Things That Go

The mini car show we had going on Sunday got all the kids interested in vehicles, I guess. Ari, Free, Xanthe and Jackson built a rocket that could transform into a magic elevator. A little more technologically advanced than the Model A, huh? No wonder I couldn't find them for awhile. They were probably on another planet!
Less magical was the broken jogger stroller the little kids like to play in. The front wheel is missing, thanks to an ill-advised off-road excursion through Josh and Emily's back yard. (Yes, it was my idea.) So instead of planting my new flowers the other day, I played Rickshaw Driver, hauling the kids around in the broken stroller. It's hard work being a "Good Mom." I only lasted about 12 minutes. Jackson pretended to drive the MG we have parked in our garage. I thought it would be a safe place to play until he said, "You can hotwire this thing, can't you?" OK, time to come in the house! Jennie, I hope you don't mind your kids' pictures all over my blog. They are just so cute!
I resisted the urge to take a picture today when Xanthe told me, "Look, Mom, I'm on the potty train!" Yes, the elusive "potty train" has been circling around our house this week. It's a little bit like the Polar Express...you can't see it unless you believe. I'm starting to believe in diapers until age 5. But I hope to soon be able to add Xanthe to my list of "Things That Go." Wish me luck!

My Favorite Recipe

I got so many good recipes from all of you. Thanks! I plan to try all of them...next week. For this week, here's my recipe:
Start with a week in suburbia. Add 14 dance classes, a flute, a voice and a cello lesson, 3 guitar lessons, 4 violin lessons, 2 soccer games, 2 play practices, choir practice, a baby shower, a birthday party, a sleepover, (thanks, Jen!) a missionary farewell, a play, a movie, a handful of family gatherings, church, 3 trips to the park and lots of school, homework and practicing. Sprinkle with cheese sticks, goldfish crackers and David's Pizza.
That's my recipe, and I love to make it every week. Granted, you shouldn't make it if you don't enjoy a steady diet of chaos and adreneline. But I do.
Today Scott's aunt and uncle, Ken and Loretta, had their missionary farewell, which was wonderful. It was followed by a huge, delicious lunch and time spent with family. Ken and Loretta are unfailingly supportive of everything we do, and we love them so much. It will be lonely not having them around, but we hope to visit them.
This afternoon, the Kings gathered for birthdays. Jim pulled up in his vintage Model A Ford and delighted all the kids by taking them for rides up the street. They loved the "rumble seat." Not to be outdone, Felshaw disappeared and soon came roaring down the street in his old Jag. If you're going to host a party, you'll want to have classic cars around. Between the cars and the Masters, the guys were completely content.
Tonight, at the close of a great week, I am so grateful for all of you. With such good company by my side, I look back with fondness and forward with enthusiasm. And the present is pretty great, too, thanks to such awesome friends and family!

Xanthe's Play Doh Birthday Party

Happy Birthday!

In 2005, there was a woman in China who was pregnant. When she went into labor on April 10th, she most likely already knew the baby was a girl. She had already decided not to have an abortion, but to secretly carry the baby to term and then say goodbye. I don't know this woman, the sister of my heart. I don't know what factors contributed to her decision to give birth to Xanthe. I know she was courageous, she put herself in great danger, and she did it for her daughter, even knowing that her daughter would call another woman mama. I wonder if her father was the person who left the little bundle at the gate of the orphanage before dawn on April 14th. Is there a more painful journey than walking away from your child? Her umbilical cord was still attached. She wore only a hat and a shirt and had a baby bottle of sugar water by her side. Don't think that Chinese parents cast their baby girls aside. Don't imagine that any parent is capable of such disregard. Condemn the one-child policy, but never condemn Xanthe's birth parents, who gave her life at great sacrifice and risk. At the moment of their greatest agony, Xanthe was already in our hearts, and we were praying for her safe arrival in our family. I wish they could know that. Xanthe was a 14-pound little noodle when she was placed in our arms at 13 months. She was too terrified to do anything but stick out her tongue to let us know she was in there! She was perfectly quiet for 3 days, but she has more than made up for it ever since.

Today is Xanthe's 3rd birthday. When someone asks her how old she is, she says, "A doll cradle." Maybe that's what she wants for her birthday! I made Erin's sticky buns this morning to celebrate, and to hold us over until the birthday party tomorrow! What I meant to say before I got all emotional was, "Happy Birthday, Xanthe! We're so glad you're here, so glad we found each other, and so happy Heavenly Father chose you for us. We love you!"

Here is one of Golda's Wonderland-inspired pictures. She's rehearsing for a production of Alice in Wonderland, so it's all about Lewis Carroll's bad acid trip around here lately. Last night, Grandma and I took 7 adorable kids to "Alice" at WX High. For Golda, it was research for her role to see another production of the play. Aunt Loretta's brother, J. D., pictured here with us and a random cast member, was the director. The play was wonderful, and the other kids around us were noisier than ours, so I was happy. After the show came the ice cream. Isn't that the whole point of going to a play? The kids probably ate more ice cream than the taco soup I fixed for dinner. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that we have had a variation on taco soup roughly five out of seven nights of the week since Christmas. And cereal the other two. Anyone have any other ideas for sustenance? Give me your best easy recipe. No, wait. Give me your best idea for something we can eat that requires either no advance planning at all or 4 minutes of dumping stuff in a crock pot at 9:00 AM. An actual recipe would be too optimistic. Something a step up from cheese sticks in the car on the way to play practice...

Riding in Cars With Boys

I took a ride with just one tiny little kid in the car, but still, NPR was no match for his banter. Dressed as the elephant man (what kind of preschool does this to kids?), Free's mostly one-sided conversation went like this...

"...and it went all the way to my room and I invisibled all the cookies and they were invisible and it was a giant pile and nobody could see them and then I ate them, what if?

-silence-

"MOM!! What IF??"

"Uhh...that would be really big!"

"Yeah, it would be a gousand million of cookies!"

"A thousand million is a lot of cookies."

"No, Mom, I SAID a GOWSAND MILLION! That's a lot."

Then I said, thinking about dinner and ballet and homework and the tax stuff I was going to pick up, "Um, it is? How do you know?"

"Because elephants do it!" Then he sighed like I was never going to get it. He was right, of course. I don't think I could follow his logic, even if I could focus.

And that's why I sometimes end up at the grocery store when I meant to go the post office.

Creative Genius?

Freestone, the kid I sometimes call Mr. Contrary, is always busy inventing ways to get out of guitar practicing. He doesn't go with the standard, "I don't want to," or "I'm too tired." His methods are far more advanced than that, albeit no more effective. He has yet to come up with an excuse so good, it actually gets him out of practicing. But he's still working on it. It began one lesson day when I told him to get in the car for guitar. He said, "Oh, I quit guitar. See ya!" Nice try. He tried the same trick week after week. Points for determination, but it wasn't going to work.

One day, Free started sitting on his guitar stool in front of the music stand and tapping out rhythms on the music stand. OK...He did it faithfully for a few days before letting me in on the fact that the music stand was his new instrument, and he was practicing it, so would I please be quiet. He was upset when I got out the guitar and told him he now had two instruments. His next endeavor was the bath-toy-penny-whistle, a career that was mercifully short-lived. Free walked around the house sliding up and down the scale on this plastic whistle until I grabbed it out of his mouth and threw it into the gully, overcome by annoyance. Freestone was sad about his penny whistle future being destroyed in such an undignified way.

Soon after that, however, he came home from school with a new instrument, the Paper Plate "Houka-laylee." It was great for me because the rubber band strings didn't make a lot of noise. So I let Free play it all day until it was time to practice guitar. He does practice every day. Sometimes he even does a good job. Recently, Free poked his finger in my eye when I gave him a "good job" hug. Instead of throwing him into the gully, I walked away. From the next room, I heard the guilt-ridden strains of Freestone's guitar, playing his song perfectly, a feat he can't seem to accomplish when I'm present. It was his apology for blinding me in my right eye, and it worked. I've never heard a more heart-felt "Sorry, Mom." When words fail, music speaks, right?

I told Freestone's guitar teacher yesterday that I heard Freestone play his song perfectly. Free quickly countered with, "No I didn't!" So if you see Freestone, don't tell him that his mom said he was a smart, incredible, tenderhearted, lovable boy who does his practicing every day. He'll deny it.

Fairies and Marionettes

Araceli ran home from school with her first missing tooth in an envelope. She chose her favorite Love Box and put it under her pillow by 11:30 AM. How could the tooth fairy forget, faced with such enthusiasm? She came!

It's not often that a marrionette show is on our calendar, but that's just what happened yesterday. The fifth graders have been working very hard on their production. Each kid made their own marionette and its clothes. They wrote scripts in which their marionette talked with another marionette on a stage. Golda's was Amelia Earhart, so Golda learned a lot about aviation. It was so fun and creative. I was impressed by all the 5th graders. Our teachers are amazing! If only they could think of a way to turn algebra into a Broadway-style production.

Chapter Two: Wild Animals We Tried to Turn Into Pets

When my family read the last blog, they started saying, "What about the snake? What about that seagull?" I realized we had a whole other subset of pets, wild animals who were injured and/or captured by us.

The seagull...Who doesn't find a seagull with a broken wing at Antelope Island and take it to the vet? That's normal, right? All we got for our trouble was an expensive diagnosis: the wing can't be fixed.

We quickly replaced the seagull with a baby bat that one of the cats had injured. It was the cutest rabies carrier ever. In my parents' defense, I'm sure they didn't know my brothers and I were keeping a pet bat in a jar. Another "pet" we acquired courtesy of the cats was a little snake that was paralyzed from the waist down. I'm not sure where the waist is on a snake, but it would drag the back half of its body around the diorama of the American West that we kept it in. It slept in the teepee. I took it to school for extra credit in science.

This one is hard to admit to, because I know raccoons are bad. But our raccoons were so friendly, they would eat Oreos right out of our hands. Again, we dodged the rabies bullet on that one. When the raccoons chewed through my parents' roof a couple of years ago, moved into their upstairs and had babies, it was war. The Critter Gitter came and set cages, trapping several raccoons, a neighbor's cat and Star. Now we don't feed raccoons anymore.

Lastly, the wild pig was one that not even my family could keep. I didn't even know there were wild pigs in this area. It was enormous, and it came out of nowhere and vigorously dug under the cement in our breezeway, breaking a sewer pipe in the process. I probably tried to catch it and keep it in a doll cradle in my room, but it was too fast. It was just as well...imagine what could have happened if it had gotten hold of my zebra finches.

Menagerie

When my parents brought me home from the hospital, Mephisto was waiting in my crib. He was a mangy, long-haired cat that had turned up as an orphan kitten in the garbage can one day. "Geets" was always there to bite me, growl at me or demand food, right up until I left for college. Shortly thereafter, Geets, 18 years old, blind and deaf, fell asleep on the wheel of the car right before my mom left to take my brother to football practice. There was a funeral, with a custom-made casket inscribed with the word, "Mephisto." We have more pictures of the funeral (My brother with a shovel, my dad holding the casket, my brother looking sadly at the grave) than we have of my high school graduation. Geets was my family's first pet, but by no means the last.
In fact, there were also three dogs in the picture by the time I came along. They were Afghan hounds, and my dad already had them when he got married. They lived at my grandparents' house, roaming their fenced yard, occasionally escaping to terrorize the neighborhood. Ajax, Achilles and Apollo were well-known to all the neighbors. Of all the dogs, Apollo was my favorite. He was soft with black fur, and he was the most gentle. He would lean on me and encourage me to scratch his ears. All three dogs probably died of heart attacks, due to their rich diets. My grandpa would get so annoyed with the royal treatment the dogs got. Big Golda would fix him a big plate of breakfast. Then, just as he was about to take the first bite, she'd whisk the plate away, give it to the dogs and replace it with a "fresh plate." There were times when my grandpa would leave for work with an empty stomach. But the dogs never went hungry!

Besides Mephisto, there were three other cats named Cheerful, Bonus and L'Orange. (Named at about the time my dad thought it would be fun and easy to teach his kids French.) Cats must be heartier than dogs, because the four cats we had stuck around through several dogs and a short-lived chicken named Gerta who refused to lay eggs on Sunday.
There was Calaban, a huge Great Dane that my mom rescued from the pound at great expense about a month before he died of cancer. He was only with us long enough to survive a $500.00 surgery. Then there was Reddy, who followed my dad home from a jog one day. He was a spunky loner who took off into the night after eating two of our rabbits (Belle and Bonbon). Did you think the menagerie was limited to cats and dogs?

On the contrary, we had many other four-legged friends, as well as some with only two legs, but a lot of feathers. My favorite pet was a ferret I got in 8th grade. I loved that ferret. She was known for escaping into the heating ducts with our socks, which aggravated my parents to no end. I'm not even going to mention how I took her to school to help with my campaign speech for 8th grade officer. I didn't win.

My parents must have been either the nicest parents in the world or clinically insane. We had three peacocks that roamed outside at will. They roosted on the chimney, hopping up and down when the metal got hot. One day, I swear, a family of wild peacocks came and took them away. We never saw them again, but we still heard them crowing every morning. I even had an ant farm. Those little insects worked so hard...until my mom put the farm in the window so they could get some sun. I came home from school to find a hundred dry, shriveled-up ants dead in their tunnels. I had a hermit crab who bit my hand. When I screamed and tried to shake it off, half of the crab flew across the room. We didn't visit the pet store for awhile after that, but when we did, we came home with a chameleon who immediately went on a hunger strike and died 3 days later. It was the opposite of what happened when we bought two gerbils, both of whom were guaranteed to be boys. About three dozen baby gerbils later, my mom "took them into the mountains to let them live in the wild." By "mountians," she meant the side of the freeway. I'm sure they made a tasty snack for the first hawk that soared by. As karmic payback, Mom locked her car keys in the trunk when she got the gerbil cage out and had to walk all the way home.

After all the pet capers I went through as a kid, I have completely learned my lesson. My kids haven't had very many pets at all. Besides the hamster. And the second, look-alike hamster I bought after I left the cage door open. And the mice Santa brought. And all the fish. Oh, and the baby ducks we got for Easter one year (they live at Barnes Park now.) And the chicks we got the next year. (Mandy the cat ate most of them.) But right now, we have a very reasonable household. Only one dog. And two cats. And a very smart and friendly guinea pig.

Last week, I got a call from the school. It was Golda. Our dog, Star, had walked over to the school. She had never been inside the school before, but she walked in and found Golda's classroom and trotted right over to her desk. The whole class was in an uproar. See, that's the kind of thing only a trusty dog will do.

I don't know what kind of life lessons my kids will learn from having pets, if any. What I learned as a kid living in a menagerie was that my parents were awesome! They were always up for a new adventure, up to and including their two relatively new Afghan hounds. When my mom surprised my dad with the two furry puppies for Christmas, he got all teary-eyed. Now he brings them over to visit the kids, and that's a whole other story!