Happy Birthday, Gabrielle!!!

Dear Gabrielle--

Remember how I was going to write a blog entry every day from the end of July through now, and that was going to be your birthday present? Well, instead of that, I decided that we'd just buy a new house for you to come visit. I already have your first week planned out. Here's the tentative schedule of activities:

--have you paint a mural on the girls' upstairs walls
--have you talk us through putting tile in the girls' bathroom
--have you help us re-carpet the upstairs
--have you help us decide if we can feasibly open up the kitchen to the dining room
--have you help us take down ALL of the faux brick on the dining room wall and replace it with something from this century
--ditto for the faux barnyard shingles in Joshey's room's walls
--ditto for the additional faux barnyard shingles on the basement walls
--have you help us decide which, if not all, hollow-core doors we should replace with solid doors and perhaps execute said switch
--have you help us recarpet the basement
--have you help us decide what, if anything, to do with the ceiling tiles in the basement
--have you help us decide if we should conver the sunroom to another room in the basement
--have you help us make fairy homes for the wooded path in the back
--oh yes, and talk for hours and hours and hours

Aren't you excited?

I consider it one of the greatest strokes of good fortune in my entire life that I was born your little sister. Because of you, I ran cross-country and track and a marathon and gained the (at this point utterly mistaken) confidence that I can really run any distance I put my mind to. Because of you I asked out boys that I was interested in and gained the (at this point utterly unnecessary) hutzpah to act on my crushes, for better or for worse. Because of you I eventually stopped liking guys that were absolutely wrong for me. If I'd followed your advice sooner, I would have stopped liking them long before they wasted years of my life, but oh well--we all have to learn. Because of you, I know that I am an ENFJ, which actually makes me happy to know. Because of you, I gave my husband a chance, back when he was a wrinkled, nerdy Ph.D student writing funny e-mails to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Because of you, I have beautiful engagement and wedding photos which bring me joy every day as I see them on my walls. Because of you, I didn't put off having children, and I looked forward with eagerness and humility to the priceless experience of becoming a mother. Because of you, Polly Gabrielle is named Polly Gabrielle--and really, could Polly even possibly have any name other than Polly Gabrielle? Because of you, I've been to Florida. Because of you, I've been to Texas. Because of you, I have the purple backpack that I use every single day of my life (with small children). Because of you, because of you, because of you--the list could go on and on and on.

I bless your name, and I thank my God that me made me your sister. Happy Birthday, my beloved older sister.

I Won!

For our nighttime snuggles, Polly likes to play a game called "Instruction." Put simply, the instructions are for her to try to touch my chin with her hand and me to try to bat her hand away. She always ends up winning. Last night after she won, she said triumphantly:

"I won and you lost, Mama! So I get to go to Africa and you have to go to Charleston!"

Sorry, Charleston, land of the losers.

Although she did soften the blow by saying, "You won the losing game, Mommy, and I won the winning game."

Banana Marshmallow Casserole

Reason #1,973 that I love David Michael Sloan: the Elders Quorum was having a dessert contest on Friday night, and the men had to make the desserts entirely by themselves. Any help from the wives disqualified them. Well, Dave had arrived home from Baltimore late the night before, and he had to leave early the next morning for work, which meant he would have precisely one hour to make this dessert. Furthermore, when he called home at 4 pm to check on us, I was bordering on a nervous breakdown from having spent hours on the phone with our mortgage lender and title company while the kids blissfully destroyed the house around me. So Dave swooped home, took the girls to the grocery store for some quick ingredients, and then assembled this dessert of his while his wife kvetched at him for 45 minutes.

What resulted was banana marshmallow casserole. Dave had googled "quick and easy dessert recipes," and had been intrigued by this one recipe for a caramelized banana sauce to be served over ice-cream. But since we didn't have ice-cream but we DID have a lot of marshmallows, Dave decided to experiment. In short order, brown sugar, cream, and butter were bubbling away on the stove, and Dave had sliced up an inordinate amount of slightly green bananas. Next up, he lined a 9x13 casserole dish with vanilla wafers and marshmallows. With five minutes before we had to leave, he added the bananas to the sauce pan and let them stew for a bit. Then as we were loading kids in the car, he ladled the banana-caramel sauce over the marshmallows and vanilla wafers, and we were off. On the way over, I voiced my skepticism.

"Dave, your dessert looks like soggy bananas. You need to cover it with cool whip or something." Dave surveyed the pan. "Yeah, I guess so--let's swing by Kroger's really quickly."

He jumped out of the car and came running back with a can of Reddi-Whip. Which, as it turns out, melts if sprayed onto boiling hot bananas. As do marshmallows, I should mention. Which made Dave's dessert a bunch of brown bananas and mushy vanilla wafers, swimming in a sea of melted marshmallows, whipped cream, and caramel sauce.

"So Dave," I began cautiously, "What exactly was your strategy here? How competitive were you expecting to be? Because I think maybe someone else would have stuck with something involving chocolate, something a little more tried and true."

I thought I was making a good point. I thought I was showing Dave that in order to win a contest determined by popular voting, you really had to think about what would appeal to an audience. But then Dave proved to me, yet again, why being married to him brings constant delight to me.

"No, I couldn't do something like that," he said. "That's just not interesting, I've done that before. I wanted to try something that hasn't been done before."

And just like that, I suddenly saw the whole evening differently. It wasn't a competition to be won, it wasn't even some routine thing to show support for the Elders Quorum. It was an opportunity to learn something new, to do something new. And even with few hours of sleep, a long day at work, a grumpy wife, and a totally trashed house, Dave still had the buoyancy of spirit to be up for doing something new.

The banana marshmallow casserole? A total flop. An oreo/cream-cheese dessert won, closely followed by a delicious chocolate flourless cake.

"Love," Dave said as we drove home, "I totally, completely, absolutely dominated the category of ugliest dessert."

But you know what? Those other ladies can keep their oreo-and-chocolate-cake husbands. I'll keep Dave. And I'm willing to bet that banana marshmallow goulash will make a great base for ice cream milkshakes.

Dear Eva,

You've been in the MTC for less than 24 hours. This time yesterday, I was fasting because Dave was going into his first job interview, and you were about to enter the MTC. It felt like a big couple of hours for our family. I lay on the couch, fasting-fatigued, while Joshey and Cici napped and Polly played (until she came over to put a blanket on me and then curl up next to me. Very sweet.), and I thought, "Let it distill upon you. Let this time distill upon you. Let whatever will come next distill upon you." My house was messy and the day felt like it was getting ahead of me, but I still felt like that was a time for stopping and letting things settle into my soul.

Now it's Thursday, Cici is napping, Joshey is making very cute noises over in his jumparoo, and Polly, who has a swollen foot from a bee sting yesterday, announced to me when I went downstairs to check on her and found her putting in a DVD, "I'm going to have some screen time, Mama." The house is its usual early-afternoon cluttered, and I have the ingredients for oatmeal cookies spread out on the stove, a penance to Dave for my eating the last of the batch of chocolate chip cookies yesterday. No word on Dave's interview--we probably won't know for a few days, maybe even a week. He would like the job, though it's not a perfect fit. At least that's what I'm telling myself to guard against potential disappointment. He'll get oatmeal cookies no matter what the outcome is :).

And you, my littlest sister? You are most likely in class, surrounded by strangers who will become lifelong fixtures in your memory, in your facebook, perhaps even in your life. My MTC companion, so very different from me, is a beloved friend-from-afar now. She has a couple of little kids, and she often posts comforting comments on my FB page when I'm complaining about some inevitability of young motherhood. But for you, these people are still new. I have to admit that the MTC was a time of great insecurity for me, but I think that's because it was a completely novel social situation, and my recourse to novel social situations is often insecurity :). One of the hardest things was feeling like I'd been reduced to a nametag. No one knew my first name. No one knew my family. No one knew what classes I'd taken in high school or college. No one had ever heard me perform on the piano or harp. All of these things that had identified me were suddenly stripped away, and I wondered what I really was, what worth I really had, if those things weren't there. How could I make my MTC district know how cool I really was if I didn't have all of the accoutrements of my coolness, and if I was too insecure to make it on my own without any of those? It was a challenge, and, as you can imagine, a very good one to have. It's good to be stripped of your self-conception every once in a while, to simply have your identifying features be your desires and your actions. And you, my dearest little sister, have pure and keen desires. And your actions have always spoken love, humility, honesty. You will come out of this stripping process just fine.

Well, time to go. Joshey's cute noises are becoming a little more annoyed, and I can hear Polly padding up and down the basement stairs. After fruit snacks in the pantry, perhaps? Probably. Poor Polly--her mother always knows exactly, precisely what she's up to :). I love you, my little sister. I am praying for you and grateful for your mission service. You are blessing everyone's lives, including mine.

More later--

Naomi

Dave's the Artist

We planted some cool flowers this summer, and I decided they were picture-worthy. "Take a close-up," Dave said. "Not like that, closer!" He admonished after seeing the first shot. Finally, out of exasperation, he took the camera, snapped a picture of me, and handed it back. "Like that," he said. I'm the recorder, Dave is the artist.