Alice turned 4 this week! We adore this sweet, spunky, creative lil comedian. Still blogging on my phone so I'll save most of the Alice milestone updates for her journal, but it is so fun to watch her come into her own personality now that she can understand and communicate so well. She always asks me to sit outside the bathroom door when she needs to go potty, so we can trade jokes back and forth. It is fun and sweet and a little sad to see her jokes making more and more sense as the months pass. Humor is such an interesting cultural concept and I can see those connections being made in real time. Now she can guess the answer to my jokes sometimes (they are usually rooted in a simple word play). And sometimes she'll get me with a good one I've never heard before too (mostly her jokes still don't make sense and she's using me as her joke laboratory, but I love that).
Alice just says the darnedest things. Sometimes I notice she'll take a specific phrase from a TV show, but other times it truly seems like she's made up her own lexicon. Today she wanted to put up some Halloween decorations, and she was delighted when I added a big fake spider high up on the wall. She gleefully exclaimed, "Mom, our house is going to look so haunted!" And then later when she was admiring the pumpkins taped to the wall outside her room she said, "It looks haunterific up here!" From the time she first started talking my mom noted that I should keep a microphone on her all the time to capture all the funny things she says. This is still true, and I need to be better about writing all the Aliceisms down--it's just that so many of the things that come out of her mouth are excellent one-liners, that i sometimes don't even register them.
Alice can be incredibly firey (and quite competitive, but I strongly believe this is due to having Jack as her example), but is at her core incredibly considerate and sweet. When I'm sick or otherwise not feeling well, she somehow knows just what I need even when I don't know--sometimes that's drawing the curtains or fluffing an extra pillow behind me. Sometimes it's making me a get-well "soup" out of milk, pepper, and diced carrots. I never quite know what I'm going to get but it's always delightful. Alice still loves making her own creations in the kitchen. These are usually terrifying, so I've been meaning to set aside a drawer or bin at her level filled with ingredients i'm ok with her using together. Homegirl LOVES a spice cabinet.
A few things Alice has mentioned wanting to be when she grows up: astronaut, ballerina, singer, doctor, princess, teacher. Can't wait to see which direction she goes. She's doing great at preschool lately and has recently really taken to the letter sounds and is sounding some words out. I wouldn't be surprised if this next year she starts doing some beginner reading.
She recently transitioned from her crib (I know, I know, I'm just a chicken) to a big girl bed. She is doing pretty well! She does come to our room at some point most nights, but one of us will walk her back to her room and she goes back to sleep without a fuss. This is a big upgrade from Jack's transition out of his crib so I'll take it. We added white Christmas lights to her room and hung a pink tent canopy above her bed. It is the coziest place to be.
I could go on about Alice forever, but it's getting late so I'll get to the pictures:
^^Signature sheepdog bangs. She's getting a trim next week--i asked if she wanted to grow her bngs out but she passionately declined.
^^on her birthday she chose her own birthday outfit for school--a sparkly black dress, hello Kitty Halloween socks, and black loafers. 10/10 birthday outfit.
^^She asked to go ice skating for her birthday, but the public skate hours didn't line up with our schedule on her birthday so we ended up having Alice go on a date with Grandma and Grandpa, and then we had chik-fil-a and opened/played with presents at home. We'll go skating next week. She had a blast with the presents anyway.
Not many jack pictures this week, but he's thriving as well (except for attitude after school, but what are you gonna do). His flag football team is undefeated this season, which is a first for him and fun to watch. He loves to be involved and has requested to be signed up for battle of the books, chess club, reflections, and martial arts...all within this last week. That one's going to keep us busy!
I'm annoyed. I wrote a long post detailing our adventures in Sundance for a medical conference Jared went to. But the phone blogging is temperamental and after an hour of typing it out and adding pictures, it got deleted. I need my computer fixed!
Ok to make short(er) of it, we had a fun weekend in Sundance. Also exhausting and painful, but it's a trip with kids so what do you expect? We had the best apple crumble with fresh whipped cream I've ever tasted. We took a scenic ski lift ride up the mountain and nobody tried to climb out! We visited the Sundance swimming pool which was just stunning in the mountain setting.
Also I took a solo hike to Stewart Falls where I ended up slipping at the very end and banging my lower leg on a rock so badly that I couldn't bear weight. As I crawled to the nearby stream to try and clean it up and figure out how I was going to get back, the biggest moose I've ever seen appeared right across the stream from me. You've never seen an injured hiker hobble away so quickly! That was painful on the leg, but on the bright side, when I scrambled around the corner, there was the waterfall. So at least I got to see that. I knew I needed to figure out a way to get back to our cabin before dusk/more moose arrived, so I grabbed a nearby long stick and made it into a walking stick/crutch. Without it I couldn't have hiked back on my own. As I started hopping back down the trail, I frantic little boy came sobbing out of the woods toward me and told me he was lost and couldn't find his family. I knew I wasn't the right person to be able to help him so I found two women who could take him from there and call trail patrol. It was the weirdest hike I've ever been on. The leg was really painful for two days (probably did some muscle damage), but I'm grateful it feels fine now. Ok, pictures!
^^After I helped the lost little boy find some hikers who could help him find his family. Wondering what was going to happen next on this weird hike (a snake appearing on the trail in front of me is what happened next)
^^We checked out the new Sundance Lodge on our way out and it was very cool. Moody Ralph Lauren mountain hotel vibes.
Everyone is ill. Even Savvy somehow. I'm aware that this happens when school starts, but it still sneaks up on me every year. To be fair, i'm pretty sure none of our maladies this week came from school, but they did keep kids from going to school. No stars for that.
My week began with a painful...lymph node? On the back of my head? Jared thinks it was a response to something viral. A few days later I was down with a UTI. So I was pretty much down and out for a a chunk of the week. We had a fun Labor Day weekend, but both of my kids came off of it with bad colds, and Alice had to stay home from school with a fever. At least no one is throwing up, and hopefully she'll be back to school by the end of this week.
Labor Day was nice. We had dinner at my parents the night before, and the day before that was spent with Jared's parents who were in town. On labor day we invited my family over for lunch and later ended up at our pool for its last open day of the season.
If I had a working computer I'd have more to say, but it's tougher to type it all out on a phone...which is probably for the best anyway😂 So we'll get to the pictures now!
The laptop is still broken, so we'll shoot for another short post this week. Jared finished a big chunk of our front landscaping this week! He put rock in all the planting bed areas, learned how to install a drip system, and put in a few plants. New dad level, unlocked.
We've had some intense storms and winds this week. It has been really cool to watch the lightning from our front porch. I've been troubleshooting how to keep all the patio furniture from flying off down the street. We put an outdoor rug under our back patio seating area, and it isn't faring so well in the wind. We have an intensely heavy stone column on one corner of the rug, and that corner is holding tight. I have another matching stone column we'll have to get on another corner. Then I'm thinking heavy boulders to hold the last two corners until I can get some heavier side tables there. When it isn't windy, we're still really enjoying our backyard spaces.
I had two family wedding receptions to attend over the weekend. It was the best to see so many of my cousins I haven't seen in a long time! Unfortunately I had to miss Jack's football game, and he scored two touchdowns. At least his Grandma and Grandpa Lambert and Uncle Will were in town to see it. We're enjoying the time with them.
Jack seems to be settling into the new school routine a little better this week. Alice is doing well too, except for the random morning last week when she woke up feeling sick and threw up, and then felt absolutely totally fine 3 hours later and ate the biggest meal I've ever seen her eat? It was bizarre. I'm glad it didn't stick around.
I need to bite the bullet and start inviting people over to our backyard. I have promised probably like 8 families that we'd invite them over when our backyard was finished. Of course the backyard started in March and still isn't done, so it's about 6 months worth of casually-extended invites that now I've got to (want to) make good on. It feels overwhelming because it's so many different groups of people and there's still technically a lot of work to be done in the backyard. This is me promising myself to have one backyard hosting date on the calendar by next week! And now for some pictures:
Ack! My beloved laptop is broken. I need to take it in and attempt to get it fixed before writing it off, but for this week we are doing a phone post, which means "short." You're welcome.
^^wow, these are the only pics from this week! Kids must be in school. Wish I had taken some pictures at Jack's first football game, but it was dreadful hot and I wasn't thinking about it. Next week!
School is in session! Jack doesn't adjust great to change, so while he seems to like his classes and be happy to see friends every day, when he is home he is pretty...let's say volatile. This tends to be his anxiety/"things are changing" response. I am keeping the mindset that this is normal for the first few weeks of school, and if I can buckle up and tap into some extra patience for the next few weeks, hopefully we'll start to see him relax into the new routine. In the meantime, LOTS of strategizing on my end. We've got this, team.
Alice started school too. She LOVED having a creative dance class this week. Preschool is 3 days a week for her. She is adjusting well and it's been nice to have tiny pockets of time carved out to start working on the to-do list that's been piling up for months now since Alice gave up her nap at the beginning of the summer. Friday was the loveliest when Jared had his day off, and we could go on an ACTUAL date while Alice was in preschool. We went to Costco because we are really krazy.
Our backyard furniture is up and it has made all the difference! I am outside any chance I can get now. Jared figured out how to install a drip system and finished planting our front garden beds over the weekend. I'm grateful he's taken this on, because our landscape team did a pretty bad job with retaining wall shape and also uneven plant placement, and it sort of hurts my soul to look at it. If I had more time on my hands I probably would've started hissing at everyone and insisted on replanting everything myself and really gotten in there with a measuring tape. But there are too many piled-up higher-priority projects for me this year so I am letting the front landscaping go. Jared's gone full dad-mode and is really into it now anyway.
I spentt a night at a local motel on Friday to have several uninterrupted hours to tackle many of the research projects that have been neglected all summer, and to get a good night's sleep since Alice's anxiety response the first week of school has been to stop sleeping through the night and be up for the day be 5 a.m.🥱 I also needed an introvert battery recharge pretty badly after that summer. My typing thumbs are tired, so here are some pictures from our week now:
Happy first week of school! Alas, it is time. Jack was not excited about school starting soon, until we met his teacher and learned that his best school friend will be in his class. Now he is officially over summer and excited to get started. Alice isn't quite as excited, but she is going to do one day of creative dance class at her school, before class starts, each week. I got lucky that it starts on her first day of school, so that is overshadowing the preschool part and she will be really excited to go to her first dance class.
Over the weekend we snuck in a trip to Jared's extended family Bear Lake cabin. We realized we hadn't gone at all this summer and it was the last weekend before school, so we made a quick, spontaneous drive up there. The weather was starting to feel ever-so-slightly crisp, and it was a wonderful transition out of summer break. I think we may make that a yearly end-of-summer tradition.
Our backyard is at the finish line! At least for this year. There will be future phases to finish the top level and the other half of our patio, but those are on hold for a few years. Our landscape team is done with everything except for the last stretch of fence, which has been ordered (phew--we were getting nervous they would leave us high and dry since the pace was so slow this last month). Did they do a great job? Eh . . . Did they leave plenty of loose ends that they won't be coming to tie up? Absolutely. But most of them are things we can do ourselves (add gravel to the planter beds, paint over the concrete they splattered onto our house). It was like pulling teeth getting them to do anything at the end, so at this point we are happy to have them out of the backyard so we can put out patio furniture and enjoy it. They say you can't have fast, cheap, and good with landscaping. We did get cheap though, and after putting down a big downpayment for our home last year, cheap is what we needed this time around. It is a great and functional backyard, and it isn't perfect but we are sure going to enjoy it. All's well that ends well, hopefully.
Let's do some pictures from our week now:
^^My favorite way to buy myself some time and keep the kids occupied is to take an inside toy and set it outside without a word. This is where the patio shines brightest. This hot wheel set-up bought me like 2 hours. A north-facing backyard means great patio shade all morning.
^^Do people around here realize how crazy of a childhood backdrop this is? The kids had a great time playing in the foothill brush late one afternoon when attitudes were rancid and I was grasping at straws to find them a novel activity to distract them.
^^Another "grasping at straws" day. Every summer I choose a random day to be "Christmas in the summer." I don't announce it ahead of time. I just pull it out of my pocket when I need it most because we've had several rough days in a row. Usually this is toward the end of summer break when everyone is just over it. The kids wake up to Christmas music, a balsam candle burning, exactly one Christmas decoration draped on the walls (usually a paper chain), and red and green sprinkles poured over whatever their breakfast happens to be. I pull out the Little People nativity for them to play with, plus a couple of Christmas books. Once the novelty of those wear off, I pull out paper snowflake supplies. By the time we finish that, we are usually over the Christmas theme, but it usually takes up an entire morning. Then if we need something else in the afternoon, I'll turn on a Christmas movie. Didn't make it that far this year because I had a freak POTS flare around lunchtime and ended up pawning Jack off to my brother and then running to my parents' house with Alice. Fun day other than that though.
^^Driving to the cabin! Alice packed her own clothes and chose out her own outfits, which meant she wore her fanciest easter dress to the cabin. She started to get really sick of the drive about an hour in, so I pulled out our YOTO and these headphones for her, and she was absolutely thrilled with the control she had over choosing her own songs. Took me back to my CD-player days.
^^Our kids are infamously awful sleepers when we travel. Jack turned a corner around age 7, but we're still in it with Alice. I had to lay right next to her, which was fine and cute, but she did wake up between every sleep cycle it felt like. We stayed for two nights, and that does feel like the maximum number of nights we probably want to spend away from home during this stage of parenting.
^^Limber pine hike
^^By the time our beach afternoon rolled around on our second day we were pretty exhausted, so Jared proposed a low-key walk to the beach instead of a full beach afternoon. Against my better judgement I agreed and hopped in the car, grabbing just swimsuits, sunscreen, two towels, and a lone pool noodle. None of the sand toys or shade canopy or paddle board or anything made it into the car. Our biggest mistake was bringing Savvy with us. Once we were there of course the kids wanted to play in the water. It was pretty crowded so we kept Savvy on leash, which she didn't appreciate. The kids still had a great time, but next time we'll bring the wagon full of supplies no matter what.
^^Savvy is getting old. On our last morning, we opened the trunk to start the 3-hour process of cleaning/loading up to leave. Savvy hopped in the trunk at the very beginning and didn't hop out at all during those 3 hours--not even when a deer wandered right in front of her. She just watched it! It was wild. She had fun but she was ready to go home.
^^Toddler drawings 4evr.
^^Buuuuut the price of said al fresco mountain backyard is actual tarantulas on our house😁 We also get wolf spiders in our garage and enormous night beetles that I didn't know could even exist in Utah. Luckily I am weird and kind of like it. (Besides the wolf spiders. No to wolf spiders.)
School is just around the corner for the kids, and they are equal parts ready, and lashing out in anxiety about it. Neat! I am really excited to see what kind of person I'll be when both kids are in school. With Alice's nap gone and Jared's work hours extending til bedtime, this has been the summer of no free time. Alice's preschool will just be 2 hours, but I am beyond excited to have those hours to replace her extinct naps.
Our landscaping seems to be on pause, but my brothers and parents came over on Saturday evening to help us install the park strip landscaping in front of our house. I'm so grateful they came to help, and it looks great!
^^On days when our landscapers don't come (most days), the kids and I spend our mornings outside. Alice is big on setting up a "breakfast picnic," which is adorable. Leveling and adding retaining walls in a backyard isn't the most fun way to spend a large amount of money, but I will say that our backyard feels like an amphitheater now, which is very fun. 5/5 stars, would recommend. And our fence is finished on two sides! Progress!
^^Getting out of the house is the only way to survive these last weeks of summer. I love these psycho, scary lil' summer monkeys.
^^Jack reading Alice her new Fancy Nancy book. This is the cutest moment I've ever witnessed. (90% of the time, these two are screaming and throwing things in joy or rage. This is not the norm.)
^^Lagoon! We took the kids on the Primordial ride. It's like a very tame roller coaster with some 3d "shoot the bad guys" stuff. Thought they would love it, but it was a bit on the scary side for them. Back to kid land for a few more years, which I don't mind at all.
^^My parents came over for dinner and to see backyard updates on Friday. Alice had fun driving cars on the back of grandpa's shirt that we got him for his birthday.
^^Tree shopping for the front park strip. Alice was being a lil' photographer.
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