I am from you

One of my goals as a mother is to create really wonderful memorable moments with my children, which is why I was so touched when Abigail handed me this poem that she wrote. I tried to photograph it, but it didn't show up very well since it was a booklet with lots of pages, so I'll type it up.

She titled it, "I Am From You."

I am from
Playing with stuffed dragons and doing dot-to-dots
From
Coloring color-by-numbers and biking around

I am from
Watching sunrises in the Smokies and biking while you run
From
Skiing down ski slopes and reading by the Christmas tree

I am from
Making lasagna and collecting unicorn models
From
Camping and roasting marshmallows

I am from
Playing with baby Hermes and riding in the car at night
From
Playing on playgrounds and reading books outside on a blanket

I am from
Playing tag and computer games
From
Swimming and creating things

I am from
Playing King of Tokyo and TransAmerica
From
Playing outside and running around

I am from
Eating blackberries and apples
From
Percy Jackson and Harry Potter

I am from
Eating gingerbread and watching storms
From
Listening to birds and drawing dragons

I am from
My bed on a cold morning and playing car ride bingo
From
Making jewelry and organizing bookshelves

I am from
The days spent in Florida and riding roller coasters at top speed
From
Building Legos on a Saturday morning and baking cookies that afternoon

Luke is 4!! Isaac is done with kindergarten!!

 My sweet little Luke is four years old! Actually, he's been four for nine days now, but it's been a rather chaotic nine days. :-)

Luke's birthday was the day that we were driving home from vacation. We stopped and had a "special birthday breakfast" at a very overpriced pancake house, but he spent most of the meal trying to slide out of the booth onto the floor, so it wasn't exactly what I would call a rousing success!

So the day after we got home, we made a "penguin cake." He asked originally for a very fancy and very specific cake that--quite honestly--would have taken hours to make and was just not something I could face doing the day after getting home, so I convinced him that penguins would probably prefer a (storebought) Oreo crust filled with ice cream and whipped cream. Thankfully, he agreed.

When I hung up the birthday banner, I took this photo first...

...and I thought, "Oh man, we can do better than that!" So I said to Luke, "Lukey! Look right at me! Smile so I can see your cute little teeth!"

And we wound up with these...

Too classic!

So...Luke at age four. He is still telling us delightfully funny little imaginative stories, and still loves to play with his dinosaurs and tell crazy awesome stories about what they are doing using these AMAZING voices (as Abigail says, if you're bored, just go sit quietly near Luke and watch the show!). He is still really sweet and cuddly and occasionally will do my favorite thing of falling asleep in some random place and snoozing peacefully while the chaos continues around him. He loves playing outside (especially jumping on the trampoline and getting underdogs on the swings!). He loves "fact" books, is completely obsessed with penguins, loves loves to do any kind of craft (he's always very sad if we don't go to "craft storytime" at our local library), will sit listening to someone read aloud for hours, and is so tall and strong that he is often mistaken for Isaac's twin. He absolutely adores Isaac and the two of them are inseparable. It warms my heart to see the two of them together.

Luke at four is also a bit of a terror! He and Nathan don't get along very well and their fighting is pretty much no holds barred. This is totally new to me, since none of the other kids ever fought, but I am hoping that I will look back on this post in a few years and smile because Luke & Nathan are now the best of friends (please, please, please!). Luke is extremely strong-willed and it's absolutely impossible to persuade him to do something he doesn't want to do; the only solution is to distract him with a story or game or something along those lines (i.e. if he just sits down and refuses to move, you start telling him a story and then he'll follow you anywhere as long as the story continues). He is very stubborn, determined, and set on doing things his way. He has an INCREDIBLE memory and never forgets anything you promise him, and often surprises me when we are somewhere that we haven't been for a long time & he starts recounting a story about what happened the last time we were there (he's very good at remembering what foods we eat in different places!).

Our Luke is a wonderful addition to our family and it would be such a dull and uninspired place without him!

Speaking of Luke's best buddy in the world, Isaac graduated from kindergarten today! Here he is with his sweet teacher. He has loved this year and has grown by leaps and bounds, as I knew he would! He is amazing with math (no surprise there--remember when he used to drill Juliet on her flashcards when he was three and she was five?!) and is a fantastic reader. Right now he is halfway through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and I love listening to him read it out loud to Luke in the afternoons, which he always does so obligingly--he even catches Luke up on what he (Isaac) read by himself before bedtime!

I'm so glad that we were able to work it out with the school to do half-day kindergarten with Isaac. His teacher was really supportive and I cherished that time with him in the afternoons; it was also really great for Luke to have his best buddy around. I don't know what Luke is going to do all day next year when Isaac is in first grade--go into mourning? Become friends with Nathan?!

Isaac's teacher described him today as "quiet but mighty." I think it's a very apt description. He's never one to make his presence felt and tends to be a rather reserved child, but he is always right there when someone needs help. Often when I would show up to pick him up, he would tell me, "Mom, just a minute--I need to help Chase finish cutting his project because I finished mine and he was having a hard time and feeling very sad," or "Mom, I am almost ready, but Mya got stuck on the computer and I know how to fix it." He is such a kind-hearted soul and is so sensitive to the needs and thoughts of others. And he is so affectionate! One day his teacher--who was a little choked up--showed me a page that he had written about what he wanted to do when he grew up--the other kids were writing about being cowboys or ballerinas or firefighters, and he wrote that he wanted to have a wife and children and take care of them. And he had illustrated it with a drawing of himself and his family, with labels like "washing dishes," "reading stories to my children," "being nice to my wife." It's obvious that my sweet little boy has a wonderful role model in his father (and I love his sense of style! Oh my Isaac...).

And here's my big accomplishment that I've been working on since Luke's third birthday and this entire school year--my bangs are finally long enough to tuck behind my ears again. I am NEVER cutting my hair that short again!!! I always think it will be cute and fun and then I realize it's a sweaty-hair-on-my-forehead nightmare. Like how I am so excited about being able to pull my hair back this summer that I think it's totally blog-worthy?!

Sisterly adventures

 When we were on our way home from the Smokies, I got a call from my sister Mary Beth. "Hey!" she said. "I'm getting a promotion and relocating to Chicago. Can you come meet me this weekend and help me figure out the city?"

"Of course!" I said. Then I checked my texts. I had one from my sister Rosalind: "Can we come visit next week?" And I texted back, "Of course!"

And my dad is arriving tomorrow. :-) It's been a fun week full of family!

Right about the time that I finished up all of the vacation laundry, it was time to stuff some clean clothes in a backpack that still smelled like campfire smoke and head to Chicago (true story: 24 minutes before departure time was when I started packing. Soooo much easier without the kids/camping/etc.!).

I was actually really proud of myself because this was the first time I have ever driven all the way to Chicago 100% by myself. I successfully navigated all the crummy traffic and road closures and GPS dying and cell phone dropping calls to Neil asking for directions due to the dead GPS and fun things like that, and managed to get to the temple right before the very last session started (good thing I left myself an extra 1.5 hours for traffic, because it was AWFUL!!!). Then after the temple session I drove to O'Hare and picked up Mary Beth. We got to our hotel on the Loop around midnight and fell asleep after a few hours of laughing and talking. It was so great to see her!!

The next morning I got up and went for an 8-mile run along the river and lakeshore. It was so beautiful! I actually took this photo at sunset but it pretty much looked the same 12 hours earlier. :-) I did one of my favorite loops out past the planetarium and as always loved running in the dark coolness near the river underneath the bridges, exploding out into the early-morning sunshine of the harbor, and feeling the wind on the peninsula buffeting me as I looped around the Field, Shedd, and Adler. Love love love my Chicago town. :-) 

Then Mary Beth and I started on our epic walking tour of Chicago--we did have to stop on Michigan Avenue to hit Wow Bao! and check out the new models in the LEGO store, but then we went over to Wrigleyville and figured out various train routes and explored neighborhoods (the photo a little earlier was while we were sitting on the platform waiting for our train and I was eating my breakfast yogurt 4 hours later, while Mary Beth made discouraging noises about food poisoning).

Like my super stylish (not!) city outfit? I'm still wearing my running shoes everywhere these days since my feet hurt like the dickens otherwise. Dratted plantar fasciitis!

We did a lot of city exploration (7.5 miles by foot, in fact!) and then ended up walking along the river again after dinner. Sooo beautiful! And I was so tired by the end of the day that I pretty much collapsed into bed. I went home the next morning joyfully rejoicing in the fact that my dear Mary Beth will live near me soon!

 Less than 48 hours later, I was happily greeting Rosalind, her husband Chris, and their darling little Adelaide! My kids have been dying to meet "Baby Addie" for months and they were soooo thrilled to finally get to cuddle her and play with her! Nathan especially was super cute with her and I loved watching the two of them play. Addie is dainty and delicate but she has a mighty personality and is just a bundle of delight!

We stayed up waaaay late talking and laughing the first night--it was so great to see them! I got to see Rosalind and Mary Beth last October, but Neil hasn't seen either Rosalind or Chris since Elise's wedding two years ago (and I haven't seen Chris either since he was deployed in the Middle East when I was in Utah last fall). So it was really great to get to reconnect with them! They also brought us some super indulgent and yummy desserts from one of our favorite pastry shops (it was right by us the summer that we lived in Michigan) and we had a great time devouring those.

The next morning we got all the big kids off to school and then packed up the three littles to go hiking! We had amazing hiking weather--unexpectedly cold! Doesn't Addie look like the cutest little snuggle bug in her bunting?

Since Rosalind and I were the ones who were in charge of our picnic, it was awesome. :-) Two kinds of baguettes, cranberry Wensleydale, pumpkin Gouda, two kinds of sausages, apples, Oreos, and Pringles (mostly to bribe Luke to keep walking). Yummy!

I can't ever get over how beautiful this terrain is! The lighting is terrible for my little point-and-shoot, but boy is it beautiful in person. This is the trail, btw. :-)

Loved watching these two dads navigate the waterfall with babies strapped on!

Rosalind wasn't quite sure about the series of ladders at first, but she was very brave and did a great job!

My gorgeous little sister and her cute family (note: she made me retake the photo because Chris wasn't smiling enough in the first one. I think he gave up in the second, but the first one ended up being blurry so Stoic Chris it is!). Rosalind is ten years younger than I am, so we weren't super close growing up since she was only eight when I left for college. It's really fun to reconnect as adults and friends who are now in a similar stage in life!

My grumpy little buddy. He would only smile if I made a weird face first, so I look totally bizarre in these photos, but he's adorable!

Duck-beaked little Adelaide, with the help of a Pringle...

So Neil and Chris talked with great passion and at great length throughout the whole visit about how they would prepare for a pandemic/zombie apocalypse/breakdown of government. Pretty much every chance they got they were comparing thoughts on growing food/providing heat/creating sub-governments, etc. I think at this point they were discussing how quickly one could dismantle the suspension bridge, presumably to ward off zombie invaders.

 When we got back to the nature center we found the cutest little chair on which we had to pose darling little Adelaide...

...and then we spent a good fifteen minutes sitting next to the copperhead's tank watching to see if he would eat the mouse running around the tank (he didn't). And then we headed home, and had dinner, and Rosalind and I went to Activity Days while the guys made cookies and puppy chow, and then we came home and stayed up too late again talking and laughing and eating. So much fun to see two of my far-flung sisters who are now not going to be so far-flung, since Rosalind and Chris are moving to this side of the country as well!!! Hip hip hurray, the tide is turning my way!!

Fresh Courage Take

Four years ago, my dear friend Jamie from BYU emailed me to ask if I would be interested in writing an essay for a little ebook she was thinking about putting together. She wanted to gather essays from eleven of her friends, all Mormon, all women, which talked about our experiences as a Mormon woman. No other prompt, just whatever we wanted to write about.

Fast forward four years, and our fun little project has turned into a bona fide book that you can buy on Amazon. There are book signings this summer and panelist discussions and all kinds of real grown-up things, but mostly I am so thrilled to be sharing my thoughts with the world! These are things that I've really pondered long and hard, and things that I realized in writing this essay have dramatically shaped my mothering and my life over the last four years. This is good, solid, real stuff, friends. This is the best I have to offer (and PEOPLE MY NAME IS ON AMAZON!). It's crazy to be sending galleys back and forth with the editors and to see cover designs and chapter headings and whatnot. (Can we say bucket list?!)

You can find the Amazon listing HERE or at Signature Books HERE.

And here's a little preview snippet from the section where I discuss the genesis of this blog:

"What I have learned, more than anything, is that happiness does not always come on its own—it, like career motherhood, is a choice. I cannot sit back and wait for bliss to wash over me. If I want to find joy in mothering, if I want to enjoy my career as a mother, I have to construct my life so that joyful moments are possible, likely, and frequent. Happiness takes work. This truth may seem paradoxical, but simply creating more time for walks in the woods and jettisoning the Play-Doh I loathe has brought me infinite satisfaction.

            Before my oldest child was two, I began blogging so I could chronicle the wonderful, miraculous moments of motherhood I was experiencing, the moments I wanted to pretend I was having all the time. A sidebar quote from Elizabeth and Her German Garden reminds me of the life I want to create: “What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!” My posts have been dotted with appreciation for the moments I would not have if I were not a career mother—the day I found my toddler in her crib without pants but still wearing her bulky slippers, which made me laugh until my stomach hurt; getting a hug from a pint-sized T-Rex with “some weewee sarp cwaws, Mama!”; spending reading aloud as we work our way through a stack of picture books; and finding leaves of baby spinach carefully stuck all over the fridge with alphabet magnets. These are snapshots of the life I am determinedly trying to create for my family—one that is full of museum trips, walks in the woods, bread fresh from the oven and slathered with homemade jam, and watercolors on the back porch."

And one more:

"There has been no transcendent realization for me, no one moment when I learned to reconcile my divergent desires and yearnings. It has been a gradual process. There are fewer dark days now of self-questioning than there were five years ago. Even so, some days are good and some are not; sometimes my heart swells with gratitude for my perfect little family, and sometimes I dissolve into tears and leave the dinner table. It has been a gradual process for me to make it this far, to be able to introduce myself as a mother of five children without immediately adding that I have a graduate degree and still teach. I have no wisdom to offer other than my own experience, hard-won and painful as it is . . ."

Guess you'll have to buy the book to find out what additional wisdom that experience has won me. :-)

---

Smokies Day 5: Porter's Creek and Go-Karts!

Our last day of hiking was the easiest; only about 3 miles round-trip and a much better path! We followed Porter's Creek the entire way (even though we didn't actually make it to our destination; turns out our directions were faulty and the falls we were headed for were another half-mile up a rutted and rugged trail that we started up, but turned around after a few minutes. Our directions told us that the falls were unmarked and screened by brush so we spent quite awhile clambering around on rocks in the river wondering if the falls were just out of sight!).

One of our favorite things about this hike was the veritable swarms of butterflies--we saw SO many! They were just swirling around in giant clouds. It was really something!

 

 This is the gorgeous creek that we walked next to the entire time. It looked like this area had been somewhat heavily settled a few hundred years ago; we saw many moss-covered stone walls and even found the remnants of a fireplace back in the woods!

 About halfway up the trail, we explored the Ownby family cemetary, who were the original settlers of this cove. Many of the graves were from 1909 and we wondered if there had been some sort of epidemic at that time. And the majority of the graves were those of young women in their early twenties and babies who were days or weeks old. Not an easy time to be bearing children.

Half a mile or so past the cemetary, we came to an original cantilevered barn which had been built in 1875. I love the ax-marks on the beams; it reminded me a lot of the old barn that originally stood on our property in Ohio when I was a kid.

We explored the springhouse and talked about what it would be like to keep all of your milk and butter and whatnot in a place like this (much better condition than the pioneer springhouse we had in Ohio, which was kind of a death trap!).

And then we went a little further off the trail to check out the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club cabin. It was built in 1934 and the kids could literally have spent all day here--they LOVED it!

But eventually it was time to move on, so we skirted this guy who was sunning himself in the barn, and went on our way.

According to our directions, this was the point at which we should have seen the falls, but no falls were in sight, so we spent a long time playing around in the stream. This was probably the scariest of the bridges we crossed, since it was quite high, three logs long, and the water was a good 10 feet deep below us--but heavily peppered with big boulders! Definitely one where you didn't want to fall off the open side!

 The view downstream--Neil was longing to swim here!

And the view upstream.

The bridge. Beautiful! I was worried that Isaac would be afraid to cross, given his reaction to the hike the day before, but he went right over without any hesitation.

We spent so long here just throwing rocks in the water and trying to figure out how deep it was. Beautiful beautiful area!

 Then we started back down the trail and found a new place to throw rocks.

 And then we went to get ice cream and ride around in go-karts!

Abigail was big enough to ride by herself, but the other kiddos took turns riding with parents.

 Juliet

 Isaac

Luke (the go-kart guys were all talking while Luke and I were going around and literally let us go twice as long as they should have. I was DYING! My hip was killing from the awkward position that I had to use to hit the gas but Luke was having so much fun that I didn't want to stop for his sake, but every time we went around again I was like, oh my gosh, please end your conversation and tell us to get off the track so that you're the bad guy in Luke's eyes and not me!).

 And then we drove back to our campsite and it started pouring rain again! Fortunately we just heated dinner up on the stove (roasted tomato-garlic soup and grilled cheese sandwiches), but it was kind of a bummer wet night for our last evening. Oh well--we all slept soundly and the kids were such a huge help breaking camp in the morning that we had it all taken down within an hour of waking up! Then we headed into town and had a fun birthday breakfast for Luke at a pancake house, then we drove home and unpacked, and then Neil and I put the kids to bed, went running (he ran outside and I ran on the treadmill), and then collapsed into bed after the most wonderful hot shower--I really appreciated it after icy midnight showers in the woods! Haha! It was a great trip.