Catching Up

OK, I have my weird computer quirk worked out so that I can once again shrink my pictures without huge hassle. Whew!
So... what did I miss?

I guess most important is that Robyn had a birthday way back in May.
She turned ELEVEN!!!
She got an mp3 player, and it's hardly been out of her ear since. She had a fun party with her friends, where she was pampered and painted and fussed over. Perfect birthday treatment.


Then, of course, there was the dance recital. My girls danced beautifully, as usual.
Sometime in there, the boys took a trip to Wah-Wah Hard Pan, which is a vast expanse of...
nothing. Absolutely nothing.But it's great if you need a nice big place to ride your scooters

.But I couldn't possibly leave out the super fun trip I took at the beginning of June with my three sisters and my mom. I even had a sister-in-law show up for a day. It was so fun!
We took a "before" picture (Katie is NOT supposed to be smiling, here)...Then we went and got our hair cut & colored, got manicures and/or pedicures, did lots of shopping, and then took an "after" picture in front of the Oquirrh Mountain Temple.


Thanks, gals, it was a blast!

Emily's Beautiful Eyes

Wow! I seem to have missed all of June - the best month of the year! Don't worry, I'll catch up. But right now I have a story to tell you. The other day the kids went over to the playground at the elementary to play. I went over a little bit later to check and see how they were doing. The bigger kids were running through the sprinklers, so I just sat down by Jennie, who was picking clover blossoms. (Armfuls of blossoms of blue. Except they weren't blue.) Anyway, so Emily gets done and runs over to where we are. Except that half way to us, she suddenly slows way down and starts acting really weird. She's looking at the grass, looking sideways at us, coming toward us in a wandering way...
Finally when she was about 35 feet away, I said, "Emily, are you looking for something?"
She looked up, squinted at me, and said, "Oh, it's you!" and ran over.

One of those stomach-dropping, someone-just-sat-on-my-chest moments.

So we took Emily to the optometrist, and sure enough. He said anything past about 10 feet is probably very blurry in Emily's eyes. I asked her if she could see the board in school, and she said no. As in "No, of course not. Can anyone?"

Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.

Jef and I have never needed glasses, so it's not something I've been watching for. But now, after a long two-week wait, she can finally see, and she looks so cute.


By the way, if there's anyone out there who also wears glasses, I highly recommend zennioptical.com. After paying shipping costs, Emily's glasses cost me a total of....

(drum roll, please)

$12.95

Which definitely helped to ease the pain of this experience.

On Blessings

"... and prove me now, herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

I now present to you proof that God wasn't kidding when he said that.
Today I sent ten big garbage bags
stuffed full of children's clothes to D.I.
Ten!
"So," you're thinking, "You got sick of doing laundry, and now your kids are going naked all summer?"
Oh no. No fear of that. Their drawers and closets are still stuffed with clothes.
Not to mention the laundry pile that's taller than Cannon. (You think I'm kidding, don't you?)

But, just in case some child decides to grow in the night and suddenly doesn't fit into any of those clothes, we're still covered.
Because I still have TWENTY-ONE boxes full of clothes in every size and season filling up every little bit of storage space in my entire house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have never in my life questioned the principle of tithing.

Until now.

I just don't have any more room!

Where Have All the Good Books Gone?

So I was looking at my little bookshelf, here, that shows the last 20 books I've read.
There is not a single five-star book among them.
It feels like forever since I've read a solid five-star book.
So I'm wondering if maybe I'm just getting a little hardened and harder to please. I do read a lot of books, after all.
But really it just feels like I've already read all the fantastic books that are out there, and there's none left. They're all so mediocre lately. Good books, yes. Interesting, entertaining, worth reading. Even some that I would have given five stars the first time, but only got four the second time around. (This is why I don't usually re-read books. But I was desperate!) I even took a whole week off, just to see if it was a case of overdose. (An entire week of only scriptures, church magazines, and cereal boxes!) But it didn't help because the next book I read was fun, interesting, fairly well-written, but just.... Well, just not five stars. *sigh*
So I ordered myself seven new books for Mother's Day, and if one of them doesn't do it, well.
I may have to take up knitting instead.

Emily's Baptism

Emily was baptized on Saturday!
Jef baptized her, and he did a great job. She only had to go down once!
She really really wanted me to take a picture of her under the water, and was very disappointed when I told her I couldn't. So we took lots of before and after pictures.

Thanks to Mom, Dad, Tom and Wil;

Stacy, Judy, and Stacia;

and LaPrele, Delia and Chris for coming!

I'm not sure where her shoes went for this picture.
We all came back to the house for a yummy sundae bar after the confirmation.

Hooray for Emily!
We're so proud of you.

Poor Baby

All during Emily's baptism, and while we were trying to get ready, Lydia was acting really weird. She would scream bloody murder if I wasn't holding her, but then when I picked her up, she would just lay her head on my shoulder and hold really still. She did the same thing whenever anyone else picked her up. Scream like crazy for a minute, and then just hold really still. I offered her some Motrin because it seemed like there had to be something wrong with her, but she just screamed at me. Not until after the excitement died down, and my mom was holding her did we notice that she wasn't using her left arm. In fact, if anyone touched it or moved it she would scream. Hmmm. So we started reviewing the day and what could have happened to her arm, and it came out that she had fallen off a chair earlier, before the baptism. She was obviously in pain, so we took her to the Emergency Room. The doctor messed with her arm a little, but she would scream so loud that he decided to take some X-rays before he did anything else. When the x-rays looked fine, he came back to talk to us. We were all just sitting calmly talking when he suddenly reached over, grabbed Lydia's arm, gave it a vicious yank and a twist, and Click! Her elbow was back where it should be. Really the doctor ought to have been punched in the face for doing that to a poor baby, but it worked, and she was all better. She still didn't dare use the arm all day, but it was fine, and today she's been using it lots without any pain. And they all lived happily ever after. :) So that's what this picture is for. To show how sad she was while everyone ran around being crazy all day without anyone noticing how much pain she was in. Poor baby.

Capitol Reef

The Secret

There are quite a few widows in our ward, and there is much talk of how lonely they get. It's sad, and I wish I had more time to visit. But I was thinking about it today, and I'm pretty sure that will never be me. Because I know the secret.
I know how to get everyone I know to drop whatever they're doing and come rushing to my place.
All you have to do to get tons of visitors at your door is to have a messy house!
Now, I don't think it works if your house is messy all the time. You have to keep your house really clean for at least a week. (During which time your house will be invisible. People walking past will not even glance in your direction. No one will even think about stopping by. And you probably won't get any mail because the mailman, of course, can't see your house.)
But then all you have to do is let it fall apart. Say, if you have a daughter who's throwing up every hour for at least 24 hours and you get no sleep and all the other kids just run around making messes while you do nothing but read Dora stories and clean up puke. Something like that.
As soon as your house is good and messy, the people will come! Lots of people. Your mother-in-law, your visiting teachers, the neighbors, old friends, distant relatives, EVERYONE! And they won't just step inside the front door and chat. Oh no. They'll need to use your bathroom, walk through your laundry room, visit your kids' rooms, and maybe even want a drink, because they can probably tell that there are no clean cups left in the entire house.
And there goes your loneliness problem out the window!
Of course, it will take several days for your house to recover from that one day of neglect, during which time you will continue to receive a multitude of guests.
Until that magic moment when your house is presentable again, and the flood of people will instantly stop. By then you'll be sick of guests, but if you're ever lonely again...
you know what to do.

One Month's Worth

It's a good thing I take so many pictures, or else I'd never remember what's happened around here.

About a month ago was the Pinewood Derby. Ben decorated his car all by himself, and he placed second every time. Didn't matter which lane. Didn't matter whether the cars were backwards or forwards. Ben just got second every single time. Hooray for Ben!


My friends and I had been trying for months and months to get tickets to Wicked. But it turned out to be mostly impossible, as those of you in my area well know. But at the last minute a friend of a friend pulled some strings, and we got to go! We stayed at a nice Marriott (thank you, Jamie!), went to an AWESOME play, and just had a ton of fun. I have the best friends ever! Thanks guys!Then on to a sewing project. The Young Women were going to sew skirts, and I decided that I should have some idea of how it was done before I tried to teach others. So I made a couple of skirts for the girls. After seeing other people's blogs and the amazing Easter dresses that were sewn, these skirts may not seem so impressive. But they were a big deal at our house, and I was happy with how they turned out. (Even if it did turn out that I did them both completely wrong. Oh well. They look good. :)
Easter was a crazy day for us, since it also happened to be a double birthday! My mom and Emily share a birthday, and this year it was on Easter. So we had a fun Easter egg hunt at our house right after church, had some carrot pizza, (Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it!), and then went up to my parents' house for a double birthday party. Actually triple, since my nephew had a birthday that week, too.

Happy Birthday to Momma, Emily, and Blake!

And that should bring you about up to date on what's happening at our house.
Here's hoping it won't take me another month until our next update!

Dude, You Gotta Try This!

Happy Vernal Equinox!
Did you know that on this day (March 20th) you can balance eggs on their ends?
No, really! It's the coolest thing.
Technically the equinox is at 5:44am (If you're in my time zone),
but we took these pictures at 10:30pm the night before, so it will still work for several hours
before and after. It'll just work the best at 5:44am.
So get out those eggs and try it!

Wrestling

Wrestling season this year (all three weeks of it) ended with a big tournament. There were kids from five different schools, and it was quite the event. Ben did a great job, and he got a silver medal for his age and weight division!

Hooray for Ben!

Found It

Well, I couldn't find it on any of your blogs. But I've had fun going back through your archives. :)
So I decided to try and look for it on that big ol' world wide web - and I found it!
So here it is.
All of you mothers should read this. Especially on those days when you feel invisible.