Germ Warfare

I'm starting this at 8:45 AM on a Tuesday; very different than my usual 10-PM-on-a-Sunday-night routine. Why, you ask? Well, mostly because I don't have the energy to stand (it's been one of those weeks) so I figured I'd do something productive while I sit.

One of those weeks, you say? Why, yes. It all started last week on Monday morning. Around 2 AM on Monday morning, when Anna woke up crying and coughing and running a fever. I spent the better parts of Monday through Wednesday snuggling a feverish toddler, wielding the bulb syringe, and keeping the humidifier filled. (On the plus side, she spent a good 2-3 hours every day napping. So did I.) By Thursday, she was feeling better. . .thank goodness, because we had Elizabeth's parent/teacher conference. (All is going well; Mrs. H. says Elizabeth has adjusted beautifully to kindergarten, is a good listener, doesn't run with scissors or eat glue, etc.)

Since Anna was feeling better and Jared was home for the day, after our parent conference I figured I'd take a trip to the mall to shop for some much-needed maternity clothes. When it comes to shopping, Elizabeth could take it or leave, but Anna is always, always up for a trip to the store. Any store. The kid loves to shop. (She's so stereotypically female that it's not even funny; her favorite activities around the house are cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry, and she literally BEGS me to take her to the store. Hoo, boy.) So, I left Elizabeth at home with Jared, and Anna and I headed to the mall. As I walked across the parking lot, I slipped and fell flat on my tush, managing to scrape about an inch of skin off the top of my foot in the process. Not to be deterred (hey, I had a hot coupon!), I dusted myself off and marched into Old Navy, washed off my foot in the bathroom and begged a Band-Aid off of one of the employees, and did my shopping.

Friday and Saturday I limped along (literally) as I took care of Elizabeth and myself. . .we were now both sick with Anna's cold. By Sunday, we were in pretty bad shape; my foot was getting worse and Elizabeth was complaining of an earache. I decided I'd spare Elizabeth from having to wait a miserable hour at the urgent care clinic and would take her to her doctor the next morning instead, and I hobbled alone to the InstaCare to see if maybe I'd fractured something. The X-ray came back clear, but the doctor was sufficiently impressed by my "flesh wound" to send me home with a surgical scrub brush and some Hibiclens to help stave off gangrene.

Monday morning I took Elizabeth to her doctor, where my suspicions of an ear infection were confirmed. . .along with a bonus: strep throat! Sigh. This isn't the first time that she's suffered with strep throat for 3-4 days before I get around to taking her to the doc, because I don't realize what it is, and of course I feel just terrible when we find out. (And, ironically, the one time I took her in because I thought she had strep throat, it was mono.) It might make my job easier if she got the "classic" strep throat symptoms like, say, a SORE THROAT. But I'm learning. The most reliable indicator of her having strep is that she cries. A lot. Poor girl. I completely understand; I remember the last time I had strep throat, and I just felt like crying all the time too!

And that brings us to today. Elizabeth is still home from school, but she's off the couch and looks tremendously better. Anna is more or less back to her usual self and I'm keeping my fingers crossed she doesn't come down with strep, too. Jared, of course, is feeling fine; a measly cold virus does nothing to him. (Don't tell him, but I totally let Elizabeth nap on his side of the bed yesterday, half-hoping that he'd catch strep throat from the germs she drooled all over his pillow. . .the man could use a little empathy, is all I'm sayin'.) I'm walking just about normally again, and my cold is mostly gone. After 9 straight nights of getting up every few hours to answer cries, suction noses, fetch drinks of water, administer medicine, and refill humidifiers, I'm looking forward to some decent sleep tonight with only my pregnancy-induced heartburn and twice-nightly potty trips to disturb me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for my wound debridement.

Stuff My Kids Say

Elizabeth: (after taking a sip of Sprite) "It just tastes like there's electricity in my mouth!"

Anna: (driving home late one night) "Look. . .when it's bedtime, everyfing SHINES."



One day I took the girls to a store, and as we walked in, somebody walking out triggered the security alarm. Elizabeth asked what that sound was, and I explained: "They put special tags on the clothes, so that if you walk out of the store without paying for the clothes, the alarm goes off." Elizabeth's face lit up and said, "Oh! And if you walk out without the tags, then the alarm goes ON!"



Elizabeth: "Sometimes it feels like there's a bug crawling up my spine."

Anna: (soberly) "Mommy, I don't want snakes on me." (Still not sure what this was all about. There were no snakes, real or otherwise, anywhere NEAR her when she said this. . .)

When Elizabeth first started kindergarten, she was obsessed with "the rules" for the first few weeks. Each day she'd come home and tell me the rules she'd learned--school rules, classroom rules, PE rules, etc. One afternoon she was playing with Anna, who, being three, couldn't care less about rules and such, and refused to do anything Elizabeth told her. Exasperated, Elizabeth looked straight at her and said in her most grown-up voice, "Anna. There. Are. RULES."

Elizabeth: (yawn) "I'm as tired as a bat in the morning. . ."

Anna: "Mommy, you gotfor your purse!" (In Anna-ese, gotfor = forgot)



One afternoon we let the girls play with the hose, and they flooded the lower half of our backyard, transforming it from a dirt pit to a mud pit. They wallowed in the mud for awhile, and when I told Anna it was time to go inside and get into the tub, she would have none of it. "No," she told me, "Let's pretend DIS be da baff-tub!"

Summer Fun

I know, I know, every summer I seem to forget all about the blog. Just read, and you'll see why I've been slacking this time.

June: Anna turned 3 years old. We had a little shindig at our house, complete with her chocolate-cake-with-bananas-and-blue-polka-dots, as requested:




Our Little Bear is so very good at being three. Delightful, silly, mischievous, stubborn, affectionate. . .She continues to be a champion mess-maker as well as the family clown and resident fashionista.


She's a great little sister; she absolutely adores Elizabeth and also knows exactly how to push her buttons to annoy her. In so many ways I'm reminded of Kellie and me when I see these two play together. . .and that's encouraging. For as much as Kellie and I drove each other crazy as kids, we grew up to be friends after all. I hope the same will be true for Elizabeth and Anna. There's nothing quite like a sister, especially when you're all grown up.




At the end of June, we spent a week at Bear Lake with my mom's side of the family, the Torgersens. The water was beautiful, the beach was perfect for sandcastles, there were cousins and grandparents and puppies and all sorts of fun to be had. . .








Being Torgersens, we spent a LOT of time just talking, joking, and laughing. . .LOUDLY. And you've never really played Rock Band till you've played it with Torgersens. Outside. At 11 PM.




Elizabeth lost a tooth during our stay, with a little help from a stray Frisbee. The tooth was already dangling by a thread; I was actually grateful to the Frisbee for knocking that sucker out already. And then on the last day at the lake, Elizabeth's newest buddy Adelyn (my cousin's little girl) lost the same tooth:



We had so much fun--myself included, despite the morning sickness* that was just starting to take hold (yep, we found out the week before the vacation that I'm expecting again!)

July: Just as my morning* sickness really kicked in, the rest of the family came down with. . .wait for it. . .mononucleosis**. I feel pretty lousy during my first trimester, but I can usually depend on Jared to pick up the slack in the evenings when he's home. However, he was so wiped out that he was every bit as useless as I was. And by the time Jared came down with it, the girls were back to their normal, energetic tear-the-house-apart selves. You can just imagine what our house looked like after three weeks of being more or less run by a 5- and 3-year-old. I wish I had some pictures, really. I think at one point they were wearing dress-ups to bed because they had no clean pajamas, and I know there were more than a few days where at least two of our three meals consisted of cereal.

Um, yeah, no actual photos for July.
But here's a photo of our lovely new made-over bedroom,
where we were hunkered down for most of the month.
Not that it looked anywhere as neat and tidy as this, mind you:

August: Ahh, finally, we're feeling human again! Jared has been working on the backyard (natch) and I've been working to undo the damage of my two-month hiatus from housework, taking the girls to the doctor (3 shots, darn!) and dentist (no cavities, yeah!) and swimming lessons, and getting Elizabeth ready for kindergarten. I can't believe my little girl is going to school! She is unbelievably excited. So am I. . .mostly.



*Morning sickness, hah. I don't know about the rest of you ladies, but my "morning" sickness would be more aptly called "all-day-and-especially-at-night-when-you're-trying-desperately-to-sleep" sickness.

**We think. Elizabeth's test actually came back negative, but her little friend got sick a week later with the same symptoms and her test was positive. And then Jared was laid so low that we have a hard time thinking of anything else it COULD have been. I told him he should've kissed more girls in high school, so he could've gotten it then and spared me the inconvenience.

May Days

What's new with us this week? Well, Jared is still plugging away on the foundation, with a few pallets of cinderblock left to lay before we can start moving dirt and finish grading the backyard. His hands and arms are a testament to the many hours of hard work he's been putting into this project. I tell ya, if Jocke had never left the family farm in South Dakota, Jared would have been completely in his element there. (Of course, he'd also have ended up one of those crusty old Norwegian bachelor farmers, since he never would have met me. . .)

I finished the new garden bed in the front yard. It's looking a little better now that I've filled in all the gaps with annuals, but I'm afraid I completely did in the daisies that I moved in the process. There's still another bunch waiting to be divided and transplanted, so maybe I'll get it right next time. My plan now is to overhaul the foundation bed--move the rose bushes, put a gravel pathway along the back, and turn the front into a shrubbery (One that looks nice. And not too expensive.)

Elizabeth has one week left of preschool and is already peppering me with questions about kindergarten--mostly WHEN DOES IT START?!? It's going to take all of my energy just to keep her busy this summer, I can tell. Weekly trips to the library should go a long way toward that; she's becoming quite a little bookworm. We found a series that she has been devouring. Actually, it's a series of series. First there were the Rainbow Fairies (one book for each color of the rainbow), and now the author has gone on to write series about the Gemstone Fairies, Weather Fairies, Days of the Week Fairies, Pet Fairies, Music Fairies. . .and it goes on. Maybe not the caliber of writing I'd hoped for, but at least the author is prolific!

Anna is turning three in just a few short weeks, though it's hard for me to believe. I've been asking her what she wants for her birthday. Her requests thus far:
1) a banana cake
. . .with chocolate
. . .and polka dots.
. . .BLUE polka dots ("like my eyes are blue")
2) a tiny house
Thanks to her big sister, Anna is quite advanced in the arts of arguing and persuading. The other day I took her to run errands, and she asked if I would take her to "the big grocery store". I said no, but we were going to Target, which is very much like a big grocery store. She replied, "But Target doesn't look like a big grocery store to ME." Again I said no, and she decided to try a different tactic: "But Mommy, the big grocery store has floooowers. And the big grocery store has fruuuuuit." What she should've pointed out is that the big grocery store also has drop-in child care; by that point I was about ready to turn her over to someone else for awhile.

We've also had someone new at our house this weekend: Duncan, Sarah and Seamus' mini Dachsund puppy, has been staying with us while S&S have been in San Francisco. He's about as adorable as they come, and we've had a lot of fun with him this weekend. His only major flaw is that he refuses to poop where he's supposed to--but then again, so does Anna, and we still think she's pretty wonderful, so I suppose I can excuse him as well.

We're looking forward to a wonderful June, starting with Anna's birthday and culminating in a campout/reunion with my mom's side of the family. Whew. All those Torgersens in one place at one time. Bear Lake won't know what hit it.

Date Night

On Friday Jared and I went on a "mini-cation" without the girls. They spent the evening with Aunt Amy and then went to sleep over at Nonny's house while Jared and I enjoyed a nice date night downtown. I'm embarrassed to tell you when our last night out together was. (Wait, do we get to count the adult session of Stake Conference? Sweet. Then we've had TWO dates this year!)

Anyway, some thoughts on our date night:

1) Why does movie popcorn smell so darn good? I rarely buy it, because there's something in the butter-flavored liquid topping that makes me queasy. But oh, that smell is intoxicating. Right up there with new crayons, Pink Pearl erasers, and Play-Doh.

2) Peanut butter M&M's are still one of the best candies ever created.
3) The Starburst jelly bean is no slouch, either.
4) Eating a Starburst jelly bean when you're expecting a peanut butter M&M is startlingly disappointing.
5) We saw "Babies", which documents the first year in the life of four babies from around the world. What I learned from the movie: Parenthood presents challenges regardless of culture, but in many regards we American moms have got it pretty easy. I've never had to skin a dog for dinner.

6) Also, I can handle a little innocent nudity when it's part of the culture--say, among the indigenous people of Namibia who always walk around shirtless and, well, don't even OWN shirts. But I'm sorry, if you're an upper-middle-class Caucasian woman in San Francisco you don't have an excuse. I don't care if it's your hot tub.


7) The ambience at Wasatch Pizza may be lacking, but the pizza is sure tasty.
8) Sausage gives me a wicked headache. Next time, this:



9) You know you've arrived when you can afford a room at a hotel with complementary bathrobes.


10) Even at 9 PM, long after the last wurst has been served, Siegfried's will still smell like brats and sauerkraut. . .which is a little disturbing when you're eating chocolate raspberry cake.


11) I wish we had a king-sized bed at home. Compared to our queen bed, it felt kinda like this:



12) There are too many TV channels out there. We watched an intriguing program at 9 AM on the History channel called Alien Engineering. This whole show was based on the premise that UFOs *do* exist and went on to explain just how they were able to travel thousands of light years, fly silently, defeat inertia, etc. The fact that a show like this managed to score air time is proof positive that there must be a vast surplus of programming slots needing to be filled.


13) Question 1: Why are UFOs almost always shaped like saucers, instead of the more traditional rocket shape? Then again, THEY'RE the ones who've accomplished intergalactic space travel, so maybe the real question is:
14) Question 2: Since alien technology is so obviously superior to ours, how come NASA hasn't tried to replicate the flying saucer design?
15) Question 3: Did that theoretical physicist just say "wet smear"? Ew.

16) Absence makes the heart grow fonder, at least until the kids come down from the "high" they've been riding while you were gone and realize their parents are kind of boring. I think by the time they'd been home for two or three hours, they were ready for me to take them back to Nonny's. So was I.

Thanks again to our wonderful babysitters. We really owe you!

Quarterly Report

Jared has been dividing his spare time equally between beating "The Legend Of Zelda" and working on the foundation for his man lair the second garage.

Holly is giving the master bedroom a little facelift. It's amazing what a difference a gallon of paint and a few hundred bucks at IKEA can make. Pictures forthcoming. (I was thinking I ought to do a "then and now" post showing the changes we've made to the house since we moved in 3 years ago. But I just can't manage to get all the rooms in the house clean simultaneously. . .)

Elizabeth has a mouthful of loose teeth: two on the bottom that are hanging by a thread, and four more on top in varying stages of moderate looseness. I'm happy to say that the girls are getting along a little better these days. The other night I found them snuggled together on Elizabeth's bed, reading a book:


Anna has proved herself a truly gifted mess-maker. Here's one of the more colorful messes she created while I was busy with the aforementioned paint project:
Yep, that's about it. Working, playing, wrangling the kids. . .Life is good.

Moab

We snuck in a quick trip to Moab this week, with Nonny & Poppa and Brittiny, Brooklyn, and Braden. The weather was very cooperative and the redrock was as beautiful as ever. The kids were good little troopers on the hikes; on the first evening we took a stroll to North and South Window:

Anna told me, "Look, I'm a stywish baby."

North Window

South Window

Turret Arch

After the Windows, we went up to Devil's Kitchen to see how far we could get before the kids ran out of steam. We made it to Landscape Arch, probably the second most "famous" arch in the park, and a even more spectacular by morning than evening, I'm told:

Thursday morning we walked out to Broken Arch. This hike quickly became a favorite: a soft, sandy trail with terrain flat enough for the kids to handle, through beautiful changing scenery. We saw tracks of bighorn sheep, a flock of blue birds chasing each other over and around and through the fins of red rock, and yellow horsetail and silvery-green juniper bushes dotting the landscape, all under a bowl of brilliant blue sky.

Jared had gone ahead with the girls, with Brittiny and Mom and me a few hundred yards behind. As the arch came into view, I was surprised to see somebody standing on top of it. . .hang on, that "somebody" was my husband!


Not to be outdone, Brittiny and I climbed to the top too. We were a little less adventurous, though, and weren't willing to stand quite so close to the edge:


Dad had stayed behind to wait for Braden to finish his nap in the car. By the time they caught up with the rest of us, we were ready to head out, so we left Dad at the base of the arch and started down the trail. A few minutes later we looked back--and of course, now Dad was standing on top of the arch.



"Pussycats always stay together when it's far". I have no clue just how it got started, but this is something Elizabeth and Brooklyn kept telling each other on the hikes. They were so delighted to be together that we probably could've marched them across Siberia and they wouldn't have complained. Every time we got out of the car and they saw each other, they'd shriek and run together for a big bear hug. I'm surprised Brooklyn didn't break her nose, crashing into Elizabeth's sternum every time they reunited.

After a morning of hiking, we stopped to eat lunch and let the kids do a little climbing of their own:

Aww, look at that cute family! (At least one couple thought we were all one nuclear family, until Jared set them straight. I guess it must be confusing when you see four kids who look like they're the right ages to be a set of siblings, plus two adults who could pass for either grandparents or parents, and then three other adults--one of whom is short enough to mistaken for a teenager and the other two who look more like siblings than husband and wife. Jared said something about how with Brandon back at home, maybe other people had thought Brittiny and I were both his wives--till I pointed out that Brittiny is WAY too pretty to be a polygamist:



Thursday evening Jared stayed at the hotel with the girls while the rest of us hiked to Delicate Arch. Dang, I can't believe people are willing to do this hike in July. Insane. You spend the first half-mile trekking up a steep hill of slickrock, with no shade in sight. Even on a cool day with the sun low in the horizon, I was feeling pretty warm. After you schlep up the hill, you've got another half-mile to cross of much easier terrain. The last hundred yards or so take you on a narrow ledge overlooking an enormous sandstone canyon:

Then you turn the corner, and voila:


Suddenly I got why Delicate Arch is on our license plate, on the front page of the Utah tourism site, in every "Scenes of Utah" calendar ever printed. . .Up-close and in person, it really is spectacular.


By Friday, the weather had turned cold and stormy--it even started to snow as we packed up the cars and headed out to Dead Horse Point. I remember being both horrified of the name and terrified of the dropoff at Dead Horse Point when I was a little girl. Dad had to promise that yes, there was a fence, and no, nobody was going to fall off the edge, before I agreed to get out of the car to take a look. I'm afraid Elizabeth was equally reticent about the overlook, though for her it was simply because it was so darned COLD. We ran out to take a quick peek and snap some photos before dashing back to the warmth of the car.

The classic "Dang it, we just paid $10 and drove 30 minutes to get to this site of scenic wonder and we're going to take a picture in front of it, I don't care HOW cold it is" pose.

We got back from our trip Friday evening, just in time to have dinner with the rest of the family and pretend to be surprised when Brandon showed up late that night, having flown in from Newark as a surprise for Brittiny and the kids. As it turns out, the news had slowly leaked out and everyone knew he was coming, but they didn't know everyone else knew. Regardless, we were happy that he made it out for the rest of the visit.

Stagestruck

Ever since Elizabeth started her ballet lessons, we've been looking forward to the big night when she would perform in the studio's production of Swan Lake. When the big night came, I was a little worried that she might get stage fright and back out at the last minute--but to my surprise, it turns out that this kid LOVES the spotlight. She pranced onto the stage with a huge grin plastered to her face, and as you can see (she's in the very middle of the group on the left), she was a little reluctant to leave even after her turn was over:

The performance was a lot of fun, even for Hailey and Anna. Anna was especially taken by the fog machine that would turn on whenever the evil sorceress came onstage: "Look Mommy, dere's da suh-MOKE!" The entire production left quite an impression on her; she still talks about it and asks me to draw "a ballerina wif da suh-MOKE and da moon".

Afterward, Elizabeth greeted her adoring fans. Aunt Sarah and Nonny even brought her flowers, lucky girl.

Despite having a fabulous time at the performance, Elizabeth says she wants to try something new, like gymnastics. I guess in her mind she's already conquered the whole ballet "thing". Well, whatever you choose to do, kiddo, we love you and are very proud of you!

The family who paints together, stays together

When Jared and I began dating, one of the things that really attracted to me was his "can do" attitude. He loves nothing more than hunkering down and fixing a problem--be it a bug in a computer program, a car that won't run, or a home improvement project. So it was no surprise to me that when we started looking for our second house, the place that Jared (and I) fell in love with was one that needed a lot of work.

It's been three years now since we bought this house. Three years of fixing faulty electrical work, overhauling the landscaping, ripping out moldy drywall, and dreaming big. It seems like for every one project that gets crossed off the to-do list, three more are added. A few weeks ago, we tackled something that's been on the list since we moved in: painting Elizabeth's room. (See, we didn't paint it when we first moved in, because Jared needed to do some rewiring--which entailed cutting holes in the wall for the new outlets. Then the holes needed to be patched, mudded, re-textured. . .you get the point.)

Elizabeth was very, very excited for this project--ever since I mentioned it to her, she'd started coming up with great color scheme ideas: "How about we paint one wall pink, one wall green, one wall blue, and the ceiling purple?" I gradually talked her into picking just one color from the curtains I'd bought for the room, and we made the requisite trip to the paint counter. Back at home, we gathered up our paint rollers, cranked the tunes, and went to work.

I was a little worried about having a 5-year-old slinging paint on the wall, but as it turns out, Elizabeth is a very conscientious and neat painter. Neater than me, for sure. (Those of you who've painted with me know that's not saying much.) Her enthusiasm petered out after a couple of CDs, though, and she left me to finish up while she hung out with Anna. When I took a break, I found them snuggled together on the Poang chair:

(Don't be too fooled by the display of sisterly affection. This was about 30 seconds before the pinch-fest began.)

We got their room put back together before the day was out, and the girls were giddy with excitement. Okay, so was I--I'd bought those curtains almost 3 years ago, and it was exciting to finally see the room all come together. All that's left to do now is to procure (build, maybe?) some real beds for the girls. . .and revamp the closet. . .and paint the door. . .and hang some artwork. . .and get some curtains for the other window. . .