A Night at the Museum

It's been all sickness all day for the last few days around the Fisher family. We've been managing, but please don't come by the house, because it really is a disaster area.

Because we were feeling slightly better, and since this is a three-day weekend, we ventured out last night to the Lehi Hutchings Museum. They have a special night once a year they call "Night at the Museum." The museum really does come to life, and it is really cool. If you get a chance next year, you should go. It's $3 a person, which is a bargain, really.

Volunteers dress up in costumes and take on rolls of people from the past. We met Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, an African explorer, Annie Oakley, an Egyptian mummy, native American dancers, Betsy Ross, a Utah pioneer, and many more fascinating people.

When we'd stop to talk to some of the characters, they'd tell you all about their life and what they did. Each volunteer had to learn quite a bit about the history of their character.

Annie Oakley was a really cute woman, who told the girls, "People always told me, 'You're a girl. You can't shoot guns.' But I showed them. Don't ever let people tell you something you can't do. Prove them wrong."

I thought that was great for my girls to hear.

And Benjamin Franklin was great, too. He told us all about living in England for 11 years while his wife had to stay in America. And how his wife died three months before he got home (or something like that). I asked him if he ever remarried, and he said, "No, but I did write a lady in France." He was a darling old man.

Here are some pictures from that night:

Get some shoes on that baby! The girls at the entrance of the museum.

This T-Rex was waiting for us as we entered. It actually moved and everything.

An English African explorer and his helper "Tuk."

Lissy pointing to a Utah geode. Grandpa C. would love that rock, as he used to collect geodes.

"Dumb, dumb. Give me gum, gum."

They had two little girls behind this frame dancing ballet. It was amazing how well these little girls did. Their faces were beet red from dancing for all that time, but they kept at it. My guess is they started out with great gusto, but as the night went on, their dancing faded a touch. By the time we got there, they mostly just positioned their arms differently, and did a plie every now and again.

This guy was hilarious. He was behind glass, but he beckoned for the girls to come near him. Closer, he beckoned. Closer. And then he turned his head, and turned it back around really quick and scared them. He posed like this for my picture.

Afterwards we met up with Kulani for ice cream. Kulani and Dave went to a post-training dinner at Rodigio.

Nono Grows Up

"I want a Tinkerbell party," Nono told me in March of 2010.
"I want a Snow White party," is what she asked for in April.
"Sleeping Beauty," was what she wanted in May.

Each month it was something else. Until the day arrived, and because I thought I could make a Rapunzel cake, I convinced her to have a Rapunzel party. And she agreed, which is rare for Nohea.

Because Nohea is a contrarian. About everything.

But I had a vision. I could build a cake with a cake tower and pipe long, golden icing flowing down the tower symbolizing Rapunzel's hair. I am not a cake decorator, but I thought I could manage that.

And I could make a pinata of a castle with a doll head sticking out. And the kids would yell, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your hair!" And I would lower the pinata and the kids could wack at it.

I could do this. I could give Nohea a great 4-year birthday party. Her first party with friends.... And then this is what happened.

I built the pinata two days before the party. Because I didn't trust my own brain, I researched the Internet for pinata-making ideas. Every site I found said, "Put paper mache around a balloon." So instead of just decorating the box and tower I made, I cut parts of the box out and put a balloon inside, thereby weakening the structure of the box. Here are pictures of what I'm talking about.

I was going to combine these two, and wrap them both with pink crepe paper...

but noooo. I had to cut out parts and put in balloons.

I can't believe I don't have a picture of the final product. It actually turned out okay, but I only put one layer of paper mache, and so with one wack, the thing fell apart. It was pathetic.

So then the cake. Easy enough. Make two cakes. One cake would be the base, and the second cake I would cut out round circles and pile them on top of each other to make a tower and place the tower on the first cake. Then frost it all.

Except, cutting out the round circles meant the sides were way to fluffy to frost. Here's what the crumbled cake tower looked like:

Kulani had to intervene at this point. It was not my finest hour. But he managed to think up another brilliant idea. He made the towers out of construction paper, and we frosted those instead. Here is the final cake. Not too bad.



It's supposed to be the top of Rapunzel's castle. The cake did taste good, so there's that.

And then we invited neighbors and friends from preschool. I thought it would be fun to give the boys pirate eye patches and the girls tiaras, and we'd play a game I created called "Princesses and Pirates." I was the alligator in the middle and held a green feather duster to signify my alligatorness. The boys sat on one side of the living room, and the girls sat on the other side of the living room. The goal was for the boys to run across the "ocean" and tag a girl on the hand. Then they both had to run back across the ocean without getting feather dusted by the alligator.

I had Lilia and Melissa show them how it was done.

"I don't want to do that," one little girl said. Then the other girls joined in. And soon, no one wanted to play THAT game.

So then I proposed another game I called the Boat Trip. One person is blindfolded and sits in a chair. I pick up the chair with the child on it and act like she is going on a boat trip. And the waves come, and the chair gets rocked. And the child has to jump off the chair to safety, but by this time I've lowered the chair to be near the ground.

Again, "I don't want to play THAT game."

Almost 10 minutes into the party, and I'm already running out of ideas.

Thankfully my friend Lindsay and her boys show up at this time. I ask the girls if they'd just like to play with Nono's dollhouse and dolls. Yes, that's what they want to do. And the boys just want to play Wii. So they do that. And me and Lindsay talk.

And it was a pretty lame party, but turns out, 4 year olds don't need a lot to be entertained.

We had cake, opened presents, and generally actually had a good time. Nohea said she liked the party, and that's all that counts.

The week before her birthday, Nohea took the scissors to her hair. She said she wanted a haircut like Dora's. After scolding her about her personal haircut, she ignored my insistence in not using scissors anymore and gave her Dora doll a haircut. She wanted to make Dora look like her. I really don't think she'll do that again, because I can tell she hates her haircut. She says she "looks like a boy."

Nono and Dora with matching haircuts.

But you can't keep Nohea down. She seems to be our most resilient child. She does as she pleases and she doesn't care if you like it or not.

She tells us that she wants to be a doctor when she grows up. I thought that was odd. What 4-year-old wants to be a doctor? So I asked her why.

"Because doctors work really hard."

What? Our other daughters wanted to be artists at this age or singing teachers.

I don't know what goes into Nono's head most the time. She has this look when she's concentrating on something. Let me see if I can find a picture somewhere...oh yes, here it is. She's digging for fossils with her sister Lissy. That's Nono in the bottom, left corner. Look at her concentrate.

Always with that furrowed brow.

We love our little bug. She's metamorphasizing into a unique little butterfly.

 

Social Butterflies

Yesterday Kulani took a call from Lissy’s teacher telling him that Lissy was talking too much in class.

We were a little surprised by the call. Talking in school is something kids do, isn’t it? Sticking tacks on the teacher’s chair, fooling around in the bathroom with lighted firecrackers, bringing exotic pets to school: these are unusual. Talking too much in school with your classmates? That’s the American way, or maybe you haven’t heard about a little program called Facebook?

Of course, we outwardly backed the teacher and when Lissy got home, we told her to mind her teacher and to not do it again or there’d be consequences. Luckily, Lissy was already shook up enough over it. She was crying, and we could tell she felt bad—whether she was crying solely because she was getting scolded or whether she was crying out of sincere sorrow for disrupting the class didn’t matter to us. We just wanted her to not want to do it again. Another of our children, Nono, would probably be like, “Yeah, so what? I was talking. Deal with it.”

Kulani and I were both social butterflies growing up. For me, it was an extension of being the middle child of a large family. There was always someone to talk to at home or at school.

I used to tell my best friend Keri, who was the last one in her family, and whose next older sibling was five years older than her, that it must be so great to be her. When she came home from school, she didn’t have to deal with noise and chaos and craziness.

But then I was able to experience her life for a short weekend when my parents left for a trip with all my younger siblings when I was a senior in high school. (No, I did not recreate the scene from 16 Candles, mostly because I didn’t think of it at the time, and I wasn’t sure anyone would come to my impromptu party, sniff.) I was alone in the house. It was approximately 15 minutes before I was calling Keri and asking if she’d like to come over and hang out.

“I thought you said it would be cool to have the whole house to yourself,” she asked when I called her up.

“Oh, yeah, but you know, I just thought it would be fun to hang out.” She totally saw right through me. She was right. I couldn’t even stand being by myself for 15 minutes. Looking back, I think that was honestly the first time in my life, at age 17, that I’d been completely by myself for longer than an hour.

It’s true you can’t go back, and that’s a really good thing. If I had to do elementary school all over again as the person I am now, a teacher’s stern warning wouldn’t get me to stop talking to my classmates.

Call my parents? You call my parents, teacher. I’m finishing this riveting discussion with Mary Beth about what she saw on the playground during recess.

And that is why Facebook is like crack-cocaine to a person like me. Looks like Lissy might struggle with it too when she gets older. I hope she friends me and we can talk about it.

Parenting Missed Opportunity

It’s no secret around here that I get cranky at night. But don’t bring that to my attention while I’m cranky, unless you like being barked at.

“I don’t need to go to bed. I’m FINE. It’s this family that is making ME cranky!”

Placing the blame on everyone but me—a fault that manifests itself brightly at night.

Last night for Family Home Evening, we read some of the Sermon on the Mount. Now, I’m no Bible scholar, but if you were to look for the best scriptural passages to sum up why you believe in Christ, and what passages you’d most want to teach your children, the Sermon on the Mount would be very high up there, if not the Mount Everest of scripture verses.

And so we began each reading three verses. Kulani and I took turns trying to explain to the girls what each verse meant.

“A mote is a very small piece of wood, like a splinter. A beam is a huge board. You need to work on your own problems before you can help others with their problems,” Kulani told the girls.

“Do we feed Jesse our finest dinners? No. So we don’t need to share things that are important to us with people who won’t appreciate it or who are just going to make fun of us,” is how I tried to explain the “pearls before swine” concept.

Afterwards I gave the girls a quick quiz. They didn’t get one question right, so either we didn’t do that great of a job explaining, or they weren’t really paying attention.

Then we had cookies, and it was time for bed.

Before Lilia goes to bed, she asks me, “Will you come read scriptures with me?”

Stop right there. What parent wouldn’t love to hear their child show an interest in learning the scriptures?

Yeah…….. but here’s what I did.

“We just read scriptures. Why do you want to read some more?”

“Well, I’m supposed to read eight verses on my own,” Lilia said.

“Fine. If you have to do it by the book, then read them yourself in bed. It’s late. I need to get up early in the morning.”

Reading what I said in the full light of day…well, all I have to say is, “Oh, heck.”

I watch Lilia walk to her room dejected. I tell Kulani, “Why does she have to be such a pharisee about these things? She can read the scriptures just fine on her own. Why does she need me?”

In the middle of the night, I awake realizing what I’d done. I hear Kulani rolling over and I say to him, “I think Lilia wanted me to read with her, so she could better understand what she’s reading.”

“I know. She came to me a little later and told me she needed help understanding the scriptures. I told her I would read with her.” Kulani answers me.

Gulp. Don’t stand too close to me. You might get wacked by the beam sticking out of my eye.

Study: Sisters AREN'T Blisters

Check it out, yo: According to a new BYU study, we'd be worse off without sisters. We'd be worse off without our brothers, too, but we'd be even worse off without our sisters.

I had four fantastic sisters. From time to time I would borrow their clothes, and from time to time I would get stains on their clothes, and from time to time they would get upset with me, and from time to time I acted as though I didn't care. I wasn't always the best sister.

But now my girls have each other to lean on, borrow clothes, laugh over incredibly silly jokes, cry over lost loves, support one another, and generally be better off having one another.
To sisters!

Sisters before their dance recital.

Sisters in their new pajamas on Christmas Eve.

Sisters climbing Grandma and Grandpa's tree in Blanding.

Sisters with our mom on a bench last summer in Lafayette, Indiana.

A Cringe-Worthy Christmas

Stop me if I’ve told you this story before, but this is probably one of my most gut-wrenching Christmas stories that I’ve ever personally witnessed. I’m not sharing this story for sympathy, although, I have been known to tell stories for that end. I’m telling this story because it’s just plain, good storytelling.

After I graduated from high school in 1994 (to me, years are important), my family moved from our small home in Heyburn, Idaho to my dad’s car lot in Burley, approximately three miles away. Yes, I said car lot.

You see, my dad was a successful car salesman at a Chevrolet dealership in Burley in the early-to-mid 80s. But then the owner of that dealership wanted to move on, probably due to lagging sales brought on by fierce competition of the Japanese auto markets. So my dad partnered up with a fellow co-worker and friend, and they started another used-car business.

Yada, yada, yada, they built a big building, yada, yada, yada, the car business didn’t do so great, yada, yada, yada, the partner left leaving my dad with a huge mortgage payment on the building, yada, yada, yada. So after years of trying to sell the business, my parents had the brilliant idea of moving the family into the car dealership and selling our Heyburn home so that they only had one mortgage to pay.

It sounds worse than it was. I left for college the week they moved into the car dealership, but from a girl coming home to visit, living in the car dealership was pretty cool. There was a pop machine readily available at all hours of the night. That’s probably where my youngest sister Hetty developed her deep and abiding love for Dr. Pepper. And we were within walking distances to grocery stores and video-store rentals. Ah, the good ol’ days before Netflix.

My parents had divided the show room into half car office, half living room. There was also another living room behind the main showroom. There was a kitchen, three huge bedrooms, a laundry room in back by the shop, and two bathrooms. Really, it wasn’t so bad. It was probably nicer than our Heyburn home, which had red, shag carpet and popcorn ceilings. Seriously, don’t feel bad for us.

And it was good for my parents to move from Heyburn. Don’t get me wrong: I love Heyburn. My grandpa started the first Heyburn Garage and was one of the first school bus drivers for Heyburn Elementary. But there’s something great about getting a new start somewhere else, where hopefully people don’t know you as the irresponsible family whose dog escapes all the time and wreaks havoc on neighbors’ lawns; or whose children wander the streets looking for welcoming doors and refrigerators full of food.

We left our old baggage in Heyburn, but as everyone knows, there are bags waiting for you in new towns, too.

The first Christmas in the car lot was interesting. For a church youth group activity, my younger siblings were asked to bring gifts for a needy family for Christmas. I can already see you cringing. Just wait for it, please. Shall I continue?

So my sister brought a rubber ball. I don’t know what my brother brought.

I was at home from college for Christmas. One night as we sat around playing solitaire on the computer or watching old movies, we got a phone call. I think it was my sister Mary who answered it. The person on the other line said, “There’s something at your door.” The car lot had four different entrances, and it took us a while to figure out which door exactly they were talking about. At any rate, we found the goods, and yep, there on top was the rubber ball my sister had taken to the youth activity to give to the needy family. I remember there being a turkey, too.

I can still see my dad’s face. It wasn’t so much sadness as it was bewilderment mixed with anger. I’m still perplexed as to how to think about this act of service. On the one hand, good for them for helping a needy family. On the other hand, I really didn’t view us as the needy family who needed help. Trust me, I’ve seen MANY needier families.

It was interesting being on the receiving end of something like that. It’s actually not that great of a feeling. I’ve always thought about that incident when I pass Giving Trees or Sub for Santa. Will these gifts go to truly needy families, or will they go to families who are just struggling like the rest of humanity? Will the kids see the tag that says, “Boy, age 5?” I don’t want to sound ungrateful, nor do I want to encourage NOT giving at Christmas time. Please continue to give. However, I’ve learned that it is almost harder to receive than to give.

To wrap up this already long story, the next day we took that box of food and presents to another home not far from our home. The family lived in a home that was patched up with tin siding. We knocked on the door and introduced ourselves. We asked if they would like some things for Christmas. They were smiling and couldn’t speak English, but they took our gifts.

I just mention this last part in passing, mostly because I love my parents like nobody’s business. On a few occasions, my mother has spearheaded us to give Christmas to another family. I remember in my youth, my mom taught us the first verse of “Silent Night” in Spanish. Then when we went to the people’s house to give them our Christmas gifts, we went in smiling and singing. My parents tried to communicate to the family who we were and to leave them a warm welcome. I remember another time, I think I was a junior in high school, when we did the same thing. And my mom in her very broken Spanish tried desperately to communicate love.

I’m not sure I have the guts that my parents had to actually go into a family’s home and bring a feeling of love, as well as physical relief. I’m fonder of the anonymous Christmas giving, purely because it’s easier.

That night when we received those gifts was a true defining moment in my life. That’s when it really hit home that we don’t need presents for Christmas. What we need is a communication of love. You are loved. You may not believe in Him or even have a desire to know Him, but I know that He loves you. In those moments in my life when I have felt the lowest emotionally, that is the one truth that has brought me back to my proverbial feet. I am loved.

How Divorce Affects Friends and What it Means to Me, Me, Me!

Recently, Kulani visited an old friend who is going through a rough patch in his life. His wife has decided she doesn't want to be married anymore. They have three young children.

Because we never know what to do in situations like this, we brought them some dinner. It's the Mormon way: "You feel like you're at the worst emotional low in your life? How about some spaghetti to bring you out of the abyss." I personally think it works.

I waited in the car while Kulani delivered the dinner, so he could talk with him privately. After visiting for a short while, Kulani came back to the car.

"The guy's not doing well. He's lost a lot of weight," Kulani said.

"Well, it's good we brought him some food," I said.

And then it was kind-of silent. There was small talk about the kids and how the guy is going to handle it from here. But inside, Kulani and I were both thinking: "Could this happen to us?"

This couple was married only five days after us. We left our honeymoon to make it to their wedding at the Salt Lake Temple.

We don't know what goes on behind closed doors, and we aren't judging or blaming. (Well, we could and we do, but that goes on inside our heads, and I wouldn't speak it openly. Just like you wouldn't mention how snug my clothes have been fitting lately.) But when an announcement of divorce is made, especially from close friends or family, it does make me pause and look at my own marriage.

After we came in the house, Kulani says to me, "We're implementing date night around here." I was all on board for that.

So for that, my divorced friends who probably already have so much guilt, sadness, frustration, unpeace, embarrassment, and  consternation, perhaps it has helped me have a better marriage in a small, little way. I don't want to end up divorced, so I'll work harder to not succomb to that end.

(Sorry for the selfishness of this post. In times of divorce, the least people to worry about are how friends are affected. But this is the Fisher blog, and what you will likely read about on here is how world events affect the Fishers, not the Brownstones down the street with their dog that yaps all night and how on earth they think that's acceptable?!)