Here’s a short clip of Evie’s performance from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Prepare to die from cuteness:
Evie Update
3 Performances
The kids have recently treated us to 3 fairly major performances:
- Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer – Evie recently completed a second year of “acting camp”. This year the play was, inexplicably, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Nothing says summer camp like Santa Claus! Last year, Evie auditioned with “Little Girls” and got Ursula the Sea Witch. This year, she performed “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and got Hermey, the elf who wants to be a dentist.
She killed it, in typical Evie fashion. As with last year, she nailed all of her lines with feeling, and mouthed everyone else’s lines. She also got more “points” for the week than anybody else at summer camp. I’ll tell you one thing: after carpooling three kids to this camp all week, I’m happy for the break from listening to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “We are Santa’s Elves”. - Vacation Bible School – In the meantime, Ollie was off at vacation bible school, which culminated in a performance of various songs in church on Sunday. Ollie is not traditionally the “performer” in the family (see above), and I was very curious about how he’d do at such a thing without his sister around (though we did basically know every kid that was there). He did a pretty good job. He didn’t sing, per say, but he was obviously trying very hard with the motions and everything. I’m not sure he even noticed he was up in front of a crowd.
- Evie’s Birthday Performance – But the very best performance of all was Evie’s birthday performance. Evie wanted to have some kind of performance to put on during her family birthday party, so she wrote and directed something for her and Oliver. There were original songs, vaudevillian routines, and lots and lots of jumping on the bed. The kids took it very seriously, and practiced for weeks. Evie even put colored tape “marks” on the bed for them to hit during the show. The whole thing went off without a hitch, and I was so proud of them for doing such a good job all on their own. My favorite part is when Ollie sings, “Happy birthday to you!” and Evie says, “Who me?” and Ollie replies, “Yes you!” The birth of a comedy duo.
Hooray for Birthdays!
Today is Evie’s birthday, and, I don’t know, it just seems like a big one.
I think it’s because she’s getting ready to start 1st grade. That just seems so old. She really isn’t a baby anymore.
Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish Evie from a teenager. However, she can be so helpful when she wants to be, and it’s so nice to be able to give her a bit of a longer leash. I can trust her to be out of my eyesight. She’s almost TOO helpful when it comes to her brother, jumping to do anything for him that he doesn’t want to do, to the point that he’s quite used to getting her to do his chores for him. (Don’t worry, they still fight plenty too!)
Evie has *big* plans for her birthday. The closer we got, the more elaborate they became. Every single detail of her day is planned out, from what we will eat, to what presents she’s going to receive from whom, to what we will do and when. It started relatively simple: “…and then I will come upstairs in my pajamas, and you guys will give me a present which will be an outfit for me to wear…”, but it’s gotten more elaborate from there. The last I heard was that she wanted me to wake her up by playing happy birthday on the accordion, after which she would take the keyboard into each guest’s bedroom to awaken them in turn by playing happy birthday.
We have to keep reminding her it’s going to be her birthday, not her coronation.
I have to admit that I’m so thrilled that Evie has turned into quite the bookworm. It just reminds me so much of myself when I was a kid, that I can’t help but feel a little…proud? Honored? Excited on her behalf for all of the wonderful books she’s yet to discover? I don’t know. But when she stays up reading late into the night, I can’t help but get a smile on my face.
Happy birthday sweetheart. I love you more than the whole, wide world.
Evie and the “Bee”
Evie and I were swimming in the pool (or rather I was swimming and she was receiving a “dolphin-back ride”), when I heard something large buzzing around my head.
“Is there something buzzing around us?” I asked Evie. “I can’t see it.” “Yeah,” she said, “A big bee.”
I started swimming away from the corner of the pool, but it’s hard to move very fast with a kid hugging your windpipe like it’s her favorite teddy.
“Is it still around us?” I asked, not hearing it anymore. With Spock-like calmness she replied, “It’s on my head. It’s stinging me.”
Just about then I reached a shallow enough part of the pool where I could stand up. I took her off my back and she was as calm and still as could be. Later she told me, “I was thinking, it’s stinging me. Is this what stinging feels like? Why does everybody make such a fuss about it?”
Fortunately for her, I discovered it was not actually a bee on her head. Unfortunately for her, it was a horsefly the size of a silver dollar, and it was positively burrowing into her skull.
I’m sure that a bee sting would have been worse, but there is something absolutely, revoltingly, primally, abhorrent about seeing a giant insect burrowing into your daughter. I shudder even to remember it now. My first reaction was just to pull her under water (which I luckily didn’t do, because I’m quite sure she would take giant biting insects over a surprise dunk in the pool any day of the week), or just get her away from that thing as fast as humanly possible. I actually don’t even remember what I did, maybe flicked it off? And then ran in the other direction? I don’t know.
By the time I got her safely to the shallow end, there was a lot of blood. I quite brilliantly said, “Ohmygoshthere’salotofblood!” It was only at this point that she started to cry.
Now obviously, at the end of the day, all was well. However, as I reflected back on the whole thing I was completely floored by how brave she had been. Thinking that a bee was stinging her repeatedly in the head, she absolutely did what we’ve always told her to do: she stayed still and calm, trusting that startling it would only make things worse. She didn’t panic, she kept her head, and if only it *had* been a bee, she probably would have been fine. Keeping your head in a crisis is a fine trait to have, it’s just unfortunate that it was a horsefly intent on FEASTING ON THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT.
Someone wise once said, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Clearly, this one’s jedi training is coming along smashingly.
By God, They Hatched!
Remember last summer, when Evie was obsessed with a couple of caterpillars she caught in the garden?
She had been catching butterflies all summer, but they mostly just fanned their wings a lot and then died. It wasn’t until she got the caterpillars when things really got interesting. Instead of just sitting there, they would crawl around and actually do things (by which I mean, poop. Oh boy, the hours that we’d while away, just watching those caterpillars poop!). Evie had to actually take care of them like pets; cleaning the cage, collecting fresh food for them to eat, etc.
Despite all of her hard work, I never expected them to form chrysalises. It was like a science project just magically appeared before our eyes. Totally rewarded all the work she put into it.
You can imagine our disappointment when we learned they wouldn’t emerge until next spring. It seemed impossible that we could keep these things healthy and hearty through an entire winter. Since they’re used to wintering outdoors, we had to keep them outdoors, which meant Evie’s little bug box has been sitting on our back porch this entire time. It’s been periodically buried in snow, kicked, flooded with rainwater, squeezed by a 3 year old, upended, kicked, frozen by -30 degree windchills, squeezed by a 4 year old, kicked, put back together upside down…just about anything that could happen to these chrysalises, did happen to them.
There was absolutely NO. WAY. any living thing could have survived it.
We were so absolutely sure these things were dead 5 times over. After spring came and went, we had finally convinced Evie that it wasn’t happening. However, we just kind of left them sitting out there; they had been there so long, they are just part of the scenery these days.
9 months she cared for those things, shepherding them through their entire life cycle. And we were there to watch it take it’s first, tentative flight.
Be free, you beautiful Eastern Black Swallowtail! Be free and have babies of your own, so that generation upon generation of future Swallowtails can be captured and summarily starved to death and dumped on our back porch by the most vicious predator known to butterflies.
Shane Halbach 