Every week I have to delete dozens and dozens of pictures and videos that Emilee makes with my phone. She makes goofy videos and pulls silly faces at herself and entertains herself forever with it. For posterity sake I thought I would include one of her latest videos in the family blog. Allison is pretending to knock so Emilee will go answer the door in the back ground. Emilee incorporates it into her video when she cackles, “You can’t trick me!”
Category: March
Allison The Busy Bee
Allison has had a lot going on this month. She just finished a big project for school and did the presentation. They did a wax museum and she presented the gymnast Gabby Douglas. This was the same project I helped edit. She did a great job presenting and making her poster.
She went to the zoo with the McDonald family a bit ago. Lori sent me some cute pictures.
This last picture made me smile. This is a very Allison thing to do. We went to the dentist the other morning and while we were waiting for her to go back I looked down at her leg and noticed she had turned to of the moles on her leg into a smiley face.
Our church has a Bishop Youth Discussion (BYD) about once a month for the teenagers in the ward. They have different topics each month. This past month was the first one that Allison and Matthew had gone to together. They leader guiding the discussion had several of the youth come up front. He told each of them to write something down on a piece of paper that someone else would have to do. Of course they all wrote down something silly or embarrassing for whoever ended up with their paper to do. Allison was one of the kids selected and on her paper she wrote, “Confess your love to Matthew Terry.” Once everyone had written something down, their papers were collected and they read a scripture. Neither one of my stinkers can remember what the scripture was but the message was-treat people the way you want to be treated and don’t ask others to do things that you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself. The leader then returned each of the notes to the person that had written it and told them they got to do whatever they had put on it. Honestly, I couldn’t have picked a much better object lesson for Allison to participate it. Someone recorded it for me and sent me the video. I will admit it brought me some smug satisfaction. Allison (and Matthew) were good sports.
Tickled My Funny Bone
The other day when I was wasting time on the internet watching funny videos I came across that joke. It comes from one of first You Tube videos that ever went viral-the guy sang the song “Maya He, Mayo Ho, Maya Ahah”. That is probably not the actual name of the song but is how it is remembered. It made me chuckle. I decided to try it on a few people. It did not work so well for me. These are some of the responses I got.
Spring Break
We stayed home this year for Spring Break. We are toying with the idea of building a house and have some things going to see what we could get approved for on a loan so we didn’t want to do anything to extravagant. To help add a little bit of fun to the week, I agreed to watch our friends dog Po. He is a Berna-doodle, at least 100lbs, a fluff ball, and very playful. They had a lot of fun with him.
Matthew took him to the dog park a few times and he slept with him at night. Emilee fed him and took him on a few walks. Allison catered to his every need and whim. She barely left his side. They all played with him and had a good time. He is a pretty smart dog. He knew how to play hide-n-seek so they played that for hours.
They were hoping it would change my mind about wanting a dog but I told them from the start that wasn’t going to happen and this was just for a week. I thought he was a very good dog but he made everything smell like a dog, scratched my floors and required a lot of work that I don’t have energy for.
He brought a lot of fun to our Spring Break, and now when we see him at our friends he is very excited to see us. We fit some other fun stuff in for our Spring Break too. Emilee did horse camp, we saw several movies together, had lots of play dates, went to lunch together, the zoo, and stayed up to late and slept in to long. It was great.
The last part of the break Ryan went on his 15th annual March madness trip with his BFF Mike and Sam.
We Work Better Separately
Allison was given the assignment of writing a paper on Gabby Douglas for school. In class they switched papers and peer edited it for each other. They were given a specific form with items to check and give feed back on the paper they edited. Allison was sick this week and wasn’t able to get her paper edited, so her teacher suggested she have a parent edit it and fill out the review form. Ryan was out of town so she asked if I would edit it for her. In hind sight I should have had Matthew do it but I wasn’t smart enough to come up with that at the time. Allison has a lot of amazing strengths and talents. She is a very smart girl. She has been working really hard on her moodiness and responding to emotions on the same level as the person she is talking with (instead of always responding with a 10).
In general we have been getting along a lot better. So much better that I completely forgot that one of Allison’s many strengths is not taking constructive criticism well. Especially from her mother.
She left me in my room with her computer and the review sheet and I started editing. I followed the review sheet and highlighted, noted and marked whatever it told me to do. After about 5 minutes had passed Allison returned to get her paper. I told her I wasn’t done yet. She left and came back 5 minutes later. I still wasn’t done. She looked over my shoulder and asked what could be taking so long. When she saw that I had actually made edits to her paper (that she apparently thought was unimprovable) she show cased another one of her talents. She is pretty incredible at quick thinking and has a quick wit to match. Unfortunately, she sometimes uses this ability to ring someone up and down on a level that makes you feel like it was scripted for a movie if she feels wronged. Looking back now it was comical, at the time not so much. She was truly flabbergasted that I could have found anything wrong with her paper beyond an accidental grammar error. Allison also has an incredible way of pushing my buttons and one of my weaknesses is that I let her. We both started arguing and ended with me telling her to edit her own paper, her taking her computer and storming out and yelling, “All you had to do was put your name on the editing sheet-THAT IS IT- three seconds to do something and you screwed it all up!”
A few hours later she came and found me and with the enormous amount of grit and determination Allison has coursing through every cell in her body she swallowed her pride and told me, “I changed some of the things back and ignored most of your suggestions. BUT you actually did have some good corrections that I kept. Thank you for editing my paper. Oh, and sorry for yelling at you.”
I picked my jaw up off the floor and gave her a hug. Not to long ago this would have gone a totally different way and been dragged out for days. While I could have tweaked her apology a little, the fact that she apologized on her own without any prompting is a big step. Huge steps have been made.
Irony
According to my children, I am an obsessive compulsive cleaner. According to me my children are messy lazy slobs. Of course we both disagree with each others perspectives of the other, but as I love to tell them I am the mom, the adult, the owner of the house, and maker of the rules so for now they have to do it my way. This opinion of each other leads to a constant debate in our home, as I am sure it happens in many homes, when a chore is given between “I did do (fill in job requested)!” and “You did not do (fill in job requested) well.” A simple task that if done immediately and correctly would take 5-10 minutes can be dragged out for hours. It is truly exhausting.
The other day when they were doing some of their jobs, several of them needed to use the vacuum. I was doing some things of my own and also needed to use the vacuum. As all of us used it and passed it around I noticed this;
According to our usual MO’s the loosely wrapped cord would be my kids doing, and the neatly wrapped cord would be mine. However, many years ago I decided it was annoying to wrap and unwrap the cord every time I used the vacuum that I keep in the closet and never look at. I started wrapping it as shown in exhibit A. A little bit messy but that is the way I prefer it. Such a slacker, I know. You would think my children-that cut every corner they can when doing their chores-would be all for wrapping the cord this way. Honestly, I’m surprised that it gets wrapped up in any way at all but all three of my children- every single one of them- neatly rolls the cord up as soon as they are done using the vacuum. They don’t put it away of course but they wrap the cord and tuck it in all nice and neat. AND IT DRIVES ME CRAZY. I will say nothing though. I am not willing to find out what happens if I suggest my kids do something less… thorough. All my ‘harping and nagging’ over the years has taken root in their heads to wrap the vacuum cord. I can only hope that one day it will spread to throwing their trash away, or putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher with out being told. Maybe it will spontaneously pop into their heads one day to put their dirty socks in the laundry bin instead of leaving it wherever they take them off. That hope keeps me from telling them, they don’t have to wrap the vacuum cord. That is irony at its finest for you.
Things That Made Me Smile
These two besties are just like sisters. Reese and Emilee were due within a few days of each other but Emilee came early so they are two weeks apart. They have been besties since then. They went to pre-school together but are in different school districts. They see each other at church and church activities and take riding lessons together and squeeze in as much play time as they can in between. They both love horses and talk about them for hours when they play. They both have similar interests in clothes (they grab the first thing they touch in the drawer regardless of if it matches or not) hairstyles (brush it just long enough to get it in a pony tail) and sense of adventure (they always climb, run, jump or fling themselves in, up, or down whatever they can). They are both the youngest and are often left hanging out together on Friday or Saturday nights while everyone else is off doing things with friends and their parents go out to dinner together. They are easy to have together and fun to watch. This picture is from the other day when they were at our house and decided they would practice putting ponytails in each others hair.
Allison has a very witty sense of humor that catches me off guard sometimes. She loves to make people laugh when she isn’t being a grump she is fun to joke around with. A few months ago I got a little to attached to a stupid farm game on my phone. The kids took notice and gave me a hard time about spending my time on something else besides them. Allison is also a very crafty and artistic person. She started making funny stories or pictures with stick figures. I am not very artistically gifted so I was impressed at how funny and detailed she could be with just stick figure drawings. One morning I found this funny little picture left for me next to my sink in the bathroom. It made me chuckle.
As mentioned a little earlier in this post, Emilee doesn’t concern herself to much with looks when getting dressed. Her first priority is comfort. Last week she attempted to add a functionality component to her Sunday outfit. Luckily her dad caught her before getting to church. When he asked her why she was wearing what she was wearing, she logically explained, “I put my clothes on that I want to wear after church under my church clothes so I can change faster when I get home.” When the look on her dads face looked like it was heading towards “I don’t think so” she quickly added, “And it keeps me warm.” He told her to trade her socks and pants for tights and get in the car to go.
Emilee is making the blog a lot this week. Another quirk of Emilee’s is her love of popcorn. Emilee is a ridiculously picky eater and has a HUGE sweet tooth so popcorn is one of her more healthy choices of snack. It also falls into the category of easy and fast for her to make by herself. Over time her love of popcorn has gotten to the point that she will eat nothing else if we don’t monitor or limit her popcorn intake. She eats all of the popcorn too, kernels included. I don’t know how she hasn’t cracked half her teeth chomping the un-popped corn. This popcorn trait is inherited from her dad. He likes his burned, she will eat it burned but prefers it not. Anyway, I digress. Most days when Ryan gets home Emilee has done her chores and home work and whatever else she needs to get done so she has popped herself a bag of popcorn and is sitting down to enjoy it while watching a show. He of course wants to have some and reaches for a handful. She turns into the equivalent of a dog that has possessive food issues. It got to the point that it was causing contentions between the two of them and we had to talk with Emilee about realizing there is plenty of popcorn to share. So far she doesn’t agree there is enough. So, the other day we were watching a movie together. Emilee popped some popcorn and came to snuggle me. A bit into the movie I told her thanks for sharing her popcorn with me and she was doing a good job at sharing. We continued watching and eating. I happened to glance over and realized that Emilee had been mining our popcorn the whole time! She had taken out all the butter pieces and put them in a separate pile on the other side of me so she could eat them after she ate what she left in the bowl ‘to share’ with me. Little stinker!
March Madness Gymnastic Meet
Allison had her second to last meet for this season, this month. She had her best meet yet! She placed first in her division on bar and floor, second on vault, third on beam. She won 1st place All Around for her division.
It was really fun to watch her and see her excitement at doing well. She puts a lot of time and effort into gymnastics and it is fun to see her enjoying it. She has one last meet at the end of this month. It is in Manhattan Kansas and it is a big event with multiple areas for each event happening at the same time. She is pretty excited.
Firsts
In our church the year you turn twelve you graduate primary and move to the youth program. Allison started Young Women’s. Each class has a presidency to help plan and run the activities. She is the secretary for her class right now. Allison loves growing up and being in charge of things so she is loving it. Most of their activities are on Tuesday night and she has gymnastics that night, so for now she won’t be able to go to a lot of them. She is still enjoying planning and going to the ones that aren’t on Tuesday’s.
The year they turn twelve is also the year they are old enough to go to the temple and do baptisms. She was able to go for the first time last week. It is fun to see her growing up and getting more responsibilities.
Matthew is turning 16 this year so he moves up to the Priest Quorum in our church. That means one of his new responsibilities is to bless the sacrament on Sunday. He did it for the first time a few weeks ago and his dad and grandpa did it with him. It was cool to see three generations blessing the sacrament together.
Allison’s Art Work
