05/07/2012

1.  We got some awesome thunderstorms tonight.  Thunderstorms are my absolute favorite kind of weather.  As long as they don't involve giant hail stones or tornadoes.  :-)  The sky had been threatening rain for a couple of hours, getting really dark long before sunset.  Finally, as I was getting dinner on the table, the clouds broke open and it started pouring down rain.  Mosey immediately got his swimming suit on and went out back to run around in the rain until the lightning got too close for my peace of mind.  We opened all the kitchen windows and ate dinner to the wonderful sound of rain-- glorious, blessed rain that we need so much!

2.  It was a pretty good Monday!  My friend from Florida is coming to visit tomorrow, so the boys decided instead of taking the day off (which last week we had decided to do since Mondays are just too hard), they'd do most of their schoolwork so there isn't too much to finish up tomorrow before Melissa gets here.  I can't wait to see her! 

3.  We finished Little Britches today.  What is with the fathers dying in two books in a row?? (Cheaper by the Dozen and Little Britches)  So sad.  It's hard trying to keep my composure so I can finish reading the book aloud.  We're reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry next, which, if I am dredging my memory even remotely accurately is also not an easy read.  It's all good stuff, though.

4.  I'm going through all my family's pictures from 1984-1989 for a project I'm working on (I've barely gotten through 1984 yet-- it's going to take me a little while), and I can't get over the adorableness of some of our family pictures.  My mom was almost 33 in these pictures, and my dad 35-- my age!  It's so funny to me-- looking at my older sister who is still a little girl in these pictures (probably just turned 10 years old), I still can't erase that "older sister" imprint.  She still looks like my older sister, even if in these pictures she is 25 years younger than I am.  In the same way, it is so very disorienting to look at pictures of my parents and try to intellectually reconcile their ages--  younger than I am-- with the indelible feelings that they (being my parents) are much older than I am now.  

I remember every item of clothing in this picture.  I especially loved mama's shoes-- those blue leather and wood (plastic?) flip-flops.  But I don't think we called them flip-flops back then, did we?  Clogs maybe?  Mama made the dresses Rosalynde and Naomi are wearing.  Why aren't I wearing a matching dress?  My mom had done my hair in my most favorite style-- a french braid all the way around the back, and then coiled in a Princess Leia-style bun on the side of my head.  I loved it, but I know I was a big pill when it came to getting it done.  I have a distinct memory of being at Grandma Frandsen's house and mama fixing my hair in this way before church, and me whining and wincing because she was pulling too hard.  It might even have been the very morning of this picture!

(I think I've posted this picture before, but it's worth posting again.) Oh yes, our orange Vanagon!  I loved that car.  I remember when we bought it new and my sisters and I spent the night in it the night we brought it home.  I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of miles we put on that van?  Look at my and Rosalynde's matching shorts.  We were so cute!  And Naomi's adorable little pigtails!  And Brigham's knee socks!  And Grandpa's bemused expression holding those two babies!  And mama and daddy!  How young and beautiful and handsome (they still are)!  And how in the world did mama keep those white culottes clean with six children and two nursing babies?!

I remember this night very clearly.  I was a hobo.  Do kids even learn that word anymore?  My mom blacked out one of my front teeth and gave me a scruffy "beard."  Rosalynde was a gypsy-- I think I might have used that costume the next year.  My mom never ever bought costumes for us.  Everything was put together using dress up clothes and this and that we had acquired over the years.  The only thing I can't remember-- where was this picture taken?  It wasn't in our house.  Rachel was dressed as Jacob (or, at least, a baseball player), and Jacob was dressed as Rachel (or, at least, a girl).  I remember thinking that was the cleverest thing ever.

This was Christmas 1984.  The cuteness is almost too much to take in!!  I remember that I loved being the angel in our nativity pageant every Christmas  I guess we couldn't talk either of the twins into being baby Jesus that year.  :-)  I know we had a smaller Christmas tree that mama and daddy put up on a table so the babies couldn't pull it down.  We might have done that a couple of years in a row.  I remember desperately wanting a Cabbage Patch doll this year, but didn't get one.  I hope I didn't make a fuss about it.  It was a good call of my parents not to get me one-- it surely would have been an expensive gift I would have liked for about a day and then never played with again.  This was the Christmas of the purple sweatsuit.  I had accidentally seen part of my mom's Christmas list (honest, it was an accident!) and saw that a sweatsuit was on my list.  So when a purple sweatsuit was on my "Santa chair" (Santa Claus didn't wrap presents that he left at our house, but left them on our designated chairs), I knew once and for all that the shocking rumors I had been hearing at school were indeed true-- Santa Claus was really my parents.  I think I took it pretty philosophically and bear no long-term scars.  :-)