Our Persisting Memories

We take turns saying our evening family prayers. Mommy was away at mutual doing young woman stuff so even though it was her turn I said the prayer tonight. When saying prayers around my children I like to format them in a familiar way so maybe they can use it as a simple outline when they pray. Mormon prayers have a certain cant and cadence so I usually stick to that when the little ones are around. I think I went a little too simple. As soon as I was done Sophia spoke up. "That was too short. When you get a chance to talk to Heavenly Father you should tell him everything." I kissed her goodnight feeling fully castigated for my transgression.

Sometimes we're slow to react as parents and when trying to nail down the behaviors that we want to encourage in our children we don't catch the ones we should have discouraged. Phoebe is a very emotional child. She feels deeply about the things around her. Her relationship with her family is important to her but her own feelings are easily hurt and buried. She's expressive enough that it's readily apparent to her family when this occurs and we're able to love her back to us when she becomes saddened. When sibling rivalry rears its head she's quite likely to express herself verbally. When directed at her sister she has a tendency to resort to name calling. A few months ago, she took to calling her sister a poo-poo. We didn't discourage this enough and so it became habit. It was her standard epithet, hurled at the her sister at even the slightest infraction of fairness to her 3 year old eyes. Sophia has become better at not reacting to her sister's occasi...

So let me get the obvious out of the way:  I am pregnant so naturally, of course, for the time being I am never alone .  What I am referring to is everyone else in this home.    I am not making this statement in any way to be negative;  it just is.....I am a magnet in this home.  Let me count the ways: I rarely get a shower without someone walking in crying, screaming, or simply wanting to just in there with me. I rarely go the bathroom in private either.  We have explained what "privacy" means to both girls, and they understand it, and sometimes they give it to me when I am on the porcelain throne when I ask for it. I am with the girls all day in various forms.   I can safely say Phoebe is a mama's girl and likes to be the one snuggling or simply sitting with me on the couch. Once the girls go to bed and Dawn, our cat, knows the house is quiet she comes out....to find me .....no matter where I am.  She is sitting with me right now on the couch as I write this.  When I la...

I love music. I hardly ever evangelize my tastes in music or rave about any particular band because my tastes in music are rather peculiar. I find it fascinating that people can find fulfillment with only a tangential relationship with music. They touch it but never immerse themselves from head to toe in aural bliss. For me, it's a relaxing and empowering experience to strap on some headphones, turn up the home theater, or crank the car stereo so I can hear every undulation of the artist's intent and participate in whatever emotion they want to convey. I love almost all of it, from brutal cacophonous metal to the most relaxing ambient soundscapes. My home theater system is reasonable with a very nice subwoofer to round out the most difficult to reproduce sounds in modern movies.  My car was up until recently fully amped with components up front and big subs in the trunk. 9 Years of changing Texas weather killed the subwoofers. I won't be replacing them. The car isn't th...

The weather has finally become warm and beautiful again so I let the girls go play outside today.  When Sophia came in I asked her to wash her hands.  She looks at me and sort of turns her hands outward and says, "But my hands are 20 percent clean."  It was such an unexpected response I just stared at her for a moment before completely losing it with laughing.  She continues to look at me, but now sightly confused and says, "What?  What's so funny?"  All I could say was "You Sophia!  You are so funny!" Needless to say she never washed her hands, but I didn't mind since she was not going to be eating anything.  I have no clue where that response could have come from or where the percentage became a factor in her vocabulary, but it sure made for a happy moment in my day!  I enjoy what my kids say. Picture Unrelated

We hadn't left the house for 4 days.  We ran out of bread and milk and needed some for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the satisfaction of crunchy toast with jam or jelly in the morning.  I took the opportunity to experiment with the bread making machine and found a recipe for double chocolate bread. It was awesome.  I eat most of it which means I really need to stop making the stuff.  When you're trying to eat clean and gain strength with a high protein and heavy weight regimen at the gym, chocolate bread is the exact opposite of what you need.  For the uninitiated, chocolate bread is bread with unsweetened chocolate, chocolate chips, and brown sugar mixed in.  Otherwise it's very similar to normal bread machine bread.  Someone save me from myself.

I'm a horrible parent. I love my children deeply but find myself meeting them in the middle rather than finding true kid appropriate media for them to consume. Some days they watch far too much television and at other times they hardly watch any at all. Imaginative play rules the roost at the Atchley home and pretending to be anything but a normal family seems par for the course. Sophia and Phoebe both love to "pretend talk". This means they would like you to anthropomorphize one of their toys and carry on a conversation about the general difficulties of dragon-hood, car-ness, pony-ability, or the role of tigers in the nuclear family. The most difficult part is that as a parent it's your responsibility to guide the conversation to interesting places and there are only so many things I can say before my limited imagination hits a wall. It's not so much a dialogue as an interactive puppet show that much be unique each time.  They would do this for hours if they coul...

I apologize that we weren't able to bring you minute by minute updates while stuck in our home for 4 days, but I was busy trying to move the site to this new address and clean everything up a bit. We did get the girls outside for a little bit of time in which they stomped in powdery snow and experienced what happens when a slide is covered in ice. They were excited to get bundled up and head out into the snow.

I've moved everything from naasen.org to here.  This is our new family blog.  Naasen will be re-purposed after a month.  For now it just redirects here.  It's sad that the archived posts no longer include the inline photos but those pictures are all still available at the gallery located at atchleyfam.com/gallery3 .