Recently on Facebook

Here are some of the things I did on Facebook recently without posting here:

Asked opinions on sending the 9yo into a Little Caesar's pizza place where I could see her the whole time so that I didn't have to get everyone out of the car. Most people were pleasantly in agreement that it was reasonable, which I thought it totally was. I did it today on our way to a friend's house for lunch, and it went very well. Coriel is very responsible and it's pretty great.

Asked a burning question: if you could be any Jane Austen character, major or minor, who would you be?

Shared a couple links:

http://mormonmommywriters.blogspot.com/2017/01/advice-i-need.html?m=1

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/28/511828717/with-a-bevy-of-ads-students-school-us-on-all-the-little-joys-in-life

Rambled about wanting to borrow carding combs and rock tumblers.

Exciting stuff, I know.

Some days are cooler than others

On some days, truthfully, I am in a foul mood and everything my children do drives me crazy. Then there are other days when they are pretty much the coolest people I've ever met.*

Today has been one of the cool days.

Coriel has to make a brochure for a pretend wizard shop. She's making The Better Broomstick. Part of the description for one of her products is "with the Hexer as your ride, you don't need a guide." The whole thing is pretty much fantastic, and she surely has a brilliant future in advertising.

Yesterday Addra made an alicorn out of a plastic bin. Also, today she drew this awesome picture that's just massively cute.

Koa has taken to wandering around in roller skates. Also, at breakfast this morning, he was dual wielding his spoons.

Ammon is popping out two more teeth and eating everything in sight.

I may be biased, but I think they're pretty cool.

*Middle-aged Mormon Man has a theory about that, which I think it's probably correct. But also, some days my kids are just extra nifty.

Four out of Six

 Four out of six Stay family members agree that footie pajamas are the way to go.

Skills bucket list, foods

Every once in a while I think of some random skill that is really like to perfect. So now I thought I'd start writing them down. Here are the ones I've recently thought of:

Cooking crispy fish skin
Chopping veggies fast like a chef
Lock picking
Contact juggling

Does anyone else have a random skills bucket list?


In other news, I made the fourth and last aspirational groceries meal. Three of four turned out yummy--black bean burgers, avocado tomato soup, and tonight's chicken kebabs. This was the most Mediterranean meal I've ever made. Kebabs, tzatziki sauce (spelling?), a salad with kalamata olives and feta, dates, fancy grape juice, pasta! Whoa nellie. Brice and I looked it, though as usual the kids were not big fans. Too bad for them.

On the other hand, Ammon has been grabbing for all the things. And wanting to eat all the things! So he's been trying little bits of lots of stuff. Including, today, tomatoes, a new baby food, grape juice (just a tiny sip, but his face was awesome), clementine, and an accidental goldfish crackers. Oops. So at least one of our kids likes variety.

Sorting through stuff

 Pulled down a box this week of random papers to sort through. So much stuff I had forgotten! Here's a recap of some favorites so far:

A list I made in high school of qualities I wanted in a spouse. I got them all!

A picture of a rock monster drawn by 3yo Coriel.

A birthday card from my mom when I was six. It's always bittersweet to run across things from her. She was a great letter writer.

This statement that Brice made and I wrote down, dated 22 January 2007. "If cuteness was a flea, you'd be a flea circus!"

The kind and encouraging notes my brother Makani and best friend Kati wrote me for some random assignment in high school.

Remembering that we used to say "ecstatic like a biscuit." I think maybe I'll start that again.

A random drawing by Brice.

The really bad underwater photos from our Hawaii trip.

A photocopy of the very worst typo I ever saw in person.

Murmuration

Go see my post at my other sometimes blog, MMW:

http://mormonmommywriters.blogspot.com/2017/01/murmuration.html

Gospel metaphors! Cool bird videos! Exciting new words!

Beast Academy

 You know what I love? When we get Coriel's next few math books in the mail and we are both so excited to open them up and start reading.

As in, "Hey, Coriel, are you excited about these?"

And Coriel jumps up and down. "Yes yes yes!"

As an avowed math nerd in yesteryear, this makes my heart happy.

Thanks, Beast Academy.

Idiom Synonyms

Today I was thinking of all the idioms I could that were synonymous with "blow a gasket."

Blow a fuse
Flip out
Go postal
Have a meltdown
Have a cow
Flip your lid

And how about the last straw? This one was tougher. Couldn't really think of any that worked great.
Straw that broke the camel's back
Match in the powder keg
Things reached critical mass

You might assume, correctly, that I was feeling a little cranky today. (Nothing serious, just junk and clutter.)

Podcasts, Pandy

 Do you ever listen to podcasts with younger kids? We've been listening to a few fun story ones that my kids like. I can even stand most of them. Here are a couple recommendations! Going from least favorite to most:

Storynory. Some fun ones, but some that I found sort of annoying.

Stories Podcast with Daniel Hines. Or Heins? Or Heinz? Not sure. We listen on Brice's phone. This one had a lot of genuinely delightful stories that we rather enjoy. And also a lot of singing, which mostly isn't annoying.

Story Pirates. These guys take kids' stories and retell them. It's a fun concept, and thought we've only been listening to a few, they've been fun. National Whoopie Cushion Day! The Girl Who Turned into Spaghetti! The Really Cool Dress! Fun to hear the adaptations of kids' stories.

But the best--drum roll, please--is called The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian. These tales are delightful. Really fun, silly, full of literature and adventure and space and robots and laser bunnies and attack moths and edible art. Seriously. You should go listen. I'm talking to you, my siblings and friends with small children. Or even vaguely small children. Or even adults who sometimes act like children. So, so fun.


Okay, enough about other people's stories. I know you've been dying to hear what Pandy has been up to. So, since he went on his dinosaur dig and had an unsuccessful dig at home, he planted a big garden in his cleared land. On his previous travels, he'd fallen in love with eating salad and he wanted fresh ingredients. After that was done, while he was eating a salad, he decided to build himself a bamboo treehouse.

He built an epic bamboo treehouse, but then he was super hot because it was summer. So he decided to travel to Switzerland and ski in the Alps (thanks for the idea, Jana!). After that he was so so tired that he decided to try out what all the other bears do this time of year: hibernate. So he had a huge meal and then went and found a cave inhabited by other bears. They invited him to share, and now he's snoozing away.

Next up: Pandy realizes he's too cold to hibernate, so he goes on a jungle safari instead (thanks, Dawn!). But then he gets too hot and decides he really needs some ice for his drink. So back to the mountains for him (thanks, Brice!). I think after that he's going to be to exhausted from traveling to do anything else. He'll go back home for a while, maybe take up crocheting. Economics and space travel are still in his future (thanks, Derrill and Marneen!), and plenty of other stuff too, but he needs a break.

Soup

Scene: me feeding baby.
Me: *offers bit of cantaloupe*
Baby: *gnaws on it but makes that face, you knows that face that says he's totally appalled by what I've put in his mouth*
Me: *jokingly offers tiny spoonful of the soup I made, with line, cumin, and jalapeno*
Baby: *eats it happily, gnaws on spoon, eats more afterward*

Later, the baby eats more soup with dinner.

Weird.

Meal #1, 11th Day

 So! Yesterday's aspirational groceries turned into an awesome meal with an awful smoothie.

The smoothie was not entirely my fault. It was the fault of the people who packaged stuff together that made me say, "Yum, that sounds healthy and intriguing." And then afterwards, "Yikes."

The delicious meal involved black bean burgers with jalapeno in them, topped with guacamole and fancy corn. Also, much fresh lime was involved. And you may not remember how I feel about fresh lime, but let's just say the word "heaven" was used extensively. Predictably, the children were repulsed. Except Koa, who actually ate some of it! I didn't even have to slather it in condiments.


In other news, today is the eve of Three Kings Day. Have we yet sufficiently established how much I love this holiday? I just think it's fun and awesome and also I love the wise men. Anyway, nothing profound to say. Just happy Three Kings Day tomorrow!

Aspirational Groceries, Construction Vehicles

 Grocery shopping. I have two kinds:

Pessimistic. This involves a few items of produce that require no preparation, a few canned foods, and a lot of frozen pizza.

Aspirational. This is where I do something like get a new phone app that provides recipes and grocery lists. I menu plan. I dream of all this delicious food that my kids are totally going to eat. That I'm totally going to cook. Because I'm awesome. This grocery trip is almost entirely produce. And weird stuff I've never bought before, like feta cheese (Brice likes it, but I think it tastes like dirty socks)* and flaxseed meal. And it usually calls up mild cooking insecurities, like "Am I inferior because I don't know the difference between toasted sesame oil and just plain sesame oil?" Anyway, today was definitely an aspirational shipping sort of day.


In other news, I came out to kitchen today to discover that Koa had utterly destroyed a couple of corn muffins and was hauling them around in mini construction vehicles on our kitchen table. It says something about my child and our life right now, I think, that I was not at all surprised by this behavior.

And hey look! I figured out how to add photos! Thank you, internet. It's still a massive pain though, so no guarantees.


* Not that I make a habit of eating dirty socks.

Crawling, Earrings

Today's random stuff is normally post on Facebook:

The baby is eight months today! And to celebrate, he decided to officially crawl! Yay! And also eek!

Whenever we go on long drives, I get time to do things like my jewelry making. So I made two sets of earrings yesterday. For other people. Eventually I'll get to the jewelry I've been meaning to make for me. I was totally going to post photos, but apparently blogger doesn't want me to post photos from my phone. Sigh.

Happy new year! I hope that we can all focus on the awesome this year.

Update: pictures!

The adventures of Pandy

For the past several nights I've been telling the kids stories about the adventures of Pandy the Panda, which is Koa's stuffed bear. These are his adventures so far:

He has made friends with three monster trucks in Texas, and he is now their pen pal.

On his journey to and from Texas, he ate a variety of new foods, including spaghetti, sushi, and Mexican food.

He has painted oodles of imaginary creatures that never existed and never will, and he has had an art gallery owner but then and compile them into a book. Now here spends one day every month writing to his pen pals and autographing books.

He has read about broomsticks and cats and dinosaurs.

He has attempted his very own paleontological dig in his backyard in the bamboo forest, but when he found no fossils in a whole month, he wrote to a real paleontologist and asked what was wrong. She quite back, they struck up a correspondence, and she eventually invited him to a real dig.

Next he's going to use all that space he dug up to start growing a garden and probably canning some food for the local poor people.

But after that I'm out of ideas. What kinds of adventures should an enterprising panda have next?

Conducting an Experiment

It turns out that I have once again been in a blogging funk. But at the same time, I frequently share random things that happen in our family and silly stuff ... on Facebook. Unfortunately, most of my siblings aren't on Facebook. This is a problem, since they are some of the main people I want to update about our life.

At the same time, I've been noticing some things I'm not happy about in myself. I've been getting too concerned about how many "likes" I get on my posts in Facebook. I check far too often just to see if anyone liked what I wrote. It is not where my focus should be. It has become a method of avoiding other things in life.

Previously I had thought, "This is just one tiny thing. I can't put this in a blog post because it's tiny and pointless and blah blah blah." Blog posts must be long and thoughtful and well edited. So I haven't been writing, just telling myself I'll get to it later ... in that mysterious place when I suddenly "have time." Which never comes.

All of which brings me to my experiment. It may not work at all. It may not be a solution that helps me or that improves communication with the people that I love. But I'm going to try it. When I would normally write a post on Facebook, I'm going to put it here instead. Even when it's dorky or short or whatever. I'll still post some things on Facebook, but at least for a little while, most of the silly family stuff is going on this blog. I'll see how it goes.

I may or may not post links to these blog posts on Facebook. I don't know. So if you want updates from me, you should probably follow this blog via email or something. But I won't be offended if you don't. And if you do, I'd love to have you comment occasionally! One of the things I miss on Facebook is actual conversation about things. It's too easy to just push the "like" button and move on.

Oh, and one last thing: I'm doing this pretty much exclusively in my phone. So no more fancy formatting attempts. No smart quotes (which you must know is simply torturing me!). And probably a lot of terrible editing. Which, again, is going to cause me more suffering than it causes you.

And that's about it! I make no guarantees that it will work out at all. That's life!