Molly at nine months. Avery wore that dress exactly ten years ago.

My Dad says (in a letter to my brother on his mission in Texas) that Molly isn’t as expressive as her cousin Eliza (my other brother’s first daughter), who isn’t as mobile as Molly. Tom has been a bit miffed ever since that letter (which I think is the cutest thing — Tom feeling a bit miffed on his daughter’s behalf. “Too bad she isn’t very expressive” he smirks as he tickles her into fits of laughter.) This convinces me of the perils of comparison. I try really hard not to compare my daughters (especially in their hearing). But I compare myself to other women all day long, mostly in my head. And it’s probably just as fraught.

Avery at six months at Tracey's reception. Those cheeks! Those arms! Mom's black eye!

My good friend Tara and her son are spending the weekend with us. Tara drove up from Arizona to attend classes from the very talented designer of my header, Alma Loveland, and to take in the BYU Homecoming football game. (It’s unfair that basketball doesn’t get homecoming festivities, isn’t it?) (And what about badminton?)

Tara scored a couple extra tickets to the game, and since we are such good friends, she didn’t bother to ask if I would like to go. (We decided last night the only way I’d voluntarily sit through a football game were if Brad Pitt — circa Legends of the Fall and Twelve Monkeys — held my hand).

So she invited Tom and Callie to go. Callie is the same age as her son, and it’s her birthday tomorrow (turning 6!) and Callie is also the only one of our girls to express an interest in team sports. (She scored her first goal in the soccer game last week!) Plus, Avery went to a Jazz game with Tom last year.

This morning Callie told me she didn’t want to go anymore; she wanted Avery to take her ticket.

Why?

“Avery says she’ll give me a birthday present if I let her go to the game.”

We told Avery that was unacceptable.

The girls did their breakfast dish chores and cleaned their rooms. I have lowered my expectations on the Saturday Morning Chores; today it was enough that I only had to ask Lucy five times (six would’ve necessitated some Very Bad Language) to pick up the Legos.

Avery vacuumed her room and Callie’s. I praised her extensively. Tom said, “Avery is being really helpful now; she was having a bad attitude earlier, but something’s changed, and she’s really working hard.”

Avery was brushing her hair in the bathroom and said Dad would find out why she was so changed soon enough.

Over lunch, Callie earnestly explained how she didn’t want to go, Avery had convinced her it would be boring.

(I couldn’t agree more, of course, but that wasn’t the point.)

Tom pointed out that if Avery really thought that she wouldn’t want to go. This level of psychology was a little sophisticated for our sweet, guileless almost-six-year old to grasp.

Callie went. Avery cried.

Then I started Wizards of Waverly Place on Netflix and told Avery she could watch as long as she held the baby.

I took a two-hour nap, showered, folded laundry, ate cookies. Avery agreed that nine episodes of tween hilarity were better than a football game.

Win, Win, and Win.

Callie usually ends up holding Molly in the koala position:

A still shot could never do justice to the way Lucy interacts with baby Molly, but here she is sharing her (and the other girls’) toys:

Right after this she changed that full diaper. I knew there was a reason I had a third child!

When she is enthusiastic about getting her chores done, she can pied piper those kids into racing to see who can finish first. All this without a single Love and Logic course. Is that just the prerogative of the first child? I remember my mom asking me to set a good example and to get my younger siblings to do things on Saturday mornings. Instead I hid in the bathroom and read (actually, that sounds really familiar, Sally).

But I still have some wisdom to impart, bit by bit as she’s old enough to handle it:

#1 Always check a new box or bag of groceries or household items carefully, so you don’t open the wrong end or ruin the zipper on the easy-reclosable opening. I demonstrate this for her on a regular basis, just for emphasis, because it’s tragic when you open a 2-pound bag of Twizzlers right UNDER the zipper.

#2 Always check your fountain drink before leaving a drive-through or gas station. There’s nothing worse than driving away with a slightly bitter soda that needed the syrup bag replaced. This one I haven’t been able to teach from my own actions; it’s one of those mistakes you only make once in life, so dire are the results. But when she got her Sprite from Costco last week, it was a teachable moment right there in the parking lot.

I do teach her important stuff, like the meaning of sex, or why we don’t drink alcohol (Hint: it’s not in the 10 Commandments, like she was trying to tell Susan), but sometimes, though she inherited a mean voice to rival my own (maybe THAT’s how she got the younger girls to keep out of her room), she seems to intuit how to do important things. (And I can’t tell you how I cringe whenever I hear that voice coming out of her mouth.)

Last night there was only a small section of pie left. Tom had already had some, and Spot hadn’t come downstairs for scripture time, or finished her dinner (which was a friendly peanut butter and jam sandwich, I might add). So I divided the rest between Sally, Susan, and myself. Spot started crying, the broken-heart crying, not the tantrum-crying (which is much easier to ignore). I held her in my lap and rubbed her back with one hand as I shoveled in pie with the other, telling her I was sorry she’d made the choice to not listen to scriptures and not eat her dinner.

Sally went to the cupboard, got a plate out, and cut off the larger half of her piece for Spot.

Maybe that’s why they welcome her like banshees every afternoon, and why Susan will hole up in her room late at night doing the reading lesson I futilely cajoled her about earlier. Even though it bugs me when people say their kids teach them so much, I’d like to have some of that mystique she weaves around them effortlessly, magically, but somehow I don’t think a mother is ever going to be as idol-worthy as a big sister.

Mr. Bennet has been busy with work and church and this and that, and preschool has been cancelled, so I have been not only primary caregiver, but sometimes the only not-going-through-premature-pubescent-hormonal-surges person it seems.

Some of the moments have looked like a scene from the fake magazine stories in Christmas in Connecticut. This afternoon I watched three girls, my tall Sally, my cheeky Susan, my gleeful Spot, watch the fat flakes of snow, Sally teaching Susan and Spot to tilt back and catch the first flurries on their tongues. Then we huddled in my bed to read our way through our new library haul.

Forget wine and song and thee. I relish a good book, a soft bed, warm covers, and, well — then I did sing a couple Christmas songs from the book Susan chose. They got all quiet when I couldn’t make it through I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day without crying.

It was beautiful. What a miracle! These fruit from my loin who love words and reading and snuggling and each other. What joy!

And then someone kicked someone else and someone hogged a blanket and someone looked at her sister and someone whined why does everybody hate me?

And I said a bad word. (Or two.)

But hours later they unloaded the dishwasher and set the table and showed their father eagerly their work. And we ate the food I made from scratch around our table where everyone has a place (except the cat, who gets sprayed with water at least once each meal), and I told them all (especially their father who watched some football and took a nap earlier) to clean up that well-used kitchen double-quick and leave me to write this post in my bedroom, which has a lock on the door and a now-empty bed.

I got a new camera for the unique purpose of taking cute photos of my kids (and because Best Buy had no-interest financing and Mr. Bennet still felt bad about the belated Valentine’s Day camera I returned last February.) In August Tara and I road-tripped to San Francisco by way of Vegas (not a very direct route, if you’re wondering), where I took a crash course in real photography from Nicole Hill. And what I learned there is that I really don’t want to take photos like Nicole, I want to be Nicole.

But I needed something a little more long-term to cement the aperture and ISO thing, so I started a community ed photo class last night, where I was shocked to see the room full of other thirty-something women with brand-new DSLR cameras who want to take cute photos of their kids.

For some reason my love of technology is not really translating to a desire to memorize the f-stop thirds and shutter-speed intervals, so I worry that our “investment” will pay off sometime in 2028, when Sally makes do with a fuzzy image for her wedding announcement.

But I can’t complain about the quality of the models I have to work with here. Looking at them through a nice lens is about as forgiving of their naturally irritating tics as watching them in sleep.

(Let’s also call these our back-to-school shots, since that actual morning I put the camera on automatic by pointing the arrow at the big A which turns out to be “aperture-priority” or some such nonsense and those didn’t turn out so well. I know Nicole told us to never set our cameras to automatic again, but it turns out I have a latent talent for disregarding instruction.It hardly needs saying that these have not been retouched, as the only thing I hate more than WordPress (which I love! keep working for me, baby!) is Photoshop.)

Mr. Bennet and I can both roll our tongues, so Sally’s genetic virtuosity has not caused any problems.

Susan got her eyes from my mother, who has one brown eye and one green eye (both with gold-ish undertones).

Spot tells me I can only eat her up “a little bit.”

I took out Sally’s stitches right after this picture. They’d scabbed over a bit, so a couple of them I had to finish pulling out while she slept that night, after coating the area in triple antibiotic ointment and promising Heavenly Father I’d never sin again as long as I didn’t have to admit to the InstaCare that I’d tried a bit of homedoctoring.

When we were shopping for backpacks last month, Susan pleaded for a pony play kit similar to one her cousin has. I conceded that her cousins do have lots of pretty shiny toys, then finally in a fit of frustration I said that their daddy doesn’t live with them so sometimes he gets them expensive presents to play with, and wouldn’t she rather have her daddy around all the time, even if it means not having all the latest toys? And Susan said, no, she’d rather her daddy stayed away because she would really like to have that pony stable set.

Spot still has Duane Syndrome.

When we drop Susan off for preschool two days a week, Spot is disconsolate. Once she’s home, the Jane Austen/Louisa May Alcott/Rainbow Valley rejoicing in sisterly affection lasts until Spot bites or Susan hits. Reminds me of the good old days when I used to kick Marcy under the covers at night. Now I kick Mr. Bennet every so often, but it’s not quite the same.

So I don’t really play with my kids. This is, in fact, why I had more than one kid, so that they can play with each other. You won’t find any cute posts here about me running through the sprinklers with them or playing Barbies or suffering through Candyland 500 times (though we do break out Old Maid on Monday nights. Sometimes).

But I am good at reading to them and, more than anything, I like to talk to them.

Today at lunch Susan and Spot were fighting. That is, Spot said Susan was fighting, and Susan rejected Spot’s overtures to introduce their plastic Ikea forks to each other (“Hello, my name is Sparkle Fork, what’s your name?). I suggested they not sit right next to each other at the kitchen island, but for some inexplicable reason, even when Susan expresses utter loathing, Spot prefers to be right next to her big sister.

I asked if they needed time-outs, and Susan said we should send Spot to timeout in Greenland because it’s really cold there. I wondered if she’d learned about Greenland this morning at her last day of preschool, but Susan reminded me of the evenings we spent at Grandma’s house this past winter, when she watched an old vhs copy of The Princess Bride multiple times. I didn’t watch with them, though I did wonder what a four-year-old found so fascinating about Fred Savage. Susan said that Sally watched with her once and explained, during the scene where Vizzini threatens Fezzik, that Greenland is a place where it snows all the time.

Today when I picked Susan up from school, her teacher said that I must be the best mom (oh, ye-deluded-but-don’t-stop-now flatterer) because Susan is always talking about how awesome it is to be the middlest child. Spot may be the littlest and Sally may be the biggest, but Susan is the middlest.

I’d feel bad about liking that scene, but my kids insist they love the part in Bambi where his mother dies and that they don’t think the part in Dumbo where Mrs. Jumbo is in solitary confinement and sticks her trunk out to cuddle her baby is very sad at all, either. Insensitive clods.

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Today we took the kids to the botanical gardens, one of my favorite places. Dick and I have been to botanical gardens all over — DC, Brooklyn, on an island in the Nile near Aswan, Butchart Gardens in Victoria — and the gardens in Utah (Red Butte and Thanksgiving Point) are not an embarrassment to our state. I think public gardens in general are a good sign for civilization. Maybe it’s just that we wish we worked with our hands more, or maybe it’s that a people who will dedicate time, money, and effort to something that is merely ornamental (yet ornamental to all the senses, and the spirit), are not irredeemably consumed with plastic toys and electronic gizmos.

(I don’t categorize the Internet under “unnatural electronic gizmos.” Surely if the Good Lord had wanted us to surf the waters of the great deep instead of the world wide web, He wouldn’t have invented roller skates.)

+++

Susan scraped her knee on the sidewalk outside the gardens. She wailed and carried on, tensing her body from any casual contact with the offended limb. She demanded a bandaid, which I had none. We showed our pass and made the required bathroom stop and passed out hats, all to the accompaniment of Susan’s wretched cries.

At the top of the hill overlooking the gardens, the crying suddenly ceased. I looked back and saw that Sally had taken the bandaid from her own knee (applied there myself not forty minutes earlier after an unfortunate bicycle incident) and cured Susan’s bleeding knee and bruised feelings.

+++

It is heaven to spend a couple hours walking among flowers with minimal whining about tired legs and only occasional demands for peanut butter sustenance — and no stroller! Why didn’t we get older kids sooner?

They’re not that old, of course. Spot’s newly-learned potty-training requires plentiful opportunities to practice, so she and I visited every bathroom in the place. At the third bathroom she showed me a wad of gum: “Look Mommy, I got some gum,” she said, and I recoiled. “You didn’t pick that up off the [gross, dirty, bathroom, cement] floor, did you?”

Oh, no, she assured me: “It was Sally’s.”

I don’t know Dick. What if their frustrated mother snaps the fifth time she hears “But I’m hungry” and starts pulling out toenails with a pair of rusty pliers?

Of course, being soft-hearted is not the worst quality in a man with three daughters. However, besides being a fine father, a delectable lover, my best friend, and something of a minor blogebrity in his technical writing niche, Dick is also a contender for the title of Mr. … Oblivious. I know, ladies. Your husband is probably a contender too. What man isn’t?

But let me tell you why Dick is in the finals this week.

On Sunday night I was whipped. I spoke in church that morning (post in the hopper, about ten down), and was tired and just not feeling very well (not pregnant, not yet). Dick put the kids down and was working on the computer upstairs in the loft outside their rooms while I read a book on the couch downstairs, and moaned occasionally.

We have always been very serious about bedtime and naptime, and our children know this. But whenever a new milestone hits, it seems we go through a couple weeks of reminding them just how serious we really are. Last week Spot learned how to climb out of her crib — at two and a half, she was the youngest to ever learn this most alarming skill. Before this, Susan had no incentive to leave her (well-lit) (filled-with-books-and-toys) bedroom because the only other free person, Sally, was invariably buried in a Trixie Belden book and completely uninterested in playing toys.

Spot, though. Ahh, Spot. She and Susan cannot get enough of each other during the day, what with the playing for twelve hours straight and the nonsensical screaming and the loving each other one minute and wanting to steal each other’s boyfriend on purpose the next. When I have discovered them playing together in Susan’s room after she has goaded Spot into escaping her crib, the wailing as I tear Spot from the bosom of her loving sister languishing from the consumption would make Louisa May Alcott swoon.

So on Sunday night, I yelled up a few times, helpfully, that Dick should lock the girls in their rooms. He declined. They all fell asleep eventually, and so did Dick. I dragged myself upstairs and stopped short at the sight of several brown curls lying on the floor of the master bathroom. And were those … straight blondish-red strands on the tiles?

Yes, yes they were — not to be confused, of course, with the short brown clippings in the sink from my latest go at my do-it-yourself ‘do. Just as a reminder, here is how my girls looked before the Great Hair Butchering of ’09:

A great abundance of hair does not run in our family. We have been growing out Spot’s bangs for a year now, and she and Susan are both blessed to have much more hair than Sally did at those ages. Susan’s even has some body for Medusa’s sake. But while we may never look this good, things could always be worse. Right?

Right:

Susan says that Spot just kept cutting more and more and more. “She doesn’t want to grow her bangs out anymore, Mommy,” says Susan. And Susan, who the day before chose to grow her bangs out (meaning she has to wear pigtails for a year) over getting them cut again, chose to grow them out, so she merely cut the side of her hair:

The moral of the story is, of course: Never trust a Sicilian when death is on the line. Also, lock up your scissors, lock up your wife, lock up your daughters and run for your life.

I trimmed their hair up a bit, but maybe I should’ve just left it long with the bald patches:

It’s amazing how little kids can get a horse’s butt of a haircut and still be criminally adorable. I’d have to shave Spot’s hair with a number 2 guard to get it even. I might still do that. Because I am the m-0-m.

Susan has a pixie face and didn’t scalp herself, so she’s still cute. Just more pixie-ish, and her scar is visible, but I think that lends an air of mystery, don’t you?

I didn’t, because I couldn’t, get mad at the girls. Besides the fact that a bad hair month (or five) doesn’t compete with real tragedy, I have shaved my own head once or twice, and not at the innocent age of two-and-a-half or four-and-a-half.

I was too mean to Dick about this. I’m sorry, Dick. (I’m glad you’ve come around on the locking-them-in-their-bedrooms issue.)

As much as I love Susan and Spot’s basic innocence, I love when my daughters conspire together. I hope they never think of sneaking out together to borrow the car, because it might be hard to work up the necessary ire, so long as they are intending to go somewhere together. I also love that they are completely oblivious to any alteration in their looks. They think they are still beautiful, and they spend no time in front of the mirror. How do they know they’re still beautiful if they don’t spend any time in front of the mirror?

Finally, I cannot get mad at Spot for anything right now, because she is potty-trained. Here is what I know about potty-training after three kids: A) Wait till the kid is ready and excited about it. B) Find out what they want and give it to them as a reward. C) Go overboard on the praise; skip the criticism. For Spot it took princess panties and gumballs.

And sisters who are as maniacally enthusiastic about her new trick as I am:

Spot, Susan, Cousin 1, Cousin 2, Cousin 3, Sally

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Because if she weren’t the cutest thing ever, I might be a little bit upset that she got the empty microwave popcorn bag out of the trash, inserted her head and, in a quest to capture every last bit of trans-fat, yellow no. 7 goodness, smeared it all over her hair, face, and clothes.

Dick is ready (I mean ready) for another baby. I’m not feeling the baby hunger at all. How could I, when I have these cheeks and these eyes and those lips giving slobbery kisses and insisting that she’s “not a Chah-lie, I’m a LOU-SEEY.” (We call her “Charlie” whenever her sisters complain about her, usually when they’re all crammed in the back of the minivan, which is unfortunately not separated from the driver’s seat by soundproof glass.)

Spot (“I’m not a Spo-ot, I’m a LOU-SEEY”) is a good baby, except that she wakes up much earlier than Sally and Susan ever did. Like 6:30 am in the morning early. She sits up in her crib, in the room she shares with Sally, and even though the railing of her crib is in the lowered position, she calls, “Sally, get me out, Saaaaallyyyy.”

Sometimes, if we’ve had a late night, I rush down the hall to get her before she wakes up her sister who needs to be alert for second grade, but most mornings I’m sure that the reason I had more than one kid is so the eight-year old can herd her sisters downstairs and negotiate the DVR.

Hmm, maybe we could have another kid — Sally’s probably old enough to start changing diapers. And a fourth kid would probably be just as cute as the other ones. Probably.

Sally and Susan have always been sleep contortionists. Now Spot’s old enough to join their convoluted contretemps, though why they’d choose her crib to sleep in is beyond me.

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Someone made me mad at church today. Not an uncommon occurrence, though usually I just feel sympathy for the mis-opinionated. Unlike Giselle in Enchanted, I easily recognize and feel anger, and in the past couple of weeks I’ve felt enough anger for . . . well, for myself and for someone who hasn’t felt much anger for herself.

I bore my testimony (“testified”) today, and I talked about agency (“free will”) and about how my sister is experiencing a trial worse than any trial I ever imagined she or I would go through. I wasn’t trying to be melodramatic; I wanted to express my own hurt and my admiration for her reaction to this trial. Instead of wallowing in anger and destroying things (my natural inclination), my sister has responded by reading the scriptures more, praying more, and spending time with her kids and our family.

Maybe it sounded like I would be mad at God if something like this happened to me. That’s not what I meant; I’d be angry at someone whose clothing I could shred and valued possessions I could take a baseball bat to.

A few speakers after me, a prosperous-looking, attractive young man got up and did his spiel. He said we shouldn’t get mad at our trials, and shouldn’t even be surprised by them. They are, after all, what we signed up for in coming to this earth. We knew we’d be tried and tested, tempted and tribulated. Embrace the trial! Turn to God and all will be well!

Dude! Did he think I was talking about a hangnail that’s giving her some trouble?

If one believes in a literal resurrection, and in the atonement’s power to cleanse sin, then the worst possible thing to ever happen to someone is the refusal to repent (or to be affected by someone who refuses to repent). This is not to diminish the immense pain that accompanies death or miscarriage or disease, but just to say that they all CAN be fixed, eventually. If I refuse to repent, however, that can’t be fixed.

And, for those whose religious convictions are different, surely you would agree that to break one’s solemn promises, to refuse to even try to honor one’s vows and covenants, is pretty low. And that the people affected by such broken promises are facing real devastation.

The funniest thing about that young man’s testimony was that he was so sure of these things that he has learned through “my many years of experience.” Right. Because he’s 24 and single and childless and looks like he has suffered. Oh, how he has suffered.

My mom said that maybe we shouldn’t be letting our daughters watch these Disney princess fairy tales all the time. Because what are they learning? Happily ever after and prince charming and animals coming to help you with the housework.

I’d agree with her, and I did introduce my sisters and mom to Sara Bareilles’ Fairytale, which gets more clever every time I hear it. BUT, happily ever after, that people should get married and stay married, and that families are meant to be together forever is what we believe in. It’s not just a Disney movie, it’s what we believe.

I wish I could take from her. I wish I could take her pain and her hurt, her confusion and her frustration. I wish I could take it all and beat it and  force it away where it could never escape.

Mary was always the good one. The quiet one, the shy one. She cried when she went to kindergarten, but was proud to show off her tube of “lipstick.” Her teachers all asked, Are you sure you’re Jane’s sister? Jane’s so . . . so loud.

Mary still plays the piano; no one has to force her to practice. I gave it up as soon as my parents stopped paying for lessons. Mary could pretend she was Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. I always had to be Snow White, and back then that made me mad. Now her blonde hair is much darker, and it’s our daughters who argue over who gets to be Ariel and who has to be the Mean Queen.

She was the seashell when I was the wasp. When we started to grow up, she wrote me letters telling me to come back to the family, come back to church, start saying my prayers, and shape up. She told me she loved me. I thought she meant it even if I didn’t come back.

Now we’re mostly grown up. I didn’t know this before, but I was hoping we would have quite a bit more time to keep growing up. Time to learn to cook (but not to sew) and to learn patience and to figure out how to be good women, good daughters, good mothers, good sisters.

Now it’s too late and we have to grow up. I don’t want to. I don’t want my sister to have to grow up all the way. It’s not fair. That cracks me up when I tell Sally or Susan, Sorry, life’s not fair. I laugh. Haha. Life’s not fair, you don’t get another sucker or get to watch a movie or get to stay up till midnight. LIFE’S NOT FAIR.

It’s much worse to realize, when you should be grown up, that, guess what? It really, really isn’t fair.

If I could make it fair or nice or fun or happy, I would, even if I had to give her a kidney. In fact, if a kidney would make it better, I’d get the knife (and the laughing gas) myself.

Until I completely lose it (quite common), and Dick takes over. Though it is annoying when he gets mad at me for swearing in front of the kids. Doesn’t he know that I know it’s bad? Duh.

Sally also yells at her sister sometimes. Usually not Spot; even Sally realizes that Spot is guileless and innocent. But Susan, well, she’s an imp. She messes up the OCD piles of books and babies and barbies that Sally has constructed. She leaves her clothes all over the floor, and then she starts with the licking and kicking and pulling hair, usually at bedtime. And Sally, my sweet firstborn who is twice as old and twice as tall, runs to mom to complain. Hit her back, I say. But for once I’m glad to not be obeyed.

My sister and I shared the double pineapple bed, named for the pineapple bedknobs (as in Bedknobs and Broomsticks) when we were young. I remember good times like when we gathered all the extra quilts in the house and piled them on the bed. Don’t remember if that was inspired by The Princess and the Pea or not, but I do remember the covers were so heavy. We felt like royalty.

But mostly I remember lying there and kicking her, and kicking and kicking and kicking. She didn’t remember this a couple weeks ago. She does remember the time I made her keep quiet all night about her arm being hurt after we were jumping off the bunkbed. It was broken, of course.

Sally and Susan share a room, but not a bed. Sally has taken to arranging the furniture lately. She makes signs: My Library, Guest Bed (in the closet), and Tramplen (her bed — notice she didn’t ask us how to spell that one). And Susan torments her something fierce at bedtime while we sit in the living room and pretend horrific screamings aren’t happpening in the back.

When we finally toddle off to bed after gluttonous viewing of old Seinfeld re-runs, we find them, like Ginger and the new kitten, together. Because a cardboard box, or a toddler bed that’s really too small for either of them, is just not as good without your favorite sister.

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Thanks to Angela in NYC for sending this book to Sally before Susan’s arrival. It’s a bit subtle (I mean for a preschooler), but now it’s Susan’s favorite book, even though it obviously hasn’t stopped her from finding somewhere to sharpen her claws.