Author: brookeshelf

Ella’s First Piano Recital

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I am so sick of “Here Comes Santa Claus.”  It’s been playing in my house, in one form or another, at least 3-5 times a day since late September, often with miscellaneous grunts of frustration thrown in for spice.

People who complain about seeing Christmas ornaments in stores the day after Halloween have NOTHING on a home with a young piano student.  There have been times when I felt that hearing even one more note of this song would be enough to send me over the edge.  But it’s been worth it.

November marked the completion of Eleanor’s first year of piano lessons, and either as a result of this or perhaps other factors, her teacher decided to give her a very advanced piece to play for the holiday recital this year.  Her arrangement of “Here Comes Santa Claus” features eighth notes, flats, sharps, and lots of tricky fingering (cross-overs, position changes, and other things that frequently foul up the beginning pianist).  This is unusual for a kid who is still in the “primer” stage of lessons.  She’s only five, and to tell the truth, I had serious doubts when I first saw the music.

And then . . . she had to have it MEMORIZED.

The great thing is that Eleanor tackled the project with enthusiasm, and after many, many, MANY days of practice, had it pretty much ready to go by last Saturday’s recital.  She practiced walking up to the piano by herself, playing without too much wiggling around on the bench, and taking a bow afterwards.  I’m very proud of how she’s able to focus and work hard.

On the day of the performance, she eagerly slipped into her red ruffly Christmas dress (“with a matching headband!” she told anyone who crossed her path), packed up her music folder, and we all headed down to the recital hall.

She was the first person playing in the program . . . and she FROZE.

Yup.  That shiny black Steinway on stage was nothing like the piano at home.  She didn’t seem nervous or upset, she just looked puzzled:  “Where are my fingers supposed to go again?”  After a few minutes of being lost, her piano teacher came up and sat next to her, opened her music, and pointed out where she needed to be.

Then Eleanor and I played a duet called “The Snow Lay on the Ground” together, which went off without a hitch.  Everyone praised her work, and then she got to go eat cookies.

If there was anything about the performance she found upsetting, she hasn’t mentioned it.  When we got home, we made a video of her playing it without mistakes, and she seemed very pleased by that.  Besides, we were going to a performance of “Nutcracker” that evening in Provo.  It’s simply impossible for a little girl to be upset when she knows ballerinas are next on the menu.

I’m so proud of my little girl!  And best of all, I don’t have to hear a single thing about Santa Claus Lane EVER AGAIN.

Eh, well.  How about one more time:

Five Hours

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Five hours is the on-average amount of sleep I’ve been getting every night lately.

Part of it is owing to stress — ordinarily, holiday excitement and baby preparation would be enough to keep me wired 24/7, but this week we also had the meeting at school for Jeffrey’s Individualized Educational Plan (or IEP).  Nobody likes to hear criticism about their child, so sitting in a room with five educational professionals listing Jeffrey’s problems was not fun.  Even though I agreed with most of what they said — in fact, some of their findings (via testing) matches up exactly with what I’ve been telling them for quite some time now.  Such as: Jeffrey doesn’t need occupaional therapy; his writing is fine, it’s his spelling that needs help.  Or, that Jeffrey is fine cognition-wise; it’s his lack of focus in class that has caused him to fall so far behind the curve.  He needs small-group, individualized instruction. And it looks like he is finally going to get some.  Yay!  Let’s see if the school follows through with its promises.

What irks me is that whenever one of Jeff’s teachers has mentioned his inattention to me (from age 3 on up) they always look at me like I have some kind of magic solution for solving this problem.  I always want to smack myself on the head and say “Why, how silly of me!  I forgot to turn the switch on the back of Jeffrey’s head from ‘naughty’ to ‘nice’ this morning!” 

But, really, there aren’t any easy solutions beyond patience, patience, and more patience.  Our daily one-on-one homework sessions last about 60 minutes, and frequently involve Jeffrey screaming himself red in the face, chewing up his erasers and throwing pencils on the floor.  He’s been especially obdurate lately since Eleanor has begun to bring “funwork” home from kindergarten, which she zips through with glee while Jeffrey struggles to write sentences.  As he tearfully said to me yesterday, “Next year Eleanor will start real homework, and she’ll race so fast ahead of me that she’ll be in seventh grade by the end of the year!”  I reassured him that he’s just as smart as Eleanor, he just needs to work as hard as she does, and he sat down and began to write.  For about 30 seconds.  And then the eraser-chewing began once more.  (And when I say “chewing,” I don’t mean that he sucks on his pink eraser; he takes BITES and then SWALLOWS.)

Yes, educators.  I know exactly how difficult it is to teach my child.  Which is why I need your help.

So I keep waking up at 4:30 or 5:00 — late enough in the morning that my body doesn’t initially “feel” like it needs more sleep, but early enough for me to collapse some time around 9:30 a.m.

The fact that I get nightly ligament pain around my belly bulge doesn’t help, either.  What I call my “tummy tendons” ache constantly unless I get out of bed and walk around the room — for some reason, it helps the pain go away, but not always.  Last night’s session was particularly bad; I still have “phantom pain” in my hips this morning.

Well.  Time for a nap?  We’ll see if my brain can calm down enough for one to happen.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like . . . Well, You Know

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Over the past week we’ve been slowly dragging out our Christmas decorations and setting them up.  Usually we try to get it all done in one day, but between painting our kitchen (more on that later) and my perpetual pregnancy-induced exhaustion, it’s been more of a little-bit-here, little-bit-there, situation.

This, of course, frustrates the kids to no end, who want everything up NOW.

On the first evening, we just set up our tree.  No decorations or anything.  When Brian and I finished this and left to do dishes, the kids decided to Take Matters Into Their Own Hands.  Grabbing up a box of outdoor lights, they went to work on their toy castle:

TA-DAH!  How festive is that?  There are golden fake poinsettia flowers all over it, too.  And in the center of it all, our much loved, much abused nutcracker in the shape of the Mouse King.  (I don’t think it’s visible in the photo.)

The next day, we put most of the ornaments on the tree, excepting a bunch of handmade straw ornaments from Germany and the silver star topper.  Once again, I was doing dishes, and Eleanor and William decided to Take Matters Into . . . well, you figure it out:

It’s an Ella tree!  See the ornaments hanging off her fingers and toes?  She’s using one hand to hold the silver star on top of her head.

This past Tuesday for Family Home Evening, we upheld one of our family traditions and picked out a new nativity set from Ten Thousand Villages.  For those of you not familiar with this store (which is part of a national chain), it is a non-profit organization sells fair-trade gifts from all over the world, and is run mostly by volunteers. I love seeing all the different cultural interpretations of the Christmas story.  So far we have creches from Taiwan, Peru, Indonesia, Kenya, Bangladesh, and a weinachtspyramid from Germany (which I found at a thrift store.  Everything else is from Ten Thousand Villages).

Upon arrival at the store, Jeffrey marched in, scanned the wall of nativities, then cornered a clerk and began asking where all the Roman nativity sets were.  Rome is one of his current obsessions.  “Where are the Roman ones?  Where are the Roman ones?”  I had to gently take Jeff aside and explain that Rome really wasn’t a country anymore.

“What happened to Rome?” he asked, puzzled.

I explained briefly — not wanting to be dragged into a discussion of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — that it was Italy now.

Ten minutes later, he was at the store clerk again: “Where are the Italy ones?  Where are the Italy ones?”

Thank heavens for patient volunteer store clerks!

Brian and I can be notorious for being wishy-washy over decisions like this.  Should we get the little crocheted set from Vietnam?  Or the punched-metal display from Haiti?  However, it was Jeffrey who spotted the nativity that we all fell in love with.  I don’t have time to take a picture of it, but this is what it kind of looks like:

It’s from Uganda.  Our set is just like this, only we have two shepherds, and the stable is made of stamped leather and triangle-shaped.  I think it’s just lovely.  The sheep made of twisted bark are adorable!

 

The Turkey Trot

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Here’s Eleanor’s “Thankful Turkey” that she made in kindergarten:

The words on the feathers are kind of random (peas?  peaches?) and I think she was picking them off of a board of suggested words her teacher made.  Thanksgiving had quite the impact on her class; over the past few days the favorite recess game is a holiday-inspired variation of tag.  As Eleanor put it, “The girls are all Indians, and Fiona is our pet turkey.  Then the boys are all Pilgrims and they try to catch our turkey and eat her up!”

It sounds like kindergarten hasn’t changed much since I was a kid, in some ways.

The funny thing is that even though all of my kids are in different classes — or different schools — they all brought home paper tipis they had made in class.  I mentioned this in my previous “100 thankful things” post, but here’s the picture of the display Eleanor made of them on the piano:

Love that bison piggy bank.

Thanksgiving proper was celebrated at Brian’s parents’ house.  Here is our festive spread — my mother-in-law, Kathryn, found these foil-wrapped chocolate turkeys and encouraged the kids to use them for name cards:

See the funny-shaped turkey in the center of the table?  Brian and I discovered a roasting method called “spatchcocking” — where you cut the spine out of the bird, then press it flat.  Because the turkey is much thinner this way, it takes much less time to roast — only about 70-80 minutes.  This ensures moist, tender meat and a crispy skin.  Brian loves this method, and rubbed a butter-rosemary mixture all over the meat before roasting, which I found fantastic.

After dinner we played games —  a literary variant of Balderdash called Liebrary (in which you make up the first lines of real books, then guess which one is real), and a marathon game of dominoes (dominoes being one of the few games the kids find just as entertaining as the adults).

Jeffrey got bored of games after just one round of dominoes, and wanted to go off to play by himself.  In his social skills class, we’ve learned that this isn’t behavior we should encourage; the rule now is that Jeffrey doesn’t have to play the game, but he can’t go off by himself, either — he has to stay with the group. Since Jeffrey had spent part of the weekend watching the BYU-Utah football game on television with Brian, he decided to stay with us and “call” the dominoes game like a sportscaster would.

“Eleanor passes a 5 to Mommy!” he cried, as Ella put down a tile.  “Mommy blocks it!”  Then, whenever someone played a double tile, “TOUCHDOWN!”

100 Things to be Thankful About (part 3)

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68.  The Periodic Table of the Elements.  Quite useful in its own right, but it also inspired Daniel Radcliffe to do THIS:

69.  The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Yeah, it’s cheesy and commercial, but for some reason I just love it.  How can a person have something against giant puffy balloons?

70.  Hoberman Spheres.  The very cool, very fun 21st-century version of a Slinky.

71.  When my kids take our Hoberman Spheres and wear them on their heads like giant rainbow Afros

72.  Ukulele/accordion duets

73.  How Jeffrey sometimes refers to a ukulele as a “rainbow banjo”

74.  “A room without books is a body without soul” — Cicero

75.  Playing a really powerful fugue on the organ, or jazz standards on the piano

76.  A really hot shower, especially if it’s been a few/couple days.  (Although, according to Lynne Rae Perkins, you should never make decisions right after a shower like that.  Your outlook on life is just too optimistic and you’re bound to do something a little too spontaneous and freewheeling.)

77.  $5 pizza at the end of an exhausting day

78.  Watching little kids run around haybale mazes, scolding each other for cheating

79.  Pumpkin pie with real whipped cream

80.  Vintage Fisher Price Little People.  I love collecting them from thrift stores, my kids love playing with them.  My favorite has to be the Merry-Go-Round.  William loves putting a boy Little Person inside it, then saying “that’s me!” every time it comes around.

81.  Apple pie, apple cake, applesauce, a big dutch pancake with an apple-cinnamon compote on top

82. My mother’s “secret” recipe for potato rolls.  They are excellent for dunking in hot cocoa or making sandwiches with leftover turkey.  I made three dozen of them today, and the first dozen disappeared within 15 minutes of coming out of the oven.

83.  The Big Bear — this is a giant beanbag chair we have with a cover made of brown furry plush.  Today the kids decided to “pretend it was bedtime,” which involved putting on pajamas, stripping all sheets and blankets off Jeffrey’s bed, and then roll the Big Bear back and forth on the mattress while shrieking.  (And then what happened?  See #77)

84.  What’s Up, Doc?

85.  Baby boy bellybuttons.  I have a vintage 2007 model.  They are so choice.  If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.  And then blowing bubbles all over it.

86.  Singing showtunes while doing the dishes

87.  Sock-skating across hardwood floors

88.  Today all the girls in Eleanor’s dance class got to wear “Ginny dresses,” these long billowy dance outfits that look like frilly old-fashioned nightgowns and were designed by the founder of the dance school.  The skirts are generous and swirl out when the girls twirl and skip.  Eleanor’s was lavender-colored and puffed out like a marshmallow while she danced.  It was so sweet!

89.  Sleeping in, being woken by little kids running around the room, climbing on the bed and smothering you with kisses

90.  Watching Anne of Green Gables or The Gilmore Girls while folding laundry

91.  The best road trip playlist ever

92.  The “blue flame” — when what you love to do intersects with what you’re really good at

93.  A big potluck dinner with all your best friends

94.  Pom poms on baby hats (submitted by Brian, who just finished knitting a baby hat)

95.  David Bowie’s “Golden Years,” probably the coolest song ever recorded

96.  People who are good at forgetting all the stupid embarassing things I’ve said over the years

97.  The way the bark of Ponderosa pine trees smell like vanilla

98.  The Ted Danson Game — in which celebrities’ names are inserted into popluar song lyrics (“You make me feel like Ted Danson!”)

99.  The Too Stupid to Sleep Club — invented in college whenever my friends and I stayed up past 1:00 a.m. talking (the record is staying up until 5:30 a.m.)

100.  Peace, Prosperity, Pancakes

100 Things to be Thankful About (part 2)

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34.  William’s hilariously adorable mispronounciations.  We even made a SONG about it!

35.  The bottomless pit of mittens and hats known as the hall closet

36.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

37.  That one guy I knew in high school who loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so much that he actually CARRIED A TOWEL AROUND WITH HIM IN HIS BACKPACK.  And by “backpack,” I mean LEATHER BRIEFCASE.

38.  Stacks of brand-new glossy magazines

39.  My children’s literature pie night group.  We get together once a month or so at a Marie Callendar’s and discuss new books while gorging on pie.  Good heavens, it keeps me sane knowing I’m not the only one in the world who gets excited about picture books

40.  Children’s cheeks, whipped apple-red from playing outdoors

41.  Root beer floats — made with a 1:1 ratio of ice cream to soda

42.  The IKEA Real Sweedish Cooking Cookbook — probably the world’s quirkiest English translation of a cookbook.  It includes the phrases “The Swedish Christmas table is a trencherman’s El Dorado” and “Behold!  The Full Monty of the Swedish herring plate!”

43.  Someone to mock a cheesy bad movie with

44.  The excitement of picking out a gift that is “just right” for someone — especially a little kid

45.  Sidewalks waxed with layers of leaves

46.  Someone who looks around the crowded room and decides they’d like to sit next to you

47.  Candles that smell like fresh-cut pine trees

48.  All three of my kids came home with paper tipis they made as part of a unit on Native American lifeways.  They are all sitting on the piano together, a little paper village, and Eleanor also dug up her bison-shaped piggy bank and set it beside them, like it’s the village pet or something.

49.  The whistling sounds the wind makes as it blows over my chimney

50.  Big-holed, crisp-crusted sourdough bread, studded with roasted cloves of garlic

51.  “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”  (2nd Kings 6:16)

52.  “Lead you down the primrose path,” “Sweets to the sweet,” “Every dog will have its day,” “hoisted by his own petard,” and other common sayings that all came from Hamlet

53.  “Over the River and Through the Woods,” currently Eleanor’s favorite song to play on the piano, dance to, and sing (although not all at the same time)

54.  A cheese plate put together by someone who knows what they’re doing.  (Especially if it includes St. Andre’s Brie)

55.  Oh, come on.  You have to try the St. Andre’s triple-cream brie.  It tastes like butter, but in all the right ways.

56.  Jeffrey’s endless list of grandiose plans — to build an airplane out of junk he finds in the garage, to buy a WWII-era tank and put it in the backyard, to write a play with a cast of about 98 people

57.  The inherent paradox in Jeffrey’s little-boy love of off-road vehicles, paired with his horror of learning that people use them to go off-road.  “What?!?” he cries, “They go off the TRAIL?  But they’ll BUST THE CRYPTOBIOTIC SOIL CRUST!”

58.  Hot buttered toast with honey on top, especially as it’s described in The Wind in the Willows:

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

59.  When I was in fourth grade, I read that passage from The Wind in the Willows and insisted on making myself hot buttered toast for breakfast every day for weeks

60.  Johnson & Johnson’s no-tears baby shampoo.  I love bathing my kids in it, and the way it makes their hair smell afterwards.  On bath nights I end up sniffing their heads so much that they complain.

61.  Hayden Valley, Yellowstone National Park

62.  This German drink my family used to get in gasthouses when we were stationed overseas.  It’s made with one-half Fresca, one-half Coca-Cola, and for the love of me I can’t remember its name, but trust me, it’s delicious.

63.  The version of “Turkish Delight” my third-grade brain came up with when I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  I imagined it tasted like Samoas, the caramel/coconut/chocolate cookies sold by the Girl Scouts.  This is probably the main reason I get so excited by Girl Scout cookies every year

64.  My children’s recent discovery of the classic Saturday morning ritual: waking up early, watching cartoons and eating cold cereal right out of the box

65.  Playing the Shirts’ family version of Apples to Apples

66.  Waiting for a storm, gathering up spare candles, flashlights, and fuzzy slippers for everyone

100 Things to be Thankful About (Part 1)

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  1. Brian’s awesome snow sculptures.  We had our first real snowfall Saturday night, and right after church Brian took the kids out to build.  This is what they made, although the photo doesn’t do it justice:

See?  It’s a backhoe made of snow!  William is overjoyed to have his very own toddler-sized “digger.”  He’s spent long hours sitting in that little seat on top, singing “Dig, dump, dig, dump” over and over again.

  1. My elbows don’t bend the other way.  (Think about it.)
  2. The way numbered lists don’t reset themselves in Microsoft Word.  (Geez, WordPress — what is your problem?  This should be #3!)
  3. Reading Lists — better even than CPR for keeping dead authors alive
  4. Fluffy pillows bobbing about on white sheets, like pats of butter in fresh cream
  5. Red candles in crystal candlesticks
  6. The “Thanksgiving” wreath that I procrastinated putting up until today, which means it will get a whopping 6 days on the door until we haul the Christmas decorations out this weekend.
  7. Butter pecan cookies.  I’m making them tonight for William’s preschool “harvest feast” tomorrow.  (You gotta love a Lutheran preschool.  They know how to feast.)
  8. The way Jeffrey strutted around Great Clips after getting his haircut on Saturday.  He was thrilled because the stylist put a palmful of gel in his hair to “spike” it.
  9. How, on regular days, Jeffrey has bedhead that cannot be put down by any amount of gel
  10. Mitochondria.  They are completely separate organisms, yet they live in our cells and help them make energy.  And in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, they are also hyperintelligent creatures who can TALK to GALAXIES.
  11. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — currently my favorite book, but this is always subject to change
  12. The way William and Jeffrey have gotten into the habit of “offering me their arm” whenever we walk through a parking lot, like miniature 19th-century gentlemen
  13. The Salt Lake Public Library basement book sale
  14. Eleanor’s awesome skip-spin-jump, a dance move she’s created that could probably take down a moose
  15. Canyonlands National Park — especially the Island in the Sky district
  16. Knitting.  As a woman in one of my knitting classes once told me, “Knitting is the new yoga!”
  17. People who think that knitting could be the “new” anything . . .
  18. .  . . or yoga, for that matter
  19. Mini meatloaf and rosemary-roasted new potatoes, served with salad on the side (our dinner tonight)
  20. Jeffrey just lost his two front teeth.  I’m teaching him the “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” song, and it is more adorable than I can say.
  21. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  22. Rubber-bottomed slippers from Land’s End.  They are indestructible — and I can wear them to pick the newspaper off the front porch
  23. Getting teary-eyed during commercials for Disneyland, realizing that the emotional swing is owing to pregnancy hormones, and pinching my leg to stop the vicious cycle
  24. Fuzzy newborn-sized sleepers with yellow duckies on the tummy
  25. How, in her bedtime prayers, Eleanor prays “that there will be turkey and mashed potatoes and peas for Thanksgiving”
  26. Jeffrey’s current obsession with Roman soldiers.  They were paid with silver coins called denarii.  What?  YOU DIDN’T KNOW?!?
  27. My apparent inability to understand the rules of football.  This saves me the trouble of pretending to care about football
  28. Squeezing still-warm chocolate ganache directly into my mouth — a level of culinary excess that must be experienced to be truly appreciated
  29. Digging up movies on Netflix, and the pleasure of knowing that I’ll never have to go inside a video store again
  30. Hot spiced cider, peppermint-flavored hot chocolate, and an endless supply of graham crackers
  31. Jeffrey just told me that we are “this close” (holding up fingers to demonstrate) to Christmas, so we should start buying more Nutcrackers
  32. These four amazing, crazy people that I live with

Brian’s Zinc Birthday

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Brian turned 34 this past Saturday.  Since there aren’t any obvious milestones associated with this birthday, I took it upon myself to christen it the “zinc anniversary” of his birth.  ‘Cause zinc is cool and underappreciated.  We wouldn’t have telephones without zinc!

It was a splendid day.  We went out to rake leaves in the morning, and the kids serenaded us with their impromptu garage band:

Then we headed inside for homemade pumpkin spice doughnuts.  These were YUMMY.  Eleanor was especially rapturous about them.  “Mom, I love these all the way up to my chin,” she said, gesturing with her hand.  Then, a few minutes later: “Mom, I don’t think I can live without these doughnuts!”  Nice to know the girl has her priorities straight.

I gave Brian a copy of Mario Kart Wii for his birthday, so he and the kids indulged and played it for most of the afternoon.  Jeffrey was so excited that he couldn’t play it for more than thirty seconds at a time.

Then, in the evening, a party!  Both sets of our parents were able to attend, along with a passel of friends.  We had a scrumptious Italian feast, including my friend Laura’s excellent Pasta Bolognese.

For dessert (and as a second birthday present), I asked Brian to choose any cake from my favorite pastry cookbook, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes.  He chose the Mystery Cake with Mystery Ganache.  I made it just like the picture in the book — the exterior edge lined with Pirouettes and tipped with red icing.  They look like birthday candles, right?

My mom said that watching me set the Pirouettes into the ganache coating was so sumptuous that I should think about hiring myself out to candy stores — to sit behind a plate glass window and press cookies into chocolate cakes in order to attract customers.

William helped Brian blow out the real candles:

Why is it called “Mystery” cake?  Because of an unusual ingredient: condensed tomato soup.  It’s in the cake batter and in the ganache.  The citric acid deepens the flavor of the chocolate, and adds a subtle zing as well as extra moisture.  Brian thought it the most intriguing — as well as delicious-looking — cake in the book.  After tasting it, I heartily concur.  Who knew something so humble as tomato soup could be so fantastic?

Queen of the Woofs

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This is the other big news around here:

This is Jeffrey back in September, on his very first day of Cub Scouts.  And who is his fabulous den leader?

ME!

Yeah, I was kind of blindsided when I was asked to be in charge of the Wolf Scouts (second graders) because I know NOTHING about Cub Scouting.  I was worried about what to do with Eleanor and William during den meetings.  I was worried about what would happen to the den after the baby comes in January.

BUT . . . owing to a briefing by the well-organized previous den leader, it’s been a piece of cake.  With school holidays and pack meetings, I only have to be in charge twice a month or so.  The boys meet at my house, so William can nap through the meetings.

Eleanor wears her Daisy Scout uniform as an unofficial member of the den, which is rather adorable.

And the boys are WONDERFUL people.  They are all so smart and excited to learn new things!  I’ve been surprised at the various activities we’ve done that have been completely new to them — like making paper airplanes or playing with marbles and tiddlywinks.  They love squishing instant pudding in a Ziploc bag and then eating it out of ice cream cones.  They are all really kind and considerate to both me and each other.  I love ’em.

Last week, we learned how to hammer nails into a board (wow) and sent everyone home with a birdhouse kit.  We’ve also been on a “history walk” around the neighborhood (they didn’t know how settlers used the neighborhood creek as a source of ice) and learned how to make a chest pass with a basketball.

The funny thing is that as I’ve read the requirements for the Wolf badge, I have been reminded of various library reference questions I’ve received that I know were about those specific requirements.  Such as “Do you have an abridged version of The Jungle Book?” (for the Bobcat badge); “Do you have a book about how different birds use different materials to build nests?” (the “Birds” elective); “Do you have a book that shows how cities change through history?” (the “Know Your Community” achievement).  Heh — I got those questions over and over and NOW THEY FINALLY MAKE SENSE!

The only sad thing is that I don’t know what will happen to our den once the baby comes.  I really won’t be able to do meetings with a newborn (“you boys just work on whittling while I nurse, okay?”), and it probably isn’t a good idea to have a pack of eight-year-olds in the house during RSV season, anyway.  There’s been an effort to get me an assistant who can take over later, but so far that hasn’t happened.  Well, we’ll all have our Wolf badges passed off by January anyway, so that’s a good thing.

Halloween Roundup

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Halloween is a big deal in Utah, more so than anywhere else I’ve lived.  Maybe it’s because of the high number of children per capita.  Back when I was a children’s librarian for the Murray Library, our annual Halloween children’s program was the absolute #1 most popular thing we ever did.  To the point of where we had to issue tickets because otherwise so many people would come that it would violate the library’s fire code.  And then we ran out of tickets within the first two hours of giving them out . . . and so the next year, people began lining up outside the library before it was even open to get tickets.  All for a dinky Halloween storytime with Little Debbie snack cakes at the end!

If that ain’t a tale to send chills up your spine, I don’t know what is.

But.  Anyway.  Halloween: a big deal in Utah.  So we tried out some of the local fare, like Gardner Village’s “Breakfast With a Witch” program:

It was . . . odd.  The witch seen here is named “Brazzilla,” and like all Gardner Village witches, speaks English with a Ren Faire Folke dialect (eurgh).  But the kids enjoyed getting her autograph, and we also got to have all the pancakes we wanted, so it evened out.

Halloween is also the only time of year when I really enjoy making cookies.  I think because at Christmas it feels like an obligation, but at Halloween, anything you do is Bonus.  Years ago my mother-in-law gave us these puzzle-piece cookie cutters that can make little haunted houses.  We decorated these with the kids and gave them to neighbors:

And then we let the kids decorate these on their own.  Note the three-inch layer of frosting:

Our neighborhood did trick-or-treating on Saturday, Oct. 30, but unfortunately it poured rain the entire evening.  So this is the only photo we got that night:

Brian let Jeffrey carve his pumpkin himself.  Can you guess which one was his?

My mother and I made Eleanor a Sleeping Beauty costume this year.  Mom is amazing with children’s costumes — she even found this little spinning wheel at a thrift store for her.  Eleanor didn’t like posing with it, though.  Here is her “Okay, Mom, have I held the spinning wheel long enough?” pose:

But she loved wearing the costume at the school Halloween parade:

Jeffrey is wearing a knight costume that my mom made for my brother when he was eight.  Jeff was too wrapped up in Pretend Fantasyland to realize that I was taking his picture:

On Halloween proper, we went down to Provo so the Great-Grandma could “trick-or-treat” with the kids.  She is a big fan of the William, pictured here in a dragon costume my mom found at DI.  (Yes . . . my mom found all of the costumes this year.  Because she is Made of Awesome).

William was very proud of his costume.  Whenever someone complimented him on it (say, at preschool), he always puffed out his chest and exclaimed, “Yes, my dragon costume has FLYING WINGS!  And [turning around to show] A POINTY TAIL!”  My favorite part was that when he wore his costume in the car, the little purple horns poked up high enough for me to see them in the rear view mirror.  Just the horns.  Love it.