Success Story

I love it when my kids get excited about something worthwhile. Evie sneakily put this together and surprised us with it the week before our church's General Conference.

They sat through all four 2-hour sessions this weekend, and listened. I asked afterward what their favorite talks were, and was surprised by how much they remembered.We had some great discussions about stories they liked and things they had learned. It's times like those that make me feel like I'm not failing as a parent. :)

The Sweetest Thing

Did I mention we have a baby?

 

A sweet baby. A crawling baby. A baby that screams like a raptor when I take my keys away from her. Margo is an absolute darling and we love her like crazy. She started crawling at eight months and is loving it. She speeds towards me saying "Mamamamamama," pausing to look up at intervals, grin, and guffaw. She also pulls herself up to stand so she can grab and annihilate more things.

She hates purees. We tried feeding her rice cereal, apples, pears, bananas, peas, beans, squash, and she rejected them all. Being an observant child, she noticed that no one else was eating mush. She happily gnaws graham crackers, freeze dried yogurt puffs, frozen peas and carrots, banana chunks, and bits of chicken. This girl is determined to grow up too fast. Margo is my first child to grow out of clothing before the upper limit of its recommended age. I was bewailing the fact that she won't get to wear some of her cute cool weather outfits, and my sister responded something like, "You want sympathy for having a normal-sized baby? No."

 She loves the dog's water dish, the dog's toys, swinging, sitting in the grass, her sisters, rolling her tongue, and screeching. Everyone loves her eyebrows.

But is it Art?

We have a lot of blank wall space in our home. It's hard for me to choose decorations, because Regis and I don't always like the same things, and, more importantly, he won't always tell me when he doesn't like something. (I asked him the other day, as he was cleaning out our shower drain, "Don't you miss the days when I had barely any hair?" His only response was, "No comment." Huh.) We've discussed adding pictures, and he always says that we should put up some more pictures of our family. So, assuming that representations of family members was safe, when we noticed that taking down our Christmas tree leaves a big empty space in our living room, I came up with the perfect solution: Let's put in a statue--of ME! Regis laughed, and when he saw I was semi-serious, said, "That would be weird." Taking this in its most charitable form, I declined to take offense and instead took to the internet, polling my Facebook friends on the acceptability of my scheme. I got so many inquiries on whether this would be a nude statue that I finally abandoned the idea. Either nobody thought I was serious, or my friends think (incorrectly) that I have sufficient sangfroid to discuss gospel topics with our home teachers while simultaneously reposing naked in a corner.