Merrick has done a lot of growing over the summer. I wish I had blogged more regularly so we could get a flow of development, but I did not, so it will all be lumped in together. His talking has exploded. My favorite things he said at first were CHANGKEN and BANGKEN (chicken and bacon). "Want more changken!" He now has a favorite answer to most questions: "Don't know!"
It's fun that he can say more, but his developing brain is getting him into more trouble than I could have imagined.
He knocks over the dog water at least once a day, usually right after I have finished refilling it. And if he doesn't knock it over, he'll pour milk in it, or fill it with rocks, or crushed up sidewalk chalk...
He loves to get into the fridge and find himself a snack (I don't love this). It's usually string cheese, but this day, it was Parmesan.
He loves to escape the yard. I found him actually inside the van Langen's house the other day when the van Langens weren't even home. He'd wandered over and let himself in (and the cat out...). When he can do stuff like this, there's really no stopping him:
He is both strong and strong willed.
But I think this has been his naughtiest act to date. Our floor is still a little wavy from soaking, and the remote computer mouse got fried. It could have been so much worse...
He is a wild thing. This is his favorite costume. All superheroes were "Batman" at first, but now he can differentiate "Pie-dough man."
He went through a phase where Frozen was his favorite thing ever and they watched it every day for weeks and weeks.
Annie took these. I think they're cute.
(Merrick is holding Vivien's replacement emoji for the one the dogs destroyed. She has a really nice Activity Day leader.)
Made it to the top...
...and a quick change to the deep squat that I so wish I could do.
Here he is begging for water with a messy, messy face. He is very good at sliming the new couch.
Here is his poor face after a playdate with our neighbor who likes to scratch. Merrick went ahead and added that weapon to his arsenal (which consists now of the wraith-scream and some impressive broadsword work with anything remotely near the right size and shape). He makes people cry a lot.
Here is a delightful pano gone wrong.
Snoozing in the car with Annie.
And crashing on the couch with Annie.
Getting bedtime snuggles. I think he's our child that goes to bed latest on average, mostly due to all the daytime napping.
Getting a bedtime story in a room that causes me to make noises like Eunice Burns on a regular basis.
His little Angel Face sharing my pillow.
Here he is pushing his stroller back from the park on a hot, hot day.
Flipping through a library book in the car.
Chatting on his fake phone.
Staying dry during a summer monsoon.
And cheesing it up!
Here are all my 2 year olds. They are all such adorable stinkers.
A broader spectrum of faces. So much blonde.
Annie
We went to the library for story time the other day, and it wasn't until I got there that I remembered I hadn't even tried to comb Annie's hair. Oops.
She wears a rat nest well.
Here are some sisters eating watermelon on the counter.
Annie loves to snuggle her doggies. They allow her to for the most part.
She lets her mommy snuggle her whenever she wants though.
And even when Mommy doesn't want. Huzzah for the king sized bed!
She picked a bunch of "wheat" on the lawn and presented it to me as a gift sheaf.
It is still sitting in the kitchen window in a little tiny bottle 3 months later.
Here is a little Annie taking the zipline up by herself for a ride.
She is definitely 4ish. Many, many frustrations. She has really good older examples of how to make pretty much everything seem like the end of the world though, so I guess it's to be expected. She has perfected her distraught voice (just pitch it up a couple steps from an average child's voice and crank up the volume and you'll have the right sound): "When is it going to turn green?! It's just going to stay red FOYEVO!" Or after I noticed her potty dance and encouraged her to take care of it: "Whenever I try to go potty in the kid bathroom Vivi and Rafe are always GRAGGING me!" What's gragging? "It's like when you bother someone." We will weather this storm!
Here's a cute video of a sick Annie (at the end)
And here are her little toes.
Rafe
Here is Rafe in the alien costume climbing on walls that are very high.
We had the futon made up for some visitors and the kids wanted to sleep in it afterwards. I came down in the morning and found them sleeping with linked arms. When Rafe woke up he said, "Vivi was scared, so I holded onto her 'cause she had a long nightmare."
Here is Rafe with yet another lost tooth. His mouth is far more appropriately spaced for adult teeth than another child we have.
Here is Rafe folding his toilet paper just so.
Some Rafe-funnies I texted to myself:
"I wish we lived in a cabin. I actually wish we lived in a house shaped like a Kinder Joy."
"Whenever there's music on, right here, (points to stomach) it feels like there's a dance party!"
He loves to make me laugh. When there's a lot going on, sometimes he can't tell if I'm amused by what he's doing or something else, so he'll ask hopefully, "What are you laughing at? Are you laughing at me?"
"Remember my dance from school with the arms? That was so muscle!"
Doing a yoga video: "Child's pose?! Oh that won't be too hard! Cause it's for childs too!"
Vivien
One Sunday evening (post-Sunday-afternoon-nap, post-night-shift) Drew and I were sitting in lawn chairs on our neighbor's driveway, lazily chatting when we heard Vivien start howling from our backyard. As she approached us we were indifferently demanding that she calm down and take deep breaths and stop freaking out, and then she turned around and we both said, "Oh."
Bo had ran past her while she was balancing on our little retaining wall by the ash tree and she'd been knocked off her feet and cracked her head on the edge of the stones. It cut a couple hairs clean off. (Rafe and Vivien were just looking over my shoulder as I proofread this wearing very queasy faces)
We gave her some hair'n'superglue stitches! She was terribly brave.
It's healed up a bit bumpy, but it worked well enough for a spot that will be covered by hair, and it saved us an ER trip!
I don't think it's affected her opinion of her own beauty.
And she does love to be beautiful! Here she is with Ocean, Jaina, and Aria, doing nails. I make them go outside and am crystal clear about the importance of my not being involved in any part of the process. I am not a fun nail mom.
Vivi decided she wanted her hair a little shorter this summer.
And she also wanted bangs. I learned last time I got my hair cut that people's hair always tends to flip out on one side because the direction of the natural curl in your hair is the same no matter what side of your head it's on. Science!
Then one day she wanted her hair cut shorter, and I couldn't quite remember how to stack the back and have it blend into the front, so I just winged it.
She really loves it...
But now she looks like Will Byers. Ah well, it will grow.
Some Viviisms I wrote down:
She was gagging over a bowl of pancake batter and I asked what she was doing. "I wasn't trying to throw up, I was just trying not to cough in the Bisquiss."
Playing a computer game, with audience. That is Annie's favorite friend "Say-Say" (Shaylee). She is devastated Shaylee was old enough to go to kindergarten this year and can't play all the time.
Throwing a fit about cleaning up after herself: "I am DONE!! I DON'T WANT TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE!!!"
She's very good at staring into space
We have a reeeeally hard time remembering to go to Activity Days because it's every 1st and 3rd Wednesday at 7 and we are...stupid I guess. Anyway, come 8:30 I realized we'd missed it, so I groaned, "Aah, we missed Activity Days Vivs." Straight-faced response: "Damn."
She made herself a little reading hammock
"Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words will never fail."
She picked up Harry Potter on her own the other day. My heart gave a thrill.
This had been going on for at least 3 minutes before I started filming.
Drew and I could have a section too
Did you know Drew has a little circle in his arm hair?
Or that he is learning to play his guitar? Well now you do.
I got to do a fun thing this summer. Melissa Spencer (who played harp for Savior of the World and had me teach her girls voice for a bit after she subbed as the pianist for Messiah practice last winter and liked my voice) asked me to help her get a concert of sacred music ready for girls camp. I did, and then I had an excuse to go to girls camp for a night! The concert was awesome. We had made a committee early in the summer (of Melissa, me, Candace Foutz, and two young women) to choose music, then we assigned it out to groups and worked with them to make sure they felt comfortable performing. There was a piano solo, a guitar solo, an octet with violin and drum accompaniment, a duet with two guitars and the drums, an SSAA quartet, a vocal solo, a vocal trio, and a congregational hymn. It was a mix of EFY music, Christian rock, uplifting pop, classical, BYU Noteworthy arrangements, and run of the mill ward choir stuff. We brought up my electric piano, and there's a guy in our ward who does sound. Melissa made the cute wall hangings out of tablecloths. It was a joy to be involved in!
Here's all our stake YW at Gorham Scout Ranch. I'm quite proud of this pano.
Summer stuffs
This summer I gave Vivien and Rafe the chance to earn as many dollars as they are old every week by doing 4 jobs a day (a morning routine, read for 20 minutes, a 10-20 minute inside chore, and a 10-20 minute outside chore). If they did all 4 jobs in a day, it was worth a dollar; all 4 jobs every day earned them a bonus equaling their age. So over 12 weeks, Vivien could've earned $84 and Rafe could've earned $72. They earned $19 and $16, respectively. I guess that makes them each about 22% motivated. Better than 0?
I tried to make the jobs things that wouldn't significantly impact the running of the house if they didn't get done, but would make our house a nicer place to live if they did (picking up the book nook, vacuuming rooms, cleaning the bathroom sinks/toilet seats, straightening the shoe rack, etc.). The yard we split into zones (playground, trampoline, lawn, porch, sidewalk) and had a rotation so each zone got done twice a week. If they did their chores. Which they apparently only did 22% of the summer. 22% is actually probably pretty representative of the amount of time our house is clean (if we include night when everyone is asleep)!
Dutifully picking up the poop with a plastic bag 'glove,' which we can get away with in this hot, dry place where the poop dehydrates within a day or so.
Vivien and Rafe had the opportunity to participate in summer swim team for a couple weeks this summer. The city set a cap on the amount of people who could sign up, and I'd heard it was nuts so I didn't even try. But after a couple weeks almost half of those people dropped out, and they didn't reopen registration, so their teams were all much smaller than anticipated by July. A friend from church practically begged us to come try it out, because she and her kids both love the program and want it to be utilized, so the kids got to do swim team for an hour every morning, for free! Here they are with the Richardson boys:
They mostly just played instead of doing their sets or learning anything, but hey, they were in the water. After swim they would lay on the sidewalk to warm up. One day was overcast and therefore not as warm. Vivs said, "I wish it was sunning." Here are the results of their "practice":
We obviously didn't do any of the meets.
While they swam, Annie and Merrick and I would hang out with the other parents and too-smalls on the grass.
Sometimes I would work out, but it's embarrassing to sweat and pant in front of other people who are not sweating and panting, so we mostly just talked, which was nice. One day Joel brought the boys, and Annie came to sit on my lap and asked "Mommy, why do you have to go to work all the time?" and Joel kidded under his breath, "Cause you're just not enough Annie." She totally heard him and looked him in the eye, then she buried her face in my chest and started bawling. Joel felt terrible. He is everything to me that I imagine an older brother would be--calls me embarrassing nick-names (Sabrina-dina??), gives me a hard time ("things have sure gone downhill in Primary since the new Presidency took over..."), torments my children as well as any uncle, straight up calls me a fatty when I eat too much at parties, but he's also the one who gets all the jokes, knows the obscure quotes and songs, supports, shares thoughts, corrects my Spanish, exchanges looks of mutual understanding, and will do any crazy music thing I can dream up. It's fun to have an adopted older brother. I think.
The Davies live on the next street down from us. My children love to play there. Sometimes Courtney will invite them all over for movie nights on Fridays when I'm at work and feed them lots of treats and let them build blanket forts in her family room and have basically the grandest time ever. My children request to play at the Davies' house more than they request to go to any other place. Here they all are, walking to her house one Sunday when I needed to nap and Drew wasn't available. I made them hold hands.
Letting them walk turned out to be maybe not the best idea, because then Merrick knew how to get there and whenever he feels so inclined he goes out in the backyard, climbs the fence, and walks over there by himself. It usually takes me a few minutes to realize he's not in the yard, then a few minutes of searching nearby, before I start to shout for his name. Then I hear Courtney's voice floating from the next street over, "It's alright Sabrina! I've got him!"
Here they are at Courtney's table when we all had dinner together with the McEwens one night. Their house has the same basic layout as ours except their front room has a bonus room on top of it upstairs and their kitchen island isn't as long.
Jordan McEwen had to work out of town a lot this summer, so Bo hung out with me. It's really nice when Bo wants to hang out, because I like to talk to her AND she usually feeds me delicious Korean things, too.
She asked Courtney and I to watch one of her favorite Korean dramas with her this summer because she was feeling homesick and wanted to have someone to talk about the show with. It was fun to watch and learn a little more about her culture and Korea's history. It made me realize how crazy it is that as Americans we only have to learn about 200 years worth of history, and all the players that were around during the formation of our country are still basically recognizable today, but for Korean school children they have like 1,000 years of history to learn, and it's all wrapped up in everything else that was happening in Asia at the time. So complicated!
For Bo's birthday this summer she wanted to have a little recital with her friends. She and I and Courtney Davies, McKenzie Richardson, Hillary Morgan, and Tiffany Shurtz learned a bunch of Broadway duets to sing together and then performed them for each other and a couple other friends on her birthday. Bo slaved all day to make a birthday feast that included 3 different kinds of curries so all the friends she was inviting would have something to eat (one is vegan, one can't have gluten, and two can't have dairy--she stood there before dinner for about 2 solid minutes, enumerating each ingredient in every dish so people would know how to choose). Then she made us play a trivia game about Korea (which we were terrible at) and set up a sort of White Elephant thing where every present represented something she loves from her country. It was fun!
The only sad thing was that The McKenzie (as Bo calls her) got walking pneumonia the day of and was unable to sing What is the Feeling with Courtney and In His Eyes with Bo. But here she is at one of our rehearsals with her cutest baby.
We got to have a surprisingly fun 4th of July weekend this year. Several months ago I switched a coworker her assigned 4th of July shift for my assigned Christmas Eve shift so we can go to AZ this Christmas, so I've had it on my calendar to work for months. But I forgot to look at the official schedule once it was posted, and my manager had actually moved me off the 4th of July to the Sunday before. We happened to have friends over to sing that night, so I didn't have my phone on me and didn't see all the missed calls from work until about 10pm. I picked up a Tuesday shift to make up for missing Sunday, and then we got to have a 4th of July together! And the day after, we got to go camping for the first time all summer! That's enough to put a smile on anyone's face. That's Drew MCing for the Intel Veterans 4th of July shindig. He had good trivia questions for people. One of them was "What is the first phrase of the Declaration of Independence?" It stumped almost everyone, but there was a girl who, brain working furiously, gave it a stab, "When....something happens.... and people...do something.....!"
We had friends over for 4th of July feasting. After we prayed we loaded up plates for the kids and set them all on a blanket outside, and then all the adults got to sit around our table in air-conditioned peace and eat a meal together. It was awesome!
After dinner we had a little Patriotic music, then a quick Parade of the Patriots to highlight all the accomplishments of our many small children.
Then we walked over to the Davies' for dessert and fireworks. Is there anything more magical than a child's face lit by sparkler??
I found a quote from a letter from John Adams to Abigail this year that pretty much made my 4th of July: "I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."
We did our best for John, and finished it all off with ice cream sandwiches.
The next day we loaded everyone (even the doggies) up in the new truck to go for a little overnighter in the mountains.
We remembered just in time that we hadn't purchased a new air mattress yet and would be sleeping on the ground, so we had to take a detour to the store and wait in the hot for Daddy to go in and grab one. There was much weeping and wailing.
We entertained ourselves taking slow motion videos of head banging, which don't upload to YouTube as slow-motion if you pull it from Google Photos apparently.
All the official camping spots were full, so we got to see if the Trail Boss was worth its stuff driving up a rocky mountain road to find a secluded flat spot. We went a little too far (it got too narrow for the truck's frame) and then we had to back up for quite a way, but that was no big deal because the truck has a backup camera! We found ourselves a suitable spot...
...then got to work...
...setting up camp.
Some worked harder than others.
After all was made ready we went for a little stroll. We found some bones!
The children made observations.
I played around with my Portrait mode for awhile in the nice light.
The kids collected treasures.
Piiiinecownth!
We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows under a beautiful sunset sky. I just realized the sunset colors below are almost the same as the colors of Vivi in the picture above. Her skin, her clothes, her pink cheeks. Cool!
I don't remember much of the night aside from it starting to get pretty squishy in our 6-man tent, now that 3 of our men are over half the size of an actual man. But here we are in the morning! I tried to set it on a timer, but I put it in selfie mode and I think when I do that it always tries to focus on whatever's closest first, so we are blurry. Also, I lost my balance after the picture took and accidentally pulled Vivien off her perch to land painfully in a pile of sticks. Mean mom.
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