Spies, Donuts and Naps 11/9/15

Those three words sum up our week.  If you want more details and photos, please continue.
Otherwise, come visit and see for yourself.

I think the one greatest thing I have done this year is implement a fabulous idea from Christy- LATE NIGHTS! I'm not always up for an elaborate evening out one-on-one with Abe or Mary. (Those don't happen often anyway.) But those two plan their late nights with care. Mary always comes with a long list of activities and discussion in the hope I'll let her stay up till midnight. Usually late nights are 30 minutes, with some game or craft or "job" I didn't finish that day that they "get" to help me with. Abe is always anxious to play a board game or chess. He is less enthusiastic about having a chat first or lesson. But I love these nights too! This week was nothing special, both evenings we chatted and did crafts or read a chapter from a book. Mary wanted to take a picture before she went to bed and I thought, sure! We well documented the change I've felt coming on... I look like a zombie! I feel like I've lost a lot of gumption. I hardly do more than one thing a day- going to the grocery store or to the school is reason enough for a nap. This baby thing is wearing, so glad there is less than a month left!




Dan was gone this week, but he always seemed to call when I was taking a nap. I never turned my phone off so that I could catch him, he'd always ask what was going on and I'd cover a yawn or try wake up fast. Worked great until he actually got home. But it is easier to take a nap when he is around rather than handing each toddler an iPad or waiting until half of them are taking their own naps. 
I actually love naps. Always have.

We walk almost every morning. Scout has taken to walking too, no more riding in the stroller, so I push it empty, because somewhere between .5 and .75 miles she is worn out. She walks independently, swinging her arms until we get to a hill, she always starts walking up the hill and then realizes she's begun hiking... She runs back down the hill and raises her arms for the stroller. Smart girl.



Abe turned seven on Sunday, we started the celebrations on Friday with donuts at school. He was more excited hat I brought Mercy with me than the donuts. He took her around and introduced his friends to her, he held her on his lap when he blew out the candle, he pulled a hair up for her to eat with him. I love to watch him take care of her. Maeser and Mary joined and passed out all the donuts, Maeser thought it was so fun to serve the BIG kids treats.







Scout also sunrises us with her smile! She smiles on demand now! Say cheese!



Birthday celebrations continued on Sunday when Abe gave a talk in church and we had breakfast for dinner. Then ice cream cake, so glad I didn't have to figure out how to make that.
By the time Scout's birthday rolls around she'll have the candles and presents figured out. Here she is helping Abe blow out the candles.



Abe wanted a spy themed party. He took everyone's fingerprints, played laser bombs in his bedroom, learned how to write in codes, and watched a spy movie this afternoon. Let's just call it birthday week.

Codes.



Laser bomb, and yes, I look this tired all of the time now.





Playing spies.



If the next four weeks end up like his one, we might just make it until the baby comes.

Speaking of baby, he is still nameless. At this rate he'll be named after the delivering Doctor. How does 梅澤 Hughes sound? That's what I thought.

Coping Mechanisms 11/17/15

With 3 weeks left until this little guy arrives, we are in survival mode.  Methods that worked for us this week, with no guarantee of working next, follow:

Sleeping. Everywhere.

Taxis, doctor's offices, the kitchen table, sacrament meeting, hallway floor while waiting for children to finish up in the bathroom... anywhere or anytime except the most logical place which would be your bed and preferably when everyone else was catching some zzzz's. Seems like the baby has taken over my biological clock as I haven't slept past 4:30 or 5 in a week.

Eating copious amounts of sugar.

Pints of ice cream before bed, with the honest intent of only having a few spoonfuls.

Crepes, or as Maeser calls them "chocolate burritos" served as a side to dinner.

The leftover Halloween candy stash has dwindled. It will no longer be a sufficient amount to fill stockings in 5 weeks.

Taking long walks.

Best done without a 3-year-old to keep up with. Take it up a notch by strolling with a toddler and you can hardly call it a walk, more of a meander.

A little distance.

Ship said 3-year-old 800 miles away to visit family. This will instantly give you an energy boost equivalent to any supplement, coke or energy bar. A short-term long-distance relationship with Maeser was like checking into a spa for the weekend. Peaceful, quiet, clean... 

And maybe throw in a couple batches of popcorn. 

Hope you find these helpful, if you have any other suggestions please forward them as I have run out of chocolate, Maeser has returned and insists on riding his bike during our walks, and I don't particularly find the wood floor in the hallway very comfortable this time around.

November already! 11/2/15

Is the time flying for everyone else?! I can't believe it is November! We've just come to our busiest time of year. Holidays every other week until February!

Abe turns 7 this week. So crazy. Dan is in Dubai until Wednesday and then he'll be here for 12 hours and back to Bangkok until Saturday. Dallin is still around for another month, at the moment he is Maeser's best friend. Maeser tells everybody.

  

Halloween was great, we played games and made homemade donuts, I'll send pictures so you guys can really appreciate them. We opted for trick-or-treating inside the house and then went to bed.

Nothing else new, can't wait to see picture of all the halloween costumes!

Maeser making his tail for his costume- Ash the fox. 

Abe was a Kerble (spaceman alien).



Mary a witch and Scout a lion.

Delightful Scavenger. 11/13/15

Discovering the joy of homemade popcorn.

Morning walks with Mercy. 11/12/15

10/30/15

Little boys never grow out of being adorable, right? I hope never.

10/27/15

The baby seems to be coming along nicely.

Long week! Lots of legos and movie nights. The kids were out of school and the haze was bad enough we didn't do a ton outside this week. We did have a long day at the zoo on a good day.  Mary and Dan had a great trip! Mom, Christy and Grandma THANK YOU for making it happen! Sorry to throw things off by having them leave a day early on short notice, but everything worked out and they are home now. Mary went back to school this morning. She seem to have adjusted fine, maybe she never got on the US time. She hasn't stopped talking about the trip. She said her favourite things were playing with cousins, trick-or treating, going to the pumpkin patch and she came home with Christmas songs that she wants to learn on the piano.

I have had a hard time getting our garden to take off here. I was discouraged and though, "How can I be killing everything in this garden?!" Yesterday afternoon we figured out why. Weeks ago I thought, I wonder if the monkeys come back here, but we hadn't seen many on the patio, and we were getting some vegetables. Well, yesterday the children and I were in the backyard when we walked around the corner of the house and there was a whole troop of monkeys in the garden. They had pulled up all the sweet potatoes and 5 monkeys were sitting eating the roots and plants. Another monkey was standing at the basil plant pulling one leaf off at time and eating it. Another was in the lettuce, and the last was in the tomatoes! I was thrilled to see I wasn't the problem!  We have got to get a dog! I think the garden is bad idea until we have a way to keep the monkeys out of it. I've attached a video that Dallin took. He ran around to the other side of the gate to try and get a photo as I kept the children out of the garden in the back. I've honestly felt so much better since yesterday afternoon. Especially because I'm giving the RS lesson on self-reliance in two weeks and I kept thinking about what we were trying to do to be self-reliant spiritual and temporally. 

10/12/15

Nothing new to report. The baby will come on December 7th. Dan ran a 16 mile race on Saturday, nothing like Spencer's PT training with 6.4 minute miles, but he completed it. The haze is much better. Our garden is failing- it is so moist here that  mold is growing on the stems of the plants.

Here's a couple of shots from after church last week.

Our sweetheart. She is a bit sick at the moment, but still adorable.

Waiting for Dan to run 16 miles...

After a day at the zoo. They were asleep before we even got to the car.

Books, we lay on the floor reading. Every. Single. Day. (Book recommendations welcome.)

Grocery shopping, Scout fell asleep after 5 minutes in the cart. Spent the next 40 minutes trying to steer the cart one handed while holding her head in the other. 

I look grumpy in this shot, I was. Just keeping it real.

We talked to Spencer last night, sounds like he's doing great, and he said he felt better about how it was going than he anticipated. Good luck this week!

Mary and Abe both went to birthday parties on Saturday. We never say yes, but they were both invited to parties on the same day and time so we split up and let them go. When I dropped Mary off a mother approached me and said she as so excited to meet me. That her son Rhees had told her on Friday that Mary was his new girl friend! I was surprised and asked Mary about it on Saturday night. She said it was true and that she like him. Long story short, after talking about boys and boy friends etc she came home from school today and said, "Mom, I have great news!" "I told Rhees it was against my religion to have a boy friend at such a young age, and even though he was sad he still tried to be my friend." I hope I never see that mother again. She probably thinks I am the worst kind of mom for breaking her son's heart when she thought it was harmless. I will do my best to avoid any and all parent contact for the rest of the year. :)

I guess the most important decision is that Maeser is going to be Ash (from Fantastic Mr. Fox) for halloween. Mary- a witch, or maybe Mrs. Fox. Abe wants to be a Kerbal, and Scout will be a zebra. I will be a skeleton- my usual costume for every other year as I am usually pregnant every other halloween.

09/28/15

It smells like a camp fire here. Fires burn in Indonesia every year as farmers burn off their crops and clear the jungle for their next planting season. We're lucky enough to have the wind blowing in our direction. The smoke is so bad that most schools have cancelled outdoor activities and sports, and last Friday school was cancelled entirely. I can't wait for it to clear out.

Here's a gem I just found when cleaning up the art mess from this weekend. Good luck deciphering what Mary wrote. 

09/06/15

15 more weeks to go. Seems like forever. For the boys, the never ending weight gain and energy depleting condition is a blast. The upside is the slow mornings, not working out, and laying on the floor for hours reading books. Lots of bonding time with the littles. I also think I enjoy food a lot more when pregnant. This is a huge perk as I love food, I seem to enjoy all cuisines and flavours. Not helpful for the ballooning effect on my hips and waistline. Enough complaining- we are supper excited for this little guy and are already getting anxious about his name. Any and all suggestions welcome, as long as you don't mind if we take them seriously and if you plan to use the name in the future there may be cousin doubles. ;)

Singapore is cool. Literally cooler than Bangkok. It is lovely, we actually eat a lot of meals outside on the patio, and the children spend a lot more time playing outside than they did before. The school is a step up: real science labs and art studios that the children visit, and Abe has an amazing playground on the roof of the school. 

A small victory this morning was when Maeser walked in and brought me our first tomato from the garden. Still a little green and small, but success none the less. our garden is about 9 square feet distributed between two grow beds back behind the laundry. We love it.

I should send pictures of our new place, but it is still coming together. I move a piece of furniture almost daily as I try to figure out rooms and flow etc... like I said, not a lot going on.

Dan is busy, and plans to be a little more so until the baby comes. Dan was in Bangkok last week, Philippines this week, Maldives and India the following week and Korea the week after that. This is following the last two weeks when he was in Korea and Philippines. 

Maeser just walked in and some how split his toe. This is my forgotten child. Of all of them, if one were to disappear or run in to a wall, or get hit by a car, it would be him. Not in a forbidding way, but he has become quite the independent third child and seems to take things into his own hands. Better go bandage it up and figure out how he did the damage.

Sakura 10/1/15

Mary is just passing this off.

09/19/15

India was awesome. Just as crowded, dirty, impoverished as everyone says. And the classic cows, they can be found anywhere in the city. As holy animals they are never herded or corralled.

Mary in Indian clothes, and a brief view of our house.

And we finally got our car! I can't wait to start using a car seat again! What a marvellous invention.

08/26/15

I can't wait for Abe to wake tomorrow!
We found him this Venus fly trap. He will be over the moon! (Feels like Christmas.)

Catching up

Derrick was here this weekend. It was so great. He is so kind to the children and always makes connections fast. He was only here two nights, Maeser's best friend immediately and Scout loved him. Summer seems like it was forever ago. I wish we were hiking with everybody this weekend.

We are planting a garden. The first real one we've had since leaving the states. We dug out some grow beds three weeks ago, and two weeks ago we filled them with the tiniest bags of dirt (but the largest ones we could find). We had to buy about 20 little bags just to fill the boxes a couple inches. We found a nursery who grows plants for hotels and resorts and asked them for dirt. They charged us $500 for 6 tomato plants, a load of dirt some herbs and 8 packs of seeds. Oh, and a shovel made of plastic. We came home thrilled! That night we planted our seeds with a lot of hope and a bit of water.

In the last week the children, especially Abe, have run out every day to see the seedlings. Abe seems to have an answer for everything about gardening.

"Grandpa says we should pull out all the snails."

While taking rocks out of the garden, "Grandpa says all rocks come back, you never get rid of them. Why am I taking them out?"

"Grandpa showed me how to put that tomato plant in mom. I can do it."

"Grandpa uses a different kind of shovel."

When our shovel broke, "Grandpa's shovel is stronger than this one."

Last Sunday morning our beans sprouted, and by Tuesday morning some of them were 4 inches tall. Mary said "Mom! It's a miracle." I love the joy of discovery and we have been so blessed in our little efforts. Mary can't wait for you to come and asked, "Do you think grandma will like our garden?"

It all amounts to 4 short rows, about 3 feet, of lettuce. 8 tomato plants, 2 short rows of carrots, I think 8 zucchini, and a bunch of beans. And for me, a small herb garden. It is lovely.

Our anniversary, (12 years!) is this weekend and I thought I'd buy Dan a lawn mower. Yes, very romantic. But after searching online I can only find the old non-motorized push kind. You know, with the rotary or drum blade. I can only imagine how excited he would be about that. Poor guy, I've completely run out of ideas. 

School started yesterday for Mary and tomorrow for Abe. I have no words to describe how much Mary _______ school. She'd rather we enroll her in a boarding school so she'd only have to come home on holidays. Abe's enthusiasm doesn't match hers, but he is willing to go. He lost a tooth today at lunch, we thought he ate it... but it was found on his salad plate, and he has packed it up in a ziplock bag to take tomorrow. 

I made a first attempt at a home improvement project in years, I decided to paint a bookcase, from black to white. We dragged it outside on top of newspaper, scrubbed it down and painted. 2 coats in I realized I had a problem- the paint wasn't adhering. What?! Yes, I've ruined the bookshelf. No worries, I'll just put it out for the garbage man and the boys can put their toys somewhere else. Well, after a few phone calls this afternoon, I think I'll just throw it in the garage. Not only is Singapore an expensive place to buy cheese and peanut butter, but this place also charges exorbitant amounts of money for disposal or furniture recycling. The best quote I got- $120. There is no dump, anything that can't be reduced or decomposed is shipped to Malaysia and Cambodia! At this rate I'm going to need a job just to throw out the diapers.

08/13/15

This is my garden. -Maeser