Author: lilydarais

After school on Friday we picked up Lennon, Lydia’s best friend, and came home for dinner and a quick play date before driving with Abe up to West Jordan for our annual Wee Witches excursion.

This year might have been my favorite Wee Witches trip so far. The weather was great, and all of the kids were so cute and well behaved. It is always stressful trying to keep track of Ammon in public, but other than that every moment felt easy and delightful.

We started off with all of the kids getting their faces painted.

After wandering around finding witches and wandering into the shops with the three older girls, Mary, Lydia, Lennon and I ended up all getting witch hats. Abe advocated for the little kids getting a small toy too so Ammon ended up with a light saber that he loves dancing with and Abe picked out this hilarious disco wand for Clarissa.

On the way to dropping Lennon off we listened to Wicked. She had never heard it before and the kids were so excited to share it.

My favorite part of Thursday was swimming while the kids had preschool. I almost missed the little kids’ Halloween program, but they did their song one more time since they were finishing as I was walking up.

This was also the day of Mary’s school Halloween program.

Abe here, chipping in a bit about my team activity tonight. Here is a video and a picture. It was so so nice to socialize a bit with such a great group of people.

This morning Ammon called me upstairs to witness Clarissa do his obstacle course. He would make a great trainer. Whenever Clarissa fell or couldn’t really do a task (like throw the giant pouf into the air and catch it twenty times), he would sound bewildered for a moment before collecting himself enough to count her reps and encourage her to keep going. “Uh, two. Come on, Galissa! (Clarissa in Ammon speak)”. Here is a video.

During the day I took my mom to her doctor appointment and on some errands. It was really fun for me to spend time with her, and Ammon and Clarissa (who were masked up in the car) loved it too.

Then we picked the girls up early and came home to make little mummies out of peppers stuffed with cheese, wrapped in croissant dough, and olives.

The weather has taken a sharp turn to freezing cold, so we brought out the winter clothes this morning. Ammon and Clarissa spent hours, literally hours playing with the clothes.

Also, Ammon had a dance lesson and here is a video of what he worked on:

Then in the evening I let the kids open their new Halloween costumes. We weren’t going to get any because it seemed like this year was a no trick or treating year, but then Lydia begged and begged…and I found a Medusa costume she’d put in the Amazon cart, and I gave in. We should have taken a picture of all of us in costume, but here is a picture of the kids opening them. They spent the next hour playing.

Today we woke up to the first snow of the year! In its honor Lydia got right to work baking pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.

I just spent FOUR hours catching up on the blog and don’t want to get behind again so I am blogging today even though it’s not even half over yet.

Abe took the girls to church while I blogged and Ammon and Clarissa watched Frozen, and then Abe went to Lowe’s to get a tool to try to fix our fire pit. It is so frustrating because one of our kids broke it before we ever got a chance to use it, and after Abe got his tool he determined the whole fire pit will probably have to be ripped up and replaced. It is so upsetting to have such a needless expense, but I guess that’s part of having kids.

Abe picked up pumpkins for all of the kids at Lowe’s and then supervised the carving while I continued to slog through the blog. Here is an adorable video of Ammon and Clarissa doing a pre-carving dance:

Also I took a picture of this INSANE school project Lydia has right now:

Since the interest rates have dropped to the two percents, Abe and I refinanced the home we just bought. So today the kids all went to school for the first time this week and Abe and I drove to Sandy to do the refinance together.

We love our finance guy, Larry Perkins. He was our Sunday School teacher in Salt Lake and so funny, interesting, and colorful. Abe and I enjoyed chatting with him a bit and then we had to race back to Orem to pick up Ammon and Clarissa from preschool. Even though it was rushed, being alone together always feels like a date.

After school the kids had a play date with Eli and Chloe, which made everyone’s day. They played outside just to be safe, and after Eli and Chloe went back home we all had chili, fall leaf chips, avocado, and corn salsa to warm up. I have also been making these outrageous cups of pumpkin spice tea with pumpkin spice creamer. They would be plain silly if they weren’t actually so delicious.

On our trip we listened to the Wicked soundtrack quite a bit. Lydia has painted her face green several times since, I assume in honor of Elphaba. When she’s this thorough, it seems like there is green on her face for a week after, even after she’s scrubbed and scrubbed.

In the evening I had a long phone with my friend from grad school, Hilary. She called while we were in Arizona so I had been meaning to get in touch with her ever since. It was fun to catch up!

The kids were home again from school because of runny nose issues, so they made use of the time by painting each other’s faces. I am sad I didn’t get a picture of Clarissa with her little ghost face. She hates the post face-paint scrub-down and the minute she saw me she gave a little shriek and ran upstairs to wash it off herself. That’s what she was doing while I was taking this photo. I then went upstairs where she had splashed some water on her face and declared herself clean. Poor thing. She tried so hard. To her dismay, it was about ten minutes of scrubbing before she was actually clean.

I don’t remember what happened on Monday other than we were all sick and everyone stayed home from school. One day this week Lydia asked to just stay up talking with me and so I’ll put that conversation on Monday’s blog even though I don’t know which day it happened. During the course of the conversation Lydia turned to Mary and said, “Mary, I asked Mom and Dad if this life is just a dream. One said that that was a very good question, and the other said it was most likely not a dream. Which parent do you think said which?”

Mary replied, “Mom said it was a good question and Dad said probably not.”

Lydia laughed and said, “Mary, how did you guess?”

Mary said with her little characteristic mousy voice, “Well, Mom is the type of person who likes to give compliments and Dad is the smart one who knows all the answers.”

At that exchange, I was doubled over in laughter. It was hilarious.

During this conversation I also learned that Lydia thinks Ammon is very similar to her because after playing they like to relax and because she thinks they are the two kids who get in trouble the most. I also learned that Mary gets offended easily (according to Lydia) and will huff away from their games if she feels something was offensive. She also told me that she and Mary have a whole world for their stuffed animals and that at this point they don’t even need their animals to play pretend with them. Sometimes they play pretend stuffed-animal world just talking while lying in bed before they drift off to sleep. They only own one stuffed animal that doesn’t have a specific family and home and identity in their world. I thought this was all so interesting and wondered out loud why we don’t talk about this stuff more.

Both girls said that it’s because I have four kids and whenever they want to talk to me they get interrupted or somebody whines or cries. That’s probably true. Hopefully though I can make more time to have intentional talks with my older kids more regularly because I loved learning what’s going on in Lydia’s mind.

On the way home from Sedona we stopped at Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, which has its visitor center at Navajo Bridge National Monument. Navajo Bridge was amazing! The water below the bridge was stunningly clear and the most incredible color I had ever seen. And the bridge was covered with California condors!! They are impressive birds. They would occasionally take off in pairs and fly over the river, which was beautiful to see especially considering they almost went extinct. It was heartening to know that they were recovering from the brink and thriving in this magical spot.

After we passed Kanab Lydia saw a sign for Lydia’s Canyon Road! Of course we did a U-turn and checked it out. We spent the next thirty minutes driving up and down this canyon and daydreaming about buying a home in Lydia’s Canyon. We even stopped a family who was out walking and asked them about their experience living in the canyon. I guess it gets a lot of snow in the winter, which would kind of defeat the purpose of a vacation home…but it was fun to daydream!