Hy at the zoo

Hi there. Hy here.

Sure, Dad told you about the animals we drove past, but we had a much better adventure than that.

Oh yeah, that's my cousin, Sammy. He was with us too and shared my daddy's lap. He's been wondering all these weeks when a picture of him would finally show up on the blog. He and Anna were a lot of fun. But back to the story.










They have this "petting zoo" at the zoo. We passed by a giant tortoise and some other animals I didn't care about too much to get there. At the petting zoo, I found exactly what I most wanted:







ROCKS!

Oh, what a wonderful collection of gravel.

And Mom and Dad let me play with all of it I wanted.




Then suddenly, I was attacked! Mom put me on her lap and opened a granola bar. These furry creatures called "goats" swarmed all over me. They tickled.







Then I started exploring the goats. I liked this one the best because it stayed right there. I played with its mouse and its head and was very excited.






This is me petting the goats.

I had a lot of fun.







Oh yeah, Dad and Sammy had a lot of fun too with the hippo statue on the way in. Dad tried to get a picture of me in the hippo's mouth. I didn't think it was very funny.









Hyrum Watson, adventurer.

Crying over spilled milk

When Joy was pumping milk for Hyrum, the process was long and took a lot out of her physically and emotionally. When even a drop of precious Mommymilk spilled, it was a traumatic experience. We learned a whole new side of the old saying "Don't cry over spilled milk."

I used to think it meant not crying over piddling things - what's a little milk? When milk is your child's lifeblood and comes at great cost to your beloved, milk is much more valuable. To a dairy farmer, milk might be your livelihood and the ability to feed your family and keep them warm. Milk is important!

But what is done is done. Crying won't change that fact. You just take your licks and move on.

We've had a lot of licks lately!

I was cleaning dishes 10ish days ago when a glass shattered into my pinky finger. I'm still getting all the infection out of it. It'll leave a scar.

I was putting in the rest of the storm windows Friday morning and put one on the other side of the baby gate. I stepped over the gate and put a 6 inch scrape in my leg on the storm window that bled much of the day. Though it's hurt for most of the last 3 days, at least I'm not limping.

Joy got a second degree burn on her elbow last night while making cookies for home and visiting teachees.

Joy has a cold sore.

We're all either getting rid of colds or trying to avoid them. This implies that I'm behind on my sleep and have been aching all over my body most of the last few days.

Hyrum has a terrible dieaper rash and doesn't want to sit anywhere. We think he's also getting ready for a growth spurt because he's been irritable as anything and not sleeping as well as usual (aka 8 hours isntead of 11).

Then today at church, we returned to the spilled milk. I got out of the car and spilled a cup of milk on my suit and the car ... just like happened last week ... TWICE ... when getting out of the car and when Hy dumped a cup on me and my seat while perched on my shoulders. Another cup fell from the pew when Joy moved something else and it burst open, so I ran to bathroom to get paper to wipe it up during the sacrament itself. We no sooner got home, but the third sippee cup of milk we brought for Hyrum burst open and spilled over the floor and Joy.

Oh, and then I dropped my lunch - chicken parmesan - on the floor next to the gargbage can.

And no, it doesn't help that the pioneers had it worse. No use crying over any of it, though. Just keep moving. "Clean it up. See if you can do better next time" Joy adds sagely. "Laugh when you write it down on your blog." Now I'm off to cook our stir fry.... Pray for it. Gravity is ag'in us.

I Created a Monster

In one day, Hyrum insisted on listening to the Hallelujah Chorus more than 50 times. We need a better system.

The one we've tried this weekend goes like this:

Hyrum comes up and says, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" This is how he asks for the chorus.

We play it.

He says, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" again. We say, "No, it's Mommy's turn."

Mom gets to pick a song. Then Dad gets to pick a song if he's home. Having now patiently waited for two songs to pass, he sometimes forgets to ask for his again, so we get through 2-3 more songs before he comes up to ask for "Yeah" again and restart the process. Sometimes, he'll even like the song we picked and ask for it "'Gain! 'gain! 'gain!" in which case we listen to it a-gain, that was his turn and we bypass the Chorus.

Occasionally we remind him, asking, "Is it your turn?" and he says "Tu'n." By the time we got to the evening yesterday, though, we were just as glad that we had to help him get in his dinner chair - that means no music during dinner. Imagine, Derrill wanting no music at dinner!

7 Random Pictures

Sleepless night, so here are some random shots from the archives:


This was the first rose I gave Joy. We were getting together for our second date to watch General Conference and I was preparing to ask if we could revisit her earlier suggestion that we be bf/gf.

She said yes.

I have no idea what they talked about that conference. And I'm sitting here with a big, stupid grin on my face. Thank you, Love.




My birthday last year was at Chuck E. Cheese's. Hyrum had not yet learned to fear all foods and was fascinated by Joy's orange soda. Never drank any, but boy he wanted to hold it.









Lifetime Achievement Awards: Too little, too late? Discuss.

















Like stepping over baby gates when you just put a storm window behind it. Oooh, that hurt! It stung most of the day. It's pretty ugly looking. I put a pic on Facebook about it. We'll see if it warrants a blog post also.










Early one July B.H. (Before Hyrum) we traveled to Lake Placid to see the horse jumping competitions. We loved it. Joy is planning on using her birthday money to pay for her first horse riding lessons.











Sadly, Chris didn't actually discover himself. He discovered the 70s instead. Thankfully, that just means we get to be retro-Columbus every 30 years. Bell-bottom cargo ships, anyone?










*singing*
When I first came to this land [8 years ago]
I was not a wealthy man
So I got myself a cat
And I did what I could

Come Thou Fount for Hy

This is just a sneaky way to "download" the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing so that Mama can play it for Hyrum as often as he wants.



I love you, Joy.

Three thoughts on humility from the bathtub

1. I had often heard, particularly from Pres. Boyd K. Packer, that being a father would teach me a lot about God. (e.g. "Much of what I know that really matters I have learned from being a father" and "being a father of a family gives you opportunities to learn to govern with love and patience.") I had imagined that as a father, I would feel for Hyrum what God feels for me, and so come to find Him in me more.

That was not quite right. I've found more and more that what I learn about God comes from finding Hy in myself and realizing how God sees me. In many ways, I'm still an infant and a toddler (Is that Hyrum in another 7 months on the right?). I worry what I'll find out about myself when Hy is a teenager.

2. Hyrum asks for many things. He will ask for many more as time goes on. We want him to ask us, and we have invested a lot of time in teaching him how to ask. It's only beginning. No matter how accommodating we try to be to his requests, though, we end up saying "no" or "later" or substituting something else we know he needs more and try to get him interested in it as well.

God spends a lot of time trying to teach us to come to Him for help and to ask for what we want. He really wants us to ask. What we ask for isn't always feasible, "expedient" (ie - not a good time), or good for us. So He says "no" or "later" or tries to get us interested in something else.

Hyrum tops a lot of us in how he responds to such treatment. Hyrum lets us know he is disappointed in our choices, but really doesn't throw fits very often. He doesn't try to get even with us; he doesn't try to make us miserable. He submits (to me anyway) tolerably well most of the time.

So many of us respond by getting angry at God. 'This was really, really important to me and God didn't do what I wanted, so I'm going to stop going to church or stop saying my prayers or do something else to get back at Him."

So many of us respond by what would be delusionary if Hyrum did it: Hy has never said, "Mom and Dad didn't give me my truck when I asked for it, so they don't exist."

It takes humility to see somthing in the world that we think isn't right - that our definition of a just, merciful God wouldn't allow - and to respond, "I guess I don't understand God as well as I thought. Lord, help my unbelief." They are opportunities to know Him better.

3. That in turn got me thinking about Mosiah 3:19, which says that we, as fallen or "natural" men and women, are enemies to God unless we become as a child. The first, dare I say natural, reaction is to say "say, what?" Then we draw an invisible semantic point that being childlike is not the same thing as being childish, the one being equated with everything good about children and the other all the negatives.

Hyrum doesn't know the difference, though. He's just a child: both childlike and childish. ... and so am I. And with that thought, I saw two new possibilities:

3.1. God looks at the good and the bad and chooses to mention and bring to our notice the good. My confidence increased that He sees us the same and tries to bring out that good in us. That was how Pres. Hinckley spoke about the youth all the time and is how Pres. Monson speaks of them now. Emphasizing the good brings it out and overpowers the bad.

3.2. The good that God mentions being in children is that they are humble. Specifically, the natural man must yield, and become as a child: "submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." Maybe that's the most important good. If you've got that - if you're willing to submit to anything God does with/to/for/at you - He can take care of the rest. And if I can't learn to submit the way Hyrum does to me, there's precious little that can be done with me, no matter what other skills I have.

If you could hum a few bars, Hy....

Hyrum has always been good at expressing his preference, but given that his primary language is still reformed Wookie, this has been at best an inexact science. At least in one realm, though, this is starting to change:

Hyrum is starting to identify songs by names.

Named songs:
"Pop" - Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree, in one of the three or four versions Dad made up
"Fa" - Follow the Prophet
"Bay" or "Bee" - Silent Night, the Ba-by Jesus song
"Ceok" - Caroling, Caroling
"Yeah" - Halelu-yeah Chorus. I'm trying to convince him to make this "ya-ya"
"Hawk" - Hark! the Herald Angels Sing

The last two are new today, the middle two came Sunday and Monday, and Fa arrived last week.

For all of them, we still need him to sign "music" for us because Pop is also his grandfather's name, Fa often sounds like Fone, there are many babies, Coek is crayon, and Yeah is really unspecific. But he's trying!

We're Going to the Zoo. How about you?

Near Verona is a really cool safari zoo. There are two parts, one that's a zoo and one that's a safari. In contrast to DisneyWorld's Nahtazu safari where you're on a preprogrammed bus ride, here you drive your own car through the enclosures. The animals are right there, and some of them (as you will see) get quite close to your car. Like at Disney, please keep your hands, arms, and children you want to see again INside the car at all times. We had an attendant very angry at us 5 feet past the toll booth entryway because we let everyone out to go to the bathroom.






The noble, enigmatic, silent giraffe strides across the field.






The obnoxious, blatent giraffe strides into our car.

This is why they tell you to keep your windows closed. The giraffe said hello to Mari, to me, then came around and attacked Joy to try to get her carrot. It was really something.





Answer: Zebras are white with black stripes. Notice the underbelly.







We figured the llama would be one of Hyrum's favorites, since his favorite story at the time was "Is Your Mama a Llama?" Maybe he didn't recognize the similarity. Maybe this one should brushed its matted fur. I got to pet its head, though.





Albino peacocks.








Albino lioness. They have extra guards around here to keep the cars moving and to make triple sure your windows ARE rolled up. Oddly enough, their windows were rolled down the whole time and the guy kept his arm out the window....




I admit I lost a lot of respect for the impressive male lion when I learned the women do the hungting. Now they remind me of beer-bellied couch potatoes who used to play football. Not that I rolled down my window or would ever make one mad, though. Respect and fear are different things.







The ever-adorable meerkat.









Black swans have amazing, python-like necks so they can scratch anywhere. This one seemed to need to do a lot of grooming, a lot more than any white swan I've ever seen anyway.






I think this would make a great cover for a fantasy book. You step through the wardrobe and see this.







But really, white swans are too refined a creature to go craning their necks to scratch back there.

By the way, I get extra credit for a lot of these shots: taken through glass in a moving car.








Don't mess with me, man.







This bird is part of the Witness Protection Program. They do a pretty good job. You'd never know it used to be a parakeet.








What's a zoo without monkeys, right? Very boring monkeys, overall, but we got to see one of them moving.








We took two or three laps around the rhino and hippo enclosure because the hippos came out of the water for feeding, so we had them about 2 feet from the van.





What'll it take, friend, for me to put you in the driver's seat of one of these babies?







And now, hear the sound of a hippo. 2 points if you can identify the video game character based on that noise.



Part 2 will be inside the zoo part, part 3 will be the kids.

Hyrum vs. Fiction

Hyrum - who can now call himself 'Hy-um' or 'Hum' - is becoming enamored with his first fictional characters. Since you can't tell the umps from the players without a program, here's the major cast of characters contending for his attention and first billing on the "Mommy, I've gotta have it or I'll die" circuit in order of appearance:



Kitty! Hyrum likes cats too and they're the first animals he can imitate, but he's also fascinated with Sullivan/Kitty from Monsters, Inc. Joy notes that it's really a love/hate relationship. He will specifically ask to wear his Kitty sweater, but then he is afraid of it when we put it on him. He points to it, then backs away, but he just can't leave it alone. He doesn't have the clearest 't' yet, but we know when he's asking for "Ki-y."





Buzz Lightyear! For Thanksgiving I put on a Disney shirt that features a lot of the major characters. Hyrum was instantly entranced by one small space toy on the bottom. He pointed at Buzz and Dada said, "To infinity! and beyond!" Hyrum pointed again ... and again ... and again. Worried that he was becoming a broken record, Da put on Toy Story 2 which enthralled Hy as no movie has before or since. Hy also loved the closing song (upbeat version of You've Got a Friend in Me) and asked to hear it a dozen times. This morning, he said "Buzz."





Bob the Builder! We got a DVD for Hy at the Trumanburg Fair back in August, showed him the video, and he wasn't really interested. Then he watched it yesterday (picked it over Fantasia 2000) and this morning was more interested in "Bob" than in his scripture video, something no one else has managed. Yesterday he and Mom also played with blocks together and Mom apparently kept saying "Build" to him, so she wonders if that has anything to do with it.


He's also seen Lion King and Sword in the Stone a couple times and has asked for Jungle Book, but something in it really scares him and he asks for it to be shut off agian. He watched Cars, but doesn't seem to have connected with a character yet.

If his connection with these characters is any indication of who he is modeling, I'm pretty pleased. They're all confident people who go forward with their jobs and try to follow their conscience. They're dependable, if a bit single-minded. Kitty is sensitive, soft, protective, and loyal. Buzz is loyal, brave, and learns not to be full of himself. Bob I don't know too well, but he's soft-spoken, helpful, and courteous. Not bad qualities to let a toddler try to imitate.

I *knew* it!

Hobbits are real. The fossil record has spoken.