An Update at 6 in the Morning

Like I've said before, there isn't really much to report.  A lot of sickness around here, plus our lives are pretty typically boring anyway.  But I'm going to pretend that I have something important to say because it's 6 in the morning and I'm awake with nothing better to do.

Rob
Rob skipped out on the flu.  Probably because he had the flu shot this year (he gets the flu shot because he works at Children's and if you don't get the shot you get fired.  They give it to you for free, though).  He was coming down with a cold one day, and then over it the next.  Lucky him.

Next week he starts Jury Duty.  He's so excited about it!!!  (Not really.  I keep telling him he's excited, just for fun.)  Shortly after that he starts teaching his class at UC.  Right now his teaching load is light, he's only gone one night a week, and it's been great!  It's so fantastic to have the weekends and most week nights as a family, with a Rob who is fully there with us. 

Tamra
My waiting is finally over:  I have the full-on flu.  It hasn't been awful, really.  A low-grade fever.  I'm really tired.  A headache.  The headache got so bad that I finally took drugs for it, which is why I'm awake now:  the drug has caffeine in it and so it wakes me up (I have to feel pretty miserable to take it at night).  But it also broke my fever, so I'm feeling good right now.  That's likely to change when the drug wears off in a few hours.

This week I will have the opportunity to testify in court, assuming the case gets on the docket this week.  I hope you all get to skip out on this opportunity, as, in my experience, it's already been pretty painful.  I'd rather the case not exist, let alone have to talk about it under oath.  I'm hoping I'm over the flu by the time I have to go in, cause that's a combo I don't want to do.  ...  No, I'm not telling you details about the case.  And no, it's not about anyone you know.  Promise.

Miciah
Miciah has written some pretty good stories lately, so I'll be posting those as I get to it.  I love her stories, her creativity.  I also love how funny she is, and how funny she thinks she is.  She will say something clever and then repeat the entire conversation for us about 10 times.  I don't know anyone else who does that (expect myself). 

Sign that Miciah is growing up:  She asked if she could start taking a shower every day.  Weird.

She was Star of the Week in her class 2 weeks ago.  I love how much the kids love being Star of the Week.  I mean, they just rotate through the class.  It's not like it's an honor.  But they do get to share special things about themselves, so I can see how it'd be cool.  A few months back she got to be Star of the Week for her grade, which is a little more on the "honor" side.  There's only 1 kid per grade level per week.  She got to be on morning announcements (where the principal got her name wrong.  Again), and got all these prizes and stuff.  It was pretty cool for her.

Elijah
Elijah is back to his normal energy levels, which is good and bad.  We can barely keep up with him!  He's kinda crazy.  But he's so happy.  I'm working on constructive ways to work with his energy, instead of feeling like we're always fighting it.  Any suggestions on that front?  I could use them.

Our wii is back up and running, which makes Elijah especially happy.  We've put in new rules.  They now have to read for half an hour every day to get their half an hour wii time (or computer time.  Now they'll have to choose).  That's all the time they get in a day.  On Saturday they get a half hour for free, and then a second half hour if they read.  This last Saturday was our trial run, and it was great.  The kids read and read, even Teancom.  Well, Miciah read to him.  And then, when it was time to turn the wii off, they did it without complaining.  Excellent!

Teancom
Tank is adorable, as always.  Not sure there's much on the announcement side for him.  Let's see.  We bought him some new pants, cause his old ones were falling apart (Elijah destroys his clothes, so when they get to Tank they're nearly rags).  He was upset at the store when I told him the size we needed was 3T.  "That's for 3-year-olds!" he told me.  Tank is a small kid.  I'm sure he'll grow eventually.  We had a kid with us for a day who is not yet 3, and they were the same height.  This is why Tank can still wear that Frankenstein outfit that he loves and has been wearing for 2 years.

A fun Tank story.  As I've been signing more, the kids have become more interested in it.  Elijah, like his father, has a hard time seeing the signs and then copying them right.  Miciah almost always gets it the first time, Tank right behind, but Elijah just ... struggles.  We were trying to get him to do the sign for "no" correctly, and Rob was holding his hands and trying to adjust his fingers how they needed to be.  It's a simple sign, and probably most of you know it.  What cracked me up was Tank's explanation of the sign to Elijah.  "No!  2 on top, 1 on bottom.  Chomp, chomp."  If you know the sign, you know that that's a perfect description.  Never would have thought of it, but it's beautiful.

Kids
Daniel, a boy in our ward, asked if he could come read stories to our kids for a merit badge he's working on.  Umm, YES!  Our kids were really excited about it.  When he arrived yesterday, Tank ran into the living room and shouted, "It's story time!"  He read to them for 2 hours.  Miciah lost interest before the end, because they were mostly picture books, but she sat on the other couch and read different books.

Daniel's coming back next week to do another 2 hours and finish his time.  ...  It struck me, when the kids were so excited about it all, that we should read to them more.  We read to them on a near daily basis, particularly at bed time, but we often have other things we "need" to do with our time.  Maybe Sunday afternoon reading time would be a good tradition to start.


And that's the end of my "updates."  Love to you all!

Randomness Smashed Together

Best $5 Christmas purchase for 2010:

Seriously.  SO cheerful.  Not sure I'll survive another winter without one.  (And did you know there's no 't' in the middle of the word?  It's poinsettia.)

And since we're on the subject of winter plants, you should avoid paper white narcissus at all costs.  They stink.  Leave them as spring bulbs in your garden.  Trust me.

Star Wars

One of the best Christmas gifts for the kids was a box full of Star Wars toys from Uncle Garrett.  Inspired by Toy Story 3, he passed on a treasure trove of action figures for my kids to enjoy.  The boys especially love them, even though they aren't super familiar with the characters.  Tank picked up Admiral Ackbar and said, "And here's this weird looking guy."

Then Tank suggested that we watch all 6 movies.  We've watched movies 1 and 2, and it's interesting how different the experience is for our kids.  They don't know the storyline through and through.  So when we were finished with movie 1, Elijah was going on about how cool Anakin is.  Miciah looked at him and said, "He's not a good guy, Elijah.  He turns into Darth Vader."  A look of profound shock came over his face.  He turned to Rob as if to say, "Tell me it isn't true."  We both wanted to die laughing.  Elijah went on and on about how it can't be true that Anakin turns into Vader because Anakin is a jedi who was taught by jedis and jedis are good guys, so it can't be true, right?  ...  You'll have to wait and see.  Dun dun dun!

T-shirts

I've never liked the tight-fitting layered shirt look.  When it started coming in style I was baffled.  How it's STAYED in style is even more baffling still!  ...  Fashion doesn't make sense to me anyway, so I guess that it's not too surprising.  Anyways, I was thinking about how I just wanted to wear a normal t-shirt.  Options on t-shirts that are wearable without being see-through have gone down in recent years.  So, much to my delight, my younger brother Chad bought me this great t-shirt for Christmas:

Can you see what that says?  (These are mirror shots, remember.)

I grew up in St. Louis.  Love it.

(And, as a side note, I have no objection to layering a short-sleeve shirt on top of a long-shirt sleeve.  It's a look I've never objected to.  Plus, it makes sense:  I'm cold, so I need to wear a long-sleeve shirt, but I love to wear t-shirts.  Solution?  Combine them!)

And now, to prove I've never had a sense of fashion, here's a picture of me doing the short-sleeve on short-sleeve shirt look in High School.  I was 15 years old:

Not sure why I was wearing it like that, with a baggy shirt underneath.  Not sure there has to be a reason for what people wear when they're 15 years old.  (Normally I wore that yellow shirt with a patterned long-sleeve black and red Mickey Mouse shirt underneath.  Cause those matched SO well.)

Sickness

Last week Rob and I were talking about how our family hadn't yet been hit by the Annual Winter Stomach Bug.  Shouldn't have said it out loud.

Bed time, a few nights back.  Tank came out of his room and said that his belly hurt.  I told him to get a bowl and get back in bed.  So he did.  About half an hour later Elijah came out of the room and said, "Tank is asleep, so I brought out his bowl."  I thought about telling Elijah to put it back, but then I thought, "What are the odds that Tank will need it in the middle of the night?"  Well, I don't know what the odds are, but he needed it that night.  He yelled for us to come help him, and then he said, "I couldn't find the bowl."  Gratefully, Rob sees it as the father's job to help out kids in the middle of the night ("You get the day shift and I get the night shift."), so he took care of it.

Tank's stomach bug lasted all of 5 minutes, and he was fine by morning.  Miciah is sick today.  Same thing:  she's been running around totally happy.  Stomach Bug says, "2 down, 3 to go!"  If we have to be sick, though, this bug isn't so bad.

Last night Tank said his stomach hurt again.  I don't think it really did, but I told him to go get a bowl anyway.  He said, "Should I put it under my pillow?"  "The bowl?  No, just put it beside you."  I heard him going through the bowl stack, picking one out, and then he came out with this one:

"I got the big one."  Seriously, that bowl is huge!  It's so big that we rarely use it.  There just isn't much need for a monster bowl like that.

I'm trying to figure out how he thought he could sleep with that bowl under his pillow.

Night Time Reading

Last night, just before 11:00, Miciah came walking upstairs, half-asleep, hair in her face.  She walked to the bathroom and Rob said, "I hope you've already been asleep."  In a groggy voice, she responded that she hadn't, but that her light had been off since 9:30, her official Stop Reading and Turn Off The Light time.  Without missing a beat, Rob said, "But you've been reading by the light of your night light."  Miciah's face broke into a wide smile.

Rob said, "She thinks we don't know."  We can't really be mad at her, though, cause we did it as kids, too, and we still do it now when we have an especially good book.  We told her so, and then we told her that we love that she loves reading, but also that sleep is a good thing.  Miciah told us, in a perfectly awake voice, that to get enough reading light, she takes the night light (which is also her alarm clock) and puts it right next to her head.  I suggested that she should just leave her light on if she's going to continue reading.  That way she won't hurt her eyes by reading in low light.

After she went downstairs, Rob and I were giggling about her act.  It dawned on me that she turns off her light dutifully at 9:30 every night so that she can tell us the truth about it.  "I turned off my light when you told me to!"  Then, for last night, she put her hair in her face, and made her voice sound all tired.  We were impressed with the amount of effort she put into the performance.

Miciah's Birthday!

Miciah is now a very adult 6 years old. Awesome.

Birthday at Parkey's Farm

We spread out her celebrations. Not on purpose, really, but that's how it ended up happening. The Saturday before Rob took Miciah up to C's house to practice some songs they're singing for a fireside, and while the cousins were all together, they did a little birthday celebration. Then on Monday we did a celebration with another family at a local farm that does Halloween Nights. It's a non-scary family-oriented night. They have a hay maze and a hay ride and there was a magic show and other stuff. They loved it. Well, everyone but Elijah loved it. Elijah had been cranky earlier in the day, but during the magic show he started complaining about his head and throat and I noticed his forehead was hot. I took him out, got him a drink of water, carried him around, and by the time the others were out of the magic show, he was asleep. I made Rob carry him, and for the next hour he just slept in Rob's arms. Poor kid. But it was still a good time.

At one point, during the hay maze, which the kids loved, I thought I had lost A, Elijah's friend that we brought with us. I was standing by one of the maze exits, as a sentinel, but the other exit wasn't being watched too closely. So suddenly I was seeing Elijah running around crazy and no A! I asked Rob if he saw him. Nope. No one else did, either. I'm looking around the maze, he's not there. I'm looking nearby at places he could be just running around. No A. Then a lady standing at another side of the maze goes, "Are you looking for a little boy?" Yes, in fact I was. "He's sitting in this corner hiding." Breathe again. He wouldn't get up for anyone, so I walked back through the maze with Elijah and convinced him to get up so we could move to something else. It ended up being funny, but for a minute there I was wondering how I would tell one of my best friends that I had lost her son. :)

October 16th

The next morning Elijah was fine, but Miciah had the fever. (Teancom had a fever Sunday night.) I called and talked to her teacher about something else and mentioned to her that Miciah had a fever and I was ordered (sort of) to not send her to school. Bummer for Miciah, since it was her birthday. So she stayed home, but was fine by mid-afternoon. She kept asking what her friends at school would be doing now. Told me about the fun things they'd be doing in class that she was missing. :) So I told her that she was lucky because she got THREE birthday celebrations. One on Monday, one on Tuesday (with the family), and then one on Wednesday when she got back to school! She thought for a minute and then said, "Then I should be 9!" ...

We let her pick her birthday dinner. She chose beef Ramen and Ritz crackers. Joy! Rob actually loves Ramen (why, again, do I try to make good meals when he's just as happy with Ramen?) so he was in heaven. Then we had her cake. She's always wanted an Ariel cake (just like last year. She's obsessed with Ariel and mermaids), but last minute she decides it should be a castle, too. So I cut notches off the top layer so it would look remotely castle-ish. I thought for a last-minute solution it wasn't half bad. She was happy with it anyway, and that's what matters.

The gift we got her was a $20 gift card to ToysRus. She was thrilled to pick out her own gift. She chose an Ariel building block set and a mermaid pool toy thing. :) It's funny to me how much a gift card can be exciting. Easier for us, fun for her. If she doesn't like her gifts, it's her fault because she chose them. How can you go wrong?

While I took her to ToysRus Rob was busy building her a bed tent. Elijah's been asking us to put blankets up so that his bottom bunk is a "tent". Miciah's been trying to get us to build her a tent, too, but she's on the top bunk. So we'd been thinking of a plan and Rob finally came up with lashings. Yea for Boy Scout training. So he lashed up some thick cardboard rolls and secured bed sheets to them and when we came home I told her to go look in her room for the surprise. She was so excited. Man, sometimes it's the easy things in life, eh? Didn't cost us anything--the supplies we already had. Just a little bit of time and effort and she's happy. Life is good.

Back to School

And Wednesday she was able to go back to school and share treats with the class, so she was happy. I was scheduled to be in helping the teacher as a Parent Helper, so I was able to share the moment with her, which was fun. She loved having me in helping, though I didn't help her specificially. I think she just liked being able to share with me what her day is like and what her class is like.

So that was Miciah's 6th birthday. Yea for kids getting older and yea for simple birthdays and family time!

Other family stuff.

Miciah is Reading

Miciah is now reading. It hadn't occured to me that there was never a day when your kid would just BAM! be reading. When people say that kids read, they say, "You were reading at 5" or "She was reading at 3 1/2", like it was a single event. Miciah has been in some stage of being able to read for over a year. Now she is reading almost any word she wants and needs minimal help, so I think that constitutes Reading. When she can sit in the back of the car and drive you crazy reading and asking questions about signs she's reading, that's official. :)

Elijah

Elijah is not driving us crazy as badly as he used to be. We re-evaluated how we were parenting him and realized we needed to just chill out a little. We've never been hyper parents, but in his transition from quiet, happy, sweet, cuddly toddler to FULL ENERGY IN-YOUR-FACE little boy, we'd been knocked off-balance. So we took some deep breaths, put some calm back in our voices and souls, and he's been reacting MUCH better to that. Elijah feeds off any anger or loudness sent his way, so really, the problem was in large part us. But we're OK with this full energy kid, we just needed to realize this is who he is now and he's not "broken" in the sense of "what's wrong with you? You weren't like this before!". So life is MUCH better.

Teancom

Teancom is still the quiet, happy, sweet, cuddly one, so he has now eclipsed my other kids as the current favorite. Mothers should not have favorites. But at times when everything is chaotic, including my older 2 kids, I can sit on the couch and gush my sweet baby and that's awesome. Soon he too will be the full energy in-your-face little boy, so he can keep favorite status for a while. :)

No real news with Rob or me, as usual. If there is, I'll make some bold headline like "ROB PUBLISHED HIS FIRST PAPER". You will know when there is real news here, not just non-news.

Nintendo Wii

Rob and I did play the Nintendo Wii for the first time last night. We made our little miis. I told Rob, "Your mii looks a lot like you, spelled u-i-i." It was fun to play. I thought my mii looked quite like me while Rob's (with the beard) looked like Kenny Loggins. But I have now been a Simpsons avatar and a little mii. My life feels complete.

We love you all!

Rob, Tamra, Miciah, Elijah, and Teancom