Ana-ism #17

After more than 25 minutes, Ana still hadn't eaten the allotted amount of food from dinner to be finished. Seth was starting to lose his patience.

Seth: Okay, Ana. I'm going to set the timer for five minutes. If you haven't finished eating your food by the time the bell rings, I'm going to pick you up. I'm going to put you in the bath. I'm going to put you straight in bed ...
Ana: (After furiously spooning in her mouth) Done!

FAME makes me famous

I should be blogging about Thanksgiving. Or heck, even Christmas or New Year's. Instead, I'm blogging about FAME.

What is FAME, you ask? I'm officially certified to tell you (and when I say "officially certified," I mean, I signed up to teach it at Back to School Night) that it stands for Fine Arts Mini Experiences.

Someday I hope to be a super PTO mom. Or do like Seth's aunt and be the ever-present sub at Fairview where our kids attend elementary school. But for now with two young kids still at home, I will be involved with class parties and a few events without taking me away from home all the time. So when I saw FAME sign-up sheet at the PTO's table with one other name on it, I decided to take the plunge and added my name to it.

I didn't know much about FAME then. I understood that it had something to do with arts and music, which have both taken hits with recent school district funding cuts. And the only other name on the sheet inspired me. It happened to be the name of a lady in our ward who is smart and talented and whom I admire very much. I figured if Sheila had signed up for FAME, it would be golden.

After I had committed to it, I found out that Sheila would only be able to organize FAME and get it underway. From December on, I'd be flying solo. Although the thought terrified me, I decided I could watch how Sheila managed it, take careful notes, and be ready when my time came.

This is what I learned from watching Sheila teach: FAME is a parent volunteer-run program that exposes students to classical music and paintings and teaches them some of the elements of art and music. Every month, the docent (as the volunteer is called) uses lesson plans created by a company in California to introduce students to one painting by one artist and one piece of music by one composer. The program is designed to be taught once a month for six months (or seven, if you include the introductory lesson on the elements of music and art).

Each FAME lesson is designed to last 40 minutes (20 for kindergarten). That means the classes cycle through the music classroom and the docent presents the same material nine different times to the various grade levels.

I mentioned that the thought of being in charge of FAME terrified me. It's not the teaching ... my degree is in teaching. I LOVE teaching. No, it's the thought of teaching ART and MUSIC that scared me out of my wits. See, Sheila is brilliant. She knows a lot about art and music. Oh, yeah ... and she's an extremely talented violinist who often plays in church and is part of a band.

I, on the other hand, have little to no experience in these categories. My formal music education includes a few years of piano taught by my mom while I was really young. Otherwise, I've held a few musical callings in church (which also terrified me) and occasionally sung with the choir. (Does watching Little Einsteins give me an edge? If so, I'm a musical genius.) My formal art education is nonexistent. I took Humanities 101 in college as a freshman, so I've at least heard of some of these artists and composers, but I can't even say their names right since they're mostly a bunch of French dudes.

So I was feeling some trepidation as I prepared my first Éponine lesson. (Get it? Éponine? She sings "On My Own" in Les Misérables. Yeah, I can do literature and theater, but music and art are completely foreign.) I read through the lesson plan, changed things, rearranged them, made them my own. I learned what a leitmotif is, downloaded "Imperial Death March," printed off pictures of a sultan and the ocean, learned how to use a die-cut machine, and generally steeled myself.

Here's the result of the first lesson I taught all by my lonesome. It. Was. AWESOME. I taught them about melody and color. They taught me what a ziphius is. We listened to music. We looked at art. We made art.

Perhaps the highlight of my first FAME adventure was a former teacher of mine expressing surprise that I had done so well. That's right, Mr. Bird. Be amazed.

All ego inflation aside, I'm extremely grateful to Sheila for getting all the materials together and showing me how it's done. If I hadn't had her to model my teaching after, my experience may have been very different. And the teachers at Fairview are incredible. They're nice, supportive and helpful.

I can't believe what I high I had after coming home from teaching FAME. And even though my next lesson isn't for a couple of weeks, I'm already preparing. If only I could figure out how to pronounce this crazy guy's name. "Camille," I get. But "Saint-Saëns"? Come on!

Bekahism #44

Seth and Andrea had instructed the big girls to clean up their room.

Bekah: But I didn't make this mess! It was Miri!
Seth: You need to help clean it up.
Bekah: But Da-a-aad! Don't we believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for others' transgressions?

Bath time

This is what happens when you leave your 21-month-old to her own devices. I guess her babies (and frog?) needed a bath.

Bekahism #43

After tucking the girls in for the night ...

Bekah: Mom, I love you more than anything. I love you more than ... science.
Andrea: Wow.
Bekah: I love science a million batrillion and ninety-nine. I love you a million batrillion gazillion.

Ana-ism #16

I've decided that -isms don't have to be spoken. Case in point ...

The other day, Ana asked for a picture of an angry tiger to color. (How DID parents function pre-internet? Thank you, Google image search.) Here is her finished product:


See, she needed the tiger's mouth to be open "so I can draw a bubble and 'GRRR' coming out of its mouth." The only problem? The tiger actually faced this way:

The real, non-flipped picture.

So, logically, the "GRRR" is flipped.

Ana-ism #15

Driving home from the grocery store last night, Ana's looking out the window...

Ana: Dad, do you know why I'm looking at the sidewalk so much?
Seth: Um. No.
Ana: Because. I am just fascinated with sidewalks!

Funny girl

Miriam is at that grand age when she can communicate so much with so few sounds at her disposal (she is, after all, not even 20 months old). Here are some current family favorites:

• Whenever she sees Mickey Mouse--on her diapers, on the TV, on a book--she makes her piggy noise. Yes, my child mistakes a rodent for a porker.
• Her "I'm finished" signal when she's eating meals is "Ah mama," meaning "All done please, Mama." A while ago when I was out and Seth was on meal duty, he asked Miri if she was all done. Her response: "Ah mama ... dada."
• Miriam is wild about pumpkins. For the entire month of October and carrying on to November, she gets über excited every time she sees one of the gourds and exclaims, "Wah-co! Wah-co!" She even mistook Buddy's doghouse (Buddy is Grandpa Dennis' golden lab) for a jack-o-lantern. (Because it was dark outside and Buddy's orange heat lamp was on inside the doghouse.)
• Lately Miri gets very upset when she's missing someone in the family. After dropping Ana off at preschool yesterday, we drove home and unloaded from the van. As I shut the door to the garage, Miri realized that she was minus a sister and shouted,"ANAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
• Miriam calls her pacifier a "baba" because that's what we've called such cry-halting devices since Bekah coined the term in her babyhood. But Miri has added a new term to our lovey vocabulary: "uh-oh." That's how she refers to her blanky.

Yes, folks ... she IS a doll.

Costumes and trick-or-treating

From the time my kids have been big enough to talk, I've let them choose their Halloween costumes. Usually, their choices fit within a certain theme. (Although, not always, unless you could say the theme was "animals" that year.)

This year, we threw themes out the window. Bekah wanted to be Princess Leia. Ana wanted to be ... wait for it ... a walrus. Miri got to reuse the cow costume (which is reversible) to be a horse (since she always neighs VERY enthusiastically whenever she sees a horse).

The three hooligans on our porch before the neighborhood trick-or-treating.

As always, we trick-or-treated at all the Idaho Falls' grandparents' houses. First we visited Grandpa Wirkus.

Grandpa insisted they each take five pieces of candy. When Miri only got two, Grandpa had to put three more in the sack I held. "But Grandpa," I said, "she can't even count."

Grandpa Scott was helping Grandpa Wirkus put a new doorknob on his shop. While Bekah teased Miri through the screen door, Grandpa Scott sneaked up behind her.

Then we stopped at my parents' house.

Grandma was on the phone when we arrived.

While we stopped at home to eat a quick dinner and pick up Seth, Grandma Susan and Grandpa Dennis came over to borrow our computer to Skype with Cooper the Cowboy in Virginia. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures because I was busy warming up lasagna and making some last-minute flipper feet for Ana.

After throwing our dishes in the sink, we drove to Old Grandma's house to show off costumes and pick up some treats.

I told the girls we should have brought an eye patch for Old Grandma since she already had a parrot on her shoulder.

To see more Halloween photos, click here.

Ghoulish gourds

In case you've been living in a hole (or you just don't read our blog regularly ... but that's about the same, right?), you know that we have a thing for pumpkin carving. We like it. We do it every year. So, of course, we couldn't NOT do it again this year.

Ana with her pumpkin (the one with Mr. Potato-like features), Seth with his pumpkin (the vampire), Miri in the general vicinity of her pumkin (the mini one in front with random marker markings), Andrea with her pumpkin (the vampire victim) and Bekah with her pumpkin (with her likeness).

Thank you, Berretts, for donating the pumpkins. As always, Seth is the mastermind behind the pumpkin carving theme.

This was a 1- or 2-minute exposure. I love the light glowing through the puncture marks.

(To view other years' pumpkins, click here, here, here, here, here and here.)

Home wrecker

Seth volunteered us to feed the sister missionaries tonight. That's all well and good, but Bekah has dance until 5:15 and the sisters are due to arrive at 5:30. Since I can't whip up a dinner and table setting in five minutes, I knew it would take some pre-dance prep to get everything ready in time for our guests.

While Miriam napped, I finished making/baking the rolls, cut up lettuce for a salad and set eight places at the table. (In case you're counting, that makes five of us and three missionaries.) When I head Miri squawking in her crib, I got her and went back to work. I should have realized that my carefully set table was about to be ambushed by a 19-month-old.

I swear, juice is to Miri as blood is to a shark; she can smell it a mile away. Twenty bucks says I can't find that cup when it's time to sit down and eat with the sisters.

Shhh ...

That title's purpose is two-fold: (1) This post is about a Christmas surprise I'm creating (mostly) for Miriam, and (2) it's supposed to keep the kiddies hushed during church.

Here's a sneak peek:


Here's the inspiration. I about died when I saw her Jedi Quiet Book and wanted to copy it page by page, but it just didn't seem reverent enough for sacrament meeting.

old

Last night at dinner Andrea and I were telling Bekah about some of the cartoons and TV shows that were popular when we were kids:

Seth: And when I was your age, in about 1988 or so, there was this show I liked called-
Bekah: (Incredulous) Wait. What? You guys were alive in the nineteens?!?

Upon which Andrea and I fell about laughing. If anyone knows how to make you feel old, it's little kids.

Seth and Andrea in another 15 years or so

Pinning

I couldn't help but "overhear" all the hubbub about Pinterest, so I signed up. And it's awesome. Where else can you find great ideas like this?


Sure you could follow the link and buy one of these from some chick on Etsy ... OR you could sew one yourself. Or three. Or two sets of three (one for your dad and one for you).


I can't wait until my next family shoot with wee ones!

Ana-ism #14

Seth spots Ana at the top of the family room steps after we had tucked her into bed 40 minutes prior.

Seth: Ana, what are you doing out of bed?
Ana: I have to tell you something funny. ... My nose said, "Bubba." I didn't want it to; it just did.