Squirrel Antics

We have a bird feeder that the squirrels had started getting to, so we moved it higher up the window in the hopes that no squirrels would be able to find a way to reach it anymore. Then, a couple days ago, I heard a thud, so I ran out to the kitchen to see what had happened. This is what I saw. (The bird feeder itself had been knocked to the ground.)

The poor squirrel was breathing hard and clearly freaking out, thinking, "Why do I always get myself into these messes? What am I going to do now?"

 

A minute later, his last claw slipped, and he fell some more. This time, oh joy, he caught himself by sinking all his toes into the formerly lovely mesh of our screen window. But again, he was stuck. Another few moments, and he slipped and fell the last few feet to the ground. Obviously he wasn't hurt, but I sure hope it teaches him to avoid our bird feeder from now on!

Wolves

A few days ago, I prayed so hard that I would be able to be patient and be kind and see the positive in the kids. I've been really struggling with them lately.

But then Addra wanted a YouTube drawing video. And then she didn't like the one she chose. Then she wanted a new one and wanted to scroll through tons to find it. Then she started getting upset because it was too hard, she said.

All this time I was getting increasingly frustrated at her. Just pick something! Just try again! It's okay if it's not perfect!

She was crying and upset and just curled up in a blanket by the computer, and I just didn't think I could be nice about this. I knew she needed a snuggle and some comforting, but I didn't want to do it. I went to find Brice to get him to help her so that I didn't make it any worse, but he was eating breakfast and I didn't want to stop him in the middle of a bowl of cereal.

So I took a breath and went back. I sat down beside the red blanket lump and pulled her partially into my lap and started rubbing her back. I told her that I loved her, over and over, and listened to her sadness at how hard the video was. At first I had to bite my tongue to keep from getting cranky at her, but slowly the back rub and snuggling soothed me too.

Five minutes later, I asked if she wanted to try again. Brice brought another pencil and paper, and we both watched the video and tried to draw from it. I paused it frequently so she could erase or catch up, and eventually we were both done.

She was totally happy again and was satisfied with her wolf drawing, and we'd had some happy, loving time together. 

Without a doubt I can say that this was a gift from God. Brice being busy so I had to handle it. My recognition and acceptance of what she needed just then--not criticism or pushing her to try harder, just a snuggle. And most of all the inner strength to actually do what was needed when I didn't want to. It turned an ugly interaction--the kind of thing that we've been having far too frequently these days--into a loving one. I'm so grateful for that gift.

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?

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.

Watermelon Carnage

In case you were wondering what it looks like when Brice T-rexes a watermelon man (and I know you were), here you go. Poor, unsuspecting watermelon man.

 

And now for what it looks like when Coriel does it...

 

And just in case you haven't gotten the idea yet, here's me.

 

Doesn't it all make you want to go and buy some watermelon? (And possibly teach me how to use Blogger so my formatting isn't always a mess?)

P.S. Isn't my husband epic?

The Pajamard and the Drap

Last week Coriel told Brice about some fascinating new animals she had discovered. I thought you might like to learn about them too. The pajamard (pa-JAM-ard, rhymes with “yard”) and the drap are “very polite but also ferocious” animals that live in the mountains. The pajamard eats beach and water animals. (Water animals include animals that live in the ocean, lakes, and bathtubs in the mountains.) The drap only eats people and dragons. Oh, also, she mentioned the roomom, which eats fruits and plants. So, next time you’re up in the mountains, try not to get eaten by a drap.

The Good News, the Bad News, the More Good News, the More Bad News, and Then a Bit More Good News… Or Why I Shouldn’t Have Pets

The good news is that when two male bettas get in the same container together, they do not immediately kill each other. The bad news is that in order to correctly put the divider between the two halves of a betta bowl—so that the fish don’t end up on the same side—you apparently have to be smarter than the bowl. … And I am not. The more good news is that I fixed my mistake, and the fish seem to have survived their several close encounters.

On the other hand (the bad news), Ella is swimming really weird and spazzy and sideways these days, and then just lying around near the top of the bowl on his side. And he looks totally broken—all wonky and lumpy.* I was sure he was dying. You would be too. So Brice asked the googoracle (i.e., the all-knowing google) what could be wrong with our poor fish. It turns out (this is the good news, by the way) he most likely has one of two very common, treatable, and nonfatal conditions for bettas: swim bladder disorder… or constipation. And the best first line of defense for our Ella is to isolate him and keep an eye on—you guessed it—his poop. Now, I don’t know about you, but never in my life have I had any desire to watch the droppings on the bottom of my fish’s bowl just to see if it looked like, well, enough. And yet, here I am, doing just that. Oh, and guess what? Next I get to try to feed him bits of peas to help him get a little more regular.

Yeah.

You know what the biggest problem about this is, though? It’s the overwhelming sense of responsibility I have for all of this. When I thought he was dying, I kept trying to feel like it wasn’t a big deal. But it was. I had this fish whom I was killing! It’s not like I was particularly attached to the poor thing (yes, I know, I’m a curmudgeon). It’s just that I didn’t want to have killed it. I remember how upset I got over a beautiful bromeliad that we had received for my mother’s funeral—I managed to kill it within a month, even though supposedly they’re quite hardy. I have felt guilty over the death of basil plants, for heaven’s sake!** What kind of craziness is it for me to be involved in pet ownership?! I will tell you: total, complete craziness.***

We went to the pet store to get the extra supplies we had run out of for our fish already (don’t even get me started on the costs of having pets), and the girls enjoyed looking at all the animals. I found myself with Addra, staring at the oh-so-adorable tiny little mice. And thanking my lucky stars that I had not succumbed to the insane desire I’d had on our previous visit to the pet store—the desire to take home some of those cuddly little critters.

That way lies madness.

*As a side note at this point, I should like to tell you that it is remarkably difficult to use the correct gender pronoun when your male fish is named “Ella.”

**Birds ate them, by the way. It really wasn’t my fault.

***It’s a whole different kind of craziness, by the way, for me to be involved in motherhood.

I killed a styrofoam bear.

Some assorted tidbits from the first week of the new year! Complete with pictures and vids at the end that I didn’t even bother to try to insert in the right places.

Ella and Lumma

We like to celebrate Three Kings Day (6 January). It’s the celebration of when the wise men visited baby Jesus, and there are lots of different ways to celebrate, ranging from very spiritual (it’s called Epiphany in the Catholic Church, and it’s one of their big feast days) to silly (which is more what we do). We leave out a small shoebox filled with grass at the foot of the bed. Then, when we wake up in the morning, the wise men’s camels have eaten the grass and left behind a small gift. This year the camels left some new pet fish: two bettas named Ella and Lumma (those were the children’s choices of names; don’t let the names fool you, though—both fish are boys). Coriel was so excited. She has been wanting a pet forever. Forever. Forever. And since I am super-allergic to all things furry (and also unwilling to take care of anything more furry than, say, Brice), we’ve been avoiding getting anything. But a couple of fish, I can manage (barely). The fish are beautiful, even I can admit. Ella is a blue-green crowntail betta, which means he’s got an awesome frilly tail. Lumma is a brick red veiltail male (isn’t that fun to say!).

Forget the birds and the bees. Let’s talk fish!

The fish also led to one of my first official sex talks with Coriel. Yes, seriously. We had told her specifically that we couldn’t have a boy and a girl fish, and she wanted to know why. She also started telling me she wanted Ella and Lumma to have two baby fish so we could have more pets. So I explained to her that fish make lots of eggs, not just two. And I had to explain at least a little about the boy/girl issue. It was pretty surreal, let me just say. But we made it through, all unscarred, and totally calm and rational and all sorts of good stuff. Let’s just say hoorah for that semester-long class I took about sex therapy, huh?*

Thirteen

Coriel was assigned to say the thirteenth article of faith in Primary on Sunday. We worked on it a little bit during the week, just a bit every day, and miraculously (because she’s awesome like this), she got it all memorized in time for church. I was so proud of her! She did such a great job, and she certainly has an excellent memory.

My daughter is a cat.

I don’t exactly remember the context, but at dinner the other night, we were talking about something that we were going to do. Addra didn’t want to do it and expressed her disagreement like this: “No, meow.” I wish you could have heard it. It was as if it was a natural part of her conversation, as if inserting a “meow” was just the sort of thing you do when speaking. She also has a tendency to rub up against my legs when I’m standing around in the kitchen, curl up in my lap to be petted, and meow at random moments. Sadly, she does not curl up and fall asleep in small patches of sunlight.

And now they are both dogs.

Our visit to the pet store, complete with trying out the doghouses.

I killed a styrofoam bear.

This last week Brice and I and a friend named Leon all went to an archery range to get a short bow shooting lesson and shoot some fake animals. It was fun, and I wasn’t even all that bad. Not good, mind you, just not bad. By the time it was all done, I had killed a number of targets and, most notably, a large styrofoam bear. Die, bear, die! I also developed a strange tingling sensation on the outer edge of my left ring finger and bruises on my left middle and ring fingers. All that bowstring-pulling-back-ness makes for weird finger feelings. (Five days later, it still tingles slightly! Hee hee!)

I am a play-doh master.

I made a really great play-doh horse this week. I mean, seriously impressive. Believe me, it was Art. In fact, don’t believe me. View images of my sheer awesomeness.

Coriel’s art

Lest you think I’m the only one in the family with mad artistic skills, please observe Coriel’s awesomeness as well. This is a rainbow (obviously) in the sky (witness the clouds). The cat on the ground has a tail that reaches “up into the universe.” Then you can see the blue line, which is the planet earth. And, of course, a space alien. 

Goodbye, Prologue

A new post on the other blog, in which I lament sending my chapters to the garbage bin.

*I see some of you widening your eyes in surprise. You remember, right, that I was studying to be a therapist long long ago? A marriage and family therapist? Yes, it turns out that sex is kind of important in marriage, so you’ve got to be able to therapize it (no, therapize is not a real word). It also turns out that, of all the classes I took, this one was probably one of the best, most practical, and most useful). 

The real reason I don't need any pets.

My horse of awesomeness.

The horse pulling a wagon Coriel made. And its headless driver (the driver did have a head at one point).

Showing a camel to the fish.

A bad shot of Ella

I just want to hug the space alien.

This one is Lumma.