Random Sillies

In case you haven’t been catching the random cuteness that is my children on Facebook lately, here are a few random items from the last couple weeks that have been quite enjoyable.

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Coriel is enjoying lately how words are put together, and she likes to try out new things. Here’s an example: One night she was trying to lie on Brice (mostly by smooshing him) and saying, “Let me see if you are lie-able.”

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Addra told me one day, “I am going to eat your head. Then you would have no head.” Then she paused, as if really considering the issues with having no head. “But that would be bad because you would have to go to the doctor.”

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Similarly, she told Brice that she was going to eat him: “I am going to eat your head on a sandwich with jellies.”

Brice: And what else?

Addra: Grapes and oranges and eyeballs. And lots of jellies. (Then she pretended to pluck out all our eyes and put them on her sandwich.)

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When asked what her yellow rice tasted like, Addra replied with something that sounded a lot like, “Starlight.”

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Okay, now for just a little bit of bragfest: Coriel is totally jetting on reading. Earlier this week she came to me and told me she was almost finished reading Sky the Blue Fairy (it’s a maybe first/second grade chapter book). I didn’t even know she’d started it. She’d just been sitting on her own, quietly doing whatever she wanted for the last hour or so—and that was apparently what she’d been doing! It’s so much fun to watch her be so into reading.

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I had to share the picture of me and my big sister M somewhere, because I think this is such a cute picture of us. Plus, when I look at Addra I occasionally catch this major glimpse of similarity between the two of us. Here is a place where I think that shows.

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I discovered a new eight-letter, each finger word: BIPLANES! Hoorah!

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The picture of the girls on this post is one my friend Meghan took for us one day just for fun (I can’t decide if I like the color or b&w better, so I posted both). It’s what happens when they get going on the dress-ups. Coriel dresses up as a pirate ninja, and Addra dresses as a fairy queen. It should be noted that there is something so perfect about these choices for their personalities at present. Coriel is all about feisty and heroic; Addra is much more about refinement and power. (Also, I believe that Addra’s expression here is her “fancy” face.) Give Coriel a crown, and she’ll become a princess—probably one who will dress up very fancy and then have to defeat a dragon. Give Addra a crown, and she will be a queen—and we will all become her servants and have to bow to her every whim. (This princess/queen dichotomy has actually happened with them on numerous occasions; I joke that Coriel knows which person gets to accessorize, and Addra just knows who rules the kingdom.)

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And they all lived happily ever after. The End.

Another Blog!

As if you didn't already have too many places to try to keep up with my random writings, here's another! I have joined another blog, called Mormon Mommy Writers. I will be posting there every fortnight (I love that word) on Thursdays, and today is my first one. So go check it out. And, you know, you could just decide to officially follow their blog, or mine (this one), or my other one. Because, it turns out, sometimes writers like to feel like someone's reading them. :)

And now I will bite the bullet and inform you all in one mass sweep that the two agents who I was most likely to get a response from have now officially rejected my manuscript. So, onward and upward, I suppose. [Insert rueful smile here, but not an emoticon, because that would just annoy me here for some reason, although apparently it doesn't annoy me in the previous paragraph.]

Also, in the event that you haven't read the said rejected manuscript and are still somehow dying to, I have the latest "final" version in actual regular kindle format. Well, it's not fancy, and the chapters are currently listed in the table of contents as "unknown." But still, I learned to convert to kindle, and that was just plain fun. And wow, let me just clarify that just because I said I liked being read doesn't mean you have to read my whole book. Blog posts are nice, though.

Okay, now I think I'll go crawl under a rock and pretend I don't sound pathetic, weird, and scatter-brained at the moment. And you can pretend too!

Bronze

Last week, Brice and I celebrated our anniversary, and it was so much fun. You can see the pics Brice posted here. We enjoyed relearning the rumba,* then getting to dance it and be goofy pretending to dance other things (it turns out that collectively we could only recall waltz, swing, samba, and cha-cha—and mostly only the basic steps at that). Then we went out for sushi, and let us just take a moment to recognize the craziness that is me eating sushi. The first time I tried sushi was less than three years ago, and when I did, it was one of those really the-fish-is-barely-there sushis. And I still had to take a few calming breaths and work myself up to it. So this was the first time I ever really just dove into a plate full of lots of raw fish, and it was really quite tasty! Brice put together an epic date night.

Traditionally, each wedding anniversary has a type of gift associated with it. For example, the first is paper, the second cotton, etc. For some reason (which I no longer remember), when our first anniversary rolled around, we decided it would be fun to do something related to these traditional gifts each year. Some of them have been quite memorable: the tiny homemade paper piñata Brice made for our first anniversary; the silly cotton ball poster of a sheep I made for Brice the next year; the time we made an offer on our new house in Maryland for our fifth anniversary (wood, lots and lots of wood). Some I have admittedly forgotten (what in the world did we do for fruit?).

This year is bronze.

Many moons ago, when I was still an undergrad, I took a sculpture class in which we cast bronze using lost-wax casting. It is a long process and involves a not insignificant amount of sand and grit. You have to slowly work up the layers of the mold over the course of days and weeks. Sometimes you have to fix parts that break. There is sandblasting and blowtorching and polishing and chiseling. There is attention to detail and patience.

Ummm, yes. This is the work of a college
student, not a three-year-old.

My gift this year is not another bronze sculpture (you can see from the picture that working in bronze is not my strong point, yes?). It’s just a little verbal tribute to my husband and our relationship. It has been (and continues to be) a process. There was the shower curtain incident, my dislike of his music, that one** time he thought he was fixing my problem and I thought he was telling me I was insane (that was this week). There has been a gradual process of learning to like dark chocolate and things like sushi. He’s still learning to fold the towels correctly, and it only took me five years to figure out how to properly hang his dress pants—but at least we agree on how to load a dishwasher (mostly).

He encourages me by example to be a better visiting teacher and friend. His presence in my life has tempered my tendency toward badly placed sarcasm.*** He makes people feel welcome and befriended and appreciated—even the harassed airline ticket agent who got cussed out just before we reached her. He reminds me to be a better, kinder person.

There have been moments of sandblasting and parts that got broken. Some things are easier to fix (we just agree to disagree about music), and some may take a lifetime (oh my gosh, we are conflict avoidant), but it’s all part of making something fine and beautiful. Eight years ago, eight years seemed like a long time. Now it feels like maybe just step one or two of the process, and I’m looking forward to more.

Happy bronze anniversary (late, as always, when it comes to blogging) to my epic hubby!

* It’s been about eleven years since Latin dance class.

** “One” is a total lie, by the way. I just can’t count them all.

*** I still do it, just less than I used to.

Mid August Picture Time

Our 8th anniversary. We went dancing! Had a lesson on Rumba. Danced. Talked. (Towson Dance Studio). I am exceptionally blessed and very grateful to have such a wonderful spouse. I love you! Happy anniversary!

Anniversary dinner at Umi Saki. This dinner / plate would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Now she's so adventurous.

Delicious (and big for a single bite)

Before the race. The face paint is supposed to look like the "Mud Factor" mascot, which is that grey skull guy. The gap where the bandana is on the guy says "Mud Factor". Sensible, no?

Before race - gotta fill up that real estate.

Mud pit

Triumph

Post race laundry. Mmmm..muddy

Post race Rita's. Did they mention "unlimited toppings"?

Just look at those eyes. Use em for good kid, not for evil.

What beautiful, fashionable girls!

Dog tied to dress. Improvised blankie-hood. This is not uncommon in our house.

Love that girl!

Twirling. Walking around with a pet dog in a dress tied to your dress. Nice summer grass. What else do you need?

Swiiiiiiings! She loves swinging higher and faster for very long periods of time ( over an hour)

Subtitles for this look: "What you are saying doesn't make sense dad. Is you confused?"

C's drawing of a cheetah. We think it might be a "Trojan Cheetah", which is awesome. Also, it is alive, which is also awesome. You don't have to wheel it into your town - it just runs in before you can close the gate. The words above say: Love - yes, Brave - yes, of course.

Cocoon Time

About a month ago, Coriel found a tiny, pale green/yellow, hairy caterpillar on our front door. Having recently grown some mail-order caterpillars into beautiful painted lady butterflies, we decided to try our hand at this new one. So we gathered leaves from a number of plants around our front door and watched to see which one it ate. Once we figured it out, we gave it a steady diet thereof. And our caterpillar grew. As he molted, he darkened to a brownish black. Finally, one day, as if some inner instinct was triggered, our caterpillar zipped up to the top of the habitat we had him in and started growing his cocoon. (I say it seemed like something was triggered because up until that moment, he had always been slow, ponderous in his movement, and now—pow!—he zoomed.)

The world's worst picture of a fuzzy webby cocoon.

The next day he was happily stuck in his little cocoon spot on the roof of the habitat. I’d never seen a cocoon like this—it looked like essentially just a bunch of thick webbing keeping him stuck there. Kind of ugly and amazing at the same time.

So we waited and watched and hoped that he would hatch. In the meantime, we’d been seeing a lot of butterflies in our yard and garden, large black and yellow swallowtails. I hadn’t looked up what kind of caterpillar produced these beauties, but I secretly hoped that we would get one of those. After all, big black fuzzy body... big black butterfly, right?

On Friday, as usual, I checked on our little habitat—and saw that our cocoon had hatched. But far from producing a big black butterfly, it had produced a half-inch snowy white moth. Its body was furred and looked luxuriously soft and feathery. It was so very far from what I had expected or hoped for.

And I was thrilled.

What an amazing exhibit of nature’s majesty and the miracles produced around me every day! A fuzzy black caterpillar became a snowy white moth (like this dude here). It wasn’t showy and huge, but it was gorgeous.

Letting the moth go.

This week, I have been reading about adversity and the Lord’s counsel to us in adversity. He speaks of the gifts He has planned for us—both joy in our earthly existence and glory hereafter. He tells us that we cannot even begin to comprehend what He has in store. Looking at our pure white moth I got a tiny inkling of what He means. I would never, ever have suspected such a beautiful creation to come out of that cocoon. I expected something marvelous, but what I got was even better than I had imagined.

Did you know that while caterpillars are in that cocoon, they essentially break down into a caterpillar soup? There are a few bits and clusters of cells that don’t break down completely, but for the most part the caterpillar essentially digests itself to grow anew. This does not sound pleasant to me. But then their bodies start to rebuild, forming something far more wonderful.

I think life can be that way, if we permit it. Adversity is our cocoon time. And while the caterpillar is biologically wired to complete this transition successfully, we have to make that decision ourselves. We have to choose to allow God (through adversity) to break down our weaknesses, to rebuild us into something stronger. And when we allow God to do that work, what we get in the end is something pure and clean and strong, something better than we had in mind for ourselves.

More of us letting it go. Fly, moth, fly!

P.S. Raising a caterpillar is an experience that can only be described as epic. If you haven’t done it, you should. It’s fun, not very difficult once you know what it eats, and just plain amazing. Plus, you can totally count it as educational.