We carved the pumpkins we procured at the Pumpkin Patch for FHE. The kids drew pictures of what they wanted them to look like, and Drew and I carved them. I wish I had been truer to Vivien's drawing . . .
. . . because I feel like Drew really captured the essence of Rafe's and it was awesome.
I love the eyes!
On Halloween we went to Vivien's class for the Costume Parade. One class would start the parade and we would sit in our class and watched them go by, then join the end of the line and follow it all the way through the rest of the school and back to our class. It was fun. Here she is at her party after the parade. I have designated her beloved friend Demenace in the picture below:
Annie loved to be at school with her sister, and Vivien enjoyed showing her off.
After school there were tears for some reason, and she cried off all her makeup and somehow gave herself a unibrow.
But it was easily fixed for trick or treating later. I stayed home and passed out candy and had a really fun time. I made all the super heroes strike poses, all the princesses sing their theme songs, etc. One kid who was probably about 7 looked at me pointedly after I laid out my conditions for obtaining candy, shared a look of disgust with his dad, looked back at me and said, "Really?" Really, little power ranger. Let's see your best move!
Rafe has enjoyed wearing the jacket Drew turned into a costume using felt and a needle and thread. He's very skilled. Guys, this picture is not posed! He really sat down and put his arm around his sister. Heart...melting....
These two have their moments, good and bad.
But they are always happy to see their sister when she's home from school. Especially since she can now read them books!
Here are a couple of Rafe's most recent drawings.
I love the eyes. This is a meteor about to hit our porch:
Here's one Vivien drew of Drew and I. We are kissing. From a distance.
Screen time is obviously a hot issue in the house right now. I went to a lecture the school district did on the blended learning program they're using (a mix of traditional face-to-face and online learning). My takeaways are that it's as important for the kids to learn to use the technology of the day as it is for them to learn to use a pencil, and that I am seriously under-utilizing quality screen time in my mothering. It's going to take some work for me to implement a good structure that will make screen time a valuable thing instead of a waste of time, but I see the importance of it now. So, time to do some research and thinking and counseling with the Lord in all my doings. Speaking of which, here is a picture of me and my wonderful friend Jo, rehearsing a lovely setting of Alma 37:37 that I sang in church last week. I will miss this lady.
Drew had to go out to sea for another two weeks. The day after he left we took part in the Kitsap Penninsula's Salmon Tours, a program run by Washington State University. We went to the one at the Moutaineers Rhododendron Preserve. There were students and a professor in the cabin at the trailhead passing out treats and answering questions and running kid crafts. I didn't realize the salmon spend their adult life in the ocean and don't come back to the river until they're ready to die and that's when they have their babies.
The spawning females come up the river full of eggs and make themselves a redd (nest) by thrashing around in the stream to clear out all the river gunk and make nice space in the gravel for their eggs to sink into. The males fight each other for fertilization rights with their crazy teeth, then the male and female release their eggs and milt at the same time. There's only about a 30 second window for the eggs to get fertilized in the open water before they start to harden. They had a table at the trailhead with some fresh samples to study. Female on the left, male on the right.
Check out the teeth on the males! It's amazing how much the bodies of the salmon change when they're ready to spawn. These are chums and they are nice and river bottom colored.
Annie was as cold as the dead salmon on ice. She wouldn't keep her gloves on.
We hiked down about half a mile through old growth forest to the stream.
There was a little Hobbit house on the way. Maybe more of a Hobbit cabin.
Our marine biologist guide told us the salmon have to give everything they've got to make it back to their spawning grounds. Their immune systems shut down; we could easily see lots of them covered in white fungus. When the males would start to fight you could see them taking chunks out of each other. There were already a couple dead ones along the banks. And just the effort of swimming up a tiny stream as a huge fish. It would be quiet and then all of a sudden you'd hear this wild splashing. Such a crazy life!
Vivien expressed her impressions from the day in art form back at the cabin.
We also went to a Native American Heritage celebration put on by the Central Kitsap School district. It was not as cultural as I was expecting, but it was still fun. There were Native American inspired coloring pages, the elementary school choir sang a bunch of Native American songs, and girl who looked very white did some dancing.
Turns out she actually IS Native American. She let Merrick try out the cradle board that's been used in her family for 3 generations. I think I'll stick with my Baby Bjorn.
The next week we had yet another elementary school celebration for Veteran's Day. Vivi's school had the Navy Northwest Brass Quintet come. They played a Sousa march and some jazz and ragtime, a beautiful rendition of America the Beautiful, and the songs for all the different branches. Musician First Class is my favorite rank ever.
Vivi lost tooth number 2! She pulled it out herself. This time she left it for the tooth fairy. And then she gave the dollar to her friend Quinn as a birthday present.
Here she is talking about the benefits of losing a tooth, then running in to school like she does every day. I lol every day, watching her skinny limbs working under that big bulky backpack. I love her enthusiasm!
We've been trying to hang out with all our friends as much as possible before we move. We met the Bolthouses for a stroll through Clear Creek Park this week. Vivien was a good friend for Emma.
And I went on my last visiting teaching visits. I have the best visiting teachees. I was at all of their houses for like 2 hours. We kept trying to say it was time to go and then we'd just keep talking. Merrick chilled on Diana Holyoak's couch.
He's a very chill baby.
And so happy.
Especially when I am funny (which is all the time, of course).
Here's a 8/9 month Punnett square!
Unfortunately, Merrick cut 6 teeth all at once (4 on bottom, 2 on top) and is having a really hard time figuring out how to eat without biting his tongue. He nicks it with every. single. bite.
Hard enough to draw blood! And he looks at me like I've betrayed him by feeding him sharp food for no reason. I hope he figures it out soon . . .
. . . because he really loves to eat. He's a beanie baby!
I was finally brave enough to make a pot of dried beans. They were delicious. And they'd been sitting in my pantry forever and needed to be used.
I have been working hard to clear out all the stock piles of things that need to be gone through before we move. The kids have capitalized on my preoccupation and gotten into all kinds of mischief.
Annie had her face "painted" Saturday night.
And she's learned how to take pictures on my phone. Her little stubby toes!
This week I've had an extra child in the mix. Her parents went to Hawaii for a work trip so she's been staying with me. It's nice for the kids to have a playmate to keep them distracted . . .
. . . but she has some bowel issues that have required a lot of clean up, and I have washed my hands so many times in the last week that my knuckles are all cracking! I may have to resort to my nightly Aquaphor sock-hands care routine soon.
Drew should be home tonight! I may or may not blog again before we move . . . I don't want to think about it. I have really loved it here and will miss it very much.
Couple of funnies:
Rafe absolutely refuses to eat food that has been split in half to share. "With himmmm it's aaaaaaall or nothin'."
Vivien had a dream that fairies were teaching her to fly. All she had to do was squeeze her shoulder blades together and then her wings would go.
Rafe, "When I die, I'll miss parts of Earth. I'll miss trick-or-treating."
At the Native American celebration there was a game where two kids would hold a stick between them, and another child would have to try to hang from the stick and keep their feet off the floor while the holders ran them as far around the gym as they could go. I told Vivien that I thought she'd be really good at the game because she plays in her jungle gym so often. She said, "Mom! You make me feel mighty!"
Annie was sitting in my room early one morning when she heard Rafe coughing from his bed. She gasped and said, "Rafie's cough! He needs me!" (That contraction is short for "Rafie is cough!")
Rafe to Annie on his way to the bathroom to poop: "Do you want to come in here and sit on your potty and talk to me?"
Vivien as I'm trying to make dinner: I don't want butt-nut squash!
When the kids are playing and run as fast as they can, they yell "CHICKEN SPEED!"
There's a tree on the highway that is sandwiched into a big line of pines and looks like a fire.
And all the trees in our neighborhood are so beautiful.
Especially ours.
Sometimes I have to pick up a handful of the leaves and just set them out and admire them for a minute. I've showed this picture to Drew about 20 times. He is tired of it, but it is so very pleasing to my eye!
I rather liked this leaf rainbow too.
I had Vivien stand on my shoulders and throw a rope over one of the branches of our tree to make a good swing for leaf jumping. Rafe didn't quite get the concept, but Vivi had a couple good flights.
Annie liked swinging pendulum-style on one of Vivien's beloved sticks she lent her for a seat.
But our leaf pile didn't stay consolidated for long. Leaf fights are just as fun as snowball fights.
SPLAT!
And it's just as fun to be buried in leaves as it is to be buried in sand.
Annie prepping to be covered:
Things got a little crazy when the Witch Cauldron became involved. "Cauldron Bum!" "Really? That's adorable."
Even Merrick likes to eat play in the leaves. It's a good time.
Thursday was the first day of fall break. It was a hard day for us, because Vivien did not go to school. Vivien gets bored when she does not go to school. Her favorite activities are things that make a mess; things that involve a lot of parental supervision. Well Drew had a bunch of Halloween related errands to run in the afternoon and I had put Merrick down for a nap and went to work on some Familton stuff for about an hour while I had my hands free, and when he woke up I came downstairs to this:
That is ALL of my salt, flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, couscous, cornstarch, breadcrumbs, and quinoa from the pantry, along with a tomato, onion, lime, lemon, and clementine from the counter, which Vivien cut herself with a steak knife. They got water from the bathroom. There were little flour fingerprints on all of the cabinets and drawers, a trail of wet cocoa powder across the carpet from the kitchen to the bathroom, and couscous coating every open square inch of the floor. I was not happy, Bob. Not happy. I put them outside on the porch while I secured the scene from Merrick's involvement and tried to impress on their minds the naughtiness of what they had done. They did not seem to be responding and I still had "Flames, flames, flames on the side of my face...breathing, breathl-, heaving breaths." I may have yelled a bit. And dumped all their good behavior beans out. And told them they couldn't go to the ward Halloween party that night. Then they cried:
But I was still angry, so I sent them upstairs to take a bath and then made them help clean up their mess. And I texted my mom, who helped me calm down and refocus.
I sat them down on little stools to the side of the oven while I started making their lunch and we had a good talk about repentance. We went through all the steps, and talked about what those steps would look like in this situation. Then we said a prayer together, and Vivien cried during it when she asked Heavenly Father to forgive her for making such a bad choice and to please help her to do better. It's hard to be mad at your children when they do stuff like that. So, we gave hugs all around and finished making lunch together. They were mummies before the offensive olive eyes got picked off
We went to the Halloween party that night. Vivien and Rafe finally decided on a costume (they are twin pandas) and we put Annie and Merrick in costumes we had lying around. I went as Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I am finally embracing it.
We ran out of time for Drew to be a cool thing, so he had to be a very rushed skeleton. I want to try this again with more time on actual Halloween, because he's got a good head for it.
The Primary was in charge of the party and had families from the ward run carnival games all around the gym. I had volunteered to do the Pumpkin walk.
I used my Ready! for Kindergarten dice to choose the numbers. Merrick did his best to steal them and disconnect the speakers I was playing music on and be generally underfoot.
We had a good time. A face-melting good time.
The next day I woke up to find Ms. Sneaky at it again getting into the Halloween candy on the very top shelf of the pantry and feeding it to herself, Rafe, and Annie, but the flames didn't make an appearance. More talking, more teaching, more loving. I think Vivien is the primary tool Heavenly Father uses to help me file down my rough edges.
Later that morning we had Parent Teacher Conferences at the school. Vivien showed me her work displayed in the hall. I may be biased, but I think her pumpkin watercolor is pretty darn good. I would even go so far as to claim that it is the best in show.
Her teacher told me she's doing awesome. She's exceeding all her educational targets and she loves to help her classmates. Every day 15 of the 18 students in her class have 30 minutes of reading intervention in a different room, so it's just Ms. De La Cruz and the three little blond reader girls, Vivien, Quinn, and Analise. They love that special quiet time with their teacher. Vivi also earned her "Self Manager" badge at the school. The program "is designed to positively recognize those students who consistently model self-manager behavior." She gets special privileges (like an extra recess or first to lunch) as a reward for being a good example. Here are all the self managers at the school for this year:
Ms. De La Cruz told me she's been encouraging the kids to start trying to spell things out on their own (she had a special name for it, but I can't remember what it was). Vivien posted this sign in her room this week that I think we may need to frame and permanently attach to her bed:
Ms. De La Cruz also asked me where I shop for my clothes, because she really loves the skirts I wear. I was very flattered, since I made them myself! After the conference we went into the library where there was a Scholastic book fair and a bunch of STEM activities for the kids to do.
Building 3D shapes!
We had to balance on everything on our way out to the car.
On Saturday we went to a pumpkin patch in Port Orchard to find some suitable jack-o-lantern pumpkins.
There was a fun little playground for littles, and in the back of this picture you can see targets for a water balloon launcher they had set up at the top of the hill.
Annie showing off the little pumpkin house.
There were also a couple of goats, chickens, and pigs.
We paid $2 each for the kids to take a barrel ride. They sang and waved the whole way around the farm. The guy driving the tractor remarked, "That was the happiest ride I've had all day," when they disembarked.
And then we paid $1 each to go on a Pumpkin Hunt in the old-growth forest behind the farm. They gave us a little laminated card that had a secret message. There were different colored pumpkins hiding up in the trees that had a letter associated with them. When you saw the pumpkin, you'd fill in all the spaces on the card marked by that color and in the end it spelled out a message ("Happy Autumn Adventures!"). Rafe named all the letters if we could remind Vivien to give him a chance, and Vivien wrote them all on our little card by herself.
There were also trees with faces.
The kids delighted in pointing them out by screaming loudly. It wasn't the serenest nature walk, but it was really fun!
A good day at the Pumpkin Patch, all in all. Even Stinky Rafe couldn't keep himself from hating all of it.
Random things!
Rafe: I like Daddy because he's bald and tells jokes to me. And he wrestles with me.
Drew stood watch for the last time, and had his very last PRT. Here he is showing off his bulging . . . head veins.
I've been tending a little girl in our ward in the afternoons for the last couple weeks to help out her mom. It was going to be a steady thing, but her mom has been in the process of switching jobs so it's just been every now and again. Which is fine with me. She is a 1st grader at the other elementary school near us, so we are all home when it's time to walk to the bus stop to pick her up. The bus stop is in front of a house with a cool front yard.
Merrick is continuing his eating of ALL THE THINGS. We had two unfortunate incidents this week. One came to my attention when I heard little Annie squeaking, "He's eating my poopies!" Andelynn "Crazy Hair" Rei Forbes
There were some old, dry, pebble-sized turds on the floor of her bedroom that I had missed but Merrick had found. Better vantage point. Blech. He has Drewpy eyes
The other was when Rafe was playing with some salt dough at our Japanese table and Merrick popped up beside him to take a big piece and stick it in his mouth. It was not a pleasant experience for him. I washed out his mouth, but he kept freaking out for several minutes after. When I laid him down to change his diaper and he opened up to let loose a wail, I saw that the entire roof of his mouth was aquamarine. I guess salt dough is the consistency of that white bread that cements itself to your hard palate. He was much happier when it was gone--he has no love for a salt lick.
I've been playing floor hockey with some ladies from the stake on Wednesday nights. It's really fun. We play at the stake center. They've put socks on all their sticks so they don't rip up the floor. When I drive home after playing there is always mist over the road, which is rather thrilling. It's a good me-time break.
Rafe dropped a weight he was messing around with onto his big toe, so we have matchy purple toenails.
We have to read Annie three books every night. "Next book?" "Next book?" "Last book?" Here she is reading The Pout-Pout Fish. Bluuuuuuuub
