other goings-on

Ann Marie has figured out how to peel mandarin oranges. I kept finding her peeling oranges and I couldn't figure out if someone was starting them for her or not, then finally one day I caught her grabbing one and it turns out that she just bites them and then starts peeling. She's good about putting the peels in the garbage, though. Never mind, I just turned and found her peeling one and throwing the peels on the living room floor.

Kevin was working on collecting orange seeds and kept reminding all of us to put any orange seeds we found in his ziploc bag because in the spring he wanted to plant an orange tree. He didn't really believe Ryan when he explained that you don't grow orange trees that way.

Kevin's class had a music party for the last school day in December, and several of the kids shared holiday songs. I was surprised and pleased that afternoon when Kevin told me that he sang Picture a Christmas in front of his class. He also gave a Book of Mormon to our neighbor just before Christmas break, which was completely his idea. His courage and eagerness to share the gospel with others are so amazing and inspiring to me.

Words Ann Marie has learned of late: trash, color, pants, toothbrush, Heidi

Ann Marie also has learned to nod her head yes, which is adorable and very useful communication-wise.

With Heidi's preschool coop we are working on sounding out words and learning some sight words. Sometimes she's excited about it and other times she doesn't want to try. We're going to be using the Hooked on Phonics book that belongs to one of the other moms, and I wish I had gotten that book to teach my kids to read instead of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. The thing I never liked about Teach Your Child was that it introduced some of the long vowel sounds before short vowel sounds. With the word read it made the letter a smaller to tell the kids not to pronounce the a, but I always thought it would be better to work on short e first and then later on introduce ea and talk about what sound it makes and what words have it. That is more like the approach Hooked on Phonics takes, and it still has a lot of the things I loved about Teach Your Child. So maybe when Ann Marie is older I'll look into Hooked on Phonics. I think the preschool kids are picking up on the reading pretty well. They really already know all the letter sounds, so we felt like it would be good to move on to sounding out and sight words and keep working on handwriting. It's really been a blessing to have this coop to help Heidi get ready for Kindergarten. She's not always as willing to try the school stuff if I'm the one teaching, so it's been helpful to have the other moms to help teach.

One day Kevin came to me grinning and said, "Mom, I'm the science kid in our family." Yep. He will sit and listen to non-fiction books for a long time, but Heidi declares that they're boring or scary, and we lovingly refer to Ann Marie as Jack the Bookripper. On a recent Walmart trip Kevin was trying to touch everything, but of particular interest to him was the battery display. How many kids do you know who want to stop and look at the batteries? His favorite pastime is taking apart VCRs and printers (which are frequently discarded by the dumpsters here).

This winter has been a little rough on Kevin of late. For a while there I was wondering if he even needed occupational therapy anymore because he was doing so well, but now I know we still need it. When the weather is nice and we can play outside for two hours every day Kevin is great because he can move and get so much of the tactile and proprioceptive input that he needs, but with the cold weather we haven't been able to play outside and Kevin is going crazy. He's back to crashing into things, being impulsive, laughing maniacally (when I hear that laugh I know we're in trouble), ignoring us, whining, and letting out that whoop that makes your ears ring. If we had a backyard I would probably send him out in the cold anyway. It's still better than it was a year and a half ago, but hopefully we will get some nice days soon so we can get him better regulated.

On the bright side, about a week ago Kevin finished reading his first chapter book, the first Magic Tree House book. He got a little ambitious and checked out four or five more from the library even though we already own the first four books, but I was glad he was excited about it.

more thoughts about kids learning to read

When Kevin brought home his first "book in a bag" in Kindergarten, I was horrified. I had worked for months trying to teach him how to sound out words using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (although easy was not how I would have described the experience) and now it looked like they had ruined all my hard work. He was reading books with text like, "The dog. The horse. The pig. The cow. The farm." All they had to do was recognize the sight word (in this case, "the") and guess the other word using the picture.

Over the course of the year reading the books in a bag was in general pretty frustrating because the books weren't very interesting and sometimes the guessing game for figuring out unknown words was complicated. I would say the kids mostly worked on learning sight words and recognizing endings like -er, -ed, and -ing. Towards the end there was more of an expectation to sound out words and they learned how to sound out words with "super e" at the end of words (i.e. like, made, take, etc.).

Over the summer we discovered Piggy and Gerald and Kevin's reading really improved because we had books that were actually fun to read. We also started having him read a verse from the Book of Mormon every day, which was helpful because there's a lot of repetition, so he learned more words. In first grade he's learned a lot more rules about phonetics and his skills have improved enough that he can read more interesting books. He can read pretty much any of the I Can Read It Myself books independently as well as Splat the Cat and Fly Guy. Recently we've been reading Henry and Mudge books and those seem to be at about the right level for him. He can also read The Magic Tree House with help, and I think once he can get to the point where he can read those and The Boxcar Children independently his world will be open to a much broader selection of books.

Over time I've stopped feeling upset about the way they taught reading in kindergarten. Teaching Kevin to read words phonetically was like beating my head against the wall, but once Kevin had mastered enough sight words he was a lot more willing to try sounding out words because knowing enough sight words meant he didn't have to sound out every single word, so he didn't get burned out as fast and he felt a lot more confident. I do wish they had worked on reading phonetically a little earlier on, but in the end I think starting with sight words was a good approach for Kevin.

I think one of the hardest things is that for kindergarteners who are just starting to learn to read there aren't a lot of fun books at their level. I realize that it's hard to write a fun book when you're limited to a handful of sight words and phonetic words. Or maybe there actually are books like that out there, but our school is making do with the same books that they've been using for a long time because there's not money to invest in new ones. I spent a lot of time looking through the Easy Reader section at the public library and until this past fall I had a hard time finding books that were enjoyable and at his level. I think my advice to parents of kindergarteners would be to be hang in there for that first year because it gets a lot better once they have enough reading skills.

Annandag Jul 2015

I actually took pictures at Annandag this year. I guess it helps that I have a cell phone now, so I usually have a camera in my pocket.

The Johnsons have invited us to Annandag Jul every year since we've lived here and we always look forward to it. Reed gives the same lecture about the proper way to cut cheese every year: "This is not a tomahawk. You don't whack the cheese. You use a cheese plane, like this, to get nice thin slices." It took me until last year to work up the courage to try the brown cheese, but it's actually pretty good!

There were the typical dishes that they make every year, including a few kinds of fish and cheese, and other things that people brought. We brought some rolls.

After dinner we did ring dances and danced Christmas through the house. Heidi wasn't as shy this year and she participated, and Kevin participated sometimes between getting distracted by other interesting things. I got a video of the ring dances this time!

Chad Kearsley always makes a kransekake (a Norwegian wedding cake) and this year's was a good one!

It was in the 70s outside and pretty hot inside. I had brought my fudge and homemade Take 5 bars to share, and even though we kept them in the freezer until it was time for dessert, the fudge melted into the consistency of frosting by the time people started going around with their plates, so that was interesting. A lot of people still took some and said it was good.

Scripture Study

When I was working as a custodian at Heritage Halls, a group of us were sitting in the office with our boss, who was talking about her scriptures. She had previously been using one of the white sets like they have in the temple, and that set was really marked up and she used it and loved it until it fell apart and she had to get a new set. She was lamenting to us that she missed her old scriptures with all the markings and she was working on transferring all of her highlights and notes to her new set. I've heard similar descriptions from other people, and it's something I'm completely unable to relate to.

I've tried a few different methods or systems for reading the scriptures. One of the first systems I tried was to underline everything said by God or Jesus Christ (a suggestion made in a talk by a recently returned missionary). I quickly figured out that sometimes this meant there were whole pages underlined in red and it made the markings annoying and pointless, but I had been doing it for long enough that I felt like if I didn't do it for the entire Book of Mormon it would look funny because the last 3/4 wouldn't be marked like that, so I think I finished the entire book like that and then was annoyed about it as long as I used that set.

Since that set was now covered in red I switched to underlining things I liked and sometimes writing notes. Oh, and for some reason at some point I started drawing a star over the word "Wo" every time I saw it because it seemed like if wo was coming to someone for doing something then I should avoid doing that thing, although upon rereading the Book of Mormon I didn't find the starred woes especially helpful.

When I was sixteen I got a new set of scriptures and I was excited to start over. I ended up underlining things I liked with pen, but when I reread the scriptures I found that I liked different things and I had no idea why I underlined a particular word or line anymore, so I hated that I had written in my scriptures. Sometimes I've written notes in the margins, but the things I wrote in the margins twelve years ago are annoying to me now. At one point I had a box of colored pencils and I would highlight things with different colors, which was kind of fun for a while, but the markings still aren't especially relevant to me when I reread those verses later.

I've heard of people color-coding their scriptures, which in some ways is an attractive option for me, but I've never done it because I feel like it would be a distraction from the message.

I've known a few people who choose to read the entire Book of Mormon focusing on a particular topic, but I've found that I focus on different topics as my spiritual needs change, so I don't want to feel locked into a specific topic when my needs change.

I've known people who use the topical guide and study specific topics, but I've found that it gets tiresome to read the topical guide too much, and I don't like missing out on the context, so while I do this occasionally it's not something that works for me for regular scripture study.

There have been a couple of times when I tried reading the Book of Mormon and looking up every footnote, but that was annoying because it took forever and not all the footnotes are good or even relevant.

So in the end I always return to reading the scriptures in order and not really marking anything. A couple of years ago Ryan got me a kindle and I read my scriptures on there, so I don't even have to see the annoying notes and underlines in my scriptures. I mainly read the Book of Mormon because I feel like the Spirit just isn't as strong when I'm not reading it consistently, although I do lament the fact that I'm not as familiar with the other standard works. And sometimes if I feel inspired to write a blog post about a particular topic I will change my scripture study for a while to gather relevant scriptures and talks. It still feels weird that I don't have a system when I see the Ensign articles or conference talks that urge us to find a system for reading our scriptures, but the systems have never really worked out for me. The one thing that I think might be good to change is that I don't spend a lot of time memorizing scriptures anymore, and I think that might be helpful so that I would have a bigger arsenal of memorized scriptures to call on when I need them, whether that's in my daily life or preparing a talk.

Christmas 2015

We had an interesting Christmas. I sometimes feel bad because I don't do a lot for our family for Christmas. Some years I am more ambitious than others. But this year we did less. A week before Christmas I came down with a sore throat (swollen lymph nodes, really) that lingered for three weeks, so that limited how much I could do because I wasn't feeling well. Plus Ryan has been busy trying to get job applications turned in and get his presentation for the AAS conference ready, so he's been going to his office every day to work when normally he would spend more time at home over the break.

It's hard to be away from family for Christmas, and we've stayed here for all eight Christmases we've lived here. For some reason this time was hard. Maybe it was partly that we haven't visited any family since 2014 when we went to Utah, so it's been a year and a half. So in lieu of being with family I made my mom's wassail and drank a lot of it (which was helpful for my sore throat too). We also made Grammy Jenna's cheese ball twice.

On Christmas Eve we reenacted the nativity and sang Christmas carols. The kids also drew pictures for the Christmas journal (a tradition we started last year, the idea being that we can write our testimonies of Christ in it every year). I was feeling really frazzled from being sick and busy with the kids and missing my family, so I was looking towards these two traditions with a get-it-over-with attitude, but on Christmas Eve I drove past a nearby Catholic church and saw all the cars of people going to mass, and I realized that I actually did want to make our Christ-centered traditions significant, so we put more effort into the nativity and the Christmas journal and it was really special.

We tend to delay putting up the Christmas tree until later because it's stressful to deal with the kids playing with it, and this year we have a toddler again, so we weren't in a hurry to put up the Christmas tree. We finally got out the tree and lights a week before Christmas. The next morning we discovered that Kevin had been playing with the lights and he pulled one out, which meant that the first segment of lights didn't work, so the tree came in the bedroom for a day. Ryan tried to replace the broken lights and discovered that the wrong replacement lights had been put in the box, which meant that the first segment blinked while the rest didn't. My parents had several years where the lights were like that and I swore I would never have my lights like that, but at this point I have more pressing issues and I realized I didn't really care if the lights weren't the same, so we dealt with it. This was the tree's last year anyway because it was getting really scraggly (we may have made several comments about Charlie Brown's Christmas tree). Then we didn't put any ornaments on until I finally felt bad enough about it that I put them on the tree on Christmas Eve. I only got around to getting a couple of the nativity sets out, so that was kind of sad.

It took a bit of thinking to decide what to get the kids for Christmas. We already have lots of great toys that the kids play with. They each ended up getting a toy from Santa and a toy from Mom and Dad, and they got lots of books. I think I chose well because the kids have been playing with all the toys a lot. Kevin got a Marble Run set, Heidi got a doctor set, and Ann Marie got a pink teddy bear and a doll. Ann Marie carries her presents everywhere and cries real tears when she can't take them out of the house or hold them at mealtimes, so I consider that a big victory. It's been so fun. We also got some CitiBlocs from Ryan's sister Tiffany, and we've all been building with those a lot. Ryan got me a victorio strainer (so now I can finally make applesauce and tomato soup!) and a set of Rubbermaid containers, and I got him the Nausicaa Valley of the Wind boxed set. We got a lot of other nice things from family.

A couple of months ago one of my friend shared a documentary about how a lot of cocoa is produced and harvested by slaves, and Hershey's, Nestle, and Mars haven't done much to avoid using slave-produced cocoa in their products. They interviewed a man whose six-year-old son (the same age as Kevin) had been kidnapped and enslaved and still hasn't been found, and when I saw that scene I knew that I couldn't support those companies until they make sure all their chocolate is Fair Trade. I knew that I would have to change some Christmas traditions to keep that commitment because we usually have Reese's and other chocolate in our stockings for Christmas. But I found out that Aldi and Trader Joe's chocolate is fair trade (apparently Costco's chocolate chips are too), which meant that I can buy their chocolate and make my own chocolate treats. First I made Marshmallow Fudge with mint extract (it was delicious, but it never got very hard). Then I made homemade Take 5 bars based on this recipe. I used caramels instead of Rolos, but next time I'm going to make my own caramel because the caramels got too hard after being melted. I'm also going to try making a "Good as Reeses" peanut mixture next time I make Take 5 bars instead of doing the recipe's peanut butter mixture. Then for New Years I made Oreo truffles using Trader Joe's Jo-Jos, which are a lot like Oreos and about the same price (I think I actually like the Jo-Jos better). The Jo-Jo truffles are really easy: You just crush a whole package of Jo-Jos in a ziploc bag, then mix them with cream cheese in a mixer. Then you shape the mixture into balls, let them harden in the freezer, then dip them in melted chocolate. So amazing. We brought those when we went to our neighbors the Dunns' house to play games (Forbidden Desert, which was really fun) on New Year's Eve.

I realized that I can make do without my favorite candy bars. It was more work, but I was able to make a lot of chocolate treats that I liked just as much as my favorite candy bars. I probably shouldn't make this many next Christmas, though, because I ate way too much chocolate!

With kids things always seem to happen so fast and it's hard to get good pictures and enjoy the moments too, but here's what I got:

Ward Party

Our ward had a Christmas party. Ryan got sick and couldn't stand up, let alone go to a ward party, but I had signed up to bring orange glazed carrots and a dessert and the way the emails about food were phrased it sounded like people would go hungry if my carrots didn't show up, so I went to a ward party with three kids by myself. I read the recipe wrong and the carrots didn't turn out quite right, then somehow the glaze that didn't get thick got spilled all over my pants and I had to change, then we had to drive to the church in traffic, so we were late to the party, but it wasn't a big deal. It turned out that there was way more than enough food and my contribution wasn't really needed, but the kids were actually good and I didn't have to make dinner, so that was nice. Kevin and Heidi are at a stage now where they can go off and play with friends and I don't have to worry that they'll be off in Mexico if I can't find them for fifteen seconds, so that has made things easier. Ann Marie didn't get to leave her stroller, but she was a pretty good sport about it all things considered, and she ate a pretty good dinner.

The Primary children sang some songs.

I bet your ward doesn't have a youth band/orchestra like mine does. We had a piano, a baritone, violins, a saxophone, a bass clarinet, and a cello. They played several songs and did a lovely job.

I wasn't planning to stay afterwards and help, but when Kevin saw people cleaning up he said he wanted to help, which I decided was a desire worth encouraging. He was actually really helpful and worked really hard. I really appreciate that Kevin likes to be a helper.

The next day was the ward choir's Christmas program, and fortunately Ryan was feeling better, so the kids were taken care of while I played the piano with the choir. It was a really special program and I really felt the spirit, especially playing John Rutter's Rejoice and Be Merry (which is also very fun to play on the piano). "So blessed forever be Jesus our King, who brought us salvation. His praises we'll sing, his praises we'll sing!" What a blessing it has been to praise my Savior each year with our choir. Because of his gift we have so many reasons to rejoice.

Duke Gardens

The day after Thanksgiving was another beautiful day, so we decided to go to Duke Gardens and then see the Duke Chapel. Everyone and their dog was there, so apparently not everyone spends Black Friday in stores.

I thought this staircase with the wooden railing was pretty.

Heidi kept begging to be carried and claimed she was tired. She always thinks she's tired.