Sage, All 'Growed' Up

  She turned 12, and measured a cool 5-foot-3 1/2 at her checkup. We can't believe the grace and good nature she is learning -- she is kind and compassionate, and gaining more and more confidence in herself. She's keeping her friends from Primary and elementary school, and happily making new ones in Young Women's and middle school.

Her birthday fell on a Saturday, and since it wasn't her year for a full-on party, we decided to take her to explore a nearby nature center (technically an 'environmental education center') that we had never yet been to. They had a few animals out that day for us to interact with -- a turtle or two, a snake, a frog, and a Flemish Giant rabbit that weighed 20 pounds and sat in a baby carriage -- so we thought it was a perfect fit for our outdoorsy-animal-rights girl.

After we wandered around in a glorious fall garden for a while, and then used some provided nets to muck around in the reclaimed marshland, we took her home to put on her tiara and make a wish.

I think whatever that wish was, it's bound to come true, don't you?

LucyLu, One Year Older

Our all-singing, all-dancing, queen-of-nonsense-words girl turned nine recently.

She wanted to watch a Harry Potter movie and make potions, so potions were provided...

It's certainly easy to please a gaggle of third-grade girls with a bunch of baking soda, vinegar, and red food coloring!

I also gave them some flour, cornstarch, and pepper, and they only stopped mixing when all the ingredients finally ran out. Even then, they had to take all the large bowls and pots I had provided and dump them into one. The final fizzy overflow of it all was delightfully dramatic.

(And yes, a hose was involved in the cleanup.)

Lucy, Nora, Ella, Jamie, Kylie, and Mischa

 What a great thing it is to share in the wonder and excitement of childhood through Lucy's eyes.

Events, Belated

I got to attend a 'graduation' for Sage, who is moving from elementary to middle school next year.

So beautiful and grown-up-looking, she towered over most of her classmates. Luckily for her, the balance of height is evened out by spunk in her best friend Jessie...

Katie, the last one on the right, is also a cherished friend who loves art and small creatures in deep ways that only Sage can appreciate.



Nora requested a nature party for her 6th birthday, so I figured I could easily make it all rustic and trendy and take advantage of the abundance of online ideas. I think she was slightly disappointed, having pictured more trees and leaves and stuff, but it was much simpler to pull together a theme that was already in the popular consciousness.

I think our favorite treat to eat was the acorns (made with mini-Nutter Butters and Hershey kisses), though I was personally enraptured by the meringue mushrooms.

We stayed pretty simple with games, playing duck duck goose in the front yard, wrapping Nora in a birthday 'cocoon' of toilet paper from which she would then break free, and playing tag wearing woodland-creature headbands that I found on a nice printable site. We pulled out our Milo and Otis movie for a little stretch, as well.

Cocoon video

Once Upon a Galaxy Far, Far Ago

I found Ian and Sage laughing helplessly at the kitchen table a few weeks ago. They had a composition notebook in front of them, and had undertaken to alternately contribute four words each to a saga. The story has a rocky start, as you can see them stuck in a four-word rut at cross-purposes with each other, but then it evolves in surprising ways. I can't help but think my kids are amazingly cool, spending their time on stuff like this epic collaboration. Enjoy.

"An army of Ianians planned an attack on the evil Sagacians. With their wimpy fruit weapons, the Sagacians couldn't fight! They upgraded to blasters! Their blasters all jammed. The Ianians were disorganized. However, they had nukes. The nukes destroyed them. They were reincarnated as very weak, stupid daisies. The Sagacians all died. Then, they lived again! The Ianians became dragons. The Sagacians became golems. They were water golems. They became stone golems. Both sides made peace.

But a new threat arrived from Minecraft: it was an army of zombie pigmen, which were planning to take over. They allied with evil creatures from Magic the Gathering. But the Ianians could resist fire, acid, and could work magic. The Sagacians could travel between dimensions. So together, they were an unstoppable force that eliminated each and every obstacle.

Suddenly, the seltzer water became stale, so according to a mystic porpoise, they must rise up in rebellion against the evil empire of fire-breathing chinchillas in flying armchairs. They must ally themselves with living beanbags, because the beanbags could spew armor and weapons. This would greatly improve their chances against the evil army of chinchillas. (Chinchillas can cancel magic.) 

Unfortunately, the chinchillas allied with rocks. This made the zombie pigmen and several ducks bound to them turn against the allied Sagacians and Ianians. They gained the ability to cancel magic too. The chinchillas cackled evilly. Then, a brilliant Ianian developed a new weapon! It destroyed the rocks! Now they could concentrate their efforts on the evil, cackling, maniacal chinchillas. With their armor and weapons supplied by the beanbags, the alliance defeated the chinchillas! Peace was established and they were heroes. The End."

[I split it into paragraphs and corrected one misspelling, but otherwise it's unedited. I only wish you could see the different handwritings in the original!]

Beautiful Lucy

As long as we just posted Lucy's debut play, I'm going to post a little blurb I was asked to write about her for an activity this week. (It seems to be the month of "daughter letters" at church...) I was asked to describe her beauty, especially inner beauty:

Lucy is beautiful in a fierce kind of way -- loyalty and acceptance come easily to her. She gives hugs readily, shares with others easily, and wants life to be a big experience. Her energy and affection are often contagious, and so she spreads her beauty throughout the world around her. Her dad and I imagine that she was so anxious and excited to come to earth, that she can barely contain it now that she’s here. She thinks, imagines, and lives large. 

Beautiful Lucy.

Lucy's Corner: Peter and the Magic Dog

After General Conference today, Lucy wrote a one-act play. There was a part for each of us, so after dinner we performed it to thunderous (imagined) applause. Here's the work in its entirety:


Peter and the magic dog

narrator;Young Peter wanted a dog.VERY MUCH!!!!

Peter;MOM!!!!!!!Can we get a dog?!

Mom;NO!!!! Thats the hunddreth time you,ve asked me!!!We need as much money as we can!!!!!!!

Narrator;As you can see,they argued.But one lucky day, Peter saw a dog.

Peter: WOW! A dog.

Narrator: The dog was a Greyhound. It followed Peter home.

Peter: Mom! I found a dog!

Mom: WHAT!!!!!!!!

Dog: I don't like the shouting woman. She's loud.

Narrator: The next day, Peter's Mom let Peter keep the dog He named her Nashta. Nashta showed extraordinary powers. Whatever she bit turned to gold, she had laser vision, and could transform into mammals. COOL! But one night...

Peter: What was that? It's Nashta growling! The house is being robbed!

Nashta: These men are bad! (Turns into a tiger).

Burgler 1: AAAAAAAAAHHHH!

Burgler 2: AAAAAAAAAHHHH!

Narrator: Nashta threw the burglers out the window and they never came back again!

THE END

A Little Bit of Boasting

I got to take my first daughter to the New Beginnings program at church last night, which is basically a special evening introducing the program she'll be joining later this year when she turns 12. There are only 2 new girls coming into the youth program for 2013, so she got some spotlight time all of her own, and they asked me to write an intro for her. Here it is:

Sage was the first granddaughter in her whole extended family, born in hot, humid, Houston, Texas. She was 3 ½ when her family first spent a summer in [this state], and 4 ½ when she moved here for good. This ward has been her home ward the whole time, as she's grown, been baptized, and now is on the cusp of Young Womanhood.

There are some really wonderful, but often hidden, qualities about Sage. For example, she's a keen observer of the world around her, especially details about nature, animals, color, and landscapes. She combines those powers of observation with a very tender heart and a desire for all creatures to be happy and taken care of. She'll stop and see every puppy or kitten but also every mantis or cricket she finds.

She's very neat and responsible, even though it's often overshadowed by the combined chaos of her siblings since she shares a room with her two sisters. She's a bit shy, but still loves to be around people and to be included in groups. She reads constantly, and has an incredible imagination. Combine her love of reading with the fact that she's definitely a morning person, and that means that she's often the first one awake, curled up on the couch with a book.

What I love most about Sage is watching those moments when she quietly blossoms. She's not dramatic, but she can really surprise you with her wit and intelligence right when you're least expecting it. She brings home paintings and art projects that belie her age, and I've kept them in a special place separate from all my other kids' school artwork. I love watching her run or ride her bike when no one else is around, she breaks free and glows with delight. I don't want to embarrass her, though that's hard to avoid; but she has such a sensitive awareness of the world around her that sometimes things are a little too much and she'll withdraw so that people don't get to see her when she really shines.

The name Sage was chosen to mean someone who was wise, respected, an anchor to those around them. It also happens to be a lovely herb, not showy but soft and fragrant, and we’ve planted a “Sage garden” including various varieties around our mailbox. Either way, the name fits her and we’re so glad to have her.

Adding to my bragging, if you don't mind indulging me a tiny bit, is the fact that my son Ian stayed home with the other kids during this evening event, and of his own initiative made us a batch of fresh bread. He had heard me mention that we were out and would have to figure something out for school lunches in the morning, and he went ahead and got two loaves rising in the pans before we even got home from the church thing. He stayed up a few minutes extra to put them in the oven when it was time, because he wanted to have done it all without my help. It was wonderful bread, and each of us thought of him when we ate it today...what a guy.

Last Days of Summer

Dear Teacher,

This is how we spent our summer vacation. We:

-saw cousins

-went to the Adventure Aquarium in Camden

-said goodbye to a pet

-chilled out along the Brandywine

-took a family bike ride

-dressed up

-slipped and slid

-waded into the Huron River

-showed Grandma how to bowl

-ate pancakes every Sunday night

-tended a friend's garden

-camped at Cape Henlopen

-hiked to a salt marsh

-parted the sea

-made an unholy mess of ourselves

-grew a few gourds

-bounded back into school

-camped with the cub scouts at Lums Pond

-got Lucy back into soccer

- and set down roots in a great place.

I'm sure there were some dull and tedious moments in there somewhere, but we forgot to take pictures of those. Is that enough, Teacher? Can we play outside now?

Easy as Pi

I can't tell if Pi Day is becoming a nationally popular holiday or if it's just heavily plugged by our school district. When a federal circuit judge at our church cites Pi Day as a scheduling conflict, well, then, you've probably moved beyond cult status. Holiday or not, I don't really care. I'm just in it for the pie, frankly, and if my kids learn something about circumference while I'm eating their math project, so much the better.



This year as prelude to unseemly consumption, we each had to measure a circular object and divide the circumference by the diameter. The person whose calculations most closely approximated Pi won--er--nothing really, but that's beside the point of Pi Day (see above). Pumpkin pies never last long in my house, but we just barely threw away the last of the chocolate banana cream--With due respect to Mae West, sometimes too much of a good thing is not wonderful. Still, when my time comes, I'm definitely not choosing Regular Heaven.

Altogether Ooky

So there's this local tradition where kids are supposed to dress up in costumes and demand candy from strangers. In Connecticut, where I grew up, there was a similar holiday called Halloween, and it was held on October 31. Where we live now, they practice something similar, except it starts around October 20, and the candy-eating lasts until about Thanksgiving. First, there is the making of costumes. Then, there is the making of a second set of costumes for the school parades--don't ask me why the kids can't just go in their trick-or-treating costumes, but our school assigns themes like "Environment," "The Human Body," and "Politics" which may or may not be compatible with your own Halloween themes (e.g. "What Your Sister Wore Last Year" and "This Was On Sale").

The first night of trick-or-treating occurs sometime in the last week of October, and takes place in a church parking lot. This allows your children pass through an entire cycle of sugar highs and lows before Halloween even begins, thus insuring that their sugar crash after October 31 will be all the more spectacular.

Speaking of crashes, K. and I sacrificed a couple of white shirts and went as a couple of grownup boogeymen--Global Warming and the Economy:
And yes, we're aware that K. looks pretty morose in this picture. In light of our gloomy statistics we were both supposed to be frowning, but I forgot to turn off my default picture settings. Our disparate faces still make sense if you pretend that K. is a polar bear and I am a bankruptcy attorney.

We hoped to grow our own pumpkins this year, but we didn't water them enough and the biggest grew to about the size of a baseball. Instead, we bought some from a small farm located smack in the middle of an upscale neighborhood near our house. For family home evening K. helped Lucy carve her trick-or-treating monster, Sage and I carved a ghost, and Ian carved "two Pokemon and two Musms." Ian just explained to me that "Musm" is his own term for a Mutant Organism. I was lucky enough to find a pumpkin shaped like Boris Karloff, so my carving pretty much took care of itself. (Trivial Aside: Did you know that Boris Karloff's real name was William Pratt? Also, he wore lifts. What a faker.)

I forgot to comment on the kids' costumes. Nora was our fourth child to wear the (suprisingly clean) white unicorn costume, Lucy wore Sage's Sleeping Beauty dress, Sage was a very winsome cheerleader, and Ian went as the Invisible Pedestr--er, I mean--the Grim Reaper. Not pictured is the plastic scythe that completed his eerie look. More that a few houses saw Ian's featureless shroud peering through the front window while slowly tapping it with his scythe. It suprises me that he didn't get more candy.

Very Sketchy

It might be an uphill battle, but I'd always hoped that we might instill in our kids a desire to be not simply passive consumers of childish diversions, but producers as well. I'm half convinced that children come wired for creativity already, and only succumb to mindless viewings of Disney, Barbie, and Pokemon with the tacit permission of their parents. Parenting is time-consuming and difficult, and passive consumption is a tempting choice when you're looking for the path of least resistance. Thank heaven for Sunday, when church and quiet time push our children onto the road less traveled out of sheer boredom.

Lucy drew the [above] picture of Curio a few weeks back--K. and I were surprised to find that she was finally drawing representational art that we could recognize. A week or so later she drew Bob the Tomato, Larry the Cucumber, and the French Peas:
Derivative work, but still pretty good, right? My personal favorite is on the bottom row, third from the left.

A couple Sundays back I amused myself with this cartoon:
Drawing anthropomorphic balloons was something of an artistic breakthrough for me. By limiting my range to circles and lines, I too could be a famous cartoonist!(And in all seriousness, do yourself a favor and never watch Killer Klowns From Outer Space. When it comes to mental images, I find some truth in the saying that you forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.)

Ian has been re-reading the first Harry Potter and today penned a comic about Harry's lesser-known relation, Jack. [click to enlarge]Characters named "Jack" turn up in a lot of Ian's stories. I guess we all have our favorite fictional names. When I taught high school grammar, "Leroy Brown" became the subject of many model sentences.

Sage liked my balloon cartoon and came up with her own.It always interests me to see how well we reveal our true natures in the things we create. Please note that Sage's cartoon has many pictures of dogs, friends, and smiles, and draw your own conclusions.

It's funny how often creativity springs from limitations. The poet Richard Wilbur wrote very structured poems in a time when free verse had become the norm, but explained that "the Genie gets his power from being trapped in the bottle." When you have absolute freedom, filling a blank piece of paper can be very daunting, but impose a few arbitrary limitations and suddenly your mental energies have a channel through which to flow. Maybe that's why I'm having so much fun with my balloon people, and why it's becoming easier to sketch an autobiographical cartoon than it is to actually write in my journal.

Kids' Corner: Introducing Curio

Sage:
Wednesday morning we heard some noises in the basement. We went down in the basement and we saw a little kitten. We tried catching it. Finally we caught it. We were looking around for it in the basement and I noticed that it was in the box that we were trying to catch it in, so we tipped it up and it was caught. We named it Curio and we petted it and played with it. Then we gave it to somebody to take care of it. Then, the next day, we got it back to keep. It was furry and cute. I like holding Curio, and it purrs when I pet it. It has soft, fuzzy fur and pointy claws. It likes chewing on lots of things: blankets, cushions, paper, and it licks you when you stick your finger in front of its mouth.



Ian:
I think it's funny when Curio gets stuck under the couch and when it falls asleep on my lap. Nora is very excited about Curio. She chases Curio every time she sees it. Curio thinks this is not so good. Lucy is a little too overexcited about Curio--she gets overenthusiastic and accidentally hurts Curio while playing with him/her. Now that Curio is here our house has a center attraction--every time we get home from a trip, every time we haven't seen Curio for a little bit, we go over and pet her when we get back. My favorite thing about Curio is that it is soft to pet, and the bottom of its paws feel like rubber.



Lucy:
I like Curio and I want him to lick my finger. I like to play with Curio--I give him baby toys and he tries to catch them. I pet Curio--you pet him with your hand, like this [makes petting motion]. I need go potty.

Nora:
[trying to say "Cat"] Khuht! Khhht! [delighted squeal.]

Dad Fills in the Blanks:
No, we weren't planning to keep it, but the kids were so enchanted that K.'s resolve began to erode even after somebody took it (temporarily) off our hands. Once the kids named it I think we were doomed. We won't know its gender until Tuesday when we take it to the vet, but we're pretty sure it was feral--it hissed at us when we first found it, but didn't take long before it warmed to human company. It seems to regard K. as its mother, nuzzling and staring at her when it gets thirsty--very sweet, actually. I have no idea how it got into our basement. Seeing it go moon-crazy every night, I would believe anything.

A Little More a' Nora

"A Lullaby for Nora"
Come to sleep, my dear little baby
Come to sleep, in the dark of the night
Come to sleep, for I am right with you
For this is home.
--By Ian

Introducing Little Baby Nora

Late Thursday afternoon, K. thought she might be having contractions. By the time the kids went to bed at 8:30, she was sure. At 9 we put on Emma, and by 11 we were driving to the birth center. Along the way we saw an opossum, looking for a safe way across the road. I'd never seen a live opossum before, so we took this as a lucky sign.

At 1:04am little Nora was born. (On her uncle Bryce's birthday, no less. Happy Birthday, Bryce! Have a niece.) She knew mom was dreading a long labor, and made haste in a very obliging manner. This is a picture of her just a few minutes after she was born.As with the other kids, we bounced names off of her until Nora stuck. Her middle name is Christine, kinda sorta halfway between the names of her mother and aunt.

This is a picture of Nora's happy, bleary-eyed mom before a decent rest.
And this is a picture of her dad, obviously after one.
Nora's sisters have been very excited to hold her. Even the deposed Princess Lucy has been eager to nurture "baby No-wa".
Proud big brother Ian immediately wrote Nora a lullaby (lyrics to follow in another post).
We got to liking the name Nora after we heard it attached to Norah Jones, and little Nora has taken it upon herself to wail a bit in honor of the bluesy singer.Her voice doesn't precisely convey the "honey and smoke" of Miss Jones, but it's sweet nonetheless.

Here's Nora and her mother, sharing a moment. We can't believe she's finally here!

PS: 8 lbs, 1 oz, 20 and 1/2 inches. Dark hair, obviously.