Awesomeness

Words fail me:

For family home evening on Monday night this week, we went to Sunnyside High School for parent night (since Jeff—aka Mr. White—aka Monsieur Blanc— had to stay till 7pm). I packed us a dinner and we all ate at desks in Jeff’s classroom. Jeff had to keep getting up between bites to meet and greet various parents who filtered through. Jay and Rose had fun scampering around the big room and long hallway, and listening to Jeff read them books in French. I sat at the teacher’s desk and read our old Top Ten Paris travel guidebook and reminisced and dreamed. Sigh. Oh, Les Champs-Elysees.

Rose dressed up for the occasion—capris with boots and upside down sunglasses with wild hair. She deserves an awesomest two-year-old award for this one, I think.

Another day this week, Jay dragged most of our books off of the shelf and stacked them up in the middle of the floor. When I asked him why, he told me it was a seat for his monkey-kid.

 

Upon further inquiry, I found this page open in the I Love Monkey book. Jay cracks me up! [putting all those books back on the shelf did not].

 

Jay finally caved to the temptation and tried on Rose’s dress-up skirts today. I thought the white-guy shirt, sheathed sword, and sunglasses were a nice touch. He said “do I look like a princess?” and giggled at his own silliness, and then quickly changed costumes.

 

By the way, we get this little squishy for 4-6 hours a day now too.

Kids are intense. When they’re all happy, THEY ARE HAPPY. It radiates from them. When one (or two or all three) of them is sad, they ooze sadness and gloom (and tears). The trick is finding the switch to flip them back into awesome mode before their boohoos affect my mood.

Bepunzel

 

Dameri’s house

My mom’s Grama name is Grama Meri. Rose has started shortening it to Dameri sometimes. Nothing like Rose lingo to keep us on our toes! Jay, Rose, and I went to visit her (and my Dad and my sister Mel) last week. We had a good time sewing, watching movies, shopping at Ikea and Goodwill, riding the ferry to Bainbridge Island for some top-notch ice cream, had heavenly French pastries at the park, and of course Grama Meri read tons of stories to her little bookworms. One afternoon, she read TEN books in a row to them! They adore her and they keep saying “I love Grama Meri. I miss Grama Meri.”

The weather in Seattle was cool, fresh, and sunny all week. I loved spending time with my family, as always. It’s wonderful to be able to visit them so easily. 3 hours is nada.

The Ferry:
Ferries are so fun with kids! We climbed up and down and explored all around the brisk, windy decks. It was a shockingly clear, sunny day—has this ever happened in Seattle in late September? And if you ever find yourself marooned on Bainbridge Island, just camp outside of Mora Creamery. Their Swiss Chocolate (with caramel swirl) ice cream is heaven on earth. It was a perfect farewell to summer.

[the ferry]

The strong wind made Jay’s Batman sweatshirt muscles bulge, hee hee.

The Space Needle actually dwarfs the wheel. Oh, perspective.

Goodwill:
You never know what you’re going to find at Goodwill, but we SCORED 3 pairs of shoes, 7 pairs of pants, 2 jackets, and a sweater, all for less than $50. Bring on the crisp fall air!

Rose’s boots were $2.50! Jay’s shoes were $4. I’ve always known that buying brand new kids’ shoes was a waste, but I’ve never had much luck with Goodwill till this time around. Hurrah!

Star Wars Day at the Bellevue Library:
They had 2 guys dressed in costumes for people to take pictures with, plus 3 giant cardboard cutouts, lego building, and a “noise guy” show with various Star Wars noises.

     

Jay and Rose kind of shut down like they always do in big crowds, but they quietly observed and then we left.

Jay and Rose would NOT go anywhere near this Stormtrooper or Boba Fett, even when they “kidnapped” me! I tried explaining that they weren’t real bad guys, just normal nice people dressed in costumes, but they completely balked and refused to take a picture with the dark side. I got a picture with them in hopes of proving that they were nice (I kind of ruined the prisoner effect by being TALLER than both guys—they’re just lucky I didn’t have Jay’s light saber in my belt!). Those costumes look just as uncomfortable in person as they did in the movies.

The Sewing:
I sewed Rose two dress-up skirts. The girl has been tying blankets around her waist for months (no, wait—she’s been making ME tie blankets around her waist for months), so I finally found some clearance fabric and whipped up two long flowy skirts for her to play dress-up with. One of the afternoons while we were sewing, we turned on Tangled for the kids to watch because Rose likes the Rapunzel fairy tale that we read at home. She calls it “Bepunzel let down yur heer.”  It cracks us up every time. Well, Mom and I put our heads together and came up with some Bepunzel hair for Rose. Probably my favorite thing I sewed all week, and it took less than 5 minutes.

It’s a simple fleece hat with a long braided tail. It turned out even better than I thought it would, I have to say. Rose loves it.

Rose-punzel

[“I not Wose-punzel, I Wose!”]

The Primary Program

Our ward Primary Program is DONE! It was today.Whew! Whew. I wrote it back at the end of July and then edited it and printed it off in August. We practiced for the last 2 hours of church 3 weeks ago, then had stake conference, and then practiced two more hours during church last Sunday. It’s been nonstop, drawn out by the stake conference between practices. Those practices are the worst Sundays of the year. Sorry, but it’s true. We were ALL so tired of it ALL that I was wondering how on earth I’d be able to stand hearing those songs and parts one more time during the actual program.

Well. The kids completely blew me away during the real deal today. They all sang the songs loud enough and stayed together and spoke fearlessly in the microphone. An impressive number of kids memorized their parts, too. There were at least 200 people (plenty of visitors) in church today. It was packed! I was all wobbly during pretty much every song, blinking back tears. The Spirit was so strong. I sat down on the front row and every time I looked up at the long line of happy kids singing those beautifully simple songs about the gospel, I could hardly breathe—it was like they were blasting the congregation with joy and faith and light (of course it helped that I did not have a toddler or baby squirming all over my lap—Jeff wrestled with Rose a few rows back).

We had the 3 and 4 year old classes sitting on the front row of pews facing the podium (there aren’t enough seats for them on the stand), so I got to sit next to Jay’s class. For every song, the 3 and 4 year olds stood up on low benches on the floor below the podium. When Jay came down after singing “One in a Million,” he said “that song tired my voice out!” And after singing “Families Can Be Together Forever,” he said “we sang my favorite song!”

Jay was so excited to say his part into the microphone during church. He’s been saying it over and over for 2 weeks now, and he was ready. The crazy thing is he pretty much memorized his part all by himself. We only went over it two or 3 times one week, and a few days later I asked him what his part was and he repeated the whole thing back to me. The boy has a memory. I love it.  He didn’t need any help at all during the program. He stepped up onto the stool and said his part clearly and perfectly, like it was no big deal that the room was bursting with people. Nailed it! The congregation did a collective chuckle after Jay said his part.

All of the Primary leaders felt so relieved when the program was over today. I started to remember why I like being in Primary so much again. 11 months out of the year, it’s the best calling ever!

I guess we can take this off of the fridge now.

Buzz, Snip, Buzz

When was the last time I waited 9 days between blog posts? Ha! I’ve been enjoying life rather than writing about it for the past week. Last Sunday morning, I gave my whole family hair cuts. First Jay, then Rose, and then Jeff. Buzz, snip, buzz. It was a the most productive Sunday morning that we’ve ever had. What now, 1pm church?

Jay, as usual, hated his haircut. He didn’t cry the entire time for once (only for part of it). He said “I’m not very happy right now!” when I started buzzing. Jeff’s haircut was a piece of cake after two kids. What does that expression really mean anyways? I’ve got two ideas: 1. making a cake is easy (NOT true) and 2. eating a piece of cake is easy (that depends on who made the cake). Well, Jeff sat still and didn’t cry, so his haircut was the fastest and easiest. I even managed to angle the boys’ hair so the top part is longer than the back part. Whew! But I have no pictures of their hair yet.

Rose’s hair was getting quite long and stringy. This was only her second-ever hair cut in her whole life! She felt very special sitting on the stool before her haircut, but once I started snipping, she said “ow!” and kept moving away from the snip-snip sound. When I explained that it doesn’t hurt to get your hair cut off, but it does make a funny noise, she moved a little less. It was still a miracle that I got it mostly even though.

Jeff and Jay left to go home teaching before I could corral them into some cute pictures. Rose was not so lucky. Photo shoot!

 

 

That reddish mark above her eye is from a few days before when she got her head stuck between the wall and the fridge while trying to reach something. Tragic but hilarious all at once.

Mother-daughter in front of the garage.

Friday morning

Most mornings after I do Rose’s hair, I stand her on the bathroom counter and we do a chant and dance: “Rose is awesome! Rose is cute! Rose is awesome! Rose is cute!” We add in any other adjectives as they occur to me—smart, sweet, fun, etc. Sometimes I get it to rhyme. She loves it. Today Jay wanted in on the action, so I got both of them up there. They were so stinking cute that we had to have a photo session. We started out in the bathroom but the lights were orangey, so we moved to the family room. If only I could aim the camera right! Kids got squirmy. Things got silly.

[at this point Jay forgot how to smile normally]

Heh, that was the best we could manage. Happy Friday!