Stuff that happened

As things get busier I'm finding that it's easier to just quickly post a picture on Instagram and then share it on Facebook, so I guess that's why I'm not blogging so much. But here, in no particular order, are some things that we've been up to:

Kevin finished the third Magic Tree House book. He always checks out two or three from the library just to look at the pictures. Math homework has gotten a lot better over the last couple of months. At the beginning of the school year it would take an hour every day, but now he's a lot faster and lots of times he enjoys the homework so much that he decides to do all four pages the day he brings them home. It does help that he's not getting as many story problems, but his focus certainly seems to have improved.

Recently Kevin expressed an interest in learning to play the piano and he started asking me on a daily basis when I was going to buy him some piano books. I asked around and everyone said the Faber method was great, so I bought the Primer books and we just started working on them. Kevin wanted to start with I Am a Child of God and I don't think he really understands that we have to start with baby steps like learning rhythm, but I think he's actually doing really well. He's really good at noticing patterns and he likes to try to come up with his own melodies. The Faber method seems really good. It's fun and engaging and I feel like it gives a lot of guidance to me so I know how to teach him, which is a big help because I don't have much experience teaching piano.

Heidi is learning to read at preschool. We're using Hooked on Phonics and I like it a lot better than Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. They're also learning sight words.

I'm still doing pretty well with practicing the piano consistently. It has been a blessing to have a piano, but I must admit in some ways this piano has been a bit of a disappointment. I had it tuned a year ago and within a couple of months it was already very out of tune, and every key has a different timbre. It's hard to try to play something musically when the quality of the instrument is not so good. I'm trying to remind myself that often when I can't get something to sound like I want it's not me--it's the piano. I am probably going to start going to the church once a week to practice so that I can keep my morale up playing on a good piano sometimes. For now my piano does work for practice and so I'm trying to deal with it and patiently wait for the time when we can save up to buy a good piano. I've been working on learning all the major and minor arpeggios because I never learned those. I have them all memorized now and I'm continuing to polish them. The arpeggio section in Fur Elise seemed a lot easier when I played it for fun a few weeks ago! I've also been working on Debussy's Arabesque 1 for several months. At the beginning I wasn't sure if I could ever learn to play those triplets stacked on eighth notes, but after practicing it for a while I got to the point where it's not that hard. I figure this has to be awesome for my brain. I have the whole piece memorized now and I'm trying to polish the whole thing and make it more and more musical. I've learned a lot about musicality from our ward choir director and now watching the dynamics and phrasing is something I tend to do out of habit, whereas when I used to practice in high school I would always forget about those things.

I am trying to implement a daily chore system for myself so I can stay more caught up on some of the housework. I set up reminders on my phone, and that seems to help. I told myself to stick with it for three weeks and see how it goes. This is week three and so far I like it. My schedule is: master bath on Monday, kids bath on Tuesday, sweep and mop Wednesday, vacuum Thursday, do a deep cleaning job on Friday. (I just realized that sounded like a bunch of Magic Tree House titles.) I'm thinking of changing Friday to cleaning the kitchen and doing deep cleaning on Saturday. I do try to do more than this, but having it scheduled helps me stay caught up. I've realized it really only takes fifteen minutes to clean a bathroom if I do it regularly. I've also realized that if my house was as clean as I wish it was, I would never do anything that really matters like spend time with my family or read or play the piano.

This has also reinforced that my biggest challenge with having a clean house is the kids' messes. It's really hard to get the vacuuming done when it means either picking up all the toys myself or (even harder) getting the kids to pick up the toys. We've invested in some really great toys that teach our kids to think and be creative, but unfortunately that means that we have several bins full of building sets with lots of pieces (duplos, marble run, Citi Bloks, play food, regular blocks, etc.). It's helped a lot to have each set in its own labelled bin, and the kids have gotten better with cleaning up, but if you dump out three bins of toys then that's already a huge mess to clean up. On Sunday I got so frustrated that I packed up almost all of the toys and moved them into our bedroom, and told the kids that if they want to play with something they have to ask me for it, and they can't have something else until they've cleaned up the ones they were playing with. We'll see how it goes. They need to learn to clean up their messes before making new ones.

The kids keep asking me when we're going to have another baby. I tell them we can't have another baby until they get better at cleaning up after themselves, which isn't really true because if I wait for that then we won't have any more. At any rate I've decided I like the three year gap better than the two year gap because two-year-olds are still almost babies themselves. The other day I saw a friend with a new baby and when I saw his tiny hands I thought to myself, "I can't hold that baby or I'll want another one right now and I just can't do that yet."

We got a marble run game for Christmas, which has been really fun, but it also stresses me out because Ann Marie loves the marbles. Her new favorite game is to throw balls and say, "Hi-yah!" and on Sunday she came out to the living room with two handfuls of marbles that had been left on the floor in the kids' room and threw them all while saying, "Hi-yah!" which was very cute and irritating at the same time, and that was when I confiscated all of the toys.

My new hobby is sewing shields for the Days for Girls feminine hygiene kits. I've made six so far and I have the materials for lots more. Our stake has started having periodic sew-ins to make things for the kits and I'm really excited to be involved. It seems like a really great cause and I can see how the kits could make a huge difference in these girls' lives.

Ryan's paper has been accepted for publication and they're just doing some final things before it gets published. We're still working on the job search.