31 March 2015

What Nut Brown does in the middle of the night when he can't sleep (self-reported):

 

28 March 2015

Grandma and Grandpa came to visit over their spring break this week, and it was very cold.  We went out to dinner last night at a restaurant that had a little train going around the place over customers' heads.  Bobo was entranced.  He waved to it, and showed the train the picture he had colored of it. 

One afternoon we rode our bikes up to the park, and the kids tried out the slides, which were not very fast.  Sigh.  Rose Pink crept down one slowly and said, "Whee.... ish."  She's so funny.

24 March 2015

My parents gave Nut Brown some oil pastels for his birthday and he's been using them to create some vivid pictures.  See below:

 



Lego mini-figures

a crab on a beach

fire vs ice

tree with monkeys

23 March 2015

Just a note to say that I'm turning into a true suburban-ite - a couple weeks ago I drove down to Ann Arbor to visit my aunt and uncle, and as I turned off the local interstate (five lanes) onto the highway that goes to Ann Arbor, I was suddenly claustrophobic at being constricted to only two lanes.  How can you drive at 70 mph with only two lanes?  Ha.  I'm obviously used to the massive interstates in the suburbs.

Rose Pink had her first piano recital two weeks ago on Pi Day, and it was quite the affair - almost three hours long.  It was a good experience for her - she played two pieces, and did well with both - but I think next time we'll leave the boys at home, and send Mr. Brown to sit in the back with a book.

Speaking of Pi Day, we celebrated with our friends the Peers, who were in town to attend the temple.  We made key lime pie and lemon pie and apple pie and strawberry pie, and my dad sent a box of moon pies from Alabama.  There was massive pie consumption that evening, and a toast to Pi, may it live forever.

The last couple days, Bobo has been consumed by his little-kid Legos.  I almost threw these blocks away a few months ago, and now I'm glad I didn't.  He will spend an hour, by himself, stacking and unstacking and rearranging and resnapping them.  Last night he sat through family scriptures and prayers with them, and then came in my bedroom while I was reading scripture with Nut Brown and sat on my bed and played with them for another half an hour.  Then he took them to bed with him ('I need fyashyight, Mama').  He talks to himself while he's playing, just like his sister.

18 March 2015

Now that it looks like we're over the hump... here's some photos from fun times with snow that was had in February. It took forever to convince Bobo that it was worth it to get his snowpants on - he kept saying that he would rather stay inside.  But once we got him outside, he had a great time.  Maybe next year he'll agree to wear his mittens before he goes outside and freezes his hands and cries for them.  :-)  Kids only get older.

All this sledding nonsense was in our backyard... piles of snow shoveled off the driveway.  We got a lot of snow in February.

16 March 2015

Lately I've been helping the kids pray at night by asking them three questions to structure their prayers - what are you most grateful for today; what are you most worried about; and what do you want to tell Heavenly Father about?  It's been such a surprise to me how differently Nut Brown and Rose Pink pray.  Rose Pink chatters away about the game of pretend she played with a friend and what she's been reading and so on.  Nut Brown views it as an opportunity to ask questions of God to which he expects answers.  The first time he asked one, he told God that He (God) didn't have to answer right away, and that he (Nut Brown) was leaving a message.

Another question was about why God let the Anti-Nephi-Lehies be slaughtered by their enemies.  He and I read in the scriptures afterwards for some of God's reasoning, which was really really neat. I've started reading the scriptures every night with both of them.  Rose Pink reads a chapter every night, and Nut Brown reads a page.  He was so excited - he's earning a cake all for himself (Mr. Brown's standard offer to everyone who reads the Book of Mormon), plus he's practicing his reading, plus he's growing his seed of faith, plus he gets to practice communicating by practicing prayer.  He counted up all those exciting things himself and was so happy.

Last night when discussing what he was thankful for, he said he was thankful that Papa does the dishes.  The he paused and pondered how life would be different without Mr. Brown - no homeschool and we'd have to go grocery shopping on Saturdays, among other things.  When he offered his thanks for his father, it was sweet and heartfelt.

Gratuitous photo of my favorite Bobo pajamas

15 March 2015

Tonight reading scriptures with Nut Brown-

Nut Brown: Why don't they put a one in front of the first verse in the chapter?

Me: I don't know.

Nut Brown: Maybe it's a zero, and they just skip one.

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This afternoon at the park Rose Pink played in the sucking quicksand of the baseball diamond, and came home very extremely muddy.  She took a shower and left a vast quantity of muddy sand in the bathroom, and then was quite upset when she was required to either clean it up or pay someone to clean it up for her.  Tonight when going to bed she was telling me that she had decided not to wash her clothes out in the bathtub any more after playing in mud, because she really hated having to clean it all up.  She said, "I thought about banning myself from playing in the mud, but I realized that would never happen."

13 March 2015

Spontaneous costume generation of some of our favorite superheros - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!  Rose Pink is dressed as April O'Neill.  Also Bobo shows off some of his best moves.

11 March 2015

The kids got some building blocks for Christmas.  Nut Brown gets them out sometimes to make tall towers.

Also he knocks them down.

10 March 2015

Nut Brown, the other night, said to me that the bathroom would be closed for awhile the next day.  Oh? I said.  Yes, he said, because I'm going to clean it.  Because I want to be a cleaner like you when I grow up.

9 March 2015

Rose Pink has a dental appliance in her mouth- she inherited my teeth (her grandpa's teeth) and mouth shape- so they have pulled a few and put in spacers that will hopefully minimize the time she'll have to wear braces.  So her brushing habits have greatly improved.

Rose Pink is reading Harry Potter at the moment, for the first time.  She is completely enamored.

The weather has been in the forties the last two days.  On Sunday after church we went for a walk and she went barefoot.  "The sidewalk is pretty warm!" she exclaimed.  Not everyone was super-diligent about shoveling, so she ended up walking across icy sections and through puddles formed from melted snow.  But she didn't actually complain much - my girl with a heart full of snow love.  Tonight, FHE treat is ice cream, and she has decided to eat it outside on the back porch because 'it's warm!'  (It's 45 degrees.)

6 March 2015

Lately, when Rose Pink goes up to bed, she calls to us, "G.N.!"  It took me a bit to figure out that she's using it as an acronym for 'good night'.

4 March 2015

Stake conference this weekend.  Mr. Brown was at home - following are the notes he got from me during the meeting:

Me: We're doing the sustaining and Bobo is toasting them all with a half eaten sandwich.

Mr Brown: CHEERS!

Me:   Speaker said something about "Sis Brown" and Bobo said, "She talking you, Mommy! She talking you!"

Seth brought glowsticks and the kids are having a lot of fun with them. (we're in the gym in the dark)
Me: Temple president just said something about ancestors who lived in Edinbragh and Nut Brown turned to me and said loudly, " Eatin' Brain! Weird!"

Mr. Brown:  We're not unreasonable i mean no one is going to eat your Ayrshire (another town in scotland)

Me: Pres Marshall just started with a story abt his five yr old. "Son, what did you learn in Primary?". "If I ever see a Lamanite I'll punch him in the face."  Reminds me of Bobo yesterday on our walk. He came up to bodyprint in the snow made by Rose Pink and exclaimed, "Yoroko!" and then punched it in the head.

3 March 2015

Yesterday the high was 23 degrees, positively warm after the bitter cold that was February this year, and things started melting and I thought that spring really was going to come.  Today we got 4 inches of snow and freezing rain on top of it.  Sigh.

Bobo has started correcting us when we call him Bobo, and tells us to call him by his real name. 

Also whenever he hears me pass gas, he says with a grin, "You poopy, Mommy!"

18 February 2015

For Valentine's Day, the kids heart-attacked my bedroom door.  It was wonderful.  Rose Pink also heart-attacked her brothers' bedroom door, although I'm not sure that they were as appreciative as I was.  She loves holidays and loves celebrating them.  This year we got a calendar from Oriental Trading Co., another entity that loves holidays, that was full of holidays - National Dress Up Your Pet Day, for example- and she was perfectly thrilled.  We discovered that National Chocolate Eclair Day is June 22 (we are planning the celebration already), and also that National Left Handed Day is the same day as Nut Brown's birthday - awesome because he is left-handed!

Anyway, the kids made their own valentines this year without any actual help from me, which was kind of novel.  Older kids are the best. :)  Mr. Brown gave me tulips and chocolates, which is our own tradition.  He's given me tulips every year since we started dating.

We also celebrated Hedgehog Day, which is 3 February.  This is a holiday unique to the Brown family, and we mark it by creating tiny hedgehogs out of donut holes with sprinkles.  This year Rose Pink made cakepops with a pan that she got for Christmas.  She chose a blue cake mix, so we ate blue hedgehogs.

Finally, we also made paczkis for Mardi Gras this year.  Paczkis are a Polish pastry that are made on Mardi Gras in order to get ready for Lent - it's an enriched dough so it uses up eggs and milk.  Then it's fried, and basically it turns into a filled donut.  Our entertainment budget ran out before we got to Paczki Day so we made our own (because of course that makes it 'grocery', not 'entertainment', right?) and they were exceedingly tasty and turned out far better than a first attempt has any right to.  Because of how the day went, we ended up frying them at 8:30pm.  Rose Pink was in the kitchen with us but the boys were already in bed.  Mr. Brown said, we should probably get them up... so Nut Brown got up (Bobo was already asleep) and we had a paczki party late at night.  Yum.

Nut Brown and Bobo have a cold, the slow kind, that never gets super bad but hangs around forever.  They're on the other side of it, but Mr. Brown is coming down with it now. 

Last night Mr. Brown went to a packing assignment at the Bishop's Storehouse, so I took all three kids to Nut Brown's gymnastics class with me.  Rose Pink wanted to bring her stuffed unicorn ('Unic') and drag it around on a leash.  We warned her about how dirty it would get, so she brought a box also, and dragged it around inside the box.  A lot of people were curious about the combination.  She and Bobo did a lot of running around together, and we also played Hot & Cold with her sandal.  Then we started on a collage, cutting out photos from National Geographic and Smithsonian.

Nut Brown's teacher had them play on the bouncy castle and also do the 'American Ninja' routine where they jump from cushion to cushion and finish by diving into a forward roll.  Nut Brown *loves* this stuff, and he looked pretty good.  Mr. Brown and I were trying to think about a way forward for him in gymnastics.  He's been invited three times to join the gymnastics team associated with the gym at which he takes lessons, but practices are two evenings a week for two hours each, and we don't have that many free evenings.  We are thinking about maybe switching to a martial art instead?  Or last night Mr. Brown suggested that maybe we could sign him up for private lessons during the day in addition to his evening class.  Either way, I hope we can find something that will continue to challenge him that also fits in our schedule.

3 February 2015

We got a foot or so of snow on Sunday.  It started snowing just after midnight and basically snowed until just after midnight again.  We shoveled twice on Sunday and there was still at least six inches on the ground Monday morning to clear off.  Fortunately Monday was a beautiful day- sunny and clear, and not too cold and not too windy.  The kids spent a good chunk of the day outside playing (once we'd convinced Bobo to go outside - he's very resistant to putting on his snow gear) and went sledding down the four foot heaps of snow piled up beside the driveway.  Nut Brown burrowed out a snow cave, and later Rose Pink and some friends turned it into a tunnel.  Although Bobo hadn't wanted to go outside at first, once he got out he didn't want to come back in!

Mr. Brown and I shoveled a tremendous amount of snow off our driveway, and then we spent the day pushing our neighbors' cars out of the snow as they came out to try and go various places.  The Mustang across the street had to go in to work, although he'd tried to call in; the Saab next door had to go to the store to get more Gatorade because they were all sick with the flu - we pushed him to the corner and then when he came back we pushed him back from the corner; the Focus across the street struggled to get back in his driveway after work; and the Jetta on the other side of us had trouble moving away from the curb to get off the street for plowing.  Lots of pushing.  Lots of good neighbor karma.  The city plows came by about 10 pm, so we went out and shoved out our driveway (and the sidewalk again since it threw the snow way up there), and we shoveled out the flu neighbors' driveway as well.  The Focus neighbor came across and helped me with it.

Last night Mr. Brown drove us safely over the to a friend's house for dissection night: this time we were dissecting sheep brains.  We didn't get stuck once, because he's really good at driving in the snow.  Also because he had built up all the karma from earlier in the day, I'm sure!  Mr. Brown pushed more people out of the snow there as everyone was leaving, because the plows hadn't gotten to their neighborhood yet either.

We had a lovely day - all that sunshine and a lot of hard work and helping!

28 January 2015

Bobo loves his superhero t-shirts.  He doesn't ever want to take them off, not for baths, not for pajamas, not for anything.  So we have a deal that when he's getting in pajamas, he can keep his shirt on under his footies if he wants to.  The same deal extends to Sunday clothes, so he often goes to church with a Batman t-shirt under his cute little blue button-down.  This past Sunday he was wearing a ninja turtle t-shirt underneath, and when we got home, he took off his coat and requested immediate assistance to take off his Sunday shirt.  As Mr. Brown was undoing his buttons, he said, "Come out, ninja turtle!  Come out!"  (When he says 'turtle', it sounds like 'Toto'.  Awwwwwww.)

27 January 2015

On Tuesdays I work from home.  This morning a certain two-year-old got up really early (6:30 am) and came to hang out with me since everyone else was asleep.  Eventually he wanted breakfast so I sent him downstairs to ask Mr. Brown.  He came back up shortly, without Mr. Brown, and came back out to the living room.  I asked him if he wanted some raisins.  "Yes," he said.  "Papa say... he say...'one second'!"  At the moment he's driving his cars on a cloth map behind me on the floor, talking partly to himself and partly to me.  He has a little plastic dresser on wheels that his cars, his superheroes, and his Sonic tot toys are kept in, and he wheels it from the bedroom to the living room so he can dump out the contents of the drawers on the living room floor to play.  With all this talking, it surprises me how much he has to say.  He just commented, "My birthday... coming."

Rose Pink calls him "fuzzball".

26 January 2015

Rose Pink's birthday party was on Saturday.  Usually I enjoy putting on parties for the kids but for whatever reason, I had a hard time getting started on hers this year.  It didn't faze her, though.  She basically planned the whole party, did all the decorating, baked the cake, and then hosted it herself.  Every time I asked her about it, she had been moving forward with it and I ended up functioning as an advisor rather than primary planner.  It was really neat to see her take charge, plan, and then execute: she is growing and it's fun to watch.

The party was book-themed.  She made invitations shaped like books and invited everyone to come in costume as their favorite character, and she hung books from a rope across the living room as part of the decorations.  We all introduced ourselves and talked about what we were dressed as.  Then we played Mad Libs and Do You Love Your Neighbor and then we ate cake.  Mr. Brown suggested that she make a poke cake, and she did and loved it.  We busted the pinata and then it was time for everyone to head home.  The last activity she had planned was board games, but we didn't have time.  She chose blue as the color theme- blue crepe paper, blue cake, blue punch.  One of the moms asked if blue was her favorite color, and she replied, "No, it's not.  Blue is just the color most associated with books - you know, blue cover, white pages."

I helped her make lists - a shopping list and a list of things to do, and she just took care of it all.  She hosted, and Mr. Brown and I just filled in the gaps behind her.  She is amazing, and it was so cool to see what she's capable of.

Also, the character that she chose to dress as was Cleopatra, and she made the costume herself too.  Seriously the easiest birthday party I've done for my kids so far... seeing as how I didn't actually DO anything.

23 January 2015

Mr Brown recounts:

Yoroko told me that she used to think a Kolob was a sleep booger in your eye

from If you could hide a kolob in the twinkling of an eye

but now she knows the lyrics are if you could hike to Kolob.