E = 5

The kids are showing me how old they are. I know. You thought you had accidentally clicked over to Martha Stewart's website for a minute there. She has asked for many consultations on cake decorating. I'm a busy woman, but I managed to put 9 types of sugary ingredients into my cake-making extravaganza.You will notice the cake does not say "Elijah," but "Elias" since he insists that is his name now that we live in Mexico. He also doesn't like me to speak to him in English in front if his friends for fear they will know the truth: We are not really Mexicans.

E opening presents:
Claire was not happy that E was opening all the presents:
So, generous E shared his presents:
His birthday celebrations included:
Wednesday: Cake to school, met David at Carl's Jr for lunch, soccer practice (he gave up karate and loves the new sport).
Saturday: A 10 hour party. Kidzania and then craziness at our place including 2 alien piñatas, pizza, and lots more sugar.
After the cake, a friend asked about E’s day of birth since it was the day we were celebrating. David said, “Let’s talk about something more import than E’s bday—his conception.” After knowing David for so long, not much phases me, but I found it difficult to talk for a little while after that one. And yet I admitted to the crowd that I had secretly given up on E's nose-picking/booger-eating habit, but that I still felt compelled to put up a front and chastise him in public.
While E was at soccer, Claire and I went to this church to see a play put on by our downstairs neighbor who teaches catechism there. I figure I need to get on the good side of anyone living right below us since they put up with a whole lot of strange sounds. In fact, the first day I met her she told me, "Children are blessings from God. The screaming, the jumping, the noises, are all blessings from God." I almost said, "No, you are a blessing from God."
We visited the crypts under the church while we were waiting for it to start.
The girls.
Why does it seem like my kids always have dirty faces? I swear I hose them off every week.
C has always had a hard time with her negatives: "do not" is not part of her vocabulary. I never know whether she meant to put a "do not" before her "want" until the ensuing tantrum.
E loves his sisters so much that he shares their sense of fashion.
When he was a baby, I took a lot of sleeping pictures of him. It amazed me how calm he could be albeit during slumber.

PSYCH!

David's asking for another post, so let me thrill you with my life.
Elijah the artist/scientist.
E has lost interest in his toys. He is usually in the junk closet discovering and creating.


Another funny tidbit about Elijah. On Saturday he got the Stealing Lecture. He took a candy from a store. The kid might be turning into a klepto. I used to think he was an exemplary student. Every day after school he would show me a treat and say it had been given to him because he had behaved well. Then, I started watching more carefully and realized he was pulling the treats out of other kids’ lunchboxes from their cubbies.
kleptomaniac + mythomaniac = my son.
Poor kid wants me to believe he is well behaved. Clever little one.

Speaking of well-behaved, Elijah's teachers specifically asked David to stop this:

and this:

And I'm pretty sure the "figgy 4" would have been on the list too:
Friday we will have our 3rd parent/teacher conference in 3 months to assess D & E's progress.

More on David. Yesterday I was in the kitchen and I heard David screaming at the top of his lungs from our bathroom shower (at opposite ends of our apartment). My first reaction was to check and make sure Iris was alive. She was. My second thought was that the poor man must have slipped and broken something…No, just wanted me to get the soap that was 3 feet away from him b/c I wasn’t already busy enough getting the other 4 members of our family ready for church. What goes through men's heads? The good news is that I have learned to laugh instead of fume in these situations.

The kids and I went to the Bodies Discovered exhibit today. They loved seeing the cadavers and body parts. Of course their favorite parts were the private parts. When we got out, E explained to me the condensed plan of salvation (we get old, we die, we live with God, we get better bodies) and asked to return to the museum.

And one last thing. Remember how I threatened to go private and then I didn't go private?
PSYCH!!!!! (did you think you were in the 80s for a minute there?)
Reasons:
1) I live in Mexico. Is having a blog really going to add more risk to my life?
2) No offense private bloggers, but I don't read your blogs often. There's love, but also simple laziness.
3) Simple laziness. I can spend an hour putting a post together, but taking a few minutes to learn how to go private is beyond the scope of my Natural Man lazy tendencies.

Reading!

Elijah read his first book today.

Bob Books: highly recommend them. We got them in the mail yesterday and I wish I would have started sooner.

But that wasn't his first book. It was the Encyclopedia Britannica. He specifically enjoyed the section about the flux capacitor. He started his time machine tonight and plans to be the first man on the moon.

romantic ramblings

Eight years ago today, I got engaged. I really, really didn’t want to get engaged on Valentine’s Day, because that’s about the cheesiest thing you can do besides getting married at Disney World, wearing a golden plastic crown, and being escorted by a man in a mouse costume in a horse-drawn pumpkin buggy (we’ll save that for our 25th anniversary). But alas, the timing worked out so that we needed to get engaged that night. The Ortiz family gave us tickets to NOLA from Utah so David could ask my father for my hand in person. And the engagement pictures were scheduled soon after, so we only had a small window. I bought David a bow tie so he could impress my father (instead he wore florescent yellow leggings which I believe impressed my father in a different fashion).
We ate at Mona’s middle-eastern food. He was timid in using a half-off coupon his dad gave him, since he was used to impressing women with the money he didn’t have. But I was proud of the one time he tried to save money. He took at least a dozen phone calls that night. I was quite aggravated with his phone etiquette—It was a little taste of my future. After dinner, we went for a romantic stroll along the levee. All of the sudden, I heard a melody floating through the oaks. What could that be, but David’s posse reciting love sonnets and playing guitars over an amplifier. I was supposed to be wooed, but I couldn’t stop laughing. David was nervous and I took advantage of the poor man. He got down on one knee; when he asked me I told him the answer was no unless he said my complete name, Elizabeth and all, just so he knew who was in the driver's seat.
My patriarchal blessing tells me I’d marry a “young man.” In my younger years (my liberal bra-burning years) I always interpreted that as meaning I’d be 60 and marry a 20 year old “young man” because dag-nabbit, I had a life to live and no man would hold me back until I had conquered the world. Never, never, never did I think I’d date for 2 months, get engaged, and then marry my first kiss (unless you count spin-the-bottle at the age of 9) within 10 months of returning from my mission. David was quite a persuasive “young man.” So, I guess my new interpretation of my blessing is that I only needed 23 years to conquer the world. I like to think David stands on top of the world and I stand on top of him. And I can still be a bra-burning liberal (my political leanings are fuzzy; I mean this in a theoretical sense)...as long as David allows it [insert evil chuckle].

Happy Valentines Day my MAN!

My kids profess a different kind of love:

Puente

We just finished a 3-day weekend, aka puente. On Saturday we went to Xochimilco where we took a boat ride down ancient Aztec canals. Xochimilco means "some place with flowers," although I think we went the wrong time of year to see the floating flower gardens.Emotions at Xochimilco:

And hair at Xochimilco:
Then we went to the Ceremonial Center of Otomi on Monday. Although the site is new, the construction is meant to reflect Otomi culture before the 9th century.

The group in front of "The Sun."

There were 52 (# of years in the Aztec calendar) of these sculptures or "guards":
Playing at the park nearby. Who is the mother of these dirty little kids? There was dirt galore!