Approaching Easter

Every year our Easter celebrations get a little bigger (and better). We started in 2009 by celebrating Holy Week. Is that the right term? When we started increasing our Easter activities, the only thing that came to mind was the phrase used in Venezuela: "semana santa" to refer to the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

This year I wanted to really make it big, so we started all the way back on Ash Wednesday, which I have to Google every year to make sure I remember what it is. Just like our nightly Christmas devotionals, every night we've gathered around a candle advent calendar, but instead of 24 days to mark off, we count to 40. Forty days from Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday. Forty days remind us of Christ's 40-day fast in preparation for his work; and 40 days to remind us of his life.

Here's the pattern for our nightly "emotional devotional": light the advent candles, sing, tell a story, hang an ornament on our Easter tree, fight over how many candles everyone gets to blow out (this is the "emotional" in our devotional), have family prayer.

The song is anything about Jesus from the Primary Songbook or the Hymnbook. This year the story part comes from a book I found on the bargain table at Seagull Book that summarizes Christ's ministry. We're just going along, hoping it works out to 40 stories for our 40 days. The ornaments are pictures of events from Christ's ministry from the Friend or the Ensign, glued on black or white cardstock, with a loop taped to the back--high class. We're still about five pictures short, so I'm hoping this next month's issues help me out! This year I'm just trying to amass 40 pictures. Hopefully I'll remember to keep my eyes open the rest of the year so I can upgrade my selections for future years. And the Easter tree is a bunch of forsythia branches from the backyard. When I first cut them, they were bare sticks. After about 10 days, they started to bud and we had great discussions about resurrection, and life coming out of death. Unfortunately, the branches won't last 40 days, so this is our second Easter tree. I got tired of dead flowers falling into the candles, so I cut a new batch.

The best part of course, has been the chance to review all of Christ's ministry in 40 days, even at the five-minute approach we're taking with our young kids. Seth has really gotten into the whole countdown thing. "Mom, it's 12 days until Palm Sunday!" It cracks me up. How many seven-year-old kids know what Palm Sunday is?

A lot of livin' to do

The days and weeks fly by, filled with chores, church, school, and long lists of "have-tos" but in between we've had some fun...

Seth joined the city theatre program and was a Munchkin in the junior Wizard of Oz production. They worked hard learning the songs, dances, and cues, and he had a super time, sticking it out through four performances in three days, including a double matinee and evening run. His favorite part was having family and friends in the audience. All his Utah cousins came and cheered for him, and you could see him just puff up with pride.

Meeting Carden's favorite author, Brandon Mull, at a book signing for his new title. Thanks, Costco, for encouraging literacy!

The night before the Wizard of Oz premier, Seth was in the First Grade's "Dr. Seuss' Celebration of Reading" performance. The kids got to wear their pajamas and sing catchy ditties about Blends, Vowels, and the Marriage of Q and U.

Carden joined the school Knowledge Bowl team. For 10 weeks they met after school to memorize at least 400 flash cards for this year's Science topic. Simple machines, electricity, weather, geology, botany, Utah ecosystems, the solar system, and types of matter were all fair game. The moderator asked a question, and the first person to buzz in had to answer. A correct answer earned a bonus question that the team could collaborate on. Definitely some high-stakes, high-stress moments! Carden was a natural with his fast recall, and he was voted team captain. I was proud of how he made sure to let everyone have a chance to give the answer for the bonus questions and get their moment in the spotlight.

Lost in spaaaaace.....

I've heard from several friends, also doing time as Cub Scout den leaders, that our Blue & Gold Banquets are way over the top. Maybe so. We really tried to scale back this year, but apparently we're not so good at thinking small. It was really fun though, and the looks on the boys faces are classic when they see all their decorations everywhere.

The boys made tin-foil-toilet-paper rockets, decorated rocket ships and aliens to hang from the ceiling, and mapped constellations to hang on the walls. We had a great slide show of all the scout activities of the past year, and the highlight was the scout dance. We put glow sticks on their wrists and ankles, blasted some funky techno music, turned all the lights off, and let them jump around so all you could see was the moving glow sticks. The key to getting 8-10-year-old boys to dance is to do it in total darkness so no one can see them. We won't talk about the leaders' grand dance entrance: Sunglasses + husbands' suit coats + the Men in Black theme song.

Carden designed a UFO cake for the cake-decorating competition and I really tried to be hands-off and let him do it myself. It worked best if I actually left the room and came back when he was done. I piped the border between the two cake layers, but he did everything else.

I don't like glovies, I bite them!

Poor Claire. The "life is tough" lessons start young for some. Claire has sucked her thumb with great devotion from the time she could maneuver her hand to her mouth.

March 2010 (5 months old)

Claire sucks her thumb when she's tired, hungry, sleeping, upset, or bored. This appears to be about 20+ hours of her day. (Maybe it's time to rethink some parenting approaches!) The dentist warned us her teeth were already bent in, and her upper jaw was being reshaped by her bad habit and we would be looking at major orthodontics bills to restore her jaw width and straighten the bone the permanent teeth grow out of if she didn't stop.

With new resolve, we left the dentist's office determined to succeed. First stop: the nasty bitter nail polish. Didn't work. Not a flinch.

This month we are trying thumb gloves. A stretchy glove fits over the thumb but leaves the other four fingers free. She only sucks her left thumb, so we started with the left glove only. Within 48 hours she started sucking the right thumb, crafty girl. So on went the right glove, too. She started sucking her index finger. When she sees us bring out the gloves, she crams all 10 fingers in her mouth and runs away.

Claire has worn them for about four weeks and she hates them. She figured out that if we don't have the gloves buttoned on the tightest setting, she can pull them off with her teeth. The first time, she hid under the kitchen table, pulled them off and stomped over to Tyler. With as much vehemence as a 2-year-old is capable of (which is quite a lot, actually), she snarled "I take my gloves off. I bite them!!). Yikes.

She gets her favorite treat, fruit snacks, if she wears them. A few times we've caught her sucking the glove out of desperation, but she is slowly making the change. The first week I'd watch her fall asleep; she'd flutter her fingers near her mouth, as if she couldn't figure out what to do with a hand that wasn't in her mouth. She's into stuffed animals, so we keep baskets of them in every room so that when she has down time and would usually be sucking her thumb, she can hold coyote and unicorn instead.

V-day boxes

Next year I think I'll promise extra chocolate to the teachers who make the Valentine boxes during class. I'm not a crafty person, and even less of a crafts-with-kids person. Or maybe I just make the mistake of saying, "Let's see what ideas we find online." Low-achieving parents (me) don't put pictures of their Valentine box projects online. High-achieving parents (not me) do. So after seeing the 4-days to make a paper mache R2D2 and other boxes that would have taken the entire contents of our recycling bin, we settled on a tissue-box alligator for Seth, and a pirate ship milk carton for Carden. It still took 4 days. I learned that art projects with Seth, are just that--art projects. Art projects with Carden are high-intensive occupational therapy. Ugh. And poor Charlotte, struggling to write her 9-letter name on 16 valentine cards...

Tea Party

My cute little niece Rachel turned 3 last week and wanted a tea party birthday with her cousins. Since all the cousins live in Lehi, we had the party here and I got to do the decorating. It's been a long time since I've had that much fun! (Naturally she tripped and skinned her nose on the sidewalk a couple of days before all her birthday.)

Entertaining is so casual now, that the only appreciative audience for gold-rimmed china and antique tea cups is the 8-and-under set. Charlotte and Claire were hilarious. Every new item that came up from the basement elicited shrieks of delight. "Oh, Mom it's sooooooo pretty!!!" I, on the other hand, was a trifle embarrassed that I own so many sparkly dishes. Granted, several items came from Mom's garage sale finds when I was a teenager and dreamed of throwing sparkly dinner parties on a regular basis. (Hey, it was the 80s--excess was in!)

Now my perspective (or justification) is a bit different; I'm into the heritage aspects of my sparklies: chandelier crystals from Vicki, painted china platters from Granny, an antique tea set and glassware from my grandparents, the Irish linen tablecloth from dad's mission.

The girls all came in their dress-up finery and raised their pinkies to sip their juice and eat their dainties. They all loved the chandelier crystals dangling from pink ribbons and the I think it should be an annual event!

Gong Hey Fat Choy

Or as Seth will be happy to tell you, "Happy New Year in Chinese!"

We celebrated Chinese New Year tonight and boy was it fun. Actually it was a good excuse to get take-out for dinner, but in a way that never let them suspect that Mom just didn't want to cook tonight.

The local party store had a pretty decent selection of Chinese New Year decorations (considering that the local Chinese population is about 0.0001%), so with a couple of Google searches under my belt, I hung up red lanterns and paper dragons and hid the brooms so our good luck wouldn't get swept away. Hiding the brooms was definitely good luck for Carden and Seth, since sweeping is one of their nightly tasks.

I remembered I had a roll of tablecloth-size clear plastic, so for our table decorations I swiped an idea I read somewhere. I made color copies of pictures and factoids about China from a kids encyclopedia. I cut them out and laid them on the table under the plastic. It does have a bit of a white-trash aesthetic, but considering a full glass of water spilled during dinner, plus the usual assortment of dropped food (especially with four kids handling chopsticks), all my stuff was protected.

While we struggled with our chopsticks, we read the factoids and talked about China and discussed the animal zodiac and which animals we were. Despite all our emphasis on the positive qualities of each animal, Charlotte could not recover from being born in the year of the pig.

After dinner we handed out red envelopes with actual dollar bills inside and watched a great documentary, "Wild China," that was perfect for the kids, with lots of interesting animals and landscapes.

We wish everyone happiness, wealth, and longevity!