Fashionistas

Grandma Michele has been wanting to have the 4 local cousins over for a fashion show and lunch for as long as I can remember. Last week, it all came together, much to the delight of pretty much everyone involved.This is Grandma Michele my husband's mother. She had on a lovely jeweled blouse that seemed so fitting for Valentine's Day.
Mina, striking her pose. She refused to take off her pajama top and funny enough, it matched her dress.
This is my niece, isn't she cute.This is her sister, equally as cute.


Did I mention that this fashion show included a lot of interpretive dance? I should mention that because it did.Love these girls.
The fashion show was followed by a lovely brunch made by Grandma Michele and then a play date. Then that was followed by a day at the roller skating rink and then a sleep over and then a day at the swimming pool.

Saturday

Saturday we had an unexpected visit from our local cousins. While John and his brother watched Star Trek. I am totally not kidding here.Spencer and Ari played Minecraft.


Seth built himself a fort.

And the 3 smaller girls did a lot of this.



No one wanted cousins to leave and Mina requested a sleepover, which was not possible this particular night. I think I see some in our future.

Bits

So the other day when we hydrated spitballs Ari put some of them in a concoction of orange juice and soy sauce. We wondered what might become of them and yesterday, I took a peek.

They took on the color of the mixture and they were lightly sticking together, which the other ones did not do. They also only hydrated about half size which we are assuming is from the salt content of the soy.

In other news, the girls built themselves a fort and then pretended to be in jail.


Adding to the randomness of this post I took a little stroll down memory lane this morning that was started by these socks.


I can't wear these socks without thinking of Donny Osmond. I was only 6 when the Osmond Show went off the air, I was not one of those pre-teen or teen girls who had posters in their rooms and wanted to marry Donny. I was much to young for that but I did remember his socks. I got to see a taping of the Osmond Show when I was 5. My big sister from the United Way took me. I remember very little of the actual show but I remember going and thinking it was pretty cool.

Then, in junior high that same big sister actually dated one of the architects of the Osmond Studios. Who lived in this incredibly cool house in Emigration Canyon that I had the good fortune of getting to stay in on various weekends when I would go visit her. I even spent a couple of whole weeks there in the summer which was pure heaven. No siblings, no grown ups all day, just me some books, some cd's, and miles and miles of hills to hike on. This would also be the time frame in which I would discover the authors Tom Robbins and Jean Auel both considered too mature for my age. I went on to read everything they wrote up until I was in high school. I still remember the mixture of guilt and pure joy with which I would read their books.

Flash forward to my high school years and the Osmond Studios were sold to a company who did team building exercises using obstacles courses. I can't remember whether I went there with the class officers group I was in our the at risk kids group I was in. I was never sure if I was in the at-risk kids groups because I was a class officer or because I was an at-risk kid. I never sought clarification and now well I just think it is funny.

Written on the errr...table

It isn't every day you go out to eat and upon sitting down find that your daughter's name is carved in to the table. And we totally did not do it, promise. Not our style.

Getting out of the line

I was talking to Ari on the way home from the library tonight about my choice to not listen to my intuition. I asked her what she thought was in my thinking that would drive me to do something that was obviously not healthy for me. What she had to say was astounding.

"It was like you were a horse in a line. All the other horses started to walk and then started to run so you ran too. You were afraid that the horses would leave you behind so you kept running, even though it was making you sick. What you really needed to do was just get out of line."

Have I mentioned lately that having a conversation with this highly unique person is like having a conversation with my wise old grandma.
(The wisdom and playfulness of children are possibly two of my greatest joys in life.)

What is really going on here...

" A lot of parenting difficulties come from seeing a problem, seeing a solution and turning the solution in to the new problem." Joyce Fetteroll

Awhile back I posted this quote on my FB and asked people to replace the word parenting with other words as I saw this as a quite pervasive life mistake. Today the idea of focusing on the problem, or what you think is the problem and then solving it has really charged in to my awareness. Let me back track and tell you the sorted details.

I have been sick for most of January. I caught a cold early on that morphed into ear infections. While I was still on antibiotics for the infections I caught a nasty four hour flu. The combination of the flu and the atom bomb to my gut that is antibiotics led to digestive issues. The digestive issues have been lingering and unpleasant. I will give myself some credit here for not panicking, but then I have to take most of the credit back with what I am about to say next.

I sat with myself and had a little Q and A about the state of my health. I thought, " What changed in January." Then my intuition quickly informed me that the health issues went much further back and I was ignoring the trail of them. Lets see there was the cold sore in December, the massive asthma attack in October, the strange and pervasive rash in August and then it gets all blurry. But then it hits me, that last time I felt vibrantly healthy and whole was when I was regularly doing yoga. By regularly, I mean every day for about an hour.

I sat with this information for awhile. Why did I ever leave yoga in the first place? I started running. Why did I start running? I.DON'T.KNOW. Add to this that in January I started walking on the treadmill regularly but honestly my body did not want to do it. My body has been giving me clear signs for well over 6 months that I am not doing what is healthy for IT.

I did yoga last night and felt like I had come home. So far today, stomach happy. Not just calm but happy. It has not even been calm for probably 2 weeks. I guess the question that remains is why did I choose to start something and keep doing something that obviously was not good for me? What thinking drove me away from my intuition that my body wants yoga and not running? And why was I so willing to suffer through it, I mean really suffer, with not feeling good and also the backlash that serves up in my relationships and everywhere else in my life?

The big piece of credit I will give myself at this point is that I did not go into my regular pattern of attacking the symptom with fury, throwing every thing I have at it. I really have patiently waited for the stomach issues to subside, tried a few things here and there, and all the while had a sense that a piece of the puzzle just was missing. I might have been able to solve the stomach "problem" only to find it somewhere else like I have for the last 6 months.

(This is my coffee face. See what happens when the kids get the camera, I go all crazy eyed.)

Monday with Mina

Mina reminds me of the characters from the Laura Numeroff books. The characters in her books are very busy moving quickly from one thing to the next. Yesterday I got out some crepe paper for her to make a craft. This craft.Which she glued together in less than 5 minutes and had moved on to the only logical thing she could move to next, dressmaking.


I think the cat next to her is relieved she is not making him a dress.As you can see, the crepe paper wrapping went on for awhile and with every color at her disposal. Then she started running around the wall between the kitchen and the livingroom yelling, "This is the longest dress ever."
Next she took scissors and carefully cut the whole dress off of herself. Making a nice pile of what she called "leaves".
So of course the only logical thing to do next is to get your mom to bury you in the leaves.
And then throw the leaves at her.Then Ari came in to the room and they decided to try and make her a dress out of the leaves.
Which did not go so well, I think crepe paper will be needed today for further clothing making.

Along with crepe paper play we also finished a catapult today- this thing took forever because I broke some of the dowels and had to find replacements.

Then we had to get out the spitballs to use with the catapult. Ari wanted to know what would happen if we rehydrated the entire bag. And this is what that looks like.

They are incredibly fun to play in and launch with the catapult. Fortunately, all of these fit in to a big plastic freezer bag where they will stay nice and hydrated until we launch them or until the girls find some other use for them. Ari wants to buy and hydrate enough to fill the bathtub and then sit in them but I don't know if we are headed that direction.