So Much to Celebrate!

Do you remember the Arthur Episode "The Long, Dull Winter"? Where they make up lame holidays to celebrate because they can't think of anything worth celebrating?

Well, that's not how we roll around here. We have filled the past few weeks of winter with totally legitimate holidays. For example:

1. Half Birthday Season: At some point in the past several weeks, Matthew and Jacob had half birthdays! I celebrated by making a white board that announced it. Matthew said repeatedly that he wanted a building cake, but so far we haven't made one.

I love him.

And him.

2. 333 month-day: At the end of January, I was 333 months old, which I thought was a cool number. I celebrated by telling my mom, and she congratulated me back.

3. Moon Day! This one was pretty exciting for the Moon-Moon clan. I mean, it had been more than 150 years since the last blue blood supermoon, so this was a really special event. Here's what we did to celebrate:

• The night before, we made pancakes that were red and blue to symbolize the blood moon and blue moon. Only, I had lent out my blue food coloring and couldn't remember who had it, so we went with green. 

• The next morning, Kevin and I went to an intersection by our home where there weren't so many trees so we could see the lunar eclipse. Unfortunately, the moon set when it was about the size of a thick big toe toenail, so we didn't see it when it was cool and red. I just had to remember how it looked back in September 2015.

We didn't end up walking to the divinity school to see the eclipse, but we were glad we scouted it out because it was really cool.

• Jacob and Matthew had checkups so we went to the doctor. Jacob got shots and bled a little, so he became my blood Moon. Matthew was a blue Moon when they weighed him because for some reason that terrifies him. But they were both super cute Moons as usual.
• Joseph had early dismissal so we got to do lots of attempts at Super Blue Blood Moon pictures

Blood Moon bandaid

• I couldn't figure out how to make origami cows so we made lots of origami frogs and pretended they were cows. And they jumped over the moon. But actually they still looked like frogs, and the moon Joseph made looked more like a lake. 

• I recently bought cotton balls and they got scattered around. So we pretended they were moon rocks and they were astronauts collecting them. (Side note: Both Joseph and Matthew wanted to wear different shirts than the ones I had asked them to, so as soon as my photo shoot was done they were back in their other Moon shirts.) (Other side note: Matthew calls them snowballs now, which I love.)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I decorated with some moon books.

  

  The dog was assigned some clothing too -- a Moon Dog shirt. Not to be confused with the Moon Moon Dog, which of course offends me.

• For dinner we had pizza . . . because pizza is round. When we said we were having a moon party, Matthew called it a spaghetti party. Maybe he was thinking of the Aikendrum song, since there was a man who lived in the moon whose hair was made of spaghetti in that song. But at least we got it right with the pizza since his face was made of pizza.
• For snack I found star crunch treats at the store. Never found Moon Pies.
• I had sort of wanted to make traditional Moon Cakes, but it looked complicated. But a treat we typically call giant eclair is also called Moon Cake. So we made that.



Matthew called it Wonder Woman cake.


• Oh. And we found moon music and danced to it on the trampoline. Like this:

4. Groundhog's Day: Celebrated by having colds and by dealing with cold weather. Still. Joseph might have done something at school.

5. e day! So, e is approximately 2.7182818, and so 2/7/18 was a great day to celebrate it! We went all out for it! (Minus the fact that we never went out, except Kevin who drove to the airport for a job interview.)

• Joseph had a snow day, so we all went for a natural look.
• E is for eye and ear, and I worried about both for Jacob. He woke up with goopy, pink, swollen eyes. Since his eardrum had been slightly red at his appointment the week before, I was afraid that this had suddenly turned into an infection. Ear, eye, sinus, who knew? With Kevin leaving and snow and freezing rain threatening to come later, e was for feeling on edge much of the day. (Turns out my phone's voice mail wasn't working right and I didn't have service for some reason, so I waited and waited for them to call back for a long time. Also, they called Kevin who was on an airplane, so that didn't help either.) But luckily we didn't have to go in, and it wasn't an infection.
• We had cinnamon rolls. Not quite logarithmic, but who can ever refuse a reason for cinnamon rolls?
• E is for eggs, so we had eggs for lunch.
• Since is Euler's number, we had oil on sweet potatoes and roasted them.
• We celebrated Phi Day (1.618) a month late since it has spirals too. We made Archimedes spirals, logarithmic spirals, and Fibonacci spirals with the awesome quilt my aunt made for us.
  
  
  
  
  

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• Then after learning about caternary shapes (they were the illustration in The Math Book for e), we found other pages and drew pictures of them. Like Pascal's triangle.

• We made e's out of pipe cleaners. E is for emotions, of which there are always plenty, especially when little ones have colds. E is for elephant and Eeyore, which watched us on the stairs all day. E is for environment, which had lots of freezing rain.
  

  

  
  
  

  

  
  

• My brother on his mission joined in on the celebration, too.
   



get it?

Overall, it was a lot of fun, especially the parts where we ate cinnamon rolls!

6. 100th day of school.

• Considered checking out Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100th Day of Kindergarten from the library, but didn't.
• Helped Joseph dress up like a kid in 1918 or a 100 year old man.
  
  
  
  

  

  Most dentures are probably better than these.

7. Super Bowl.

• Celebrated by not watching.
• I was slow leaving Sunday School, so priesthood was already starting. They were singing America the Beautiful, 4th verse. I left before I found out why. I mean, Lincoln's birthday was the next day, but that didn't seem like a normal reason to sing it. Later I found out. "Oh beautiful for patriot's dream." Groannnnnnnnnnn.

8. Chinese New Year

• Our neighbors gave us Red Bean Buns.
• Ate potstickers and fried rice at some point in the last fortnight.
• Didn't go to an activity at the school because people felt sick.

9. Valentine's Day

• Bought myself chocolate and shared some with Kevin
• Got a funny poem from Kevin which included lines about space heaters that melt the electrical outlet even though they're not on that much. Because that also happened on Valentine's Day. Don't leave it plugged in. Don't turn your space heater on, period, for that matter.
• Helped Joseph write his classmates' names on PJ Masks Valentines and died a slow death in the process. Made the mistake of putting the stickers in the little slots too.
• Steak was on sale a little while ago so we thawed it and cooked it and ate it. Had to break it to our kids that they can't eat steak every day now even though they want to.
• Celebrated the fact that 2+14+2+0=18 on 2/14/2018.

10. Everyone's Feeling Better Day

• Celebrated by not wiping any noses for the first time in about a month. It was magical. Best holiday ever.

11. President's Day

• Celebrated by making a dessert with cherries in it. Made it up as I went along. My kids were happy to eat the marshmallows that didn't touch any cherries.
• Reassured myself that most US presidents haven't been that great. Chester A. Arthur is underrated.

12. Square Root of 5 day (2/23)

• Celebrated by remembering all the great celebrations we've had this last month! Every day is worth celebrating with these cute kids!

Making our own fun, indoor version

Tomorrow marks six months since the muggy day that we loaded up a moving truck to leave Michigan.

We've had quite the six months. There have been a lot of great things about moving here -- we've met some wonderful, wonderful people, participated in the Hartford Temple open house and dedication, and presumably been more of a blessing than a burden to our new ward.

But it has been very different from Michigan. One of the greatest challenges has been the lack of structure on a day to day basis.

Church of course is crazy. Since about the second week Kevin and I have been running around subbing, teaching, translating (him, not me), playing piano and organ (me, not him), doing scouts, organizing, conducting, and trying to keep track of kids with scarcely a moment to catch our breaths.

But the rest of the week is so quiet. This is a huge change from Ann Arbor, where I generally had a long list of things to look forward to on a weekly or monthly basis, including:

• Monday Time Out For Women institute class (always with treats)
• Morning Out play dates
• Zumba Wednesdays and Fridays
• Weekly preschool
• Friday lunches at the institute
• Monthly book club
• Various Relief Society activities
• Library story time
• Spontaneous museum/park invitations from a ward Google group
• Monthly Institute date nights
• Bad Movie Club nights
• Game nights with friends
• Ward choir
• Northwood events (Valentines activities, winter clothes swaps, etc)
• Talking to neighbors outside
• Joseph playing with friends at our house or theirs
• Voice lessons
• Piano lessons
• Rackham graduate school events
• Visiting teachers
• Baby showers

In contrast, while there's not nothing going on, things are a little subdued here. Here's what I've come up with:

• Monday institute lunch class
• Weekly gymnastics
• Monthly Relief Society activity
• Monthly Institute date nights
• Baby showers
• Occasional book club (none in December or January)
• Baby signing time
• Primary presidency meetings
• Joy School (all other participants have been on maternity leave for past few weeks/months though, so we've started going to the library)

One reason I share these lists is I'm just curious -- which list is closer to what is offered by your ward/neighborhood right now? I think Ann Arbor had a fair amount of social capital (and the number of activities even increased in spring and summer), but I feel like that number of activities wouldn't be out of the question in Utah either.

Of course, it's nice to keep to ourselves a bit compared to the craziness that we sometimes experienced in Ann Arbor. I really wish (especially this week) that there were more consistency here, especially regarding playgroups, but I guess in exchange for fun we get more sunshine in the winter, so I suppose that's okay. (Who am I kidding I complained plenty this week, even on the sunniest and warmest day yet.)

I also know that I didn't do as much in the community as I perhaps should have because I could keep myself happily busy with more fun things. (Also, it's hard to do things when you don't have a baby that sleeps through the night, especially in the early mornings.) So the emptiness of the schedule is a blessing here because it's made me think about things I could and should be doing. I have some ideas I just need to figure out how to implement.

But in the meantime, here is what we have done to keep ourselves busy lately. Since this post has gotten long, I'll focus on the calm indoor stuff for this post and show the active stuff soon. 

• Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic

I don't really know what I'm doing, and we're not consistent about it, but we all have fun learning together! (This is probably Joseph-centric, but it is so fun to see what Matthew picks up on too.)

We like to do reading time with the white board. I think the watermelon gas station was made out of Legos, and there's probably a picture of it somewhere.

The day we learned about "ow." Pretty much the best story ever.

If you're going to teach about addition, you might as well make it look cool. If he's making pyramids out of Jenga blocks we talk about triangular numbers then too. We've gotten into negative numbers once or twice too talking about subtraction. Most of it probably doesn't stick but exposure counts for a lot.

The first book he read by himself. I'm not sure how much of it he had memorized, but it seemed like he was reading.

Very occasionally, he will pick up a book and try to read it. He got through a few pages of Horton Hears a Who!  I had to help with lots of words that he spelled to me, but it was so exciting that he tried it.

When we couldn't go to Chick-Fil-A because of the nor'easter on Thursday, we made our house into Chick-Fil-A. 

• Story time

If it were up to Matthew, we would spend hours every day sitting on a couch, covered by a blanket, and reading board books. He is so funny about so many books -- what he has to point out every time, what he has started calling a tauntaun thanks to the Star Wars book, how he has so much of Little Blue Truck memorized -- but it's funnier in person.

Joseph is fine with most any book right now. He likes to be there for the board books and he likes to be there for the chapter books. We are reading Ramona the Pest and just finished listening to Farmer Boy in the car, and it's amazing how emotionally invested he gets in the books. "I wanted you to skip that part!" is what he says for most any part that involves conflict of any kind.

• Building 

Both boys love to build, though one likes to destroy more than the other (much to the chagrin of the other). We cycle through Legos, puzzles, electronic snap kits, small Legos, trains, and blocks until I decide I'm sick of cleaning up that particular toy and hide it for a week or two.

The other day I went and did other stuff and he told me he built the one where "there's the thing that stores all the energy so the light doesn't work." "The capacitor?" "Yeah. I built the one with the capacitor."

He liked to build these puzzles on top of each other.

He also liked to build things on top of each other, which is how we discovered they had the exact same shapes.

It's mostly fun to break Joseph's creations, but he does like building his own stuff as well.

  

Most everything Joseph builds he likes to take a picture of. Our camera is full to the brim of various lego robots and airplanes and houses and block towers so that he can rebuild them when Matthew breaks them. He was shocked when I told him I wasn't really allowed to take pictures of my legos because it was a waste of film.

• Crafts and coloring

These are less frustrating than they were a year ago, so that's good. Matthew also really likes to color . . . almost as much as he likes to throw crayons when he's done. He says "mess, mess, mess" in agitated tones whenever he gets marker on his hands.

We still make birthday cards, but we've also been branching out to other sorts of crafts.

Rain maker. You can't let a good paper towel roll go to waste.

The groundhog can pop out of the slit in the paper. 

Monster Valentine love note box.

One day we drew things that we loved. "Are you going to draw me first, Mommy? Because you LOOOOVE me!!!" I did. And then he drew me. (I think my picture of Joseph was on the back, and that boy I drew was just a demonstration of how to not draw stick figures.)

We celebrated Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday with this log cabin. And by not having any hot water starting the next day. And being homebound for like 4 straight days. How did they stay sane.

Painting the snow. Laura Ingalls never had watercolors so she never got to do this with all the snow. Sad.

• Playing

And then there's just lots of playing. Lots of dancing, lots of acting out animal movements to a little magic wand we got for Christmas, lots of running, lots of hide and seek, lots of wrestling with Dad, etc. Kevin has had to help with one blanket fort so far this winter, and I haven't had to do any, and that's been just fine.

Everything cost like $8 at this store.

 

One of his cute customers who was also good at shoplifting. Couldn't blame him.

Lining up cars on the couch. He isn't quite as obsessed with cars as he was several weeks ago, but they are still his favorite. I find them lined up all over the place.

A box this big can't have anything more exciting than diapers in it, but luckily the box itself is its own fun.

So, we survive. I still go stir crazy, and I desperately wish Joseph had the same kind of friendships he had in Michigan so that he could play with someone who wasn't boring like me or too little like Matthew, but we survive.

And luckily, there's plenty to do outside the house, too. (to be continued)

Thanksgiving in New Haven

Last year, we decided to go to Alabama to have Thanksgiving with the Paulsons. We had a good time, so we decided to repeat last year's success and have it with them again, except this time they would visit us!

Granted, the drive from New Jersey to Connecticut is less harrowing than the drive from Michigan to the very very bottom of Alabama. But it's no cakewalk either, so we were glad they were brave enough to make the trek!

Here are some highlights.

• Not driving on I-95 the day before Thanksgiving. Or any road anywhere near I-95. They eventually made it though!
• Not setting the house on fire after leaving the range fan on probably a little longer than we should have. (I don't think it was anywhere near fire stage, but it was smelling a little funny.)
• Seeing cousins play and dance together.



Actually I think they were watching Tarzan right then. I wasn't the best at taking pictures, to be honest.

• Playing Codenames, even if it went really badly.
• Not peeling the potatoes, even though I was afraid everyone would judge us for leaving the peels in the mashed potatoes.
• Using uneaten bread crusts to make stuffing. Turns out picky kids help you save money! (And the germs got cooked away, of course.)
• Making a pretty good pumpkin pie. Not that pumpkin pie is that good to start with, but at least it wasn't gross.
• Getting so much quality time from little 1-year-olds who never ever ever wanted to nap the day of Thanksgiving. Either of them.
• Being reintroduced to real hairdos and foundation by my beautiful sister. I think she inherited a few genes there that I didn't.
• Eating Thanksgiving food!!!
• Meeting lots of people from different countries. 
• Eating turkey cooked by a really good cook. 
• Not telling people that the Paulsons were actually siblings of the Palssons (since that would have been lying), but a few people assuming that anyway even without knowing their last name.
• Thoroughly enjoying my first plate of Thanksgiving food.
• Somewhat enjoying what I could eat of my second helping.
• Enjoying the two slivers of pie I managed to barely fit in.
• Having room in my tummy an hour later to enjoy pie at a different pie party.
• Singing songs from the Reader's Digest Christmas songbook, including the never-before-sung "The Boy Who Santa Claus Forgot." Talk about a tear jerker.
• Singing with opera singers. (And Matthew.)
  
• Watching Derek read a cookbook the night after Thanksgiving. Howwwww did anything sound good???

  

  
  

• Walking around the prettier parts of New Haven to get to the art museum.

  

  Here's the Yale it never fails it makes me wanna wag my tail when I come I want to wail YAAAAAAAAALE! #bluesclues

• Not breaking a stroller on the teeny tiny elevator at the museum.
• Being outnumbered by security guards at the museum.
• Being followed around by grumpy security guards at the museum from room to room.
• Appreciating that security guards are the same everywhere across the world and cannot handle any part of a toddler touching the ground other than the toddler's shoes. (No sitting on the ground, for example.)

  

  For example, right after this picture, K. happened to sit down for two seconds, and the security guard was immediately motioning for her to stand up again. Because . . . slivers. On her pants. I guess.

• Seeing art at the museum. Actually I think I was so preoccupied with the security guards I don't even remember much art beyond the armless Greek statue women. Ha! (Wait. There was Monet and Degas too.)
• Not being in the museum anymore so we could eat.

  

  
  

• Eating tacos.
• Playing.

  

  
  

• Eating Kevin's birthday cheesecake because somehow nobody felt like they got enough pie the day before. (Everyone was too full to eat much pie, but still.) We broke one of our cardinal rules and shared it with the Paulsons. Derek got the most interesting bites.

  

  Say what you want about the photography skills, it tasted really good.

• Dominating Dominion.

 

He wanted to watch us play, but I think it got a little boring.

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  not too shabby

• Only having to listen to snippets of Gilmore Girls.
• Making the top 3 favorite people list for my niece K., which meant that I got to hold her sometimes. (Yay!)

  

  
  

• Eating New Haven pizza for lunch on Saturday because you only live once, especially when you're eating a lot of pies and cheesecakes and tacos and pizzas.
• Eating apples to balance the junk food out.

  

  
  

• Almost seeing Michigan beat Ohio State after the Paulsons left.

The Ohio State and Michigan robots.

Overall, it was a fun, laid back weekend with family and we are so grateful we got to see them!