Darais Days

This morning we all went to watch Ammon play his soccer game at 9am. He scored a goal!!! We were all so proud, but Abe, who actually cares about sports, seemed extra enthusiastic. We all made a really big deal about it until by the end of the day Ammon was announcing jubilantly to everyone who would listen that he scored two goals! (He actually only scored one, but the ball hit him on the way in in the second case, and he is completely convinced he hit it in himself.)

After soccer we drove to a fun park in Pleasant Grove next to the Murdock Trail. Lydia and I biked for forty-five minutes while Abe and the other kids played. That was such a gift. I know biking is one of Abe’s most favorite things but he was so insistent that I go with Lydia, and that was such a kindness. Lydia and I had a peaceful, gorgeous ride. My favorite part was biking behind her, seeing her small frame, her pink bike, and the ribbons trailing from her handlebars as she happily biked along. The ribbons reminded me to cherish the passing moment of childhood, and Lydia is such a beautiful child.

Then Abe dropped me off at a spa to get a massage while he took the kids to lunch. When I was done we swapped places and he got a massage. It was my first day on Zoloft and on my period, and I didn’t sleep much last night so I was exhausted when we came home. I also have some pretty intense nausea that I assume is probably a side effect from the Zoloft. So after giving Ammon and Clarissa a shower (because they had gotten really dirty from eating in the car), I put Clarissa down and flopped on the couch. Pretty much for the rest of the day.

I have spent the rest of this day watching Der Spiegel news videos in German and reading German articles and feeling horrified at the little percentage I understood. QAnon has a presence in Germany and I could not believe my eyes and ears at their protests. Also, Nazis have been emboldened by all of the fascist world leaders, which is almost too much to comprehend.

Honestly, when it comes to handling Covid though, I don’t know what to believe. I am grateful my kids get to go to in person school because they both are so thrilled to be with friends, and I am thrilled not to have to juggle four kids all day. I feel much less personally stressed now that my girls are in school and Ammon and Clarissa go to preschool for two and a half hours twice a week. And I’m grateful we can use playgrounds and parks and do extra curriculars and see friends a bit more now. But I don’t personally know anyone with Covid, I haven’t lost anyone to the disease, and we haven’t come down with it ourselves. With how lax we’ve become it’s probably only a matter of time until we get it, so maybe I will be singing a different tune when that happens. But even though Utah politics drive me kind of semi-insane, in this one area I feel presently grateful for the fact that the state is as lenient as it is.

This is a picture and a video of Clarissa trying to convince me to give her ice cream after her slice of pie:

After the girls got their after school stuff done, I fed the kids early. I halved pie pumpkins, seasoned and roasted them, and then stuffed them with wild rice pilaf and manchego–which they, miracle of miracles, ALL loved. Well, Mary objected to the manchego, but the rest of them gobbled that up. Then it was baths before watching the new Mulan movie while Abe and I puttered and tidied.

Then we put the kids to bed and my friends, Heidi and Courtney, came over. We sat around talking until 1am. We were all shocked at the time. But let me just say, that time flew. We had a lot to talk about, and they are both such intelligent, sensitive, morally grounded women. I felt so lucky to share the evening with them and Abe, who always chimes in with awesome insights of his own.

Thursday was a beautiful day, temperature wise. Ammon had soccer practice and right after the girls had tennis practice. Ammon didn’t want to participate so he spent most of the time practicing monkey bars–and he did it!!! He made it all the way to the end!!! I was in awe, having never accomplished this feat myself. Lydia was so inspired that the very next day she, after having tried daily at the monkey bars for a month, finally made it to the end herself. We were all so proud of Ammon. Also, he scored a goal during his soccer practice–the first one he’s ever scored in the right net!! We were all very excited for him.

After the kids were done playing Abe and I played a little but not much because my knee has been hurting. I gained ten pounds last month and my knees are not happy. So back to the intermittent fasting drawing board.

After the kids were down I attended my virtual book club on Braiding Sweetgrass and loved it a lot. I feel like that book and those discussions are changing my worldview in major ways. It is one of my favorite books I have ever read.

On Wednesday I got up early for my German tutor that I found on Verbling. Our first meeting was at 5am this past Saturday and I was so thankful that Wednesday’s meeting was at 6:30. She is in Germany so we have to navigate that time difference, but it is so worth it because she is awesome and I love the chance to practice speaking. I also got Lydia a tutor through Verbling because I think the chance to speak is just so fun.

I also got the kids new fall clothes last week (well, mostly Lydia and Ammon), and since the temperature took a dive this week, Lydia was so excited to wear hers Wednesday. She loves, loves, loves getting new clothes and picking out outfits. And, thanks be, Mary loves, loves, loves getting Lydia’s hand-me-downs. So on Wednesday morning they were both ecstatic to be in their new and hand-me-down outfits, and they asked me to take a picture.

After the girls were in school we dropped off some stuff to my mom and came home for a play date with my friend Courtney and her son Wyatt. We have been a lot more lax about social distancing lately, and it was so fun to get together with a friend.

Then I went to an appointment with the psychiatrist and got a needed prescription. I feel grateful for how good my life is, but even with the major pieces of it intact, I feel like life itself is a kind of trauma. At any rate, she said I appear to have PTSD, which would explain some of the mental pain recently. So here’s hoping modern medicine, EMDR and therapy do the trick!

Thanks to Abe, I actually did make it to my appointment with my new therapist. I loved her and felt helped from the first session. Abe, Lydia and I will all be going to her and I basically want her to help our family until she retires.

I don’t know exactly what Abe and I did Monday morning, but I do know our kids played so cutely all morning long. At one point I think Abe and I were doing yoga together and the kids showed up in homemade armor. We grabbed our phone and took a picture:

The children also danced to a freeze dance song together. We caught it in the two videos below. It was sooooo adorable!

In the afternoon we played more games and then in the evening we drove to Squaw Peak, built a fire at an overlook, bird watched, roasted s’mores, and enjoyed the time together so much. By the end of the evening the kids were running up and down the trails singing and dancing and laughing together. Abe and I just watched them and marveled at how lucky we are. It was one of the most magical evenings we have had, and all of the kids kept saying how it was the best day ever.

On Sunday the kids unwrapped some more activities and we spent a lot of time playing games. There was a lot of laid back together time where we all just enjoyed being together. We neglected to take pictures.

We also visited my mom in the morning and after Abe dropped me off at home because I was feeling hot and tired. Abe took the kids to Bridal Veil Falls and they all biked and scootered for a couple hours.

When they came home Abe took a nap and then we all had home church. I joined and discussed Mary’s upcoming baptism with her. I tried to support her decision, affirm her choice, and encourage her to study Mormonism’s sacred texts. It has been a long journey trying to feel at peace with the idea that my children study a white supremacist text and call it scripture, but I had a conversation right before with a dear friend that was helpful. I was so grateful for her courage in engaging the conversation and explaining the ways she reconciles anti-racism with Mormonism. That conversation gave me the clarity and peace I needed to support Mary in her religious path.

While my friend explained to me that she trusts God to resolve all of the tensions between Mormonism and anti-racism, I realized that I am swimming in the exact same murky waters as my friend in the area of childhood education. Although I do not feel racially motivated to send my kids to a private school for the first couple years of their lives, I do recognize that racism and classism make my choice possible. So my hands aren’t clean, and being horrified that my children are actively immersing in white supremacist text is somewhat disingenuous when my own active choices still prop up a racist system.

Even though I feel very alive to the ways I still cave to societal racism, I still did my best to give Mary some general guidelines for a healthy approach to Book of Mormon study. I reminded her that it is not historical so that she can have the mental and spiritual freedom to take the good and to dismiss the bad. Lydia then tossed out several instances of racism in the Book of Mormon and demonstrated her ability to think from her moral center. She referenced conversations where she had the courage to confront her church teachers when they were teaching things that were unnecessarily unkind, and that was very reassuring to me.

She has a heart of pure gold, and so does Mary. At the end of the day, I kind of feel like all of my angst about my kids internalizing racism from church is just a reflection of my own trauma from doing that myself. I trust my kids are smarter and have better hearts than I have, and I trust their good minds and hearts will prevail against anything they encounter that would make their minds and hearts smaller or colder. I also trust that embracing their religious heritage will (hopefully) affect them more positively than negatively. And I truly am proud that Mary made a decision for herself, even though she knows I would not make the same choice myself.

Also, as someone who had a parent who resisted my baptism, I know that resistance would just make her more resolved. Practically, I think loving and supporting and believing in my daughter will do more than fearing continually that she will be led astray.

At the end of the conversation, Lydia thanked God in her closing prayer for our family conversation, and that made me feel so warm and happy. I also can not overstate how grateful I felt to have realized I can trust my kids to make good choices. That felt like an incredibly connective and liberating moment.

After this warm and fuzzy conversation we all had dinner, ate pie together, and played more games until bed time.

On Saturday the kids woke up and discovered all of the presents. Before they opened them Lydia made about fifty yummy pancakes–which lasted all weekend long. I am hoping to never flip a pancake again as long as Lydia lives with us.

Then we loaded into the car and headed to the Murdock Trail to bike, scooter, and walk together. I can’t tell if Ammon or Lydia took the selfie below, but it looks like it might have been Lydia.

On the trail it was so so hot. We went all the way to my favorite type of place–the cemetery–before turning around. Mary was totally scared to bike down the hill on the path and when I was running beside her she crashed. Abe was much more proactive about helping her not crash and as a result on the way back she inched down the hill with Abe only letting go for a few seconds at a time. It took about twenty minutes while Ammon and Lydia zipped up and down the hill and Clarissa and I waited in the shade.

On the way to and from the trail we practiced Spanish, French, German and Italian together. Lydia and I have been watching polyglot videos and she and I have started doing tutoring sessions on Verbling in addition to our Pimsleur German and Tagalog classes. While we were listening to stories in Italian and waiting for snow cones, Clarissa fell asleep. She was happy to wake up to everyone eating snow cones on the porch and we took this picture of her eating hers:

Here is a video:

Then everyone rested before reading books about blueberries and blueberry pies. Then we baked two blueberry pies.

Then we played endless rounds of Otrio. I bought it at the beginning of Covid and we had never played it until Saturday. It is basically a more complicated version of tic tac toe, and Abe and I were in absolute disbelief about how hard this game was for us. We would verbally coach ourselves to do the simplest things and we would still lose! All we had to do was keep track and make sure the person after us couldn’t Otrio and then set ourselves up to Otrio, but maybe because of the colors or pieces we could never keep track of the person after us–even when we were verbally coaching ourselves to do those two simple things. At one point Abe said, “First check Mary. Mary can not Otrio. Now check myself. Myself can not Otrio.” At this, Lydia laughed so hard she wet her pants. We were all laughing so hard. And then–Mary won!! Abe said he had never laughed so hard in a game.

After we finally went to bed, Lydia surprised us all by sleepwalking for the first time ever. She came down and had totally pleasant conversations with Abe and me, but she was clearly sleepwalking because she said things like, “I am leading with my paw,” and then after peeing asked Abe where the soap was.

“It’s right there, Lydia, in front of you.”

“No, dad. I mean the soap to wash my hair.”

At that point Abe asked Lydia if she was awake. She looked at him for a minute, smiled dazedly and said yes. Then she came in and had a conversation with me that had me wondering if she was sleepwalking too. I asked her if she wanted melatonin and when Abe ran some up to her room literally two minutes later, she was already conked out in the bed. The next day she had no memory whatsoever of these conversations so we are pretty sure she was sleepwalking.

Lydia did not know whether to be delighted or freaked out about the fact that she sleepwalked and spent the next day mulling it over trying to figure it out.

This Labor Day weekend was the best one any of us have ever had. Each of the older kids declared repeatedly that whatever day we were on was “the best day ever” and that they were having the most fun they have ever had. As a mom, there is nothing that makes me happier than hearing my kids say stuff like that.

We toyed with the idea of camping somewhere this weekend, but campsites in the Tetons are hard to come by and with Covid everything just seems complicated and risky. So we ended up staying home and playing with our kids every day. We started off the mornings by wrapping games, puzzles, and activities for them to open. We promised them that we would play the games and do the activities with them. Some of the stuff we already had around the house but hadn’t played much, but other stuff was new for the weekend.

Also, today was Mary’s first day at school! I was keeping her home because I liked the extra time to work one on one with her and to get all of her stuff done before Lydia gets home, but Mary was getting really frustrated with the online school assignments. On Thursday she ended up sobbing in front of the screen, so I emergency emailed the teacher and begged her to take Mary in. Then Friday morning we showed up and begged in person. Her teacher was so so so accommodating and let Mary start even though she didn’t have anything ready for her. But Chelsea’s twins are in Mary’s class so they immediately took Mary under their wing and showed her all around and told her what to do. They are absolutely adorable and when Carter twinkled at me and waved I just melted. What good kids, and I am so thankful Mary had those kind boys to help her get oriented.

During the kids’ tennis lesson, Ammon and Clarissa played again on the playground.

After we did our thing where we parked the car right in front of the court and played tennis together until way past the kids’ bedtimes. Lydia spent most of that time under a bright light by the court reading, and the rest of the kids sat quietly in the car watching. It was unbelievable how good they were. I am so grateful for them for giving Abe and me the chance to have such fun. They are such good kids.