Month: April 2019

I’m often fairly low-key when it comes to Easter. I think it’s because it’s kind of the last of the holiday crush: Halloween->Thanksgiving->Christmas->New Year’s->Valentine’s->Pi Day/St. Patrick’s->Easter.

Thus, I’m often disinclined to put together any kind of big shebang to celebrate. In some ways, this is a good thing, since it allows me to fully focus on the religious aspect of the holiday.

However, I had a difficult time focusing on even that this year, because of (say it with me): TOOOOOOTH DISCOMFOOOORRRRT.

I had a filling replaced at the end of March, and the tooth began to tingle/ache like crazy. It amplified right over Easter weekend, and since we were leaving town for Spring Break the Tuesday after Easter, it was very difficult to not think about. Especially when playing the organ for church services.

But we still managed to check off most of the holiday boxes. I managed to make Hot Cross Buns (delivered with haste before heading off to the Kirtland Art Center for a pottery class with Katie’s scout troop):

Then, on Saturday, the three big kids had a temple trip, so Brian and I decided to take Katie to the tulip festival at Mt. Vernon. I don’t think Brian and I had ever been to the festival together, and it was really neat to have some Katie-only time.

A few days ago, Katie came up to me sighing, saying she wished she could be a middle child, “because I would like just one person to be older than.” Sometimes I forget that, like Beverly Cleary says, “grown ups forget that when you are the littlest person, you sometimes have to be a little bit louder and a little bit more stubborn in order to be noticed at all.”

The color was spectacular at Roozengaarde, it’s been a few years since I’ve been able to go during peak bloom. Because of the temple trip’s early start time, we were able to arrive in Mt. Vernon right at opening time, which meant it was busy, but not too crowded.

SO many fields were “on.” I loved it!

I was especially tickled by the number of display beds that were created to look like different shapes:

And then there were the beds so bright you practically need sunglasses:

Afterwards, we headed to Edison for lunch at Mariposa. Brian hadn’t ever been there before. It’s pretty much the only good Mexican food I’ve been able to find in the Seattle area, and he was moaning at the deliciousness. Maybe it’s a good thing that it’s over an hour’s drive away.

Also the obligatory stop at Breadfarm. Ohhh, buttery cinnamon-y graham cracker goodness. I bought three packages: one for me, one for the family, and also one more for me. [rolls eyes innocently up towards heaven]

Afterwards, we hastily dyed some eggs while Jeff and William hosted a Magic: the Gathering tourney at our house.

Easter Sunday was peaceful (when I wasn’t worrying about my tooth). The program included hymn changes I hadn’t been informed of ahead of time, which is always exciting. I managed to execute my special “last verse” arrangement of Christ the Lord is Risen Today, which always sounds wonderful. My piano teacher, Jensina, was really impressed and moved by it (she gave me three hugs afterwards).

Brian went all out with fiendishly difficult hiding spots for the children’s Easter baskets this year: in the pantry behind boxes of cereal; buried under newspaper in the recycle bin; inside the piano; and hidden under bags of frozen veggies in the freezer. (I can’t remember the fourth hiding place! Too fiendish for the likes of me.)

Since I wanted to keep things simple this year, we only invited Kristen & Patrick over for dinner — and then they came down with a stomach bug!

We ate our grilled leg of lamb anyway, and then made up plates for them and drove them down to their house. I tried a new potato recipe from my favorite Beat This! cookbook. They were tasty, but I don’t think I realized how long they take to took (after boiling and squishing the potatoes flat, you then have to bake them for 40+ minutes).

And of course we had carrot cake. Which is so exciting it apparently requires jazz hands.

Happy spring — happy Easter!

Spring has sprung, and the Brooke is running . . .

. . . everywhere. This time of year always feels especially hectic for our family. It seems like there’s a different kid event every night. Meanwhile, the Dire Spectre of Summer is looming over the horizon, threatening to cancel all my personal productivity, so I’m scrambling to get as much writing done as possible before school gets out.

Every summer I tell myself I’m going to write every day, and every summer it never happens. It’s nearly impossible for me to focus with kids running around and squabbling — or worse, zoning out on YouTube. (Ugh, if I could throw Jeff’s school-issued Chromebook in a lake, I would.)

BUT that’s getting ahead of myself. In between all the scurrying, there’s been much to enjoy.

Eleanor did a great job in her school’s production of “The Internet is Distrac– Oh Look a Kitten!” She played a creepy Kermit-obsessed Wikipedia contributor. Her friend Esther played the lead, a kid who is desperately trying to finish the last paragraph of her essay about “The Great Gatsby.” (Eleanor’s character changes the Gatsby wiki entry to say that the green light represents Kermit. “That’s not weird! YOU’RE weird!”)

The next day, I made my annual pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms at the UW. Laura is moving away to California this summer (I am very sad about this) and in all her years of living in Seattle, she’s never seen the cherry blooms, so I invited her to come along with me.

Brian was able to walk over from the hospital and say hello, too. It’s such a nice, fresh way to say hello to spring. It always feels like a big public party.

And of course I had a double-header: the afternoon after the cherry blossoms, I climbed in my car to head off to the annual Northwest Pilgrims retreat. We had a much smaller turnout than usual this year (about 55 people instead of 80+) and . . . I don’t know. I shouldn’t use attendance size as a measure of how successful the retreat is. But it’s hard not to. The tone of the retreat felt “off” to me, as well. For the first time, I began to question whether or not I should be there. Perhaps it’s just me feeling burned out on organizing the retreat every year. This was the sixth year in a row for me. Maybe I need to take a break. Eh.

It was still fun to network with other curious, questioning women from all over. I made a Captain Marvel hat for the silent auction. The first attempt turned out enormous:

So I unravelled it and tried again. Better, I think (modeled by Julia):

Here’s something hilarious: on the Sunday of the retreat weekend, Katie went to ward choir practice, and once again the director brought cookies for everyone to share. Katie grabbed an extra for me, but on the way home, she decided to take a little bite. Soon she was saving half a cookie for me . . . and then a quarter.

When I arrived home, Katie handed me this:

I remarked that it sounded like something from a “Frog & Toad” story. But Brian suggested that in a real F&T story the cookie would be completely gone, and I’d only get an empty bag full of good intentions. So I guess I should be grateful that I got this much. `

Spring is still springing, despite the absence of cookies. Our main seasonal attraction is this guy:

This is Mr. Robin, and he and his mate built their nest stupidly close to our dining room window. Ergo, Mr. Robin keeps seeing his reflection in the window, thinks it’s a rival bird, and tries to chase him off. All day long this bird is attacking our window, so we’ve got a fairly constant thump-thump-thump in the background as we go about our day.

We’ve tried putting bird cutouts and other deterrents on the glass, but it’s not working. I’m worried that Mr. Robin will injure himself. We’ll have to wait and see if the eggs hatch soon.

In the meanwhile, we’ve been having a bit of Arts Extravaganza lately. Since I’ve started a better household budgeting program, we’ve been able to set aside money for going to more performing arts events. Eleanor and I went to see “Marie, Dancing Still,” a new musical at the 5th Ave. Theater which many people predict will be headed to Broadway soon (it was written by the people who wrote Ragtime and directed by director of The Producers). It’s based on the statue “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” by Degas, and imagines the friendship that developed between the artist and the young dancer who was his model.

I thought it was a pretty good show! What made it stunning was how they used digital projections to make the scenery look like Impressionist paintings. I was able to snap these images from intermission and the curtain call:

Meanwhile, Jeff finished another run on the tech crew of the school drama club. He was the spotlight operator for their production of “Newsies.”

Kristen and Sven got to come watch a matinee with Eleanor and I last weekend. The tech crew came on stage for the final curtain call and did a little line dance together, which was really fun. I’m so happy that Jeff has found his funky tribe with the theater people.

(Oh, and Kristen and Sven got to come over for a massive dish of paella afterwards. I put William in the picture for scale)

Finally, this weekend Eleanor turned fourteen! She asked if we could do an “escape room at home” party. I found a company that sells downloadable escape-room kits, and we chose the zombie-themed one.

The scenario was as follows: the girls were trapped in a hotel room surrounded by pizza-eating zombies, and the last surviving pizza was locked in the oven! To escape, they had to get the pizza, get a weapon, unlock the door, and then shoot their way to freedom.

The puzzles were . . . uneven. The best part was the end, when a “zombie invasion” required a shootout. Paper zombies were lined up for a shooting gallery, and the girls took turns firing at them with a Nerf gun.

 

Can’t have a birthday chronicle without Cake Commentary. This was the “She Loves Me” daisy cake from Rose’s Beautiful Cakes, split and filled with lemon curd and blueberries. Divine.

The festivities continued the next day, as Eleanor and William got to meet their “fur-st cousin,” Maggie Murderface, at Aunt Kristen’s house the next day. We then embarked on a yarn-shopping expedition (I’m planning to knit Kristen a sweater) followed by a lunch of savory waffles:

We then finished the afternoon watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was very fun, even if it didn’t have the play-within-a-play. (I guess that would be difficult to do in ballet mime.)

Only one more week before Spring Break . . .here’s to hoping we survive the carpooling madness!