The Professor and Mary Ann

For months now, Sebastian has been telling anyone who would listen that he wants "A BYU Party" for his birthday. Secretly I felt it was because we are bad BYU fans and completely indifferent to any and all athletic teams that the place holds so much allure for our kids. We didn't even have any BYU apparel or paraphernalia until this year. Despite this, we tried to pull something together. We had 12 first graders and our whole family up on campus running two teams (Team Blue and Team White) around trying to find a dozen or so clues for our digital camera scavenger hunt. After an hour of running and posing, we taught them all the lyrics to the fight song, showed them highlights of Jimmer Fredette and fed them bagel pizzas and legendary BYU mint brownies. In planning the event, the professor and I had scoured the bookstore and other local venues for BYU stuff. With the stiff prices they charge, we couldn't even afford to get them each a keychain ($7.99 for a keychain. Re...

[click to enlarge] I know I'm a little late for Halloween, but I've wanted to scan this in for nearly five months now and I just got a new printer. And last week I posted on Valentines day . . . I love this story of Sebastian's. I love the picture with it. It shows that he understands the genre, but he's not quite ready to see it through to its grisly conclusion. I love my tender boys. The three of them can be crusty and uncouth and crabby and smelly, but they all have soft and creamy centers.

I hope you'll forgive my post, but instead of rolling my eyes and feeling grumpy about this, I've decided I'd just better say something and get the word out. Last week during Sunday School our instructor read us a letter to the admissions committee at BYU. After the first sentence, which read " . . . and I am an alumni of BYU." I turned to my neighbors and we shook our heads. This is a common error around here, but there is no such thing as an alumni. Of any institution. This is because alumni is a Latin word and the endings change based on the gender and number of people you're talking about. If you are talking about one man, he is an alumnus . If you are talking about a single woman, she is an alumna . If there is a group of women only, they are alumnae and if you are speaking of a group of either all men or men and women, they are alumni . If you don't believe everything you read on the internet, you can check here or here or here . This is why pe...

This is one for my family. Joss is singing "Andy Bardeen" here, a ballad about a pirate from Scotland. It's a unique choice for a lullaby not only for lionizing a thief, but also because the hero dies in a watery grave in battle with the King of England. Yeah. Not that that is stopping me from singing it most nights to Joss. This is his deeply abridged, but legitimate version.

On Wednesday Rob held the Pinewood Derby. You can tell what sort of week it's been by the fact that neither father nor son is wearing his uniform. We began late and Will had to leave early, so he only got in a couple of heats before I ran him across town. One of the little brothers got to race his car and was over the moon about it. Unfortunately Sebastian wasn't the little brother -- he was home with strep waiting for his amoxicillin to kick in. Will had to make it back to school to perform in his class play I Never Saw Another Butterfly . It is about children in the Terezin (or Theresienstadt) concentration camp in the Czech republic and uses their actual names, dates and the poems they wrote for their secretly-held school. I cry at everything -- like Rosie O'Donnell and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle who cry at the commercial where they bring in the new refrigerator with the big bow on it; or at beer commercials, and I don't even drink beer. So I took a box of ...

Certain parties were concerned that we'd fallen off the face of the earth. We're still here, we're just not doing anything blogworthy. The professor is teaching his five courses, wrote his article, is polishing up a book review today, is still in the middle of creating the online course (he had to ask them for an extension on that, but said they were very "hakuna matata" about it) and is only fraying enough to take some fresh students down a notch or two. In addition we're planning our upcoming study abroad this summer. We've shortened it to just one term and are going to spend July in Berlin and August in Tuebingen (a university town south of Stuttgart). We're being uncharacteristically organized and we've already calendared most of it, with side trips to London, Dresden, Potsdam, Eisenach, Nuremburg and Heidelberg so far [I'm open for suggestions on things to do and see in any of these, hint hint] . I've checked out a dozen or more trave...

Few people know how many and varied are the professor's talents. He can watercolor, throw pots, is the best $#&*@! sandcastle builder anywhere, and he also writes wonderful poetry. So when he asks me what I want for Christmas/my birthday/mother's day/our anniversary I always ask him to write me a poem. This is one he wrote this year for Valentine's Day. It begins with an article called the U-bend of Life for any of you who don't live and die by the Economist (you don't know what you're missing!). Nadir Happiness, the researcher said Was ours when we were young and will, The researcher said, Be ours when we have left the low point: When we finally grow old, turning our attention from our children to ourselves, from others back to us. The researcher said. But what about those looks the white heads turning on wrinkled necks craning to drink in all of this, Our nadir They watch our children like a cat watches a bird fearful that these plovers might start and fl...

I made my first quilt top last week. I grew up with three or four quilts made by great grandmothers: a yellow pinwheel pattern, one with seafoam green leaf shapes, one made from jeans on one side and sunday suits on the other, and my favorite made out of pink, blue, and yellow flannel. We nearly loved that one into oblivion. When Rob and I got engaged, he had a quilt top that he'd commissioned from a woman in Ridgefield Utah, a whirling fan pattern which my parents' ward then quilted for us. The ladies of Oakland I had been quilting for about 25 years by then, and they knew what they were doing. Then for Christmas of 2000 my mother gave me a quilt she'd made out of the flannels from all of the nightgowns that she'd made for me and my sister each Christmas growing up. When our German friend came last semester, she was very taken with American quilts. We showed her ours and I took her to a few places to look into buying one, but we couldn't find anything. She went hom...

Maddie McFarland Actions ▼ me: girlfriend, what are you doing on the computer? what sort of homework requires gmail? Maddie: i was looking up translations on the interwebs Sent at 2:47 PM on Wednesday Maddie is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when Maddie comes online.

I told the professor that I'm not blogging right now because it would just be a litany of messes and scrapes by this one. "Today I nearly throttled my son because he shouted 'SHUT UP' at me all through the grocery store. Today I nearly killed him when he dumped out two baskets of clean laundry I'd just folded and danced on the clothes. Today I wanted to drop kick him to the state line when he ordered six things for breakfast, wouldn't eat any of them and then threw them on the floor so he could fingerpaint with the yogurt." No one would want to read it, including me. So instead I've escaped three times in the last three months and it's been heavenly. When I come home I am ready to take more of the daily punishment he dishes out. Of course he's equal parts exasperating and darling: Here he is in the swim diaper he insisted on, going through my desk. Last night he drew on some tax forms. Then he shredded them. The darling part of him is solely f...

While I was off getting my zen fix, Rob took over with the kids. Except when he was at Sundance. Then Maddie was in charge and filling the coffers for her next big purchase. On Saturday Grandpa flew in and he had a firm pinewood derby mandate. So that's what we found when we got home. Three pinewood derby vehicles primed and ready for painting. There had also been plenty of eating out and watching exciting computer clips. Grandpa also got to see Joss as an engine of chaos one morning. He would run from spot to spot, creating mayhem and leaving destruction. He'd made ten messes in 10 minutes. And that was before he climbed up on the counter and drank half a glass of Rock Star. Grandpa said "I could see that it would be fatal to try and keep up with him." Ain't dat da truth!

We spent the next two days relaxing and retreating. I read nearly an entire "O" magazine, none of my Isherwood novel, and I even colored in a coloring book. It was such a peaceful day and I felt no guilt since it had been snowing outside. This is some of the view out the window. Later we went out walking around the grounds of the Homestead and Zermatt. On Monday we got to check out the spa. It has a fitness center, steam room, dry sauna -- the works. It also had plenty of skulls and horns and some fabulous homegrown masseuses (is that the plural of masseuse?). Kim worked on my back and ground out horrendous knots from one shoulder (the one I thought was my good shoulder). I went home a new woman. It was a wonderful retreat. Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mom came up to Zermatt resort to celebrate her birthday a few weeks back. We got in Friday evening and had soup for dinner, played Blokus and stayed up late talking. Saturday morning we attended yoga with Ned. He was a different sort of instructor than I have had in the past, but he put us through a good workout. We had missed breakfast completely by then, so we skipped straight to lunch at Matty's Bistro. We made a stop by the Heber thrift store of great renown to pick up some $5 boots so I could go snowshoeing. My sister has taken up the sport, so she took us on our first hike at Wasatch State Park. It just so happens Wasatch State park was having a snowshoeing race that very day, so we got to hike on groomed trails while true masters jogged past us on the final leg of the race. They were very chill and I liked snowshoeing. I'd love to go again with my own boots on! That evening we met up with my cousins and my aunt and all went to the Homestead across the street. The food...

[Sorry, just had to do that with the picture. Sort of a Picasa imperative] Don't know if I've explained this, but Maddie's school has half an hour in the schedule called intervention/enrichment. When you need to catch up or catch on to something in a class, you attend during this half hour. If you're up on everything, you get to choose from the mini-classes offered like Suicidal Poetry, The Graphic Novel, and Ballroom. As soon as she got herself situated, Maddie became a fixture of the ballroom class. This semester, she and her papa talked the school counselor into homeschooling German and art at BYU and taking ballroom with her friends instead. Now she talks of ballroom, she rejoices in ballroom, she preaches of ballroom, she obsesses over ballroom, and she actually practices her ballroom without being nagged or even reminded. Last week she told us that she had a competition on Saturday. I couldn't quite grasp the magnitude of the situation since she'd only ...

I'm a Sundance widow this week, which means that the kids get their feet rubbed with peppermint lotion at bedtime instead of their papa's amazing and raucous Kyle & Pablo adventure stories. We're having some great conversations. Here are a couple: MA: " . . . and someday you'll all be taller than I am and you'll get married and have lots of kids! I love grandkids. Babies are so fun to hold!" Will: "You'll probably be off your rocker by that time." Then last night: Maddie: "If Cain killed Abel, how come he got the good food named after him?" MA: "What food?" Maddie: "Candy canes!" Will: "And cocaine!" Sebastian had his share over Christmas. Here's one I remember: Sebi: "I'm glad we have a small house." MA: "Uh, really our house is not that small." Sebi: "I know. I like that our house only looks small on the outside and inside it's big. Because if you have ...

Joss was at the height of his energy and powers this Christmas season. He love love LOVED all the outdoor lights and called them "Crimmas". Each evening he'd beg his papa to take him outside for a bike ride to look at Crimmas. He yanked all of the garlands and ornaments off both trees, though I suppose that it goes without saying this third time around. He managed to break off a few branches in the front of our living room tree as well. We thought that we'd hung all of the fragile ornaments up high enough, but one of Joss's siblings taught him to throw small blocks at the tree. We lost two of our eggs from Prague and the tail of a glass bird that way :( The man threw himself into learning all of the new Crimmas tunes. He liked "Fa la la" and "We Wish You a Merry Crimmas" (even the "What the heck is figgy pudding?" verse that the Macs sing -- the Professor is so proud). He loved "Crosty the Snowman" and we had to watch that v...

We agreed with our buddies in the the Isaak family that we would tone things down this year and shop for gag gifts at thrift stores. We gave them a Michael Jackson jukebox ornament that lets you moonwalk around the Christmas tree to "Startin' Sumpthin" and a Soul version of a trivia game. They, in true Isaak fashion, poured their whole hearts and souls into the assignment. After they found bathrobes and other strange fuzzy fabrics at the thrift store (including a "Grand Ole Opry" sweatshirt), the amazing K. fashioned the finds into huge, comfy "Ugly Dolls" for all of the McFarland Kids. The McKids promptly named them John, Paul, George and Ringo (although they all claim that their own pet is named Ringo, and the others are Paul and John and George). Thanks Isaaks, for the fab four new family members! Even as I type, the children are nestled all snug in their beds, with fuzzy bright Ugly Dolls under their heads! Actually, Fluffy must be missing the Ch...

In a little red box, Rob and my parents surprised me with a getaway the day after Christmas to Salt Lake. It was perfect! We took off right after church on Sunday and checked in at the downtown Marriott. We laced up our walking shoes and took off to see the lights. We walked through the Gallivan Center and watched the ice skaters, visited Temple Square and heard the sister missionaries singing carols, then hiked the Conference Center as high as we could go. From there we wandered up into the Avenues, by way of the McCune Mansion, City Creek Park, 217 B St and on and on until we came to the Smiths, where we ran into friends and family and decided to buy dinner. Then we walked back to the hotel past the Governor's mansion and South Temple. By the time we got back it was cold slippery and I was starving. After we ate dinner in our room, we headed down to the hot tub and watched the frozen rink through the steamy windows. The next morning we tried Lamb's Grill Cafe for breakfast...

After lounging around the warm house all day, we jumped into the car and headed up to Park City for a sleigh ride. It was fun to get out and see a different crowd -- the hardcore skiing/snowboarding bunch for whom Christmas is all about the snow. Grandpa, MA and Joss. I think Joss looks like some sort of crazed Russian royalty in his hat. It was meant for someone larger than he, but he loves it, so it's become his signature piece. Our horses, Cap & Nick. We didn't discuss Nick's size, since he was the runt here, but Cap is seventeen hands high. These were some monstrous beasts, snorting and steaming up the hill with all of us in tow. The whole crowd on our two horse open sleigh. Our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy cozy are we.... John, our driver, who grew up in the area and used to mine here in Park City. The Professor thought he was the best part of the ride--he used to work in a silver mine here, and knew the real, old, 'ungentirfied' Park City before...