GoldenGrams

Dallas has a grandmother who lives in Las Vegas.  We’ve been wanting to visit her for some time, and a couple of weekends ago, we finally made the trip.

I feel like this road trip was our first taste of truly traveling with children.  We heard countless refrains of “Caroline, stop!”  and “Caroline, no!  I don’t want your paci!” and, of course, “I need to go potty!”

Dallas and I are obviously very inexperienced with this whole traveling-with-a-newly-potty-trained*-toddler business because on they way we stopped at a gas station that had a Dairy Queen in it.  I let Brooke get an icee.  An icee…which consists of flavored ice…which is water…which meant we had to stop for bathroom breaks every 20 minutes after that for the next two hours.  (*I’m using the phrase “potty trained” fairly loosely here.  We’re mostly there…)

Highlights from the trip included playing with Grandma’s moving, oinking pig-

Walking the Strip-

Seeing some friends who live in Vegas, and visiting with Grandma Golden, of course!

Oh, I’ve been a bad blogger lately.  I haven’t felt the creative juices flowing.

I’ll just leave you with a Brooke quote.  This is for my Dad.  Or maybe for my sister who needs something to read at about three in the morning when her baby wakes up to eat.

Brooke has been interested in the sounds that letters make.  One day she was looking at alphabet letters.  She said, “M!  M says /m/, /m/  Mommy.  C!  C says /c/, /c/ Caroline.  Y!  Y says ‘Go Cougars!’”

Solid foods + a baby =

Solid foods + a baby who loves to run her fingers through her hair =

Add four teeth and you get

Does anyone know how to make a baby + solid foods ≠a big mess?

Brooke got the opportunity to conduct the Utah Premiere Brass.  She doesn’t look like she was having a good time because she was a little scared having the entire audience and the band looking at her, but after she was done she admitted that she liked doing it and wanted to do it again.

Unfortunately, I had the autofocus turned off from the filming I was doing at Saltaire, so Rebecca didn’t know how to get the focus working.

I was out at Saltaire this last week filming a dance company.  There was an absolutely beautiful sunset.

We invited Brooke’s friends over for a little party.

First we had a pinata.  Unfortunately, I was in charge of making it.  Through a series of unfortunate events, the pinata busted before the kids even hit it.  I tried to mend it, but it was in sad shape.  Brooke tapped it once and then passed the bat on to her friend.  He smacked it, and the pinata fell.  The candy dumped out and the kids grazed on it for the rest of the evening.

Next was the cake.  Brooke, my little tomboy, surprised me by saying she wanted a pink cake.  I couldn’t think of anything cute to do with a pink cake so I told my Mom I was just going to make a round cake with sprinkles.  My Mom gasped in horror and said, “Oh Rebecca!  You can’t do that!  You have to make the cake into something!  I always did that for your birthdays!  You get online and find something cute to make.”

After being thus chastened, I went online and found a pattern.

I present – the cake:

Brooke loved her butterfly cake, so I guess I’m glad I made it for her.

Presents!

The last scheduled event was water balloons.  The kids had fun chucking those.  Then Brooke ended her party with one of her favorite pastimes – jumping off the picnic table.

Resting with Emma after the party.

Caroline busied herself climbing in and out of her chair while we cleaned up.

Now we get a couple of weeks to rest before we do this all over again for Caroline.

Brooke loves temples.  She talks about how she wants to go to the temple.  Dallas and I have told her that she can go when she gets bigger.  (We have found we have to be careful when we tell her she’s such a big girl because then she says, “I’m bigger!  I go to temple now?”)

Since she is now bigger and one year older, we decided to take her to the temple and have a picnic on the grass.  It was perfect weather, and we had a great time.

After our picnic, we ran home, put the girls down for naps, and prepared for Brooke’s birthday party.  Stay tuned…

Last week was Brooke’s third birthday.

We’re still working on appropriate smiling for the camera.

I blew up several balloons for the occasion and Brooke had a great time piling them all up on the couch and jumping in them.

My parents came down and took us all to Pirate Island to celebrate.  We almost didn’t make it through the doors; a talking skeleton greeted us and Brooke was scared to move any farther.  It took several minutes for her to summon the courage to enter.

Brooke’s favorite ride was the mini-carousel.

Caroline loved the ride, too.

The other day Brooke gave me a hug and whispered, “Mom, I’m so glad you’re here.  I love you.”  That was one of my favorite moments as a mother to date.

I love you, too, my little Brooke.  Happy birthday!

I think I have a tendency to be a little bit of a hypochondriac.  I don’t mean to be, but sometimes I hear symptoms of illnesses and they just seem to exactly match something that happened to me at one time or another.

I’ve diagnosed myself with PMLE or polymorphous light eruption, and I don’t think it’s the hypochondriac in me talking here.  PMLE is basically an allergy to the sun.

I blame it on spring.  When the weather is nice, the girls and I love to go outside and play.  When we would come inside, I noticed that my skin would get itchy.  I didn’t think much of it until the itch kept persisting.  I wasn’t using any new soaps or detergents and I couldn’t think of anything that would be causing the itch.  Then I noticed I was only itching on my arms and my neck — areas where the sun hit me.

I tested my hypothesis and found that every time I went outside, I would itch the rest of the day.  Finally, I googled my condition.

Turns out 10-15% of the population experiences this fun phenomenon.

Turns out it affects women more than men.

Turns out it often appears out of the blue in young adults.

Turns out there really is no cure except to expose your skin to the sun and wait for your skin to get used to the sun.

Turns out this may happen to me every spring.

Do you know how uncomfortable it is to have your skin constantly itch?  I find myself alternating between trying not to itch and itching so violently that I draw blood.

It seems I have a knack of coming down with crazy medical conditions.  I am not amused.

Whew.  The last few weeks I have been busy.  Too busy to blog.  I’ve been…

–administering end-of-the-year reading tests to two kindergarten classes

–organizing a community garden

–taking care of Caroline who got sick…and got sick again…and became crabby so I thought she was sick again though it turned out she wasn’t…and then she really did get sick again.  (I’ll end the ellipses there.  No more getting sick, Caroline!)

–working to reorganize an organization that is not working properly

–planning a visiting teaching conference

–seeing a TMJ specialist for my jaw

This is a fun story.  A few months ago my jaw started popping.  (That’s not the fun part of the story.)  I went to the dentist.  He was horrified with the noise.  He sent me to a specialist.  The specialist put a stethoscope thing on my jaw and had me open and close so he could measure the noise and range of movement.  As he was showing me the results, he said that all of the numbers should be below 20.  My numbers were all over 400.  Apparently he has only seen one other patient in his life that has even come close to sounding as bad as my jaw sounds.  At my last appointment I got a lovely mouth guard to wear at night.  As I was paying, the secretary gave me a sideways look, leaned forward and whispered, “Are you the one with the really loud pop?”  I said yes.  She said, “Wow.  You’re kind of like a star around here.”

Anyone want my autograph?

Apparently “A place of love and beauty” and “This is my sacred duty” sound a lot like “Shake your booty” to Brooke…

By popular demand we now present the video from Caroline’s first crawl.

The other day Brooke was playing with Caroline and making her laugh so hard that Caroline was turning pink from the lack of oxygen.