30 September 2018

September has been a bit of a blur.  I'm working a very busy yearend closeout and am very very glad to see the end of it today.  This afternoon Rosebud and I decided to make 'material mosaics' and collected some different textured things in a muffin tin - rice, salt, tortilla chips, dirt, wood chips, grass and dead bugs - and then glued them on pieces of paper.  I'm not sure we made lasting artwork but it was fun.  We ran out of dead bugs first.

8 September 2018

Rosebud loves to pretend to be a kitty and will turn into one at random times.  Sometimes it helps to get her into bed if I invite her to snuggle up like a kitty and she'll lay down while making tiny little meows with her tiny little voice.  The other night she said her prayers as a kitty, and the preciousness of an extra tiny little voice saying, 'Dear Heavenly Father...' cannot be expressed.

17 September 2018

Bobo hugged me this morning and said, "Mom, I know I was born into the right family."  Warm happy feelings!  I said to him, "How do you know that?" and he replied, "Because I'm really good at making gun noises."

13 September 2018

Rose Pink has joined our D&D group.  We play with two other (young) couples on Tuesday nights, and Rose Pink is playing an elven ranger with us.  It's a fun time, and the other couples are good at including her.  It's nice to see her learning more about interacting with adults.

She asked to take a civics course this fall, because all her friends are taking civics in ninth grade and they say it's really interesting.  So we got a civics textbook and she'll be working her way through that.  School starts for us again at the beginning of October.

The other day I asked her to help me color some people puppets for nursery.  She likes coloring, so she took on the whole project, and brought me back puppets with five or six different skin colors.  I loved the unconscious application of diversity - so glad that she's growing up without (or with less of) a feeling that people can be othered based on their skin color.

11 September 2018

Rose Pink and Nut Brown spent time building a world together.  See if you can find the sawmill.  Smiley faces indicate allies.

9 September 2018

Putting Rosebud in bed just now and I said, "Do you want me to sing a song?" and she said, "I want a song, but the songs are all dead."

7 September 2018

Rose Pink has been reading a trilogy of books called "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children".  It's very gothic, and Mr. Brown advised me not to read it.  It's just her sort of book though.  She read Lovecraft awhile ago, and thought it was boring, but she likes Poe.  She finds the horror and suspense stimulating and interesting.

5 September 2018

We spent Labor Day weekend at my sister's house in Tallahassee with her family and my parents.  Mr. Brown stayed at home and had a restful weekend, and my brother-in-law went down to Tampa to see their son there, and my sister and I sat up late and talked and talked and talked.  Being closer to her has been such a wonderful thing!  So glad to count her as a friend.

We arrived pretty late on Friday because I ignored the GPS and we ended up going almost 90 minutes out of our way to make up for it.  (oh well)  We went to Home Depot on Saturday morning to do the free kid project, which the kids really loved.  That afternoon, Grandma split the grandkids into two groups and had them each do a skit, which was fun.  Then we went to the pool and went swimming, and then Grandpa took all of us out for Chinese food.

Sunday we went to church, which I just love, because the ward in Tallahassee is so wonderful!  Sometimes I tell Mr. Brown that we should move to Tallahassee so we can be in that ward.  Then it was board games for most of the afternoon, and we left to drive back just after dinner.  At the moment we're listening to Howl's Moving Castle as the audiobook, and the kids AND I are completely entranced.  I know they're listening to it now without me and I've just about decided that I must get it out of the library in order to to finish the story!

4 September 2018

31 August 2018

Nut Brown's birthday this year was kind of a bust.  He was disappointed in several things.  He had been talking about a couple of different activities earlier in the year for his party, but when we started planning it, he didn't advocate strongly for anything and Rose Pink ended up setting up a party that involved playing Live Action Clue in the living room, having a silly string fight in the backyard, smashing a whale piñata, and then eating cake.  Only one of the three invited families could come, and then Nut Brown was disappointed that he didn't win the Clue game, and then we couldn't go outside to smash the piñata because it was raining.  The silly string canisters ran out after about ten seconds.  He felt that Rose Pink wasn't listening to him well enough when planning the Clue game either, and he was disappointed that he didn't have enough budget left over to buy another gift.  He wasn't satisfied with the spending account that we gave him for the funding.  I hadn't had a whole lot of energy available to devote to his birthday, and was grateful for Rose Pink's support that made the party possible.  I felt that it wasn't a great party either so I could understand his disappointment.

(We had a good time playing Clue.  I think we should set up a Sorry board in the living room sometime too; I think that would be fun as well.)

Nut Brown has talked about it for a couple weeks afterwards, and I did get a better accounting of the funding together that satisfied him.  Eventually I learned that he had wanted a surprise party but didn't know how to tell us.  If he told us, then it wouldn't be a surprise, so he didn't say anything, and hoped we'd figure it out.  As a result, he didn't get either of the events that he wanted, because he wasn't talking about them or about what else he wanted with us.  I was disappointed that he was disappointed, and felt like I'd failed somehow for not making sure he was happy with his birthday. 

Mr. Brown explained to me that Nut Brown was learning a valuable lesson about communication, and finding out that if you don't tell people what you want, then you're not likely to get it.  He had a conversation with Nut Brown a couple nights ago as they were doing after-dinner chores about it, and told Nut Brown that he also had wanted a surprise birthday party this year.  "You did?" I said in surprise.  He told Nut Brown that he hadn't told me, because he wanted it to be a surprise, and when I asked what he wanted for his birthday he'd said, "Nothing special."  And guess what he got for his birthday?  Nothing special.  We went out for breakfast as a family, and that was it.  So he was now telling Nut Brown that the same thing had happened to him – he'd gotten exactly what he'd asked for, which wasn't what he wanted.  A very important lesson!