The Tulip Festival

Last weekend we went down to Thanksgiving Point for their tulip festival. Their garden spreads over an immense area, with all kinds of great features, like some Roman columns on the top of a little mount, an Italian fountain, a big covered trellis-walk in the rose garden, and a huge man-made falls. It's a really beautiful setting, a bit of which we tried to capture with the camera. The downside was that the tulips hadn't come up yet down there. In fact, the whole adventure was an exercise in imagining how beautiful this place will be- in about three weeks. Some flowering trees and bushes, lots of buds where you'd want to see blooms. We enjoyed thinking about the coming colors, but didn't get to see much of them ourselves. Oh well, still had a nice time.

Primary Documents

Every Sunday, the kids run into sacrament meeting carrying several pieces of paper each, their Primary work product. They are always so excited to show us what they made or drew or colored or cut out during the previous two hours, and we love seeing their stuff. But we don't usually come to church equipped to deal with the document retention issues their output demands. Usually, their drawings get stuffed quickly into the brutally overstuffed 'church bag,' along with 12 ziploc bags full of half-eaten snacks from previous weeks (a close analysis indicates that the raisins and the fishies are the snacks most likely to be left behind), 11 broken crayons, 3 dry markers, two never-used puppets, hundreds of sacrament meeting programs and several activity booklets and sketch pads. There, these precious records of budding artistry are smashed and crumpled and defaced and, ultimately, forgotten.

Which is just a long way of saying that tonight I cleaned out the church bag, and here are some of the invaluable artifacts I unearthed, captioned with the artist's commentary on each:


Rex: They said to draw Heaven. That's Jesus. Next to him is red berries on a bush. Next to that is a tree with two purple berries. In the air there are some M's. (Are you sure they're not birds?) Oh, yeah, they're birds. It has a yellow sky, because I think Heaven has a yellow sky.



Lucy: This is Jesus. He has some butterflies and some flowers. In Church I did it, and Miss Julie telled me to do it. And we put stickers on it. I liked the butterfly under his chin. And these are his eyes, the flowers are. I think it's pretty. I like him.



Lucy: This is a guy that's a moon and he has feet and he can walk. (The words say you are thankful for the earth). Yeah, it's the earth. I made it purple. I like it like that. I put some pink right here in the middle. I drawed it at our church. It has feet.


Rex: This is Molly June. It's when she has big legs and she can walk, and big arms. She has lots of hair, and has a curl on her forehead. And has my name on it, to Molly June.


Rex: This is me and Pop Pop playing football. But I didn't draw the football. (Isn't that blue thing the football?) No. (What is it?) I don't know. There's grass. (Pop Pop is on the left, Rex is on the right).


Rex: I wanted to color it really good so first I did one side green but it didn't work so I did it red. I did the other side red, I did the whole top blue. I did the top of the T blue, and the straight line of the t blue. Then R line, pink, then on the curl of the R, red. Then on the little line of the R, blue. And the T top is blue, green on the straight line, and blue right here, yellow, red, orange, pink, green, and dark green. And my name. (Is T-Rex your name?) Yeah. I wanted to make it beautiful. And I drawed the outside blue.

Stunts

Rex and I have been spending more and more time out on the tramp making up and doing trampoline tricks. It's kind of weird, because it's honestly something we're doing where he's clearly better than me. I sort of thought I had another 10 years until that kind of thing started happening, but oh well. The parity has its advantages though- playing soccer with a five year old is fun, but not exactly athletically challenging. Trying to keep up with Rex on the tramp, though, that's a whole different story.

Anyway, here's some video of our stunt man.


Rex Stunts 1 from Ryan on Vimeo.


Rex Stunts 2 from Ryan on Vimeo.

After I taped Rex doing his stuff, he wanted to tape me. I am usually too modest to show off my sweetest tricks, but it would be selfish to hold back this action from you:


Ryan trick from Ryan on Vimeo.

And yeah, if it looks like that wasn't sufficiently daring, just keep in mind that that's the same guy who bounced back from breaking his STERNUM on a trampoline. If you think you can do better, first break your STERNUM, then pop off. Yeah, I thought so.

videos

Here are some family videos of our kids doing what they do best. Molly has been so funny lately. She has entered a new phase of squawking when she needs something. During any meal time if we walk away from feeding her or if she is out of her puff cereal snacks she squawks really loud. It is really funny, and there is a video below. Enjoy!!


Lucy Singing Star Wars from Ryan on Vimeo.



Molly Squawks from Ryan on Vimeo.



Rex singing Spiderman from Ryan on Vimeo.



Lucy- "Once Upon A Dream" from Ryan on Vimeo.



Rex and Lucy sing Batman from Ryan on Vimeo.

Gymnastics

We just finished up gymnastics. Missy Marlow (do you remember her?) has a great gymnastics center here in SLC and Rex and Lucy have been taking classes for the last little while there. They have both loved it. I learned early on that Rex definitely needs a place to get his bugs out, you know a place to dispense energy during the long winter months, and gymnastics with his good buddy Will was just the trick. He learned to do cartwheels and round-offs. Also did a lot of balance work on the beams and the rings. Then of course just lots of fun jumping on the tramps and into the pit!

Lucy was in Ikey's class which was so cute to have them together. They also did somersaults and balance work, lots of tramp time. And of course both of them were a little more hesitant about the jumping into the pit. I wish I had more photos. I also got to see a new glimpse of Lucy in a more structured, you know teacher/student environment. She had to get a talking to by the teacher a couple of times for being too bossy, it went like this, "Lucy, now who is the teacher?" or "Lucy, let me be in charge of Ike, ok?" Lucy loves her little protege, Ikey, and loooves to boss him around. Anyway, we had many car talks on the way home about worrying about ourselves and not about Ike. All in all a fun time, and a great winter activity.

Chickenpox!

Yeah, the kids said they didn't feel well last night, and here's what we woke up to:


This could be a pretty miserable week!






Alright, alright, this was a joke. But just so you don't think I'm too lame, the joke was not on the blog audience, it was on Macy. After she went to the gym last night, I snuck into the kids' room and they let me put dots all over their faces, necks, and arms. I was surprised that it took some real convincing-- even bargaining-- to get them to let me, but I did get it done. I told them they had to act sick tomorrow and Mom would freak out. (And you have to know Macy to know what it would do to her to have Rex and Lucy both come down with a raging case of the chickenpox).

When Macy got home later the kids were asleep. But to set the scam up for the morning I told her that Lucy said she was not feeling well. Of course she couldn't just wait and see how Lucy was feeling in the morning, but had to go up and check on her that instant. She was shocked and a bit skeptical at first to see Lucy's face covered with spots, but with a little nudging, she was convinced we had a full-blown case of the chickenpox, or, because she was aware of having gotten chickenpox vaccinations, maybe it was the measles. Her sickness defense mechanisms immediately fired off, meaning that she removed directly to the computer to look up all possible worst-case scenarios for this set of symptoms. Panic began to set in.

The trick didn't last forever- she eventually realized that I was acting far too worried myself, where my normal response would be to blow it off and tell her that the kids were just fine. I don't know what it says about me that Macy thinks it's not credible for me to show a little concern when both kids are covered with red-brown spots. But it was really fun for a while, watching Macy slowly slide toward meltdown, while the kids slept peacefully in their beds speckled in washable magic marker.

Anyway, happy April Fool's day. Or as Rex calls it "Saint Fool's Day." Lucy continued the holiday mix-up today by walking into the office this morning in the middle of getting dressed, holding a white shirt and asking "Mom, do ya have to wear green?" They are both such cute kids, pocked or not.