30 Things 2014: Thing #2—Impromptu Pizza Party at the Park

Everything tastes better when you eat it outside. Even if you're a nine-month-old and you have to make do with a kale-spinach-apple teething puff bar.

Sometimes you have everything in the fridge to make (1) minestrone and (2) tacos, but what you would rather do is go for a long walk with the family in perfectly lovely spring weather. Sometimes this perfect walk doesn't get to happen until 5:00 p.m. Sometimes you have to choose between forgoing a walk to make dinner or forgoing dinner to take a walk.

A frugal family would stay home and start boiling those vegetables. In fact, an awesome family might do that.

But there is more than one way to be awesome. We decided halfway to the park to turn around, grab some food for Charlie, and then walk past the park to the local pizza place, Capital Pizza, home of the weirdest pizza crust and mostly unpredictable levels of cheese. It also happens to be delicious.

I would just like to point out two things: (1) David's hair is magnificent; (2) you can't tell, but Hollie's shorts are covered in pink flamingos. Grandma Hollie finds all the raddest clothes.

We took the opportunity to bask in the sunlight at the local elementary school and let Holls slide on slides, wandering over for bites of pizza at her leisure.

Okay, so Thing #2 wasn't anything epic. But you know, it was awesome for us. There are few things we feel like we are managing well in our life right now, because so much is happening all at once (good things, mostly, so we really don't want to complain). We try to stay home and cook our own meals, for the sake of health and the sake of money. But there are some springtime late afternoons that you don't get to relive later, and you feel like you might waste them hunched over a stove in a dimly lit kitchen.

So we opted for an impromptu pizza party at the park.

This may be hard to see, but there was this moment when David made me laugh so hard on the walk home that I threw my head forward and all my pizza toppings came off on my face. I have a pizza beard that looks like shadows from my hair, but I promise it is cheese and tomato sauce. Also, somehow we left the house with two children younger than age 3 and brought ZERO wet wipes. Not even a napkin. And we were still several blocks from home! So David did what any tender husband would do—he pulled our brand new smart phone (the first we've ever owned) out of my own pants pocket to document my disgrace. (Also, the pink shirt was a Valentines' Day gift from Davey. He also got me knee-high striped tube socks. It's frightening how well he knows me.)

Awesome Thing #2: Dance, laugh, and run around with pizza slices in our hands—ACCOMPLISHED

30 Things 2014: Thing #1—Eat Ice Cream Cake, Fly a Kite

Cake, glorious cake!

It's that time of year again when the Grovers binge-blog about 30 Awesome Things in 30 Days—our way of celebrating the month in-between my May birthday and Dave's June birthday. It started in 2012 when I turned 30. When we realized that David and I would both be 30 for a little over 30 days, we decided to make the most of those days by fulfilling goals and doing "awesome" things. It made what I thought would be a scary milestone birthday a month filled with activities and dates and friends and very good memories. We did the whole thing over again last year, and we'd like to make this an official yearly tradition.

We're playing with some new ground rules this year, though. I am trying to finish my dissertation, and David is studying for his qualifying exams. We are also getting ready to move to eastern Idaho in late July. We're busy people!

Since we don't want to feel guilty doing awesome things, we've created a daily to-do list of what needs to happen before we are allowed to relish life with an awesome thing from our list. Here, for the sake of documentation and for the sake of making our friends hold us to it, is our daily of list of what must be done before Awesome Things:

• Emily must dissertate for three hours (scheduled from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.)
• David must study for his exams for three hours (scheduled from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.)
• We must have family prayer and scripture study (scheduled at lunchtime, 12 p.m.)
• We must have personal prayer and scripture study
• Laundry must either be put away or in dirty clothes hampers (this one is mostly for Emily)
• Dishes must either be in the dishwasher or the cupboards
• Dave and Emily must both exercise five times each week
• On Sundays, we dedicate our regular three hours of dissertating and studying to attending church and fulfilling our church callings

There are some Awesome Things that must be done between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., so we have to be very strict in rescheduling our study hours for those days. We hope this gives us our evenings back, too. (We've been in the habit recently of accomplishing very little until the kids go to bed and then binge-working from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. It isn't healthy.)

Other rules that have changed this year is that we don't need to do an Awesome Thing every day. If we are burnt out on one day, we can do a couple of Awesome Things on our list on a more open day. We aren't forcing ourselves to blog everyday, either, unless we feel like it. So we might have catch up blog posts that list a few different days' worth of Awesome Things.

(I know none of you care about these changed rules, but I'm typing them up for the sake of family history documentation.)

I'm going to let David blog about our list of Awesome Things that we are compiling, but feel free to leave us comments about ideas you think we should try. We want to do a lot of local activities in order to start saying goodbye to Lubbock, and we also have a Houston/San Antonio trip and a quick house-hunting trip in eastern Idaho between now and Dave's birthday. So please recommend some Awesome Things for us!

I've already bragged about Awesome Thing 2014 #1 via ye olde social media, but I can't say enough about it. I told David I didn't want him to buy me anything for my birthday this year (we're saving money to eventually put a down payment on a car or a house—whichever we need first), so instead he put all his creative energies into making me an epic homemade ice cream cake. He got my favorite ice cream (Baskin Robbins' chocolate peanut butter ice cream) and put it on an Oreo cookie crust with a thin layer of creamy peanut butter between the two. After the ice cream, he put a vanilla-almond cake layer he made from scratch, followed by homemade peanut buttercream, chocolate ganache, and chopped roasted salted peanuts.

This picture barely does the cake justice. It gets better each night, too, especially the midnight pieces.

We also did more than eat cake on my birthday. Blowing bubbles and flying kites is a great way to make you feel younger, as anyone who grew up watching Mary Poppins knows.

Charlie-by-Barley picking leaves and looking all grown up in the outfit Grandma Grover sent him.

I feel like Hollie looks a little toddler here . . .

. . . and a grown up preschooler here. I spend all of my days lately vacillating between the two versions.

Hollie was my little helper whenever the wind wasn't in our favor. She liked to "catch" the butterfly and help send it back into the air.

We didn't quite get the little guy to the highest heights, but flying kites is always more fun when you're trying to tackle a real touchy wind. It's once you get a kite stable that flying kites suddenly gets boring, amirite? I mean, how long are we going to stand there staring at that kite way up in the sky? The one that isn't threatening to spiral out of control and konk my two-year-old on the face? That's where the action is, my friends.

It was so touching that someone would take the time to invent not only this cake, but the process of how to make and put it all together. It was a laborious process! And we're grateful for good friends who helped us eat it, too! I've been having ice cream cakes ever since I was a teenager—my good mom has always made sure I've had one, because she knows I love them. But this was the first time anyone has ever made me one, and I have to say: it was truly awesome.

Awesome Thing #1: Devour a homemade chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream and, also, fly a kite—ACCOMPLISHED.

Restoration

Springtime has been a time for grandma visits. Here is Grandma Grover with her arms full.

And here's Grandma Hollie with her arms full. How is it that when grandmas' arms are full of babies, it is a beautiful thing, but when my arms are full of the same babies, they are both usually crying and pooping at the same time?

My last blog post was called "Resolution," and detailed my goal to reflect more here this year. My good sister-in-law Jen reminds me that I haven't been so sharp on this resolve. So, on this Easter Sunday evening, I will follow up my last post with one titled "Restoration," and see if I can't restore some of my reflective energy from earlier in the year. After a quick spill of my guts, I'll post of bunch of pictures so friends and family can see what our kids look like these days.

I taught a Sunday school lesson to the group of teenage girls in my church today. I based the lesson around a favorite scripture of mine that comes from a Book of Mormon story in which an ancient prophet, Alma, is talking to a disbelieving man named Korihor who demands that if God exists, and if Alma is really meant to speak on His behalf, then God should show him a sign to prove it. I've always been fascinated with this story because I don't think that asking for proof is generally a bad thing in most life situations. I love this story because Alma agrees with him: evidence is essential for knowing where to put your trust. He basically tells Korihor to just look around—that there are signs all over the place. Alma 30:44 reads, in part, "Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, Show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

I love spiritual texts because I think the possibility of multiple interpretations are very empowering for personal revelation. A teacher of mine from the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, once pointed out to a group of us new missionary recruits that he always liked to think of the seasons when he read this scripture, because they testify of a cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. The planets moving "in their regular form" testify every year of the Atonement and resurrection of Christ.

I had the girls at church today help me brainstorm other "signs" on earth that testify of this rebirth cycle. We talked about daily rotations of the earth bringing night and day, sunsets and sunrises; we noticed how humans and other living creatures lie down to sleep as if we were dead only to rise refreshed the next day. Someone mentioned moon phases and butterfly cocoons. We considered what it meant for something to be "restored," particularly in the case of the butterfly, whose transformation is not only restorative but an amazing improvement in terms of beauty and mobility. As a kid, I always wondered if the caterpillar entered the cocoon knowing what it would turn into. Perhaps it spins its cocoon merely because instinct tells it that this must be so. Perhaps it wonders if the cocoon it is spinning is a place for its death. I never liked the idea of being stuck inside such cramped quarters in dark, suffocating heat. I continue even as an adult to feel anxious about the vulnerability of a chrysalis—just hanging there so precariously, where a bird or something could fly over without even bothering to sneak up on it and snatch it up in its beak. And yet, every year, I see butterflies and moths who have somehow made it through their journey. I wonder if they can appreciate the difference in themselves the same way that we human observers think we do.

Anyway, the idea of restoration was already on my mind this morning when I found out I had made an unfortunate purchase from a spurious internet site yesterday and lost a good deal of money by not doing more research. Don't worry—it's not terrible, and we weren't really robbed. I just spent a considerable (on the verge of obscene) amount of money on Paul McCartney concert tickets that I could have purchased for a fraction of the price by a proper ticket seller this next week. We'll still likely get the tickets, and no one is robbing us blind, but I keep thinking about those old-timey movies where bristly old men are biting into gold coins only to curse when they fold in half, or that Arrested Development episode when Michael makes a large land investment on Uncle Oscar's lemon orchards only to find out it is covered in land mines or something. Duped! Had! Hoodwinked! And for a good twenty minutes this morning, I was obsessed at restoring what had been lost. 

But here's what else happened: nothing. And by that I mean, we didn't fume, we didn't cuss beneath our breaths, we didn't shout at anyone over the phone. Dave never said, "How could you let this happen? Why didn't you look more carefully at the site's credentials?" In fact, the only thing Dave said was, "I'm sorry, Em. Don't be so worried. The important thing is that we'll get to see Paul McCartney IN CONCERT!" I worried that I had ruined Easter, but, instead, I think it forced me to reflect carefully about what is really worth restoring. It made me pay attention to the restorations that really count, the promises worth making covenants to obtain, worth sacrificing for. 

I love my family so much that I try to live in a blissful denial that I am living in a time of mortality. I know that Dave or I will eventually have to say goodbye to each other, in spite of our pacts to die at the same time in the same place when we are at least 100 years old (and still fit as fiddles!). We will have to say goodbye to family members, and there is no security or safety net that we can rely on perfectly to protect even our own sweet babies. But I live for the faith that what we lose in mortality will be restored again to us someday. And it won't be lost money on concert tickets. It will be my family, my David, my Holls and my Chaz, my parents and my relatives. That is what I see in the signs of spring all around me, the daffodils and the crocuses and the irises—I see hope in restoration.

Anyway, enough guts-spilling. Here's some kid pics (not to be confused with Kid Pix).

The Grover fam are proud new owners of a BOB jogging stroller. I won't lie—it is lovely. Having the kids nap while I exercise? Brilliant. (And, also, now I have zero excuses for not running.)

Cheery Charlie. Happy all times of the day, crying all times of the night. But seriously—he is giddy happy all day long to everyone. Even on planes. One flight attendant was with Charlie and me from Salt Lake to Dallas and then on our connecting flight from Dallas to West Texas and she fell in love with him. The little flirt cooed and grinned and babbled and more than one stranger actually kissed him on the cheek. He was so cute and chubbsy and toodly-doodly that they couldn't help themselves. He's just a charming little dude.

Chaz likes to sit, stand, climb, crawl. He isn't so keen at trying to walk by himself, though this was Hollie's favorite pastime at his age, if I remember correctly. He also has zero teeth, the same as Hollie at 8 months.

This is generally how he looks all the time: on the go, grinning mischievously, and a little bit drooly and poofy-haired.

Do all babies like sitting in high chairs with one foot lounging way up high, or is it just my weird babies?

He loves to bang on this toy xylophone, which always surprises me because it took a long time for Holls to get interested in it when she was younger. Also, Charlie is only in his crib when we are reading books to Hollie. He has never slept in that crib because we can't figure out how to sleep both babies in the same room. He "sleeps" in a pack-n-play in the living room by night and sleeps on either my or Dave's chest by day. We're pretty much the worst parents when it comes to sleep-training. Somebody come fix us, please.

Hollie's latest obsession has been David's guitar. She's learned to strum it pretty efficiently with her thumb, and sometimes she sings along. Other times, she bangs on it until she gets shouted at by us to lay off. She's either a musical genius or just straight up naughty. Probably a bit of both.

Exploring touchy-feely baby books. Those soft little ducklings. He just can't help himself.

Grandmas are the best because they aren't sick of all the baby books yet.

This is generally how we see Holls most of the time: jumping and shouting.

In spite of my personal vendetta against all things pink, Hollie has become obsessed. How? I have no idea. She's never seen a commercial for kids, the only television shows she's ever seen with any consistency are Charlie and Lola, Yo Gabba Gabba, and old Mickey Mouse cartoons on Netflix, but, somehow, pink has become her favorite. Here she is eating edamame and raisins, head to toe PINK.

Holls has never been a good sleeper, but she has been particularly weird lately, refusing to sleep in her bed at all. She has to have things on her own terms, even if that means sleeping in her little purple chair, the glider in her room, or, lately, her floor. (Dave has finally convinced her to sleep on the green rug in her room rather than right on the wood.)

La petite princesse eating goldfish, surrounded by Grovers. Our Craigslist couch started to fall apart, so we have been sewing over the holes with denim patches. It actually has sort of made me like the couch even more, even though I know I should probably be embarrassed to admit that this is our adult living room furniture.

Don't let her fool you. She's after your M&Ms.

Old enough now to pose for pictures. For some reason, every time I look at this picture, I have an absurd desire to introduce her to Full House. She would hate it; she's only two and a half. But this pose just screams T.G.I.F. circa 1992 to me. (She's probably stretching, to be honest. Dave brought home a book about stretches from the library to help with his back pain, and Hollie loves to flip through the pages and try out the poses. She calls it "Shertretching."

Hollie avec superhero cape. Her recent "best" friends have been Muno, GroverMouth, and Foofa. There are different cliques among her stuffed animals. Sloth only runs around with Purple Monkey. Brown monkey is chummy with Blue Robot. "Handy" (Raggedy Andy) has been seen with Minnie Mouse, but Minnie also runs around with Fluffy Grover. GroverMouth and Mama Bunny used to be best friends until Muno and Foofa came to town. Hopkins the frog is a bit promiscuous but tends to accompany one of the Grovers. Lately, Pink Brush has been a best friend and has even been to the grocery store. Holls is very particular about her friends.

H & C have been much friendlier in the past few months. C adores H and follows her everywhere. H has moments of sudden passionate interest in C, other times not. I've seen her take her foot and place it on his forehead to push him away from her purple chair. She does it gently but with an air of irritation that only big sisters truly understand. (It never works—he never tires of wanting to be close to her.)

Resolution

I resolve to be more reflective in 2014, and I suppose that means spending more time chatting here and leaving collections of thoughts that I can return to later, someday. It's been difficult to blog when I scarcely have time to dissertate—the very idea of writing a book-length project is leviathan. (There is this scene in Blackfish—have you seen it? you should see it—when a killer whale is resting on its trainer at the bottom of a 20-foot tank. It is mindbogglingly terrifying, and sometimes I feel like my dissertation is that orca. A creature I thought was my friend, but who really just wanted to swim me to the bottom of a tank so it could sit on me. Okay, but seriously, the SeaWorld trainer was way worse off than me—I'm glad I just have a metaphorical orca made of paper on top of me and not a real whale. That documentary made me pee my pants and I wasn't even pregnant.)

Here are some things on which I would like to briefly reflect, before I turn my mind over to other responsibilities.

The ChazMan is six months old. How this happened so quickly, I dare not ask. But here we are.

Our Bonnie Prince is a dapper little joy. He grins for all and is a complete dear to wake up to (three or more times per night). Despite my efforts to teach him to sit, he is much too active and impatient to reach diapers, wipes, and Hollie's toys to bother with any upright-balancing skills. Instead, he has been bobbing about on all fours for over a week now, and can manage to flop himself across an entire room in the time it takes me to walk to my bedroom for a hoodie.

He is decidedly pleasant in all his endeavors (except sleeping, of course, but then I wouldn't recognize him as my child if he did sleep well). He enjoys rice cereal and his few experimentations with sweet potatoes and squash. He did not feel like solid foods tonight, however, and when the spoon was brought toward his lips, he did not scream or cry or go tight-lipped. Instead, he just looked away and grunted. I thought it was a fluke at first, but sure enough, every time I tried to stick a spoonful of mush toward his mouth, he turned in just the same way and grunt-demanded that I quit it. I was astonished at how effectively he communicated, to be honest.

So that is our chubby Charlie dude. He is charming and delicious. He giggles a lot and is ticklish everywhere. He always watches The Walking Dead and Downton Abbey with me, with nary a complaint. And, like his sister was, he is six months old and totally toothless.

Holls is a two-year-old maniac. I wouldn't call the twos "terrible," but I would call them recklessly vibrant and indefatigable. So many emotions are new, and she seems to experience them each in an amplified form. It's like how baby rattlesnakes are extra dangerous because they can't control their venom when they strike—toddlers are like emotional little baby rattlesnakes. If they are happy, they are happy. If they are sad, they are sad. If they feel a desire for something, it is for real. It is the most real thing in the world.

This picture captures my daughter completely. She is dreamy-eyed and chocolate-goateed. She is rough-and-tumbly and rosy cheeked, and her hair is both beautifully blonde and hopelessly ratty. She is my love and my dear, and David and I can't help but fawn over her even when she is naughty. She is giddy and fearless.

Navigating these new emotions and explorations in what it means to be human is tricky, and my heart is touched by watching her care for and worry about people and things that she loves as often as I am irritated by her energetic shouts, her tireless "games" of trust-falling into my face, and her defiant "NO!" when I ask her to stop climbing on the bookshelves.

Snowbaby.

She sings everywhere and always. She sings church hymns, Yo Gabba Gabba songs, and plenty of old classics: "The ABCs," "Home on the Range," "Give Said the Little Stream," "My Favorite Things," "Yankee Doodle." She shocked David and I in the car one night when she busted out three entire (albeit muddled together) verses of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." Her favorite lullaby is "Asleep, Asleep" (by which she means "Away in a Manger"). She doesn't understand that Christmas is a separate season that ends with January 1, and we haven't wanted to correct her. When she prays, she always ends with, "In the name of Baby Jesus, Amen."

A rapscallion one moment; a porcelain doll the next. Don't let her charm you into thinking her innocent—she'll steal all of your M&Ms if you look away for a second.

We mix our own Playdoh colors here at the Grover household. I showed Hollie how to make clay rosebuds—Dave showed her how to make poop piles.

This is usually how I see my daughter—running at me with full speed and an impish grin.

She slides by herself these days, even on the big kid playgrounds. In spite of being amazingly clutzy (she runs into walls daily but never seems to get hurt), she's already quite a surprising athlete.

She loves to help in the kitchen, by which I mean she loves to sneak tastes of anything being prepared on the kitchen counters. No matter how often I warn her against raw flour, she'll still stick her finger in the bowl and eat some as soon as my back is turned. I usually give her two bowls and a handful of raisins, and she'll carefully transfer raisins from one bowl to the next with a teaspoon until suddenly the raisins are gone because they've all managed to end up in her mouth. She is still a sneak and a thief, and she has zero self-control when it comes to cookies and cupcakes. She remarked recently after baking a batch of cupcakes, "I'm going to lick it? I'm going to lick the cupcake and it will be PERFECT." When we told her no, she immediately burst into the most pitiful sobs I've ever heard (re: boundless emotions) and shouted, "I DON'T WANT TO NOT LICK THE CUPCAKE AND IT WILL BE PERFECT! I DON'T WANT TO NOT BE PERFECT WITH THE CUPCAKE AND THE HOLLIE AND MY CUPCAKE!" (She sometimes gets stuck this way, in songs and sentences. She hasn't quite mastered syntax or where a sentence ought to stop. It always breaks my heart in her earnestness to use her limited vocabulary to express feelings so deep and new and dear to her.)

It is fun to see Holls and Chaz grow interested in each other. I anticipate some brawls ahead, perhaps quite a lot of them. But in the meantime, it is astounding to watch them quietly play on the same rug, swapping toys on occasion. Charlie will play with two Little People princess dolls for a twenty-minute interval while Hollie shakes a baby elephant chime. They both fight over my faux-pearl necklace at church services each Sunday.

This isn't a well-taken picture, but I had to document a moment in which both of my babies were happily playing by themselves while I unloaded the dishwasher. It was an amazing moment in the Grover house.

More and more often, I am seeing these two like this. It always seems miraculous to me, that these two wild creatures know to be kind to each other, at least part of the time.

In spite of orca-dissertations weighing me down, these two kiddos keep me from drowning. You would think they would add to the weight, but it doesn't feel like that at all really. Though they do take all of our time, patience, energy, and creativity (not to mention our sleep), they are just as much our inspiration and motivation, our hope and our love.

So I guess that is what I am in the mood to reflect upon and record tonight. That's the thing about little kids that I always heard but never really believed: they grow too quickly. It's easy to complain about the young mom who is always posting pictures of her baby, but I understand now what it is to want to box up each little new face that changes from month to month, to secure our memories of these little people as the bright little stars that they are so that we can recall them later, in those moments when they are backtalking us in their tight pants and taking our car keys.

No one ever properly explained to me just how quickly time passes, or how small a decade of time really is after high school. It's a snap of two fingers. It's a quick succession of Hello Kitty backpacks to Star Wars lunchboxes to Trapper Keepers to canvas bookbags to leaving home. So for now, I think I'll just drink in my babies and let them stomp on my feet and barf on my shirt and trust-fall into my face as often as they please.

Groverweenies 2013

Per Grover family tradition, we put off making our costumes until October 30, making mad rushes to Hobby Lobby and the hardware store like the class-A procrastinators we are. And, like usual, we had a blast and swore to leave things to the last minute next year, too.

Here's our cast of characters:

After we had gussied ourselves up in the church parking lot, Dave and Charlie manned the trunk and passed out candy, complimenting costumes like the dears they are. Hollie and I meanwhile hit the asphalt and came back with a whopping five pieces of candy because Hollie preferred to see rather than approach the people in costume. (She even saw our awesome neighbor dressed up as Plex from Yo Gabba Gabba! but her enthusiasm turned to terror when Plex started talking to her out of a human mouth in his neck that sounded like just some dude. Sheer terror, you guys. My heart would have broken for her if it hadn't been so funny.) Luckily for her, two of those five pieces of candy were a fun-sized package of M&Ms and some Smarties. It took her an hour to get through the M&Ms, which she asked for one at a time and got excited about each color that came out of the bag. We only got through a quarter of the Smarties by the time we were ready to go home.

Handsome old exterminator; cute little Charlie Brown Bee

Holls mostly sipped her milk and appreciated costumes from a distance. At one point she turned to me and said, "I love it!"

Happy Butterfly caught by a scary Mama Spider

Hollie, Charlie, and I have all been sick this week, so we all went to bed really early except for Dave, who we sent to a friend's house for spooky games. He came home later and said he missed us the whole time, that big old softie.

LET THE HOLIDAYS COMMENCE! *old timey trumpet fanfare, with jingle bells*