Currently our read-aloud book is Radiant by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. This morning we read the part where the two sisters are pooling their money to buy a Beatles album but are still coming up short, so they appeal to their brother to loan them fifty cents. He agrees to this—with interest. 

"Oooh! What's the interest?" Alexander asked.

"Do you mean how much interest? Or what is interest?" I asked.

"Ummmm..."

"Okay, so you mean what is interest..." 

"Sure."

During the April 2025 General Conference, I did some "visible mending" on a pair of Alexander's pants. I actually turned a hopelessly ruined pair of pants into a pair of shorts and used some of the cut-off part to make patches for a less-ruined pair of pants. 

You can see how awful the ruined pants were at his seventh birthday celebration (2024):

I wasn't sure Alexander would like my handiwork, but he did! He dubbed them his Death Star Pants and wore them a lot, though it took me a while to locate any pictures of him wearing them...first I found many pictures of him wearing his cutoffs.

Here he is wearing the cutoffs at Rachel's graduation:

We did, in fact, make it outside to play in the rain. 

Alexander and Zoë got up at 6:30 this morning and finished all their (individual) school work by 10:00 this morning, so they were free to go outside and play. Benjamin slept in a bit so he had to do math hour.

Sometimes we have issues with...accountability...at our house. 

But I was talking to my friend Bekah in class on Tuesday and she mentioned that the teacher she's observing has this, like, surveillance screen on their computer where they can see the screen of every child in the classroom at once to know whether they are on the appropriate screen or not. And I was like, "Ummm...what program is this, precisely??" 

She told me, but it is not priced for private use. It's more of a thing a school district buys. 

But I was telling Andrew about this and so he, of course, came up with a solution—screen-casting through Discord! Apparently a lot of people do this for study groups and things, just for an accountability measure. And it seems to work for a lot of people. So Andrew made a channel where the children can stream their screens and I can see them all at the same time. That way I can easily see whether they're working on their math lesson (or whatever) or whether they're watching a YouTube video (or whatever).

And because the kids don't know whether or not I'm watching...they act as if I'm always watching.

The potential of being watched is motivation enough. 

Andrew initially called the channel "Panopticon" and we explained to the children a bit about what that was (some of them had listened to a 99% Invisible segment on Panopticon so they already knew about it), but he was like, "We can rename the channel to be less threatening...like "study hall" or something instead of the foucauldian panopticon. School-time to match gaming-time..."

So he changed the name to boring ol' "school-time" and there was quite an uproar about that.

It's back to Panopticon. 

Here's a shot of Benjamin looking at his own screen through his own screen through his own screen through his own screen through his own screen...

Screen-ception

It's a wet day today. Our gardening co-op is cancelled because it's simply too wet to be out in the garden. Phoebe would like to go outside to play. 

"Please can we go out and play in the rain?" she begs. "We won't get struck by lightning! We promise!"

We've only just come in from walking the neighbour's dog. 

We were talking about how to calculate one's h-index the other day in my post qual class—ironic because the very idea of measuring and tracking one's productivity in that manner seems rather against everything poststructuralism stands for. But, nonetheless, that's what we were talking about. 

In the winter when it's especially chilly, you can often find the cat sitting under the IKEA workbench on one of the only two heater vents situated on the floor in our house. Here she is earlier in the month when we were experiencing all our little ice storms:

It finally snowed in Utah. They have been having such a dry year!

We frequently bring up and laugh about the fact that one of the first words introduced in the Arabic curriculum Al-Kitaab is United Nations (الأمم المتحدة). Granted, the curriculum was developed somewhat specifically to train foreign service officers of varying capacity—to read the news, to act in diplomatic capacity, and so forth. So it makes sense. It really does. 

This afternoon while I was getting lunch ready for Phoebe I opened the drawer to our kitchen work bench to grab something and she...grabbed the drawer and swung on it like a little monkey. 

She does enjoy swinging from things—and we have an entire jungle gym for her just out the back door!—but I'm constantly having to remind her not to swing on things like door handles and towel racks and drawers (apparently) because they're not meant to hold the weight of a human child. 

Phoebe has lived a rather privileged life as a rather tiny human child her whole entire life, and thus far nothing tragic has happened...which has only fueled her desire to swing from...everything. 

"What do you mean it can't hold the weight of a human child? Here it is...holding the weight of a human child—see?"

Unfortunately, Phoebe is such a tiny human child that she is still in the phase of life where she is getting larger every single moment of every single day (it seems). So she may have swung seemingly without consequence from any number of things any number of times...ultimately I was correct the entire time. 

And today is the day she broke our kitchen work bench thingy. 

Lucky me. 

Andrew was out doing the grocery shopping and running Zoë to and from a birthday party, so Benjamin and I figured out how to fix it (good thing IKEA instruction manuals are so easy to find). Here it is disassembled (it looks worse than it is):

I attended the Children's Literature Assembly conference on Friday. I also presented my research (and chaired a session). Grandpa is practicing being retired, so he's no longer working on Fridays. While he's plenty busy getting ready for his and Darla's mission, he came over to take the kids to the park in the afternoon. The house was nice and quiet while I was in my session—and the kids got ice cream as well as park time so they came home very happy. 

Darla came over for dinner and then they both stayed to keep the kids company while Andrew and I went to the temple. When we came home they had the youngest three in their pyjamas and everything!

Here they are playing Swoop: