2012 Catch Up

I have been really busy. And I haven't updated this blog. But then I realized this is how I keep track of when and what happened during the year. So here is a quick wrap up of October and November and December.

First a flashback to September. The oldest of my nieces got married. Jessica is a beautiful person and I think she picked a sweet and loving man to be her husband. We were able to go to her wedding where the girls chose beautiful dresses in her colors and Isaac played violin with his aunt Becky for the wedding. But most of all the kids had so much fun with their cousins.

In October, Becca turned 11 with a Paris party. She is kind of obsessed with Paris right now.

She ended up having to make the cupcakes herself. I was sick the day before her party. But she is kind of a holly homemaker. I am not sure whose daughter she is.

We took a drive on Conference weekend to see our beautiful mountains all ablaze for autumn. We took a couple side roads (Tom always explores the side roads) and found an abandoned cabin and some beautiful aspens.

And then we went to PA to see my parents and sister. It is four years since I have been back to my parent's home. It was beautiful the whole time we were there and we had lots of adventures. I took the kids to Hershey Park with their cousins. They had a blast together. We visited Washington D.C. and we took some beautiful hikes to enjoy the Fall colors.

Swinging on the tree vines was a highlight of the trip.

Plus we had the boys grill up some tasty dinner on Sunday night.
I loved being home. It was a little hard to come back.

But then we did and we had a really fun Halloween. I love Halloween, which is weird because I come from a family of Halloween haters.

Rebecca was the mad hatter, Lia was a witch and Isaac showed up on the doorstep in this crazy grim reaper outfit. We thought Isaac wasn't going trick or treating so it was kind of hilarious.

And then came Thanksgiving. We had a pie party where we made too many pies and then the next day Tom, Linda and I cooked up Thanksgiving dinner. My brother Jake came to visit and he shopped with us and took a hike to some nearby mini cliffs near our home.

We have had a lot of wonderful amazing moments in the past few months. Looking at these photos reminds me that despite the tough moments and days (And there really have been some this Fall) we have had some joyous times as well. We have been insanely busy, but in being busy we have been blessed to have the good outweigh the bad and the hard. This Sunday I am grateful for family and friends.



December is here and despite recovering from me recovering from surgery, we have managed to get the new Christmas tree up and decorated and the rest of the house. And we have already made our gingerbread house and Tom and the kids have already eaten most of it. I choose not to eat off the gingerbread house. I saw where those sticky fingers were during the building process.

See you in 2013.

Schools In!

I am not going to lie. I was happy when school started. Two weeks before school started I thought I really don't want school to start. But the week before the fighting started non stop and I knew it was time for to school to start.

The crazy part is that Isaac started high school. It seriously weirds me out a little.


First we went and did some shopping with friends. It was an 8 hour marathon.  But the girls had fun with their friends. They tried on way more clothes than they bought. We definitely were not buying these blingy pieces.

But we did get these three dollar Hello Kitty bling shirts. How do you resist that?

And then school came. And I sent off a 9th grader. 

 

And a 5th Grader and a 2nd Grader

 

It's already been  2 1/2 weeks. The adventures have begun. Becca is getting ready to start orchestra, Isaac is getting ready to try out for the highschool play Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I showed him the songs and it may have freaked him out a little. Lia is back in ballet. 

Last Saturday I let the girls have a back to school s'more party. It was a blast even if the screaming from the following night games had me expecting cops at my house all night. 

SUMMER!

I love summer. And yet, I am so distracted. Running a business and having all my kids at home is not even remotely working. I just want to go play with them all the time. And I have to keep putting off fun stuff to meet work commitments. I am so not liking my magazine right now.

But I have tried to squeeze in some fun and we had an amazing week at Lake Powell with Tom's family. Thanks to Tom's sister Melinda and her husband Jason we had an awesome houseboat to hang out on, lots of fun water toys to play on, and good company. Lake Powell is just dreamy. And I especially loved that I could not get on the internet or my cell phone for a week.

If you want to see all our fun Lake Powell pics we have them posted on facebook.

I have seen lots and lots of theater, including Les Mis (one of my all time faves). Which reminds me I have 3 reviews to write still. But we did take our kids to see Aladdin at Tuacahn. My girls love their Disney production every year. And they insist on getting photos with the actors afterward.

Isaac is not huge into sports but he loves archery and has been taking recurve archery classes with the JOAD organization. During the Utah Summer Games he competed. We sat there for 4 hours and watched. It is not the most stimulating fast paced of sports but he really enjoys it and we are glad he has found a sport he likes. He has also been taking tennis lessons this summer. I have figured out that boy has an affinity for anything with strings attached. Piano, violin, bow and arrow, tennis.

We have also been trying to stay cool. It is getting hot here. We have not been to the pool much (except for Lia who is taking swimming lessons) but we are finding ways to cool off. We made our own fun sprinkler with a soda pop bottle. The girls played in it for about an hour.

 

I also finally went and bought myself a $10 hammock. I am a hammock girl. And I dream all day in summer about getting to my hammock. Now this one is a little chintzy. I am on the lookout for something much bigger and wider. Meanwhile we are all finding time to chill out (except Tom, he is not a hammock boy).

 

Still more summer to go and so much on my bucket list. 

New Calling

I got my new calling today. I am a little nervous. I am in my first presidency ever and it just happens to be primary, where I have spent the least amount of time in callings. I am also a little worried I won't be the nice one. I already had to get upset at one class today.

But I am also a little excited. I want to help those children feel the spirit and I love the ladies I am serving with. Also eternally grateful I am not the president or secretary and just the second counselor. Here goes a whole new learning experience.

Musical Bonanza

Some of us have been very musical lately. Well, that really means everyone but me. My musical contribution is to be the support.

So for my family and anyone else who wants to listen here are a bunch of videos.
The first one is just a picture of Tom and his band playing at Tuacahn. I have that on video but we are having technical difficulties.

Please ignore the tunnel like sound in some of them. Most of them were taken with my phone.

Isaac as the Daddy Duck in his middle school production of Honk.







  Lia's first piano recital




Becca's Recital piece
Isaac's violin and piano recital. The piano piece is kind of awesome so stick through to the end.

And here is Lia's ballet dance that she had in Coppelia. This is not her costume. This is just dress rehearsal.

Here she is all dolled up.

 

There are more videos of my kids performing their hearts out. But good grief, I think I gave you enough to watch. 

Teenage Love

Excuse me, but I have to vent for just a minute. Because frankly, I am a little confused.

Let me just preface this by saying I am not bragging about my son here. I am a little unsure how to deal with this. I choose to laugh because it is getting a little ridiculous. I laugh because I am also a little freaked out. You may choose to think what I have to tell you is cute. I am a little disturbed by it all, and I feel a little sorry for Isaac and for the girls who continue to basically throw themselves at him.

Isaac came home and told us that some girl had declared her undying love for him. Isaac is not bragging either, he is a little overwhelmed by the attention. Especially when said girl wrote all her flowery feelings down in a letter. As Isaac said there were similes and metaphors involved in the writing and although I did not read it (he crumpled up and threw it away) some of the things this girl said about Isaac's eyes make me really embarrassed for her. It also made me laugh really hard, which also makes me embarrassed for her. Isaac doesn't really know her well. But what makes it even more awkward is that she is his wife in the school play. Poor kid. And poor girl. Her friend told her she should take more risks and she did. Nice but stupid friend.

This is not the first incident of this kind of teenage girl love this month either. A few weeks earlier a girl asked if he would be her boyfriend. This girl is actually a good friend of his but he told me she reminds him of his sister. Thank heavens he didn't say that to her.

He politely declined and told her he couldn't go on dates until he was 16 and that he had a relationship before that turned out bad. I thought he handled it well. He was a little concerned. The girl did not come to school the next day.

"She will be fine" I told him. "At least you didn't tell her she reminded you of your sister."

That same week some girl's friend came up and asked Isaac if she liked her friend (I admit this is a little less aggressive).

I have had to tell some of Rebecca's 10 year old friends to leave Isaac alone too. One of them told him she would pay for his movie ticket if he would please just come with Rebecca and her friends to the movies. Poor Becca.  

And anyways why are all these girls so aggressively going after boys? Do they really think that flowery love notes saying "I will never break your heart." to a 13 year old boy are going to make those boys feel anything but uncomfortable. And 13 year old boys -- at least most of them -- are uncomfortable when you throw yourselves at them and they have to try and be gentlemen and not hurt your feelings. Because as Isaac knows well already, when you hurt a girl's feelings you also offend her circle of friends and that never turns out pretty.

Please middle school girls restrain your raging hormones. Boys do not want to feel cornered by your undying love when they are 13. They may like you, it's true. Probably just not quite as much as you like them.

Phew Mama Bear got that off her chest. Feel a little better now.

March and April

Let me just say that the last six weeks of my life have been INSANE. It always happens that the craziest weeks of mine and the kids' lives fall in the weeks when Tom is entrenched in tax season. I always think I can pull it off and then the week before tax season is up I come just moments away from a panic attack. A friend even offered me some of her valium at some point. I politely refused. I've done this before, I knew I would survive.

The problem is that Isaac's scout stuff always comes due in April and since he is way into music and theater it is also the time of year when he has recitals, competitions, performances and plays. It is a little crazy. Now it turns out that my youngest also happens to be a musical dancing girl and now we have her stuff too. Add Easter, the fact that my children have all outgrown or outworn their clothes. (Isaac was literally down to one pair of shorts and 1 shirt that fit him last week.) and magazine deadlines and meetings and I was feeling just a little overwhelmed. People kept trying to call me at home last week and saying I couldn't get you. Yep, that is because I was barely home. And the disaster state of my house proves it! 

So, a few photos of what we have been up to this month. 

 A little Spilbeedog one March morning.

 With Tom's band playing in the background, Lia gets 2 feet up the climbing wall before succumbing to pure terror.

Isaac went on an orchestra trip to Disneyland to compete in the Heritage Festival. It was quiet in our house without him. His sisters were so excited when he came home they anxiously waited for him to get off the bus. This is the cutest picture to me.

Spring break came and I decided to take a hike with the kids. I had heard of this Lion's Mouth cave west of Cedar City that had petroglyphs. We set out to find it -- which took us much longer than I expected. There are no signs or marked path indicating how to get to it. Finally, we decided to head up the hill towards the rock formation. It was a much longer and steeper hike than I thought. Rebecca and I were laboring all the way up. Rebecca kept saying. "How did I get to be part of this family. I hate hiking. Nature hates me." It was actually quite comical. Meanwhile Isaac and Lia ran ahead of us like little jack rabbits scurrying up the hillside yelling, "Hurry, Hurry." And then finally "We are here. Where are you."

 

Becca and I finally made it. And the view from there was amazing.

And then came Easter. We dyed some eggs. Isaac got so artistic it was a shame to eat his eggs later.

                                                             Lia goes to the park hunt

                                                        The haul from Nana's house.

And then Lia gets ready to be in the Cedar City Junior Ballet Company's production of Coppelia. Lia only had a small part in this ballet but she worked really really hard for months and especially the week before the production. By Sunday she was exhausted and so was I frankly. But she loved being part of this bigger production where she got to dress up, go on stage, put on makeup and watch the big ballerinas sway by in their beautiful costumes.

Saturday morning both Isaac and Lia sang at different times at a fundraiser for a local family who lost their mother in a car crash. 


Isaac has joined honors choir -- the blessing and bane of my existence. He has to be there at 6:45. Which means I lose an extra hour of sleep but I don't have to fight him to be on time for school. Isaac actually sang a solo at this event but forgot to tell me so I only got 3 seconds of him singing. Turkey. Lia is also in her school choir.