Celia: Reverent Prayers PART 2

This morning, Celia said the prayer for breakfast. Sabrina was busy dumping magnets out of their box and then throwing them (usual). Here was Celia's prayer:

"Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and be reverent. Thank you for Sabrina will get bigger and bigger and learn to be quiet and reverent. Thank you for the oatmeal. Please bless it. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen."

Celia: Reverent Prayers

We just got back from a trip to Denali where we took a million pictures. I'll get to that someday. I just wanted to document Celia's prayer for dinner tonight. As I was setting dinner on the table, I said: "Okay, let's say some prayers so we can eat dinner." Celia said: "I'm gonna say it" and then immediately started saying it. Tom was still trying to get Sabrina in the high chair, so it all went down like this:

Celia: Dear Heavenly Father, Thank You for this day and be reverent. (looking up and seeing Tom strapping Sabrina in) HEY! BE REVERENT!

Tom: Just a minute.

Me: We're not quite ready to say prayers yet, wait just a minute.

Celia: (immediately) Dear Heavenly Father, my daddy's not being reverent. Please help him to be reverent. In the name of... oh! And bless the food. The tomatoes (potatoes), green beans, and that. That food right there (pointing to stuffing on her plate). In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen."

Daddy Kisses

Sabrina is a big kisser. And sometimes we don't see it coming. She just attacks our face. With tongue. And then eats our nose. Here she is in action.

Celia: She likes Tangled

- Today at lunch, Celia and I were talking about movies. Apparently Sabrina's favorite is Ratatouille, Tom's favorite is Cars, and my favorite is Kung Fu Panda (I told her this one, so she got at least one right). I asked her about her favorite and this is how it went:

C: Um Tangled is my favorite.

Me: What is your second favorite movie?

C: The lantern one.

Me: Isn't that the same movie?

C: Yes.

Me: Well what other movie do you like?

C: Rapunzel.

- The other day, she looked outside and said something like: "It's a nice cold day today. The wind is blowing all around. The sun is gone. The rain is all over the ground." Our little optimist.

- Last week or so, Celia was sitting at the dinner table. Her foot fell asleep and she told us that it had "spicies" in it.

Baby Bakes!: Kid 2

Other than noting how great that beach house kitchen is compared to our lovely home kitchen, there's one major difference in these pictures. With Celia, she came and clung on to me so rarely we thought it was cute. With Sabrina, this happens ALL THE TIME. I spend most of my time in the kitchen cooking saying: "Can someone come get this baby so I can finish dinner?" She's cute, but clingy. Oh so clingy. Tom took a picture because I was commenting on how much I loved it when Celia did that but am so sick of the commonality of the situation with Sabrina. Even as I type this Sabrina has pulled herself up on my knees begging me to hold her. Back to the regularly scheduled pack mule part of my day...

Giant Veggies: Please Identify

We just got a box of local produce. Since everything is bigger here (seriously, our fridge has never been so full with just a few items. The cabbage and collard greens are taking over!) thanks to 24-hour sunshine, we're not sure what these are. Our best guess is a giant leek and some kohlrabi. Any ideas?

Somewhat related, here are Celia and Sabrina playing with their fruits and veggies. They play so well together these days. So fun!

Celia + Sabrina: Harry Potters

Remember Celia's teeny tiny friends? Yeah, they're still around in full force. We always have to accommodate them. I've had to leave a spot empty on her plate so they can get "all noodle-y." She bites her sandwiches into a tunnel for them all to go under. They go with us everywhere. When they don't ride with us, they always meet us there. And there are hundreds of them. They have a million different names and they fly all over the world to see each other. One lives in a state I've never heard of that's "by Oregon." One of them lives in "Toyo, Japan. Just like Tokyo, Japan." Well, recently, she's added the "harry potters." They're like a different tribe of teeny tiny friends. If the teeny tiny friends want to play in the living room, the harry potters want to go play on "mommy's and daddy's bed." We have not seen the new Harry Potter film (blasphemous, I know), but we did go to a Harry Potter party for the movie. So Celia has been hearing the name. Still, I'm pretty sure she thinks she came up with it. And those harry potters are just as crazy as the teeny tiny friends.

Other funny things as of late:

- Tom was feeding Sabrina the other day and making airplane noises to get her to eat. It was something like "Bewwwww." Celia said something like: "Bew is my teeny tiny friend, Daddy. So don't say that. Say 'Kewwwww'."

- The other day we were talking to Tom's parents on Skype and Celia said to them "So...we had a nice visit to your house."

- She was sitting on the couch all meditatively and said: "You remember Mommy, it's my turn on Earth!" (We then introduced her to the cheesy soundtrack of the musical "My Turn on Earth" and it's her new favorite.)

- She asked me the other day: "Mommy, were we in space when Adam and Eve were on Earth?"

- She is in the annoying asking question phase: "Where's the hairbrush, Mommy? Oh, what bathroom? Oh where? What drawer? This one? Oh, what hairbrush?"

- She still is pretty awesome at pantomime. She loves making beaches out of pillows and blankets on the floor. Today she set it all up and went fishing with a big net (sound familiar?). She caught them, picked them up with one fingers by the gills, lifted the cooler lid to drop it in, closed the lid, and went back to pick up her net again. This happened for each one and she always remembered exactly where she put the net and where the cooler was. Then she filleted them all, "grilled them up," and we ate some with plastic lemon. Delicious.

And remember how Sabrina is our trouble maker? Here she is living on the edge:

Sabrina: Ten Months

Sabrina's still our crazy little firecracker.

STATS: She went to the doctor on July 25th. She weighed 17 lbs 4 oz (10-25th percentile) and was 28 inches tall (50-75th percentile).

FOOD: She still nurses every four hours, eats a big bowl of applesauce in the morning, eats whatever she can get her hands on at lunch (usually some bread and baby food puree), finger food for dinner (peaches, avocado, black beans, and salmon are her favorites), and then a big bowl of oatmeal before bed.

SLEEP: Woof. Not sure what to say here. She's been teething really bad lately (still no teeth) which has really impacted her sleeping. Teething gives my kids coughs that they hang onto for months. So I really want to let her cry it out at night, but she gets into a coughing attack and that's not good. So, sometimes she sleeps from 9-9 and wakes up at 6, but other times she sleeps from 9-8 and wakes up at 12, 3, and 5. So it's really hard to say at this point. For naps, she usually takes two naps. A short one in the morning and a longer one in the afternoon (a little under and hour for the first and about an hour and a half for the second), but this week, that has been a little jumbled too.

SPEECH: She doesn't have any. She mostly just grunts and says "ah." I knew I would worry about this with the second child because Celia was so conversant, but I'm sure she's fine. She does sign "all done" but it sometimes means "all done," "more," or "get me out." She's starting to sign "more" but is having a hard time figuring out the difference between the sign for "more" and clapping.

TRICKS: She waves. Mostly she just sticks her hand up in the air in more of a "Whazzup" fashion than an actual wave, but she does give really enthusiastic waves to Celia in her bed and to herself in the mirror. She's also hilarious about kisses. She'll just randomly attack my lips with a giant open mouth. Sometimes with tongue. Kinda gross if she wasn't so cute. She can climb up all the stairs. She can climb up the slide (and get stuck). She can climb into the dishwasher (and get stuck). She's a climber. And a destroyer. I put all her toys in little toy bins on the shelf and she just pulls them all out and crawls away. Then she heads to the fridge where she takes off all the magnets in a frenzy and then crawls away. Then she heads to the side table where she pulls down the little tea set, the coasters, and the decorative plates and crawls away. I spend a lot of my day putting these things back together just so she'll have something else to destroy. She finds things I didn't know were hiding behind and under things and gets into everything. Every time I try to take her picture doing something crazy that she shouldn't be doing (or frankly just anytime I get out the camera), she stops what she's doing and poses. Then crawls as fast as she can to get the camera lens.

ANECDOTES: Can't really think of anything right now, specifically. She does get really excited to see Tom when he comes home. Sometimes when we're outside and she's the first one to see him ride up on his bike, she makes a really excited noise and starts freaking out. But she is still pretty clingy onto me. Annoyingly so sometimes. Some days she'll just crawl around pulling things down. Other days she has to be in my arms the whole day. If she just settled there, it would be one thing. But she gets bored and tries to dive out of my arms to get things but then when I set her down so she can get them, she cries. But she is very sweet. And a total flirt. And we love her. How could we not? Look at that smile.

Gone Fishing, Need Babysitter

So who is coming up next year to watch the kids on the beach so Tom and I can both get in the water? We'll pay you back with delicious salmon dinners!

Dipnetting: The Real Alaskan Adventure

On the way to dipnetting, we had to pull over and see the "bore tide." When it's low tide, the entire inlet is made up of mudflats. There are signs everywhere warning you not to go into the mudflats because they are like quicksand and the tide comes in one big wave and you get caught in the mud and die. No gradual tide changes. One big wave comes in and then the tide is in. So, this one wave starts at the ocean and goes all the way up Cook inlet where we saw it on Turnagain Arm. It just keeps going. You can watch people surfing the Bore Tide on YouTube. There are only a few places in the World where this happens, and Cook Inlet, Alaska is the only place in the United States where you can see this phenomenon. And we saw it. Check. Now back on the road to start fishing!...

Intro to dipnetting: When someone has lived in Alaska for a full 12 months, he or she can purchase an Alaska Resident fishing license. This allows Alaska residents, between July 10 and July 31, to get in the water, with a net, at the mouth of the river to catch sockeye salmon ("reds"). Each head of household is allowed 25 fish per season with an additional 10 fish per family member (we could have caught 55 fish!). This year, the reds ran in record-breaking numbers. Over 230,000 fish ran up the river in one day. And nearly 1.5 million fish ran up the river in the month of July. This year we went with President Smith (member of the stake presidency). He's the king of dipnetting and he showed us the ropes. In the same amount of time we caught 27 fish, he caught 80 and threw 20 back because they were "too small." He went home with 60 giant fish. (Our 27 filled the two coolers we brought. We couldn't have fit any more fish if we wanted to!)

Since you've already seen the results of our dipnetting adventure (72 pounds of edible fillet meat!), this post will be about the "experience" of dipnetting. Tom will walk you through the process of fishing (He's wearing a yellow hat so you can follow him in all the pictures). You get suited up (preferably with a friend to join you in the water. Hi Logan!). Then you take this incredibly large and awkward net and walk it into the river as the tide goes out. You get in line and hop into the water with everyone else. You walk the net, with the current, about 300 yards. If you don't catch a fish, you pull out, walk it to the beginning, and start again. If you do feel a fish in your net, you give the net a good jerk (to get the fish caught in the net), and you try to pull the net out of the water as fast as you can before the fish gets out of the net. (This is by far the hardest part of the whole thing... we probably lost 30 fish because we never figured out the best way to get the fish caught in the net. The real pros can get a fish caught in the net and keep walking so they can catch 2-5 fish in one go.) Then you whomp the fish right on the nose (so you don't bruise the meat) and throw it in the cooler with the rest of the fish. Then you get back in the water and do it again!

When you're all done, you clean off all your fish and gut them on the beach. This means the beach is full of fish guts down by the water. And fish guts = lots of birds. Apparently real Alaskan children like to throw fresh fish guts up into the air and watch the seagulls dive bomb to get them. I'll wait a year before letting my kids be "real Alaskan children."

After the girls got in bed, it was my turn in the water. We camped right on the beach with everyone else. I got in the water at 9:30PM and fished until 11PM when all dipnets had to pull out of the water. (The day after we left, they opened it up to all night fishing for the first time in ten years because the salmon were running so thick. I'm bummed we missed that!) It looks like I'm not in the water as deep as Tom was, but all the boats were coming in and the waves were huge. I actually flooded my waders a few times (nothing major, but it was cold). I caught my first fish the second walk. It was totally by accident since I didn't really know what I was doing yet. I made Tom take a million pictures of it in case I never caught another fish. Then I caught 6 more and they were all giant compared to that first one. Fishing at night was a blast! There were less people and everyone was very into the communal experience. When I caught a big one, I felt better about the Scandanavian guy next to me saying: "Nice fish!" than I did about actually catching it. And since we all had to pull out of the water at 11PM, everyone was calling out things like: "25 minutes left!" and everyone was happy to see people pulling fish out of the water. Since only Alaska residents can dipnet, all of dipnetting is like this (people encouraging and helpful and communal), but at night, it was especially great. I felt great being an Alaskan!

Let me tell you, fishing in Alaska at 11PM was a beautiful experience!

The next morning, I got back in the water and fished another couple of hours, but it wasn't nearly as fun as night fishing.

So what did the girls do while we were fishing during the day? They played in the sand, of course (with Celia's friend, Sophie). And Sabrina also started eating it by the handful. I couldn't stop her with a binky or real food... so I banished her to the tent. Then the girls spent a long time playing in Sabrina's tent (inside our tent). They were rolling around laughing. Funny ladies. They had a great time. And other than Sabrina eating sand and Celia getting a bad sunburn on her neck (I put sunscreen on her!), it was a fabulous family outing. Definitely the same time next year!

Vacation Pictures: Final Round

We took a train from Portland to Seattle. Really a great way to travel. A 3 hour airplane ride with these two is like torture, but a train is a blast! In Seattle, we enjoyed time with Tom's family. Celia enjoyed being the oldest by 2 years. She pretty much did her own thing. She went hiking with the boys, learned to play all the musical instruments at one time, got all bundled for a ride on the boat, enjoyed playing in the water with Jack, read books while Aunt Hilary did her hair, and just hung around. Because the house was full of people, Celia slept in a "fort" under the pool table. She was pretty into it. Sabrina, after spending so much time with Papa Edvalson in Portland, decided that she would try her hand (literally) at dentistry on Uncle Evan. She also spent some quality time with the Great-Grandmas, found her match with Jack (lots of food-stealing went on between high chair trays), proved that she can still touch the camera before we can take a picture of her, and showed us a bunch of cute faces that we had to document (notably all in high chairs). The rest of us hung out at the family cabin with family, hung out at the family house with family, and played the family Mario Kart Wii with the family. Grandpa Ted also had a birthday (and is so old, the candles were totally melted by the time he blew them out!). Another great adventure of a vacation. Can't wait to see everyone in one fell swoop again! Same time next year...?