Wren's Favorite Things That I Say

Tonight, after I had just said "island view" (code for "I love you") to Bear, she said, "Guess what my favorite thing is that you say?" 

"Island view," I guessed.

"Yes," she said. "I also like 'wing na.' And 'egregious and Kathie Lee.'"

"Wing na" means "why not" and was originally inspired by the actress Ming-Na. I've been saying it for decades.

"Egregious and Kathie Lee" means "agreed." "Agree" became "egregious," which suggested [Live with] Regis and Kathie Lee. 

After I wrote this, Jim said he invented the whole "Egregious and Kathie Lee" thing, so maybe I don't get all the credit for the quirky sayings being passed down to our offspring. But I love it.

Slumber Party - November 2024

Jim was gone on his surf trip Thursday, November 7 to Tuesday, November 12. Ever had her last regular-season soccer game Saturday morning; the Littles had had theirs the week before. The Littles had two free Menchie's yogurts coming to them via these things they'd gotten at school for reading a bunch, and we could only redeem them at certain locations - including San Marcos but not including our Carlsbad location. So after Ever's game, we got sandwiches at a nearby Jersey Mike's and then went to Menchie's. That afternoon, the girls did their weekly jobs (vacuuming upstairs, vacuuming the car, and cleaning a bathroom). Ever wanted to play pickleball or soccer at the courts, but Ella was gone. So I invited all the Henie Hills kids in the ward. The Pete and Meagan Bunnell kids went, along with Maggie and Norah Gustafson and Alina Karner. Wren didn't want to go but ended up joining after I told her Norah was there. Tiny was playing with Nathan Cikanek at "The Tribe," but after he had to go home, I ran her up to the courts for the last little bit. Things didn't go super smoothly, largely because I couldn't find our courts key. (Ever thinks Jim put it on his key chain, so it was in Mexico.) Ever can reach through the fence and open the gate at the upper courts, but she can't get into the lower courts without the key. But it was lovely to see a bunch of neighborhood kids playing together up there, being sporty and being outside. I want to take advantage of our amazing neighborhood and do that more often. 

Because of the impromptu gathering, the girls and I started our planned slumber party festivities late. I made pork chops and cheesy potatoes for dinner (between running people up to the courts). Ever really likes pork chops, and Jim hates them; it seemed as if we should eat them while he was gone. Then we watched the movie Eight Below while eating popcorn and muddy buddies. Traditionally, our living room slumber parties conclude with my reading to the girls while we're all in our beds. I thought maybe we should skip that part since it was so late, but when all else was done, Tiny said, "Now, reading time!" So I read On Fortune's Wheel (one of our current "family reads") until we discovered that Ever had fallen asleep, about 11:00 P.M. 

Sunday afternoon, I asked the Gustafsons and Nearents if they could take my kids home so they didn't have to hang out during my Relief Society presidency meeting. The Nearents took Tiny; Gustafsons took the other two. (Too many extra kids for one car.) The Nearents didn't want to leave Tiny home alone (she arrived before the other two), so they took her to their house. Then Gustafsons picked her up and took all three girls to their house until I got home. They fed them and everything. It's so amazing to have nice friends in the neighborhood. 

Ever wanted to nap when we got home and asked me to read her to sleep. I loved so much that my nearly 13-year-old wanted me to read to her. We went up to the guest room, where she has been sleeping (with sisters) a lot of the time lately. Ever got in bed, and I lay down next to her and read to her until she was asleep or nearly so. I read the part she'd slept through the night before, plus a few extra pages, which I then had to read to Wren and Tiny separately to catch them up. I've been sad that we haven't been doing much family reading lately, and it's something I never want to end. So my heart was warmed by the whole thing. 

Tiny's Sleepwalking: A Snapshot

4/9/23, 10:15 P.M.

Jim got up from the couch and went to the downstairs bathroom before heading up to bed. He found Tiny in the dark bathroom asleep on the mat in front of the toilet. 

4/24/23

I was hearing movement upstairs, probably in the ten o'clock hour. I went to see who was up and why. The light in the girls' bathroom was on and the door closed. When I tried to open the door, it was blocked by Tiny's body. Again, she was asleep on the bath mat in front of the toilet. I couldn't open the door to lift her up, but she awoke when I said her name. She got up quickly and said, all squinty-eyed and confused, "What's going on?" 

The next morning, I asked her if she remembered what happened. She didn't remember but had seen on the floor of the bathroom the red panda stuffy with which she'd been sleeping the night before and figured it out. 

Around 5/8/23

Tiny got out of bed and came downstairs while Jim and I were watching TV. My instinct is to hurry her to the bathroom because I assume that's why she wakes up. She said she didn't need to go. She came up onto my lap and hugged me, and then I took her back to bed. She just need a late-night snuggle, I guess. It was quite nice. She had no recollection of it in the morning.   

6/26/2023

Dawn came for the weekend to visit Grandpa. We got up at 4:00 A.M. to leave for the airport Monday morning. When she flipped on the kitchen/family room light, she discovered Tiny asleep on the couch. Nobody knows when Tiny relocated herself in the night. She, of course, did not remember going downstairs. 

9/12/24 (tacking this on way later because we just had another funny incident)

Jim and I were on the couch around 10:00 P.M., and I heard footsteps coming quickly. As I was getting up, I caught a glimpse of Tiny rushing around the corner by the bathroom. I called to her, but she just flung open the door to the garage and rushed out. I made it to the garage door right as she reentered the house. I asked her if she needed the bathroom and pointed her to it. After she used the restroom, she came out, waved to us when we said goodnight, and went back upstairs. The next morning, she said she had awakened with an extra t-shirt on. In her sleepwalking, she had put a tie-dyed t-shirt on over the one she was sleeping in. When she got up in the morning, she wondered why her shirt felt heavy and discovered an extra layer. 

More July 2024 - Home, Camps, Soccer, Certificate of Merit

The Cikaneks picked up a crazy steep waterslide that Scott jerry-rigged up on a ladder. It was unstable but very fun. 

Another video of Tiny doing her signature slide.

Tiny and Ever earned free Girl Scouts sleepaway camps with their massive cookie sales (more than 1,000 boxes each). We realized that sending two of them away for camp and having Bear home alone for a week (well, five days) would be really sad, so we offered camp to Bear. She decided to go, and we sent them all off - but to three different camps! Ever's old friend from Palmquist, Grace, went with Ever to a horse camp (for which we had to pay because it wasn't eligible for the cookie rewards). The Girls Scouts let me apply Ever's credit to Wren (which shocked and elated me). Wren wanted to go by herself (also shocking), so she and Tiny went to different camps. 

Ever's face in this pic is classic Ever - so not amused by the silly, trying-to-be-fun thing the counselor was saying. 

Jim took one day off the week the girls were gone so we could have some fun. We went paddleboarding in the lagoon and went farther into the lagoon than we were allowed to. Although I despise rule breaking, it was really cool in those recesses and made the trip way better. Then we went out toward the ocean and saw a couple of guys jump off a little bridge, so we did that, too. We felt like very fun middle-aged people. 

I picked the girls up on Friday. They had a pretty good time but said it was really hot, and Ever would have liked more time on the horses.

We went straight from Wren's Saturday soccer game to a Wave game at Terero Stadium. 

Posting this bottom pic only because Tiny is cute and mischievous. 

The very next week after the Girl Scout camps, the girls went to Cedar Lake Camp up in Big Bear. Molly Bowen, mother of Lucy and Lola (JCS friends of Ever and Wren, respectively) invited Ever and Wren to the camp, which is run by some Christian church in the area. (Molly knows somebody who is associated with it.) In looking into it, I found that Tiny was just barely old enough to attend, so we sent all three. Overall, they had a great time. Each day had a theme - like He is the light; He is the way; whatever. They learned Christian songs and seemed totally into it when we picked them up. Ever and Wren said Lucy and Lola didn't hang out with them at all (rude), and Wren never recovered from seeing a spider in the bunk house on Day 1. So after all was said and done, Tiny wanted to go back the next year, but neither of her sisters wanted to (for Bear, that was because of the spiders).  

Miss Amber Dahlberg, the Biggers' piano teacher, facilitated Certificate of Merit testing for them, and they both passed. 

I've got an Ever-wakeboarding-while-with-the-Rondos video in my July 2024 photo folder. I don't know if that's really when it was taken. I could very well have posted this already somewhere else. 

Lastly, Bear (second from the left) with her soccer team.

Tiny's Eighth Birthday

Big Tines turned eight! Her birthday was on a Tuesday, so we celebrated the Saturday before. She even opened her family presents that Saturday morning. I got her an old-fashioned quill pen that was a really good idea but was defective and got ink EVERYWHERE. I'm mad I didn't return it. She tried to use it a bit for a year or so until we finally threw it away. 

Always books for Tiny. 

It was her golden birthday (turning eight on the eighth), so I got special gold balloons for her birthday chair. These pictures were taken a few days later when we enjoyed a german pancake for breakfast.

I also got cute gold plates, cups, and napkins for the party. Sweet Bear made special "Happy Golden Birthday" balloons to put up by our birthday banner.  

Tiny helped me make her cake - chocolate, with cream cheese frosting.

Rainbow platter. So proud. (Picture flipped.)

We had Kaia and Maya from school, Gustafsons and Bunnells from church/neighborhood, Cikaneks, and a couple of friends from Let's Play Music/rec soccer (Kate Packard and Clementine Colby). It was the traditional playbook - water balloons, pizza, cake, piñata, presents. After the water balloon fight, though, Cikaneks said everyeone was already wet so should just jump in their pool. Maya didn't have a swimsuit and was very embarrassed about swimming in a t-shirt but didn't want to borrow a suit, and I felt really bad about that. 

Tiny loves to beat on piñatas.

Another birthday in the books for our sweetest Tiny!

Futsal, Fair, 4th (Beginning of July 2024)

The girls did a week-long futsal camp (indoor soccer), the big draw being an appearance one day by Amirah Ali from the San Diego Wave.   

I tried to be fun by taking Jim on a date to a show at the La Jolla Playhouse at UCSD. We absolutely HATED it. We already know the story of Johnny Cash and June Carter, having watched Walk the Line, and we would have been better off just rewatching the movie. 

Just photographic evidence of Tiny's sleeping on the window seat.  

We went to the fair with Cikaneks on July 3. It's so much more fun going with Cikaneks than alone. 

💗💗💗💗💗

We caught a fun acrobat show. One of the Littles took about 50 pictures, which I then had to delete. 

We passed a fireworks show on the way home. 

Tiny wrote a letter to her future self and attempted to use a bit of cursive. 

Berry came up with a new inchworm-style method of propulsion. 

Scott Cikanek was involved in the procurement and setting off of a bunch of fireworks at the end of the cul de sac on the 4th of July. It was quite the party. Wrenzy borrowed my phone to take the following notes:

    - Diamond Cutter (Fountain)
    - Glittering Fountain (Fountain)
    - Modella (Shoots up and explodes)
    - Blazer Box (Fountain)
    - Rain Dance (Fountain)
    - Roman Candle (Shoots up a bunch of purple-blue balls that explode)
    - Pyro Fan (Fountain)
    - Grand Blossom (You throw it up and it sizzles and spins around)
    - Warrior and Resolution lit together (Fountain)
    - Lil Red Devil (Fountain)

No one has ever made more lists than Wrenzy.

Jim made a poor impulse buy of a bunch of $1 mini pies. Surprisingly, they were not good. 

Just June (2024)

Gary Oddou had a campsite he couldn't use at Palomar, and he offered it to us. It was a nice spot, but it turned out to be the worst camping experience ever because the mosquitos were INSANE and daytime was nightmarishly hot.

Saturday morning, Jim made pancakes while we tried to swat away the endless mosquitoes.  

We went on a little hike. I believe Jim was a bit reluctant, but I thought we had to hike - even though it was about 100 degrees and the mosquitoes were out of control.   

We had to call it after one short hike and head home. The mosquitoes and the heat were relentless. There was no way to enjoy it. 

Another cute surprise photo on my phone from Goosey.

Tiny and Wrenzy did a few swim classes at Alga Norte. I'd really like them to become stronger swimmers (especially Tiny), but these classes aren't sufficient. In fact, they were registered for another two weeks of classes later in the summer, and I canceled and took a credit with the City of Carlsbad that I probably will never use because I didn't want to waste more time. 

Maggie Long had Potato Chip Rock on her bucket list, so we hiked it early one Saturday. We got to look down at some fun cloud cover. 

I had insisted that we go early to try to beat the crowds, but we didn't go early enough. There were already quite a few people there. I was maybe just going to settle for a quick snap of Potato Chip Rock with nobody on it, but Maggie said we had to get a photo of us. The stranger who took it didn't do a great job with the angle, so you can't really see the thinness of the rock. 

Ever went to a birthday party at Moonlight Beach for Emalyn from school.

Tiny planned her birthday way in advance. Mostly it's just all about the food. 

Tiny went to a glow party for Girl Scouts. 

She took a nap in a cubby in the Sisters' Room (bunk room). 

Sunday snuggles.

Ever went to stake girls camp. 

If Ever was trying to look fierce here, I don't think it worked.

Ever with her soccer team and Coach Alex (a very fun, passionate, and yelly Scottish fellow).

Wrenzy, Ever, and I went to watch Leela dance. 

Cikanek pool time. I can't tell who these people are. I'm guessing Bear is top left, Fiora (her friend from school) is top right, and I don't know about the bottom layers. 

We met the Johnsons (Kaia and her family) and Maya Phillips and her mom, Melissa, at South Ponto Beach in Carlsbad. It was probably about the only time we made it to the beach that summer. Tiny's face is completely hair-covered in the only photo I got. 

Tiny, Maya, Kaia, and Stella (Kaia's sister)

It's a wonder our books don't have more food on them, given all the reading at the table.

Ever got a babysitting job. I think it was for the Longs. We gave her Jim's phone since she didn't have one. I was very happy to get a report from her, and I appreciated that she made an effort to clean up (and understood the pain of doing so).

Chantalle and John Bishop open their magnificent Lake Arrowhead house up to families in the ward every summer for what they call "Ward Week." I took the girls and Ella Rondo up for a few days when the Warrs were there, too. Jim had to do some maintenance at our cabin (staining the decks, I think), so he just joined us briefly. It was our first time seeing the lake house, and it was really something. They have room for about four extra families. There's a movie theater and a game room on the bottom floor. The top floor has a Lego room and a play room. It's just a free-for-all up there, kids gone wild. The girls went off with friends upon arrival, and I mostly saw them at meals after that. One day, Ever and some of the older kids had already watched a movie during the day and then some Studio C (BYU TV comedy), and then at about 10:30, Ever asked if she could watch another movie. I consulted with Mark Warr (his wife, Shanna, wasn't there) because his son, Conner, who's a year older than Ever, was involved. Mark wasn't going to say no, so the teen party continued into the next morning.  Chantalle asks that everyone help prepare and clean up meals (although she provides all the food), and other than that, people are free to do whatever they want. It was a nice little vacation for me. 

The Bishops took us out on the boat for some wakeboarding one day. I really wanted to wakeboard, and I took a turn but had a hard time getting up. (The only other time I've wakeboarded was with Dawn and Ed, and I have been able to get up without a problem with them.) I couldn't try again because there were too many people, so that was sad. 

John stopped the boat so we could take a dip.

Tiny got cold quickly.

Kids played games.

When it came time to leave, the Littles had to be torn from their Lego creations. 

The Littles read something about "mint to enjoy" on a bowl we got from the Girl Scouts. In this video (which I took surreptitiously and sideways), they go from sort of bickering about it to singing a "mint to enjoy" song together. 

Wrenzy's soccer team had a pool party. 

Tiny's went to the movies...

... and had a pool party.

Some of Ever's team went to the Scottish Highland Games in honor of Coach Alex. It ended up being a hot day and not a very exciting event for us. But we tried.