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!
Lydia and Mary and Ammon made a fort today. Ammon’s wearing his soccer uniform because I messed up the Google calendar again. I literally do not understand how I get so many events wrong, but we have reached a point where I don’t actually trust the calendar, even though I rely completely upon it.
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.
After this shot the phone died. That was sad because Abe and I wanted to get videos of the kids singing and capture the magical moments this evening held, but we’ll just have to rely on our memories.The trail was steep and the kids were completely covered in dirt from climbing on all fours and sliding back down. So after we came home they all got baths–and afterward Ammon fell asleep steps away from his pajamas.
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.
We started off the day by eating Lydia’s pancakes and doing this puzzle together.
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.
Lydia wove the top of this piece herself. I was super impressed because I cut the strands really unevenly and expected the pie to turn out looking badly. But I think she did an amazing job!We were almost out of dough after the lattice pie, so for the next one we just did some hearts from the leftover scraps.
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.
We just used old Christmas wrapping paper. The kids had no idea this was coming and they were so surprised and excited the next day. On Friday evening, Abe and I took a gloriously long walk (we just circle our block over and over again and talk) and then wrapped presents outside in the silky evening air. Abe made that sign and took a picture of what the kids were going to wake up to.Ammon took a lot of photos today. I loved this one he took of Clarissa.
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.
For one of Mary’s school projects, she has to have a picture of herself. We went outside and she picked a spot and a pose. OMG she is so cute!!!
During the kids’ tennis lesson, Ammon and Clarissa played again on the playground.
Ammon was so determined to learn the monkey bars! I was very impressed. He kept trying and falling over and over and over again. The most he ever got was two in a row, which was probably my personal record as a kid too. I never got the hang of monkey bars, but I also never good at trying again after hard falls. So I was just so impressed with Ammon.On the way to the car Clarissa spied a deep, big puddle. She asked so plaintively if she could splash that I, after initially saying no, changed my mind and circled back. She and Ammon jumped to their hearts content. And then we stripped them down so they wouldn’t be sopping wet while waiting in the car while Abe and I played tennis together.
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.
Wednesday started off with the sweetest moment. I peeked into my closet to see Ammon sitting there quietly smiling to himself. When he saw me, he kind of hugged himself and whispered, “I had the most wonderful dream!”
“Aw, what happened?” I asked, delighted.
“I flied!!” he said, his eyes sparkling. Here is a video of him talking about it.
I about died of cuteness overload. And then I ran my phone and tried to recreate the moment by asking him to repeat himself for the video. It wasn’t quite the same, but I just never wanted to forget the magic of having my four year old tell me he had a wonderful dream where ”he flied.”
Also another cute moment from the day. Mary had just finished piano practice and Abe wandered in. He complimented her on her good practice and Mary, who often hugs people who compliment her, jumped into his arms. I had my phone and couldn’t resist capturing the sweetness.
On Tuesday we had so much fun as a family in the afternoon. First we watched Ammon practice soccer, which is hilarious and all around highly entertaining. Well, at least I think so. The girls got bored and started playing hide and seek around the edge of the field, and Abe joined them.
Then we walked across the field to the tennis court where all the kids took their second tennis lesson. Ammon and Clarissa’s attention spans didn’t quite hold so they played in the playground while I watched them.
Then when the lesson was over, we all stayed after and played tennis together. Abe and I had parked the car right next to the court so we were actually able to play with each other while Ammon and Clarissa waited (very patiently, I must say) in the car. We could see them the whole time, and they could see us, so maybe that’s why they didn’t cry or complain? I don’t know why they were so good for that long, but I’ll take it. It was SO fun to play with Abe, and I can’t believe we haven’t ever played tennis in our ten years of marriage!
The only picture Abe took was this one he took at the psychologist’s today. We are getting a new psychologist’s for him, Lydia and me, and I am also getting a psychiatrist. I don’t know why Abe took this picture, but later when we were talking and I was telling him about some of my mental pain, he told me the new psychologist does EMDR, which I am very excited to try.
