Show-stopper

Wherein Joseph steals the Nativity scene show :).

Three on the Trampoline

"Quick, smile and hug each other, and THEN you can go back to pushing each other off!"

The Marble Track

Hours of fun, we Frandsen kids have had with this. Did you ever get your fingers stuck in the little holes, trying to dig out stuck marbles? When I think about having this toy in our house now, I shudder at the thought of how many marbles would be ingested by my babies...

Little Boy Blue

I posted this picture last year at some point, but it's cute enough to warrant another look.

Caroling in Shorts

Ah, the privileges of growing up in Southern California. You could Christmas carol in shorts, even if Mama made you wear the obligatory red sweatshirt :).

True Colors

Is there a story behind this picture, Christian? Besides just Halloween? I'd love to hear the thoughts behind the exuberant posture :).

Three brothers

"Three little monkeys, climbing on the statues. One jumped off and broke his..."

Dave's not here, so I don't have a clever ending to that stale line. But it's a cute picture, no?

Portrait of a Move

Three things for this last Monday in Morgantown:

1. I've thrown in the towel for cloth diapers this week (if you'll excuse the questionable metaphor). I didn't even make a conscious decision--I just couldn't bring myself to wrestle cloth diapers onto my wiggly Joshey, clean gross poop off now that we've returned the diaper sprayer that we were borrowing, and do an extra three loads of laundry this week. So we're going all disposible until after we're settled in Baltimore. Sorry, earth!

2. I was doing Polly's hair (which happens once a week for reasons that will shortly become obvious), and she was narrating to me exactly how much it was hurting her as I combed and brushed and rubber-banded. "You made me lean!" she yelled, as I combed her hair on one side. "You made my eyes cry!" she shouted later. And then the best description of all: "You made hot lava come!" That's a pretty good description of Polly getting upset, actually.

3. Both of our pictures of Christ are off our wall. I know we don't worship graven images, but it does make our house seem quite... cold!

When I Have Grown a Foot or Two

Does this picture seem a little strange to you, now that you've been to the MTC as a full-time missionary yourself? So many generations passing through those doors, swinging around that flag pole...

Christmas Mayhem

Are you pondering, perhaps, what the true meaning of Christmas is in the midst of all this madness? Or just where are the other 41 things that had been on your list :).

Cousins

I think this must have been Cutler--yes? Don't tell anyone, but I think you're cuter :).

High achiever

Chocolate is SO worth aiming high for! (er, make that: "Chocolate is something for which it is SO worth aiming high" :).

Big sister love

I love this picture of both you and Rosalynde. You were Rosalynde's baby, did you know that?

Normal for Me

I had a thought that seemed worth sharing, so I'm turning a blind eye to my messy house and recording this for all two of my readers :). The kids and I went to Blockbuster yesterday for some mid-week entertainment, and after the kids went to bed, I watched "The Jane Austen Book Club." It was a fine movie--Dave wouldn't have let me waste 99 cents on it, but for mindless escapism at the end of a long day, it was fine. Cute outfits, some reminiscing about Jane Austen books, beautiful people. Afterward, I was thinking about the world view it was assuming as its premise, and I articulated to myself something that had been a minor but pervasive irritation throughout the movie. It was normalizing--not necessarily glorifying, but definitely normalizing--sexual behaviors and assumptions that are just totally not normal in my mundane life. It wasn't all bad--the two marriages in the movie ended up stronger than they began, although they both went through infidelity of various degrees of severity to get there. And it certainly normalized things that are great to normalize--bike-riding as an alternative to driving, reading as a social experience, supporting friends who are going through hard times. But the feel-good resolution to the movie was two of the characters finally yielding to their passion for each other and the loveable daughter finding a new fling when her previous girlfriend betrayed her. So the movie was definitely normalizing sex outside of marriage, promiscuity across all sexual orientations, infidelity as an inevitable part of marriage, the pursuit of multiple (times 7) marriage partners as a great life adventure, etc.

Now, my feeling wasn't necessarily that this was a terrible movie because of all of these things and how dare Hollywood continue its assault upon family values and what is this world coming to. I hope that I will never reduce people to their sexual orientations or behaviors and dismiss them summarily based on those categories. [nb: I don't mind dismissing movies summarily based on those categories--no tears for me over not being able to watch Black Swan or any of the other Oscar contenders from the past few years]. A few years ago when I worked with a girl who was living with her boyfriend, I wanted to see her as a complete person, not just as someone "living in sin" (her words--she was joking about it with someone else in the office), and as we became friends, I saw her as someone who worked hard, who was competent, who had a great sense of fashion, who was tolerant of my propensity toward loud classical music in a small space. So to portray people living in a wide variety of relationships doesn't necessarily bother me--there are neighbors and friends all around who live in those situations and who are valuable parts of my life.

But what I realized was that my normal--my wait-till-you're-married, find-value-in-children, no-affairs-necessary--was just absent. Nowhere to be seen in this movie. And I realized that what was bothering me was the possibility that my normal may become so quaint--no, so antiquated--that it is summarily dismissed as irrelevant and unrealistic. What, you think teenagers can remain virgins through high school? Impossible. You think kids do best with a mom and dad who love each other? Old-fashioned. You think promiscuity is stupid? Judgmental.

And now we've arrived at the point of my thought that seemed worth sharing (I know, it took a while to get here). I can't necessarily make a movie showing my normal. I won't have the reach of Hollywood on popular culture. But at the very least, I can be open about my normal. I can make a place for my normal. I can show that my normal doesn't necessarily mean impossible, old-fashioned, and judgmental. Or irrelevant and unrealistic. And I have ways of putting my normal out there, limited though they may be. Thank you, Facebook, for allowing us to live our lives publicly. And, of course, the normal conversations at the park, at the pre-school, in the street. Those are forums where I can show what my normal is. And hopefully I will be able to be a part of making a healthy, viable place for a Mormon normal in American life.

So what is my normal? My normal is a priceless childhood where I learned to share and love and work with 10 brothers and sisters and a mother and father who were faithful to each other and their religion. My normal is going to church for up to 4 hours every Sunday. My normal is singing hymns at the top of my lungs when I feel like I'm about to keel over from the powerlessness of caring for small children and babies. My normal is finding myself grateful and surprised and humbled by the unfailing support and fellowship of a church family. My normal is having complete, implicit confidence in my husband's devotion and fidelity to me and our family. My normal is praying throughout the day, and especially when I'm feeling frustrated, tired, or discouraged. My normal is feeling joy in the goodness of God to me and my family.    

And lest I end on too impossible, old-fashioned, and unrealistic a note, I should disclose that my normal is also scrounging out all of the chocolate in the house around 3 in the afternoon, routinely failing to get my laundry fully clean, and living with a perpetually dirty bathroom :).    

Yet another musical number

This pictures totally, completely cracks me up. Gabrielle and Naomi lost in the raptures of musical expression, you thinking, "Great, when is this rehearsal going to end. I'm starving!"

Rub-a-dub

Let's just pretend like that's not me in the back right corner. I've had better picture days. But you, Christian! The expression on your face is priceless.

"Get the baby!"

What a tolerant, adaptable little baby you must have been :).

Happy Birthday, Christian!

Dear amazing brother,

You were on your mission during my miraculous run of blog diligence. A little less than two years, I gave our family the Christmas present of posting a picture a day from our Frandsen Family picture archives. I wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a rewarding challenge to choose pictures that would evoke memories and stir the deep feelings of love and solidarity that I have always felt within our family. And it was fun to see the comments that came out as Mama and Daddy relived some of those early days in their courtship and in our family. Well, because you were gone for that, I thought that I would do a variation on a theme for your birthday (which, lest you think I'm losing my marbles, isn't until November :). From now until your birthday, I'm going to post a picture a day, but I'm going to try to have them all include you. As you know, our slide archives don't include that many pictures of your high school days, but I'll see what I can do to capture a representative portrait of the wonderful Christian Jacob Frandsen. Starting... NOW!

Notes on Thursday

1. In the middle of packing and cleaning and good-bying, our smoke detector started chirping at us. In the middle of the night. Waking up our baby. Needless to say, Dave took it down and took the batteries out before his irate wife could ask him twice. But this morning, our landlord came for a walk-through, to give us a sense of what he'd need to take out of the security deposit for repairs, etc. So Dave made a quick trip to Kroger in the morning for double A batteries (how did we run out of those? We should have just raided one of the numerous collection of battery-operated toys we have. Although now that I think about it, they're all packed...). Now I'm sure I could come up with a poem, an essay, or just a good testimony meeting anecdote about smoke detectors and stressful situations in life and the little things that we never think about checking on until it's too late, but for today, I just wanted to share one of the unexpected results of this early morning repair job. Dave was fiddling with it on the bed (spoiler alert: we never did get the thing fixed, and our landlord couldn't figure it out either...), with Polly right next to him, observing his every move. I'm in the kitchen, washing dishes and trying to straighten up the house for Bob's visit. All of the sudden, from the bedroom, I hear Polly's clear little voice, "Dog-gone-it!" Followed quickly by, "Dang it!" That's as close as Dave gets to swearing, and Polly delighted in learning some new words from him. That new vocabulary has made its way into her playing this afternoon, too :).

2. I feel like we're in an eternal waiting room. We're never going to be finished packing. We're never going to be finished signing and faxing paperwork. We're never going to have a full night's sleep (well, I'd given up on that one long ago). We're going to be stuck in this transitory existence, my children getting more and more needy and clingy and weepy, forever and ever. I know this isn't true, of course. Next week it'll actually be worse, since Dave will be gone with the car in Baltimore for the better part of six days. And the week after that, it'll be more of the same. But eventually, we will finish packing the house and the truck and the car, we'll finish packing the children, we'll give the keys to Bob, we'll say a prayer, and we'll drive out of Morgantown. And we'll drive to a new home. And I may even miss this intense time of our lives, when I had an excuse for not fixing dinner.

Last Weeks of Morgantown

Three Things for Friday

1. Dave did an experiment yesterday and is doing one today and Monday, too. He got home well after I went to bed, and when I asked him this morning how it went, he chuckled ruefully and said, "Well, I'm remembering why I decided to switch careers!" The surgery on the rat went well, but his first two pipettes had bubbles in them, and then the cells that he was finally able to isolate didn't stick around long enough to give him data. 14 hours in the lab for nothing. Except character building, I suppose. In any event, he really wants to get a couple of additional data points for this paper he's finishing up with his PI, so here he is, a week away from his new job, stuck in the throes of his old job. It's been important to him to do well by his PI and to finish his work with as much honor as possible, and I'm proud, in a gloomy sort of way, of his willingness to continue going back in, months after the paychecks have actually ended. Anyway, this will make his new job all the sweeter, when it starts in a week and a half.

2. The kids and I have been doing a Meals on Wheels route for a couple of months now. We drive the route about two Fridays a month and deliver to six or seven homes. Polly finds this tremendously fun (Get in the car! Get out of the car! Knock on doors! Ask questions!). Cici finds this tremendously distressing (Try to beat Polly to the door! Cry when she can't knock first! Get really excited about going in someone's house! Cry when we have to leave one minute later!). The first time around, I left the kids in the car and just ran up to doors and delivered the food. Polly howled in protest that she couldn't come along. So the next time, I just brought Polly with me. Cici howled in protest at being left behind. And that brings us to the current state of events--howling from someone at almost any point in time. Sigh. We're only driving one more time before we move, and maybe in Baltimore I'll vet my volunteering a little more thoroughly for the howling factor involved.

3. I just uploaded some pictures to the blog from my phone--hopefully they're up by now. Last night after dropping dinner off for Dave, I took the kids to Marilla Park to enjoy the absolutely gorgeous evening. There's been a strange quietness to our life, in the midst of preparations for a move. Somehow knowing that everything about our lives will be changing in just a few weeks has given me permission to not worry as much about bedtimes, routines, chores. An hour and a half in a park on a nice evening is far better than shepherding the kids home, plopping some food in front of them, and then getting frustrated with them until bedtime. When, I wonder, will I feel back in the rhythm of whatever it is that we've gotten out of?

Three things and a picture

1. Happy Rosh Hashanah! I remembered it was Rosh Hashanah because a good friend sent me something with the subject line "Blessings for Rosh Hashanah," and the wonderful Fred Childs from Performance Today played something in honor of the holiday. So an hour or so later, when the kids and I were walking toward the beach park and I saw a Jewish man in skull cap and prayer shawl walking in the same direction, I called out a cheery, "Happy Rosh Hashanah!" He looked surprised and asked how I knew about that, and I will admit that I felt a little smug as I nonchalantly said that I had a Jewish friend. Well, he quickly left us behind (not hard to do when I have a baby in the backpack and about 60 pounds of combined little girls in the weak-sauce umbrella stroller), but as we finally made it to the little sandy beach area, who should be there but the man, now stripped down to electric blue swimming trunks. I felt a little strange, pulling in with my loud crew to what was obviously intended to be a solitary swim. And what a swim! There had been a big storm a few nights before, and the beach and water were littered with logs, leaves, twigs, trash--it was truly gross. Plus, it was a chilly day. We weren't there to swim, just to dig in the sand and build sand castles. But the man stood for a moment in the shallow water, then plunged in quickly, and just as quickly got out and started toweling down.

"Was the water too cold?" I asked. One has to make conversation when one is intruding in such an embarrassing way.

No, he told me--it turns out that he was there to immerse himself in a natural body of water. That's the traditional way of preparing for Rosh Hashanah, which would actually start that night at sundown. Not all Jews will actually do that, he told me, but he was. As he put on his black trousers and white shirt and everything else, he told me about blowing the shofar (not that hard, once you get used to it) and Yom Kippur next week and the Jewish community in Morgantown (there's a temple with a congregation of 100, but he doesn't attend). I knew the name of precisely one Jewish person in Morgantown--the friend of my friend Dana and, coincidentally, the next-door neighbor of my friend Mary--and it turns out that he knew her and her family! Small Jewish world. And that was that. Once dressed, he set back off down the trail for the quarter mile walk back to the ranger station and the long, steep walk up to the parking lot. And the kids and I enjoyed the dirty beach in solitude.

2. We've decided on our home owner's and auto insurer for the next year, at least. Allstate is the winner! I was kind of dreading the process of getting quotes, comparing premiums, deciphering the arcane terms for coverage. But it's (basically) the last thing standing between us and home ownership, now that our loan application is approved, so it had to be done. For some reason, these things are always easier to do with Dave around to make me do them and to complain to if the process gets too onerous.

3. Cici had therapy this morning with her occupational therapist and surprised us by not running and laughing all over, but instead lying down on the carpet and almost falling asleep in the middle of it. That's what she gets for not going to sleep until nearly 10 pm last night. In any event, it gave Christina and me a chance to talk about how to help prepare Cici for the upcoming move, and how to use this big change to institute good habits from the beginning. To wit: in the new house, we actually sit down in the bathtub! In the new house, she'll sleep in a bed. In the new house, she sits on the potty. I have a list of things for Polly, too. In the new house, we don't eat snacks in bed. In the new house, she has 30 minutes of quiet time in her room so Mommy can at least check her e-mail, if not actually respond to it all. In the new house, she leave Mommy's office supplies alone and only uses her own desk things. Think she'll go for all that?

And now for a picture. Sorry, Christian, not the best view of you, huh? Let's talk about how this is symbolic of many things about growing up in our family :).

A Picture for September 2nd

Today is my youngest brother's birthday. Isaac Jacob was born on my first day of college, and he lived just long enough for my mother to hold him and see him alive. I know that Mama has told me all of this before, but today I find myself wondering what her due date was, how early he was born. I remember going over to Gabrielle's apartment that night and crying with her. Mama had lost a lot of blood, and for the first time, I found myself completely shaken by the thought that my mother could have died. I had never considered that possibility before. Last night, Mama wondered aloud in her family letter what Isaac would have looked like. Would he be as tall as Abraham? Would he have glasses like Christian? Would he have those bright blue eyes of Benjamin? Would he have cowlicks in his hair like Brigham? I can almost visualize the picture of a tall, almost-high-school-senior boy holding his chubby nephew at the family reunion over the summer.