Sunday outfits for Phoebe

I will start this post by once again stating that I should be working on my thesis right now (I really need to get a presentation pulled together), but instead I'm going to blog a little bit about my baby. Because, you know what, babies grow up, and master's degrees can wait. I mean, technically I have a hard and fast deadline, but I mostly know what I'm going to say, I think...I just need to create a powerpoint.

Anyway, starting in July we started attending sacrament meeting at our ward building, fully masked, of course. We attended weekly before, just from home (which honestly is probably more work than going and just sitting in a pew). I won't talk about my feelings about the pandemic because they are too large for this platform. I will just briefly share a quote often attributed to Krishnamurti: "it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." The sickness of society I see is our unwillingness to find solutions to our problems; instead we accept whatever ills as just the way things are. They're not the way things have to be, but we're too tired or scared or broke to do anything differently (even when what we're doing is what is making us tired and scared and broke). 

That didn't really explain anything, but that's okay. 

The point of this post is Phoebe, who hasn't spent much of her life getting dolled up and now finally is getting dolled up. I mean, I put her in dresses when I could, but in all honesty, dresses are frustrating when you're crawling around, so we just had several months where she didn't wear dresses. Now she's wearing dresses every week and it's fun to dress her up. 

Here she is with a barrette in her hair—the first and only time she's let me put something in her hair (and left it in longer than 0.3 seconds):

I wanted to take a pretty picture of her, but Grandpa pulled into the parking lot just as I was pausing to take her picture. She thinks all tan vehicles are Grandpa's (and that all white vehicles are Daddy's), so she's often incorrect about vehicle ownership (Grandpa owns a very small percentage of tan vehicles; Daddy owns a similarly small percentage of white vehicles), but at least we know she can identify colours!

In this particular instance she was correct. It was Grandpa's car and Grandpa was inside it. Here she is yelling, "GAMPA!"

And here she saying, "See ya, Mom! I've got to go see Grandpa!"

Of course, she's never as excited to see Grandpa to his face as she is behind his back. Once we got up to him she was all "Mommy, Mommy! I want my mommy!" 

Toddlers are confusing.

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These pictures are out of order, because this picture is just from this past week:

My niece Rosie would probably approve of this colour palette. She likes the neutral aesthetic. Miriam found Zoë's dress on the sale's rack at Target (a woman after my own heart). Alexander picked out these brown shorts because he was tired of wearing the corduroy pants I recently cut off into shorts. In all honesty, I was sick of him wearing the corduroy cut offs to church as well—and in fact never intended him to wear them to church! I thought he'd just...wear them as play shorts. But he insisted on wearing them to church for an entire month because they "used to be" his church pants. 

Sure, buddy...like, before you put a gigantic hole in each knee, yes! Those pants were your church pants. But now they're not. 

Church shorts might seem like a strange thing in Utah, but it's definitely an accepted style in the South. 

At least this way Alexander can't put holes in the knees of his Sunday pants...

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Here's just a random picture of Phoebe with a headband on. This stayed on her head for more than 0.3 seconds because she put it on herself. And doesn't she look fabulous?

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Popcorn's not popping on the apricot trees right now, but the crepe myrtle trees sure are blooming! Here's Phoebe reaching for some blossoms in her ladybug dress (she loves bugs, so she loves this dress).

And here's Alexander once again not in his cut-off corduroys, so maybe he only wore those three weeks in a row...

And here's Phoebe with Daddy just because:

And here's a picture of me and Zoë together because we needed a picture of our coordinating dresses. It was kind of funny because we both walked out of our bedrooms at the same time, only to see we were matchy-matchy!

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This last series of pictures is of Phoebe trying to be helpful about unloading the utensils from the dishwasher. She loves to help unload the dishwasher. And so we often end up with forks in the junk drawer, cups with the pots and pans, and bowls and plates all jumbled together. 

Here she is happily chucking handfuls of silverware into the junk drawer:

This last handful got a little scary for a second:

She wasn't sure whether they were going to go into the drawer or whether they were going to jump back out and hit her in the face (honestly, neither was I). 

Her sheer panic when she noticed the (butter) knife that was sticking out of the drawer is classic:

I was ready to grab it, but since the handle was settled in the drawer (and that's the heavier part of the knife), I figured it would probably stay put. Here she is "fixing" it:

And here she is with the appropriate drawer open, standing on a step stool so she can actually see inside the drawer as she works on sorting things into their proper places:

She's been enjoying puzzles lately and this is like a real-life puzzle that she gets to solve every day!

Here she is sticking a fork in with the spoons. Clearly we're still working on this skill.

And here she is, having decided she's going to save herself a few trips and just bring the baskets of utensils over to her workspace rather than constantly climbing up and down from her stool:

That's right, Phoebe-cakes—work smarter, not harder!

I will close this post by recognizing that I'm aware I have three older children, and I'm aware they aren't featured in any of these pictures, but they don't like to hang out with me as much as the younger three, so that's kind of on them.