Here's Vivi's first day of school picture. I wish I'd taken a better one, but we were in a hurry, so it is what it is! She chose to wear her "school dress" for the first day. I was very gratified.
We had driven by the school on Saturday and done a dry run of the drop-off, so I didn't feel bad driving by and sending her in on her own.
That is, I didn't feel bad until I pulled up past that satellite building and saw all the other kindergarten parents waiting outside the classroom with their children . . . My friend whose son is in Vivi's class texted me later that morning and told me Vivien had been crying a little when she walked in, but when I picked her up that day she was a right little ray of sunshine. I think she would've cried whether I had walked her in or not. Probably would've been worse if I had! I think she was just nervous to do something new, but she is so ready for school she couldn't be nervous for long. She absolutely loves it. Every day I pick her up and she says, "Today was even better than the day before!" Here we are waiting at the school for her to get out.
She gives me very detailed reports of her days. My favorite comment so far: "Mr. H controls P.E." She is in heaven making a new friend every day. She comes home and tells me their names and what she did with them. There is a boy in her class that she was calling "Hiwi." She said, "Like the book we got from the library!"
Vivien likes to draw the Hueys.
I like Oliver Jeffers books. He's got these characters that are easy enough for a 6 year old to draw mixed in with gorgeous illustrations and his cool handwriting. And he was raised in Ireland, so sometimes there are funny words in there too. Like "boke" which is apparently the Irish word for dry heaving.
Vivi had pictures on Friday, so we gave her a haircut. Her picture smile is going through a weird phase right now . . .
Reminds me of this:
I think I might be getting a little better at cutting her hair. It still mega-stresses me out, but it's nice to save some money, and she always loves to have it short again. You can see the layers well in this picture of her pouting.
She was trying to play a game during stake conference today (we're singing I Believe in Christ at a peppy mm=106), but Annie wasn't cooperating. I tried to convince her that helping Annie to be happy by changing her game a little so that Annie could have a fun time too would be choosing the right and make her feel good. She didn't buy it. So, I made her do it anyway and she threw a fit.
Annie was unmoved, and unsportingly smug about getting her way. How do you keep younger children from being spoiled? There's no one to make them share with!
So hard to learn to play together. Sometimes it's nice when we can just parallel play happily. Notice Rafe's hands full of long pointy things. The other day he played with a Tylenol syringe all day. He called it his "boo-let gun." Like bullet, but funnier.
It's interesting to have Vivien at school all day. There's definitely a different feel to the house. The first day she was gone Rafe replaced her with a bike pump he carried around with him everywhere and referred to as "Tall Kid."
It's been fun to watch him play with Annie more.
And Merrick too. I hate to say it, but there's a lot less fighting when Vivien's at school . . .
Rafe got a haircut too. He needed it.
I don't love how it turned out. It looks really cute when it will stay parted on the side, but it never stays parted on the side.
Luckily he is a cute enough boy that he can get away with a funny haircut for awhile. Here he is asking me if his face is clean. I instituted a rule that they can't ask me if their faces are clean unless they are close enough to touch me, because I got tired of them asking me from across the room where I can't possibly tell. He likes to clean his face himself, because apparently when I do it I let the damp washcloth touch his shirt and it gets him wet. It's hard for me to not roll my eyes sometimes.
Annie is being a potty training champ! I still put her in a diaper at night,
but she is 100% successful during the day . . . as long as she is completely naked from the waist down.
Underwear is confusing to her, and it's tricky to get on (I realized this week that I've never made her dress herself in her life, so we're having to learn how to do that simultaneously. Toddler proportions make dressing oneself very difficult!).
I hope we can get accustomed to underwear soon, because the tender skin on her little bottom is getting all irritated from direct contact with the scratchy carpet all day. Also, there is GLITTER all over my house and therefore all over Annie's backside. When she sits on her "baby toilet" she always leaves it a little more bedazzled than it was before.
I also hope we can progress to the actual toilet soon. I bought (and installed myself!) a nifty diaper sprayer for Merrick's cloth diapers now that he's eating solids, so that makes cleaning out the little chamber pot super easy, but Annie actually has a really hard time handling the sight of her excretions. She'll hop off to show me she's gone in her baby toilet and then start gagging at the sight of it. I think she'll benefit from the separation a toilet bowl full of water will afford her. Enough poop talk. Look! Annie got a little haircut too. All the pictures I take of her seem blurrier than they actually are because her fine hair is always in her eyes. Well, no more! Hello, Pretty Eyes.
Here are more pretty eyes.
Merrick can sit up now.
Which means he can join his siblings for bathtime . . .
. . . and reach even more things, like my skirt hem.
He can also roll quickly and purposefully, which means he can reach everything the kids leave on the floor. Scraps of paper, little toys, scissors, library books. Merrick can't keep himself from trying to eat all these dangerous things. He's like a suicidal goat. We have lost so many book pages to his grasping hands this week . . .
But you can't be mad at him, because he's the sweetest little Fatso there's ever been.
I am making him a wall hanging for his room. It is going to be Goodnight Gorilla themed.
Some sad new for the week. Sassafras is ill again. His gills were all swollen and he's been very lethargic. I came in the other day and he was throwing himself up on top of his Catappa leaf and laying there miserably for a few seconds before sliding back off into the water. He's stopped eating and spends most of his time resting against the stems of his plant. It makes me sad. He was such a lively thing before.
2 things here at the bottom. Annie's getting really good at talking, but there are still a couple words that crack me up. My favorite this week is, "Close the doord!"
We were making shapes with our magnetic construction set the other day and talking about how shapes can be different depending on which way you look at them (square, diamond, etc.). Vivien said, "A circle is always right no matter how you look at it." It made me think about how "the course of the Lord is one eternal round." No matter who we are or how different our lives are from each other's, God's love and plan is the same for each of us. I love this line from a talk my Uncle Rex gave at a family reunion on things he learned from my great grandma Woods: "Her conduct implied to me that the gospel essentials are few and simple at the core, and in the rest there is great latitude to include the customs and traditions of humanity." Those few and simple gospel essentials are a circle, and they are the same no matter how you look at them!
I'm afraid her birthday wasn't quite as glorious as she would've liked it to be, with Daddy out of town and a bunch of babies for siblings, but we do our best. I had hosted Book Club the night before out on the porch (we put up twinkly lights for it! It was very festive) . . .
. . . so all the chairs in the house were downstairs that morning. Vivien and Rafe snuggled up in the papasan for some Reading Rainbow while I made oatmeal, which is a treat to them, not a punishment. They love it because it makes them warm.
Vivien wanted to open presents right away. They were supposed to be attractively wrapped, but that didn't happen. She didn't mind. She was just excited!
She got a new pair of shorts she wanted, I gave her a reading light for her bed since she knows how to read now, she got a fun princess night light projector from Grandma Paula, and Drew made her a magic wand. This is a terrible picture of the wand, which is actually quite beautiful, but it's a good picture of her excited face.
In the afternoon I made her a cake while Rafe and Annie struggled to accept the fact that it was not their birthday. "That's how it is, Alice. Your birthday is always the one that is not now." Annie did a lot of crying. Right now if something displeases her, she says "I don't want to!" even if it doesn't make sense. "It's Vivi's birthday today!" "I don't want to." Rafe turned to vandalism to vent his frustrations, taking a running race medal and scratching the paint off part of the wall in the family room. My friend recommended "Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child" to me. I think it may need to be my next book, if I can ever finish Les Miserables. The nice thing about birthdays is everybody gets some cake.
I just used a chocolate cake mix, but I did make delectable blackberry/raspberry filling from scratch and I successfully made Italian buttercream frosting. I was inordinately proud of myself for not ruining it--so many places it could have been a disaster! I had to give myself a couple whoops and do a kick when it finally came together at the end.
Things people like about Vivien:
Dad sent his via message: "I love that she will ride with me int he car and tell me all her wonderful stories. She is so creative and it always makes me laugh and smile."
I like that she is such a good helper with her siblings and that she is so smart.
Rafe and Annie both liked that she plays with them.
We love our Vivs!
On Wednesday we had a meeting with Vivien's new teacher, Ms. De La Cruz. She is from AZ and graduated from ASU. I like her, if for no other reason than she painted her table with whiteboard paint and has a basket of mittens for the kids to use as erasers. Brilliant!
Her classroom decorations are not your usual kindergarten variety. It's very cute. Here's her board out in the hall.
Vivi's first full day will be tomorrow. I hope we are ready! In honor of school starting, I put up the fall decorations.
I am hoping to have a little time this week to "teach Annie to use the toilet." Big bottle of Gatorade=lots of opportunities to learn to use the toilet. I decided not to call it potty training because I already know I am terrible at that. But Annie is a teachable thing, so surely I can teach her to use the toilet? On Thursday I was trying to finish Les Mis before book club (didn't happen!) and I could tell she had been needing to go for awhile and was just holding it in, but I wasn't paying enough attention to do something about it. She heard Merrick wake up from his nap on the monitor and went running up to his room, climbed into his crib, and then peed all over him, herself, and the bed. Heavy sighs were heaved.
Vivien asked me to teach her to play the violin this week, so we got it out and gave it a whirl. I'm trying to not be A Suzuki Teacher teaching Vivien to play and instead being Vivien's Mom teaching her to play, because it's a lot more fun for both of us the second way. Semantics is important to me!
Rafe was persuaded to give it a try too. I think little boys look so cute with violins . . . He participated for a minute or two until it got a little hard and then he said, "I JUST WANT TO PLAY DRUMS!"
Rafe's been having a really rough time with this separation from Drew. He has days where he asks me every few hours when Dad'll be back, and he's at once clingy and prickly. Vivien's been sad too. She suddenly burst into tears yesterday at dinner because she missed her daddy. I try to just give them hugs and reassure them he'll be back soon. Rafe laid down with me the other day during nap time while I was reading Les Mis. I fell asleep, and when I woke up I looked around for him and saw that he had slid off the couch and fallen asleep on the floor. As soon as I got my camera to take a picture he woke up, then flatly denied he had ever been asleep.
Yesterday I took the kids to a ward service project where we did some yard work around the church grounds. I did not want to go. I felt like I had a pretty good excuse to stay home, with 4 tiny kids and a husband at sea, but I went anyway. Not because I wanted to give service, but because I knew I'd get blessings from it, and I wanted the blessings. Does that count as having your heart in the right place? I put Merrick in the baby backpack and pulled weeds while the other kids ran around the church parking lot for 3 solid hours. Everyone slept very soundly that night!
Here's a picture of Merrick snuggled up with Diana Byron during Relief Society today. She's the one who watched my other babies when I went to have him.
And last, here is the random thing I found in my freezer this week. It is an old kiwi container full of individually paper-towel-wrapped ice cubes. I'm not sure when or how or why. I have a feeling these unexplainable oddities around my house will become more frequent the more capable my children get.
School starts next week, so we are taking this week to get used to a new wake-up time. I'm supposed to be asleep in an hour. Can I finish a blog post in an hour? It would be a record for me. I'll give it a shot. (Update: probably not going to happen. I went to YouTube to upload the videos and saw the new Star Wars movie trailer . . .)
I have some solar eclipse 2017 stuff I needed to get on here. I had grand ambitions of driving down to Oregon to be in the path of totality, but the thought of getting stuck on I-5 for any amount of time with 4 small children in the car was too much to stomach. They are good travelers only so long as we are moving. So we slept in and woke up to this lovely eclipse-viewing weather:
It did turn out to be a nice clear day, if a little cold. We sat on our porch with our solar glasses while I planned our Canada trip. I kept notes of all the observations the kids made, but now that I am looking for the page in the notebook I used, all I see are the little bits of paper stuck in the spiral binding where someone has ripped it out. Maybe it was me? I don't know. All I can remember is Rafe being sooooper excited about "looking into space!" (because the glasses cut out all light except the sun, so it looks like you're peering into the blackness beyond), and Vivien thinking it looked like a "tilted cat" when the moon covered a corner of the sun.
I took a timelapse of the whole thing hoping to capture the change in light, but my iPhone camera adjusted for the dimness. At the peak it felt like maybe Rainier had erupted and covered the sky in ash. It was disorienting, for sure. It also kind of brought home that we live on and around enormous balls traveling at incredible speeds through space, which makes one feel rather small and full of wonder.
Good news! Annie has officially moved into her cupboard under the stairs. Our camping trip threw her off her sleep pattern enough that it was easy to start a new one when we got home. I folded our other futon mattress in thirds and added another rail to keep her flailing, unconscious self from spilling into Rafe's sacred space.
To get her to go to sleep I just have to snuggle her up and say, "Close your eyes!" and she screws them up tightly and eventually drifts off. Some days. Some days she plays for an hour in the semi-darkness. That's fine with me.
As long as she's happy and ready for a good reading session on the . . . porch . . .
Annie graduated from the crib not a moment too soon. This boy is a roly poly roller.
He is much happier now that he can sort of get where he wants to be.
Remember that time that Merrick was so big he fit in all the clothes that Rafe wore when he was old enough to walk?
He's too heavy to hold on my hip in one arm while I do stuff (it gets to the point where my bicep slowly and involuntarily releases, like when you're rock climbing and max out your strength), so I've been getting to use my pretty Guatemala wrap. It's too fussy for outings, but it's nice to use around the house.
Do you see his little toes? When I sit down on the floor to change his diaper, he kicks me with them. He is strong and his toes are tiny . . .
. . . so I have little bruises all over the insides of my legs.
Look at his pudginess!
Much cuter on babies.
This baby loves his siblings so much, especially his biggest sister.
Poor Vivs. It took her a long time to get over the illness she had in Canada. She said, "I spent all my strength hiking, and now my legs don't work anymore."
But little by little she has regained her strength. The kids have named all the "swings" they created in their jungle gym. The yellow rope in Vivi's hand is Shine-rides, the one she's standing on is Babies'-turns, and Annie is hanging from Beckaboy.
Vivs is so creative and smart. And big! She vacuumed the family room while we were cleaning the house this week. But, she passed on my offer to let her vacuum the whole house, unfortunately.
Drew left for his month-long cruise on the ship this weekend. I was sad, so I packed everyone up and we went for a hike. We did the Green Mountain trail. It goes through a logging forest, and it was interesting to walk through the recently logged areas.
They gave us some lovely unhindered views of our Olympic friends, the Hood Canal, and all the pretty lakes. But it also made it really hot. And the heat combined with the uphill made for some tired and sweaty hikers (Vivien, as the rivulets drip off my face--"Whoa Mom, you're really sweaty." Thanks Vivs; I am carrying like 50 pounds!). Rafe took it especially hard. He finally came down with whatever the girls had in Canada, so by this day he was feeling about like Vivien was at Lake Louise.
I pulled out every happy, encouraging stop I have and we made it to the top. There were some picnic tables where we sat to rest and have lunch. Since the hike was going to be so long (5 miles total . . . heh heh) I had Annie in the baby backpack and Merrick in the Baby Bjorn. My shoulders were sore and grateful for the break.
We had a view of Mt. Rainier and the Seattle skyline. We broke out the binoculars to get a closer look at the Space Needle.
I'm so proud of these hiking kids!
Another!
The way down was much easier, though that didn't stop the last mile from being torturous. Rafe said, "Why do we do this? It's so hard!" I got to talk about how it's good to do hard things, so when you are growning/grown up and you have to do really hard things, you'll already know you can! Like when I have to take 4 kids to the grocery store . . . I swear on Friday when I walked out of the store into the wind, cart laden with children and food with which to feed them, I could hear my glorious theme music playing. I'm pretty sure there was an enormous American flag unfurling behind me in slow motion, too.
One more thing about the hike. I found the COOLEST feather on the trail and Rafe begged me to let him hold it on the way home. He had it when we got in the car, but when we got out of the car at the house it was gone. I asked him where it was, and he said he'd decided he didn't like it . . . and threw it out the window! I'm pretty miffed. I would've liked it for our collection.
Today was Sunday. I love my ward so much. On the way to church today I asked the kids why they think we go to church. They said, "to learn about the gospel," and with prompting talked about the sacrament, and I added that it's also important to just be together so we can help and strengthen each other. I read them this thank-you note the seminary teacher in our ward slipped into my hand last week, and gave them some examples of what people had said to me last week that made me feel loved or helped me learn something. Then I told them that maybe someone just needs a smile from Vivien today, or someone needs to hear Rafe singing a primary song to help them feel loved and appreciated and supported. It was a good conversation to have before doing church without Drew.
After church we went for a Sunday Stroll with our friends. It turned into a big blackberry picking fest. Er, blackberry picking and eating fest.
There's an element of danger to it . . .
. . . but there are so many berries out right now that they were accessible to even the smallest.
Annie and Paisley are good little nursery friends. I love Annie's sharing face.
