We are moving a week from Saturday. I have The Final Countdown stuck in my head while I write this. Unfortunately, I do not write to music very well. Vivi just came up and said, "You're going blogging!" which I feel is evidence of how zoned out from the rest of the world I have to get to be able to write anything. Now Vivien is reading over my shoulder (she has 4 lessons of her reading book left and is getting really good). I'll write her a couple sentences to mull over.
Vivien is so cool.
Vivien has a toy in her hand. She is playing with it.
Vivien likes to read even more than a big hippo likes to dive.
(Telling b, p, and d apart is a challenge.)
We've been spending our last weeks prepping to move and enjoying all the things we will miss. I have been very diligent in trying to use up all the "background" food in our cupboards and refrigerator, which has resulted in some . . . less than amazing meals. The kids are getting pretty good at raiding the refrigerator when the situation is dire.
We will miss our friends. Here they are with Dakota down on the playground, making a funeral pyre for some dead cicadas they found. I told them all to smile--Dakota is very fond of purposefully ignoring directions, bless her.
Here are all of our wonderful missionaries having email time at our house on their iPads because the internet at the church was struggling.
And here we are at Crossroads afterwards. Vivien's favorite food from the food court is "tacos and burritos." Rafe prefers a cheese roll-up to a burrito, but mostly likes to have bites of my Subway sandwich. They ate quickly, then spent the rest of the time until the missionaries were done "being grownups" at the tall table.
We've been playing hard with our toys before we have to pack them up and say goodbye to them for several months. I think Magna-tiles are the best toys ever. The kids build such amazing things out of them, and even Annie likes to stack them up (and destroy towers).
She also really likes to play with the doll house.
I will be curious to get Annie into a different climate and see what happens to her skin. She gets this funny rash on her back and legs all the time. I pretty sure it's not because it's dry, because it's so humid here we practically have indoor fountains from the condensation around our AC vents. And it's always in the same spots, and not around her diaper. The only thing that seems to help it is hydrocortisone cream. We'll see how it reacts to Utah!
She can walk well enough now that when her siblings blow past her she can retain her balance and turn around mid-step to follow them. She loves to wrestle with Rafe. She does not love Vivien's hugs (which are always too hard). She is a world class dumpster diver, which has necessitated moving all trash cans several feet off the floor. When it is time to go somewhere, she waits by the door until it's opened and then she takes off for the elevator. Coming back home is a different story--she gets distracted by the exit signs, so I have to carry her. She points at things she's interested in and opens and closes her hand at things she wants (I always hear want, want, want in my head to the beat of her hand closing). She is a stellar morning napper and a feevty-feevty afternoon napper. And she started sleeping through the night again! Just in time for us to change hemispheres . . .
She had her birthday a few weeks ago. I wanted to use up some baking stuff in my cupboard, so I improvised a frosting. It did not go well. I should just always follow recipes.
But Annie did not mind.
In fact, it might have ruined her. She has a pronounced preference for desserts. We were eating at Crossroads the other day and even though she was hungry, she completely ignored her lunch, spending the entire meal staring longingly at the ice cream cones the girls sitting at the table next to us were eating.
She still likes to eat crayons though. She ate a bunch of them right before opening her birthday presents, so she has wax all over her face in the picture below. Many multicolored diapers from this little baby . . . It would be super awesome if I could get my children to join me in keeping the crayon bucket out of her reach when they're done using it. Ha!
We took our last temple trip a few weeks ago.
I took the kids to the zoo while Drew did baptisms in the morning (we have to bring 6-7 priesthood holders with us to be able to do baptisms at the Fukuoka temple, so he was needed there). It was steamy hot. The Japanese all wear a little sweat towel around their necks in the summer and I was very sad I didn't have mine with me. We did half of the zoo, then we headed back to the temple and switched with Daddy. I did an endowment session listening to the English version (and sometimes Spanish to keep me awake) over a headset. About halfway through the session I started hearing thunder from outside. It was POURING rain. So, everyone got wet that day.
We also took our last chance to go to the Yanai goldfish festival. Yanai is about an hour away to the south, and is where the Japanese members in Iwakuni go to church. We decided to take the train so we wouldn't have to deal with parking. This is the train station right across the street from our church building (free parking!). You can see the tan buildings of the base behind the beautiful lotus fields.
We went with the Bolthouses since their daddy was on call and ours was climbing Mt. Fuji. There were LOTS of people from base on the train. Actually the guy on the left in the red shirt in the picture below is our doctor. He's from New Mexico.
And he did gymnastics in college. We like him. And his family.
There was lots of food at the festival (we got long "hot dogs" on a stick and french fries), and we passed by a band concert happening down a side street. Dakota loves music, so we stopped to listen.
Across the bridge they had a big stage area set up and there was a group of teeny tiny taiko drummers.
Followed by a slightly older group.
Vivi and Rafe had squeezed up to the front to sit on the ground. Annie had a pretty good view from her backpack.
After the drumming, the parade started. There was a long line of big goldfish floats that would make their way one by one into the central clearing. The announcer would talk about the groups sponsoring the floats for a minute, then the taiko drummers on the stand would start playing and each group had two chances to spin their float around and around as fast as they could. Once they got close to the audience, the workers would blow their whistles. It is was crazy. And fun! (Sorry for the vertigo).
Some of the floats got going really fast and the pushers would lose their footing and go rolling off across the asphalt. Or just hang on for dear life like the lady in this one:
And some of the floats asked for volunteer pushers from the audience. They tried to wave my kids over, who immediately shrank back into the audience to clutch at my clothes, but Dakota marched right on out there and took her place. When the two turns were up they released the children back to the audience, but the float was between me and Dakota (Kelly was further back in the audience with Emma), and she'd been spun around so many times I was worried she would never find us. Luckily one of the orange-clad men took her under his wing and spotted me waving like a madwoman and sent her over in my direction. She was so proud of herself. I wish I had a picture of her face!
After the floats were all done, there was a procession down the main street back towards the train station.
There were fireworks later, but we decided to call it a day. I did get talked into buying these ridiculously expensive mylar dolphins on the way back to the train station. They lasted a couple days, until Vivien decided they were getting "a little less full" and cut holes in them with scissors.
Some funny quotes from the last few weeks:
Vivien likes to point out the "air contraffical tower" on base.
V: Do you want to be like Daddy sometime?
R: You shave your head.
V: And wear no shirt to the pool.
(I had to ask Grandma Paula to send some pictures of Drew when he was a boy to prove to Rafe that his daddy used to have hair.)
Our door doesn't close all the way if you let it just shut by itself, but then if the air pressure in our house changes it will suddenly shut. Vivien describes this sound as "kazump." "I heard the door go kazump!"
Every time Rafe poops, "MAAAH-MAYYYY! WILL YOU PLAAAYZ WHIPE MAYYYYY!"
Rafe always says "somedybody" instead of somebody.
And maybe someday this will be funny, but I have washed sheets every day for the last 5 days. Rafe peed the bed 4 days in a row, and the first day he stayed dry, Vivien peed the bed. I wanted to say swear words. But I didn't.
