Oh to be British for a day...and maybe a princess.

I recorded the royal wedding.  So sue me.  I wanted to show all of my daughters the girl who rode to her wedding in a car, got out in a gorgeous (modest) dress, got married to a prince and left in a horse drawn carriage.  I mainly watched it in fast motion because holy moly, the ceremony was long.  What an exciting event.  And I have to say that even though I know things are not all happy cheery perfect, they sure have the acting with class thing down.  I dig that.
My greatest conclusion from my viewing though?
America needs to wear more hats.  Boy, do they ever.

Easter Smeaster.

Easter smacked me upside the head this year.  I just wasn't super ready.  We were finishing off a week of Spring Break where we had literally just taken turns being sick, me being the grand finale...the kind where I didn't rest once during the whole week since I was trying to entertain kids and make the most of their week off...therefore making my illness last a full week instead of 2 days like everyone else.  I still don't feel over it, but maybe that's just because now I am "recovering the house" from having everyone home 24/7 for an entire week.  In any case, I do love spending time with the girls when I am really making effort to "spend time" with them.  They make fun, wherever they go.

 Doesn't Hazel have the most squeezable looking face? Kinda makes me wanna go upstairs and wake her up to take that face in my hands and just kiss 'em...almost.  And those other girls...is it normal to wanna cry every time you see a picture of all your daughters together like that?

 We had some friends from Connecticut come stay with us at the beginning of the week.  I am too lame to have taken any more pictures than this but at least I got one! We were foolish enough to go downtown during Spring Break.  I mean, I sooooo know better.  But we went, we saw, we came home and relaxed.  Thanks Carol and boys for coming!! It was so fun to see you guys!

 Remember how I mentioned our skitso weather? On this particular day is was quite chilly and our stay at the farm was brief....but long enough to visit each of the animals and touch lots of dirty things.

 I was particularly taken by the litter of piglets...do you call them a litter? Well, there was a litter nonetheless.  I wish I had taken a picture again a few minutes after this when they charged their poor mother laying on her side...they attacked her underside with such voracity that her back was banging up against the back of the stall....and it continued on like that for quite some time.  Again, I would have taken a picture but I was a little horrified but how "un-cute" those rotten little piggies were being.  And the mother, not saying one darn thing.

No manners at all.

 We dyed eggs even though no one but me eats them...and I kinda have to force myself.  I did make up a big 'ole bowl of potato salad to eat at every meal since I am the only one that likes it.

 We had a lovely lunch and egg hunt at the park with friends on Saturday.  Hazel's mouth was stuffed with chocolate from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon.

 Having children stinks because it is near impossible to find matching buckets to add with each child you birth.  I scored this year at Target with these adorable little things. 

PS I love my cricut.

 And remember how I mentioned that the shipping date changed for the Easter dresses that I ordered four weeks ago? I got them in the mail today.  The girls will feel all pretty and new 2 whole Sundays in a row.  The first ones I ordered were clearance, non returnable type.  So being the Type A mother of four daughters that I am, I went out on Thursday and found four matching dresses (in do-able sizes, amazingly enough on clearance!) and cute-ified them.  I took off their funky little flower things from the shoulder and added some of my own from fabric that they each picked out from my little stash.

It all worked out in the end and only cost me a few run-ins with the hot glue gun.

Post Edit: I feel a little sheepish now having sat back and read my own words that I failed to mention anything about the real Easter.  A few years ago I was inspired by sister in law Megan's idea to do "Funny Bunny" day on the Saturday before, getting it all good and partied so that I feel good on Sunday about just sticking to the real Easter thing.  I grew up doing our big family get together and hunt on Sunday, I don't have a problem with all that but Funny Bunny Day is a tradition that we have adopted and come to look forward to.  We obviously have no qualms about participating in all the commercial celebrations throughout the year-they're fun and there's nothing wrong with that.  
So there is my two cents about the real real Easter.  I love it a lot too.

Thanks for nothing Glen.

Glen the mechanic gave our van 6 months to a year.  A grim prognosis for a six year old vehicle...a six year old vehicle with 150,000 miles on it.  He strongly suggested that we sell this sinking ship before the engine needs several thousand dollars worth of work.
That is just what I was hoping to hear, 6 months after replacing the entire transmission and deciding that we were committed to the end.  Just turns out, the end is a lot sooner than we thought.
So my question you all of you is, what do you drive and how well do you like it?

*Stay tuned for my Easter post where I temporarily lament the fact that the Easter dresses that I ordered four weeks ago to avoid making something didn't come and I had to come up with a crafty alternative 48 hours before.  It was awesome and only involved two hot glue gun blisters.

Time to catch up before getting behind.

We are trying to enjoy Spring Break this week - lovely weather mixed with dips in temperature and brief storms, mixed in with a fever and cough jumping from child to child.  But we had some lovely company in town for the last couple of days which always brightens things up a bit.

However, before I get to that, we had lots of other stuff happening last week too.

Just a few days after Hazel's birthday we celebrated Sho.  We love having Sho in our lives and try not to feel too guilty about surrounding her amazingly serene, beautiful, kind hearted loveliness with our loud, obnoxious ways.

We love her enough to blow up 50 tiny balloons (note to self: read balloon packages more carefully to assess size of final products.)

 I'm so glad she remembered to bring her pretty party hat that Carrie made her last year.

Spring is so schizophrenic.  Some days we have a 30 degree swing in temperature.  We have been trying to enjoy every nice day possible.  On this particular day it meant making mud under the swing and creating caveman hand prints up the driveway.

 ...and lots of sidewalk chalk.  I like to buy it in bulk.  My favorite is when they draw street lines into the garage to show Clark where to park his car.

 Hazel had an accident at the park and I thought plastic-garbage-bag underwear was the answer to keeping her carseat from smelling like urine.  Turns out it just makes you super sweaty. (note to self: don't try to market plastic underwear...it won't sell.)

 We traveled down and descended upon the Millers once again (we love doing that-it's our favorite place to descend upon) so Clark and Mike could run their first half marathon.  These men are doing amazing.  I don't think either one of them has ever run more than 5 miles in their lives before and they are well on their way to their marathon in November....planters fasciitis and all.  Mike could apparently use a lesson or two on how to pose like a goon for pictures, from Clark.

 No matter how he was doing, he was sure peppy at our cheer-points.  High fives, alright.

 (That's Clark in the blue all the way to the right with his finish time.  Not bad for the first time running 13.1 miles ever, I'd say.)

 Mike was close behind and graced us with high fives as well.

Well done boys.  Well done.

 They had free horse rides for the kids between the half marathon and the kids' run.

Aren't these kids adorable? I think they certainly are that.

 Even Ben who was desperately trying to look like he wasn't having fun riding a horse.  (He was.)

 They were adorable and excited.

Ben came in fourth overall, awesome.

 Haley and Emma were not far behind.

 I started running with Mia but told her to go ahead when I had the fortunate excuse to slow it down a bit with Abby.

 This is Abby being a champ and running all the way (and my rear end.) Poor girl was sore for two days after.  Definitely my daughter.

 We finally hit the road later that evening to head home and narrowly missed some 240 tornadoes that touched down in the surrounding area.  It was the scariest weather I have ever driven through.  The sky was the color of mud.  Before the weather was even cloudy we drove through a mile of road in Williamsburg where the trees were either uprooted or torn clean off, 20 feet up....it ran that way down one side of the road, hopped into the median and then on over to the other side of the road.  We are sure that we had just missed a tornado minutes before as cars were slowing down to miss debris all over the place.  We apparently had left the Millers in the perfect window.  Even though we drove through this sky and torrential rain for a short time, we made it to that blue sky on the other side.  I was very very grateful to have missed it....to say the least though I was keeping my eyes peeled for any kind of sewer tunnel to hide in with my family should we have had to abandon our vehicle.

Despite what it kind of looks like in this picture, it was not a lovely sunset.  Those are ugly, menacing clouds of doom and destruction.

I hate tornadoes.

But I love Spring Break...so more on that, later.

Since we moved here in October we had no idea that the trees at the end of our driveway did this.  

The Cherry Blossoms have suffered through this chilly spring but the dogwoods have exploded this week almost overnight. They are quite lovely.

If I was an author...

Sorry, no pictures.  But read on, I promise it will be worth it.  OK, maybe it will be worth it.
I think that probably the sign of a true author is that they actually compose material before coming up with a title.  In my case, I have lots of great titles but no actual content.  The volumes of my own "two cents" that I have been writing in my head this week is titled

"Everything I ever needed to know was once learned and planned for...and then I had four daughters."

Also, I would make a poor author because I don't really remember all the rules for writing, like how to properly write the title of a book...quotation marks? italics? underlined? That's what editors are for I suppose.  After all, if you call yourself and artist, you don't really have to be responsible for following rules, right?  Not that I am calling myself an artist, but I will if it excuses me from following certain rules.

I have been thinking a lot lately about parenting, and it's ever evolving-to-fit-the-needs-of-growing-children conundrum.  It's a fast paced game.  And I want to be an all star at being prepared for what comes next, instead of always struggling to keep up with where we are at.  (See that? I ended the sentence with "at"....I'm pretty sure that is not grammatically correct.)  For instance, when the kids were really young we could make all sorts of inside jokes and the kids would never know what we were talking about...now they are old and smart and intuitive.  We can't do that anymore.  We have had to raise our standards a bit, so to speak.  That statement and example alone calls me out on some things that I should have had figured out before I started having kids.  Like, uh, having higher standards. Hopefully by recognizing that now, it's not too late.  

The thing that I keep thinking to myself in the past several weeks has been this: in this ever changing world where morals, honesty, modesty and decorum are on a slippery slope downward, I must maintain our standards.  I must defend them with all the vigor of a parent.  Settling for the excuse of "changing times" IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR MY DAUGHTERS.  Accepting that the world is just a different place than when I was young is a poor excuse for allowing our standards to change.  I know that my daughters are growing up in a world that is very different from my own childhood, even 20, 25, 30 years ago.  Imagine what the people born 80 years ago think of the world we live in.  I know that my daughters will not have the same reactions to things that I did, that their perceptions will be on a different level of tolerance because of what they are exposed to.  However, I don't think that their level of sensitivity has to change.  They will be exposed to oh, so much more than I ever was on a daily, accessible basis.  But as their mother I can still condition, through valiant effort, to instill that sensitivity to right and wrong; a recognition and distinction between what is wholesome and what is not uplifting.  In the past several months I will have the brief thought of "well, I guess I don't mind" or "whatever" and then quickly have stopped myself with that pounding thought again....THAT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Giving in and giving up is not good enough.  The truth is, we do live in a different world.  They will be exposed to more inappropriate, dishonest and unsavory things.  My kids go to public school.  We watch TV and listen to the radio.  We live in a big city.  We are surrounded by neighbors.  We go into public.  They will be exposed.  I do wish we could live out in the country and have nothing influencing us but sky and air but we don't.  And as much as I would love that, distancing myself and my family in that way just wouldn't be the answer for us.  It's a terrifying prospect but I am comforted because I have guidance and faith and optimism that we are not alone in this endeavor.  

All of these thoughts that I have been pondering were reinforced and enlightened by General Conference last weekend.  I am forever grateful for that driving force that once again met up with all of the things going on in my life and provided that next chapter of instructions.

I was especially touched by a couple of talks.

Elder Maynes spoke about our responsibilities in maintaining strong families.  And in light of my recent discovery that Clark's and my own standards of what we watched or joked about should be uplifted, I was touched by this poem that he shared by C.C. Miller.

’Twas a sheep not a lamb

That strayed away in the parable Jesus told,

A grown-up sheep that strayed away

From the ninety and nine in the fold.

And why for the sheep should we seek

And earnestly hope and pray?

Because there is danger when sheep go wrong:

They lead the lambs astray.

Lambs will follow the sheep, you know,

Wherever the sheep may stray.

When sheep go wrong,

It won’t take long till the lambs are as wrong as they.

And so with the sheep we earnestly plead

For the sake of the lambs today,

For when the sheep are lost

What a terrible cost 

The lambs will have to pay. 

^{We are a blaring example to them for better or worse.  That means what we say, how we say it, what we do, what we spend our time doing, where we spend our money.}

^{I will not allow my generation to be the one that takes a step down, farther from the things that matter most.}

^{So I guess step 1 in my quest to strengthening my home and family would be to ensure that I am in check with where not only I should be, but where I want and expect my daughters to be.  Why would I expect anything else?}

^{Step 2 is to maintain the standards we believe in.  Find the balance and moderation between the evolution of the world and society, and what we hold to be concrete and most important.  Allow change where change is appropriate.  Avoid deterioration of morals or standards because of what we are told they should be.  Accept nothing less.}

^{This means being involved.  Being aware.  Being sensitive.  Listen.  Watch.}

^{Step 3 is to love them.  Love them love them love them.}  

^{I'm sure there will be many more steps along the way.  I know there will be.  I will be looking.  I will be ready.  And I will be unwavering because they are worth it.  They are worth every ounce of "that's not fair" and "my friends get to" and more.  As their mother I will have that perfect perspective of who they are and what they are worth as a constant, even though at times in their own lives they will not.}

just for my peace of mind...

I just wanted to clarify that there is one part of the book that I have recommended that we do not agree with...however, I left the pages in so we could talk about it anyway.
There.  That is my clarified endorsement.

Squirrel anatomy...things I never knew.

This morning I drove the girls to school and was privy to one of their sister conversations (I sometimes liken these to the bizarre kind of communication that sets of multiples have with one another.  Entertaining to those around them but completely incoherent.)  Occasionally during these conversations I try to stay as quiet as possible so they will just talk to each other and forget I am even there.  This is how it went down.

ME: Jeez, why are there dead squirrels all over the place this morning? (because there were, it was weird.)
MIA: How can you tell if a squirrel is a boy or a girl?
(I became temporarily frozen in that moment of deliberation where a parent has to determine, rather quickly, what to say and how much...good thing Haley saved the day and I didn't have to bother.)
HALEY: The girls have flowers in their hair.
ABBY: And the boys are holding guns.
MIA: Oh.

Mia, apparently, is a much easier crowd to satisfy than some of my other kids.
On the other hand, I may need to brush up on the talk I had with Haley and Abby a couple of years ago.  Did I ever tell you about that?  Allow me to share.
I had been having the thought for a while that it was time to have "the talk" with the girls.  That feeling came very strongly one day, as in "have the talk NOW" so I decided to listen to the prompting and proceeded with the educating of my kids on the delicate matters of things.
Haley and Abby are less than two years apart so I felt as though it should be done with them together since one hardly knows anything without the other soon finding out.  I kept fighting the feeling because they were soooo young but I am also of the strong opinion that it has to be done much earlier nowadays than it used to.
Forget the maturation talk for now, pear shaped organs, cycles, eggs and all that jazz, we were moving on to the big guns.  The "S" word.  I thought, if I have chosen to send my children out into the world each day to learn and experience and grow and distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad then I should prepare them with the knowledge they should be getting at home.  A friend recommended a good book.  I went to go buy it.  Of course I couldn't locate it on my own so I casually walked up to the info counter and asked him to look up "The Amazing You".  He looked.  "Oh" he says quietly, and then in an escalating tone so as to be heard by every person waiting in line behind me, "The Amazing you, getting smart about your private parts?!"  He was practically yelling by the end.  "Yes.  That would be the one" I replied.  He directed me where to find it.
I had my half day kindergartner with me who was going to be one of the recipients of this new knowledge.  When we got up to the counter to pay for the book she sweetly and excitedly looked at the cashier and stated "We get to stay up late tonight for a special talk."  I told him "She has no idea...."
He wasn't as amused as I thought he should be.  I had called my sister earlier in the day to practice saying all the words out loud to avoid any parental blushing or giggling during the actual talk.  You know, the words that only mature people and doctors say.  I got it all out of my system because as we all know, I am neither mature, nor a doctor.
It went over well.  There was minimal giggling and plenty of questions.  It was thorough but age appropriate (as appropriate as that topic can be for a kindergartner and second grader.)
I hope that they will have an understanding and respect for the subject matter enough to know that kids joking about it is not that funny and its not something to be ashamed or embarrassed about.  I don't deny that they will hear snippits of random things here and there in the world that we live in but I want to be the primary source of information like that.  And I want them to be comfortable coming to me with questions and concerns of that nature, of any nature I hope.

In any case, watch out for the squirrels today, both those that don't look both ways before crossing the street and the ones holding guns.

(I hope you all find it as entertaining and bizarre as I did, that I could google "squirrel holding a gun" and have so many options.)

A day, what a day to be 3.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Hazel Christina

April 5, 2008

Slideshows bring me true joy on birthdays.  I like to sit and openly weep at how fast time goes and how adorably wonderful my children are.  Then I make other people watch them too.

I am feeling only slightly guilty that on her birthday I decided to post all about myself....but as was pointed out in my defense, I didn't have the full photographical documentation of her special day to post it just yet.  But now I do.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAZEL!!

Little Hazey Bazey, Basil, little sister.  I almost feel guilty posting how wonderful you are because you are the only one that didn't make me want to tear my hair out this morning.  I never want to send you to school because I love having you around.  You are easy going and happy.  You are silly silly SILLY and funny.  You keep me entertained and will give a hug or kiss whenever someone needs it.  

Happy 3rd birthday my littlest little.

 Presents from near...

 and far.

 A little birthday grocery shopping...what? that's a thing.

 She wanted a bike cake and being the not-so-into-fun-cake-maker that I am, this is the best I could come up with.

 Is it obvious when Spencer and his picture taking skilzz showed up?

 Everyone needs goggles for the bath, don't they?

She spent a good portion of the day singing "you look like a monkey, and you smell like one too" to herself.

Her birthday started and ended with a song and some candles.

And she was happy.

It is done.

300 meter swim
10 mile bike
5K run

My goal was  to finish in under 1:30:00

My race time was 1:26:20

I can totally live with that.

In the Women's Novice category I place 14 out of 27.  I can live with that too because let me tell you, I was impressed with the people out there.  I loved that everyone's age is written on their calf because I was inspired every time I was passed by someone whether it be the 14 year olds that encouraged me with a "good job" or men and women in their 50's and 60's.
It was hard.  Harder than the run through I did with Laurie last week.  But it was satisfying to accomplish something that took a lot of preparation.  And I am proud of myself.
And I am really grateful that both of our families were there because it meant that I had not only Laurie (who encouraged every, I mean, every step of the way) but both our husbands and all of our 9 children combined.  I love these people and I am grateful for them.
They were there to cheer for us at each transition and the kids were there to run in the last 30 yards with me.  That made me cry but it also made me very happy.

Laurie did amazing.  This mother of 5 encouraged me to do it in the first place.  She not only met her goal to beat her time two years ago but she shattered it by 6+ minutes.  She just had a baby 5 months ago.  She is amazing.

 I made us dorky t shirts that we wore proudly!
I am waiting to see if it's like having a baby.  While I was doing it I was thinking "yeah, OK, I am doing it.  I am good with never doing this again." But in a week I might just consider it.  In any case, I need something ahead to keep me going to the gym....besides their hydro massage table and child care.