Week of February 2 - February 8

So, I had this terrific brain wave about three weeks ago that Kevin and I should take our kids to the circus! It happened to coincide with finding free children's tickets offered for a circus coming to Orem (which is just ten minutes down the road). Funny, that. But still, it sounded like a great idea. Afterall, it's winter and yucky and we needed something fun to look forward to. Also, circuses are much more affordable than trips to Hawaii (or trips to anywhere for that matter). AND we had never taken our kids to the circus!! You can probably see from all my enthusiasm that I had my family pretty hyped up over it in no time. We twins and I checked out books from the library about the circus and talked about what we might see. We were all pretty excited. Finally the day arrived! We had planned to go to the 4:00 show (it was a Monday) so the kids wouldn't be up too late, but Kevin forgot about an appointment at work so we had to go to the 7:30 show. Still, we were ready to have fun. Here is all of us in our seats waiting for the circus to start:

It was a small circus, of course, but they still had elephants and bears, lions and tigers, and even scooter-riding poodles. It was a good taste of the circus. They didn't have any tight-rope walkers and the trapeeze act only used one swing, but they had a guy who balanced atop a big stack of chairs and another guy who ran along a giant pendulum thingy. These last two really had the older girls on the edge of their seats and hiding their eyes. At the intermission, Megan asked, "What if he fell and died?" I said, "That's what makes it so exciting is that it is so dangerous!" and Megan said, "Exactly! And if he did die then we would all feel terrible because we're the ones who paid to watch him do it!" This made me laugh. She's right! What were we doing at the circus anyway??

In the end, it was a great memory-building experience. Unfortunately, we did all get very tired and the twins started whining to go home. Here is a picture at intermission. Notice the expressions on the faces of the twins:

We went on a Monday. On Wednesday, we were driving in the car and Cheyenne said, "Remember when we went to the circus? Let's do that again sometime." To which Calianne responded, "BUT NOT ME!!! I DON'T WANT TO GO TO THE CIRCUS!!" It took me awhile to calm her down. A little post-traumatic stress going on, you think? And then on Friday, Calianne said to me, "Remember when we went to that circus that had only one trapeeze and they didn't throw candy at us?" When I assured her that I did, she said, "Let's not go there again." So much for treating your kids to all the traditional joys of childhood! I am having a great time laughing over it, though, so there you go.



We had preschool at our house this week and the letter was "L." So, on Tuesday we learned about the Liahona (sometimes living in Utah is so cool) and we dressed up like Lehi and the Liahona told us where to go. Of course, sometimes we did things wrong and the Liahona stopped working. Then we had to repent before we could continue! We also made our own Liahonas out of clay. That was a hit! On Thursday, we did lollipops. I told the kids the story of the lollipop tree and sang the songs. That will forever be one of my favorite preschool memories, all those little faces staring at me, completely enchanted by the thought of the lollipop tree and listening to the story in the song I was singing! Then we made real lollipops. To wrap it all up, we colored lollipops and ice cream cones, cut them out and pasted them on our tree pictures. It was great fun. Oh, and we played Looby Loo, of course. :)