01/30/13

1.  Brigham is concert master for his orchestra!  I'm so proud of him!  He had chair testing last week, and practiced very diligently for it.  He felt good about the audition, and all last week anxiously asked if I had received an email about the chair test results.  So on Monday night when he came to meet Mosey and me in the cafeteria (where Mosey's orchestra meets), I asked if he found out about the chair tests, and he said, "No, they didn't say anything about it."  I told him I was sure they'd send an email as soon as they were ready.  On the way home he asked me several times when I thought Joseph would be home from archery. Finally once we got home, he couldn't hold it in any longer and blurted out, "I made first-chair, mom!"  He was wanting to wait until Ben and Joseph came home to announce it to the whole family.  Funny boy.  Anyway, he is very happy, and I am very proud of him.  He was seated in the back of the first violin section this last semester,which I still thought was great, especially since he was not happy at all with his chair test.  So for him to make concert master this semester is really exciting, and I think so good for Brigham.  He wants to practice his orchestra music every day so that he will be a good concert master.  :-)

2.  On Monday, a friend from church gave us her old Nook (Barnes and Noble's version of a Kindle), and Mosey has been utterly entranced by it.  He is my technology fanatic anyway, and he also loves to read, so this is the perfect blend for him!  He's been trying to figure the whole thing out, which is good, but also a bit distracting for him...  Yesterday it came to a head when I went to get him to practice piano at 11:45 AM, only to discover he had not done ANY school work at all so far!  And then as we were practicing piano, he was NOT focusing, NOT cooperating, and causing me much frustration.  I gave him several warnings, and then I told him the Nook was gone.  I was going to give it back.  Oh, and then the tears started and then came the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Finally I told him that if he could show me for the rest of the day and all day tomorrow (today), then he could have it back.  And man oh man, did that do the trick!   He was good as gold the rest of the day, did extra math last night, and was extra cooperative and very good all day today.  And now I've got me some Mosey-currency to work with!

3.  Yesterday as I was finishing schoolwork with Mosey, Brigham and Joseph (who had been done with their schoolwork for a while) went into the forest.  After a while they came back and Joseph asked if he could use some yarn to "make something."  After a while they came home sporting a number of home-made stone-age tools, including a hatchet and a mace!  I love living next to the "forest."  It is exactly what I have been wanting for my boys-- a place to explore and create and imagine and get bitten by fireants and infected with poison ivy...  :-)

picture post

I seriously need to be cloned.  I have about 5 important things that I need to be doing right now, each one requiring between 1 and several hours of work.
1. Laundry.  There is a sour smell coming from the laundry room.  I have a feeling there is a load in the washer that has been neglected.  Also I know there are 3 other baskets that need to be folded and put away.  And I also know that at least one of my boys is seriously behind on his laundry.  Do I break down and go into his room and get it?
2. Cub scout stuff.  I am finally being released!  I have mixed feelings, as always, because I really had fun in that calling.  But now I need to transfer all my records to an excel file to send to the new leader.
3.  Seminary prep.  I need to be preparing my lessons next week so I can get more than 4 hours of sleep a night on seminary weeks.
4.  More seminary prep.  I feel totally lost with scripture mastery.  I need to do some serious internet research and figure out some fun and effective ways to do this.
5.  Pictures from the Stake dance last weekend.  I got asked to be the photographer for the big adult dance this last weekend.  It was pretty fun-- someone had really nice strobes that I got to use for lighting.  I've never used them before, and it was cool.  Of course, midway through I somehow messed up my settings and I'm pretty sure some of the shots are overexposed.  Ugh.  I get so mad at myself when I do stuff like that.  Oh well, they are free photos anyway, so you get what you pay for, right?  Anyway, I was NOT planning on doing ANY editing on these photos at all, but I'm going to have to.  The backdrop they had there was cute, but not big enough, and I'm definitely going to have to do some cloning work for some of the taller couples.  I'm kind of dreading this, it's going to take a couple of hours at least, and then I have to figure out a method of getting the pictures out to all the wards.

So that's what I should be doing.  Instead I'm going to update my blog since I've been so negligent.
I'm just going to post some pictures and commentary instead of going back day by day the last couple of weeks.

Airsoft Warriors!  The boys had some friends over on Friday for an airsoft war. We've now got little bb's all over the backyard.  They are supposedly biodegradable, but I'm not sure how long it's supposed to take!

Brigham's new shoes.  We looked long and hard for these shoes, taking a couple of different trips to different  Targets.  You can also see the mouthful of metal he's got.  Poor kid!  It is hurting him less now.  He had a couple of miserable days last week.

 Me and my brand-spankin' new returned missionary brother, Christian!

Happy Mosey.  We've had some beautiful "winter" weather around here, and last Thursday for our art group we stayed outside and made driveway murals.  Mosey has a really cute way of running when he's happy-- I didn't quite capture it here, he waves his arms way up in the air.  But you get the idea.

My most wonderfully pudge-a-licious nephew Jacob.  Oh how I love this kid!  He is 6 months old and the jolliest roly poly baby you've ever seen.  I got to see him only for a few hours when I was in La Canada, before Rachel left to go back to Boston, but I did manage to get a few pictures in.

Me and my co-den-leader Andrea at our last official Cub Scout event, the Pinewood Derby!

Another one of my beautiful nephew, being held by my brother in the gorgeous window light of my old bedroom.  Rachel's kids have the longest eyelashes!

 And, the Pinewood Derby!  Here is Mosey videoing one of his races with his new camera.  He came directly from cello lessons, putting his shirt on in the car, and is looking just a little disheveled.  :-)

And here he is with his car!  This is the first pinewood derby we've made it through with NO TEARS from any of my boys.  Possibly because I only had one boy in it this year.  :-)  And there was just a little bit of drama in getting the car made. The day before the race he suddenly decided he didn't want to be in the race and refused to work on the car or explain himself.  After some cajoling from Ben, he figured out that the design Mosey originally had in mind he decided he didn't like, but couldn't figure out how to alter the design to one that he liked.  Anyway, Ben talked it out with Mosey and they decided to make a lego spaceship car. It turned out great!  Of course, the legos broke apart after EVERY single race, necessitating Mosey to put it back together about 20 times over the course of the evening, but he was OK with that.  It was worth it for the cool car!  This year I delegated the wheel-polishing to Ben.  I just couldn't do it with seminary the next day.  And we didn't have the full wheel-polishing kit.  I thought we did, but it turned out we only had 4 of the 7 grades of sandpaper, and Ben is not the attention-to-detail kind of person that I am (or maybe he is just not so foolish as to spend ridiculous amounts of time polishing wheels).  Anyway, Mosey's car ended up almost exactly in the middle of the pack, and he was fine with it.  Thank goodness.  Only one more year for the pinewood derby!  :-)

Another one of Joseph writing love notes to Sandy on our driveway.  :-)

A close-up of Mosey's awesome car.  We would have glued the lego pieces down, except these are all highly-coveted pieces in our lego set!

The judges at work.

All the boys excitedly determining the results of one of the test-runs down the ramp.

 And finally, my beautiful niece Rosalia in the tub at my mom's house.  She was rather attached to her binkie, but I did manage to get her to take it out for one *very* brief shot.  Rachel tells me when they got home she took it away cold-turkey, and she's doing OK!

 With the binkie.  Doesn't she have the most amazing eyes?  She can thank her daddy for that one.

And my missionary brother.  My mom wanted me to take missionary portraits of him while I was there, but we didn't think about it until the night before I had to leave for my 6 AM flight back to Texas.  I attempted some in the living room with lamp-lighting and my ISO up around 2000, but really they were not acceptable. He needs to get some professional ones done before his missionary-newness wears off!  But here's one, anyway.  I had to make it black and white because I just couldn't correct the wonky colors from the different lights we had going on in that room.

01/23/2013

Blogging during seminary weeks is challenging.
I know I will get the hang of this, but I definitely haven't mastered the whole teaching a full homeschool day, take my kids to lessons, prepare meals, do chores, prepare a seminary lesson AND sleep more than 5 hours a night.  It's been more like 4 hours.  But, I know I will get better at this.

So, a quick three things:
1. Yesterday Brigham and Joseph got their herbst appliances put back in.  The first ones they had both broke, and it took a few weeks for the new ones to be made.  When Joseph found out yesterday he had to go to the orthodontist, he started crying.  Poor boys!  I know someday they'll be glad, but it is hard right now.

2.  Tomorrow is the pinewood derby.  We are seriously behind this year.  We got the car cut yesterday, painted tonight, and Ben and I (mostly Ben) just finished wheel-prep a few minutes ago.  I'm so glad this is the 2nd to the last pinewood derby car we have to make!!  There was just a bit of drama tonight as Mosey suddenly decided he didn't want to make a car and didn't want to go to the pinewood derby.  Maybe I should have just gone with that!  But I knew deep down he did want to do it, he had been very excited about it.  Ben finally got it out of him that he didn't like his original design, so together they figured out something different.  I'll take pictures later!

3.  Tonight as I was preparing my seminary lesson, I had a scriptural question.  So I called my mom (as usual), and Christian answered the phone.  So I asked him, and he did a great job of explaining things to me. He is going to be as good a scriptorian as my mom.  I sure love being able to make a phone call and hear his voice!

01/20/2013

1. I have a new nephew! Naomi had baby Joshua this afternoon. She called last night to tell my mom her water had broken, and I ended up having anxiety dreams all night. The worst one was right before I woke up (it woke me up, actually), and in it the baby's umbilical cord had gotten compressed during labor, but they didn't realize it until it was too late. It was an awful dream. Too realistic. Anyway, I woke up, sat up, grabbed my phone, and texted Dave (Naomi's husband) to make sure everything was ok. It was, but all morning I kept having recurring thoughts about this awful dream, so after church I called her. She was still fine, but I just had to tell her my dream on the infinitesimally small chance that my dream was some kind of warning. I've had those dreams before. Then I felt like a jerk for talking about her baby dying as she is literally in the middle of labor! Oh well, you can't win sometimes. Anyway, all's well that ends well, and she had a perfect, healthy baby just three hours after I talked to her (and after a medication-free delivery!). I am so proud of her and so happy to have another nephew!
2. Christian gave his homecoming talk in church today. He is a great speaker and seeing the transformation in him is so wonderful. He is inspiring, and it has been so great to spend some uninterrupted time with him this weekend.
3. At church I saw Todd Reynolds, someone in my high school class a million years ago. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen him since graduation. We weren't at all in the same social circle, but I knew him. He now has a 12 year old daughter (and three other kids). Now, I have two eleven year olds so this should come as no shock to me, but I guess since I haven't seen him since high school and I'm here without my kids, it just struck me as a little surreal, as if we were just playing at being grown-ups or something. Of course I was there listening to my brother give his missionary homecoming talk--the same brother who was just two years old when I graduated from high school. I guess the swift passage of time will never stop surprising me.

01/18/2013

1. My brother is home and I got to put my arms around him got the first time in more than two years!!
2. I flew to Los Angeles tonight, just for the weekend to see my younger brother Christian just home from his mission to Paris, France. It is so good to see him and hear his voice. Two years is a very long time! Seeing the transformation of these 19 year old boys when they come home as 21 year old men is truly miraculous. I can't wait to get to know this new Christian better.
3. Meanwhile all my boys are left to their own devices at home. Ben is going to put them to work tomorrow finally getting the last of the stuff in our old back yard since we finally have renters moving in. Last night Ben and I spent a romantic evening installing a new garage entry door in that house as well. I'm getting pretty handy with a router. :-)

01/16/2013

1.  OK school day.  Pretty good attitudes, generally, but we didn't finish everything.  Tomorrow?

2.  Ben jumped my car this morning and left it running in the garage. But a while later when I sent Brigham in to turn it off, it had already died again.  Another jump from a neighbor didn't work (it would turn over, just not stay running), so Mosey skipped out on TKD and we got a ride to and from piano lessons.  One of the boys commented as we were walking back inside after piano how we are so lucky to be a member of a church with so many people willing to drop everything to come and help with something like giving us a ride to piano lessons.  It's true!

3.  I spent some time tonight typing up my seminary class notes from last week.  It took me 3 hours!  And while I was doing so, I thought of some better questions and ways I might have run the classes.  I think I'll do that before class from now on.  :-)  I'm sending the class notes to a couple of kids who can't ever make it to seminary.  I don't know if they'll look at them, but it will be good for me to have that stuff saved on the computer anyway.

Here's a picture of Mosey and the kittens.  Look how big they're getting!

01/15/2013

1.  We've had two pretty good days of school!  All the practicing has been done except Mosey's cello, but he hasn't had a lesson yet, so it's not too big a deal this week.  I need to find a time to practice with him.  I'm still so torn about practicing with the boys.  I was at the point of having them practice almost all on their own (especially the twins), but then I started reading "Helping Parents Practice," written by a Suzuki violin instructor, and I feel like I still need to practice with them...  I do know that if I am going to practice with them, I need to do better about making it be positive.  Brigham is my most willing practicer.  He almost never gives me a hard time about actually sitting down to practice.  Thank goodness I have at least one like that!  But I don't do a very good job keeping it positive with him all the time.  He is very good, but after he plays something, I tend to jump right into what he needs to do or work on for the next time through, instead of really making a point to tell him something good every time.  It's hard to do that because I'm mostly focused on getting the practicing done fast.  :-)  But I need to, because he hears my constructive criticisms too often as just plain criticism.

2.  We were supposed to have scouts this afternoon, but when Mosey and I got in the car to go, I turned the ignition and nothing happened.  Shoot!  I called a few people but no one was home, and then I tried to pop the hood and couldn't even get that up (it sticks sometimes), so Mosey and I called it a wash and stayed home.  Instead we spent the next two hours working on arrow point electives.  It was fun!  Mosey is a cool kid.

2.  The kittens are getting bigger.  It's amazing how fast they grow.  They eat all the time.  They like to come sit on my lap in the wheelchair and let me wheel all over the house with them.  They also love to chase the mouse on the computer screen.  We have a computer connected to a projector in the living room, and they'll get up on the couch against the wall where we project the computer screen and jump around trying to catch the mouse.  So cute.

3.  Joseph is my biggest animal lover, as he has been since he was born.  He loves to talk baby-talk to Sandy, saying, "Sundy-Wundy" (his nickname for her) "is the bestest duggie in the whole world!", among other sweet nothings which he is very good at making up.  It is sweet.  At least, it is sweet until the 30th time during the day when he is insisting that I join in on the Sandy baby-talk.  "Mommy, say something about Sandy!  Say 'Sundy-Wundy.'"  "No, not like that, it has to be like this: 'Sundy-Wundy!'"  It can go on like that for quite a while until he is satisfied with my exact inflection and enthusiasm when talking to Sandy.  :-)

4.   A few days ago when I was driving Mosey to Tae Kwon Do, he asked me, "Mom, do you think you are happier than you would be if you didn't have MS?"  It took me a bit off guard.  I told him I couldn't say, because I don't know what I would have been like otherwise.  I wish I could have learned all the lessons I've learned from MS without having to have it!  But, I guess if I had to make a choice, I probably am happier having had it.  The only thing that makes me uncertain is that if I hadn't had MS I definitely would have had more children.  More kids doesn't necessarily make a mother happier, though, I suppose.  Anyway, I thought that was a pretty deep question from my boy.

5.  A couple of weeks ago Joseph took some pictures of me.  Since I'm always taking the pictures, I don't end up in many of them.  It's taken me a few weeks to actually go through them.  He did a good job!  Here are the two I like best.  The lighting was different in both of them and it makes my hair look a lot different.  I think the first one is more true to life.

First week done

Of seminary, that is.
I have next week off, during which I plan to prepare lessons for the next week, get my kids on a really good school/practicing schedule, and blog a little more consistently.
This week I simply wasn't getting enough sleep to justify blogging.  I have discovered the only time I really will have for lesson prep is around dinner time, which makes the whole dinner-making process a little complicated.  I did have a menu all planned out this past week, which helped, but still, the actual preparation of the dinner and cleanup afterward took too much time.  Ben has Bishopric meetings often in the evenings as well, or other work, so I can't simply pass off dinner duty to him.  So I'm going to have to do more weekend prep so that the boys can really do all of it on their own.  They are old enough now!  If I don't have to worry about making dinner or cleaning up the kitchen afterward, I think I can make this work.
But the first week was fun!  I learned a lot, had a couple of lessons I thought were pretty good, one that I felt fell a little flat, and got a lot of ideas about what I need to do to improve.  There's definitely going to be a learning curve to this.  But I feel like seminary is really so, so important and has the potential to really be a great influence in the lives of these good kids and I want so much to do it justice.
A couple of mornings my boys woke up early and sat in the schoolroom and listened in on my lesson, which was awesome.  Scripture study taken care of for the day!  And a bonus-- I didn't have to wake them up!
And, just for fun, here is a picture of Brigham with the kitties.  They are so fun!

Happy 9th Birthday to my sweet Mosey

Right after seminary, Mosey was up out of bed and rarin' to go.  He desperately wanted to open his birthday present *before* breakfast.  He's pretty sure he know what it is:

And... he's right!  Now on to his special birthday cereal.

He had a good day-- he got ahead in schoolwork over the past few days, and so was able to take the day off.  This was a good thing because I was so, so sleep deprived from seminary the past few days, that I really needed a bit of a break.
The boys played airsoft, watched x-files, played with the dog and cats, and let their mom snooze for a few minutes.  Good boys!
One more present came for Mosey around noon-- a new camera.  He's had one his uncle Jeremy gave him for a couple of years, and it was time for a new one.  Mosey was thrilled, and I was excited because he didn't have any idea about it.  He quickly got busy taking pictures and planning out movies to video with his brothers.
In the afternoon our art group friends came over, bearing cupcakes, airsoft gear, and more presents.
In the evening, Mosey got a special birthday dinner-- meatloaf, shoe-string potatoes, and brussels sprouts, and for dessert, apple pie!  That's his birthday dessert of choice.
I am so glad Mosey is my boy.  He is friendly and thoughtful and talented and creative and gentle and I love him so much.

01/07/2013

1.  First day!  First day of seminary (for me) and first day back at school for the new year.  I thought seminary went pretty well.  I wasn't as organized as I could have been, logistically, but we'll work those things out.  I thought the lesson went pretty well.  I taught John 9.  I know the big challenge is going to be making the lessons more interactive with the kids, but overall they seemed fairly alert and participatory, so I can't complain.  Hot chocolate afterwards went over well, and the kids stayed an extra 10 minutes or so, so I'll call it a win.  :-)

2.  First day of school wasn't stellar, but it wasn't a disaster.  It was hard because it was broken up by 2 doctor's appointments.  I finally got my act together and finished getting my immunizations after my transplant.  Two shots in one arm, one in the other.  In the afternoon I had my annual neurology appointment for prescription refills which went just fine.  Dr. Tallman is a great guy.  I did discover, much to my dismay that I've somehow gained five pounds over the past 5 months.  Oops.  This needs to stop now!  Time to start counting calories I guess.  I know 5 pounds isn't a huge deal, but it's already hard enough for me to walk, any extra pounds makes it that much harder.  Also, since I can't exercise, losing weight is really hard, so I need to nip this in the bud.

3.  Mosey got a Rubik's cube knock-off from Grandma Jackee for Christmas, and he has been obsessed with it the last couple of days.  It didn't have the same colors or orientation of colors as a real Rubik's cube, which has made the instructional YouTube videos he's been watching harder to follow.  So, sucker that I am, last night I peeled off all the stickers, and made new stickers with address labels, markers, and clear packing tape and redid his Rubik's cube to match the ones he's been watching on videos.  It took me a ridiculously long time on a night I ought to have been going to bed early.  That's how much I love my boy.  :-)  Anyway, he's been playing with it nonstop since then and quickly becoming a Rubik's cube expert.  It's pretty cute.  :-)

4.  Here are some pictures of the kitties.  They have gotten a lot bigger in just a week.

Luna:

Sola:

Brigham and Sola the Parrot:

Mosey and Luna who's not quite so sure about what's going on...

We can't forget about Sandy!!

And here's who is hanging out next to me as I type.  Cat and Mouse!!  :-)

01/06/2013

1.  11:00 church.  Aaaahhh.  Still, we managed to be late.  That's the danger with later church, you *think* you've got more time.  But by the time I slept in, got up, got dinner in the crockpot, got ready for church, looked up the lesson I was teaching for primary (substituting for the CTR 6 class), and gathered up my stuff and got in the car, we were 10 minutes late...  Oh, well.  :-)

2.  I really like teaching primary.  There were only 3 boys in my class, and we had a good time.  I just love kids.

3.  In the evening we had a night-before-seminary meet and greet.  9 of the 16 enrolled kids showed up, which was way more than Ben thought would come.  :-)  We had brownies and cupcakes and cookies and the kids all filled out a get-to-know-you survey.  Sandy and Luna and Sola all made a bunch of new friends, and Mosey and Brigham got out their hex bugs for a giant battle with a couple of the boys who were there.  It was fun.  :-)

4.  I ended up staying up way too late trying to get the church hymns uploaded on my ipod.  Stupid computer.  And then I went to bed and my mind was racing and I probably lay there another hour before finally falling asleep.  Stupid insomnia.

01/05/2013

1.  Work day!!  We did a bunch of stuff.  Picked up the house, swept the floors, put all the Christmas boxes in the attic, swept out all the leaves from the front courtyard (Joseph did this-- big job!), mowed the lawn (Brigham did this), and grocery shopping.  Hmm, that doesn't seem like all that much now that I write it out, but it took all day.  This year one of my goals is to have the menu planned for the week so I don't have to make more than one grocery run, and so our meals can be better planned and organized.

2.  The boys helped with chores, as well as spent a fair amount of time on the computer, especially Brigham and Mosey.  They were working on Rosetta Stone, which is fine, but there was also a fair amount of Tanki playing.  I HATE tankionline.  It is such a waste of time, and it causes me major stress having to police it.  I want to ban it, but I keep thinking that I've got to be able to figure out a way to bette rmonitor my boys' usage (especially Mosey) so that he can play it a little.  He and I had a long talk about it after he had a major melt-down about getting off the computer.  It's the equivalent of junk food and it makes his brain flabby.  Flabby brains get bored and otherwise healthy fun things seem boring in comparison.  I don't always want to be the mom that says "no" to EVERYTHING.  I'd really like him to be able to keep playing, but in moderation.  I'm not doing a great job monitoring his use right now.  So do I ban it?  I do get the make the rules, I guess.  But part of me thinks it's not fair to ban him just because I"m not doing a great job in setting boundaries and limitations...  For now I told him he can play before breakfast on school days or before noon on Saturdays.  If he can't limit himself, it has to go away, I guess.  It's getting to be like TV-- I just couldn't/didn't monitor it effectively and it was easier to simply take it away altogether.

3.  Tomorrow church starts at 11:00!  Yay!  My favorite church time.

4.  I never posted any pictures from Thanksgiving.  I need to go back and do that.  Here are a couple of my nephew Miles, the sweetest little 3 year old boy since my boys were 3.  :-)  He can come and live here any time he wants, and here's why:

I remember when my boys thought it was the greatest thing ever to vacuum and help do other household chores.  What happened??  Anyway, Miles is obviously awesome.  And obviously adorable.

01/04/2013

1.  We had a pretty good school day , now that all the organizational projects are done!  I got all caught up in the read-aloud stuff we've gotten behind in.  We're starting a unit on Southeast Asia, having finished Russia and Mongolia.  We finished the World Book entry on Russian history, which I found fascinating and Mosey found boring...  I remember the fall of the Soviet Union, and how we had to get a whole new set of maps in AP European History that year-- 1991-1992.

2.  My table and chairs came for seminary.  I got an 8 foot folding table and 8 folding chairs that we can use in addition to our kitchen table and chairs.  I also got a big dry erase board on an easel, and chart paper.  I think I'm ready for 16 teenagers every morning at 5:45 AM!  :-)

3.  We put the table in the playroom.  I'll have the kids move it out to the kitchen for seminary, and then back into the playroom afterward.  It makes a nice work table for the boys.  We got out some puzzles.  Joseph and I started a couple of them.  Brigham commented on how pointless puzzles are, since you already know what they will look like.  And then he slowly got sucked in and ended up working on mine for about an hour.  He used to love puzzles!  I knew he'd remember.  :-)

01/03/2013-- Ben's birthday!

1.  It is Ben's birthday!  38 years old.  We celebrated by eating at Carino's and then going home and watching 24 and eating banana bread and ice cream.  He got a really classy bookshelf from Walmart for his present, since I'm so romantic.  :-)  If it weren't so late, I'd enumerate 38 wonderful things about Ben.  But it is late, and my New Year's resolution is to be in bed before midnight, so a picture of my wonderful husband with our wonderful children will have to suffice.  Excuse the goofiness which is my son Joseph and my son Mosey.

2.  The rest of the day was spent in doing some schoolwork (the boys actually wanted to get started early, so they can take next Thursday off for Mosey's birthday), and finishing my big organization project.  I think we finished!  There are now a line of boxes in the hallway filled with Christmas decorations and other items to be stored in the attic.  The garage is cleaned out and organized, the closets are organized and I can say we are 100% DONE with unpacking.

3.  Speaking of Ben being 38 years old, I found an old poster in one of the boxes we finally finished unpacking-- a box of old pictures and picture frames that we hadn't opened probably since we lived in Utah forever ago.  It is a picture of Ben in his Army ROTC uniform.  He was a poster boy for the BYU honor code back in 1994 when he was a freshman.  Literally a poster boy-- his image appeared on this poster around campus.  He looks so handsome!  Anyway, yesterday I asked Joseph and Mosey if they recognized who it was on the poster.  They hmm'd and haa'd and looked confused.  Mosey said, "He looks kind of familiar."  Joseph said, "I think I know but I don't want to say because I might be wrong."  Finally I told them to look on his name tag and then they got it.  I guess 20 years is a long time, but Ben still looks the same to me!

01/02/2013

1.  Day 2 of the new year, and I almost got my to-do list done.  I have a whole bunch of framed pictures that I have had up in various houses of ours with which I am trying to figure out what to do.  Ben doesn't like a lot of pictures on the wall.  Which is very unfortunate for his photographer-wife.  :-)  I've gotten permission to put family pictures on ONE wall down the hall, but that's not enough space for everything.  I need a room only for hanging pictures!

2.  Our new kitties are obsessed with the keyboard.  Which makes writing blog posts very difficult.  How about I just end with some pictures from our trip to Utah back in October.  :-)

New Years Day 2013

1.  Finished cleaning/organizing the garage, finally.  We are soooo close to having everything finally totally organized and put away.  Tomorrow for sure.

2.  Goodbye Christmas.  It's always a little sad, but also a little bit good to put Christmas away.  We're about half de-decorated.  Well, more than that.  Everything is taken down, but a bunch of stuff is still on the kitchen table waiting for me to put back in boxes.  I have no idea what I'm going to put on our mantel now.  Better get on Pinterest to get some ideas.  :-)

3.  The boys have been good about pitching in and getting the garage organized.  But Mosey was a bit more reluctant this evening, and after dragging his feet one too many times, ended up in his room at 7:30 with peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and instructions not to come out again.  I'm not sure it was much of a punishment for him, since I let him have his new book, but he did miss out on Mission Impossible that the rest of us watched while de-decorating the Christmas tree.

Here are a couple of pictures from today.

The new kittens have not diminished the love the boys have for Sandy.  Despite the look on her face, she really does love this.  :-)

Goodbye Christmas.  Until next year.

Happy New Year 2013!!

We had a nice New Years Eve today.  We cleaned and organized the garage (yahoo!), did errands, ate lunch at Taco Cabana, played with the kittens (oh yes! The kittens!  We picked them up yesterday afternoon and they are soooo cute), had our yearly New Years Eve cookout over the fire in our fireplace, drank root beer floats, and of course destroyed the gingerbread house!


Here are a whole bunch of pictures.

 Me and Sola.

 Me and Sola again.  She loves to ride around on my shoulder like this.

 Mosey and Luna.  Luna is smaller, quieter, and more timid than Sola.

Luna trying to sneak some honey butter.

Hey, get out of their cat, it's not for you!

These two kittens are sooo curious.

And sooo cute.

Luxurious Luna.

 Dainty Luna.

I have fewer pictures of Sola because she is so rarely sitting still!

Brigham and Sola.  Sweet kitty!

 Luna (left) and Sola (right).  Such pretty kitties!

Brigham, you're not supposed to let her do that!

Our beautiful gingerbread house before the boys got to it.

Luna was curious and had to see what was going on.

Getting ready to KILL the gingerbread house!!

And... they're off!

Sola gets in on the action.

Joseph's goal was to pulverize the walls into fine powder.

Mosey doing his bit with the garlic press.

Brigham orchestrated the final staging, of course!

The boys after the great gingerbread apocalypse.

Happy New Year!