Sweet Doodling

This is what K did during Sacrament meeting at church today. I play the organ, Joseph juggles Baby A and J-boy, so K is usually left to her own devices. Today she brought a pad of paper and wrote little notes over in her corner of the pew. I loved reading this after church! Please forgive her spelling - the English language really doesn't make any sense at all. We're still trying to understand the 'silent e.' :)

Transcription: I like home. It is the best place. I play with my family. I like my family. My family takes care of me. My families are the best.

Of course, the tallest girl with the crown is me (the queen mother), I'm guessing Baby A is the little one with the crown, and K has curls. J-boy and Daddy have spikey hair.

What a sweetheart!

Happy Birthday to {ME!}

A couple weeks ago we celebrated my 29th birthday. And because I have a fantastic husband, it was a great day. Let me set the stage -- we'd gotten home from our wonderful trip, and it took a couple weeks to feel like I was back on top of laundry, groceries, routine, etc. So I was saving up all these fun projects for the weekend before my birthday, but I got sick instead. Just some kind of sore throat, fever, virus kind of thing, but it wiped me out for a couple days. I was so MAD! I'd worked really hard catching up on 'chores' so I could do FUN work. So when I thought about my birthday coming up, I told Joseph that I just wanted a day. A day all to myself, no meals to cook, no children to dress, no messes to clean, no errands to run.
It was MAGICAL! Of course, I still had Baby A (she's a little to young to play at the indoor pool all day), but she was pretty aimiable. I pulled out all the projects I'd been saving up for weeks (months?) and felt so good. 

I was actually kind of surprised at how good I felt!  As I worked my way through my projects, I began thinking in terms of my computer.  Now, let me tell you first of all, I am not a techie, so if I get my terms wrong and you know better, just bear with me or quit reading now.  :)  I was likening myself to the CPU (the central processing unit).  I think moms (and women in general) are like CPU's -- we run the processes, and we keep things going.  The more processes I've got running, the less efficient I am.  And sometimes when I've got too many processes going on, I just crash (and occasionally loose data!).  So on my birthday, I was running the 'fun project'  process.  But usually I've got at least a half dozen other processes running simultaneously -- first of all the 'K-girl' process, the 'J-boy' process, the 'breakfast/lunch/dinner' process, the 'goodness this house is a wreck' process.  Toss a few others on there (husband, church, school, friend, blog...), and then there's the 'guilt' process (for doing a non-essential thing when there are so many essentials that really should take precedence).  

Well, Happy Birthday to me!   'Cause the 'fun project' process and the 'Baby A' process were the only things running ALL DAY and even into the night.  My wonderful husband brought me lunch at 12:30 - YUMMY Chicken Bacon Dijon grilled sandwich from Panera Bread - and then he brought dinner at 6:00 - serious comfort food in the form of Baked Potato Soup with Sourdough Bread.  Did I mention that neither of these meals required any dishes to be washed?  He took the children to the gym with him, then took them swimming at the community center for hours.  Then he ran errands with them as I peacefully project-ed my way through the day.  It was so wonderful to do things I enjoy in my own home without multi-tasking myself  to death.

So for my birthday this year, I got: Take-out lunch and dinner, two vinyl lettering phrases for my walls, one sign for my front porch, one sign for my MIL, one memoir organizing binder and 3 little notebooks for taking along with me so I'll never again forget that cute thing my kids' said, Baby A's taggie and I cut the pieces out for the little Molly Monkey up there in the picture.  She was actually sewn together last week.  

Oh, and the ones I love did make a cameo -- Joseph, the kids and I enjoyed cake (my wonderful visiting teacher made for me) together around 7:30 just before Joseph put the kids to bed.  

BEST. BIRTHDAY. EVER.

Thanks, Joseph, for pampering me with a day.  I love you!

Christmas 2008

So, I was going to just cut my losses and move on with life -- after all, it's February, and I thought to myself, I'd really rather blog what's going on RIGHT NOW than try to remember what happened nearly 2 months ago! But I started looking at pictures, and I couldn't stop, and I'm horribly perfectionistic, and I just can't shake it, so here it is, in all it's glory - pictures of our trip to Utah for Christmas. Between all the siblings and their cameras, we came home with over 1,000 pictures - I just picked my favorite 100 to share! (so ridiculous! I am so grateful for fast picasa collages!)  
We had such a fantastic time -- usually at the end of a long vacation I'm ready to get home and get back to work, but this time around I could have stayed forever. In fact, we got home, walked in, and I wanted to turn right around and race back to the airport. It felt like the stress had been bottled up, preserved in our little apartment. Opening the door was like breaking the seal, and I could almost feel a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders. A few days later life was fine again - the sparkling memory of vacation was starting to fade.
My favorite moments? Singing around the piano, making J-boy's Christmas bow and arrow with my dad in the shop Christmas Eve, shopping with mom (even grocery shopping was fun! Wow!), playing silly games late into the night, holding Baby A ALL THE TIME just because I could, watching my kids laugh and play and run and dance, ice skating with Joseph & K & J-boy, eating Eric's very yummy food, eating Great Grandma B's very yummy cookies, eating Aunt Phyllis' very yummy cookies (good thing I got sick and lost a few pounds the next week!), LAUGHING HARD EVERY DAY, meeting my newest nephew and the first grand-dog in the family :), and seeing my sweet little neice for the second time ever, going to the movies with my fantastic husband, going skiing with sisters and brothers and husband and daughter (K's first time on skiis!) while my angel mom watched a very needy Baby A, playing games and catching up with Joseph's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc, visiting Temple Square in Salt Lake City with our family (sorry, forgot the camera), watching the snow fall and fall and fall, chatting with some of my most favorite people in the entire world.
I left Utah so grateful for my family! I cannot think of anyone I'd rather belong to than my fantastic parents, siblings, and in-laws. It was the perfect way to spend the holiday - in places I love with people I love. I have got to be one of the luckiest people on earth.

A Little More Christmas

Still MORE Christmas!

Thanksgiving, 2008

 

 

(Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that it's nearly the end of January.... did I mention that one of my New Year's goals is to blog more regularly so I don't get behind like this?!)

Thanksgiving this year was spent in Missouri with Joseph's oldest brother's family. We had a good crew present: Grandma & Grandpa L, Uncle Jared & family and Uncle Jacob & family brought our grand total to 23. My sister-in-law Heather enlisted the help of her wonderful Aunt to feed the crew, and feed us they did! They were completely amazing. Heather made an amazing turkey roll in place of a traditional roasted turkey -- she deboned an entire turkey the night before, rolled it up with sausage and stuffing and cream from her cows and butter from the cream and all kinds of goodness. They made a fantastic sweet potato dish, a fabulous corn casserole, cooked the ham on the grill outside, had 5 different beautiful gourmet pies, fantastic mashed potatoes, scrumptious green beans, and the list goes on and on. This family amazes me -- they moved to MO from Puerto Rico (literally from a sandy beach to a muddy farm) a few years ago, and have been experimenting with small scale farming. They use all organic fertilizers, & their produce is fantastic. Then they also raise their own meat (food storage on the hoof!), have their own milk cows and all the products they can derive from that (Heather makes butter and just about every kind of cheese I've ever (and never) heard of. They currently have two milk cows, a handful of sheep, pigs, beef cows, chickens, 2 dogs, a variety of cats and occassionally have goats, donkeys, horses, you name it. I have always been impressed with this family's industry, but now I'm simply amazed. Joseph dreams of having a few acres some day, but I just don't know if I could handle all that WORK!  In any case, along with all those fantastic raw ingredients, Heather is an absolute wonder in the kitchen.  She and her aunt really made an amazing meal.

About the fried turkey -- last year, Joseph fried up his wild turkey that he'd shot earlier in the season.  He tried to share it with everyone, but after Jacob got a piece of breast meat with buck shot in it, no one was very interested.... :)  So this year he was determined to redeem himself.  He BOUGHT two nice little birds, and fried them up to PERFECTION.  He did get a leetle carried away with the injecting of cajun marinade -- there were pockets of soupy juice in a few spots that were a little weird.  But it was so yummy and moist and flavorful, and I just wish I had brought a second stomach so I could have eaten more...

So Thanksgiving this year (and, really, every year) was all about the FOOD. I didn't even manage to get a picture of all the beautiful people there. Oops....

After dinner we lounged around and enjoyed one anothers' company while we digested.  The boys all went off to the back of the property to play with their guns.  The kids enjoyed exploring the barns and watching the milking of the cows.  It was a really pleasant holiday.  We came home, went to bed, and 4 hours later I woke up to go to WalMart.  Crazy.  The portable DVD player is a piece of junk -- should have slept. :)

Family Pictures, Take 162