My list

• gym bag for Martial arts gear
• Lidda Bit Sweets cookbook
• new doormats for the inside upstairs doors (beautiful, will stay put and not kick all over the house)
• mesh bags for washing sweaters
• a large new bright lamp for our living room (Arren, we've had a great time with the lamp you gave us, but it has seen better days. Especially since I broke one of the bulb settings when I was trying to tighten a bulb!)
• the Good Wife on DVD (because Hulu commercials are really annoying)

Spit-up covered boots

Hooray that
1) They wash off easily and
2) We have a baby to spit up on them!

Becca's emergency plan

"If there's something dangerous, like a war or a bomb, I'm going to go to France."

Santa Sightings?

R: "I want to see Santa again!"
A: "Santa isn't real."
R: "Yes he is!"
A: "No, he isn't. Mommy and Daddy are Santa."
R: "No, they aren't. He was at the school!"
A: "That wasn't the real Santa, and we have proof!"
K: "What proof?"
A: "He had black hair sticking out, and Santa has white hair. And his beard was attached to his hat. And Allen saw he had his tummy tucked into his coat. I mean, a pillow."

So when your older child is telling your younger child that Santa isn't real, should you defend truth or childhood fantasy?

What I found on the couch at 10:20 pm

An 8-year-old boy reading MAD SCIENCE. When asked why he wasn't in bed, he said "I haven't said my prayer yet!"

Skillet Deconstructed Pie

From Skillet in Seattle:

Pudding:
• 1 3/4 C whole milk
• 1/2 C plus 2 T heavy cream

1. Heat milk & cream in double boiler.

• 1/4 C cornstarch
• 3/4 C sugar
• 3 T unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 t salt
  
• 3 large eggs, slightly beaten
• 2 1/2 ounces 70%+ dark chocolate, finely chopped 

2. Mix dry ingredients, then add eggs and chocolate.

3. Whisk a few T of hot milk into chocolate, continue to whisk in the remainder. 

4. Cook pudding over medium heat until it reaches 208 degrees F. 

5. Buzz with an immersion blender or stir (~5 minutes) with wooden spoon until smooth. 

6. Cover with plastic, chill 3 hours.

Crust:
• 4 C flour
• 3/4 C sugar
• 1 T salt
• 1 C unsalted butter, chilled and diced
• 2 large eggs
• Splash of whole milk

Make crust, bake on a sheet 350 until done.

Top with sea salt, cocoa nibs, or chopped nuts.

Rebecca fixes English

on "Teachers"
"It should be E, E"


on circles: SRKLS

So Much for Tummy Time

Baby can now roll left!

Sunny day at the park

One last day of sun before foul weather was about to hit. I pulled my kids out of after-school choir practice, and we spent the afternoon at the park.

Redecorating

Apparently Rebecca is worried about bathroom privacy, because she just made paper signs to stick on the door: STOP for when it's occupied, or GO.

We Call You Genevieve

We call you Genevieve
but there is room for doubt
at times I call my baby, "my Jenny,"
and leave the "Veev" right out

Your daddy calls you Jen
Your sister calls you, "Mine!"
And since you don't yet answer to anything,
Everything is fine

Your grandma calls you "pumpkin,"*
Great grandma calls you "doll,"
But you're still you, no matter who we call.

Having you here is a treat
From your head down to your feet
Whether I call my baby Genevieve or Jenny
You make my family complete.

Jen, let your family see
How sweet a baby can be
Whether you're Jenny-girl or Zhuhn-vee-ev** or Jeannie,
You are the baby for me!


*Poetic license
**Genevieve with French pronunciation (sort of)

Meals

People are always asking me how I manage with four kids. I'm actually very organized. I have a cooking plan, and I always know what meal I'm going to cook next: sausage/kale/potato soup. It's been the same plan for weeks now, because I haven't actually managed to cook it yet.

Sous Vide Substitute

When you're trying to cook flank steak in 130 degrees water sous-vide style, but you don't have a fancy cooker, adding boiling water every few minutes to this setup does the job:

On Having Sisters

Friend: "So you're the only boy--you just have sisters. Too bad!"
Alex: "No it's not. I can be really good friends with them. Besides, there's my dad."

Hulu Plus

Running pumpkins to the front porch, boxes to the back porch, cartons to recycling, pumpkin guts to compost...now that I'm watching Hulu Plus, I wonder, how did I ever clean the kitchen without commercials?

On Picture Selection

My husband set up a touchpad to display a random selection of the photos we've taken over the years. It flips through fun memories of camping trips, the solar eclipse we rushed to Utah for a few years ago, cousins, babies, and all sorts of wonderful things. But since my husband rarely culls his photography collection, and since he's set it to pick any photo, we also get other pictures: a blurry photo one of my kids took, a photo of pH strips from last year's science fair project, a photo Lar took on a ward service project of a random person's fusebox.

I keep meaning to point out that this is kind of silly. Why display pictures of a stranger's fusebox when we could limit our selection to beautiful pictures of our beautiful children in beautiful places? But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe using random selection is a better way to remember that life itself is full of good experiences, bad experiences, and meaningless ones. Maybe we need a reminder that life isn't just fun adventures to clear mountain lakes. We also need fuseboxes.

On the Love of Christ

I have heard the stories of Jarius and of the woman healed by touching Jesus's robe many times. But it was only when I opened to the chapter in Mark that I realized something I'd never known before: these two events happened at the same time. Jarius approached Jesus and begged him to heal his dying daughter. As he led Jesus to his home, the woman with the issue of blood reached out to touch Jesus's robe, hoping to be healed. Jesus turned, found her, and spoke to her, and she was healed. Only then did Jesus continue to Jarius's house, where the young girl was also healed.

Jesus reached out to bless and heal those in need even while he was hastening to help others in need. What a testimony to me of the way Jesus cares for all individuals, and all of us!

Rebecca says

I may be little...but I am a big sister!

Girls do Literary

Me, Katherine, baby--and Susan Cooper!

Daddy Dresses Baby for Church

Dress plus fleece pants and wool socks.

Garden produce

I almost gave up on planting beans, since it was July when I finally got around to thinking about it. But it wasn't a waste after all!
And it turns out that my kids really like eating green beans raw, especially Rebecca. So we enjoyed these!

Rebecca's poem

Jenny, don't cry.
Your big sister is by!

Haircut

From Rebecca, after I got a haircut today: "You look like my mom again!"

Me: "Who did I look like before?"

Rebecca: "You looked worse."

Chores

I have asked my kids to practice the piano. I also told one that we need to vacuum. (Actually, she told me that--emphatically!)  Last week I told them I didn't care about raking yet, just weeding, because we have so few leaves on the lawn. Are they weeding? Vacuuming? Practicing? No. They are raking.

Matching

Me: That skirt doesn't match your shirt.
R: Well, it matches my underwear.  So there!

A find!

Cleaning things off of the deck led me into the storage room, where I opened a small white box and found two cartons of baby formula! They haven't even expired yet. And the box has my name on it, so at some point I must have 1) received the box 2) opened it 3) stashed it and 4) forgotten it. Which, given the way my memory's been behaving lately, I admit could have happened as recently as yesterday.

sleep

Baby slept 6 1/2 hours last night! but of course that's all I slept too so I'm still dozy...

Precocious?

I'm impressed that I just found my 5-year-old on the couch reading our antique copy of Plato's Dialogs. I would be even more impressed if she could actually read.

Whose Fans?

I hoped that becoming an author would make me feel famous. But it turns out that my 1-month-old baby gets WAY more adoring attention in public than I do. I should dress her only in shirts that say "Ask me about Candy Experiments!"

Going the distance

After Rebecca and I walked to church, we turned to see how far behind Daddy and Alex were (they'd gone back for Alex's scriptures).
"They're not far behind," Rebecca said. "But they're still shorter!"

Baby

Becca decides to show baby how well she can put away silverware, so I carry baby over. As baby watches Becca carefully dry and place each piece, Becca says, "It's baby theatre!"

K:" It's baby's [1 week] birthday! We should feed you cake so baby can have special milk."

On Getting Sick

5-year-old Katherine: "I want to get sick.'
Me: "Why?"
Katherine: "Because I want to eat candy!"

5-year-old Rebecca: "I want to get sick.'
Me: "Why?"
Rebecca: "Because I want to stay up too late."

(Non-lazy) summer days!

Monday and Tuesday:
Sunny Clyde beach, with kayaking, takeout, grandparents, and a teenager-installed tightrope!

Tuesday music lesson: a singing lesson for Katherine, with Alex's first guitar lesson (hooray for an inexpensive, if slightly out-of-tune, Craigslist guitar!)

Wednesday
-Lunch with Dr. Grandpa
-Hiking through Bridle Trails, where Alex read signs about invasive species, Katherine picked four different wild berries (salmonberries, red huckleberries, native blackberries, and thimbleberries), and Rebecca ate the berries
-Swim lessons, followed by open swim at the Kirkland pool, where Katherine and Alex are now old enough to pass the swim test and play on their own!

Day at the Dub

Can't beat visiting the UW, getting free parking, and getting paid, all for a few minutes work of letting my children test cushions on a future brain-scanning chair! After my child models had finished their task, we spent several happy hours enjoying things like...
-trying to identify the "gargoyles" (people faces) on Savery Hall
-The neogothic reading room at the Suzallo Library (Katherine pointed out that the ceiling wasn't exactly right for a cathedral)
-exploring the stacks at the Suzallo, where we found German-language books about Japan, Arabic books, books over 100 years old, Sunset magazines from the 1950s, and children's books about Ben Franklin (quickly disproving my assertion to Katherine that "you can walk through shelves and shelves of books here and not find one you'd ever want to read)
-The "Mt Rainier" fountain, in which one mother duck and one baby duck spent most of their time losing each other
-sushi and teriyaki at the tiny Ichiro restaurant, where my children distinguished themselves by each draining two huge glasses of water (yes, it was hot, and we only survived because we took the corner table by the one fan, which blew all the straw wrappers off the table)
-Magus books, which I just wanted to show the kids, but where we ended up spending money on decades-old Dover edition coloring books of medieval images, Audubon birds, and a cut-and-assemble your own castle
-the Burke museum, where we enjoyed the crystals, the Stegosaurus fossil, and the employee who invited my children to come examine the fossils on the cart she was about to put away

Counting

Today in the car Rebecca counted from one to one trillion. (She might have skipped a few.)

Not Exactly Sneaky

Alex (reappearing well after bedtime): "Mommy, where's the tape? So I can get it tomorrow morning?"

Me: "In the cupboard. Now go to bed!"

Alex: "How long are you planning to be in this room?"

Dear Mrs. McShane

I admit it, I didn't play any of the music you taught me for years and years and years. I can blame it on my very old, banged up piano (75 years in a kindergarten classroom does that to an instrument) or my busyness, but really I just didn't get around to it, though I did used to practice the organ once upon a time...

But when I realized that my piano's major flaws might impact my children's learning and brought in a piano technician, he started playing classical music. Music that I knew! And I thought to myself, "Why don't I play like that anymore?"

So you'll be pleased to know that I pulled out my old piano music. It's the Romantics, of course (way more expressive than Bach, especially now that my piano has dynamics instead of thunks), and there's way more music in that book than I ever learned or ever could learn. But the pieces you taught me still sound pretty good.

You must have despaired a little during my later high school years, when I didn't fit much practicing in (see above, though I was quite busy at the time). Still, we managed to work up a few very nice things that have stuck with me all these years. I even have a few of your notes scribbled in the pages to guide me through what I've forgotten (although could you clarify your note about tone at the end of the Chopin etude?) I'm even learning something new.

After all this time, I want to thank you again for all that you taught me. I had a very pleasant half-hour tonight playing the piano after I put my children down. I hope they were listening. I hope you were too.

Sincerely, your once and always student

How To Make A Family Meal

Day 1: Husband thaws beef brisket (which you would never do, because you're wary of any kind of beef that's not ground)

Day 2: Read brisket recipes in the afternoon. Realize that you cannot possibly cook a brisket by dinnertime, no matter what method you use. Make kale with sausage and a quinoa salad with cherries, celery, goat cheese, and toasted pecans instead. Kids object to 1) goat cheese 2) contamination of cherries with goat cheese, and instead serve themselves plain quinoa with soy sauce.

Day 3: Spend all morning mixing spices, slashing brisket to cover with dry rub, frying onions to go in crock pot, and assembling the whole thing on a teetery breadpan inside crock pot. Finish by noon. Brisket still half-raw at dinnertime; feed kids hot dogs and pull brisket out at 11 pm.

Day 4: Serve brisket with still-plentiful (thanks to the goat cheese) quinoa salad, along with a strawberry spinach salad conceived to keep kids from downing the whole carton of strawberries in five minutes. Wish I could sit on the deck savoring dinner, but have to run to deliver one child to martial arts testing and another to church activity days. So much for dinner!

on FINALLY doing the mending

-The upside: finding the right color of pale blue thread to sew up a mysterious J-shaped hole in my daughter's pants leg*
-The downside: realizing that my daughter probably grew out of these particular pants last year

*not to mention finding a pair of snazzy brown jeans I totally forgot I owned--perfect except for one easily-mended hole in the pocket

The Campgrounds Were Full

On the way back from Pullman, WA, we went looking for someplace to camp. Palouse Falls was full to overflowing, and we ranged farther afield: The Tucannon River

The view after getting children to bed was quite nice:

Horseflesh?

K: "Why do people fight wars?" (This is accompanied by a 4th-grade sigh of exasperation, as if civilizations should just get their act together and end violence.)
Me: "People fight wars for various reasons." I start talking about land grabs and political power.
A: "Sometimes they fight wars over racehorses."
Me: "Racehorses?" I rack my brains, wondering if he has been reading about warfare in medieval Arabia or something. When in history have racehorses been so significant?
A: "Like Japan, before World War II."
Me: Really? The Japanese were so strapped for oil and everything that they were invading to seize racehorses? Then I realize what he is really saying:
Resources!

Correspondence

When I ask which grandma Rebecca is writing a card to--
R: "Not great-grandma Hulterstrom! She's dead!....But I guess I can send it to her when she's resurrected."

Scandal

Rebecca says that Harold's purple crayon is really pink!

Geology Rocks (classroom show)

This is Katherine in her classroom performance of "Geology Rocks."


This is Alex in his classroom performance of "Geology Rocks."


And this is how parents now watch classroom performances.

Sorting Marbles

Rebecca has sorted her marbles into communities. A group of green is "the biggest family." The big and small marbles with dots are "the mommy and the kid." And one lone marble "is far away from her family. Her family is in another country."

Good idea, bad idea

Good idea: starting martial arts to improve strength, coordination, balance, confidence, grace, posture, and nunchuck skills.

Good idea: getting a Tdap booster to help protect my family against possible future outbreaks of whooping cough.

Bad idea: learning a new nunchuck drill which involves slamming the nunchucks* against my shot-sore shoulder.

*(full disclosure: light-weight, foam-covered nunchucks. But they still hurt.)

What Rebecca Wants for her Birthday Dinner

"Something super duper duper yummy! Peanut butter...with bananas."

What Rebecca Wants for her Birthday Party

-Play at the park for 20 seconds and thirty minutes.
-Smash hard candy on the sidewalk with a rock.
-Make chocolates.

Dinner Favorites

Me, seeing the untouched plate of salad as Rebecca spoons up chowder: "Aren't you going to eat your salad?" R: "I eat the badness first, then I eat the goodness!"

Indulgent

Today I gave my son the extra snack he begged for in his lunch: a romaine lettuce leaf.

April Fool's Day (and post-Easter) dinner

Green eggs and ham.

Difficulty

When you have
one sink full of Easter egg dye
safely covered by a (dirty) cutting board
holding a (maggiano's) film tray
rinsed by a continually running faucet
that's overflowing developer chemicals into your other sink
It's hard to do dishes.

Bike riding

Kids must ride bikes to school for the next few weeks.
Great! Next time, I'll ride with them.
Get on bike and fasten helmet. Roll bike out. Flat tire.
Visit bike store and buy innertube.
Drag bike out to lawn, flip upside down.
Pry off tire, innertube.
Open brand new innertube and try to mount. Won't stretch far enough! Realize it's for my 4-year-old's bike.
Find correct innertube. Mount on wheel. Replace tire.
Attach pump as 4-year-old holds tire in place. Inflate tire.
Decide to oil chain while bike is upside-down. Apply WD-40. Feel very responsible!
Read online that WD-40 REMOVES oil from chains. Oops. Console self that 22 year old bike probably didn't have any oil to be removed.
Try bike. Tire too flat--pump up full.
Time to ride! Get 4-year-old on her bike, fasten helmet, mount up.
Seat is killing me! Try to stand and lean on handlebars as I ride.
Wrists are killing me! Debate turning back, but 4-year-old is way ahead. Too late to stop!
Get kids from school, coast back to house.
Tumble onto grass. Sore seat, sore wrists. Carefully park bike.
Next time, I'll walk.

Dark House

New film camera
New developing solution
New developing jugs and canisters
and trays (actually old Maggiano's takeout cartons)
BUT
No darkroom
SO
Commandeered bathroom, occupied by film developer
Dark hallway
Dark bedroom
Dark kitchen (kill the oven light, the microwave light, the porch light--anybody ever see Wait Until Dark?)
Dark study with a towel under the door
One lit computer screen
and me

Rebecca tells Katie

Periwinkle

On Strength

R, as she carries a 10 pound bag of onions inside:
"I'm strong. I have a lot of strongness."

Celery Dinners

My daughter refused dinner, munching only on celery. If she were ten years older, I might be contacting a psychiatrist about eating disorders. But since she'd eaten a large after-school snack, and since she really, really likes celery (being a soft-hearted mother, I indulge her when she begs for it at the grocery store), and since she's only four, I will save body-issue fears until she hits pre-adolescence, at least.

On priorities

At the mall, I had the choice of buying books for my daughter's birthday, or buying nail polish. I chose the nail polish. Since I have my priorities in order. (And since, with her, the nail polish will last longer!)

On sharing

When I bought pistachios for Rebecca, but told her not to eat them all
"I'm not! I'm going to share with everybody except Alex..."
Wait! Favoritism? Time for a lecture?
"...who doesn't like nuts."

Our Utah February Trip

Highlights

• Leaving our house at 6:45 AM to make it to Utah before bedtime! (but only because it took so long to get packed the day before we couldn't leave until night. Did that make us early or late?)
• Appearing on TV, on Good Things Utah! Super nice staff and hostesses.
• Taking kids to temple square (can you believe this was the first time?) Seeing the conference center with all the original art (those pictures in the Book of Mormon? On the conference center walls.) and the chairs being set up for the next conference (that's early!)
• Brick oven pizza, where the late root beer was free and the pizza is still yummy
• Amano chocolate, where my kids tasted everything and (at least it felt like) Lar bought everything
• Seeing cousins at Ed and Maria's house, where the adults eventually collaborated in serving up quesadillas and fruit--my kind of meal! Also admiring Noah's science fair project, in which they'd compared various types of highlighter ink in UV light (hey, we have to do a science fair project too! better start thinking)
• Watching Lar and his dad work together to brand cows. It's a little like ballet, except with lots of mooing, gate slamming, yelling, and burnt hair smoke. (Apparently you have to wear clothes for cattle branding that you never actually want to wear again.) While my girls, safe inside the hay paddock, dropped handfuls of hay out to all the cows outside, who, lured together into a mob, knocked the license plate nearly off the front of our car. Lucky that ominous "clunk" didn't mean anything worse.
• The sale at Gary's shoe store! At 75% off, I think we bought half the store. But we saved a lot of money. And those shoes I wore today to church were super comfy as well as super cute.
• Snowmobiling up to the cabin. (Oh, wait, I actually pretty much hate that part. But I liked being there.)
• Ice crystals and icicle stalagmites adorning the nearby gold mine cave, until the Becca Godzilla monster went on a rampage
• Snowmobile driving practice (oh, wait, I hated that part too. But I didn't crash into anything, and when I nearly tipped us off the hillside Lar took over and saved us)
• Attending LTUE, where I was a guest panelist, and where I participated in the signing (thanks, Uncle Bill and Professor Tate, for showing up and buying books!)
• Traveling to Salt Lake City to do a book signing at the King's English bookstore, where we sold and signed a bunch of groups (in part because we were lucky enough to attract a group of homeschool families)
• more time with friends and family
• Dry erase crayons for drawing on window.
• Photographing old farmhouses while we drove. And granaries. Snowmobile tracks. And competing in Lar's contest for best I-84 sign photo. (As the only contestant, I must have won!)
• Discussion of body language. How exasperated sighs are perceived by parents.
• Trader joes wasabi almonds and juicy grape tomatoes.
• Drawing strawberries on window to pick and pass out
• New notebooks for drawing animals out of book, practicing Piggy, dot game
• Blokus--like a Tetris board game. Lar and Alex got very intense.
• Lar's flashlight tag

Frozen Yogurt

After my book signing at the Secret Garden, we went with some friends (good friends! we used to swap art and piano lessons for kids, and since they finally bought the house of their dreams we hadn't seen them in months! it was so sweet of them to come all the way into Ballard!) AHEM to frozen yogurt, the kind where you serve yourself. So each kid got to choose favorite flavors.
Katherine got pineapple and coconut.
Alex got pineapple and vanilla.
Rebecca got chocolate. And cake batter. And pineapple. And coconut. And vanilla. And dulce de leche. And white chocolate. And raspberry. And strawberry-banana. And tropical fruit.
Then she mixed them all together.

(And boy, did the onion rings at Red Mill Burgers taste good, too, found because Lar didn't feel like driving south on the freeway right then, and searched for hamburgers instead. Just goes to show that these sell-five-books, buy-books-plus-dinner events will never make us rich!)

On foreign currency

When Katherine spearheaded a fundraising coin drive for the Red Cross a month or two ago (her very own idea), we ended up a surprisingly high amount--maybe even a handful--of foreign coins: a few Mexican, maybe even a few Asian, and lots of Canadian.

Which reminds me, now that Canada is discontinuing their use of the penny--pretty soon the US will have more Canadian pennies in circulation than Canada!

Nature's Just Desserts

When you catch the illness you made light of in your child just the day before.

Note to self

Next time I invite Alex to run himself a bubble bath, specify that he should add LESS than half a bottle of dish soap.

On Being Tired

Rebecca stumbles into the kitchen this morning yawning and rubbing her eyes.
Me: "Why don't you go back to bed and get some more sleep? You're so tired?"
Rebecca: "No, Mommy, I just LOOK tired."

Alex's Favorite Restaurant?

Lar: "Alex, if you were going out to a restaurant, what restaurant would you want to go to?"
Alex: "Restaurant Dad!"
Lar: "And what would you want to eat at Restaurant Dad?"
Alex: "Pizza!"

The boy has good taste.

What a morning!

Alex set his alarm for 7, got up, read, practiced his piano, vacuumed stairs and his room, and still managed to get ready to leave before me!
Katherine played her piano this morning.
We all sat together for breakfast and Book of Mormon time.
And as I walked Katherine and Alex to school, we saw a tiny hummingbird perched on a blackberry vine. From one angle it looked drab and dull, but when it turned our way its whole head and throat flashed a brilliant magenta. An unbelievable blessing to brighten the day.

In Hawaii

To prove that I was really there

and that I saw fish (these are right under the snorkel tour boat, because I didn't have an underwater camera to snap the butterfly tangs and the moray eel and the green sea turtle that I saw in the depths)

and whales surfacing in the distance

and even (and it's a great pity that you can't capture this with a point-and-shoot) humpback whales in the far distance breeching RIGHT NEXT TO a group of kayakers, who couldn't seem to decide whether to stay and admire or to paddle madly away
and I apologize to my sister
who was the cause of our whole trip together (thanks, derm conference!)
because I never could remember to carry the camera
to capture our dinners overlooking the ocean
or the waves we jumped in
(you can't photograph the wind that froze our wet skin to shivers)
or the conference banquet with a table full of friends
or our grand snorkel adventure right in front of our hotel on our final day, which was almost as good as my expensive tour
followed by ride after ride down the two small hotel waterslides
(all to ourselves at 9:30 am)
or my sister's heroics as she played with the young children of her fellow dermatologist doctor whose husband had to return Stateside for a medical emergency

And many thanks to my husband, who heard my sister's words "anybody want to go with me to Hawaii?" and started checking airfares for me, eventually getting me onto my sister's very flight, while he stayed home coughing with sick kids ("Don't worry," he assures me when I dithered about whether I should really take off. "I'm related to my mother. I'm tough!). And to my parents, especially mom, who put in lots of kid duty so I could really be gone.

So glad to go.
So glad to be back.

Becca Ponders Religion

"Do you feel your Father up above?"
and
"Does God have a tongue?"

Becca's Plan

Becca says: "I want to stay four forever. Because I always want to have a mommy."

Drilling Rebecca's Spanish

My dad: "So if Alex is a chico, what's Katherine?"
Rebecca: "A chica!"
My dad: "And what am I?"
Rebecca: "A very old chico!"

Rebecca plans for the future

R: "I want to stay poor."
Me: "Why?"
R: "Because I want to stay a kid. I want to stay with you."

Poem for an Alligator that Knows How to Read

I took a pie out the street
I almost got run over.
I quickly went to the sidewalk
So I didn't get run over


By 4-year-old Rebecca

Words of Wisdom

Says Rebecca to Alex when he got frustrated with the new Perplexus: "If you do it lots of times, it gets easier!"

New Year's Day

Slept in.
Worked on photos for blog posts (relying a lot on my husband).
Went sledding with family, and dressed youngest daughter in my extra clothes and super-long socks after we realized we hadn't grabbed her snow coat or pants.
Argued kids back into bed for hours after bedtime--surprisingly, the youngest one is the noisiest!
And oh, yeah, my book was released today. (!!!)