When I Turned 41...

When I turned 41, my friends came over and we ate a million kinds of pie. 

I love pie.

I love these pictures so much. There have been a few times when my friends are laughing, and Jim pulls out his camera and captures the perfect moment. 

They are laughing about how Lisa got a bruise on her foot. 

Roxanne walked in and handed me some mushrooms. I asked "did you gather these yourself?" They were different and suspicious because the were actually meringue! and so so delicious. But they look so real!

Lisa gave me the most perfect gift. It is some art we are going to hang at Galbraith. Stand by on that...I will show you when we do it. 

When I turned 41, we ran up and over Galbraith mountain, starting in Sudden Valley and ending in the dollar lot. Climbing a mountain is my favorite. 

If you look way out there in the light blue zone, you can see Rainier! It is a rare sighting, the visibility has to be just right. 

At 41, me and the kids take Koda out to the fields of BP a lot.

Each time we find a new off leash place for that dog, it get's covered in puddles, so we go looking for a new spot. This is a great winter dog spot. 

This day the lighting was so pretty. It was dark because of the cloud cover...

but as the sun began to set, the light spread under the clouds and it was like someone pulled the shades up. 

One day we came home to Koda in a hoodie. 

Evan's teacher said it was "dress your dog day", so he did. 

She's a cool dog. 

At 41, I am heavily involved with my kids' math education. 

Every day at 11:00, I become the math teacher and sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's so terrible and we fight and yell.

But then we take a break and chill out and resume the math studies. 

It's all bizarre. 

When I turned 41, Avery gave me a foot massage. 

There is no greater gift, I swear. 

When I turned 41, Hunter got baptized. 

When he walked into the room with the jumpsuit on, Andrew desperately wanted to feel it. 

It was only us and the Blacks. No music (per Hunter) and a few tiny talks from siblings who already got baptized. 

It was awesome. 

At 41, Koda comes and lays submissively at my feet when I catch her eating food off the table. 

I yell "KODA!" and she drops her head in shame and crouches down low, walks over to me and rolls on her back. She just lays there in total apology while I wag my finger at her. 

One evening when I was 41, after Jim gave himself a haircut, Andrew attached the hair to his chest. He tried tape at first, but that didn't really work.

He walked in and said, "Oh hi Jimi! Do you like my manly chest hair?" We died laughing. 

At 41, Wednesdays afternoons are spent by the bay and bookmobile with my original covid cohort. 

They are a bunch of cool cats, playing on the logs and packing around. 

We would have been at sports or something else in a normal year. 

At 41, I have so many pictures of dogs on my camera roll. 

When I turned 41, the "first day of school" picture was taken in the winter dark with an umbrella and rain. 

This was the first day all three got to return to in person school. 

They love it so much. Online learning is a drag. 

Lots of reading.

This day at BP, the dogs chased some geese. They chased and chased but didn't come close to catching. 

At 41, I love finding weird root formations in the forest,

and big views. 

At 41, I love laying around in Thanksgiving Bed. 

It's such a weirdo world we've landed in. It's all cliche. It's all been said.

Specifically, the divisiveness. We are in a civil war, and it's not just in social media or at the capital.

At ward council on Sunday, Bishop and Gary got into it about covid. The problem is, we've all had such different experiences with the thing, so our reality is different from everyone else's reality. 

Gary has a family member who died from covid. 

Bishop just recovered from covid and it "wasn't that big a deal". 

So they are both right and both wrong. It got super uncomfortable as they both got emotional about the thing. The rest of us were dead silent, staring at our hands and they kept arguing until we were late for sacrament meeting. 

It's like we live in a post-truth world. There is no truth to be had. 

How tall is Mount Everest? It depends on what source you get that information from. 

Overall, we are fine, everything is fine. 

But at night - the middle of the night - that's when I start panicking. 

If I'm going to panic, it's in the dark when my brain isn't fully functional. 

The other day, I read a Rilke poem "Go To the Limits of Your Longing", and as I lay in bed in a panic, I said the line over and over until I fell back asleep:

"no feeling is final" 

I won't always feel this helpless, this panicked, this hopeless, this frustrated, this happy, this lucky, this excited.

Things will change, thank goodness for that absolute truth.  

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

2020. What. The. Heck.

JANUARY

We started out so confident, going to Canada for my birthday, 

and Hawaii with the Kelvs.

It was going to be a GREAT year.

A fun snowstorm came through, getting us excited for the Hawaii sun.

FEBRUARY

Jim traipsed around Europe...

We had no idea all these places would be closed off to Americans in mere months. 

He climbed this giant hill on that little tourist bike. haha

We had such big plans for the girls camp backpacking trip. 

Avery had her first young women's campout. We were so excited to go on the first temple trip together. 

Contact sports were still a thing. 

MARCH

This was the last sport any of the kids played. 

There was talk and rumors of a coronavirus. Some said this tournament weekend would be the last big thing we did before things shut down. 

I didn't realize what we had then. We were packed in the gyms with crowds of people. 

This night was our last young women activity. 

When I got home, the NBA got cancelled, Tom Hanks had the Covid, all church was cancelled, Disneyland shut down.

It was the beginning of the end. 

The next day school shut down. I remember sobbing loudly when I got the call.

Remember the novelty of it all at the beginning? Mixed with a lot of anxiety? 

We watched the numbers, assuming they meant something.

With all this TIME on our hands, we took Evan mountain biking that first day of home school. 

The novelty and excitement of home school! This was our first (ps you're really gonna want to read sassy sassy weener.) project. Andrew took my computer and wrote that part in parenthesis...

I just came up with nonsense to keep the kids busy and on a schedule.

APRIL

In the beginning, there was big talks and movement to "isolate" and "quarantine", but nobody really knew what and why and how. I read this article and it rang so true to me. 

So we picked our social cohort (the Dicksons and the Blacks) and felt great about it. 

I had that article ready to defend myself on the chance that some warrior came along and wagged their finger at us for not following the rules. 

I did end up using it once in our neighborhood facebook group when someone posted how appalled they were that children were outside playing in groups. 

haha. what in the world.  

Blessedly, with nicer weather came "the time of the forest".

The kids would leave the house and be gone for hours and hours.

This was also the time of frogs. 

We were somewhat bored. We had so much angst and time on our hands.

We grew a mustache and looked like a PE coach.

There was "the time of the bike park at Halverson". 

We worked hard on it only to have the parks and rec people come in and flatten it. 

We were being cautious by not entering each other's homes.

Because we weren't sure what the RIGHT thing was to do (now we have hindsight! we didn't have that in April), we did what felt right. Yes to cohorts, no to masks outside, no to going in others' homes, yes to sanitizing everything...stuff like that. 

At the end of April...

we got. a. dog.

and then things changed even MORE. 

It's like we brought home a newborn baby. 

She was a cute little baby for like two seconds. They changed so fast.

MAY

This is me trying to figure out how to incorporate this newborn into my very comfortable and independent lifestyle. 

By May we opened our cohort up a bit. But still only while playing outside. 

JUNE

Some big things happened in our little world and our big world in June.

Evan broke his toe. That mask there was one of the first kid's mask we owned. It was a pediatric, disposable mask, but we reused it many times as masks became mandatory. Eventually we bought some from Old Navy. Now they sell masks on every street corner, but they didn't back then. 

Riots and violence and protests erupted throughout the country. 

We started obedience training. Look how cute those dummies are. 

The dogs are cute too. 

ha ha

The last day of fake school...marked by the end of lunch bus. 

Koda learned a lot of good social skills at lunch bus. 

This far into the year of COVID, these pictures make it seem fairly easy. But it wasn't. It was inexplicably hard. We always talked about how we felt like a boiled frog. Every day was something new and weird. 

Our one reliable source of entertainment: the beach. 

We spent so much time jumping off docks this summer. 

JULY

A COVID 4th of July

Fallon! 

Biking to the Stake Park was another reliable activity for the summer. 

AUGUST

Neighborhood parties are introduced to our lives.

We still went out and explored all the beautiful places,

except now all the trails were choked full of people. People everywhere. 

I hope they all go away next year. 

And then another school year started. At home.

It's weird. We didn't even have to go school shopping. 

SEPTEMBER

It was a COVID year for camping.

The Bookmobile became a key part of our educational experience.

By now COVID was no longer a common threat against humanity. It launched a civil war, a political war, all the wars. By September it was just so annoying and engrained in our psyches. 

Lisa became the seminary teacher, so I needed a new 1st councilor in yw, which led me to one of the best things to come out of the year 2020: Roxanne. 

She's the greatest new discovery, yet feels like she's been our friend forever. 

I didn't know her from Adam (she moved here recently), but I knew she should be my councilor. 

I was even told by the bishop - "no, not her. "

and I said - "yes her."

and he said - "pray again, she's going to another calling."

so I sat in my rocking chair and DIDN'T pray about it,

 then went back and asked the him for ANOTHER gal whom I knew he WANTED me to ask for,

and that gal said "no thanks. I can't right now."

so I asked for Roxanne again,

and he said "yes. definitely."

Then I asked Roxanne to climb a mountain with me as a way to expedite our relationship. 

It was a steep 4 miles up and it was one of the coolest summits I've ever reached. 

And now she is a key part of our young women program. And she is the greatest. 

 

OCTOBER

Because the kids are home every second of their lives, I went to Baker with my ladies instead of with Jim like we used to do. 

"Home schooling" is so hard, but this gave me something to look forward to. 

Another necessity from 2020:

We needed a place nearby to take dogs off leash, and we needed a place for kids to "do school" on No-Screen-Fridays. 

 This green space in our hood was the solution. 

Off leash training begins.

That was 12 weeks of hard work/frustration. 

She failed hard, but guess what...a lot of what I taught her stuck, and she gets more obedient every day.

 I have a good feeling about it. 

Without any sports to go to, we start boxing with Jeb. 

Jim "couldn't buy Andrew boxing gloves fast enough."

I'm realizing that by October, we are all used to the COVID life. It's background noise, white noise. 

NOVEMBER

Back to school! Kind of. 

Painting the downstairs was the worst. 

We finished just in time to host Thanksgiving.

Remember Thanksgiving Bed? That was awesome. I need to remember Thanksgiving Bed for the future.

DECEMBER

My cutie pies in their Christmas dresses.  

We had Solstice Snow!

Here is the "after" of the piano. It looks so pretty. 

The day after Christmas, we went running/riding at Galbraith. 

But first we sang Ice Ice Baby into Avery's new kareoke microphone. 

For New Years, we partied at the Blacks until a respectable 9:00, then came home and sent off the crazy year with Pac Man and Captain Underpants and some bubbly.