Cerebrate Good Times

I finally decided to update the blog. So I picked a random template and it seems nice enough. Maybe I'll customize it one of these days. Or maybe I'll keep switching it out until I find an especially awesome theme. There hasn't been a lot on my mind in particular, so let's see where this goes. I'm struck by the intense contrasts of parenting. For example, a few nights a week I come home from work, and Katie drops Sam off at taekwondo and heads to the gym. I stay home with the other three kids and try to make dinner. It can be pretty stressful to prepare a meal with constant demands for something or other, fights, and whatever else is happening. I feel good that I'm giving Katie a little time to herself, but it's exhausting. Then there are the other times. I usually read a chapter in a book to Allison before tucking her in, and it's just the two of us for a few minutes. Or I hold Clara and sing to her to rock her to sleep. She's almost four, but...

On Saturday evening it began to rain while we were out and about celebrating Allison's birthday. We had an early dinner and came home to relax with my parents. The kids were watching a movie and Katie went to the church to practice the organ in preparation for playing the next day. Then my dad's phone piped up with some kind of extreme weather warning, and I looked at my phone's weather app. There was a tornado warning for the eastern part of our county (which is where we are), but it looked like it was cancelled by that point. But the rain turned to hail, and I mean HAIL. The way the wind was whipping the hail into the house was insane. We went out on the front porch (which is well sheltered from the direction of the storm) and watched the constant lightning up in the clouds. For maybe 20 minutes it was as intense as any storm I have ever experienced in my life. When it was over we assessed the damage. The first thing I noticed was that it had pummeled the paint o...

Saturday was Allison's 8th birthday. In the LDS Church, 8 years old is the age at which children are baptized, so it has particular significance. My parents and Katie's parents came up for it. We're pretty low-key about things like this, trying not to let Church culture overwhelm the actual significance of the event. For example, we didn't get her a plain white dress because I don't understand the point of buying a dress she will likely only wear once. (We'll see about a wedding dress.) Everything went fine for the most part, but I had forgotten some dry clothes and Katie went back home to get them, which made everyone wait an extra five minutes or so. Afterward, Allison wanted us to go to Chuck-A-Rama for dinner. (Side note: It might be cheaper for me to send Sam there for dinner every night than to actually buy food for him, given how much he eats now.) Allison has an interesting duality. She can be the sweetest child, putting up with a lot of anno...

When it comes to parenting style, Katie and I are of the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants variety. For better or worse, we don't read parenting books or solicit advice from others. We typically just muddle on through. And as far as I know, so far our children have escaped being permanently scarred from this kind of upbringing. (Though admittedly most of these issues would probably show up later in their lives anyway.) Enter: toilet training. I don't know how we managed to get the first two kids toilet trained. I can't speak to how other parents do it, but our kids flat-out refuse to try. The only way we got Sam to use the toilet was to make him sit there until he couldn't hold it in anymore. Then he saw it wasn't scary or painful, and quickly progressed. It was the same with Allison, and between the two of them they only ever wet their beds a handful of times. We trained them late, but they got it down quickly. Clara turns four in May, and by last fall I was pret...