Vaunt Couriers of Oak-cleaving Thunderbolts

We know not where to begin. We have just read the Chapman’s blog and left it dizzied by its ferocious advocacy of the Ron Paul Revolution and stupefied by its gong-pounding paean to the glories of Carpe Diem. It is as though one had watched, in a single sitting, eighty-four consecutive hours’ worth of alternative installments of Dead Poet’s Society and the Travel Channel, haunted all the while by the spectral admonitions of the ghost of William Jennings Bryan, declaiming anew against the evils of the gold standard (“You cannot crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” ran the refrain). Should one roar with merriment or shake with fear and trembling? Best to shrug in wonder and proceed with the merely factual recitation of our own illustrious Week in Review.

Monday (November 5): Eli awoke like a ball of fire, descended from the royal crib, and sounded in stentorian tones the inevitable verses to honor the day:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
'twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

Julia made a more leisurely entrance into the breakfast chamber, sneering at her sister’s invocation of a hackneyed nursery rhyme as she herself invoked an obscure and early poem of Milton’s (“In Quintis Novembrim”).

For family home evening we went to the Yale Bookstore for the purpose of buying children’s books to donate to the Yale-New Haven children’s library in honor of the one year anniversary of Eli’s last release from the hospital. We had hoped to buy books in Spanish, since Y-NH has a lot of young Hispanic patients and few Spanish books, but most of them proved prohibitively expensive, so we settled on three of Eli’s favorites (“Where the Wild Things Are”; “Joseph Had a Little Overcoat”; and “Hop on Pop”) and a single book in Spanish (something about ducks—and who doesn’t love ducks?). While at the Bookstore Julia sat quietly at a table perusing Princess books while Eli made great sport of running away from Justin in any convenient direction.

Tuesday (November 6): Lia left the girls in the nursery at our ward playgroup while she made the trek to the hospital to deliver the books purchased the evening before. The books were safely delivered; the nursery was an unmitigated disaster. For it just so happened that another child—whom we shall not name, but the first two letters of whose name are Mayah Sevy—was at playgroup without her mother (she was there with her grandma). We shall omit the painful details, but the long and the short of it is that when Lia arrived at the nursery Mayah and Julia were joined in a cacophonous chorus of holy bedlam as the shrieking figure of the former, limbs flailing wildly, was forcibly pulled from the beleaguered figure of the latter, weeping in terror. Eli sat quietly in an opposite corner of the room, chanting Tasso. In the end, all was set right with a miraculous absence of broken bones and a modest modicum of bloodshed. Returned home at last, Julia begged in anguish to be allowed to go to Mayah’s house. Qual piume al vento!

In the evening Lia went to the Church for crafts night. Justin stayed home with the girls and watched snippets from sundry Disney movies on YouTube. The genius of this last practice is that it gives the girls the sense of having watched seven or so movies, and thus in half-an-hour’s time affords the sly parent with an excuse for the imposition of several weeks of cinematic abstinence. “Oh, but Julia, remember last month when you watched Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White all in the same evening?” Justin asks. “I think you’ve had enough Disney movies for a few months anyhow!”

Wednesday (November 7): Things proceeded as usual at home; at school, Justin slogged on in his preparation for the GRE with its attendant effort to remember math first learned during the first Clinton administration.

Thursday (November 8): Justin returned from Institute in the evening to the sweet strains of Eli, from her crib, screaming like an anguished banshee. He went to the crib and tried to soothe her. He failed. Not only did he fail, but in the end Julia and Eli, both wide awake and happy for the new lease on life, were back in the living room—bouncing off the walls and proclaiming the virtues of family togetherness. At length—i.e. at around 11 o’clock—Lia put down both of her proverbial feet and decreed that the entire family was to go to bed at once without further discussion. There was further discussion—most of it coming from an Eli who had seemingly forgotten her inside voice—but in the end things quieted down. Or at least your correspondent fell asleep and knew nothing further of the evening’s festivities.

Friday (November 9): This weekend witnessed the invasion of the Yale Divinity School by a handful of Latter-day Saint scholars who participated in a symposium honoring the bicentennial of the birth of Wilford Woodruff, a native of Farmington, CT and the only Connecticutian (pronounced like Lilliputian) to rise to the presidency of the Mormon Church. The keynote address was delivered Friday evening by President Woodruff’s accomplished biographer, Tom Alexander. Sander and Bianca Daniels kindly sat in our home while the girls slept so we could attend (making the most of our humble library, Bianca devoured a goodly portion of Little Women while Sander perused the speeches of Abraham Lincoln).

Dr. Alexander spoke on the uncontroversial subject of the Manifesto, eliciting a whirlwind of comments during the question-and-answer session. Lia thought it best to begin that session with an ice-breaker: “What’s that?!? No more polygamy?!? Well that’s GREAT news!” One conferee seriously did ask, “How do you decide what to study and what not to?” Dr. Alexander promptly put this upstart in his place with an apposite invocation of Thucydides. It was a good talk. Dr. Alexander succeeds admirably in being honest without being smug; in being faithful without being saccharine.

After the lecture, we celebrated Bianca’s admission to Georgetown Law School (officially called the Georgetown University Law Center, we think) by eating ice cream and homemade pumpkin pie. The treats were spectacular and the conversation better; we talked late into the night before Lia threw in the towel. Or rather, she threw a towel at Justin—mostly just for the devil of it, but it broke the course of the conversation and allowed us to realize that it was time for bed.

Saturday (November 10): The Wilford Woodruff conference continued this morning, and Lia and Justin took turns attending the sessions. The Saturday sessions were good but woefully attended. In the evening Justin’s friend and classmate Dan Luskin and his girlfriend, Linda, came over for dinner. They kindly offered to make a meal and bring it with them. They were slated to come at 6:30 but Dan, alas, nearly chopped off his thumb (some exaggeration here) in the effort to chop up an onion. This required an unanticipated trip to the University Health Center, and delayed dinner by nearly an hour and a half. The girls were about to be put to bed when Dan and Linda arrived. The result of this was that the girls looked upon these new friends as saviors who had liberated them from the tyranny of bedtime. They were at their shamelessly flirting worst (or best?). Anyhow, we had an excellent meal and a lot of fun. The girls, of course, had another late night and need, as of this writing, nothing so much as they need sleep. May their sleep be as profound and blissful as that now certainly enjoyed by our readers.

This is Eli sporting her very first set of pig tails! They didn't last past sacrament meeting. And I know the movies are boring, but we took no pictures this week; that's all the reconciliation we can muster. The second one of Julia is a synopses version of Hey There Delilah. I really can play this song, and Julia really can sing it, but neither happened on this take.
After repeated viewings of all the videos, Julia decided the one of Eli was a lot cuter than the one of her and demanded a retake. We have since taken off the boring one and added this Ariel one which, to those few of you lucky enough to remember, seems rather reminiscent of a certain rendition of "Three Little Monkeys".