Snow in St. George

It's been snowing like crazy here for the last couple days. Weird, weird, weird! When it started, the kids were so excited and Ashton was quick to point out that I was totally wrong when I said it didn't snow in St. George. The red hills all around us looked so odd and beautiful all covered with snow and capped in misty clouds and as the snow melted, the wetness brought out such beautiful colors. I took a lot of pictures. Two whole days of snow. We stayed inside mostly for the first day of snow, drank hot chocolate, ate cookies, read stories, watched the snow. Ashton didn't have school since it was a teacher improvement day and it was so nice to be all cozy in our beautiful new home, no one having to go anywhere and all the home-finishing projects on the shelf for a while. The second day of snow (yesterday), we were all a bit stir crazy so we headed out to this wildlife museum full of taxidermied animals from all over the world - not exactly the most impressive thing I've seen, but interesting and good to just do something not related to finishing our house. Our house still has a ways to go and after pushing for so long to get things done for the Parade of Homes open house a couple weeks ago, it's been nice to go at a slower pace for a while. We've still got 6 doors that need to be stained and installed, quite a few baseboards and some casing to go in, the floors downstairs need to be redone by the stamped concrete guy, some carpet and grout needs to be fixed, and there are tons of other little details still hanging. Sometimes it drives me crazy that everywhere I turn, there's something that needs to be done. But mostly, I marvel daily that we live in such a beautiful home.

Oliver and Silas are walking around like crazy. Si has this cute and very secure shuffle-walk and Ollie walks like he's constantly worried he could fall over at any moment - but when he does fall, he gets right back up and keeps going - he gets more and more confident every day. They're both so fun right now - laughing their heads off at each other and anyone else who gives them the time of day and playing contently with just about anything they find on the floor. I woke up this morning to two sweet little guys throwing open the double doors of my bedroom and coming in, arms raised, laughing their heads off, dressed in their matching fuzzy jammies. Could there be anyting cuter? Si's been giving the cutest, longest hugs lately to me and Jared, saying "Awwwww" as he hugs. Ollie makes the "Awwww" sound, but likes to grab our faces and cause some pain as his latest form of showing affection. These guys get into the kitchen garbage about 100 times a day, foraging for food and finding some disgusting thing to eat (banana peels are a favorite). Hate to put child locks on our beautiful new cabinets, but we'll have to do it, I guess! And Si has been waking up at night and although we try to let him cry it out and get back to sleep, he just doesn't give up - he'll cry for hours! We've had some really bad nights lately and it's pretty darn frustrating when it's 3am and he just won't go back to sleep and when he finally wakes up Oliver who's great about sleeping through it for a long, long time. We've given him medicine to see if he's teething and is in pain and that's why he's waking up, but it doesn't help much - he's just in a bad habit, I think. He was better last night so we'll see how tonight goes.

Sometimes I dream of a day when I could eat dinner without being interrupted 20 times or having to share my food with the bottomless pit twins, when I could sleep through a night and not be woken up by kids noises early in the morning (Jared's amazing- total morning person and happily gets up with the kids when they need attention in the morning so I'm totally grateful, but the noises wake me up no matter what), or when I could just read something or do something without 100 interruptions and questions. But this is my season for all this stuff and I'm trying to savor it as much as possible.

Eliza's been SO emotional lately - so sweet one minute, and then throwing a total tantrum about some tiny thing the next minute. She cracks us up all the time as she comes up with the most random and hilarious imaginary scenarios and is always pretenting something or other. She's always saying things like, "mom, let's pretend that I'm a cat and you're my mommy - now 'tend mom, can you give me a lick?" She calls me "tend mom" (pretend mom) more than anything else lately. And then sometimes she calls me Saren. She's taken to calling the twins Mickey Mouse and Baby Jesus. Where does she get these things? She woke up in the middle of the night the other night screaming (just after I'd gotten Si back to sleep) and both Jared and I rushed to her room because her screams were so serious-sounding. When we asked her what was wrong, she said "Nobody will give me a tomato!" Trying not to laugh to obviously, we calmed her down in her half-asleep state by telling her she could have as many tomatoes as she wanted - she snuggled back down into bed with a smile on her face and went to sleep. What a funny girl!

Our Parade of Homes open house went really well over all - probably had over 100 people come through, most of whom were very impressed with the house and many of whom picked up fliers and business cards for Avanti Design. We'll see what comes of it. Mostly, though, it was great to get feedback and find that there were a lot of people very impressed with the unusual new approaches we've used in this house and very appreciative of our color scheme, floor plan, concrete countertops, cork flooring, etc. It was stressful trying to keep the kids out of the house or under control and happily in the house and trying to keep the house as perfectly presentable as possible for a couple days, but it turned out fine. We had a couple people sending their friends back or coming back themselves on the second day, they were so impressed. It really is very satisfying to create something that we love and see that others love it as well. I've finally been able to put to use so much of my art, architecture and home design knowledge and ideas.

Ashton and I had a great parent teacher conference and his teacher loves him so much. He's just such a bright, good kid. He's reading on a "G" level (they hope most kindergartners will be on a "C" level when they leave Kindergarten) and he can read just about anything with ease and with feeling in his voice (not much of that robot-sounding early reading with this kid). Ashton's so fun to talk to about so many things and he's really great about helping out around here lately.

Isaac's got some whining problems that just won't go away - especially when he's a bit tired. He's become more interested in learning to write his name correctly and we were both SO excited when he finally could write his name really perfectly without help this last week. He's such a bright kid, but likes to learn things on his own terms. He's always so excited about everything and is such a good big brother and plays so well with Eliza lately (he just HAS to carry the twins around and they DON'T like it, but we're working on that). He's always thinking of other's feelings and his little random acts of generousity are so sweet.

More later - got to go to bed. Crossing my fingers that Silas stays asleep!

where to begin?

I'm sitting here in my gorgeous new home listening to some Dave Matthews on our excellent whole-house sound system and my amazingly good, handsome, patient and smart husband Jared is downstairs putting together some of the exciting new furniture that just arrived today. The kids are sleeping and they looked like such little angels when I just checked on them. Life is good. And life is crazy. A couple hours ago, as I left my job of putting together a new chair to clean up poo off our brand new carpet thanks to one of our 1-year-old twins somehow taking off his own diaper and six-year-old Ashton was reminding me that he needs to bring a special poster to school tomorrow since this is his spotlight week and 3-year-old Eliza was having one of her regular tantrums about something I can't even remember now and 4-year-old Isaac was whining about how we never made the cookies I promised to make today, things weren't seeming so rosy. But that's just how life around here is - great moments, hard moments, great moments, hard moments - and a lot of stuff that needs to be done, some of which just doesn't happen. I'm learning to be OK with the eb and flow of a life that involves five very young kids, long lists of projects that still need to be done on this house, three fledgling businesses we're trying to get off the ground, the CareerMothers organization I helped start that has a conference coming up and the orphanages I'm supposed to be helping in Bulgaria.

Ashton and I worked on his poster for a couple hours and he finally begged to go to bed at 10pm. He did a great job helping with the poster, coming up with some very artistic additions. It was fun to focus just on him for a while and go through some great old pictures of him as we selected photos for the poster. He's a wonderful kid. He's been giving me random unasked for hugs lately which is something new and great coming from my non-cuddly big boy. And he's been making me valentines daily which is always nice. He's reading just about everything and he's always writing things these days and it's amazing to find papers around the house covered with his blocky handwriting. It's so fun to pick him up from school and see all the kids gathered around him and hear all their "bye Ashton's" as he leaves. It's so fun to see him so well-liked. He's such a mature and bright kid. Sometimes I feel bad that he has to shoulder such a load as the oldest of so many kids. We really expect a lot of him - we really have to! But he shoulders it well.

I can't write about all the kids right now becuase it's just too late so I'll try to write somethign special about a different kid each time I write. But I do have to say this time that our babies just keep getting more fun and they're growing up way too fast! Silas is walking all over the place these days on his cute fat little legs. Oliver can take steps but prefers to stand in one spot and survey the scene, then crawl when he wants to get somewhere. They both have these awful colds right now, but they hardly complain, sweet things. The snot everywhere is somewhat annoying but no bit problems. They both just got their first top teeth and do these snaggle toothed grins that melt your heart. They're full of hugs for me when I got to get them out of bed in the morning and there's nothing like their cubby little arms around my neck (and their snot all over my shoulder and their super sharp fingernails grabbing my face!).

Our house really is amazing - more than I ever even dreamed of. I wake up every day to the most gorgeous red mountains and lava rock and wild vegetation right outside my bedroom window. The views from every room in this house are breathtaking. And all the paint colors and cabinet designs and flooring choices and light fixtures and so many other things I spent forever researching and deciding have turned out wonderfully. We're still missing some backordered and sadly discontinued lights here and there, there are baseboards still to be done, we're missing 6 doors that had to go back because they had too many knots, there's paint touch up to be done, there are a couple boxes to unpack still, we're missing some of the furniture we've ordered and some we've got yet to order, and there are still pictures to hang, but really, we've come a long long way since we moved in two weeks ago. And we've come a very very long way from 3 weeks ago when we were freaking out because we had to get out of our rental and there was so much still to be done on this house! We've had way more than our share of problems and setbacks on this house, but we've also had many things turn out even better than expected and we've had wondeful help from my parents, my brother Jo and his wife Aja who live by us here and some great friends and neighbors as well as our new and very wondeful babysitter, Ashley.

We're doing an open house this Friday and Saturday to show off the hopefully finished house and it should be a good marketing opportunity for our new design company. It just feels like the right thing to do and it's nice to have a deadline for getting the house pretty much done - but it's pretty stressful and crazy trying to finish building a house while we live in it with our many little kids. But mostly the kids are loving playing in the basement and have been getting along surprisingly well without all that much attention from us.

Got to go to bed!