Author: lilydarais

My Saturday meal prep is paying off! I haven’t had to resort to fast food or yucky stuff once this week! Okay, okay, it’s only Tuesday. But I’m still proud of myself! On Sunday we had salmon, green beans, spinach, apple, and barley salad, and an apple sharlotka. On Monday we had eggplant rollatini (and I went out afterward for beets and pizza with Emily). Today we had cheese soufflé, made from the base I prepared on Saturday, green beans, and butter lettuce.

We also had two playdates today. Emily brought over my leftovers from Pizzeria 712, and Chloe and Ammon spent an hour playing together. Then after school Ellie Hanson came over and played with the kids until dinnertime.

After dinner, Abby came over to babysit while Abe and I went ministering to the Taohoes and the Morrells. We had so much fun and felt like we were on a date.

The kids were over the top excited to see Abby. Lydia made a sign, “Welcome, Abby!” and taped it to her door.

She also composed a poem about how much she loves Abby and had Mary read it to Abby. They worked out a signal for Mary to make when she couldn’t read one of Lydia’s words. Mary would make the signal and Lydia would read the problematic text. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it was such a cute system!

I think the kids love Abby.

This morning I took the kids out for errands and to the Orem library while the cleaning people cleaned the house. It was so nice to come home to a clean house, especially after we trashed it so much on the weekend!

In the evening I went to Pizzeria 712 with my neighbor, Emily. She and I always have very deep, intense conversations that leave me very inspired but kind of emotionally wiped. She is a beautiful soul.

Abe called my dear former home teacher, Brother Richardson, and chatted about his work issues and fears. Brother Richardson gave him wonderful counsel and advice. We are so blessed to have such people in our lives.

Our favorite part of Sunday was after we put the babies down. Abe and I played bananagrams and a flower matching game with the girls. It was so fun!

On Saturday morning I left early to get some errands in so I could prep food for the week. As I was leaving, Mary, who had gotten up before everyone else, asked so sweetly if she could come too. I said of course, and she excitedly informed me that we were going on a mommy daughter date. I have actually been meaning to take Mary on a mommy-daughter date for a while, so I was thrilled that she suggested one!

We just did groceries together, but it was such a nice opportunity to enjoy having such a cute, cute daughter. Mary is nothing if not over the top cute. She always has been. Sometimes I don’t appreciate this because I interpret her cuteness as manipulation or even immaturity (the bad kind), but honestly, when I take a step back and remove myself from the picture, Mary is just so adorable. And because of this, she gets a lot of attention everywhere she goes. We can’t go anywhere without someone solemnly telling her how much they love her red glasses, for example.

When we got home, I hurried to prep a bunch of meals for the week and then I took off for hot pilates and bikram after. I thought I might not make it through bikram because I was so tired after pilates, but somehow I made it through and didn’t even go into shock this time!

Then I came home, did my hair for the week, and collapsed on the couch with Abe, who was taking a break from putting the basement back together and all of the playmobile play the kids had him do while I was at yoga.

After that I had a really hard practice with Mary. I feel so bad about these. But I take comfort in Prince Albert. I have been reading online about Prince Albert because I love the show Victoria. He supposedly used to hit his children’s fingers at the piano.

Before I was a parent of children who practice instruments, I would have been horrified by this. Now, even though I don’t hit my kids’ fingers, I have the utmost sympathy and admiration for Prince Albert. I mean, the man was not only a spectacular king-in-the-wings, but he was also a TIGER PARENT.  He was incredible! Somehow he made time to supervise his children’s piano practice even when he had so much going on (and sooooo many kids!). I am in awe. So I definitely don’t judge the finger hitting, and I completely, completely understand where that came from. It is maddening when your child turns off her brain and decides that she can’t/won’t do a simple task. It really is.

At the same time, I wish I had more self control and didn’t lose my mind when my child refuses to play a simple measure for the umpteenth time.

After practice, we rushed everyone into the car and drove to Olivia Marshall’s play, Annie. Olivia was Molly, and she was fantastic! Everyone had a great time, although I left with the babies at intermission to drive through Chick Fil-A for everyone else, since we forgot to feed people dinner at home. Oops. The price of practice, I guess?

After we put the kids to bed, I binge watched Victoria while Abe kept working on the basement. Thank you, my love.

On Friday I felt in a celebratory mood, and so after school I took all of the kids to The Museum of Natural Curiosity. They are the perfect ages for this museum, and they all had so much fun. Ammon and Lydia did the ropes course together while Mary stayed close to Clarissa and me. She loves Clarissa so much and always tries to help take care of her whenever she gets a chance.

Clarissa was a wonderful sharer in the baby section. At one point, she leaned down and picked up a ball that another girl had dropped. I thought she was going to keep it and that there would be crying, but instead Clarissa stood up and handed it right back to the girl who had dropped her ball. That made me so happy.

In the evening we ate the beef and barley soup I made on Thursday, and we inspected our new basement floors. They looks so great! It makes me want to do something special with the space.

Then Lydia and I left for her harp lesson. She needed to pee the whole lesson long, and I guess that feeling made her totally crazy. She acted completely out of control the whole lesson long. I was so thankful that our normal lesson time is at 6:30am, because if this is how she would behave for evening lessons…wow.

Then, despite her lesson behavior, I took her out to Crumbl to get some cookies. I then let her stay up until midnight reading Harry Potter, which was a bad idea because by midnight she was practically drunk with fatigue. But I do have so much sympathy for her when she gets so into her book and doesn’t want to put it down. It’s hard for me not to indulge that.

Pictures:

 

 

Ammon pooped in the potty today! Afterward he donned a superhero cape and “flew” around the house on a rolling pin. He was a superhero!! The guys who are redoing our basement floors after the flood thought that was pretty funny. Ammon also spent the rest of the day referring to himself in the third person as “the superhero.”

E.g.” The superhero pooped in the potty!!” and “The superhero wants a snack.” etc. It was so funny and cute.

I also took Ammon and Clarissa to the park this afternoon. Ammon, of course, wore his superhero cape there. The first thing he did was fall and get, in his own words, “soaking wet!”, but he still kept the cape on.

Lydia is also reading so much these days! She is blasting through the Harry Potter books. She is almost done with book three and spends almost all of her spare time reading.

This is the third day in a row that Abe is not coming home until super late (or, in Monday’s case, he didn’t come home at all). As much as I miss Abe and am always so happy to see him come through that door, I actually really enjoyed doing it all myself today.

Normally I clean while Abe does the kids’ night routines, but since he’s here, I do the night routines. And I really sank into appreciating my kids and enjoying how delightful they can be. We still had hard music practices, but that was a discrete hour in an otherwise very happy, peaceful evening.

I didn’t feel that well this morning and so I spent a lot of it curled up on the couch watching art history documentaries and working on a photo book for 2017. I couldn’t actually relax that much because Ammon demands that I accompany him every time he goes potty, and because he’s terrified of pooping in the potty, he’s constantly running to the potty because his body actually does need to poop, but then he gets freaked out and hops right off. Three minutes later we do the exercise again. But since I didn’t work out today or yesterday, I just counted these potty trips as my exercise. There’s a lot of deep knee bends involved in helping him in and out of his pants and undies (he also believes he needs to be naked from the waist down in order to go potty).

I wish I had taken pictures because Clarissa was in the best mood all day and was SO CUTE. But my phone was dead in the morning and then in the afternoon and evening, life is on super speed and there wasn’t a moment to take any photos.

On Tuesday Lydia got her retainer put in. She already sees a speech pathologist, but with that retainer, the poor girl is really struggling to speak. But she was very good and diligent about brushing her teeth and retainer so carefully, and I think she feels proud to have one in.

Abe came home late at night while I was binge watching Victoria. We sat on the couch and he told me all about the sales kickoff. It has been a really hard year for Abe, and Tuesday night was the awards ceremony. It was humbling and difficult for him, but when he tells me about his feelings, I am always so amazed at what a magnificent soul he has. He recognizes his own weaknesses so clearly, and he has such a gracious, intelligent, spiritually sensitive approach to the challenges work is presenting to him.

After watching Victoria, I am a little terrified Abe going to die of something like Albert did. I guess we’ll probably steer clear of typhoid, but with all the stress Abe is under, I am concerned he going to have a heart attack or get cancer or something. When I see love like mine depicted in books, television, or any kind of media, it always seems like it ends in someone dying. Even in Up, after the couple has lived a full and happy life together, Ellie’s death feels like a tragedy. It makes me cry, every time!

I know it’s so morbid and stupid to anticipate that tragedy, but honestly, the happiness I feel in my marriage feels unbelievable. When I think about it, I can’t help but feel like it’s not fair I get to experience it, and I have this dark suspicion that life will balance the scales by killing Abe off.

What a way to end the post. An aboutface: I guess the point is, I got lucky in love!

On Monday Abe left for sales kickoff in Salt Lake. Since the meetings start early and end late, he spent the night at his parents’ house and the kids won’t see him again until Thursday. So to make the absence a little easier, Abe stayed home until 8:15 in the morning so I could go do a full yoga session.

The roads were so slick and crazy! I spent forty five minutes driving to yoga, and then it took me the same amount of time to get back. By 8:10 I had already been on the road for an hour and a half. But I was grateful to have the chance to do yoga. With our treadmill out of commission and our local rec center under construction, and with the slippery roads and sidewalks, yoga is really the only exercise I can do. To make up for the days of exercise I missed this past week,  I did hot pilates before my regular bikram yoga and almost had a heart attack afterward, but once I recovered I resolved to try to do that combo every week. It felt very effective (as long as I don’t accidentally kill myself. As I lay on the floor pouring buckets of sweat for a full five minutes after it was over, it did occur to me that this exercise combo might actually do me in).

When I got home I was so hungry, but I promised Ammon if he peed in the potty we would go play outside in the snow. He immediately peed, so I delayed breakfast and went outside to play with Clarissa and him. Clarissa was so funny! I kept thinking she had fallen down and couldn’t get up because of all of her snow gear, but instead she was just lying on the snow licking it up. That happened a lot. And Ammon was so happy making angels, playing with snow toys, and running around. Our yard is now the only one in the cul de sac that doesn’t look pretty with unbroken snow…but we did have a great time.

Doesn’t Clarissa look like she’s stuck in the picture below?

But she’s not! She’s just licking the snow. Look at her happy smile:

During Clarissa’s nap, Ammon and I did a beautiful insect puzzle together and I folded a million loads of laundry. Then Clarissa woke up and we all went to pick up the girls from school.

I don’t know what it is, but when we pick up the girls and I have four kids instead of two, I morph from being a fairly patient, kind parent into this horrible monster who’s so deep in fight or flight mode that I literally can’t think of simple vocabulary words like “plate,” “shelf” or “socks.” I start talking/screaming and then I can’t finish a sentence because my brain can’t think of words like those. And wow, the girls’ practices are just insane. I feel highly stressed and irresponsible because I can’t see Clarissa, who has now learned how to climb on tables and is always attempting to scale the stove. Since our TV is no longer in our basement, I can’t sedate Ammon during the girls’ practice anymore, so he is a chaotic, free-roaming agent who might, at any minute, pee or poop on something. And if those two things aren’t stressing me to the point where I’m a yelling, crazy mess, then trying to get Mary to focus or Lydia to learn something new makes me INSANE.

So basically I was a total disaster for several hours and spent the rest of the evening after the kids went down feeling sad and guilty, binge watching Victoria, and buying Lydia her wishlist of Scholastic books because I felt so bad about her harp practice.

On Wednesday Ammon had a poop accident and a ton of pee accidents. He is really scared to poop in the potty. After all of the laundry I did, I wasn’t in the mood to cook dinner so the kids and I ran through In-N-Out. Sigh.

But after that we went to Costco and joined Abe to “help” him pick out new glasses. The girls were so enthusiastic about this that they were picking every pair off the shelves and demanding Abe try them ALL on. So I ended up taking the kids around Costco and ate samples.

Then we came home, ate dinner, took baths, and got ready for the temple. Eliza Freestone came to babysit so Abe and I could go experience the new feminist changes that have been made to the temple ceremony. I felt so grateful these occurred in my lifetime! I thought changes like these would probably take decades, at least.

We bumped into the Blosils while we were there and ended up chatting with them in the Celestial room. It was fun to hear their insights into the ceremony. We got to drive home all together, so the fun continued.

Then Abe and I collapsed in bed, only to be woken up all. night. long. by every child except, ironically, Clarissa. First Mary came at 2am and told us she had peed everywhere (we are trying to put her in undies at night again). Then after we cleaned her and the bed all up and had barely fallen asleep again, Ammon woke up screaming from a nightmare. It was probably about potty training. Then after I went into him and tried to go back to bed, Lydia came in hysterical because she had just had a giant nose bleed and there was blood everywhere. And by that point it was almost time to get up for Mary’s 6:30am piano lesson. What a night!