David took the girls to the mall after Claire's play a few weeks ago. Somehow Iris conned him into getting her an expensive makeup kit. His excuse was that he was on a work call: his attention was divided.
Later that day
Claire: not only with a make-over, but a new daddy-dress
(they know how to milk him when I'm not around)
Sybil: after Claire got her hands on her
Sybil: after she got her hands on herself
Sybil also got her hands on the dog.
His makeover was just as beautiful.
And this is Iris, just being Iris.
The kids fared better this week in their swim meet.
Claire got second when she raced her best buddies.
T minus about 36 hours until we hit the road.
Nola here we come!
Sybil brought a mini stuffed animal to my Great Uncle's wake a few weeks ago. Although the drinking fountain was out of her reach of her lips, she was able to saturate her stuffed animal and then suck the water out of the toy.
Genius.
Today, on the way to the bathroom to change her diaper, Sybil stopped at the drinking fountain, doused her fingers, and sucked the water off her fingers. I pulled her away, trying to hurry to get back to class. In the bathroom while my attention was turned to assembling the diaper changing area, she got a paper towel, dipped it in the toilet, and sucked the water out.
Not so genius.
In other news, Elijah decided that there aren't enough April Firsts in the year, so he deemed today April first. I seem to be the brunt of all the practical jokes: hair gel on all knobs, confetti in the car AC, tape on the kitchen faucet head. Iris asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom, so I had him clear that too.
I wasn't happy with him.
But that doesn't mean that I can't put shaving cream in his bed tonight, right?
This is the picture I posted on Facebook for our anniversary yesterday.
Megan remarked that David has aged, but I have gone in the reverse.
Just call me Benjamin Button.
Every year gets better.
But that first day, the morning of our wedding, I remember standing in my driveway, about to get in the car to go to the temple and wondering if I was doing the right thing. A few months before we had gone to the temple to pray about it and David felt good about it, but I hadn't gotten a strong impression.
Until we got to the temple June 21, 2003.
There's a part of the ceremony where it was just David and I alone and that's when it hit me hard. It was one of the stronger spiritual impressions I had received up to that time in my life.
This was the man for me.
And he still is fourteen years later, thank goodness.
For eternity.
Speaking of eternity, today we visited the Tucson temple. We met up with my friend Carol and her parents. Carol and I were practically joined at the hip when we were kids.
Gymnastics at the temple
After the temple, we went out to eat with Carol and her parents. Carol told us some great stories, including when she got a homemade tattoo of my name on her ankle in eighth grade using a sharpened guitar string and ink they got from school. When people started calling her Caroline, she got another tattoo on top of it.
On Friday, at the conclusion of Claire's 3 week acting camp, she performed in a play for the first time. She was Tree #4 and had 3 solo lines and several shared lines and songs. The play was "Alice in Wonderland." Here's her scene:
Elijah got formal wrestling instruction for the first time last week. After a week of wrestling camp at ASU, he performed in a tournament on the last day:
On Saturday, Iris participated in her first swim meet.
My goal for her was to not drowned.
She exceeded all my expectations!
Also on Saturday, Sybil ran into the public sphere completely nude twice in one day.
Happy Father's Day to the best dad ever!
Here are a few David-isms to celebrate my favorite man.
Someone told me that David's sense of humor is an acquired taste. Maybe like when he tells the missionaries that their arms are skinnier than his daughters'.
When we went out to eat sushi on Friday, he offered Iris the "green ice cream" that was on the tray next to the pickled ginger. She didn't have an acquired a taste for the wasabi nor his sense of humor. She cried and he felt bad.
A few days ago, as Claire was preparing for her play, she said, "Dad said that he was going to throw flowers at me very time I said a line and throw rotten tomatoes if I don't do them well."
Elijah: "Was he serious?"
Claire: "You never know with Dad."
David went to see Elijah in his wrestling tournament on the last day of wrestling camp. Then they went out after for the classic gas station junk food stop. Then this morning, at my great uncle's funeral, Elijah came up to me sweaty and excited and said, "Mom, I just put someone in a Full Nelson (I had to google that move). Inappropriate was the first thing that came to my mind, but I'm sure David would have appreciated it.
In his testimony a few weeks ago, David talked about a night at home with just Sybil. They ate chocolate milk and twizzlers for dinner and then all she wanted to do was snuggle with him on the couch.
He loved it.
Can you spot a crouching boy, poised to attack an unsuspecting girl?
He might have gotten what was coming to him.
Esie and Max came with us, although I have no proof that Max ever touched anything. Maybe hand sanitizer, if there was hand sanitizer.
Esie and Claire created a mud masterpeice.
MUD OBSTACLE COURSE!
The 3 girls
This is the part the girls didn't like.
Everyone was required to go head-first here.
Elijah
Elijah was the only one who lasted at the mud0fest for more than a few hours.
He and I stayed until the lines were short. He went through several times.
1:20 was his personal best.
Iris just told me that she felt we should go to McDonalds to get a toy as a reward for her.
I asked her what she was being rewarded for.
"Walking" is what she told me.
Not speed walking,
just walking, as in walking to the refrigerator.
I told her she had to take into account breathing and blinking too.
All are rewardable skills.
Claire has been in acting camp for a few weeks and Elijah is in wrestling. All 3 are on the city swimming team. Yesterday Elijah was out of the house for over 12 hours: wrestling camp to piano lesson to indoor soccer in Phoenix (he had to miss swimming). Poor child is learning the painful meaning of sore muscles.
Who said summer was relaxing?
For Memorial Day weekend, we spent a few days in Tucson, meeting up with relatives. Most of the relatives I had never met before, or at least it had been at least a few decades since I had seen them last at the Deputy Knight Commander Club in Santa Fe. This club was created for the child relatives of my Uncle Stewart when he was knighted by Spain.
Interestingly, accompanying the invite to the reunion, there was attached the dissertation of a Stanford PhD student, entitled, "Udall's: the Kennedy's of the West." I told my uncle the title, and he said, "the Kennedys didn't touch the breadth of our influence." He was joking...I think.
On Saturday morning we headed to the Udall Center for Public Policy on the UofA campus. They deal with water policy (water is the oil of the 21st century), Native American rights, and other issues that Mo and Stewart supported. It's housed in the buildings that were the dorms for the first female faculty at UofA.
Then we headed over to the UofA Special Collections Library where the Udall collection is always in the top 5 most used at the university. Mo Udall ran for president in 76 against Carter. More importantly, when I ran for vice-president of my senior class, I wore his campaign shirt.
These are from the Udall Collection. I didn't get as many pictures of Stewart items. Stewart and Mo were my grandpa's cousins, but Stewart was also married to Sybil's sister.
The third stop of the day was at the Udall Foundation, which is a federal agency. Here I learned about a time when Mo and Stewart (who were big sports stars at UofA) integrated the university cafeteria. They invited a black man to sit with them, which was forbidden at the time, but everyone followed suit and welcomed blacks afterward.
This is Elma Udall. She is the oldest of the Mo/Stewart siblings: 100 years young. Or almost 100. She told everyone she would be 100 on Joseph Smith's birthday, which most thought was hilarious (most aren't Mormon, including Elma). She never married, but traveled the world working for the State Department. When the statute of limitations expired, she admitted that she had worked as a spy. She said when she was younger, her grandfather wanted to give all of his kids a patriarchal blessing. Hers said that she would be involved in genealogical work. She didn't know what that meant until she was working in England and was able to trace her line back to the time of Henry VIII. Udall was Uvedele, which came from the word "feudal" (which means "tied to the land"), because that is the class to which they belonged. When she was asked her secret to long life, she said, "All things in moderation, including moderation."
San Xavier del Bac
Fry Bread
We enjoyed some fry bread before we went into the church.
She looks sweet, but
She was the loudest one in the chapel...sushing everyone, loudly.
Then she tried to blow out the prayer candles as if they were on top of her bday cake.
Dinner that night at El Charro.
We were surrounded by Udall's.
On Sunday we went to church at the chapel I attended as a kid. Which brought up so many memories (Being the sad poinsettia in the Christmas play, playing in the pitch-black halls, being in the Relief Society fashion show, staring at the stained glass window of JS in the sacred grove, being jealous of Hunt taking donuts to his class).
I asked an old man where I could buy a bolo tie because I've been wanting to get one for David. At the end of church, he gave me his. David wore it proudly.
We drove by my old elementary school where I remembered bagged milk, losing a tooth in an apple, loving the Back Street Boys, going to a sleepover where we played spin the bottle (I was Claire's age!), and so much more.
Below is the kid table that night at dinner. Many people spoke and performed. I was sitting by my Uncle, who whispered under his breath that, "How could these people have PhD's when they say "I'm done" instead of "I'm finished." What is she, a turkey?" He inherited his fierce protection of the English language from his mother, Sybil. Tom Udall (Senator from New Mexico) spoke about hope in washington, which he admitted was an oxymoron. He did say though, that his office used to get 50 calls a day and now was getting 500-1000 per day.
Af few funny stories from Burr Udall:
My grandpa got a call from a mass-murderer in DC who claimed to be related to the family through the 3rd wife of David Udall and he threatened to take the news public. My grandpa freaked out, but his aunt said, "Why are you worried about the news about the 3rd wife, when we have a mass-murderer in the family? I found out later that there was a semi-secret 3rd wife, but had children through a previous marriage only.
Also, Mo had a glass eye and every year that would get a few dozen glass eyes shipped in from Colorado. The kids would sit around and shove them into his socket, seeing which ones would fall out.
Claire and Sasha (my cousin's daughter) did a presentation.
That's all for now. The 3 kids are at swim team. I fed them leftovers before they left and now I'm going to gear up for popcorn and milkshake (banana, ice, milk, vanilla: the recipe from my childhood) for the night snack while I read to them.
Summer is great!
For Memorial Day weekend, we went down to Tucson for a family reunion. I have lots of notes and pictures to sort through, so I'm going to start with the post about Memorial Day itself. We got back from Tucson at about 11pm and woke up early to meet with another part of the Udall family at the Greenwood Cemetery; a tradition that is 45 years strong. The picture below is the whole group in back of graves of John Hunt and Leah Smith.
T
he following is an excerpt from an email my mom sent to family: "We went to 2 family reunions: Tucson for a 2-day celebration of the Mo-Stewart family and Levi Webb family, and Monday for the John H Udall family. Big contrast between the number of children in attendance. Tucson relatives are a mixed group...mostly not active in LDS faith, some gay, many political, not many children. As you can see, John H Udall reunion in Phoenix is filled with posterity...did not take a poll...but probably most are active LDS. In Phoenix, there was a sweet focus on family and a more earthly confirmation of the reality of the covenant and blessing of having joy in our posterity."
The smaller group who is descended from John Nicholas and Sybil Elizabeth went to their nearby graves.
My mom read to us from Sybil's diary.
Sybil with Sybil
Then we went to Chick-fil-a.
My dad proving that you are never too old to play a practical joke on your brother:
