Wins All Around

Life has been funny lately. There have been a lot of things that make me burst out laughing or at least bite my lip pretty hard.

I know there's lots to catch up on about life, such as Christmas, our trip to New York (not quite the city), and at least 1 or 2 Facebook albums I should make about life in New Haven if I want to be consistent with albums the way I have been for nearly 5 years . . . but I think I just want to get this all down first. So I don't forget it.

Two other pregnancy symptoms

I forgot to mention these in my other blog post, and I think they will work pretty well here. The first is my memory. When we first moved here, I was so grateful for my good memory. I felt like I immediately learned most people's names and they stuck. I kept track of things pretty well and felt like I got the hang of my calling pretty well the first few months.

Now I feel like my memory has gone out the door. Each week that I stand in front of Primary I panic a little because I have to remind myself every kid's name. Sometimes I ask a kid if they are a visitor, and they say no. But they kind of are because they're not on class rolls, but I guess not enough to justify singing the "Hello" song. (It's complicated.)

And it's not just kids I have trouble remembering. People are always giving me information about all sorts of resources and I have to remind myself that I can't just sit there nodding and not absorbing any of it. Then there all sorts of questions about teacher manuals and the pictures that went along with them and I had no clue what they were talking about. And I realized I had gone through my entire life (including a year in Primary) without touching a physical Primary manual. Haha!

So, I guess I feel like I'm drowning all over again, just like I was during scout rechartering and the Primary Program. I'm not sure how much to blame on the calling and how much to blame on faulty memory, but I figure as long as I keep a sense of humor about it it will all work out.

The other thing that I keep a sense of humor about is all my crying. So, like I said earlier, I don't cry in public. But in my house . . . all bets are off! What usually does me in is music, so I have definitely had times where I turn on music to work out and just find myself sobbing as I exercise. It's not that I'm sad at all. Just a tiny bit of nostalgia mixed with a lot of hormones.

I mean, some things are understandable. Mr. Kruger's Christmas is a nice old Christmas story. But sobbing my way through it twice while Joseph was watching it felt, well, a little embarrassing. And it gets worse. My mom bought a bunch of music we listened to as kids and gave it to us as Christmas presents (Scripture Scouts and the like) and . . . hoo boy. All I have to hear is music recorded in the late 80s or 90s and there I go, turning my head away so no one sees me cry. And rational me is saying, "Ack! Ack! Ack! They're even singing out of tune!" and still I go on like I'm cutting onions or something.

And finally there was the Christmas Chatbooks ad. That one I was watching at my phone til I said to Kevin, "Take this away from me." Because I was not going to cry about a Chatbooks ad. And I think I didn't. Barely.

Joseph

Going back to exercise, Joseph is a huge fan. I once exercised when he was at Joy School and told him about it. His face fell. "You did it without me?"

I mean, it's not real exercise. It's finding songs on the computer and doing the kickboxing/aerobics/zumba moves to them that I remember long enough to bring my heart rate up. But for Joseph it is a magical experience involving lots of jumping and punching and spinning and superhero moves.

His favorite song right now is "Larger Than Life" by Backstreet Boys. That one was kind of an accident. He made up a little ditty called "Bu-uzz Lightyear to the Rescue" to the melody of the main instrumentation, and once Kevin and I recognized it we played the song to compare it. So now of course he loves it. We've cycled through worse songs, and we'll get through this too.

Matthew

Matthew loved his grandparents lots while we were in Utah, and he learned how to say "gamma" and "gan-pa" pretty well. Perhaps having two of each was confusing for him, because now he calls most adults "gamma" and "gan-pa." We can just be walking somewhere and walk past some man of any age and he starts shouting "gan-pa! gan-pa! gan-pa!" and I just have to hope they're not offended.

And then sometimes he mixes it up and calls men "gamma" or women "gan-pa." Every time Donald Trump shows up in the news, Matthew gets really excited and starts shouting, "Gamma! Gamma! Gamma!" And I just have to change the subject as fast as I can. Because I'm not teaching him his real name.

He's also mastered several animal sounds, though he gets cows and horses and neighs and moos pretty mixed up. There was a while where he wasn't eating much of anything that wasn't a grain, so it was a surprise when we put some chicken on his tray and he began to eat it. "Chicken!" he said happily. "Chicken! Cluck cluck!"

Ever since, he says "Cluck cluck" for any meat he's given. I don't know how much he really understands, but so far he seems to have no qualms.

Joy School

On the other hand, I feel like I opened a can of worms at the end of Joy School last week. We were reading books about Thanksgiving because the lesson was on gratitude (I know, we're way behind), and one page had a picture of the Pilgrims carrying a dead deer on a pole over to a fire or something.

Joseph's friend asked, "Why is that deer upside down?"
"They probably hunted it in the woods and now they tied it to that pole."
"What are they going to do to it?"
"It looks like they might take it to a fire and eat it. It'll be meat for them."
"What????" She looked shocked. "I didn't know meat came from animals!!!!"

Who says kids don't learn useful stuff at Joy School?

The whole day was really funny, actually. We started out by looking through some magazines and catalogs for things they were grateful for. Unfortunately, I hadn't planned ahead so most of our magazines were already out in recycling. I found a coat catalog, an engineering magazine, and a Michigan alumnus magazine. I gave some examples of things to cut out.

"I'm grateful for trees, so I'm cutting this tree out," I explained.
"I'm grateful for Legos," Joseph said. The Lego he had in mind had a very distressed face as it was an illustration for an article about mental illness, but I cut it out anyway.
"I'm grateful for rocks."
"I'm grateful for walls."
"I'm grateful for this coat. And this coat. And this coat."
"I'm grateful for that necklace."
"I'm grateful for that street."
"I'm grateful for that pink ribbon."

That ribbon was part of an illustration of an article about breast cancer research. The rest of the picture showed, well, a rendition of a mostly topless woman (tastefully done, I must add . . . it fit the purposes of the article without being graphic), covered mostly by that pink ribbon. I nixed the pink ribbon.

So that was our grateful day.

Primary

Keeping up my tradition of stellar teaching, I found out a half hour before church that I needed to sub for a Primary class. I wasn't too worried -- these were kids whose names I actually remembered, I'm not too bad at last-minute teaching, and I feel like in general I work well with kids. I had even spent some time the night before rereading The Happiest Toddler on the Block, so I clearly totally understood kids. So I scanned the lesson, grabbed a few supplies, and headed to church. In spare moments I worked on my puzzle and wordstrips, and I felt pretty good about things.

After a hectic Sharing Time, I followed the boys to their classroom. A few of them instantly darted under the table. I started to panic. I knew how to handle kids Joseph's age, and I knew how to handle 10-year-olds, but what about this in-between age?

"I'm going to count to 10 and I bet you guys can set up the chairs and sit in them by the time I'm done." I counted and by the time I was done they were all under the table. So I set up the chairs, looked them sternly in the eyes, and somehow got them in their seats for the lesson.

"I don't like that you're our teacher," one of them said. I tried to get them interested in the attention activity -- all the fun facts about Joseph Smith taped over his picture with lots of puzzle pieces. They kept pulling pieces off and not guessing Joseph Smith, and they were getting antsy. I decided it was time to reach down into my stores of knowledge.

"What do you guys know about volcanoes?"

Four or so minutes later, I had learned a lot more about volcanoes than I was anticipating.

Somehow I got them back on track (trying to ignore major glares from the volcano expert who could have talked forever), and told them about the volcano Tambora which had erupted, filling the sky with so much ash that 1816 was called "The Year With No Summer." And so Joseph Smith's family had to move from New Hampshire to New York! No, the volcano wasn't in New Hampshire. ("Most volcanoes are in the Ring of Fire in the Pacific and . . . ") It was just ash that filled the sky all around the world. Etc.

They got antsy again, and they headed under the table. I panicked again. Then I remembered a suggestion from the lesson to sing "Love at Home" since Joseph Smith's family loved each other. "I am going to sing until you guys all get back in your chairs." And I began. "There is beauty all around, when there's love at home." Most of them hurried back to their chairs, wincing and plugging their ears. So much for perfect pitch and voice lessons. It was pretty hard not to laugh.

One boy stayed under the table, unperturbed by my voice. Everyone begged him to please, please sit down already, but he stayed. I started into the second verse. I forgot how the third began, so I just started the first over again. "She's never going to stop!" one boy said in dismay. "She's just going to repeat it and repeat it forever!" Then the younger boy who technically wasn't even supposed to be in that class began to cry at that horrible prospect. I stopped. I could handle someone under the table better than tears.

So, on went the rest of the lesson. I showed them pictures from times we visited Palmyra and Kirtland to give them a sense of what things were like back then. We talked about what it was like to be farmers back then, with no electricity, no bathrooms, no cars. (They were most interested in the "no bathrooms" aspect and were very curious about what they did instead. I tried to not let them dwell on that.) I described all the hard work that went into a farm -- how they would have to plow and plant and weed --

"Ew!!! Weed is gross!" one boy said emphatically. So I got to explain how "weed" could be a verb. We went through the rest of the lesson (spending a little extra time on the infection in Joseph Smith's leg because they were pretty interested in that), and then all of a sudden I had run out of material! Oh no! The rest of the class was a mess of hangman and watching my homemade puzzle pieces get thrown around and trying to access any church video on my phone with no success. I double checked the lesson -- I had done everything the lesson suggested, and I thought with regret about all the junky old matching games I had just purged from the Primary cupboards last week. Although, who knows if they would have kept their attention anyway.

At any rate, we were all pretty glad when 12:30 rolled around.

Spanish Sunday School

Meanwhile, Kevin was doing what he does best -- using apps put out by the LDS church in intelligent ways. He had gone down with Matthew to the nursery to get him used to nursery, and also so he wouldn't have to teach Spanish Sunday School. But they found him, so he did what he always does when he's called upon to sub last minute in a foreign language -- pulls up the lesson in Spanish, reads it in Spanish, asks the questions in Spanish and sort of understands the answers people give in Spanish. So pretty much we're just the best teachers ever.

Cauliflower and Eclairs

(This one has nothing really to do with anything. Maybe it's just funny because I'm tired.)

I have paid a decent amount of attention to the women's marches, to the point that they made it into my subconscious. Last night I dreamed that I was in a march with my sisters, and one of them was handing out little sprigs of cauliflower to everyone she saw. Then I looked down at the table set up in the center of the march and it was full of eclairs and cream puffs. I don't think I held onto the cauliflower anymore and just piled my plate (where did I get a plate?) with cream puffs.

I'm not sure what the meaning is behind all this. Probably that I should eat more cauliflower, but I probably won't.

Texting

And, of course, the last win is that I texted my visiting teachee about herself. I meant to text my companion.

It really wasn't a bad text, just a "we had dinner and so I think that counts" kind of text that you could laugh off if you think eating dinner counts as visiting teaching and get offended by if you don't think it counts. (She's in the former category, thankfully.)

While this wasn't a win, I've definitely thought of way worse things I could have texted someone about themselves without realizing it, especially when visiting teaching is involved.

So, yeah. I guess I will put this in the win category. And it also fits in the "laugh at myself" category, just like the rest of life lately, which makes it a double win.