September and October Happenings - 2014

So I wrote this at the end of October. But when I wrote it, I didn't have time to finish putting in the photos so I set it aside for a while - which turned into a long while. It's been in the back of my mind forever that I needed to finish this post. So I finally got it done. Old news. But good news.

Since school began, life has been about kids' sports and book reports and church duties and Power of Moms work and house projects with a good measure of fall leaves and pumpkin cookies and that nice slanted sun you get at this time of year. Sometimes things feel way too busy and rushed. But cross country season and volleyball season are almost over and keeping up this crazy pace is realistic for these short seasons. The kids are loving this involvement so much that it's worth the effort.



Isaac and Eliza were both on the Cross Country running team at school. They practiced after school M-Th until 4pm and had meets every Tuesday.

Eliza LOVED running. I loved seeing her beautiful smile as she ran.

She got faster and faster as the season went on and developed a beautiful stride.

Here's Eliza speeding on past some of the older girls on the team:

And here's Isaac (don't have as many great photos of him since all my best photos of Eliza are courtesy of my friend Emily who was there for the girls' races but not the boys')

Lining up at the starting line:

 There was a serious downpour during one of the boys' races. It ws so cold and so wet! But Isaac got one of his best times:

Grammie was there for that super rainy meet. What a lady to come support Isaac and Eliza even in the pouring rain!

 The whole team at Cross Country Regionals:

Eliza qualified to go to state and was so excited about that!

Here she is running at State:

Isaac had a rough year - serious breathing problems while running. At the close of the season, we finally got him into an allergy and asthma specialist.

Sure enough, he's got some pretty intense allergies plus a little asthma so we've got him medication to try and we'll see what happens. But he was great about cheering his little sister on even when he wasn't able to perform the way he'd like and his times weren't what they've been in the past. Hopefully this medicine will help and next season will be better!

Isaac had a wonderful time on a school trip to Havasupai. He was away for a week, hiking, jumping off waterfalls, camping and learning about geology from his wonderful science teachers. We missed him and were glad to get him back.

Ashton has been practicing a ton on the guitar and getting REALLY good. He's been playing his guitar every Saturday at the Farmer's Market downtown and earning great tips to go towards the trip to Spain that his school is doing at the end of the year. But now he's a little bit on the fence about whether or not to go on that trip - it's so expensive and he's just not sure it's going to be the right thing for him. It's been great to have discussions about making decisions and earning money and pros and cons of opportunities that come our way. One way or another, it's been great to have something to work towards.

Ashton made the volleyball team again and practices M-Th until 5pm and has two games every Monday and two games every Wednesday. Here's a glimpse at that:

That's Ashton jumping for the ball in the picture below:

Such a great group of kids and wonderful coaches:

Ashton has also been attending Seminary this year and has been amazing about getting himself there every morning. He takes off from home on his bike in time to be at Seminary by 7am and has been so good about getting himself up and getting there on his own. So proud of him! Then it's been great that he has his bike there at school so he can get himself home when volleyball practice ends at 5pm (otherwise I'd be driving back and forth to the school all afternoon long!)

And... drum roll please... Ashton has started getting ready for church on time without being nagged - had to capture the first time with a photo:

Eliza ran for Vice President of her school - and won!

Plus she and her best friend Rachel worked hard and received their Faith in God awards at church on the same day. So proud of them.


Eliza has also become a serious Ogden volunteer. She joined the Jr Junior League with a bunch of other great neighborhood girls and has loved being an official volunteer at several great events downtown including the Ogden Temple Open House, National Cycling Championships, the XTerra Triathalon, and the Harvest Moon Festival. There's always something great going on in downtown Ogden.

Here's Eliza and Rachel volunteering at the National Cycling Championships - they helped pedestrians cross safely when it wouldn't disturb the bikers.

Eliza had a great performance as part of the beautiful Children's Dance Theater production at Weber State. She loves dancing with these girls (they've danced together for four years now) and is still doing Virginia Tanner Dance which we both think is such an excellent approach to dance:

Eliza did a wonderful school report on Bulgaria and put the dress I brought back from my mission to Bulgaria to good use:

And Eliza loves doing my hair while I work on the computer. She gets pretty creative. And takes pictures of her hairdos when I'm not paying attention:

Oliver and Silas both got their Bear awards in Cub Scouts and LOVE Scout stuff.

Not everyone gets to have their Bear award presented by Abraham Lincoln! (The pack meeting theme was "heroes from history" - we have such great scout leaders - so grateful for them.)

And they saved up for a long time and got some exciting new Lego stuff (they are so into Lego):

Silas went for the Delorian from Back to the Future - love that they love movies from my past...

Jared gets pretty excited about building stuff iwth the twins.

Plus they're playing soccer on Monday and Wednesday afternoons - at the park next door - so nice that they can just walk over there. Isaac's been helping to coach this new little soccer program.

And they had to do some book reports. Which really aren't my favorite thing. I like the writing part but why do they always have to involve some sort of a craft? The boys had visions of awesome paper mache masks but in the end, they were happy with the simple paper plate masks that we had time for:

Oliver, Silas and Eliza got to participate in this fabulous new "Music Detectives" program put on by the Ogden Symphony Ballet Organziation. They got to go to a pre-concert talk to learn all about the composers and pieces they'd be hearing, had a special worksheet to fill out during the concert and nice binoculars to use to help them really enjoy it all the more, enjoyed great snacks at intermission with the group, then when parents went back to enjoy the second half of the show, they got to stay in the classroom and try playing lots of different instruments - they called it an "Instrument Petting Zoo." They loved it all so much and are now so excited about classical music. There are three more concerts in the series and we're excited to go to the next one!

 

Ashton and Isaac got some rank advancements in Boy Scouts. Ashton has to get his Eagle before he can get his driver's license so he'd better get moving a little quicker here!

Jared put in a fun new slackline in the backyard.

And there was pretty much always a group of neighborhood kids playing in our yard:

I sure love this pack of neighborhood boys:

Our garden did better than ever this year and we enjoyed tons of wonderful tomatoes plus some great spinach, kale, beets and swiss chard. Fresh produce is so beautiful, don't you think?

I had this for lunch every day for about a month. Oh how I love fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes!

Jared and I have spent way too many hours the past few weekends repairing, stripping down and repainting our front and back porches. What a lot of back-breaking work it turned out to be! But now the porches can stand up to another winter and we'll be better about doing some yearly painting so that we don't have to do this serious overhaul work again - hopefully.

On September 8th, it was our 16th wedding anniversary. Ashton got up early to make us delicious banana pancakes for breakfast - what a guy!

We celebrated by attending my cousin's wedding:

And re-visiting the place where we had our super-fun dance-party reception with a live swing band (mirrors come in handy when you're trying to take a selfie):

As part of our anniversary, we re-committed to a weekly date night which does wonders for us.

My sister Charity came in town a couple different weekends and Eliza and I had a great time helping her with wedding stuff alongside Grammie:

I've been hiking every Wednesday with friends which is always a great highlight of the week for me. I need that serious strenuous exercise and outside time and beauty so much! Here are a few shots from some of my hikes this fall:

View from the top - how I love that feeling you get at the top of a hard hike!

Did a couple great family hikes as well:

I spent a LOT of time in September and October and on into November on a big site re-design for Power of Moms plus there are lots of other exciting new things going on at Power of Moms. Here are a few links for you:

Free New Clutter Buster Kit (Excellent materials to help make clutter disappear and bring more peace and order to your life)

Free new Family Life Audio Series (10 30-minute podcast episodes with great topics to enhance your family life - features me, April, my sisters Shawni and Saydi, and my parents)

Free "Make Huge Projects Feel Easy" Webinars (April's been doing these wonderful 1-hour webinars that walk you through 4 simple steps to help you actually accomplish the projects hanging over your head)

Please share any and all of the above with friends and families - April and I work so hard on all this and it can help so many people - if they can find it! You can help there.

So we've been been busy and happy. There have been PLENTY of hard things, but this post is just about the good stuff and not-too-personal stuff that happened this fall. It's fun to look back and see how blessed we are and realize that the hard stuff fades away as I look back, leaving just the warm memories and some good lessons learned from the hard stuff.

Is Choice a Bad Thing?

I watched this great TED Talk today (trying to get back into the habit of learning new things every day through TED and other sources), 

The talk TOTALLY explains a lot of my stress and anxiety. Choices are SO hard for me and make me so worried and I always analyze too much before making a choice and second-guess myself after I make a choice. Whether it's choosing new shoes, choosing what to write about on this blog or in a Power of Moms post, choosing where to go running, choices stress me out! The bandwidth of my brain is taken up way too much by choices that really don't matter that much.

I love how my kids' dentist just gives them three choices of floride flavors. He told me that there are actually 12 choices but that kids take forever choosing so he just tells them about three and they quickly and happily make a choice. I wish there was someone in my life who could narrow things down to just three choices for me on a lot more things!

I'm trying to narrow choices by doing things like giving myself only half hour to research and purchase things online - I'm working to convince myself that whatever I find during that time period will be just perfect and I need to make the purchase and decide to be delighted about it. In stores, I'm tring to more frequently just buy something when I find a thing that fits basic criteria decently even though there might be something better or cheaper elsewhere. And it can work well to assign choices to others (Jared and Ashton had a fun time picking out a new computer for me - I left it totally up to them and I didn't do a bit of research but told them a couple things that mattered to me and asked them to please just decide for me - and they did - and the new computer is great - and I'm not even going to think about any other computers.) I've decided to just follow the same 3-mile running loop all the time and go whether no matter what the weather is (I was spending way too much brain power trying to decide whether or not to go and where to go each day that I had "running" on my calendar). I'm working on turning off my brain after making certain choices - just deciding to be excited about what I chose and tearing my brain away from re-visiting and re-analyzing decisions.

But I've got a long ways to go. And I want to figure out the right balance when it comes to offering my kids choices. 

So after watching this and thinking about it, I'd love further ideas about how I can "create a good fishbowl" (end of the video explains this) for myself and for my kids? What works for you?

Arches - Family Trips are Worth the Hassle!

For fall break this year (mid-October), Jared could only take a day off work and we had lots of projects to do around the house and were up to our eyeballs in commitments for work and church and the community. So we toyed with the idea of just staying home and relaxing a bit. But you know what? Staying home is rarely if ever relaxing. And we realized that what we really really needed was some good family time and some time in nature away from it all. So even though packing up the family for a weekend of camping and actually camping is rarely if ever relaxing, we decided to bite the bullet and head off to Arches National Park, one of our bucket-list items that we've been trying to get to forever.

We made it to Moab in great time and started the hunt for free spot in a camp ground. We knew it would be tricky finding a spot (there's only one reserveable campground in the area and it was booked) but with about 25 different BLM campgrounds just outside Arches, we figured we could find something. And we did find something. But it took two hours and felt a little worrisome by the end of the hunt! We ended up driving through this crazy little canyon and through a small river in our mini van to ultimately find a campground with open spots. It was pitch dark as we set up camp and we weren't really sure what sort of a place we'd ended up in. But at that point, any free campsite was a great camp site. When we finally got to sleep, we were awakened repeatedly by some not-too-considerate campers nearby who eventually required a not-too-polite statement from another camper nearby that it was 4am and time to seriously shut up. The kids didn't hear any of it though and slept really well - thank goodness.

Anyway, after a not-too-stellar first night, it was fun to wake up and find that we in a really beautiful place, surrounded by red rock splendor:

All the hassle felt worthwhile when I woke up to the twins' delightful chatter as they helped Jared build a fire and explored the awesome climbing rocks nearby.

Here's the canyon we'd driven through the night before:

And this was right outside our campsite:

We decided to do Delicate Arch as our first hike. Wow, It did not disappoint. We hiked for quite a while and then came around the corner and bam, there it was - this amazing formation we'd all seen in pictures all our lives.

Then we hiked to Landscape Arch - so thin it won't be around a whole lot longer:



And on to Double O Arch: (see that there are two "O's" on top of each other?)

Yep, that's Jared and the kids on top of the arch. Apparently it's like 10 feet wide up there. Or so they said so that I didn't have a heart attack when they called down to me to take a photo. I was happy being the photographer. I didn't do much climbing early in life and never really learned to trust myself. I do push myself and thoroughly enjoy hiking - but I'm not as deft as Jared and the kids when it comes to scrambling up and down steep places.

That's Isaac laying down on top of the arch and waving his arms around:

We took the long and adventurous primative trail back and did a lot of fun exploring and climbing around in the amazing rock formations:

Silas is so sweet to always find me a flower to tuck behind my ear while we're hiking:

The next day, we played around in the canyon near our campsite for a while. Jared and the kids somehow convinced me that this was perfectly safe (It looks like a REALLY deep chasm between the rocks but it's actually only about 8 feet down where they're jumping):

I have to thank Jared for helping me let these kids really develop confidence in their physical abilities. He's always held me back from keeping them from doing things that are somewhat scary but couldn't cause any super serious injury. And as a result, these kids have lots of physical confidence, a good sense of what they can safely do, and they've never experienced anything beyond a scraped knee or elbow due to the fun they have testing and extending their physical possibilities. Isaac broke his arm falling off a chair when he was 18 months old and the twins and Eliza have had stitches resulting from dumb little household accidents. But when it comes to hiking and climbing and playing on playgrounds, we've allowed them to try things that look a little scary through a mom's eyes - and they've been able to really learn about and respect their abilities and limits so they don't generally get hurt.

(For more along these lines, watch this Ted Talk: Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do)

Then we did the Park Avenue hike:

And Turret Arch:

And the North and South Windows:

We ended up with some pretty banged-up legs and some very dirty clothes - but what fun we had!

And we ended with the spectacular Double Arch:

These three were excited to complete their "Junior Ranger" booklets, report back to a ranger, and get a badge. Love the Junior Ranger program they have at all the National Parks.

So the trip was a pain. Yep. But staying home is a pain in it's own way. And we built memories and relationships and had such a great time exploring and enjoying the amazing and unique grandeur of Arches.

Here's to family camping trips, with all their challenges and joys!

Christmas Cancelled

Night before last, I told my kids that I was going to have to cancel Christmas this year.

I had spent the morning kicking off the "secret elf" week we started last night by putting a special little gift and note on each child's bed. (Eliza gave an excellent lesson in Family Home Evening and had everyone draw names, then everyone is supposed to do nice services or give nice little notes or gifts to their secret elf during the week. Last year, some elves didn't really remember to do anything so I thought I'd get things rolling with some simple grocery store gifts from their secret elf's mom or wife.)

While delivering these gifts, I found that no beds were made and all rooms were pretty messy. So I added to my gift-on-the-bed idea and made beds and cleaned rooms, with love in my heart rather than the sometimes - well usual - annoyed and put-upon attitude I have while cleaning up their messes that they really should be able to take care of themselves. I felt such love for each child as I thought of each thing I put away as evidence of their interests and creativity and of our family's busy and happy schedule of late, rather than evidence of their slothfulness.

Then I worked my tail off to get all my Power of Moms work done before the kids got home from school. The afternoon started off nicely. The twins and Eliza let out squeals of delight when they found their simple gifts from their "secret elf's mom,"

Eliza shared her dragon fruit with everyone as a fun afterschool snack,


Silas got right to work on making the gingerbread cookies he's been wanting to make with the molassas I got him (he's so into baking - and he made amazing gingerbread cookies totally by himself!), and Isaac seemed quite impressed with his giant avacado (he LOVES avacados and none of us had ever seen one so big). Ashton was totally focused on the exciting new tablet he's saved up for that arrived in the mail so he didn't venture up to his room for his prize. But that was OK. We were all so excited for him to finally have this new tablet that he's worked so hard for and talked about so much.

We went for our daily walk around the park and I had Ashton tell me all about his new tablet which he was very happy to do. And the other kids had a great time scootering and rollerblading in the surprisingly warm weather we've been having. So it was seeming like a really good day.

But then everything started to fall apart.

I pointed out that I'd been happy to help them get their rooms clean as a special extra service for them but that I needed them to hop right to it on doing their "zones" (they each have an area of the house that they are in charge of - and the whole house was quite dirty and messy because we've been so busy - a trip to CA, Thanksgiving, putting up all the Christmas decorations... no one had worked on their zones for a LONG time.) And I needed a little help chopping things up and setting the table for dinner (I'd made their favorite dinner and wanted to have a nice un-rushed family dinner before getting Eliza to dance and the boys to scouts - Tuesday evenings are usually stressful and rushed but I thought I'd gotten ahead of everything for once and only planned on a little seemingly-very-reasonable help from the kids.) With every little thing I asked the kids do do, there were issues. There was complaining. There was forgetting. There was whining. I tried to be patient. But EVERY kid was giving me a serious attitude about doing EVERY little thing I asked them to do.

But I kept my "nice mom" hat on through it all,

Jared got home, we had a nice dinner and got everyone to where they needed to be and enjoyed scount Pack Meeting with the twins.

Then when we got home and I asked each child to do one small thing to finish the after-dinner clean up we hadn't fully finished before heading out for scounts and dance and then to please please please get right up to bed, things really went downhill. Complaining. Remembering forgotten homework. Forgetting to do the small thing I'd just asked them to do or claiming that I had NOT told them to do it rather than saying they were sorry they forgot or admitting that they weren't listening. Throwing stuff on the floor of the rooms I'd just cleaned. Messing around in the bathroom when they were supposed to be brushing teeth. Forgetting to brush teeth and wash hands and faces (how is it so hard to remember something that you are reminded to do EVERY SINGLE DAY?!) and being bugged when they had to get out of bed and go do their teeth and hands and faces...

Needless to say, my "nice mom" hat finally got knocked right off my head and was replaced with my "seriously angry hat."

I went off on a tirade about all the things I do for them every day and how very little is expected of them in comparison. I told them that one person simply cannot do everything for 7 people and that I couldn't imagine that I'd have time to buy and wrap Christmas presents for them and make all our traditional Christmas meals and do gingerbread houses and take them to Christmas events on top of everything else they were forcing me to do by not doing it themselves. I told them Christmas would have to be cancelled and stormed off downstairs.

Where I found Eliza. She said she just had to finish polishing up a couple slides for the Powerpoint presentation she was supposed to give the next day. I'd offered to help with this project a couple weeks ago when she first started on it but she was in a huffy mood at that time and didn't like any of my suggestions so I told her she'd better just do it on her own. So she'd done a lot of it. But that small polish on a couple slides actually proved to be a nearly-two-hour project as everything needed some cleaning up (spelling, formatting, punctuation) and Powerpoint kept doing weird glitches. We were both in tears by the end.

When Jared got home from meetings, I told him I'd cancelled Christmas. He gave me a nice back massage while I tried to finish the Power of Moms newsletter that was involving WAY too many glitches and when I broke down in tears, he put me to bed and assured me that everything would be better in the morning and that the newsletter could wait.

I found a nice note from Eliza on my bed and got lots of hugs and "I'm sorrys" from the kids the next morning. I said a lot of "I'm sorry's" myself too.

I told them that Christmas isn't cancelled, but it can be a lot better if they step it up around here so I have more time to do the things they love at Christmas. I promised to explain things well and make sure they understand what needs to be done and would love for them to do the relatively small things I ask of them PLUS notice what else needs to be done and do it. I love being their mom and doing lots of things for them. I love all the joy they bring to me and they are my top priorities by far. But I do have other obligations and priorities and I need them to do a better job taking care of their rooms, their homework, their zones, and their after-dinner jobs if they want me to have time to do fun Christmas-oriented stuff for the family. They seemed to really get it.

After dropping the kids off at school, I went for my weekly hike with friends and that cleared my mind and lightened my heart like it always does. Then I got caught up on a lot of work and got that newsletter sent out. Everything felt much better.

 After school yesterday, I had a list of totally spelled out and clear tasks for each child to do and they did their work cheerfully, happily and well (that's our little motto for how we should work "cheerfully, happily and well"). I've realized I haven't been the best "household manager" so our kids haven't been able to be as good of "household helpers" as they need to be. Having general responsibilities doesn't work for them. They need specific lists of things to do on specific days. I need to take the time to make sure they fully understand what they're supposed to do. And they need to report back to me and I need to take time to check their work. They also need to learn to notice what needs to be done and do it - so as well as the couple of things on their list each day, they are supposed to think of one thing to do on their own and report back to me on what they did. I know I've got to put in more time to get everyone into better habits after a couple weeks of travel and holidays. They aren't going to be self-motivated, detail-oriented household workers without a strong manager to guide them through lots of supervision, instruction, encouragement and follow-up!

And I need to get more sleep so I can do a better job of keeping my "nice mom hat" on when things get dicey around here.

So we're all working together to get Christmas back on track.