Double One!

Today is our sweet Cowgirl's 11th birthday. Here are eleven things that I love about her:

1. She was born not even a month after my dad died. I was still having a hard time with that loss when this sweet, wide-eyed little darling joined our family. I am not exaggerating when I say she was a perfect baby. She almost never cried, and when she did it was just a sweet little sound to let us know she needed something. She would wake up and lay there in the crib until someone noticed her. She was born with a birth mark on her forehead which the nurse who helped with her delivery called an angel's kiss - and I believe she really was sent down with an extra measure of love from my dad.


2. Cowgirl was our first brown-eyed girl and I loved singing the chorus of Van Morrison's song to her as we'd dance around the house when she was small. When we got to the part where I'd sing, sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-dee-dah she would giggle like crazy and just melt my heart every time.


3. She has such a kind heart. Cowgirl is always looking out for those who are left out or sad so she can try to somehow brighten their day.


4. She is excited to be old enough to babysit for others and actually enjoys getting some good practice in with her younger siblings when I run a quick errand somewhere close by. She comes up with fun and inventive things for everyone to do in order to keep everyone happy.


5. She is a great artist and writer. She loves to draw pictures and has a notebook filled with dress designs that she'd like to actually make someday. Cowgirl loves notebooks and fills them with pictures and words. Her poems and stories offer a unique and interesting perspective and are almost always cleverly funny, too.


6. I think it started back when we went to our first Texas family reunion, but Cowgirl is a country girl at heart. She loves horses, boots and cowboy hats over the usual cutesy girl stuff (but she can be cutesy, too). She loves being outdoors and often points out the beauties of nature that are overlooked. Every chance she gets she asks for a horse. Maybe someday, Cowgirl. It's good to dream.


7. Cowgirl is amazingly creative. She can turn a box into a fort complete with skylights, curtained windows and a secret exit. She can turn a piece of fabric into a purse, doll clothes, a costume or any number of other things. She likes to do things differently than others and I love her unique perspective.


8. She is almost painfully shy if you don't know her well or if she's put into a situation she's not familiar with. But she takes the time to observe what's going on and how she can best fit in before she starts to come out of her shell a bit. And once you get to know her really well, she can get pretty crazy.


9. Cowgirl loves music. They are learning how to play the recorder in her music class at school and she has mastered it to the point where she helps other kids now. She has a beautiful singing voice, plays the piano and wants a ukulele, too.


10. She wants to be a runner like Coolister, play basketball like ElemenoB, become a seamstress like Thumbelina and go on campouts like All-a-Boy. She looks up to her older siblings and wants to have the best parts of each of them as a part of who she is.

11. Cowgirl is some sugar and some spice, which keeps things interesting.

I can't believe it has been eleven years. As the saying goes, time flies on wings of lightning! You're growing into such a bright and lovely young lady, Cowgirl. Have an awesome 11th birthday.

A Modern-Day Hairy Tale

...there was a boy named Coolister.
One day, after Coolister had proven that he was ready,
he left his home to attend a university where he could learn new things, make new friends and experience all sorts of new adventures.
Before he knew it, Coolister was living a very full and busy life.
Very, very full and very, very busy.
So busy, in fact, that he didn't have time to cut his hair.
Coolister's hair grew and grew and grew some more. One day, Coolister went home to visit his family.
"Coolister, we love you!" his family exclaimed joyfully. "But we do not love your hair!"

Coolister laughed (as he was known to do) and he and his long hair went back to the university. His hair grew and grew until eventually it could fall back against the sides of his head like two wings on the side of a bird. It grew over his ears and curled up at the back of his neck.
Every time Coolister made the journey home, his family rejoiced at his return. But still they said, "Coolister, we love you! But we do not love your hair!"

And Coolister always laughed (as he was known to do).

One day Coolister decided he had had enough of this small animal who was taking residence upon his head. He told his mother, "I am ready. It is time to cut my hair."

There was much joy and rejoicing throughout the land!
Coolister and his mother went to visit a cousin who was well-known for her ability to use her magic scissors in order to transform hairy beasts into handsome young men. With a snip-snip here and a clip-clip there, Coolister's transformation was complete.
When Coolister's family gazed upon his new hairstyle, they shouted for joy. "Coolister, we love you! AND we love your hair!"
Then Coolister laughed (as he was known to do) and they all lived happily ever after.

The Great Hair Debate

photo by Backroads Photography

What is it with a woman and her hair? Or maybe that would be better stated as: what is it with me and my hair?

I have noticed that many of my friends have matured enough to have found a hairstyle that they are content with, one that they maintain and keep. It doesn't look like it changes much because they visit their hairdresser regularly and keep it the way they like it. I'm not sure I will ever reach that point.

First off, I can not get the whole 'regular visits to your hairdresser' thing down. Sometimes there can be as much as a year lapse between my haircuts because I'll just... forget. But when I do make an appointment? Whoa, man. Look out. The entire week between the day I call the hairdresser and the day I get to the salon I am constantly debating what to do with my hair.

Every day I am Googling pictures of possibilities, pasting them into a word document and then looking them over obsessively. Is this model's face as long as mine? Is her hair naturally curly or are those curls created? Could I pull off this straight look? I resist the temptation to go on to Facebook and create a poll:

Gerb's getting her hair cut, what do you think?
1. Short, medium or long?
2. Dark, light or a different color?
3. Highlights?
4. Keep the bangs or lose them?
5. Stay curly or go straight?

When it comes down to it, I always end up just looking like myself, the same old Gerb I've looked like since my late high school years (plus a few well-earned laugh lines). But no matter what happens, I always wonder; if someone with a little more fashion sense could choose the way I styled my hair, what would they tell me to do?

I'm getting my hair done tomorrow. And I'm going to love the outcome, no matter what, because I'm a happy person who loves me for me.

Right?

(But seriously, what do you think? Maybe you should answer that poll in a comment.)

Quick Quips

From the mouths of my kids...


Me (to Allen): I just sent that to your email.
Hubba: What?! I didn't know Dad had email! That's awesome!


(in a fit of rage) Kids in other families don't have jobs! You only make us do jobs because you just... you just... I DON'T KNOW WHY YOU MAKE US DO JOBS!!


Hubba: Could you turn on the radio so we can listen to some sweet tunes?


Mom! Stop acting crazy like that. I only like it when you're really, super freaky. It's weird when you're just a little crazy.


Look out! I have a gun with my thingers (fingers)!


You're not a girl. You're just a MOM!

Me: Little O, are you going to pick up those toys or what?
Little O: What.

Thinking Inside The Box

My littlest 3 were pretty busy a few days ago.

First they took a train ride from the desert to the ocean.

Then two of them were robots while one played garbage collector.

Curly piloted a rocketship through the solar system to discover an unknown planet where they played hide-and-seek with some friendly aliens.

Then they enjoyed a drive-in showing of Megamind, each in their very own vehicle.

Curly and Little O repeatedly built a tall building for Godzilla (a.k.a. Baby X) to destroy.

Unique works of art were created.

And this was all before lunchtime!

A few days later some other kids asked if they could have a huge box that was folded flat in a corner of our garage. I figured, why not?

All-A-Boy, Cowgirl, Princess and Hubba made this cool bedroom/house/fort and had a blast playing in it for two days straight.

Cowgirl had to come up with a creative book report on the last biography she read. She decided to make a TV monitor and crawl inside to be a real live news anchor reporting on a famous speech given by the person she read about.

She would tell about Martin Luther King's legacy, flip this picture up from the inside and then read part of his "I Have A Dream" speech.

The kids all took turns being the stars of their own TV shows after this was built.

Remind me again why I bother buying toys?

Choice And Consequence

The first time, he told on himself.

The second Hubba walked in the door from school he went to my room and seemed kind of nervous and mopey. When I asked if everything was okay, he spilled the beans.

"We were standing in our lines after recess, waiting to go in to the school. The teacher was already all the way in the doors and it was just me and John* still out there, but he wouldn't move! I kept telling him to move, but he just stood there, and the rule is No Cutting In Line so I had to kick and push him a little to make him go."

We talked about how it would have been better to break the No Cutting In Line rule than to kick or push someone. Hubba mentioned that his teacher had talked to both he and John about that. Then he said, "I'm sorry, Mom." I asked if he had apologized to John. He had. "I don't want to hear of this happening again," I told him. Then I gave him a squeeze and thanked him for telling me about it.

The next time I got a call from the principal's secretary.

The third time he told on himself again. He had pushed a kid down the slide because he was tired of waiting for his turn. "Did you push him off the slide or down the slide?" I asked, nervous. "Just down," he answered, "but he was really mad at me."

The fourth time, the principal called me to tell me that Hubba and Josh* had gotten into an argument on the way to music class which ended with Hubba hitting Josh. The music teacher sent them both to the principal's office where Hubba had lied about what happened, saying that Josh hit him first. It turns out that Josh didn't hit him at all. When Hubba got home that day we talked about what had happened. "Josh kept saying that the aircraft carrier in Battleship is this big (arms open wide) and I was telling him that it's this big (finger and thumb held about an inch apart) but he kept saying, 'No, it's this big'. So I had to hit him to make him stop talking." As a side note, Hubba loves the game Battleship. He will play it with anyone who is willing at any time. And he's pretty passionate about the names of the ships. Apparently their size is important, too. Anyway, we talked about how no one ever has to hit another person, it's a choice - a bad choice in most circumstances. He didn't get to play Battleship for 2 weeks.

Just last week we found a message on our answering machine from the principal's secretary. We didn't hear the message until a couple of weeks after the incident, but Hubba was building a snowman during recess and another boy had knocked the head off. Hubba responded by hitting the kid. Hubba was sent to the principal and lied, saying the boy had hit him first. As they talked, Hubba admitted that he was the only one who did any hitting. The principal was concerned that Hubba's way of dealing with problems is through being untruthful and hitting instead of talking to an adult about what's going on.

One day after school I went into Hubba's class to find his coat. His teacher told me about another incident on the way to music class that afternoon. The boys' line was standing in place, waiting to enter the class, and Hubba had pushed the person in front of him down, causing everyone else to fall in succession. When I asked him why he would do such a thing he told me that the row of boys looked like a whole line of dominoes and he wanted to see if they would topple like dominoes do. And they did!

And then there was last Thursday. Hubba was caught peeing on the floor in the boy's bathroom. Another student reported him and the head custodian called to let me know that she was going to have him clean up his mess. When I asked him why he did it he told me that when you start going pee you can get it into the 'wall toilet' just fine from far away but by the end it doesn't reach that high anymore so it gets on the floor. And besides that, it seemed like it would be fun.

???

After this latest incident, I was feeling especially overwhelmed and frustrated. What's going on with my kid? Why all of this acting out? I tried to call the principal but he was busy with another parent. I went in to talk to Hubba's teacher after school to see if there was anything going on in his classroom. Does he have friends? Is he happy? She thought so, on both accounts. We talked with the assistant principal to work out a consequence for Hubba's actions (I personally thought that just cleaning up his pee wasn't enough) and she agreed to have him come in after school one day and clean the black scuff marks off of the floor in the halls.


I was there to supervise his efforts. He kept saying things like, "I hate cleaning up after other people's mess!" Well, Hubba, now you know how it feels. After an hour he had buffed out 61 rows worth of tiles with the bottom of his shoe. He was exhausted, but proud of his work.

He is also cleaning the bathrooms at our house daily over the next week.

We are going to schedule some time where Allen or I can be at the school during recess this week to observe Hubba from a distance, to see if something is happening on the playground to cause this behavior.

I'm not sure what else we can do, but I feel like we need to do something. I do not understand this side of Hubba. And I realize that because I am his mother I am biased, but the Hubba I know is a sweet, sometimes crazy, silly/funny, tender-hearted, precocious boy. Sure, he has his faults, like not knowing how to control his anger and the typical potty humor of a 7-year-old boy, but man do I love this kid with a fierce, mama-bear kind of all-consuming, heart aching kind of love. And I just want to get to the bottom of things. I want to know what's going on inside his head.

I hope we get this worked out soon.

Eight Hundred

photo credit

This is my 800th post. Holy schmoley.

I was reading back over some of my earliest blog entries and noticed I was kind of testing the waters. Unsure of what to write or how it would be received, I kept things to a minimum and just told about my daily life. As time went on, I became more retrospective and told my favorite (and not so favorite) stories about my life's journey, the stories that make up the whole person that I am today. Somewhere in there I hit a burn out stage where I had thoughts like, "Who cares what I do or what I have to say? Why do I do this anyway?" and my posts became less frequent and less wordy. And now I feel like I tend to let pictures do more of the talking than myself.

Words are my friends. I want to feel passionate about writing again but I just don't seem to have it in me. I think I need to fill my reservoir with the words of others for a time because I have learned that I am often inspired by what others have to say. So I am reading - books and blogs and news and even the journals I kept for years before blogging was introduced to me. I am slowly filling up my reservoir with thoughts and words that I hope will come spilling out more often.

I want to share more of myself, continue to write of the sunshine in my life but also write more about the rainy days, too.

I want to write so I'll remember.

Arise And Shine Forth Fight Song

I am our ward's official team mascot, Sunny.

Camp planning has begun! I am so giddy-excited for camp this year. The young women's presidency in our ward decided to use a tailgate party/sports theme for our New Beginnings program and the girls thought it would be great to carry that throughout the whole year, including up at camp this summer.

The camp theme for our stake this year is D.O.T.S. (Depend on the Savior) and we wanted to have something that would fall under this same idea for our ward but still keep with the sports theme. We decided on:

Choose The Right Team: We're on the Lord's Side!

I wrote our ward's 'fight song' based on the church's annual theme for the youth all over the world, "Arise and shine forth, that thy light may be a standard for the nations" (D&C 115:5). I think it turned out pretty good - and I got approval from ElemenoB and Thumbelina just to be sure.

If you want to sing along, it's written to the tune of BYU's Cougar Fight Song.

(Our) Ward YW Fight Song
(sung to the tune of the BYU Fight Song)

Rise, all loyal daughters, and be a light to all you know
We'll decide to choose the right everywhere we go.
Kindness, faith, virtue -
These we all value
Be a light and let it shine bright
Come on, (our) ward, it's up to you!

(chorus)
A-rise and shine forth, this is the time
to be a light to every nation.
A-rise and shine forth, now is the time
to be a shining-forth sensation!
A-rise and shine, our spirits will climb
As faith is built on firm foundations.

Every single day - if there's a will, then there's a way!
We'll show the world what's good and what's true.
And be examples in all we do!

RAH, RAH, RAH-RAH-RAH,
RAH, RAH, RAH-RAH-RAH,
RAH, RAH, RAH-RAH-RAH,

GOOOOOOOO (OUR) WARD!

Eat Your Dinner!

A few nights ago I had a headache coming on as I prepared dinner. It felt like the kind of pain that I can usually make disappear with a large drink of water, some good food and a nap, so I avoided taking anything for it in the hopes that it would just leave me.

By the time dinner rolled around, the kids were bouncing off the walls with an amazing amount of energy and the headache was still there. I got everyone seated and dished up so we could start to eat.

As we began to eat our dinner, Little O and Hubba decided it was necessary to sing the well-known music riff from "The Final Countdown".

Loudly. Repeatedly.

I kept my cool. I asked them to stop and eat. The headache grew. They sang again. I said please. Nothing worked. One of them always resumed singing. After the 23rd or so time of hearing their "Neer-na-neer-NEER, neer-na-neer-neer-NEER..." I felt the tension building up, and the headache controlling my brain would no longer let me contain it. Before I could stop myself, I screamed out,

"WOULD YOU GUYS PLEASE JUST BE QUIET AND SING!"

There was a moment of shocked silence amongst the kids as it slowly registered in my brain that I had meant to say eat instead of sing.

But before I could correct myself, All-a-Boy broke the silence with a quiet, "Neer-na-neer-neer, neer-na-neer-neer-neer..." and before we knew it, everyone was laughing.

Even me.

Making My Day

I made my way to Scout Committee Meeting, wondering once again why I was even a part of the committee. I have so many opinions on how to do things that I just keep to myself. What was the point in being there? I was going through the usual self-pity talk about being the only woman and the least respected person there when I opened my notebook to a random page in order to begin taking notes on what was being said.

I found this.
And for the rest of the day the self-pity ceased, I had a smile on my face and I just felt awesome in general.

It's amazing what power there is in a kind word or thought.

Puppy Love

One neighbor brought over two of their new Husky puppies the other day.


These little doggies were so cute and sweet!


They let the kids just hug and squeeze and carry them around without so much as a whimper.


Aren't they adorable?


It almost makes me want one.


Almost.

3-D Cell Model Pizza

All-A-Boy is a clever kid. When he was tasked with creating a 3-D model of a cell for a school assignment he went about it in a different way than most. In true almost-a-teenager form, he made it out of food. Pizza, to be precise.

He listed various ingredients to represent each part of the cell and then put his creation together.

He was a little nervous about cooking it, thinking that some components wouldn't be as easily distinguished, but ultimately decided that his class would enjoy his presentation even more if they could sample it afterward.

He was right - it was educational, memorable and delicious.