30 December 2020

 December and Christmas were stressful and wonderful at the same time.  Mr. Brown helped me timeline what needed to happen in December, so we started the month with both advent calendars in place and ready to go on December 1.  We guessed right on the gifts, and the children all felt very loved and were very sweet and kind to each other and to us all day.  Christmas was a really wonderful day.  Thank you to the grandparents and aunts and uncles who also sent gifts and made Christmas so great for our kids.

Pictured above is Christmas dinner.  Mr. Brown found Christmas poppers, and we ate ham and potatoes and pear custard pie, and it was also lovely.  Rose Pink took the picture on her new cell phone.

20 December 2020

Bobo and Rosebud play together a lot.  They fight a lot but they are also primary playmates, and Rosebud misses him when he is at school or playing video games.  Tonight at dinner, Rose Pink asked them if they ever wished they were twins, and Bobo immediately said, "Yes."

18 December 2020

 Rose Pink and I went to get her learner's permit on Tuesday.  I managed to get all the paperwork right, and we had an appointment that we made in July (long wait time) and all of that meant that we were only in the office for maybe twenty minutes.  So excited for her to learn how to drive!

17 December 2020

 This morning Rosebud was sitting next to me working on her homework and when I looked over I discovered that she was drawing on her hand.  I didn't feel like I could reprimand her because her older sister draws on herself a lot with body art markers, and actually just recently gave me and Rosebud and Bobo drawings of peppermint candies on our arms for Christmas.  So I just admired the loops and squares and hearts that she was creating.

15 December 2020

 A few catchup bits.

-Bobo has started using words that he's never heard said but that he's read in books.  Last week he told us that Santa was a 'hoe-axe'.  Love to watch his vocabulary growing.

-Thanksgiving was a quiet holiday, with just us.  Mr. Brown decided to make a pie every day instead of all the pies at once, and we turned it into a Festival of Gratitude for the whole week.  It was a lovely sunny week, with good food and lots of pie.

-Last week the littles and I went stargazing during church youth night.  We spread out a blanket in the church parking lot in a dark corner and grappled with the constellations in a book from the library versus the actual stars in the sky.  I don't know how successful we were but it was fun to lay on the blanket together and speculate on the stars.  So glad to be living somewhere that I can stargaze in December while wearing sandals.

14 December 2020

 Bobo came downstairs this morning with his blanket, and instead of sitting up to the table for scriptures, rolled himself up in cocoon on the floor.  After scriptures, the older kids took off for other things, and Bobo sat himself up without unrolling, and then lay down and inched his way around the floor like an inchworm.  Eventually he conducted a brief grapple with himself, at the end of which he exploded out of the blanket and got eaten by a bird.  Since he was now dead, he spread the blanket out to its full size and told me that he couldn't leave the 'ghost zone'.  So I made him a fried peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk for breakfast, which he ate in the ghost zone.  And then went up to start school.  Not a bad start to the week.