Fry Bread and Hail Marys

Alexander woke up at 6:00 in the morning on Saturday and refused to go back to sleep even for a little while, so I got up with him. Benjamin and Zoë joined us shortly before 8:00. 

We had a full morning of stories and fun. Zoë particularly enjoyed the book Fry Bread by Kevin Maillard. She loved the poetry of the story and returned to it several times over the course of the morning. She was a little emotional and kept having outbursts while we were playing (with the magnet tiles) and would escape to the music room to center herself by reading this book. 

"Fry bread is food," she'd read and then take a deep cleansing breath before reading the rest of the words on the page. 

Then she'd take another deep breath, centering herself with her eyes closed. 

"Fry bread is shape."

Deep breath. 

This girl is very good at melodrama. The only thing wrong was that she believe the magnet tile "base plates" had been unfairly distributed. But this story...was calming...so I'll take it.

At the end there's a recipe and Zoë immediately wanted to know if we could have fry bread for dinner. I'm...not the chef in this house...so I said we'd have to talk to dad about his dinner plans. 

She raced to Daddy's office, but he wasn't there. 

"Where is he?!" she demanded. "I need to talk to Daddy about fry bread!"

"He's still sleeping," I said. 

"Well, let's wake him up!" she said. 

"Yeah! Let's wake Daddy up!" Alexander agreed. "To talk about fry bread!"

So those two ran upstairs to pounce on Daddy and beg for fry bread for dinner.

They had to wait a long time, but when dinnertime rolled around, Andrew invited Zoë into the kitchen to help him make some fry bread. She was over the moon!

But she didn't really want to eat the chili. Zoë hates beans.

"Come on," Andrew urged her. "You helped make this. You know everything that's in it. There's nothing you don't like."

"Ummmm...onions!" she said.

"Oh, but those are cooked into such small bits. You won't even notice them."

Rachel and I exchanged looks across the table because more than hating plain, ol' beans, Zoë despises black beans. 

"Don't say anything," Andrew said. 

"Oh, I know what they're thinking," Zoë said, rolling her eyes. "Black beans."

She did manage to clear her plate (but only because Alexander's primary teacher had stopped by with some (three) cookies for him to share with his siblings and all the siblings agreed that the youngest three could have them). 

Anyway, while Daddy and Zoë were finishing frying up that fry bread, I opened windows and doors to the house because things were smokey! Our fan is a "recirculating" fan, rather than a venting fan and it doesn't seem to work very well at all. Opening the doors was cold but got the smoke out and we got to notice that it was...precipitating...in a wintry way.

It wasn't quite snowing, but it wasn't quite hailing, and it wasn't quite raining, but it was doing something and that something was cold. So we ate our warm dinner of fry bread, cleaned up as quickly as we could, and then headed outside to enjoy our evening of winter weather.

Here are all the kids in the...slush:

We managed to make a snow person by dragging our boots along the deck boards to collect the slush and shaping it into snowman form. But since it wasn't really a snow person, we decided to call it a Hail Mary. We are so funny.

Here's everyone with our little winter creation:

Andrew's in there even though he only stepped outside to see what we were doing, while I'm not in there even though I got all freezing cold to help the kids shape the darn thing, so here I am with Hail Mary:

And here's Alexander giving her a good night kiss:

The little stinker got up around 6:00 again this morning, in spite of having a relatively late bedtime for a little guy his age. He hardly made it through our video call with Grandpa (though he was wide awake and as chatty as could be when we talked with Naanii) and absolutely didn't make it through scriptures:

Here's hoping he doesn't wake up until the sun is shining tomorrow morning...