It's School Time!

With summer drawing to a close, it was time to get ready for school.  We went through all the clothes to make sure everyone had enough nice things that fit.

 We met Drew for a last lunch date all together at Hot Tamales.

  

And we went to Puesta del Sol's Meet the Teacher night. It was hot outside, so they found some shade.

 Vivien started 2nd grade this year and Rafe started 1st.

 Here's a more smiley picture.

 And here's one that fits their personalities just right.

 Vivien got to choose a new backpack this year.  And she is wearing the yoga pants she bought with the money she earned over the summer.

It hasn't been too much of a challenge to get up early for school so far because we don't have to get up before the sun just yet.  

Vivi and Rafe like to get dressed, then come snuggle in bed with me until we have to go get breakfast started.  Our mornings have been 100x's smoother this year since I am paying for them to eat hot lunch at school and have decided to let them eat cold cereal every morning, even though I maintain that it's a worthless breakfast.

Once Drew and the kids leave I usually have about half an hour before Annie and Merrick wake up.

  

We exercise together, and I leave nice sweaty marks on my wood floor after doing corpse pose.

Some days we walk to the park.

With friends...

...or without.

Some days we walk to friends' houses.  Like when we picked all the peaches off our little tree and McKenzie helped me can them all, and told me stories of growing up in Idaho and canning with her mom and grandma and aunts. 

 Some days our friends come to us, like when Bo came and taught me to make mandu, and told me stories of her grandma making them for her family for holidays.  She is too short for my counter, so I had to give her a stool.

 I think she told me that if you can make pretty mandu it means you'll have beautiful children. 

Some days it's just too much playing...

...and we can't make it through the drive to pick up kids from school without catching some z's. This is one of Annie's favorite outfits right now--a swaddling blanket wrapped around her back, twisted, then tied around the back of the neck.  It's actually kind of cute.

  

On Thursdays we pick up Allen from preschool at 12. He just had a birthday we got to celebrate with him.

And now on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Annie goes to preschool from 9-12.

 It is 5 minutes away and run by my friend Megan Davis that I wanted an excuse to see more often. 

One of the days we got to decorate a bag and fill it with 3 things that tell about you.  Annie put in a picture of her family, her Elsa doll, and the jinbei she wore when she was a baby in Japan.

  

 She is enjoying preschool, but she's going through a hard 4-year-old phase right now.  She easily falls into a "nobody plays with me" mindset that makes her not want to go anywhere or do anything because it's not worth it because no one will be nice to her, and then she'll cry and cry.  Sometimes I give her a count, and tell her she needs to stop crying by the time I get to 10 or she needs to go cool off in her room.  She usually can stop pretty quickly in her room, but she can cry for a loooong time if she's got an audience.  I hope she moves on from this quickly, because everyone likes to play with happy Annie!

We pick up the kids from school at 2.  Here is Vivien with her good friend Iliana

 Then we come home and do homework.  Here is Rafe studying his sight words.  He's doing really well at reading, and I'm enjoying doing his Spanish homework with him.  His accent melts my heart.

 Sometimes we come home and we relax.  Here is Vivien reading a book.  She reads like a wildfire.

  

Or we play.  Here is everyone taking turns on the zip line.

Drew has been cooking for the family a lot lately.  He made this tasty pesto chicken salad the other day.  

And Annie captured him cooking something, sometime.

At dinner we had to institute a family rule that you don't touch anyone at the table until they're finished eating, because kids were finishing early then hanging on arms just as you'd be about to take a bite and making all the food spill onto the floor, or climbing up the back of your chair to sit on your head when you were trying to take a drink.  The rule is void if you get your phone out though.  

After dinner on Monday we have family night.  Here is the lesson Drew came up with for 1 Corinthians 12 about the many parts of the body all working together to make a whole.  Everyone drew a body part and then had to draw it on our guy. They loved it.   

Annie had a birthday the same week that school started.  I asked her to smile, and she took offense.

 But she was pleased to blow out candles, wearing her favorite dress that is falling apart at the seams.

 It was an exciting cake inside!

She got a lot of Barbies for her birthday of different sizes and colors.

She also got a new set of markers, because this girl loves to color.

 She is a sweet thing.

Some Annie quotes from recently:

"Mommy! My hoyt [heart] is beeping right heeow [here]!"

"I killed a fly once.  But not with the fly smacker, with my hand!  It was on the windowsill."

She calls my old stuffed animal that was named after my Grandma Ann's little dog Tyrone, "Tylerone" which makes me want to have a Toblerone.

We went for a bike ride the other day and I took a "short cut" that ended up making us go for about a mile on a very bumpy dirt road.  I was ok with my shocks, but the kids in the bike trailer were screaming and crying and Annie finally shouted, "I CAN'T HOLD IT ANYMORE!!!"  I think she meant I can't stand it anymore.  

Dad: Colette is at the MTC

Annie: Empty?  Wait, it has no water?

I let her crack an egg the other day while making pancakes, then she started gagging cause she got it on her hands.

"The night was really scary, because I had a nightmirror!"

We were driving to pick up the kids the other day and Annie started teaching Merrick that Jesus is the Son of God.  She told him the story of Jesus' baptism when the voice came from heaven, and she sang him the last line of Come Follow Me ("for thus alone can we be one with God's own loved Begotten Son.").  She frequently talks about Jesus and Heavenly Father, and sometimes says she hopes she dies soon so she can meet them.  I try to focus more on the fact that she's happy to see them than on the dying part.

She is a sweet little Sunbeam and tries her best to sing all the songs.  

We love Annie!

I got to have a really nice weekend two weeks ago due to a chance scheduling strangeness.  My manager scheduled me to work Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Saturday instead of Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday.  So I had a Friday off, then on Saturday I got put on call.  I got to sleep in my bed the whole weekend.  It was amazing.  Church that Sunday was my favorite week ever!  And we got to go on a date with the Morgans.  We went to a Greek place called Chello Grill.  The owner is a patient of Spencer's and traded him coupons for services.  

 Then we went to I Scream Ice Cream which I will need to take all of you to when you come to visit me.  It has to be experienced. 

 Since I didn't have to spend Sunday sleeping, we decided to have friends over for Dessert Night and singing.  Our kids ran wild.  We ate and chatted.

 Then it started to get dark, so we sang Belle (the opening song of Beauty and the Beast), What is this Feeling?, and One Day More with everyone, then some people went home and some others stayed, and by the time we were all sung out and left the music room, the kids had finished Moana and Vivien, Annie, and Rafe were standing in front of the screen doing Polynesian dances to the menu music while Drew and Merrick dreamt on the couch.

 And THEN it was LABOR DAY!  So we got to have more fun.  We were going to meet the McEwen's at Tent Rocks, but we all got a late start and the line to get in was about an hour long when we got there, so instead we drove into Santa Fe and looked up a hike on Alltrails that seemed promising.  Vivi apparently doesn't have shoes that fit her anymore, and within 5 minutes of hiking had a blister all along one heal.  I switched her a boot for my sock.

 It didn't take long for the other foot to get a hot spot, too.  She hiked the whole mountain in double socks, cause she's tough like that.

  

We got up to a high point and sat down to have a little picnic while we watched a thunderstorm roll in over the mountain.  Asian picnic food is way more tasty than American picnic food.  Bo had made plenty to share, of course.

 We had some nice cloud cover for our way down.

 I happen to love this Drew.

  

All the hikers at the end.

 And now you will be subjected to my nature shots.  There were many beautiful wildflowers...

...excellent textures...

 ...and surprising colors.

 These are a special favorite of mine.

 I like them in combination with these purple ones.

 One more cheery yellow. 

  

That evening we had Drew's family he ministers to over for dessert.  They happen to be Vivien's Primary teachers as well, so that was fun.  Their 4 year old just got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, so we had sugar free dirt pudding.  I don't know who took this picture, but here it is!  It was nice to have them over and get to know them a bit better. 

This last Sunday was Vivien's birthday.  We made her a Miraculous Ladybug cake...

 ...and took it over to the Morgans for dessert night, where she got to be serenaded by 30 people before she blew out her candles. 

 On Monday after school we took a couple friends bowling to celebrate her day. 

 Iliana gave Vivien a board game (Life), an Ugly Doll, and a coloring book.  She told me that she knows Vivien really well, and I'm inclined to agree.  They are cute friends. 

 Left to right, Natalia, Vivs, Oceana, Aria, and Iliana.  Guess we should've named ours Viviana

  

They had a good time bowling.  The high score was 80.

  

A little group picture before we disbanded so they could clean the lane for the bowling competition that night.  I took them all home afterwards.  I had the classical music station on in the car and Iliana moaned, "Is this torture music??"  It was John Phillips Sousa.

Here's some more quotes that need to be recorded, and a video of Rafe being mauled by Drew's coworker's new Aussiedoodle puppy.

We went for a walk the other day and an old lady stopped her car next to us and said, "How cute can you get?!"

Rafe in a tree: Amn't I a monkey?

Merrick calls Fruit Loops "floot loops."  When he wants a taste of your food, he says, "Can I bite?"

We had a ward Sunday Social the other week.  We arrived and Merrick immediately took a warm chocolate chip cookie off the table, broke it apart, and dropped pieces of it that had warm gooey chocolate all over the floor.  I ran to get some napkins so people wouldn't step in it and track it all over the church.  Right as I walked in, Vivien, who had been spinning around and around, suddenly lost her balance and crashed headlong into the stack of folded chairs and started screaming.  Later I had told the Primary children I would run some games, so I was busy doing that when Merrick flooded the nursery toilet with paper towels.  Then Vivien and Rafe spent the whole time chasing teenagers around the hall of  the church (the teenagers love them now, and come up and talk to them at church).  It was a very difficult hour, made more difficult because Drew had decided he didn't want to be social that Sunday and didn't come.  

Rafe collected a bunch of acorns outside and stashed them in the car cup holder, then forgot about them.  Merrick and Allen took all the acorns out and threw them on the floor a few days later, and what was left behind in the cup holder?

Rafe's special take on "made ya look, made ya look, now you're in a baby book!" is "tricked ya! tricked ya! now you're in a chapter book!"

Annie got some Pirate's Booty for her first day of Preschool.  Rafe came home and asked her, "What's the Judy Moody for?"

The kids really like the Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog song, but Rafe sings the chorus, "George to the fishes in the deep blue sea!  George to you and me!"

Rafe has to do speed reading tests for his homework every day.  He has a hard time doing it because he moves around so much while he's reading that he frequently loses his place.  Drew described it as, "his terrible breath and his wandering hands."  

Merrick after listening to Heartbeat Song in the car: "Gen, Dad!  Gen!"

Vivien and Rafe say "English" "Ainglish" because they're using the Spanish pronunciation of "e."

Merrick likes to ride the "zip lion."  He's painfully cute.

Even when he stays up so late at night and ends up watching movies with us he has no business watching.

Here are some projects that have been happening.  I keep having pain here in my left arm while I'm playing, so I have been trying really hard to figure out a way to play that doesn't hurt.

I got a mirror for my music room so I can check my form while I'm playing.  I love this room.  It is my sanctuary.

 We got a cool rug that reminds me of a cable knit sweater and some wonderfully soft pillows from Costco for this room.

And we got some new bedding for the kids room, because the blankets were so soft and squishy we could not resist. 

I took my hair to the salon.

  

They cut it off.

 So now I am short again.

  

And I am actively trying to increase my ankle flexibility.  Apparently you are supposed to be able to put your toes 5 inches from a wall and touch the wall with your knee while your heel stays on the floor.  This is the closest I can get, so my squat form is pretty terrible, as you can imagine.

 Drew texted me the other day around lunch time and told me he wanted to eat all the bad food in the world.  I read the text right as I was about to take a bite of cake, so I had to send him a picture and tell him he'd caught me in the act. 

I saved my string of pearls succulent!  It needed to be repositioned in the dirt, but it looks so much better than it has for months.

Also, this is apparently how I sit while I blog.

 And this is what my house looked like after ignoring it for 3 days while I blogged.  But now...I am all caught up!  Woot! Woot!