Fruits

It's a good time of year to think about the Law of the Harvest! Starting with Seb's amazing piano recital, two years to the day after Abe's senior recital (but so much has happened since then!!). I honestly did not ever think Seb would be where he is, pianistically speaking. He was not an enthusiastic practicer as a child, and I decided early on that it wasn't going to be one of the things we fought about. So he practiced, or not, for years without my interference, and his teacher patiently helped him along until suddenly he caught fire and became a real artist, hardworking and dedicated. It has been a joy to see (and hear!), even if it does often mean the music is SO LOUD (but I knew what we were getting into when we bought a grand piano!).

So many people (50+!) came to support him, and went away amazed, I think, that it was such a great performance. He played Bach, Beethoven, Pieczonca, Joplin, and then some other rags he discovered himself—modern ragtime is a genre I didn't even know existed, but I've loved being introduced to it—and I played some Gershwin just for fun. I was SO nervous beforehand, not for myself but for Seb, but I needn't have been. He was completely prepared and he played beautifully.

Here he is with his wonderful teacher, my cousin Heidi. She has been so perfect for him! Seb and I decided that I'm going to take over as his teacher now, but I will never match Heidi's patience and thoughtfulness.

I thought it was funny that in every picture I took, Ziggy was turned around looking at the people behind him.

After the recital we went up on the hill and looked at the beautiful clouds and felt SO HAPPY. There is nothing quite as good as being done with a recital! :)

And a few other fruits of note:

Clementine stealing popcorn from both her sisters' bowls at once. What is that the fruit of? The fruit of everyone spoiling her a little…I'm afraid.

Cookie-glarer (quite an alarming expression I must say!)

We went raspberry-picking and it was fun. Ziggy didn't remember ever going before, and he loved it! We have had better years for picking, in terms of yield, (many of this year's pickers were quite small) but we still managed to get 15 pounds or so. NO thanks to this little Gussie:

…who ate every single berry he could get his hands on! Of course, the youngest kids usually eat SOME of the raspberries, but I have never seen a more incorrigible eater than this Gus. He wouldn't stop, no matter how much we threatened and cajoled and reminded him how yummy the future raspberry muffins would be. It was no use. He plunked the raspberries into his bucket and then…pop…into his mouth.

Here he is proudly showing me his ONE remaining berry (which he then promptly ate).

We picked a lot of the "golden raspberries" this year. I love how they look. Not really golden, but pinkish-peach.

More raspberries, and the hands that picked them

We made muffins, jam, oat crumble, and two magnificent berry pies.

Daisy helped make one…

…and Junie helped make one. They were both excellent, but the one I made with Junie was probably the best pie we've ever made. SO good.

I don't know why any of these other things are fruits. The fruits of my loins, I suppose. There are quite a few of those.

Homework help

Clementine saying "huuuug" to Sam

Clementine toddling around in Primary

Ziggy telling Clementine to walk to him, a game they both found hilarious (since she is SUCH a professional walker now and all 🙄)

More of Clementine walking to and fro upon the earth

Clapping for herself

Gussie for some reason became obsessed with the doorbell, and in particular the speaker that the doorbell sound comes out of in our living room. He talks about it constantly and wants to be lifted up to see it. He calls it the "seaker" ("Can you say SPeaker?" I say. "No," he says.) and asks how it works?, does it has a cord?, does it has a hole?, why it says that?, is it up high?, is it on the wall? let's go see it!, can I see it again?" In this picture he has climbed up onto the stool, then onto the windowsill to get that extra 1 inch of height and perhaps catch a glimpse of the fascinating thing.

We have lived in this house for two years now! We celebrated with dinner on the deck, decorated for the occasion by Goldie and Junie (see all those fall leaves on the ground? Those were BROUGHT IN for the occasion, since none of our trees are losing their leaves yet. Goldie went out and gathered them at the park or somewhere).

More decor

Some funny game they were playing after dinner

Daisy and Junie wanted me to take a picture of their hair and see if they could tell which was which from behind. Junie is crouching down a bit so they look the same height. :) I can tell them apart—can you? They have such pretty hair!

We made paper flowers for school one day. They are pretty (except that big sunflower, which I forgot to round the petals of! The children made much better flowers than I did).

Goldie made these very realistic dandelions!

And Daisy made the tiniest Black-eyed Susan with baby's breath!

I don't know if you can tell how small it is. I don't even know how she could cut paper so small!

I took a floral design class in college (with my mom!), which was so much fun. We made flower arrangements in pumpkins for one assignment, and I have always remembered it! So I was happy to have a chance to do it with the children as a school activity (we have been learning about Flowers, if you can't tell). I told them the secret my floral design teacher told me: you really just can't mess up flowers. They always look pretty no matter what!

And it is true. The arrangements all turned out so beautifully. I really think we could have sold them for lots of money! We gave some to our neighbors instead. :)

Seb and his cute homecoming date. I loved his suspenders.

Another fun thing Sebastian got to do recently was go on a cross-country trip to California to run in a big invitational. It was in Orange County only 15 minutes away from my brother's house! We've actually been to the very park the race was run in. There's a big orange hot air balloon there you can ride in, and we've tried to do it several times, but sadly, it's always been too windy when we go. 

I wished so much we could all go and visit Philip and watch the race, but alas, we could not. But I told Philip and Allison about it, and they took all their kids and went to cheer—even though the race started at 9:15 pm and I'm sure they had to fight their way through a bunch of traffic and parking issues. It was SO NICE of them and I just loved them so much for supporting Seb like that!

They took this cute picture of Seb happily recognizing them at the finish line.

The race itself was pretty amazing. The meet lasts for two days with 52 races, and all of them are huge—I think I read there were 10,000 runners over the two days? It's crazy. And it's a nationally-known meet with live coverage and everything. The runners are unbelievably fast. They say it's a "fast course" because it's flat and smooth, and for us anyway, it's at sea level so the air feels great. So most of the kids were expecting to get personal records. But I was thinking about it and it's not like the course being flat or at sea level negates the fact that YOUR legs and YOUR lungs have to actually carry you through that three miles! Seb ran a 15:29, and that wasn't even close to the fastest time on his team or in the race. Some of them got 14 minutes!! And the winner was 13-something! For three miles! Just think about that. WOW.

Herriman has a great team this year. Usually the top seven runners are your varsity runners, the ones who score for the team. But in multiple meets this year, Herriman's top 14 boys are faster than everyone else's top 7, and sometimes even their 15th or 16th runners are beating the top kids from other schools. So their depth is impressive. But this meet was in California where there are a ton of nationally-known schools, so it was exciting for our kids to see how they matched up. One of the parents invited a bunch of people over to watch the race, which was after 10 pm our time, so I almost didn't go. But I wanted to see Seb run, so Sam and Malachi and Daisy and I went and watched, and it was so fun! Amazing, actually—like watching a really exciting BYU football game at the Wilkinson Center with a bunch of students. I've forgotten how fun that can be, everyone whooping and cheering together.

We got glimpses of our kids among the crowd, and when we did everyone would clap and yell. And then, at the end of the last boys race, a bunch of the kids were obsessively checking the results on their phones, and suddenly someone yelled that Herriman was in first place! We couldn't believe it! It was so exciting, we all screamed and jumped up and down. And of course it was so fun for the athletes actually at the race. When Seb called me he was so happy, I could hear it beaming out of his voice. It's the first time a school from Utah has ever won that meet!

This picture of armpit guy was on the race website, but I was excited to see Seb's head! :)

When the team got home the next day, some of the families and the kids who hadn't traveled to the race waited at the high school with signs and balloons to welcome them home. It was a little awkward, as these things are (Malachi was roped very much against his will into making a poster, and drew this weird duck in protest, which then became a coveted item for other people to hold up). But it was also nice, and I think the returning cross-country kids were secretly kind of touched by it.

Just a few more things.

Swinging

Two pets

Daisy and Junie wanted to go to the toy store and use some of their babysitting money to buy tiny animals (if you don't know what those are, they are just little…tiny animals. Sort of rubbery ones. Like this! The kids have lots of them and they love trading them among themselves and lining them up in rainbow order and so forth.)

Anyway, the girls kindly let Gus and Teddy come with them, and Gus was SO excited about it. As well he should be, because at the toy store he found this:

A brand-new Caw! We wanted to buy it for him, of course. But we resisted…barely.