Darais Days

I don’t remember if anything significant happened on Thursday. I think we just did our routines, and Abe got this picture:

On Wednesday I let Ammon and Clarissa help make a ricotta, plum and strawberry galette. We got our only picture of the day while they were spreading the cheese:

On Tuesday Mary and Ammon played together for hours building and playing pretend. Here is a video and below is a picture capturing their play. The video includes Ammon saying “alsoly” which is one of my favorite words that I hear him use:

This morning I biked almost an hour, roasted some sweet potatoes, did preschool with Ammon, helped Mary practice the piano, roasted onions, eggplant, and peppers, made veggie enchiladas, and visited with Andrea when she came to get her phone. It was a nice visit after yesterday’s gut wrenching conversation!

She offered to do art with the girls and me once a month, which is incredible because she used to teach art at BYU and is a professional artist. Since Mary does art every day for hours upon hours (she probably averages three or four hours a day just coloring and drawing!)–this is a great opportunity for Mary especially. Andrea took a great interest in her art yesterday and I was so touched that today she offered to help guide Mary’s artistic progress.

Mary said something adorable during the dinner conversation on Sunday. When Andrea asked her about her process, Mary responded that she has to think about her art before she creates it because “otherwise it will be a big flop.” We all about died laughing. Mary is so, so over the top insanely cute!!

Today Ammon and I did preschool activities and books for the letter “f.” We watered flowers, blew out a candle (fire!) by making the “f” sound, and read books.

Ammon also spent most of the day just playing with his magna tiles, laying out his Zingo cards around the house to make a path for his toy witches, and playing with his toy dragons and dinosaurs. He and Clarissa also spent a lot of time together.

Lydia spent the entire day reading Life of Pi start to finish. I put it on her summer reading shelf and totally forgot about the gruesome ending until she was already into it and addicted. Hopefully she doesn’t get nightmares.

Abe had a great day at work even though he is so tired. We are going to try to get to bed early tonight and fix that situation. But for being so tired, he still got out of bed early and went running before work, helped Mary do her eye exercises, and right now he’s cleaning the kitchen (the fourth time it’s been cleaned today!!).

My mom had a bad spell today but was great for most of the day. She has been doing much better ever since Sunday when she requested a blessing from the bishop. We’re all so glad she’s been feeling overall so much better.

I went grocery shopping today and then came home to put it all away, roast veggies, pickle onions, make a vegetable soup, and assemble some bagel sandwiches for dinner. Abe’s Aunt Andrea came over for dinner because he was helping her with her new phone. It ended up taking him five hours to set up her phone and even then there were still more pictures to download, but by then we had to call it a night.

We had a really pleasant time and all of the kids adore Andrea. But after they went to bed Andrea announced that she really wanted to discuss something important with us. At that point, she sat down and informed us that Jesus was coming again by roughly 2060 and that it was so important for us to prepare ourselves.

That did not go over too well with me.

By the end of the night I think we were all in a state of mild shock from the conversation. Abe ended with a wonderful scripture from Paul on how everything will vanish except for love. And at the end of the day, that is how I feel. Nothing matters, really, except for love. I am so grateful for my wise, kind, incredible husband, my good, kind, intelligent mother, my darling children, and the best life I could ever imagine for myself. Every day I wake up and want to pinch myself that this is really my life. It’s an existence filled to the brim with family, with love, with abundance, with things that make me happy every day.

And at the end of the day, I’m grateful for Abe’s Aunt Andrea too. The world is full of every type of person, and she is a colorful, beautiful, interesting, talented person. Even though I deeply disagree with her on everything related to the Church, I think her faith gives her a lot of buoyancy, cheer, and zest for life, and those things help her make the world a better place.

On Saturday Abe and I were so, so tired. We ended up cleaning the basement. I should have taken pictures because it is looking so good! We set up another table so I can use the sewing table for sewing, we set up more bookshelves so for the first time in our marriage all of my books can be out, and I picked up the disaster that was the crafting area. There were hundreds of sequins and buttons on the floor, not to mention kinetic sand all over the place and coloring stuff everywhere. It took…a while.

Abe played a TON with the kids and I made zoodles and Trader Joe’s bolognese sauce for dinner. I think I also spent a lot of time on the couch. We also walked to Morgan and Jessi’s house and visited with them outside after the kids went to bed. They are so fun, and I love that walk with Abe.

Today Abe came up in the middle of the day wanting to talk. The night before I had been very negative about the racism in the Book of Mormon, and he felt really attacked and unsafe in his faith.

While Abe was talking, I realized that I need to be less toxic about things when I talk. But when the issue of racism came up, I basically just started bawling. I really struggle with the idea that we immerse our kids regularly in white supremacist scripture, even though when I listen to Abe explain it to the kids he turns it into the most beautiful, principled teaching. It’s like alchemy or something. Nevertheless, on principle, it is just really, really hard for me to know that the racism and God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Mormon is surmountable because of all the other good things one can extract from the text. Personally, I wish we could find a way to transmit all of the other good things to our kids without dousing them in racism too. So anyway, at the point when Abe was saying “I know the racism in the Book of Mormon is a problem, but…” I basically broke into hysterical, ugly crying and couldn’t stop.

And at that point, Abe had some sort of light bulb moment when he could hear himself saying, “I know racism is a problem but,” and in that moment he resolved to do he hard work of rewiring his conscience to be authentically anti-racist. I was so grateful, so relieved, and so in admiration of his introspective capacity and desire to grow. Thank you, Abe.

Abe and I have very different philosophies and approaches to travel. In addition to navigating our faith journey, we are enjoying the bonus of exciting conversations around negotiating these differences too. Woohoo!

All joking aside, working things out with Abe, while hard for both of us when we have strong feelings on a subject, is its own type of joy. He is wise, rational, level-headed, a great listener, introspective, self-aware, and unfailingly kind. And when he’s talking,half the time I am wondering why I feel any differently because he articulates himself so persuasively and well.

Abe values routine and comfort more than going new spiritual, mental, or physical spaces. He functions better when he is operating within his usual rhythm, and we feel equally invested in his health–so giving space for his routines is something we both want. And his reference point for international travel is that he never did it until college, and when he did take a Europe trip with his friends it was extremely uncomfortable for him. He felt guilty about spending the money and out of his comfort zone encountering new cultures and people and places. So for him, international travel is uncomfortable–and for our kids, mostly unnecessary.

My reference point is pretty different because my family spent two months every summer traveling, and every other year we spent those months abroad. My dad also spent a semester teaching in Italy, so I did preschool there–and my parents put a lot of energy into camping with their very young children all around Europe. Although I don’t remember much from those earliest trips, travel always felt like a part of life’s regular rhythm. In college I did three study abroads and traveled with friends and with my cousin, and I always assumed I would raise my kids with the same travel patterns my parents gifted me.

Up until now, international travel has not been a financial possibility (or if it has, I have not been creative enough to figure it out!). But now that it is, we have another issue to surmount, which is time. Abe can not take more than two and a half weeks (at the very most) off from work, and I can’t imagine compressing an international trip into that amount of time, especially considering that by the time I was Lydia’s age I had spent almost a year abroad.

Last year we fixed the time issue by just having Abe join us for just part of our summer trip, but when I imagine toting four young children through Europe by myself, my heart fails me just a bit. Ammon, who is addicted to wandering off on his own any time we are in public, would most certainly get lost. Or Clarissa, who always wants to immerse herself in water, would end up in the Thames, the Seine, the Arno or the Danube.

And having meaningful conversations about art or history with the older girls would be impossible because all of my energy would be directed at keeping my younger kids alive and in one piece.

The only solution I can think of is to take the older girls and hire a day-time nanny for the younger kids here at home, and then have Abe and the younger kids join us for part of the trip. Ever since I’ve landed on this solution, my heart kind of does this somersault when I am cuddling or reading to or playing with or watching Ammon and Clarissa. I keep remembering a line from Lincoln in the Bardo when one of the ghosts says of her three children, “They were London, they were Paris, they were Rome!” (or some phrase like that.)

Would I rather be staring at a painting or watching my babies grow? For me, personally, I’d be content to just watching my babies and never leave my home again. Reading widely largely fill that travel thirst for me, and my kids delight me in ways I never imagined before motherhood–and this delight repeats itself multiple times a day, every day.

But I really can’t imagine having Lydia and Mary being almost graduated by the time we finally take them abroad. That sounds insane, especially since Lydia has always been intensely interested in other cultures and Mary is a little budding artist who loves art museums.

So anyway, right now the plan is for me to take them abroad for a month or so while Abe works and keeps to his routine, and Abe and the little kids will meet up with us in Greece and Israel. Of course, we are going to have to wait until the travel bans are lifted and the pandemic is under control. It’s hard to know when that will be, but we’re tentatively planning this trip for the spring of 2021.

So basically the picture is of us planning our trip, which we have spent a lot of time doing this week.

Here is another picture of the girls Abe took outside. They picked the first tomato of the season this week!

Clarissa video

Here is a video of Clarissa on the horse.

Here is a video of Clarissa helping with the biscuits.

Here is a video of Ammon and Clarissa learning the letter E.