Why is this boy smiling?

That's what I asked myself when I saw the pictures. Why is my son smiling?









Oh yeah. He lost his first tooth just before we left Nigeria.

He lost his second tooth (right next to it) in California.

We never found either one, so he still hasn't been visited by the tooth fairy. That or else she does things via internet right now and he has some bit-coinage laying around.

What has made him slack jawed?

A brand new set of Woody pajamas, like he got the "first" time he went to Disneyland. Now he could match his Woody doll he got from Pop and Grandma.

I don't suppose I need to explain the smiles here.

This person deserves a raise

To Whomsoever was starring as Minnie Mouse at the 8:30 character breakfast at Disneyland on May 21, 2013,

Thank you.


You were the person my not-yet 2 year-old daughter was dying to see. She was excited to see other people, too, but you were the one she talked about before the trip. So the character breakfast was the very first thing that needed to be done. You were right there as we walked in. She ran up to you with a Hug of Everlasting Happiness in her arms and an older brother in hot pursuit.






You admired her and made kissy sounds and all the things the other characters did, and that was nice.

You got hug after hug, and that was nice.

You and Princess Ariel sure knew how to take a picture, and that was nice.













You put up with Woody being bonked on your head, I'm sure not for the first time, and that was nice.





But when your break had come, you took an extra moment to dance with my little girl ...

That was Disney Magic.

A week after the trip, we asked the kids what their favorite things were. For the most part, they enjoyed California Adventure more than Disneyland ... except you. You were her favorite out of everything.

Thank you.

Enjoying America

(Ten mostly-random pictures from the last three weeks in the US)


It's nice to be in America. We landed in LA and had lunch with my grandmother the next day. Then we spent the next day with my brother's family in Ventura - like here at Chuck E. Cheese.

Joy and Princess got matching dresses made in Nigeria. Here they are before church the first Sunday.

Pop and Grandma took us to Disneyland. We bought Princess her own Cinderella dress, which was adorable ...

while Superstar got a Woody costume to match the Woody doll he got for his birthday. Woody was declared to be his second favorite toy the first night and was his official Favorite Toy and Best Friend the next morning.

Woody goes around greeting everyone by saying, "You're my favorite deputy." Superstar pulls his string several times to get him primed for that saying each day.

Princess loves Disneyland.

She loves being on a horse.

She loves her Daddy.








She also has a serious crush on anything dressed in polymascotfoamalate.

She feeds the furry creatures (or anyone else she likes), gives big hugs...

She kisses their noses...

Tigger, Miko, the Brother Bears, Chip n Dale, all big winners.

Minnie Mouse was the biggest victory, and her first introduction to Disneyland (this trip). Video and pictures to come.

 Superstar agreed to go on the river rafting ride. He was kind of nervous, but decided after the first splash this was pretty great.

We did lunch at Ariel's Grotto, which was one of the kids' favorite experiences. They liked Ariel alright, but their treatment of the other princesses was odd.

Aurora came by and they said Hi.

Snow White came by and they ignored her completely.

Tiana came by ... and ELVIS WAS IN THE BUILDING.

Tiana got hugs. They gave her food. They put stickers on her dress. They both talked to her. They smiled. They LOVED Tiana.


Belle came. She worked really hard to get a smile out of them. Nothin'. They'd stand up with her, but that was about it.



Princess Tiana. Who knew?

After Disney, we flew to Provo where we have an apartment for the summer. Among the nice things of living in the land of plenty is having large boxes of diapers delivered the next day.

Another nice thing is turning large cardboard boxes into airplanes that you can fly back to Pop and Grandma.

Nigeria in the Morning

Today I am thinking about what Nigeria sounds like to me in the morning. I hear birds chirping, guards talking and laughing. I hear roosters crowing. I heard that wonderful sound of the generator.
When we first moved here Margee was worried that we might not like our apartment because it was located so close to the generator. Granted it does make it hard to hear our children at night, but everyone in our family, even our one year old, is relieved to hear the generator when it peals, because of the hope that it will bring the electricity on again.
Then there is the awful sound of prayer by microphone (shouting) at 4 am. I am not awakened by it anymore, but our first few months it was really nerve racking. I don’t like it when I am awake either, but at least it isn’t as bad as waking up to it.
Another morning experience for me today was the hot sticky feeling of being just as wet after I toweled off as I did before.
I was also thinking about emotional independency and how I get to learn even more about it. Nigeria has been a diamond in the rough for me in learning how to be truly independent when before I cam here I only liked to think that I was. With this blessing has come an added closeness with my family that I cherish.
 - Joy

A Neoimperialist reading of The Cat in the Hat

I was reading The Cat in the Hat to Superstar tonight. As usual, I like to pick random dialects, accents, and characterizations to make the books more interesting. Tonight I happened to give the cat a very deep, posh British dialect and the fish an Indian accent.

Suddenly the entire book was transformed into a colonial pseudo-commentary: wise India continually cried for the British to stop with their Great Game to play, but its voice went unheeded. When the British finally left, everything was a mess. But, in good neoimperialist/White Savior/white guilt tradition, the Cat shows up again as an NGO (or an economics professor?) to clean up the entire mess and restore everything to its idyllic state. Shall we go so far as to name Thing 1 and Thing 2 the Breton Woods Institutions of the World Bank and IMF?

Even though the narrator is "Sally and I" (notice the ever  dominant male perspective and the completely silent female), the real star of the show is the imperialist who gets his own line of dolls, t-shirts, books, sequels, television specials, and movies, all upheld by copyrights promulgated by Thing 3 (the WTO) and the corporatist government (the mother) who pretends to see nothing amiss. The neoliberal market allows the developed world to exploit the developing once again by controlling how its story is portrayed.

Catch up: A few little moments

Superstar lost his first tooth. He lost it and we don't know where to find it, so I'm afraid the Tooth Fairy shall not be making a Nigerian appearance. This is probably for the best since the Nigerian Tooth Fairy would ask for a tip after taking your tooth.

Superstar and I started reading Harry Potter, which he chose over Narnia or Fablehaven. He also rather enjoyed the Muppet Christmas Carol. Among their innovations is that the two hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, play the part of Jacob and Robert Marley. Superstar hoped that there was another version with three brothers Marley.

--

Last night we packed Joy's and Derrill's clothes for our trip to the US. Superstar's are mostly packed. When Joy mentioned this at lunch, Princess got off her chair and ran to her room to start packing her clothes.

Just before that, though, she asked me to move her chair closer. Then she said, "I love you," and gave me a big hug. She is a very sweet and adorable little girl.

The other day she went to the window to comment on the trees. Then she noticed the new onions in the basket. She picked one up and said, "New onions. They so sweet."

--

After Church, they wanted to speak at our makeshift podium.

Books Princess loves and asks me to read her regularly at night: The Marvelous Toy; Saint George and the Dragon (she's scared of the dragon but regularly asks for the book anyway); One Fish, Two Fish; The Tawny Scrawny Lion; Little Bunny; Fox in Socks; and anything with a lot of animals or anything else by Dr. Seuss.


--

Dinner Dreams

A few weeks ago Joy and I counseled about what was wrong with our dinner time. It was completely unpredictable whether either child would be done in 5 minutes or not for over an hour. If one decided to be done quickly and the other to dawdle, making mealtime family time became very difficult.

We counseled; we prayed; we studied Church materials on what the Point of mealtime was beyond nutrition and how to get there. We came up with a plan, which oddly enough focused on what I had to do differently:

I would make sure to give the kids smaller portions of each food and ensure they ate something on their plate before they got something else - that would keep them moving.
And I needed to prepare some conversation. Get a story or a few Ungame questions or a gospel topic or a book, something. That way if Superstar had wound down in talking about Mario, there was still something interesting going on at the table so they would be slightly more likely to stay.

Both parts have worked supremely well. The dawdling dropped immensely. One kid is still often done before the other, but it's not nearly so long.

It hasn't taken much time to plan dinner conversations/material. It's always hit and miss, of course, but I've gotten some pretty good hits lately:

• Superstar is extremely interested when I retell stories from Lucy Mack Smith's history of Joseph Smith's life. This week I told them about Martin Harris losing the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, and he asked me to tell it to him again another time.
• Everyone loves Shel Silverstein poems, as you may have gathered over the few posts we've put up over last two months.
• Sundays I'm translating from my German/missionary copy of The Little Prince
• I told them the Southern Nigeria version of the Just So Stories for why the elephant has small eyes and why worms live underground.
• We talked about what makes a good friend and how to communicate with others.
• We spend a lot of time planning together what will happen over the summer so Superstar in particular is prepared. That will make everything ever so much easier.

It had never occurred to me that mealtime takes planning (beyond the food part). This reminds me of Boyd K. Packer's instruction that pricked my heart as a newly returned missionary and I continually relearning:

Give careful, prayerful, conscious thought and consideration to your family. ... Many men play the role of fatherhood just by ear. They only react to what is, rather than to strive with conscious, prayerful effort for what ought to be. (a link from 1963).

As a result, dinner has been happier, we've been closer together as a family, we rarely spend so long at the table we run out of Family Fun Time after, and life has just been better.

LDS Growth in Africa

The LDS Church Growth blog (not an official LDS website) recently posted the 20 countries with the fastest growth rates and the 10 with the higher total growth in members of the church. As in each of the last five years, I was very impressed with the growth in African countries:

1. Benin - 59.9% - 1,081
2. Rwanda - 34.4% - 121
3. Solomon Islands - 31.5% - 509
4. Botswana - 27.1% - 2,152 
5. Malawi - 22.9% - 1,421
6. Angola - 20.9% - 1,257
7. Togo - 19.7% - 1,861
8. Jersey - 16.7% - 349
9. Cape Verde - 16.2% - 9,326
10. Ethiopia - 15.7% - 1,678
11. Sierra Leone - 15.7% - 11,664
12. Tuvalu - 14.9% - 200
13. Madagascar - 14.6% - 9,190
14. Cote d'Ivoire - 14.5% - 18,602
15. Liberia - 14.4% - 6,709
16. Democratic Republic of the Congo - 13.5% - 34,547
17. Namibia - 13.2% - 763
18. Malaysia - 13.1% - 8,967
19. Vanuatu - 12.9% - 5,491
20. Cameroon - 12.4% - 12.4%

Several of our West African neighbors rated here. Rwanda has nearly tripled in three years. Nigeria is in the happy middle area: young enough to have lots of growth but large enough that the percentage is not as amazing. The table also explains why there's a temple going up in Kinshasa, DRC - one third the membership of Nigeria and a growth rate that shows them catching up eventually.

On the other hand, for large numbers of new converts, the focus is on the western hemisphere and the Philippines, where 73% of growth occurred.. 

Other blog posts about the Mormons in Nigeria and Africa are here.

Princess tells her first joke

We enjoy reading Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books together as a family. One of our favorites is "Can I Play Too?" which includes this choice conversation:

Source

Snake: You do not want to play with me?
Gerald (Elephant): No! We do want to play with you. But ... But...
Piggie: We are playing catch.
Gerald: With our arms.
Snake: So?
Piggie: You do not have arms?
Snake: I do not have arms!?! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!Snake: Hee-hee! Ha-ha! Hee-hee! I know I do not have arms! I am a snake.
Piggie: You are a funny snake.

 ----------------------

Today we had a conversation during lunch. Of all the times we reminded Superstar to not correct his parents and his sister, this was one of them.

Joy: You are not the mommy.
Superstar: I am not the mommy.
Princess: I am not the mommy!?! Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!! 

We stared at her for a moment ... and remembered.

All: Hee-hee! Ha-ha!
Derrill: You are a funny snake.

Princess smiled with great pleasure.

The Words of General Conference

This week we joined with fellow members and friends around the world to listen to a living prophet, apostles, and other leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The talks are already online and available for download. I downloaded them, put them all in a Word file, and played with them a little bit.

This wordle shows you the relative frequency of the words said at General Conference. I'm going to very briefly talk about the top 99 words, grouping them in a way that makes sense to me. I cut off around 100 not only because that's normal, but because with 33 speakers, we have 33 Amens. Anything with more than 33 uses was mentioned at least once every talk on average - and there happen to be 99 words said that often.

Clearly, we were taught a great deal about God (330 mentions) and our Lord (257) Jesus Christ (276). The Holy Ghost (78) testifies that He is our Savior (155), the Son (71) of our Heavenly Father (113) in whose name (61) we pray, testify (33), and worship.