Greetings! Sorry we haven’t written much in a while, but I do have some kid stories that will hopefully make up for it. First of all though, congratulations to Jody and Kaerlek on the birth of their girl on Thursday, Celestia Snow. They will be calling her Snow, which we think is beautiful. Yay for new nieces!
OK, we’ll start with the Gwen stories. A few weeks ago we had read a folk tale in which a man had to hide himself in the heart of his beloved (literally inside, you know how folk tales are….). A couple of days later we were listening to a John Denver song with lyrics that said “You are in my heart and living there”. Gwen looks up at me a bit incredulously, and then giggled, “That boy’s wife is in his heart!”
She also recently told me a story. Here’s how our conversation went,
Gwen-Once there was a girl and a hotdog. And she put it in her hotdog cowection.
Mamma-A hotdog collection? Wouldn’t it get kind of stinky and rotten?
Gwen-No, it was a magic hotdog cowection, so it didn’t get sinky or wotten.
Laurelin has made some wonderful choices lately, so hopefully this doesn’t come across as braggy, but it’s exciting to watch your kids exercise wisdom, especially when they’re only six.
I picked her up from school one day and she was upset about something. I asked her what was wrong and she told me one of her friends said she wasn’t going to be her friend anymore. I asked her what had happened, and apparently all of Laurelin’s friends were bugging another kid, and the other kid of course didn’t like it. One of Laurelin’s friends then said they should all start a club with the express purpose of bugging this other kid. Laurelin said that was wrong and they shouldn’t do it, and totally stuck up for the other kid. Yay! Then the girl with the club idea said she wasn’t going to play with Laurelin anymore, and Laurelin still stuck up for the other kid. I told her that she absolutely did the right thing, and I was very proud of her for sticking to it. She was obviously still sad about her friend though, who was still at school where we were waiting for the boys to get out of school. So I told her her friend had probably forgotten all about it by now and she should go over and play with her while we wait. So they’re friends again. I know that was kind of a long story, sorry, I was just so happy with how she handled the situation.
A week or so later she came home and told me there was a boy spying on her and her friends, and they were kind of mad about it. I suggested that maybe he wanted to play with them, but was too shy to ask, and maybe she should ask him to play with them. So the next day at school, she did! Even though the other girls still didn’t really want to. (After he started playing with them they were fine with it.) She’s been such a good friend, I’m very proud of her.
I’ll let Rus tell you about Xander’s latest experiment.
“The sink is overflowing!” Before I had consciously processed the meaning of the words in Xander’s screeched exclamation, my feet began to propel me towards the kids’ bathroom. I turned off the water and asked what had happened as I began to examine the problem. Picture, if you will, an acrylic lip gloss container of a size such that it all but obstructed the flow of water down the drain. Even if I could have reached more than a finger down the narrow opening, the smooth surface of the container prevented me from gaining any purchase. As I pondered my course of action, I began to question Xander. Soon, he admitted that he put it in the drain himself. When asked why, he said, “I wanted to see if it would plug up the sink, and then I was going to take it out.”
Unfortunately, some time later, after employing bamboo skewers, a paring knife, and considerable elbow grease, Kelly and I were no nearer to removing the offending object from the drain. Finally, inspiration struck: We dried the sink as much as possible and fetched the drill, with the largest bit we had attached. This eventually resulted in perforating the container, though it was still firmly entrenched in the drain. Only after Kelly inserted a length of coat hanger that I had bent into a hook did we find success. Once again, we reminded Xander of the value of thought experiments, and of consulting adults before embarking on experiments of any type. Perhaps one day, he will take our entreaties to heart.
On Friday afternoon, we took the kids to see the baby elephant, Zuri, at the zoo. Though Kelly and I had done so one week previously on our date, it was no less incredible to see her again…a baby almost two years in the making! I was hired at the zoo soon after the announcement of the pregnancy, and as I worked there, I told countless visitors to come back at the end of the summer to see her, so for me, seeing her is especially significant. We also ran into a friend of the zoo who generously bequeathed DVDs of footage of some of the big cat babies: Hamal, the snow leopard, and the debut day of the three tiger cubs.
Last week, the kids and I plugged in Isaac’s birthday TV microscope, and viewed several creatures. One of the most popular were some nearly microscopic rotifers from the Hawaiian Lava Shrimp tank. At 400x magnification, they were about the size of an apple, and quite bizarre. Isaac said that they looked exactly like Pokemon. The funny thing is, he had a point.
We finally made it up to nearby Millcreek canyon yesterday, something we have been wanting to do since this spring. We hiked about 4 miles round trip on “desolation trail.” It was a great trail, mostly under cover of trees, with a few patches of sun. The weather was marvelous, not oppressively hot, nor too chilly. The kids did quite well, although Gwen objected to our holding her hand (which turned out to be quite necessary, as there were some very steep dropoffs in several areas.) We did not encounter any salamander larvae or moose this time, but the fall leaves, mossy rocks, and views of the valley made it very enjoyable all the same.
