Halloween 2014

I only feel like posting pics...

With the exception of three of them(perfect round darker orange ones), I grew all these pumpkin in my garden.

 WT Halloween decorations

Ben also wants to be a penguin when he grows up.

Ben's class went to a pumpkin patch.

Rachel #2

These pictures should say it all!  She's just so cute!  I love this baby...she's not even a baby, she's two!  It's so sad.  Olivia regularly threatens her to not grow up and if I thought it would work I'd do the same.  She's so silly and by far my naughtiest child, but she can almost get away with it when she smiles.  She loves to be sang to, tickled, jump on the trampoline, play with the chickens, watch Tangled and her favorite foods are eggs, oatmeal and sketti meatballs. She was, at first, my shyest child but easily goes to nursery and child care at the gym.  She is only five pounds less than Ben and can push him around, and does.  She knows how to the throw a fabulous flailing tantrum but responds well to being ignored and of all my children, she submits the easiest to sleep. She has good a vocabulary, eats by herself and has started going pee in the potty on demand (still in a diaper, but likes to go in the potty like Ben). Keeping my fingers crossed for easy and early potty training. I hope her sweetness doesn't fade as she gets older.

26.2

You know that sticker you see on people's cars. Yes it's obnoxious!  I got one!  The week after Ben's birthday we drove down south of the bay area and camped in the red woods near the coast.  I ran, with my training partner, a trail marathon called Skyline to the Sea. That is the actual name of the trail that starts at just over 2500 feet in the red woods and ends at sea level, just short of the beach.  First of all, I want to thank Adam for his support of my running habit and the long Saturdays I spent on the trails and sorry for worrying and irritating you on a couple of occasions, as well as sorry for the horrible 4 hour drive each way, camping and doing all the work associated with it, with kids in tow so I could run my race. BTW-never camp before you run a marathon.

 Camping was beautiful and wish we would have come only for that. We could have had a blast exploring the trails and creek. Adam took care of everything while I played with the kids and we had the whole camp ground to ourselves!  Then after dinner all these city people started showing up...after dark. Kids were running around with head lamps on going crazy.  I really thought I was going to get the kids to bed on time and get some sleep but it was not to be.  Oh well, who needs sleep before you run 26.2 miles?

These are some of the ladies I trained with: 

Patty(50), Tamara(47), Me(35), and Kim(42)

Kim is amazing! She used to weigh over a hundred pounds more and then started trail running. Her religion dictates strict modesty and hair styles: 3/4 length sleeves, mid calve length skirts and long hair. She didn't let that stop her.  She wears running tights but sews her own running dresses to go over.  Her husband was so supportive(and 4 kids) and he cheered for her and all of us at every aid station. He was a spirit uplifter!

The morning of the race I got up early to eat and take care of business. Adam dropped me off at the start and then came back to camp to pack up to then meet me at the finish. I ran with Tamara the whole race. I won't go into too much detail, but I'll mention that I trained on hills and dirt doing long miles.  I wasn't prepared for the down hill this race had.  The first 15 miles of the race had some good climbs in it but still a gradual steady descent.  It took us 3 hours, which was right on with what we planned to finish the race in under 5 hours. We still felt pretty good.  The next 6 miles was brutal, technical down hill and then another 5 miles was a gentle down hill that any other day would have been easy breezy and a little boring.  HaHa! Not so! It took us another 3 hours just to go 11 miles, and it was awful.  My quads were shot, my feet hurt, and I was sick of running!  I felt like my energy was OK. I did run out of water for a short period but I didn't feel dehydrated and I fortunately didn't have any stomach issues to keep me from eating. It was that dang down hill.  So by the end we were both miserable and swore we'd never do this again, but we were going to get that sticker!  So it's been over a month since I've run-I developed plantar fasciitis in the last couple weeks of training-so I'm out for a while. I'm glad I did it but to tell you the truth I love to trail run and I like the challenges but being miserable and injured really takes the fun out of it. My friend Tamara signed up for a 50K (31 miles) and I think she's nuts. Adam and the kids met me at the end, an hour later than I planned. We went to the beach for a while so the kids could play before we left. I was dirty, stinky, mildly shocky, and grumpy and it was a long ride home.

 Tamara and I near the start!

We stuck together the whole race. We had to convince each other that running was better than walking because that means we would finish sooner.  The smile is forced, I hurt!

Ben #4

We don't do big birthday parties for our kids but we have been wanting to have a get together with a few families from the ward. So we invited the families of all the kids in Ben's Sunbeam class, 5 families plus Adam's mom June and his sister Amy and her son Jackson came. We rented a big 'ole bounce house with a slide, which was not too expensive and we got to keep it almost 24 hours. We served pizza and potluck salad, plus cake, ice cream and blueberry pie!  It was a success I think.  We got to know a few couples we don't know as well and no one got injured, although the bounce house blew a fuse twice and we had to scramble to get kids out before it collapsed. Ben was so excited to sing and blow out candles this year. He was really anticipating it and it was really cute.  If the video was better I'd upload it but it was dark and it's kinda fuzzy. I always make my kids cakes but he wanted Mickey Mouse and I couldn't bear the thought of trying to make black icing and piping the face, so I had a $10 off coupon for a store bought cake and went that route.  He was thrilled and my hand doesn't hurt this year. Not many pics from the party but a few from the morning after.

 It was 90 degrees the afternoon of the party, but cooled down nice about dinner time.

 

Benjamin is such a joy to our house. He is sensitive and thoughtful and notices when someone is not happy, says sorry when he does wrong and is so affectionate! Not to say he is perfect, for he knows how to throw one down. He has been our worst sleeper overall-a perfect angel the first 6 months but then...He has for the last two year tried to weasel his way into our bed.  We have stood firm on no kids in bed with all of our kids but he doesn't get it! We are so tired of the fight it's just not a battle we feel like picking anymore, so as of a month ago Adam gets kicked out of bed about 2:00 in the morning. Yes, we have tried all the tried and true recommendations, this kid is just persistent. He is very active, loves to color and paint, "help" me in the garden and pick up the ten pound chickens. He's not a big kid for his age but he's very coordinated and I think in the next year he will be two wheein' it.  We love him!

I Turned 35 This Year

'Nuff said!

OK, OK, OK. Adam baked me a yummy lemon coconut cake, took the initiative to get a sitter and take me out to sushi for dinner and found a pair of $50 sale shoes I wanted from REI online for only $35 (6pm.com).  It was awesome!

Adam's B-Day!

No pictures for this but for Adam's birthday my brother Jared came and stayed with the kids for two days and a night and we took a 45 minute drive up the road to do some river rafting on local class 3 & 4 rapids.  This is another thing that we have only just realized is so accessible to us and pretty reasonably priced.  Since we did a two day trip they set us up with one specific guide (5'2" 110lb girl, maybe 28, with a bachelors in geology-regular jobs boring!) who took us down both days and took care of lunch on the river (sandwiches with the fixin's including avocado), cooked us an amazing dinner (tri-tip, chicken, grilled veggie pasta and salad) for two (actually more since some of the other guides joined us) and had a fab breakfast to go (bagels, cream cheese and avocado). We camped over night and luckily we were the only couple in their camp ground for the night.  After the river we had hot showers, played on the slack line, swung in Adam's hammock, had dinner, a fire, dutch oven brownies and an amazing night of uninterrupted sleep on our air mattress, listening to the sound of sprinklers(we are in a drought ironically but they had a fire earlier in the summer so they were trying to keep everything green and moist by running the sprinklers 24/7). The river run was awesome. The river gets its flow from a dam release where we started from.  It's timed released from like 8-11 in the morning which allows for runs from about 9-4 in the afternoon. There were some pretty shifty rapids we went over but we survived and had a blast. Our guide had to take the raft over a class 5 rapid(like a 30 ft waterfall) and we had to get out and walk around it. She was so little and it was super impressive how she just handled the boat.  She said she feels sick to her stomach every time she does it. She does it like 5 days a week! There are multiple river options we could have chosen but we went extreme both days. What a fun trip!

How American parenting is killing the American marriage

Written by

Danielle Teller

Physician and researcher

Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America. As with many religions, complete unthinking devotion is required from its practitioners. Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children, and we must never speak a disloyal word about our relationships with our offspring. Children always come first. We accept this premise so reflexively today that we forget that it was not always so.

In our recently published book, Sacred Cows, we took on our society’s nonsensical but deeply ingrained beliefs surrounding marriage and divorce. We often get asked whether we will next address the sacred cows of modern parenting, at which point we ask the speaker to please lower his voice, and we look nervously over our shoulders to make sure that nobody has overheard the question.

To understand the frightening power of the parenthood religion, one need look no further than the 2005 essay in The New York Times by Ayelet Waldman, where the author explained that she loved her husband more than her four children. On “Oprah Where Are They Now,” the author recently reaffirmed the sentiments reflected in her New York Times article, and she added that her outlook has had a positive impact on her children by giving them a sense of security in their parents’ relationship. Following the publication of her essay, Waldman was not only shouted down by America for being a bad mother; strangers threatened her physically and told her that they would report her to child protective services. This is not how a civil society conducts open-minded discourse. This is how a religion persecutes a heretic.

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The origins of the parenthood religion are obscure, but one of its first manifestations may have been the “baby on board” placards that became popular in the mid-1980s. Nobody would have placed such a sign on a car if it were not already understood by society that the life of a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter. A toddler is almost as precious as a baby, but a teenager less so, and by the time that baby turns fifty, it seems that nobody cares much anymore if someone crashes into her car. You don’t see a lot of vehicles with placards that read, “Middle-aged accountant on board.”

Another sign of the parenthood religion is that it has become totally unacceptable in our culture to say anything bad about our children, let alone admit that we don’t like them all of the time. We are allowed to say bad things about our spouses, our parents, our aunts and uncles, but try saying, “My kid doesn’t have a lot of friends because she’s not a super likable person,” and see how fast you get dropped from the PTA.

When people choose to have children, they play a lottery. Children have the same range of positive and negative characteristics as adults, and the personalities of some children are poorly matched with those of their parents. Nature has protected children against such a circumstance by endowing them with irresistible cuteness early on, and by ensuring that parents bond with children sufficiently strongly that our cave-dwelling ancestors didn’t push their offspring out in a snowbank when they misbehaved. Much as parents love their children and have their best interests at heart, however, they don’t always like them. That guy at the office who everyone thinks is a jerk was a kid once upon a time, and there’s a pretty good chance that his parents also noticed that he could be a jerk. They just weren’t allowed to say so.

Of course, Ayelet Waldman’s blasphemy was not admitting that her kids were less than completely wonderful, only that she loved her husband more than them. This falls into the category of thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me. As with many religious crimes, judgment is not applied evenly across the sexes. Mothers must devote themselves to their children above anyone or anything else, but many wives would be offended if their husbands said, “You’re pretty great, but my love for you will never hold a candle to the love I have for John Junior.”

Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children.

There are doubtless benefits that come from elevating parenthood to the status of a religion, but there are obvious pitfalls as well. Parents who do not feel free to express their feelings honestly are less likely to resolve problems at home. Children who are raised to believe that they are the center of the universe have a tough time when their special status erodes as they approach adulthood. Most troubling of all, couples who live entirely child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home.

In the 21st century, most Americans marry for love. We choose partners who we hope will be our soulmates for life. When children come along, we believe that we can press pause on the soulmate narrative, because parenthood has become our new priority and religion. We raise our children as best we can, and we know that we have succeeded if they leave us, going out into the world to find partners and have children of their own. Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought.

 

I randomly came across this article the other day and after reading it I couldn't help but wonder if I do the same thing.  I like to believe I don't. Adam and I have usually made an effort to do things together pretty regularly, although on a daily basis it feels like the routine is all about the kids and then we hit the sack, ready to do it again tomorrow. I hope no one is offended by the comparison to religion but I thought it was interesting.  Seems like worshiping God today is obsolete to more and more people but we are all trying to cling to some belief, something that we think will make us better or happier and it is being replaced by the aforementioned parenting, organic food or trendy diets, compulsive exercise, etc. Any and all of that is replacing the peace we can feel inside by letting go of these other things that cause distraction and anxiety. While I struggle on a daily basis to find that peace I have never found it in those, but only in my knowledge of a loving Heavenly Father and Savior, only in the knowledge of my eternal marriage. When we were sealed, the sealer emphasized that he was sealing Adam and I first as ours would be the enduring relationship, as long as we nurtured it, and only then would the children be sealed to us. I know my marriage is where I want my energies to be directed. I truly believe that the success of our children will be the success of us. The rest is just details.

 

Summer Fling's

Adam took the older scouts on their yearly adventure, this year backpacking in the Sierra's. I can't wait til the kids can carry their own packs so we can take them  Gorgeous. As a family we were able to go to Tahoe multiple times this summer and went to Stinson beach again this summer (Adam's mom rents a house for the fam). Here are a few pics.

Adam's trip

Tahoe pics:

 One day we got rain-actually thunderstorms.

 We ducked into our beach tent and shut ourselves inside. Rachel didn't like it but I thought it was kind of exciting. When we came back out when the rain stopped we were the only ones left on the beach.

Stinson beach: Actually I really didn't get any pictures but these.  Lame, but the trip was fun!  Boogie boarding, stand up paddling on the lagoon, kayaking, trail running, tennis, biking, dessert date in town after kids in bed, eating...a lot.

Only picture on the beach! It was warm this year, not the usually cool in the 60's. I actually got a tan.

Ben wrestling his cousin Jackson and getting schooled!