Do you remember the friends of ours, Tim and Malinda Tucker, who had that tiny two-pound baby two and a half years ago? Well, guess what? They have a new baby, a little girl. Her name is Laura Ann, and she weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces. We are all ever so relieved, for Malinda had some troubles early on, similar to the last time. So we all been holding our collective breaths, ever since.
Victoria was eating red hots one day--Valentine candy, given her by one of her elder siblings, who had more than enough to spare from the Valentine Parties at school--and she said, “These make my teeth really, really hot!”
I have finished Victoria’s dress, and Lydia’s is about three-quarters done. After that, I must alter a couple of dresses for Hester, and then comes wedding clothes. I have to make seven dresses, and totally redo Hannah’s wedding gown. And doesn’t that make my hair stand straight up on end!
We finished recording songs on our tape at church. We recorded it onto a Sony, and, after only listening to the tape a couple of times, it acquired a vibration. It is not the tape player, for a duplicate did the same thing, and we did not play it on the same player.
Lawrence and Norma came visiting February 14, which was their ninth anniversary. They brought us a box of cookies and a gallon of ice cream--when we should’ve been baking something for them!
For Valentine’s Day, Dorcas gave me a full-blown yellow rose inside a heart-shaped white balloon, and Hester gave me a heart-shaped pin covered with little white and gold buttons. Hannah gave Bobby a shirt, a stuffed hedgehog, and various other items inside a big balloon with a giant red bow on top. Instead of just popping it to get the things out, he cut the neck off--and then the latex of the balloon collapsed tightly all around the things inside, and he like to never drug them back out again.
Once upon a time, when I was about 5 or 6, and we were traveling somewhere out west, I decided to pick my mother a bouquet for the camper. So I trotted into the middle of a field of flowers, and picked a big handful. Trouble was... they were thistles. It did hurt, but I wanted those flowers...I didn't stop until I had a big enough bouquet for the vase I knew my mother had in the camper. By the time I got back to the trailer, my hands were covered with angry red bumps--every red bump an embedded thistle spine. My mother spent almost an hour picking them all out of my hands with a needle and a pair of tweezers, while I sat reading a Sugar Creek Gang story.
One afternoon, Caleb was coaching Victoria as to how to answer ‘Knock-knock’ jokes. Finally, after he was sure she was well-versed, he told her, “Okay, I will start, and you say the right thing.”
“Okay,” she agreed congenially, so Caleb began:
“Knock-knock.”
And Victoria, standing directly in front of him, took a huge breath and shouted, “COME IN!” whereupon Caleb laughed so hard he could not finish the rest of his joke.
One even, we went to Bradshaw Park to look at some gates Larry made. His bosses are more impressed as the days go by, that, no matter what they happen to ask of Larry--he can do it. He can build things from scratch with no pattern whatsoever. He can fix things so that they work better than they did when they were new.
Wednesday night, Larry stayed home from church with Victoria, who had a fever. She said, when I told her she was going to stay home, “Oh! I am really sick.” She tipped her head and considered. “But I still feel just fine.”
Keith and Esther came visiting one evening, and we tried watching a video from the library about wild animals from Africa…but it was gory and awful. We finally gave up and rewound it, instead watching a video of my father preaching, Easter Sunday, 1992, five months before he died. On this video is a song of Keith and Hannah singing Early in the Morning. They were ages nine and ten.
The other day we heard that when the kindergarten children were having art class, Katrina told Kyle she was going to marry him.
Kyle responded, "No, because I am going to marry Nancy." (Nancy is the art teacher.)
Upon hearing that, one little girl looked up at Nancy and asked, "Aren't you already married??"
Kyle's mother, upon hearing this story, asked him why he had said he was going to marry Nancy.
He replied, "Well, I thought they would like a bigger brother for Zachary!" (Zachary is Nancy's baby.)
Friday there was no school, because the long-promised snow finally arrived. Teddy got up at 6:00 a.m. to scoop snow. Joseph joined him at 10:00. They made $150 clearing driveways and sidewalks for people. Bobby, who helped remove snow around church this morning, removed some snow off Hannah’s car, leaving a big heart shape on her hood.
The littles went outside to play in the snow, and I went out to take pictures of them. Some of our parishioners who have an excavating business had earlier scooped the roads and the parking lot, and they’d left a sizable pile of snow at one end of the parking lot. Snowpiles and snowsuited children have strong magnetic pulls to each other, and the children had not been outside three minutes before they discovered that heap of snow. They were immediately back home again, searching for their sleds. They invited their little cousins from down the block to come play--and then a dreadful thing happened. Before the cousins--Jodie, Sharon, and Jason--arrived, Koch’s Excavating Company came back with their big loaders and dump trucks; and, before anybody could protest, they had all that snow scooped into the dump trucks and were heading on their merry way down the avenue. The littles watched in dismay, and then went off to find other snowy pursuits.
Before long, I thought I should bring Victoria back in, because I was quite sure she was too cold, even though she said she was not. When I got her in the house, and removed her soggy, snowy mittens, however, I discovered, underneath the mittens--very warm little hands! She was telling the truth; she was not cold in the slightest.
Hannah and Dorcas got the wallpaper for Hannah’s kitchen; it is a dark mossy green, and the border print for the top of the walls is Thomas Kinkade paintings.
My nephew Robert and his wife Margaret have a new baby boy: Joseph Daniel, 8 pounds 3 ounces, 20 inches long. Margaret is Malinda Tucker’s younger sister. So now Robert and Margaret have four--three girls, and one boy.
Friday night, Larry took the kids sledding--all but Dorcas, who decided to stay home to finish the pillowcases she is embroidering for Hannah for a wedding gift. She is also crocheting a lacy edge on each pillowcase. Bobby, Hannah, and Teddy went sledding, too.
Upon everyone’s arrival home, Dorcas, helping Victoria removing her wraps, asked her, “Did you have fun?”
Victoria answered gleefully, “Yeaaah!” and then, “Where did we go?”
Larry and the younger children then went to Larry’s shop, where they went four-wheeling. In the meanwhile, I made Apple/Almond/Cheddar Cheese Danish bars.
Saturday, because they’d had so much fun the night before, and because the snow was threatening to melt away entirely, the kids all went sledding again. Bobby went, too, this time with all his siblings. Teddy and Joseph invited the twins, Anthony and Charles Haddock.
Shortly after everybody but those last four left, a couple of boys came swaggering along the dike, acting as though they were just looking for trouble…and directly Anthony threw a snowball at them. That did it. They came running, straight at--Joseph.
Teddy yelled, “If you touch him, you’ve had it!” and went running toward them. Meanwhile, Charles hit that kid in the face three times in a row with snowballs; so then both boys headed for the twins. They hit the twins in the face and knocked them down; Anthony’s glasses got knocked off, bent up, one lens came out. And he got the wind knocked out of him. Teddy was rushing to help them, and one boy headed for Teddy. Teddy swung. The boy dodged just enough that Teddy wound up hitting him with his forearm, rather than with his fist, right on the side of the head, hard.
According to the other boys, that kid’s feet flew far off the ground, and he went sailing backwards, where he landed on his back and was unable to get up for a minute. Meanwhile, because the ground was snowy and icy, Teddy slipped and fell down, too. Afraid that other boy would jump on him while he was down, Teddy leaped to his feet as quickly as he could--and there was the other boy, still lying on the ground. Anthony was still on the ground, too, gasping for breath.
Teddy told the boys angrily, “You boys get out of here!” The boy on the ground scrambled to his feet, and both of them departed quickly, saying, “We’re going, we’re going!”--along with a volley of intermingled swearing and cursing.
Anthony should not have thrown the snowball--but, once the fight had begun, Teddy was obligated to help his friends. Anthony did not intend to start a fight; he thought perhaps they would have a friendly snowball fight; no more. Live and learn!
At suppertime, the kids told us the funniest stories ever about their sledding adventures… Once, Teddy and Joseph were sailing down the hill; the sled got hung up on something and came to a stop--and Teddy and Joseph proceeded on down the hill without it, still in perfect formation, one behind the other, seeming not to know that they’d left the sled in the dust…or in the powder, as the case may be.
Several times, Lydia was flying down the hill on a big inner tube, when suddenly it hit a bump, tilted up on end, and stood Lydia straight up on her feet before rolling on down the hill, leaving Lydia behind, laughing her head off. Caleb was enthralled with a big hump in the middle of the hill, where, every time he went over it, he went airborne. And Hester invariably came whooshing down with her eyes squinted tight shut, laughing uproariously all the way.
After dinner--Larry’s scrumptious French toast--we went for a drive out in the country beyond Lake North, where there are lots of little creeks with snow and ice on them. Everything was pretty; it was a sunny, blue-sky day, just right for a Sunday afternoon drive. The snow is all melting; soon there will be none left. The weathermen tell us that we should expect several more snowstorms, with perhaps one this week. But then, they’ve said that before…
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