Joyful Noise

With both Daniel and Nathan away at school, the house has been quieter than it has been in years. Yes, Matthew and Malia make their share of noise, but with just two of them bouncing around the house, the noise level is automatically diminished. Factor in the piano and the saxophone, and the decibel level around here has been markedly lower. I appreciate having a quiet house on a regular basis as the quiet gives me a chance to gather my thoughts and mentally rejuvenate but having all the big bodies and the accompanying big voices and big noises around has been nice. Malia has been looking forward to a joint Chicken Invaders game like they played last year and that was most definitely not a quiet way to spend an afternoon. There was much laughter and conversation involved and I believe the quote of the hour was uttered by Daniel: “Matthew, I can’t see past your bacon!”

It makes me smile to hear my four kiddos laughing and joking together. While they all have their moments when they need a break from each other, they do actually get along pretty well nowadays. Having Daniel and Nathan staying here only periodically means the opportunities to get on each other’s nerves are greatly diminished. Add to that the fact that it takes a lot to ruffle Daniel’s feathers and his personality is naturally non-confrontational, and the presence of the college kids has been really nice. It has created a buffer zone of sorts between Matthew and Malia so that they get a bit of a break from each other. Like all siblings, the times when they get along are peppered with moments of conflict and adding the two older boys back into the mix changes the dynamic. There has been a remarkably small amount of bickering today.

There is also music. Oh, how I have missed the music! Matthew plays his trumpet and Malia is just starting to pick at the piano, but the days when I was bombarded with a cacophony of sax from one room, piano from another, and the trumpet interspersed are mostly gone. Daniel practiced for a couple of hours yesterday and it made me smile. Even the scales. Nathan sat at the piano and sight read through a bunch of music this morning and that was wonderful as well. The three boys all got out their instruments after lunch today to arrange some joint music numbers for our gathering with Kevin’s family on Saturday and it made me so happy to hear them all playing together. Malia has been learning to play the ukulele at school this year and Nathan got out his ukulele for her so she could add to the music as well.

As I ponder today on how thankful I am for the multitude of blessings that are mine, the joyful noise created by my children is a concrete reminder that of all the things that fill my heart with gratitude, my family is right up at the top.

Turkey for Breakfast

I’ve never made Thanksgiving themed pancakes. I don’t know why since pancakes are one of my fun food staples, but it just never occurred to me. For some reason Thanksgiving has been overlooked in all my themed food endeavors. Maybe it’s because I’m so laser focused on pie that I don’t think about anything else. Of maybe it’s because food is such a huge part of the holiday that I never thought to branch out from the traditional offerings. But whatever the reason, Thanksgiving has been sadly overlooked where fun food is concerned. This morning was flex Friday which meant Matthew and Malia didn’t have to go to the actual school building, so it seemed like an opportune time to rectify my oversight with some fantastic turkey pancakes. No, they did not have any actual turkey in them. That would be…weird. And a fine way to ruin a perfectly good pancake. Unless it was a potato pancake or a crepe and then maybe…but I digress. Turkey pancakes. Good times. Gotta love fun food. 😊

Honor in the Honor Band

 The return to a more normal school years means the return of a variety of opportunities for the kids. For Matthew, the latest opportunity was the chance to play in the district honor band. The most skilled students from each middle school in the district were invited to participate. Most of the music was learned on their own and after just a handful of rehearsals, they kids were able to perform for a live audience of their families and friends. Matthew was super excited to be invited to participate and had a fantastic time. He neglected to tell us that he was give the honor of being first seat in the first trumpet section, but I’m so pleased with the work he has put in to be able to earn such a position. It was a great concert as well. The kids did a super job!

An Old Favorite

In the last little bit, Kevin and I have realized that as our youngest child, there are a lot of things we haven’t done with Malia. Activities, outings, disciplinary tactics, etc. that were commonplace when the boys were all young were left by the wayside as they grew up. As the youngest by a pretty big span (there are nearly eleven years between Daniel and Malia), Malia has missed out in some ways due to that mental “moving on to a new stage.” Once we made that realization, Kev and I have been working to fill in some of those gaps.

When the boys were young, the zoo was one of our favorite places for an outing. Malia has been to the zoo on multiple occasions, but it has been a while, two and a half years in fact. I like to blame a pandemic for part of that, but the other part was the waning interest of the boys. When family outings occur, Malia has gotten outnumbered, and we have ended up going other places. The last time she got voted down we ended up in a trilobite quarry, which she enjoyed, but she was really sad about not getting to go to the zoo. Knowing Malia didn’t have school today, I put a trip to the zoo on the calendar. Matthew still had school and Kev had work, so it was a girls’ day out.

Going to the zoo with a ten-year-old Malia was calmer than our trips were of old. I didn’t have to run to keep up with a pack of little ones with miniscule attention spans, tell anyone to stay with the group, or prevent anyone from climbing into the bear habit. We shunned our traditional route through the zoo and wandered wherever Malia’s interest took us. We saw all the animals, but we did it in a different order. She still got to ride the carousel, which she has always loved. We saw the rhinos closer than we ever have in all our myriad of previous visits. We also caught a glimpse of a one-month-old Colombus monkey and got to see another young monkey lose its balance and fall off a branch which was super cute. We wandered past the sea lions just at training time. As we’ve discovered in the past, the animals are more active in the cooler weather than in the heat of the summer which made for a fun morning.

Taking a step back to have these adventures with Malia is good for her, but it’s also good for me. Sometimes I get too caught up in the whirlwind that is life and taking time to smell the roses (or the rhinos, which is not nearly as pleasant from an olfactory standpoint) is a blessing. Having adult children comes with its own set of challenges and being able to take a morning returning to an old favorite gave me a much-needed bit of calm. Malia loved it too. And we got to stop at Crown Burger for lunch on the way home which we could never do when Matthew was with us.

I think we had better plan more of these outings because as I well know, before long she’ll be too old to spend a morning with her mom talking to the animals.

First Pie of the Season

Last year we ate pie for FHE throughout the month of November rather than only eating pie on Thanksgiving. Our reasoning was that we could enjoy all the flavors of pie we like the most without feeling like we needed to eat our way through a dozen pies in one weekend. We enjoyed that change in routine so much that we are repeating the experience again this year and I suspect it is here to stay. Malia had the honor of choosing the first flavor of pie which means that the top of our apple pie was adorned with dragons. It looks lovely. FYI-cookie stamps work great on pie crust!

 

Hallowe3n

Like most things, Halloween last year was unusual. There was no Halloween parade at the elementary school, no parents helping at class parties and no trick or treating. Given the circumstances, Malia was fine with all the omissions. We had a fun celebration here at home and there was still plenty of candy to be had.

This year kind of made up for last year’s losses. With Halloween falling on a Sunday, there were three days of celebrations. The Halloween parade and the class parties at the elementary school were held on Friday. I was able to help with the class party and after a year and a half of not volunteering in the school, it felt like a little bit of normal to be back there. I’ll admit that I was a bit on edge due to the fact that Malia and I were the only ones in the room wearing masks, but like I’ve told her, we do what we feel like we need to do to keep ourselves healthy and then don’t worry about what everyone else does.

Malia’s costume this year was Hiccup from the “How to Train Your Dragon” movies. She wanted the armored flight suit from the third movie and since I was not up to the task of creating a bunch of fancy cosplay type foam armor, we perused Amazon and found a costume that she liked. It did not have the wings associated with the flight suit though, so she drew a plan for a set of wings, and I set about creating them. There was some near cussing involved with said creation at a few points, but in the end, they turned out fantastic. Malia was perfectly pleased and in my mind, that made the blood, sweat and tears worthwhile.

Yesterday was trick or treating day. Malia was super excited to be able to go this year. Kevin planned to be out with her for about an hour, but after running into a friend of Malia’s who lives down the street and deciding they wanted to trick or treat together, Malia and Kev were out roaming the streets much longer than normal. Malia had a great time though and ended up with fewer unsafe candy items than I would have expected. The weather was perfect for the occasion as well. Our bit of Indian Summer meant temperatures hovered in the mid-50’s which made for a fantastic walk around the neighborhood.

Today is the actual holiday and while there are no costumes or doorbells involved in today’s festivities, it was definitely full of fun food. We started off the day with what has become our traditional Sunday morning waffles, but we gave the waffles a bit of a sprucing up with green food coloring and chocolate. Malia was thrilled that she got to eat chocolate for breakfast. That doesn’t happen very often. We are usually pretty healthy breakfast eaters around here. We don’t consider doughnuts or cinnamon rolls to be breakfast items. Pop Tarts and other prefab breakfast foods are exceedingly uncommon at our house. Even sweetened cereals are a special treat and not the norm. So eating chocolate for breakfast was a rare treat for her. And I justified the inclusion of chocolate by reminding myself that I worked in a bit of fruit as well. It’s the Bill Cosby “Chocolate Cake for Breakfast” mentality. It had wheat, and eggs, and fruit. So it was a healthy breakfast, right? 😜

 

After church, our grilled cheese sandwiches got in on the Halloween action using some cookie cutters. I don’t usually do anything fancy for lunch on Halloween, but with the trick or treating done last night and the kids at home rather than at school, we took advantage of the calmer day to work in an extra fun food item. They ended up being very tasty and their giant grins told us they were happy to be so.
 

Ever since Nathan was just a tot and wanted spaghetti and eyeballs for dinner, our evening meal on Halloween has been a fun one. This year we partook of some witches’ brew (cream of broccoli soup, a favorite around here) served with some delightful witch finger breadsticks. Matthew and Malia helped me create the fingers which means that they got creative and branched out to other appendages. Matthew made some fantastic toes to go with the fingers and Malia created dragon claws since she is all about dragons right now. Malia also took it upon herself to create the Jell-o brain this year and made it cherry flavored since that is what Kev likes.

 

With 50% of my children now living away from home, I’ve started wondering if my days of creating fun foods are limited. Maybe I’ll still subject Kevin to the fun foods when it just the two of us. Maybe someday I’ll have grandkids to entertain with my festive creations. Maybe my children will assume the role of fun food chef. But who knows? For now, I still have two kids at home who are happy to eat the brains, intestines, and fingers that I create for them. And I’ll try to take advantage of the time we still have.

Bite Me

This evening we enjoyed our last Halloween themed treat for this year. It was a simple one to create, just a bit of fancy jam work on frosted cupcakes, but highly effective. The only things we were missing were the actual fangs. I have other fun things to make, but they will have to wait for next year. 

 

Up next: pie! The traditional treat of Thanksgiving!

Family History and Ancient History

Today we took advantage of Matthew and Malia’s last official day of fall break to take a road trip. We have been talking about going to dig trilobites at a quarry that is about three hours from here and decided it would be a great day for that experience. The quarry is about an hour outside of Delta and since that is where my dad grew up, we took time to stop by my grandparents’ graves as well as drive by the farm where my dad grew up. It is a rural area, still all farmland, and very different from the life that my kids know so I’m hoping it was meaningful for them to visit these spots so they can know a bit more about their ancestors. This evening after we returned home, I spent some time on Family Search showing them pictures of my dad’s folks so they would have some idea of who we were talking about. My mom has spent a lot of time uploading pictures, documents, written memories, life sketches, etc. to Family Search since she retired years back and I’m so grateful for the time she has spent as it puts a variety of information at my fingertips and allows my children and me to learn more about our ancestors.

After our stop in Delta, we drove out to the quarry. It is about an hour outside of Delta and is truly in the middle of nowhere. My siblings and I always tease my dad about growing up in the middle of nowhere, but in all reality, there are placed even more in the middle of nowhere and the quarry is smack in the middle of one. It was a great day to be there though. This is the last week the quarry will be open this season. They will close in the winter and reopen in the spring. In the summer months it is unbelievable hot and dry out there. It is the middle of the desert after all. But today it was around 60 degrees with enough cloud cover to keep things nice and cool. We were provided with rock hammers and had a fantastic time splitting the limestone shale to find the trilobites. It was much easier to break the rock apart than I anticipated it would be, and it was oddly satisfying to take a whack at a rock and have it split right down the middle. Even Malia could easily break the rock. Matthew started off in a great spot and found a variety of good specimens right off the bat. Malia found a bunch as well. Between the four of us, we probably ended up hauling about 40 lbs. of rocks out of the quarry, each having a trilobite of some size.

This was one of those days when everything went just exactly the way we had planned. We arrived at each location just when we planned, had all the time we wanted at each spot, and made it home right on schedule. There was no bickering in the car and none of us came away feeling disgruntled with how the day progressed. It turned out to be a day that was just right. Gotta love days like that. It was definitely some high-quality family time. Oh, and since it was a road trip, Matthew and Malia both selected Twizzlers and Corn Nuts as their travel snacks at our first pit stop.😂