June 2023

June was another whirlwind month.

Early in the month some friends of ours celebrated their little girl's birthday.  She is just Lucy's age and the two of them are so cute together!  

All three of the kiddos enjoyed hitting the pinata.  You gotta love Hinckley's form.

Two days later Dane and I celebrated our 11th anniversary.  We have so much going on and Dane was on call so we had decided to keep it very simple and just get take out from a favorite restaurant and try to celebrate later.  It turned out that God wanted us to celebrate a bit more.

A friend called last minute, asking if they could hang out with us that afternoon and evening while their house was being cleaned.  I told her I'd have to ask Dane since it was our anniversary but I thought he'd be okay since we weren't really celebrating it that night.  At that she responded, "Well, we can watch the kids while you guys go out!"  It was almost right when I hung up from that phone call that I got a call from Dane telling me that his coworker had heard it was our anniversary and had offered to take all of Dane's calls for him for the evening.

So we were able to go out and celebrate a little, after all.  Even though we took Lucy and Baby Israel, we enjoyed ourselves immensely!  It felt like a date to go out with only two kids.  Isn't life funny?  

Our luck ran out later that week, however, as a few members of our family came down with a small cold.  It passed quickly for everyone but Dane was still coughing by Monday and that was a very bad thing because that was the day he would undergo surgery to correct his hernia.  June 12.

Poor Dane.  The surgery went well but that rotten cough lasted at least a week and a half while he was healing.  As you can imagine, every single cough was so very painful for him.

Meanwhile, I was trying to keep things going around the house and there were some relatively stressful days.  It was almost like having Dane gone- especially the first week, since there was so little he could do.  

One consolation for him was that he got special treatment a week later for Father's Day.

We tried to make things special and snapped some pictures that we love.  Man, do we love and appreciate him- especially after having him out of commission for a week or two!

Fortunately, things have progressively gotten better and he is feeling more and more like himself. 

Enough about the grownups!  Let's talk about these cute kids.

First, Baby Israel.  What a month!  He really is a little ray of sunshine for us (well, sunshine that spits up on you every ten minutes or so, ha ha.)  We just love his sweet, chunky legs and we all love to hug and squeeze him.  His smile lights up the room.  He just enjoys any attention we or the children give him- "This Little Piggy," tickles, songs and nursery rhymes, dancing, Peek-a-Boo, you name it.  He just glows when given attention.  

This is pretty amazing for him to be so pleasant because he had been teething all month!  We were pretty sure he was teething and then, sure enough, right at the end of the month he got his first tooth.

To celebrate finding his tooth, we had him eat his first solid food: avocado!  He LOVED it and ate it so well.  

Here he is at 4 months, to the day.  When we took him to the doctor a couple days later we discovered that he's over 16 lbs and in the 74th percentile for weight, the sixty-something percentile for height and right around 50% for his head.  So he's still easily our biggest baby, so far.

He got his first illness this month, which wasn't fun.  He was congested and coughing for several days

This month he really started to figure out his hands.  They are always either together like he's praying or he's karate-chopping with his right arm.  

Hinckley has nicknamed him "Bubbles" because he's still blowing bubbles all the time.

  

How we love our little butterball with the mad scientist hair.

Lucy has taken off with swimming this month.  I've tried to take her every day and it has paid off.  While she still hates floating, she has gotten so much more comfortable and understands her buoyancy very well.  It is so fun to watch her when she gets silly.  She pretends to be a fish or a shark and likes to wiggle or twirl around in the water.  She is so happy in the water and works so hard- she never wants to stop.  

As for potty training, well... She got sick at the beginning of the month and just stopped wanting to try.  We're not discouraged.  It's honestly a bit of a relief.  Maybe July will be her month.

Boy, does she love pink.  When we wrote Bobba his Father's Day card she wanted me to draw "Pink Bobba with Black hair" and every pink item she sees in books belongs to her ("this is Lucy's pink pillow," etc.)  I think we might have to have a pink birthday party when she turns three.

Thanks to watching her brothers earn and save their money she has a budding interest in earning some.  It's funny, though.  All she really wants are pennies.  Not just any pennies, mind you.  She wants shiny "Church" pennies.  I didn't understand what she was talking about at first until I realized she was talking about the Lincoln Memorial on the back.  She thinks it's a church.  It's adorable and she's welcome to all the pennies she wants.

Listen to Lucy:

• "I want to pactice." (practice swimming.)
• "Yes." (Finally she's saying a very clear "yes."  Not "yep" or "uh huh.")
• "Twinko twinko wittle star, hando window what you are."
• "Twinkle twinkle wittle star, Mandalorian what you are."  
• "Cinderella is like Mom!" (Said while crying because Mom wasn't at home.)
• "Fweeeeeeease!" (Please)
• "I just need to hold it." (About special treats.  She never wants to eat it right away, she wants to save it.  It's very aggravating)
• "It's not holy!  It's U-TAH!" (After hearing Atticus call Utah the "holy land.")
• "BOBBA!!  I LOVE BOBBA!" (As we pull into Nana and Bobba's driveway.)
• "I want to hit you!" (Right after she punches me with the boxing glove on.)

Hinckley lost his second tooth this month!  He was a little disappointed that the tooth fairy brought him a dollar bill instead of a gold dollar.  I'm pretty sure I overheard him the next day saying, "Man,  our tooth fairy's poor!"  

He has had some rough days.  The main issue is that he doesn't keep rules.  They aren't life-threatening rules but it makes our life messier and more chaotic.  Things are already so messy with Hurricane Lucy on the loose that we can't have another family member acting like a two year old.

One day I was reminding him of a couple of the rules he had broken (eating outside of the kitchen was one of them) and he went off at me, yelling, "That's it!  I am going to real life school!  I don't want to get in trouble any more!" 

I tried to reason with him, "If  you just keep the rules, you won't get in trouble."

"I keep forgetting!" He yelled.  

I tried to explain to him that there are plenty of rules at school, too, but he just stomped off to his room.

When I approached him later in his bedroom he had calmed down but was still talking about going to a nearby public school.  He quietly asked me, "Are there bullies there?"

I answered, "Probably.  It's a good school, but there could be one or two."

"That's okay," he said.  "If I see a bully, I'll just say, 'Hey.  I'm okay.'" (He said it in the cutest, quiet, shy voice.)

By the end of the day he had changed his mind but it definitely led to some good conversations.  He has started to keep (some of) the rules a little more as the month ends, too. 

Hinckley Speaks:

• "Did I poop when I was in your tummy?" ("Yes, you did.") "How much poop did I produce?"
• "HI BUBBLES!" (To Israel.)
• "Because I'm always right!" (Sung to his mother during a disagreement.)

June was a big month for Atticus because he tried out for his first club soccer team and made it.  He is now a member of the Las Vegas FC Elite.  The practices are intense and they expect a big time commitment but so far he is loving it.  They played their first gave toward the end of the month and Atticus scored the first goal.  He has a lot to learn and our favorite part is that he knows it and works so hard at practices.  I still have mixed feelings about leaving our other team but this does seem to be a good thing.

He came back from one of his practices with an interesting epiphany.  They race up the hills almost every practice and he told me, "Mom!  I figured something out.  If I don't look at my opponent I go faster.  I was looking over because I was scared but if I look straight ahead I go faster.  Now I"m one of the fastest."  

I think there is a life lesson in that.

While learning about Beethoven he fell in love with his 5th Symphony.  He asked me to print it off so he could learn it.  He learned it in a day or two and plays it angrily all the time now.  It fits his intense, energetic personality so well!  

He can still surprise me sometimes with his mature moments.  One day, when Hinckley started to request a song from our Alexa speaker, Atticus interrupted him, saying, "Hinckley, no dark music."

"Huh?" Hinckley replied, questioningly.  I wasn't sure what Atticus had meant, either.

"No rock music in the morning."

Wow.  I was so surprised. And thankful.  I've asked them to only play certain music on Sundays and in the morning I'm pretty picky about listening to any music, but I've never actually used that term for some of their music.  He coined it himself and he isn't wrong.  I hope he can continue to feel that difference and choose the better part when he gets older.  

Another moment that made Dane and me very proud was when an older kid tried to show him something on his phone.  Atticus wouldn't let him and kept Hinckley safe, too.  Don't get me wrong, we still have plenty of arguments and we butt heads all the time about rules and expectations, but man were we grateful for his strong and bold spirit.  He said he actually told the friend he was "breaking up with him" as a friend and he couldn't talk the way he'd been talking around them.  

Here are some fun pictures from our month.  Above we are with our awesome neighbors.  We love them so much!

Here are some photos from a day at Mt. Charleston.  Atticus was trying to look like an Army general in his photos, which would explain his very serious appearance.

Here we are with friends after one caught a lizard.  "Now we're men!" one of them shouted.

And here we are that same day with more of those friends at the splash pad.

The worst thing that happened this month this.  Bugs.  We had some maggots in our kitchen.  I seriously felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown but the kids kept it together and killed all they could find until their dad got home.  Thankfully, Dane sprayed the whole house, inside and out, and the problem has been solved.

It was an interesting role reversal that day.  I felt horrified and paralyzed at first but my boys came to my rescue and Lucy soon joined them.  I think the boys secretly enjoyed themselves.  Everything turns into a battle for them and so they were talking about their tactics the whole time.  So achieving victory over the worms was all in a day's work for them. 

For homeschool we studied Germany and Austria, as well as World War I and II.

We read a fun book called Mitz and Fritz of Germany, Honey Cake, Mozart Finds a Melody, Becoming Bach and Beethoven, the Power of Giving, among many others.  

We ate hamburgers, bratwurst and frankfurters but we eat those all the time.  The special food we tried was Pfannkuchen or German pancakes (believe it or not, I had never eaten or made them!  We'll be making them a lot from now on!)   When we studied Austria we tried making Zimt Mandelschneken (Cinnamon Almond Snails.) 

We also made pork Schnitzel (I couldn't find veal to make true Weiner Schnitzel.)  I guess schnitzel means a "sliver" of something, so it worked.  

Both dishes were very much enjoyed!  I guess a "milanesa" is pretty much the same thing over in Uruguay, where Dane served his mission, so he loved it.

We watched two great movies with the boys, The Longest Day and To Hell and Back.  Atticus LOVED them and Hinckley really enjoyed them.  

We'll move on to Russia and Eastern Europe in July.  We'll see how it goes!