Fall 2022

Oh boy, I think I have about half a year of blogging to catch up on. So here comes another long one. The girls have become very protective of each other. If one is getting in trouble, the other will try to take the attention off her sister to save her any punishment. This started a while ago, but it’s gotten to be more and more. One time last year, the girls kept picking the blooms off our potted flowers in our front yard and giving them to me to be nice. I always said thanks but I like the flowers better when they’re alive and still attached in the pot, so please stop picking them. But they kept doing it. Finally one day Tille picked several flowers in a row and I started losing my patience. Hattie, out of the blue, started screaming at the top of her lungs. I rushed to her to see what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, she just didn’t want me to yell at Tille. Ugh. Another time, Matt was getting the girls ready for school and Tille mentioned that she had wet the bed (this all came to light a little while after they had woken up, so she’d been sitting in gross underpants all morning). After some more digging, it came out that Tille had been awake at the time, she just didn’t feel like getting up to go to the bathroom, so she did the deed in her bed. Matt made her go take a bath and there might have been some stern words. Right about then, Hattie peed her pants to deflect the punishment from Tille. When I got home from work that day and heard about it all, I felt so bad for Matt having to navigate that whole thing. Another side of this is that anytime one of them gets in trouble for anything, the other one will sob and beg for mercy. If one gets sent to their room, the other will go kicking and screaming and wait outside the door. If one loses tv or treat privileges, the other loses her composure. The punishment always seems to be worse for the one who isn’t in trouble. And if one is sad, the other will always try to find ways to make her feel better. She’ll rummage through the cupboards for treats, or find a good toy or a favorite book. It’s pretty sweet. One time Tille had lost her tv privilege by the time I got home from work. She was supposed to be in her room playing or reading while I made dinner and Hattie was watching tv. As I moved around the house, checking the stove, folding and putting laundry away, etc., Hattie was watching me with guilty eyes. I finally decided to check on the situation, and it turned out Tille had snuck out of their room and was hiding under a blanket on the couch watching tv too. I told them Tille could either go back to her room or nobody would watch tv. Hattie was more than happy to turn off the tv and play with Tille. Chickens! Our chickens definitely aren’t little fluffballs anymore! They’re full grown hens. We thought we’d be getting eggs by now (5 months old), but now I’m hearing it might be closer to 7-9 months, so we’ll just wait until spring. They have the funniest personalities. It took them a while to warm up to us, but they like us now. When I go outside they’ll kind of crane their necks to look at me, and I’ll say, “Hi girls, you want a treat?” and then they’ll come running and flapping like they’ve never eaten before. And they always talk and talk when we go outside. They have a lot to say to us. It’s so funny. They’ll all eat out of our hands and if we’re too slow they’ll peck at whatever container of food we have. In their first few weeks of being in the backyard, they explored a lot. Sometimes we’d find them on top of our big concrete wall, but they never really went up on the hillside. They can flap a little distance, but not really fly, so they’ll get on top of their coop, then fly to the shed roof, and then just hop to the wall. But some of them are scared to get down, so only a couple of them will go up there anymore. One night we were getting the girls ready for bed and we heard a big thunk. I went out to check it out, and the chickens were on the house roof. They had ‘flown’ from the wall to the house, but instead of landing they just crashed and then were walking around. We didn’t want them up there pecking and pooping (so much poop everywhere), so we weren’t thrilled, but within about 10 minutes they were all back in their coop. We’re guessing they saw a hawk or an owl and got scared. Every now and then in the summer a hawk would come in the yard and scare the chickens half to death. They’d hide under bushes or in their coop the rest of the day. A couple days ago I was with them and a bunch of crows flew overhead. Immediately one of the chickens ran for cover. I’m sorry they’re traumatized, but I’m glad they’re conditioned to take cover. Lately the chickens have taken to running over to the side gate and watching us drive away whenever we all leave. Then they hop over the fence and hang out on the deck. And poop all over it. Again, so much poop. Everywhere. I wasn’t ready for how much poop there would be. One night we were eating dinner and there was a little tap on the door. The chickens just came to say hi. Anyway, we found a solution. It’s a fenced in, roofed yard type thing. It’s like 6x6 or something, made of fencing and trampoline type bars, and we can put their coop in it. That way they’ll have their own decent sized yard that they can’t get out of and we can contain the poop to one area. The hawks can’t get in and the chickens can still roam to some degree. We haven’t set it up yet because it came a couple days after all the snow, but we’re excited. More funny things from the girls: One day after breakfast Tille told me I had milk in my hair. I ran my fingers through my hair and she said it was still there. A few more tries, she said it was still there. Eventually I realized she was looking at my white hairs. Hattie and Tille both said at the same time, “Oh yeah, you have white hair!” and then Hattie said, “because you’re getting old!” nice. We had stake conference in September. Our stake gets to go to the Ogden tabernacle. They had the primary kids do a musical number, so we were sitting kind of in the middle so the girls could find us easily after they sang. About 10 minutes into the conference the girls were asking how much longer it was going to be. So we knew we were in trouble. 2 hours later, the last speaker ran a little long. When he finished, before we sang the closing song or said the closing prayer, Tille announced very loudly, “it’s finally time to go home!” It’s so hard not to laugh at times like that. A couple weeks ago I was eating breakfast with the girls on Saturday morning. We were just talking about whatever and they casually mentioned that the other day when they switched places at school nobody could tell except one of their friends. I paused for a second and said, “Wait a second, go back. You switched places at school?” They said, “yeah”, like it was nothing. I asked if they do this a lot. They said yeah, like a couple days regular then a day switched, they’d been doing this for a while. I asked if they do it for the whole school day. They said yes. They were so nonchalant about it, like the whole point of the story was the only person who could tell was one of their friends, not their teacher or anybody else. One of the girls has been getting extra one-on-one time with the teacher while the other kids have computer time, so by switching, she got to have computer time while her sister took the one-on-one time. It was great as far as they could tell. We talked about how it’s fun to switch but it’s their teacher’s job to make sure they’re learning what they need to and she can’t do that if she doesn’t know who she’s teaching. I think they understood that. They said that made sense. But then they said, “but you switched when you were a kid, didn’t you?” I said, “No! Who would I have switched with?! There was nobody who looked like me.” And then they said. “Oh yeah, we love being twins. It’s so special.” Little turkeys. I don’t know if I should give their teacher a heads up or not. As a follow up, a few days later one of the girls told me that she had passed all her tests and didn’t have to have one-on-one time with the teacher anymore and gets to have computer time now. We were so excited and made a milkshake for dinner dessert to celebrate. The next day, I got to thinking. Did she pass her tests, or did her sister pass them for her? Great. We’ll never know. And now some pictures: Christmas Village with the girls and their cousins last week. They finally got to sit on Santa’s lap for the first time ever and did great! Back in August the girls went to a birthday part at the Layton aquarium for one of their friends. I was in Arizona for work that day and Matt had the honor of shuttling the girls to the aquarium, waiting for the party to arrive, taking them to lunch because the party started late, picking them up a couple hours later, taking them to the birthday boy’s house for cake, and then picking them up a little while later. He was my hero that day. The girls had a blast and it was the last time they got to play with that friend because school started not long after and life has been happening. First day of kindergarten! Tille in front, Hattie in back The girls went to Matt’s sister’s house for a few hours one day. They sent us these pictures later. Check out Hattie’s face in the background ????? The girls turned 5! And had a Mickey and Minnie themed birthday with hot dogs and ice cream cake. A couple weeks ago the girls got to go to the Layton Aquarium again for a birthday party with one of their best friends. She was in their preschool class and is now in their kindergarten class. School ended up being canceled for snow that day so they had a blast getting picked up by their friend’s mom, then swinging by to pick up another friend and having a girls’ day out of fun. Trick-or-Treating! Hattie was Elsa and Tille was Sara Sanderson (from Hocus Pocus). Her wig kept falling off so Matt wore it most of the night. He makes a pretty good 80s hair band rocker. A couple days after Halloween we finally got around to sorting all the Halloween candy. The girls made quite a haul. They combined their bags and sorted it into types. Then divided between two bags- chocolate and fruity. We still have the bags and are slowly working our way through them. We might be done just in time for Easter. A few months before Covid hit, so maybe the end of 2019 or so (?) Matt’s friend’s dad, who lives in Washington, let us know he had a Jeep truck he could sell us. It’s a ’68 Jeep Kaiser that he bought from a military base up near Spokane back around 1984. He lives on a big wilderness property near there and has used the truck over the years to haul things, including once a buffalo he shot (so yes, this truck has been used to hunt buffalo). He’s been fixing it up over the years and was just about done and wanted to sell it to somebody he knew. He likes us and thought we’d be good candidates for it. Matt’s always wanted an old truck and I’ve always wanted a Jeep, so this was perfect! We were super excited. He said it’d be done in a few months and he’d bring it down. Since then, he’s had several other projects come up that delayed the truck, and he wanted the truck to be in good working condition before he sold it to us. He always said it was just a few months away. But then suddenly one Saturday night in November we got a call that he was on the road towing the truck and would arrive late Sunday morning. So now we have a Jeep! It’s a beast to drive and it’s so fun! It doesn’t have power steering or power breaks, the windshield wipers are manual, there’s no heat, and if you stand too close to it while the engine’s on you smell like gas for hours. But it’s fantastic. We want to give it a good paint job and put the side rails up (the wood pieces on the back are side rails that can be fitted around the bed. This model is a military utility jeep truck and not many were ever made, so it’d be really cool to get it looking like a military truck. It only has 2 seatbelts and can only go about 45 mph, so it doesn’t serve a lot of practical use, but it sure is fun! There’s a little crepe restaurant in downtown Ogden that we’ve been meaning to try for a while and we finally did. The inside is so cool. The walls are covered in pink silk flowers and feathers, there’s a swing hanging from the ceiling, there are fluffy couches and fuzzy chairs. And the crepes! They’re so good! The first time we went I got a churro crepe and Matt got a berry crepe. I was devouring mine thinking it was so good, then I tasted Matt’s and it was even better. We went back a few weeks later and got paninis and they were amazing. Such a good little find. At the beginning of December we went to a movie and Santa happened to be there. He came over to the girls and started talking to them. They were kind of hesitant, but eventually talked to him. This was the first time they’ve talked to Santa in person without crying or screaming. It was so great! The girls have been in a dance class for the last few months. It’s an intro jazz/ballet/tumbling class. When they watch Descendants and other Disney musical shows, they can’t help getting up and dancing along when the songs come on, and they’re pretty good at picking up the choreography. And we’ve taken to calling Tille Tigger because she’s always bouncing. So we wanted to give them an outlet for all their energy and a chance to hone their moves a little. Last weekend they had their first recital. It was super cute. They loved getting all dressed up and wearing makeup and having their hair done. The dance studio was super intense about having everything just right. A week before the recital they had a dress rehearsal and I had to do their hair and makeup and the teachers would send a note home if anything wasn’t right. They even had notes about which makeup brands and colors to use, and they didn’t want any fly-aways in their hair or anything. I felt a little weird putting that much makeup on 5 year-olds. But the recital was so cute. Hattie and Tille did great. They knew all the steps and looked great on the stage. Making gingerbread houses. We’re fully ready for Christmas now.