamin made the Yucky Pumpkin Pie and helped layer the banana cream pies (with Zoë's help). 

There were...so many pies.

I think we ended up with 4 pumpkin pies, 3 YPP, 2 banana cream pie, 1 pecan pie, 1 cranberry curd tart, and 1 Atlantic beach pie. Oh, and an apple pie in a sheet pan, which was divine. 

It was a lot of pie!

Zoë shaped these pumpkin crusts.

Another rough night for Phoebe and Naanii

Rachel is spending Thanksgiving with her roommate's family up in Idaho. One of Hailey's aunts hails from Glenwood and thus thought the Myrna Layton of Glenwood was Rachel's grandma. But that is not the case. We have plenty of connections to that other Myrna Layton, but have never met her. 

So I was texting my family about Layton-everything this morning, while sleepy Phoebe was snuggling next to me in bed and the morning stretched longer and longer.

"Mmmmm..." she moaned, finally stirring. "Are we going today?"

She has been counting down the days until Thanksgiving, so I very cheerfully answered, "Yes! Today's the day!"

To my surprise, Phoebe broke down in tears. 

"Oh! What's wrong?" I asked her. 

"I don't wanna get a shot today!" she wailed. 

"Get a shot?!" I exclaimed. "It's Thanksgiving! We're going over to Grandpa's house today!"

"Oh, yeah," she sniffed, giggling a little bit. "Not the doctor today."

"No doctor today," I assured her. "But it a couple of weeks, yes."

Apparently she's been counting down the days until her doctor appointment as well. She knows it's coming because (a) all of her siblings have had their well-child checks (except Miriam, who is going in at the same time as Phoebe), and (b) she was worried about having to get a shot when I took her in for pneumonia earlier this month (and I told her that she didn't need to be worried because they don't do vaccines at sick-child visits, only at well-child visits). 

While I was texting my family this story, because it's kind of funny, my mom texted everyone to wish us a happy Thanksgiving and to tell us that Josie is being the cook today because/so my mom got both her COVID and flu shots and my dad is recovering from wrist surger(ies). 

It was kind of funny that my mom would be talking about shots this fine Thanksgiving morning as well!

Made me think of Phoebe's birth four years ago when my mom also got both the COVID and flu vaccine...

Beanbag toss

We found a jack-o-lantern beanbag toss board in the church closet. 

It's been in the church closet for years. No one knows who made it. No one knows which ward it belongs to. It's simply perpetually there.

This is boring bzzz...

 

Today Phoebe wore Miriam's beautiful Mary Poppins dress to church. Naanii found it at a thrift store (probably DI (Deseret Industries)) and mailed it to us out in Durham when she heard Miriam wanted to be Mary Poppins for Halloween. It's been a beloved dress ever since.

Six-Seven

We can't escape from "six seven" recently! 

For the record, it's a "thing" kids these days are saying. It means...nothing...like, possibly it means "mid," but mostly it just means nothing. But if the numbers 6 and 7 come up consecutively (which given their spot in the number line happens a lot) the kids all chant, "Six seeeeeeeeven!"

That's the bit.

So, Andrew went to Indianapolis and parked in the long-term parking at the airport. Guess what his spot number was? Lot 8 number...67!

A day of leisure (kind of)

Tonight I made it to a get together with some ladies in our ward. In order to do that guilt-free I had to finish my essay for my qualitative methodology course...which I did yesterday afternoon. 

Without going into too many details, I conducted a critical content analysis on a serial publication produced by the church, looking specifically at how gender was portrayed. I noted one scene in particular where a young boy claimed that he would grow up to go on a mission while his sister would grow up to get married (as well as several other scenes indicating that this male child was a future missionary and finding no scenes indicating that the female child might some day serve a mission). 

I wrote about the mission ages at the time of publication (19 for males, 21 for females) and discussed the change in 2012 lowering the mission age to 18 for males and 19 for females. What, I wondered, would be so wrong with females leaving at age 18? If males could leave at 19...and then females could leave at 19...what made it possible for males to leave at 18 but not females?

I submitted that paper and dusted my hands.

Then Rachel texted this morning: "Mission age for women was just lowered to 18."

And, I mean, I don't want to take credit for that or anything...but...uh...the timing is suspicious. 

Anyway, because I had finished my paper and because the weather was so nice and because we're all healthy again (though I forgot to give Phoebe her last dose of antibiotics with dinner—darn! I'll have to remember that last dose with breakfast), I decided I could fill Phoebe's request to go to the town green.

She has been begging to go to the town green for quite some time, but it's just been so...busy.

But today we ran to the town green between a couple of my meetings (after one meeting, and in time to take my other meeting on a bench at the park—the town green has wifi...which probably means we should go there more because I don't have the excuse of needing the internet to work). 

Here is a portion of the park (probably about a quarter of what's available to play on):

Buda-Pesth? Budapest? 1935? 1989? What's the difference?

We recently finished reading Dracula, published in 1897, the opening scene spilling us into Buda-Pesth (still hyphenated in Dracula because the city had only recently been created, remember, "on 17 November 1873 from a merger of the three neighboring cities of Pest, Buda and Óbuda").

Today the children gave their reports on Romania (Benjamin and Alexander) and Hungary (Zoë) and we had a Zoom call with my friend Amanda, who currently lives in Bahrain. 

Bahrain has little to do with Romania or Hungary, but we're looking into Middle Eastern countries right now and thought it would be fun to chat with her about her experience. I had the kids write some interview questions and then we woke up this morning to workshop them a bit before the interview. Many of their questions were yes/no questions, so we worked together to create "open-ended" questions and wrote our revised questions on the whiteboard.

Five minutes prior to the meeting I went to open the Zoom room. 

"No internet connection," my computer told me. 

After a few frantic moments, I messaged Amanda from my phone to tell her that...we had no internet...and to give me 15 minutes or so to drive to the church (the library wasn't open yet). 

So we called her from the church. And by the time we made it home whatever hiccup our internet was having was over.