Rachel turns two this week. She is fascinated with the song “Happy Birthday” and the concept of cake and ice cream. She absolutely loves ice cream. She calls it, “Guy spream.“ I have ordered a cake for her from Baskin Robbins. The frosting will be her favorite color…pink. I am excited for her. I am also tempted to get her doughnuts for breakfast. We got doughnuts from the cafeteria hospital for Isaiah’s birthday breakfast. She got a cake doughnut with pink frosting. Since then she has been absolutely fascinated with “pink bagels” as she calls them. I am planning on taking her to the zoo that day if the weather permits. I am so grateful to a mother to this happy, joyful girl. I hope to make her day feel really special.
I have been doing a music class with Rachel on Friday afternoons called Music Makers. Her friend Gracie comes to do it with us. The class is very simple. It has 3 opening songs, songs following a theme of the month, marching and playing a musical instrument, dancing time, and story time. She seems to love this music time. This week for dancing time we listened to Nutcracker music and did simple ballet. She loved it, but showed me that she felt shy by continually burying her face in my legs.
Rachel seems restless to me at home. She seems bored with the toys, puzzles and books. She requests movies all day. I have been wondering if she is getting bored of the same old things. So, I took her to Red Butte Gardens for a walk the other day. She was so thrilled to see that we were going there and said, “Oh! So special!” She loved throwing rocks into the river. I can’t wait for the winter to be over. I seem to forget what to do with children in Winter without parks, zoo trips, exploring the outdoors, and just plain running around outside.
I also went with Isaiah to Red Butte Gardens on Saturday. We went alone together to check out some animal paw prints that I noticed when I had been there with Rachel. Isaiah was interested in trying to find the tracks, identify the animal, tracking it, capturing it, and then selling it to the zoo for money. So that is what we did. It was very fun. We saw deer tracks, bunny tracks, and some animal with sharp claws. We can’t tell if it is a racoon, a bobcat, or even a mountain lion. Some of the clawed tracks look small, but others look big. Because the Gardens don’t allow dogs, our curiosity ran wild. All of the afore mentioned animals have been found in the Gardens so it wasn’t too far fetched to be true. I love to be in nature with my children imagining, marveling, and getting unsuspecting exercise.
To try to celebrate Mark’s birthday, the week before last, we went to the BYU exhibit of Carl Bloch’s paintings. We took the kids and so we had to go through rather quickly. Somehow, we didn’t anticipate that Rachel would be squawking while others were trying to ponder and appreciate his magnificent works. I loved the exhibit. I was so impressed, but I wish that I had been able to sit and stare at one of the masterpieces until the message of nuances of the painting had sunk deeply into my heart. It simply didn’t happen with kids. Mark and I were pretty hard on ourselves about being so slow to learn about the things you can take children to and the things you can’t. I felt better about myself when I learned that Em and Jared had a similar experience a week before when they took their 5 kids to an art museum in Nashville. Ironically, Monet prohibited them from enjoying Claude Monet’s work after they had waited in a line for hours. See, we are all just learning and trying to figure it all out.
