Cloudy Day

Every once in a while, in a fit of insanity disguised as active mothering, I decide to bust out the fingerpaints. Clara loves to do any kind of painting, and Jonathan seems to have a vested interest in testing the validity of "non-toxic" claims on all art supplies.

For our most recent project, I cut up some sponges and told them they were painting clouds. Both of them started out with very delicate dabs, but by the end their papers were basically just saturated blue blobs. And for Jonathan's final stroke of artistic experimentation, he dipped a stubby finger into a big pile of paint and licked it clean. I overreacted ("Oh! That's disgusting! Stop!"), then he promptly stuck his tongue out for me to wipe off. I cleaned him up (which is surprisingly difficult with even allegedly "washable" paints; my kids' hands are regularly tinted), then walked into where Jeremy was working, fretting, "So when they say 'non-toxic' they mean that, right? Don't you think? He's okay, right?" If you know Jeremy, it may not surprise you to learn that he thought I was crazy. He may have even rolled his eyes--just a little, of course. Whatevs.

The things we suffer for our art.

(Un)Creative Mothering

I have long suspected that my powers of creativity are mediocre at best. This is probably why my favorite genre of writing (like writing I can actually do myself) is The Essay. My attempts to write fiction are always laughable, I think, even though I have been known to swoon over the beloved novels I read (although I almost never cry, as you may know, on account of my heart of stone).

Recently, my lack of creativity has been brought to light in a different way: as a mother. I tend to be pretty matter-of-fact and literal, so when Clara asks me a question, I answer it with The Truth. For example:

Clara: Mom, do you think dinosaurs ate mountains?

Me: No, they didn't. Mountains are made of dirt and rocks, and dinosaurs ate plants and meat, not dirt and rocks.

Clara: Mountains are not made of dirt and rocks!! Dinosaurs did eat them!!

Me: No, they really didn't. I don't think they could digest dirt and rocks.

Clara: They COULD digest them!!!

At about this point I realized how lame I was sounding, arguing with a three-year-old about dino digestion.

Another example:

Clara: What are clouds made of?

Me: Clouds are made of water. Tiny drops of water rise up into the sky and make clouds. When the water gets heavy, it rains. Fog is the same, but it's a cloud on the ground.

Clara: Clouds are not made of water! Fog is not a cloud!

She eventually came around on this one, due to my expert logic and to a book we read at the library. But still. I am a mother who has a serious lack of ability to be imaginative and to encourage imaginative play in my children. I do like to pretend, and we do a lot of pretending in my house, but it tends to be less on the dragon-slaying side and more on the pretend-to-be-an-animal side. ("Dragons aren't real." "Dragons are real!!")

Thoughts? I know several excellent mothers who seem extremely gifted at letting their children wonder about the world without feeling compelled to draw a diagram of the water cycle to prove life's "realities." I have seen mothers who are able to get their kids to do the undesirable things in life (like taking a bath) by telling them that they're superheroes who need to save a princess from an underwater cavern full of jewels. So clever! Our bath play is primarily limited to pouring water out of cups, although in my defense (or perhaps in Clara's favor) the kids do spend a lot of time digging up elasmosaurus fossils in the bathtub. They actually do a lot of fossil hunting at home, and a lot of flesh-tearing of weaker dinosaurs. Perhaps I should be worried about that...

So what do you think? Is there some sort of ideal line for children between fantasy and reality? Does it matter whether Clara thinks dinosaurs ate mountains? Am I damaging her potential for creative play?

Dancing Queen

Clara's dance recital was Monday night. She took a six-week tap and ballet class through the city, and I'm pretty sure the only thing she learned was that she gets extremely annoyed if we ask her to do an arabesque. Oh well. She had fun!



I think if you asked Clara, she would say the best part of the recital (and, quite possibly, the class as a whole) was that she got to go to Coldstone after her performance. She could not believe her good fortune. She was extremely surprised to learn that there are restaurants on God's green earth that serve nothing but ice cream. Wonders never cease for that child. That's probably why we love her so much.


Nice work, Clara-B. Now show me an arabesque.

18

This baby is now 18 months old. I feel like a walking cliche, because probably five times a day I look at him and say, "Where did the time go?" Seriously, though: where did it go?? His life seems to be flying by at breakneck speed, and I already miss the days of snuggling a lumpy Jonathan in my arms.

Nevertheless, this toddler Jonathan has his charms. He's still fun to snuggle, even if he wiggles a bit more than he used to. And he's something of a tiny tot, so he's still fun to tote around. He loves being near Clara and doing what she does (something she only inconsistently welcomes). He loves eating blueberries and prunes (which is good, since they're a bit of a necessity, if you know what I mean). He loves stuffed animals and playing outside. And he absolutely loves his shadow. He's fascinated by it! He just discovered it last week, and ever since then he's constantly on the lookout for it. He can't quite say "shadow," so he calls it "hoe," and he likes to say "Hi, hoe," and "Night-night, hoe." We have changed the shadow's diaper, we have chased the shadow, we have put the shadow to bed, we have fed the shadow. He loves that thing.

Jonathan can be trouble sometimes, mainly because he is so good at climbing on stuff. I often come around the corner to find him standing on top of the table or on Clara's bed or on the toilet, or wherever else he can manage to climb. Sometimes I think he is determined to maim or kill himself, but he just likes to conquer obstacles in his path. So far he still has all of his teeth and has not broken a thing. We'll keep him.

Another Anniversary

On February 24th we marked another Sam-Day: the sixth anniversary since our first baby, Sam, was born. I have been surprised by how peaceful I've felt about this anniversary this year. Last year was incredibly difficult for me for some reason, perhaps because five years seemed like such a milestone, and for whatever reason I found myself obsessing about all of the "firsts" five-year-olds enjoy.

This year has been different. I can't say we haven't had our share of stresses over the past month or two, but when I thought about Sam I felt almost nothing but peace. Clara is old enough to start realizing that Sam was a real person, and that he's a real part of our family. I don't think any three-year-old can really conceptualize death and eternity, but she feels very certain that Sam lives with Jesus and is her brother. She has remarked several times over the last month that she's excited for when Sam can come down from the clouds with Jesus and do fun things with her. She talks about the jokes she'll tell him and that he will laugh at all of them. He sounds like an ideal older brother, other than that in her mind he is the tiny newborn she's seen in the pictures. But I'm glad she can start understanding him. I hope that she can come to know him, in some small way, if only in the way that we know him: that he is a pure, special spirit who is a constant source of inspiration and motivation to live our lives the way we know we should.

Sometimes, when I think too much or too hard about Sam, I can't help but cry or feel sad. He is our first baby, and we had so, so little time with him. As I explained to Jeremy, sometimes I think about it like if we took all of Clara's life or all of Jonathan's life and erased it back to the day they were born. How much we would miss! How little we would know about how them and how they have enriched our lives! How we would miss their laugther and their warmth! Knowing each of my subsequent children as well as I do, sometimes my mother heart aches for Sam and wishes I could have him and know him as well.

But, in spite of my earthly longing, I know that God has a plan for our family, and part of that plan was for Sam to be with us for three short hours. We were meant to have him, to hold him, to love him for those moments, and then to say goodbye. We were meant not to forget him, but to look towards him and to recognize the promise of eternity he holds. Sometimes I do wish I could trade the lessons I've learned through him and just have him snuggled on my lap instead--frustrations and all--but since I cannot make that trade I'm grateful for what he taught us. He taught us, through what I cannot deny were often painful, wrenching lessons, that God is our Father, that he loves us, and that he wants us to return to live with him. He taught us that faith is real, that prayer is real, and that despite anything else we learn in our lives that there is something greater than ourselves--something untouchable by the rational mind. I'm grateful to know that I do not know everything, that I do not understand everything, but that I can have faith--and that matters a great deal.

Eight years later...

Jeremy and I celebrated our eighth anniversary in February. As is our yearly tradition, we went all out and went to lunch. (Some people take awesome trips for their anniversaries; we go out to lunch. Every year. In times like these, you know...)

We went to Beverly's restaurant, which is a delectable 5-star restaurant at the Coeur d'Alene Resort with a great view of the lake. The food is always fantastic, and our anniversary was no exception. Jeremy had some kind of halibut (the man loves him some halibut) and I had the trout cupcake. Trout? Cupcake? Yes. It was amazing. A fillet of red trout shaped like a cupcake then filled with scallops and lobster and drizzled with an outrageously rich beurre nante sauce. And if that doesn't sound good enough, the cupcake was nestled in a bed of spinach and extremely buttery mashed potatoes. Oh, how I loved that cupcake.


I also love Jeremy and am glad, especially in times like these, that we are together. And although I joke about our yearly lunch date, I really do treasure those lunches. I remember every single one: where we were, what we ate, what we talked about. If life is comprised primarily of moments, then I have at least eight special moments with my very best friend. Thanks, Jeremy.

Also, how could I not love any meal that ends with a huge cloud of cotton candy in which a little scoop of homemade ice cream is nestled? My only complaint was the little "Happy Anniversary" chocolate: it was both hokey and disgusting. Other than that, Beverly's was too good to us...


Until next year...

My Funny Valentines

I've realized recently that kids make holidays much more fun. Clara is old enough to really get into the holiday hoopla, and since it takes so little to thrill her we end up getting lots of credit for very little work!

We began the day with pink pancakes. They started out as heart-shaped pancakes, then Jeremy told me they looked more like amorphous blobs than hearts, so we switched to circles (well, he just took matters into his own hands and started cooking circles, which was just as well).

For lunch we had heart-shaped sandwiches and heart-shaped jello jigglers (you may have seen the pudding-jello jiggler recipe in the February Friend magazine, if you get it). I duly noted that half the battle in any great holiday celebration is just walking around cutting food out of appropriately shaped cookie cutters. Genius.

For dinner, we went all out and had steak. Yes, Rachel and Jeremy bought and ate actual beef. Miracles do happen. We broiled it, and we spent most of the time in fear that our oven was going to catch on fire. Jeremy even busted out the fire extinguisher, read the instructions, then told me that if the oven did indeed catch fire that he would be sure to keep the kids safe but that I was otherwise more or less on my own. He is pretty clutch in a crisis. In the end, though, nothing caught on fire and the steak was decent. Maybe we'll make it a tradition and eat red meat every Valentine's Day.

Clarasaurolophus

Clara, as I may have mentioned before, truly loves dinosaurs. Her favorite show is PBS's Dinosaur Train, and she is always getting new dinosaur books from the library and from Goodwill. She retains an incredible amount of information about the dinosaurs we read about, and she can identify more than a dozen by sight. She is fond of talking about dinonychus's "terrible claw" (and likes to pantomine how a dinonychus can tear the flesh of other dinosaurs), and she is often torn about whether T. Rex or allosaurus is the "fiercest dinosaur to ever roam the earth." Sometimes while perusing one of her dinosaur books, she'll point out a particularly bloody carnivorous scene and say, "Look Mom--that is so fierce!"

The other day, Jeremy and I were reading to her before bed. She really wanted to figure out how to best tell apart the sauropods--what best differentiates an apatosaurus from a brachiosaurus or a diplodocus or an argentinosaurus. We decided that the brachiosaurus was the most distinctive, and we pointed out that she has a little plastic piggy bank shaped like a brachiosaurus. This shifted the conversation towards piggy banks and other money matters, and she reminded us of how, six months or so ago, Jonathan broke her nice froggy bank and that she was in need of a new one.

"You're probably right," I said. "It would be good for you to save some money, so when you're bigger you can go to college or go on a mission."

"Or go to the store," she responded.

"What would you get at the store with your money?" I asked. She had no real response for this (money makes no sense to her), so Jeremy told her that if she saved money for college then she could go to college and become a paleontologist. Well, this struck her as just about the greatest idea of all time.

"Mom," she said, "When I'm bigger like you and go to college, can I wear your clothes?"

"Sure," I said.

"OK. When I'm bigger like you, I'll put on your underwear, then your shirt, then your pants. Then I'll wear a jacket--your jacket. I'll drive your car to college with my piggy bank, and I'll be a paleontologist."

She's got it all figured out.

Finally!

After last year's epic winter snowfall, I will admit that we were hoping for a bit of a reprieve from having to shovel 10 feet of snow. Nevertheless, this winter, so far, has been a crushing disappointment--particularly for the kids. Clara has yearned for snow, and although Jonathan is not incredibly fond of being cold (and has a particular dislike for cold wind), even he was thrilled by the sight of falling "no" out the window this morning. They watched the snow fall for a full 10 minutes, with Clara asking, "Can we go and play yet? Can we go and play yet?" Finally the snow let up, and Jeremy popped out of his office to see if anyone was interested in a little snow play.

Happy taste of winter!

Costume drama

Clara loves to dress up, and Jonathan loves to wear the lion costume at the children's museum, so we thought we'd try our chicken costume on for size. As you can see in this little triptych, sometimes being a chicken is for the birds.

Dance, Poppet!

We signed Clara up for an eight week dance class through the city recreation department. Good times! She got to pick out some tap and ballet shoes to bring home for the duration of the class, which thrilled her deeply. She loves to wear her black leotard around the house as much as possible so she can practice her moves. I'm most excited for the recital in March. Who knows what will happen?

The first class went well for Clara, although it was tricky for her to do all of the steps. She tried hard, though, and had fun, and she can't wait to go back to "Dancing School" next week.

This video shows how Clara reacted to the news that she'd be taking dance lessons, which Jeremy told her about 30 minutes before her class started (I was not home from teaching yet). Sorry about the bad camera angle at the beginning; he was trying not to distract her with the camera. I'll try to get some better dancing action videos for next week.

A new post for a new year

I'm finally back on my computer after what has admittedly been a nice, long break. We enjoyed nearly two weeks in Utah over the Christmas break, splitting the time between my family and Jeremy's. It was fun to see all but two of our six collective siblings and their families. As always, though, it was a busy couple of weeks and we were happy to be home by the time all was said and done. Now our Christmas stuff is all packed away, the house is (relatively) clean, and I'm busily working to get my syllabi in order for the upcoming semester.

I've been thinking quite a bit about goals and new beginnings. My only official resolution of 2009 was to have feet as soft as my mother's (seriously), and I was a total failure. (My foot-softening efforts have perked up a bit in 2010, since I got a pumice stone in my stocking. From myself. But it still works like a champ.)

For 2010, I want to read more (I'm thinking two books a month, which is not nearly what I'd like to read but is probably realistic given the other strains on my time), go to the Temple every month, play the piano more (not including the better part of three hours at church I'm either sitting at an organ or a piano), do another triathlon, and do more to develop my spiritual strength. So there you go. I have a few other things in the works, but I figure I can make goals whenever I want to (even if Jeremy thinks it's barbaric to start a new goal on any day that's not either a Monday or the first day of a new month).

While you chew on all of this, please enjoy a few pictures of our Christmas fun--or, really, just a sample of our fun over the last month or so, since the odds of my going back and posting past events are quite slim. The pictures are in no particular order, but I think that adds to the excitement and uncertainty of the new year. Happy 2010!