Halloween

For those of you who haven't seen these on facebook or in person:

Ode to

 Ode To Spoonnoses

Oh spoonnose,

my pointy, skinny nose

was never right to make you stay

but now what joy!

these Seminario genes

make you stay on my children's faces

i bet they could even sneeze and you'd stay on.  

 Ode to Matey

Oh Matey

You look just like the pirate name you chose for yourself

I'm glad at least one of our children likes to wear hats

and stuff on their face

Dollar store costumes

really give their money's worth.

Ode to Stale Red Vine

Oh stale Red Vine

Your stealth was appreciated.

You gave us all peace in the car

when I put you into a chubby hand 

sticking out of a carseat one night

You kept silent

what is usually shaking the car with screams of discontent

I did not anticipate

the damage

one stale red vine

could do.

De-Ode to BYU Football

Oh BYU Football

You tease us every year

you are good enough to be great

but then you forget.

And sometimes you forget

to pass the ball to your own team

instead of the other one.  

Ode to Crossbreeding

We found a watermelon

Hiding underneath a marigold bush.

We didn't know any had survived!

We chilled it in the fridge to eat with dad

for dinner that night.

When we cut it open...

We found it was ORANGE

with BIG FLAT WHITISH SEEDS.

Google told us you could not have mixed with the pumpkins.

But we know better. 

Because sometimes my belly looks like a watermelon.

And the kids come out looking more like my pumpkin husband.

Fernando taught the kids to play spoons a couple of months ago.  It is now the game of choice around here. The kids love it and we always laugh.  Sometimes I'm being a boring mom and doing dishes or something so I can't be on Teo's team, so he just passes the cards sitting directly across from Fernando and he watches for Fernando to give him a wink which means take the first spoon.  It's pretty funny and he's pretty good at it, but one of my other children not to be named used her or his clever powers to just watch for the wink instead of looking at her or his cards.  Intelligence is a curse.  

So last night, for the FINAL round, we raised the stakes!  

The loser

(loser)

 had to kiss THIS face

(the face)

Here it is!

(That's what you get for losing.)

 Look at these beauties.  Sorry for being absent for awhile, especially to you Rosie.  We love you.
Little update. Mims lost another tooth and loves to read and draw; Sam the man loves soccer, baseball, and the wii; Teo our grown up little miniman loves alphabet letters, singing songs, and being silly; VictorRulon is crawling, wishing-he-could-walk, and not sleeping thanks to teething. And he's super cutey.

I have lots of fun pics to fill in the blog with our summer activities, but for now I'll just say we're back in school and loving it!  The kids never cease to amaze me with how much they absorb and how much they enjoy the routine of what we do here and spending time learning with me.  I am so happy to be their mom.  SCORE!  We have a co-op school group that we love and Fernando again made the back to school pinata for our party.  He made this in about an hour, maybe a half-hour!  Yes he is PRO and he isn't even Mexican!

And he's also handsome, clearly.  I should mention that for my birthday I got those LOVELY lockers that Fernando is standing in front of!  (Poor sentence there, NEVER end with a preposition.)  He and our home teacher Jeremy installed them in our garage.  I LOVE love LOVE them.  

Anyway, school is good, the kids are wonderful, I don't sleep ever, and General Conference was just the best.  End of update.

ninjahhh-GO!

I have a problem.  Even though I know the first season is over and the second season hasn't started yet, I keep looking for new episodes of NINJAGO.  I used to pretend like it was just fun for the kids, but now I openly admit I love the series too.  It's lego ninjas fighting snakes and skeletons, just in case you're out of the loop. But the premise is just that, a front masking that the series is really about facing challenges with courage and humor, processing complex family dynamics, finding true joy...you can tell I'm a fan eh?

Sammy boy had a NINJAGO birthday this year to celebrate 5 years!  I tell you, 5 years has come too fast.  The night before he turned four I cried and cried.  He fills every year with so much love and happiness, it's hard to let them go.

The birthday was excellent.  Most of the time I have ideas and Fernando brings them to fruition.  It is a WONDERFUL blessing for me.  This was one of those times.  He made the greates ninjago heads from bouncy balls, fabric, and paper.  Pictured below from left to right: Cole, Zane, Lloyd, Sam, Jay, and Kai.

Then he hung them in the trees outside where we did our ninja training.

Pretty sweet, eh?  And we all dressed up like Ninjas. Sammy was Cole the black ninja.  Here he has just completed the ninja obstacle course.

I was the white ninja Zane, my favorite one.

We had the obstacle course, twister to increase flexibility, nerf dart target practice at Pythor behind plexiglass, snacks, and WONDERFUL friends. 

Here is Sammy telling who came.  Thanks so much everyone!  It was a great party.

transplant

We had a family tree on our basement wall at the last house.  I love that tree.  So Fermando made us a new one at the house.  That husband of mine did a spectacular job on this house project. And each of the kids got to paint a leaf.  Since they are the leaves on the tree.  Fitting.


I find it funny in an interesting not a ha ha way that we walk by the family tree day after day, up and down, without thinking about it and then suddenly one of us will stop and notice.  "Is that Victor that Victor is named after?" Sammy Boy will say.  "And is that the one Miranda is named after?"  And Teo will just stop and say "Gwama Baugh.  Gwampa Baugh.  Gwama Howell. Gwampa Howell. Pa.  Gwama."  Just letting me know he knows all those people and it's cool that they're there on our wall.  But it makes me so so so so glad that he KNOWS those people. 
 
So now this turned into a bit of a memorial day post because I have been so blessed in my life to know many of the people on our tree that are the next set of limbs up on the branches.  I think about them sometimes, watching me here, rooting for me and having empathy for me.  I would like to be better for them, to be a strong link in the chain they took so much effort to build. 

I love Fernando's grandparents too.  I love Mami Betty whom I know, and Papa Papa who is Victor's namesake for everything I know about him.  I love his maternal grandparents who are gone.  I will never forget visiting their graves in Peru.  Tall, stone walls of names on boxes.


So different from our stones nestled in grass with carvings of temples or children's names on the back.

  Just a grey grid with the name of someone so important to us in the center.  I felt an overwhelming, deep love and my heart reached out with gratitude toward these people even my husband never met in person.  Thank you, I said.  Thank you for sacrificing having your daughter close so that she could be my mother-in-law, so our family could be.
 
The truth I have is so precious it is a wonder I don't cry about it every hour of my life:  I will be able to see these women and men that I love so much, that have shaped me and my situation, again. Forever!  What a tree.    

time passes

Time passes.  On this blog an embarassing amount of time has passed.  And amazing things have happened in that time. 

A new person joined our family. 

We live in a different house and neighborhood. 

There have been birthdays, teeth lost, milestones.  Time passes. 

Sometimes I think that my fears and weaknesses and personal failures are never going to be conquered.  Yet time passes.  What seems impossible can be.  God's gift of time is SO precious. There is time to change.  Time that will soften, illuminate, divide the important from the un.  It's the miracle grow that only Heaven can spread on our garden. Time. After all our work planting and weeding and watering, Time brings the harvest.   

I recently gave a lesson in Church about personal records. Because of it I challenged myself to resuccitate this blog, because I KNOW that these records are important to my family, and to me, and to me learrning from my life's experiences.  The me of a time passed can answer right now me's questions.  Personal records give me the gift of having a concrete capturing of time passing.  So here I am.  CPRing this blog and feeling blessed by it even as I type.

One of my faves Eva Cassidy sang this song called "Time is a Healer" and one of the parts says

"Time is a healer

And all hearts that break

Are put back together again

For love heals the wounds it makes." 

A long time ago I posted our famous goose story. And I honestly thought my children might not recover from their trauma! But time passes. They recently went back and chased those geese down and felt a surge of satisfaction.  Hopefully from the joy of overcoming not from the pleasure of vengence.  Time gave them a much different experience. 

Sammy Boy is as big as the geese now.

  

 

Two more squishfaces have come to us since then. 

I've learned a few things.  I still have some of the same things to figure out.  I have new things to learn.  Time passes.  And blessings trail as it passes like dust from a shooting star.