Crazy Hair

 Crazy Hair Day.  It's part of Red Ribbon Week, the week that the elementary school introduces my innocent, naive children to drugs, drug overdoses and the possibility of dying of a drug overdose and having your eyes roll back in your head.  (Yes, that is an image from last year that still haunts Ari.) No trauma so far this year, but I still wish that my kids didn't know so much about drugs, courtesy of the public school system.  Believe me, we're not cooking meth at our house, and most of our neighbors aren't either.  And if they are, they're not just giving it away to my kids.  They're selling it for a profit to people with money. a.k.a., not third graders.

Oh, sorry, did I get off on a tangent?  Anyway, Ari has been telling me for days that Crazy Hair Day is the most important day of the year.  I've heard her talk about it with her friends, planning out their elaborate 'do's, giddy with anticipation.  Ari has proclaimed to me numerous times that "THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST CRAZY HAIR DAY EVER!"  (She usually talks in all caps.)

So did I help her plan?  Did I buy supplies?  Did I get excited along with her?  No.  The big morning rolled around and Ari had nothing.  We are not hair people.  We don't have hair stuff. A brush, maybe.  I tried to convince her to stick a bunch of elastics in her mane, but her plans were far more grandiose.  That's how we ended up at Bowman's early this morning, Ari with thirty bucks worth of fancy hair supplies in her arms and me armed with some common sense and a dash of realism.  We ended up with a can of magenta hair spray and a can of glitter hair spray.  For under three dollars, Ari was back to her giddy self.  Phew!  To get even more for our money, I suggested she take the hairspray to school in case anyone forgot about Crazy Hair day.  She told me that hairspray isn't allowed at school.  Oh, but the school is going to make sure the kids know all about drugs.

ANYWAY, we saturated Ari's hair with magenta, then with glitter, and she loved it!  I have to say, it was the most benign, well-behaved "crazy" hair I've ever seen, but it was beautiful.  I think Ari should always have magenta, glittery hair.  It matches her soul.

Xanthe reluctantly allowed us to do her hair too, cringing and shouting, "They said we didn't have to do crazy hair!  What if it doesn't work?  What if it doesn't come out?"  She loved it.  Xanthe's hair is magic, though.  No matter what we do to it, it reverts back to the Asian Bob.  It will probably look completely normal by the time she gets home.

Freestone didn't do crazy hair because the 4th grade was also doing crazy hat day.  Oh my gosh, people, could we please slow down on the special events?!  When you have hair day AND hat day on the same day, during a week when each day is a different dress-up day for Red Ribbon Week AND it's Halloween, you really need to ask yourselves if it's overkill, and I'm not talking drug overdoses.  Geez, I sound angry.  I'm not.  Maybe I should get some of that purple hair spray.  I bet it would be difficult to feel hostile about school if I had glamorous, glowing, glittery hair like Ari.  Even the alliteration is alleviating my angst.

Escargot, Anyone?

It was unseasonably warm here yesterday, and sunny in the window where the snails live.  And, well, it's easy to forget about pets that mostly don't move.  They don't even have faces!  I didn't exactly saute Ptolemy's snails in butter and garlic, but I did find out that they don't like their water hot.  It makes them, um, die.

Good-bye, Snailie and Davis.  We will miss you!  Or at the very least, the kids will eventually notice that your trifle bowl is gone.  Not yet, however.  Ptolemy is busy with his new pet, a millipede who likes to watch Arthur.  (Not the giant pet store kind.  The kind you find in the garage.)  I think he'll make a good distraction, although he has already broken in half.  Ptolemy put him in a cup and said, "Don't touch him!  He'll come to life!"  You know, maybe Ptolemy isn't a pet person.  He might be traumatized by the time he carried an earwig into the house and said enthusiastically, "Look at this scary bug!"  I screamed and then he screamed, "Get it off me!  Get it off me!"

So he's ruined for a career in entomology, and now he's not a good candidate as a French chef either.  Is this kid going to have any career options left when I'm finished with him?  The only position petulant Ptolemy will be qualified for is Emperor, and for that, he'll have to move to 19th century Japan.  Maybe by then someone will have invented time travel.  Otherwise, Tolly will be doomed.  Just like his snails.

Don't Fret, Ruby!

Ruby has taken the fretting out of playing music...just for this week, though.  She has a solo coming up in orchestra, so she has been playing the violin a LOT, even if some of it was while reclining on the couch.  She says guitar is so much easier because of the frets.  You can't be out of tune on the guitar like you can on the violin!  But don't fret, Ruby.  At least when you play the fiddle.  Ha ha.  Don't you just love musician humor?

We have another reason not to fret today, too.  Ruby went to the knee doctor this morning (Pepper Murray, for those knee aficionados in the area) and he gave her the go-ahead to dance without worrying about what could be wrong with the knee.  Basically, it is still healing from the original injury, but the x-rays looked a lot better than they did three weeks ago.  In the first x-rays, Ruby's kneecap looked like it was floating in space, far, far away from the rest of her body.  Now it is settling back into its groove, so Ruby can too.  Ballet after school today!  Yippee!

So don't fret about anything, Ruby.  Not today!  Until you practice guitar, anyway.  Then you can "fret" all you want!

Get Candy!

 Cutest thing you've ever seen?  Wait until you hear the funny things he says.  Tonight it was, "Tizzy and Rolayne are SO cute.  And Abe and me are so NOT cute."  Another Ptolemy zinger was tonight when I was tucking him in.  I said, "I'm so glad we have you!  Before you were born, we didn't even have a Ptolemy in our family!  Can you even imagine?"  He said, "I was in Paris?"  Yeah, kinda like that.

One of the best reasons to have kids:  Pictures like this.  One of the best reasons not to have kids:  The sugar crashes that happen about 3 hours after pictures like this are taken.  But are they adorable or WHAT?  Ari was Little Pink Riding Hood and had, you guessed it, a pink cape with her costume.  Xanthe was an octopus because of the dangly things on the ballet costume.  I'm just glad the kids are able to be creative with the costumes we have.  Otherwise, they would all be dancers for every Halloween.  Octopus?  OK.
Freestone earned 16 points practicing today, which, according to the rules I was making up as we went along, was just enough to buy a Halloween costume with, except we never got around to it.  So he was a Dementor who found a mask in the cupboard above the microwave at the last minute.  I think we're getting carried away with the creativity here.  And Tziporah's mom almost forgot her costume.  She was Bambi.  No idea where the costume came from.  Can't believe it fit!  Scott and Golda dressed up as Utah Ute football fans.  And just to lend a legitimate air to their costumes, they actually went to the game.  Go Utes!

 Ruby in the car on the way from Nutcracker to the ward Halloween party...perfecting her "ballet dancer" costume with fake eyelashes.  She was going to be a Jellicle Cat, but she didn't have a tail and could only find one leg warmer.  And, since it's not 1989, I'm not sure how many people would get the reference.  Then again, how many people guessed that Xanthe was an octopus?

 So...I can just put ALL this stuff in my mouth!?!?

 "I'm just going to have this, OK?"

 Xanthe quickly had all her candy sorted into categories.  She gave me ALL of her Reese's.  I something wrong with her, or is she just really sweet?!  I told her she was my favorite child.

 Ruby and her friend Taylor used Tziporah to get candy.  I mean...they took Tziporah trunk-or-treating for her first time!  Aww...  I heard that Xanthe also used Tizzy for her own personal gain, asking people for "an extra one for my baby sister."  I swear, kids in large families get very resourceful about getting their fair (or not-so-fair) share!

I think we'll call it a night!  This reminds me of my all-time favorite Halloween story form Jerry Seinfeld.  We have the book, which is a classic, but it's also hilarious as a stand-up routine.  Enjoy!

Build It and We MIGHT Come

We have kinda chosen a certain level of mediocrity here at our house that is nonetheless hard to maintain!  I know my kids aren't going to graduate from Harvard magna cum laud with a double major in astrophysics and piano performance, but I'm hoping they won't drop out of high school to bar-tend, either.
When I imagine what I want for our kids, I try to organize each day, each month and each school year toward my vision of success.  And then we all fall short, of course, every single day.  What I need is a bunch of kids whose parents are complete slackers to be my kids' classmates so that we can pat ourselves on the back if we remember to turn in our homework packets.  What I see is a bunch of kids whose parents are totally on the ball, kids who always turn in all of their homework and even have time to enter the Reflections contest!  Where do parents find the time to read all those guidelines, buy all the materials and then remember to turn their inventions in on time with the forms filled out and signed?  Ari had to build a volcano this week.  It took all week, and it was still wet when she turned it in!  It was all we could do to add that to our list of obligations, and we had to put up with Ptolemy smelling like a muskrat from lack of attention to accomplish it.

Xanthe now has to do math online.  I can never remember the password and I always put it off until the last day.  It has become a huge thorn in my side, along with turning in Ari's "Monday Folder" on Tuesdays and remembering on Fridays when Freestone read out loud that week so that he can turn in his log on Mondays.  (Wouldn't it be easier if we had the log to fill in as we went along?)  Maybe not, since I keep forgetting to have Xanthe fill in the pumpkins on her reading chart when she reads.  I have to make each pumpkin look different on the day it's due so it doesn't look like we filled them all in that morning, which, uh, we did.

Ruby stayed home from school yesterday because her knee hurt so badly.  At the end of the day, she said it felt much better after not having to slog around the school carrying a heavy bag, not to mention participating in gym class!  It made me so sad that she is suffering to gain success, and sacrificing what she really loves - ballet - to prop up her grades.  If we let our guard down for a minute, we pay.  If we get behind, we can't regain our footing.  There is no time for injury, no room for rest, no margin for error.  Of course, I could pull all the kids out of all their extra-curricular activities, including the three or four church activities we have every week (YW, scouts, activity days, ward parties...).  But these are MY kids and there are things I want to educate them in, things I think are essential, things that will bring them joy...and scholarships.  So we add those to the list, and we add the things the kids are passionate about, and we add the social and family obligations.  These are not things that are frivolous.  We have a plan here, but it's freakin' hard!

I got a call yesterday about Young Women's volleyball and how Ruby was supposed to be there in 15 minutes.  I said, "Sorry, we just don't do volleyball.  And Ruby is injured anyway."  And the leader said, "But isn't Ruby the Beehive president?"  Do you see why we can't just opt out?  I stood my ground on volleyball, though, like I do - believe it or not - on so many other things.  When people say to me, "I don't know how you do it all," I am at a loss for words.  We don't and we can't.  So just a note to all the math worksheets, volleyball games, hastily rescheduled church activities, gym classes and volcanos:  We are doing our best.  Take it or leave it.

Build it and we will come.  Or NOT.  And speaking of old movies, please excuse us while we take some time off to watch White Nights, my favorite movie from the '80's, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov.  For extra credit in Golda's dance class, of course.

Xanthe the MVP

 Xanthe is the MVP in her class this week!  She made her poster twice because she wanted to do it weeks in advance, so she got it finished well ahead of time.  Then, the week before her big spotlight week, her teacher gave her a special posterboard to do her poster on.  Worried that it wouldn't count if it wasn't on the special posterboard, which was red instead of white, she did it all over again.  And now I can't find pictures of either poster!  Or the trophy Xanthe took for her big show-and-tell day today.  (She played a graduation piece at her last recital.  Woot woot!!)  I'll have to take some pictures after school, if Xanthe can stop long enough to pose.  Thursday is the day she comes home fast and gets ready for ballet!  Even though it's not until 5:00, she likes to get right down to business after school.  It's been a fun week with our little MVP.  She is just blossoming this year.  First grade is crushing at our school.  It can suck the life right out of you.  Now that she can breathe without fear of recrimination, she is taking off with reading, piano, math...everything!  We're so proud of Xanthe.  She is a fighter in every sense.  (Some of her siblings and cousins even have scars to prove it!)  We're so proud of Xanthe.  Here is the letter I wrote for her teacher to read to the class:



Xanthe Mary Mei has been waiting to be the MVP at school all year. She has
had her poster planned for weeks! Xanthe loves to be organized and
prepared, and besides that, it's awesome to be the MVP, and she could
hardly wait!

Xanthe was born in China on April 10, 2005. On that day, her family here
in Utah didn't even know she had been born, but we were waiting for a
special little baby girl to join our family. When Xanthe was about 10
months old, her nanny at the orphanage took some beautiful pictures of her.
Those were the first pictures we saw of our little daughter. One Xanthe's
first birthday, our family celebrated at Chuck E. Cheese. Xanthe wasn't at
the party, because she was still waiting for us in China. It's OK, though,
because Xanthe was really scared of Chuck E. Cheese when she was little.
Imagine how scared she would have been when she was only one year old!

Xanthe's mom and dad went all the way to China to pick her up when she was
13 months old. She was scared, but she liked to giggle and stick her
tongue out at her dad! When she got home to Utah, she discovered that she
had three older sisters and an older brother. I'm not sure if she was too
happy about sharing the spotlight at first, but now she is really glad she
has siblings. And that's good because she also has a little brother and a
baby sister! Xanthe is a good sister to everyone.

Xanthe loves to dance. You should see her fly across the lawn when she
shows us her dances in the front yard. She has only missed ballet one time
in three years, but sometimes she has a bad dream that she forgot to go to
ballet. She just loves it so much, she couldn't live without it! She also
loves to go to tumbling class on Mondays and piano lessons before school on
Thursdays. If you see Xanthe on a Thursday and she is really tired, it's
probably because she got up way too early for piano! At least she gets to
stop at McDonald's on the way, right?

I hope everyone in the class gets to be friends with Xanthe because her
cute little smile will make you happy and her laughter will make you feel
like the sun is shining all winter long! We love you, Xanthe!

Love, Mom

Happy Birthday to Me!

I'm lucky because my birthday is at such a gorgeous time of year.  October 24 is always the kind of breathtaking day that makes you glad to be alive.  Today I'm celebrating by living my life.  Getting kids off to school, cleaning the kitchen, listening to toddler babble and baby babble, wrapping gifts for my dear friends who share my birthday, welcoming my mom back from her trip.

I don't want to be whisked off to a spa or sent away on a shopping trip.  Then I'd miss my birthday!  I want to be here, where my birthday is, celebrating with my favorite people.  Everyone says it's better to give than to get, which works out well if you're a parent because it's a hundred kinds of giving, 24 hours a day.  Which is why my birthday started with a 2 am feeding and will probably end with shooing kids off to bed at midnight.  I take that back.  My birthday really started last night when Ruby texted me from her bedroom, "Hey, it's already your birthday in Paris.  Happy birthday!"

You can't give without getting!  I'm so glad I'm here!

Homeward Bound

Sadly, sadly, we had to leave Paris.  But happily, we had some amazing kids to come home to, in a house that we love in a city that we call home.  We left by Metro early in the morning, catching one last glimpse of Notre Dame before going underground.  Here is Freestone at Charles de Gaulle airport.  Little does he know he's about an hour into a 24-hour doorstep-to-doorstep journey.  That's what you get when you buy the cheap seats!  But we don't care.  Even the flights are an adventure when you don't fly much.  I love the airports, with their singular global energy.  You feel so alive!  Maybe less so when you've been awake for 24 hours, but we had a great trip home.

Freestone bought his last macaroon.  We gave him our last few euros and sent him to one of the duty-free stores.  He came back with a giant tube of Mentos that contained six smaller tubes.  It was so cool, we scrounged up a few more coins and bought one for each of the kids.  It was the biggest hit ever when we got home with all the presents.

Traveler Tizzy waiting for takeoff.  I got a whole row of seats for the two of us on the trans-Atlantic flight.  Tziporah was a perfect angel.  We even slept horizontal for awhile.

Freestone telling Tizzy not to worry about take-off and pointing out the pretty clouds.

We had a layover in New York and another one in Dallas!  Each flight was shorter than the last, so even though it took a long time to get home, it was anything but awful.  The flight attendants doted on us and the kids got all kinds of compliments on how good they were.  For the most part, there was a lot of this...

How angelic is that?  And she's even floating above the clouds!  Little sweetie.

Thank heavens for Freestone's Kindle. 

At last we touched down in Salt Lake.  Tziporah had been asleep for the last two flights so she was wide awake to greet Uncle Josh when he picked us up at the airport.  I texted him to ask him if he would pick us up and I said, "Sorry it's so late."  He said, "Late?  Not for a King!"  It was only 10:30.  Kings are just getting started at 10:30, right Josh?  Freestone must have the King night owl gene.  He stayed up for most of the 24 hour trip reading Harry Potter.

We were so happy to see our precious kids when we got home!  Ptolemy really missed us.  We heard that he was hugging his cousin Jersey and said, "My baby is in Paris so I have to hug this one."  Aww...
I was thankful for the timing of our return.  We got back during the kids' fall break so there was little to do except rest, catch up on a few music lessons and restore everything to order.  Grandma and Grandpa had provided very well for the kids, feeding them and getting them where they needed to be.  Thank you, thank you!  Ptolemy, once we were home, wasn't about to let anyone out of his sight.  We were at a Halloween carnival the day after we got back when Ptolemy, standing right in front of me, burst into tears.  I picked him up and he sobbed, "I thought I was lost!"  I hate to leave him, he gets so lonesome!

At least we won't be leaving him again in the foreseeable future.  I have a feeling the next trip that far afield will include just our travel-sick older girls...without us...as soon as they can save up the cash and find a way.  I'm content to stay home for awhile.  This is where my heart is.  Tonight, after our first day back in the fray, was a little intense.  There was a stack of make-up work for Freestone, two hours of make-up practicing for Ruby's orchestra class, catch-up reading for Xanthe, Golda steadily working, Ruby's knee on ice, Tziporah wanting to be part of everything, the Giants vs. the Cardinals and needy little Ptolemy vying for his share of the love.  And then Ari said, "I can't believe my volcano is due this week."

Paris is all well and good, but this is where the action is.  It's good to have Paris in my heart and Utah under my feet.

Our Last Day...Opera and Luxembourg Garden

 On our last day in Paris, we went to see the Opera House.  Remember Phantom of the Opera?  Story took place here.  It's such a beautiful building! 

 You don't see many old-school Roma beggars in Paris these days, but this woman was the real deal.  She was beautiful.

 Freestone finally found the perfect Swatch watch and bought it in this tiny store by the Opera.  He wanted it to have the date and numbers.  He loves it.

 Macaroons are all the rage.  They are tiny, expensive and semi-yummy.  I would rather have something extremely chocolatey.  And bigger!

 And we're back...to the glass shop.  I think we were calling this the last time.  But then we went back for the final time later that night.

 Freestone's creative photography

 I found out on this trip, from all the pictures, that I am older and uglier than I thought.  Bummer!

 The Luxembourg Gardens, at the palace built for Catherine de Medici, are gorgeous.  The grounds are like the Temple Square of Paris in terms of floral backdrops.  Had we been in Salt Lake, the place would have been full of girls in wedding dresses accompanied by photographers.  We did see quite a few wedding couples around town, but they were always in front of more famous backdrops.

 This is where I caught a pigeon!  We used a crushed baby cookie that I dug out of my pocket and the pigeons loved it.  While Freestone distracted them, I put my hand on one!  It was greasy and it started flapping its wings.  I was afraid of hurting the greasy little thing and spending our last day in France at a veterinarian's clinic, so I let go.  I had it though!  Scott, you owe me a hundred bucks.

 Trying to get a good shot of my parents that's potentially Christmas-card-worthy.  It's tough work!  They have the same problem I do:  the camera makes them look a lot older than they think they are.  :)

 At least this guy is photogenic!

 ...When he wants to be.

 Watching guys play chess

 This is for Golda and Ruby...the ballet store we visited.

 I take it back about all the pictures of Freestone being good.

 For our last supper, we got sucked in by a restaurant hawker.  They stand in front of their restaurants and try to lure you in with their charm.  This one lured us in with his three-course meal for fairly cheap.  It was just the kind of ambiance you hope for in Europe.  The food was delicious, the pace was relaxed.  I had French onion soup (only they just call it onion soup. ha ha.), spaghetti carbonara and creme caramel (flan).  Yum!!  We all had to take turns walking outside with Tziporah, but that in and of itself was a delight.  So many people stopped in their tracks to admire her.  One restaurant hawker just pinched her cheeks and tickled her.  It was amusing to see grown men transform into little kids when they interacted with Tizzy.  On the bus, one older gentleman was talking to her.  He said, "Just a  minute," and reached into his pocket and put on a fake nose!  A three-inch-long fake nose!  Just to get a laugh out of a baby.  That is so funny!

 Freestone looking at the Eiffel Tower through an Eiffel Tower glass keychain he bought.

 Since it was our last night, we stopped on Pont Neuf to watch the Eiffel Tower twinkle one last time.

And then we went home to pack Freestone's collection.  I wanted to stay longer!