Snickerdoodles and backsplashes

Some of my favorite posts to read on other peoples blogs are the ones where they just talk about what they are doing lately. So I figured I would give a post like that a try.

Monday night was FHE. Parker was assigned the lesson and when I asked him what he wanted to do a lesson about he said trains. So in an effort to keep his attention for more that 25 seconds I had him help me do a lesson about determination featuring the little engine that could. I think it might have held his attention for at least 3 minutes. For a treat we had snickerdoodles made from store bought dough which the kids really liked. It reminded how yummy homemade snickerdoodles are so I will probably be making some in the next week. I also think I will be making my aunts famous oatmeal cake because it also sounds really tasty and its not the kids favorite so I can eat most of it myself.

Tuesday during the day one of my friends volunteered to watch my kids while I did my grocery shopping. So I got to go grocery shopping, in the day, without any kids. It was awesome. Tuesday evening we drove up Provo canyon to take some pictures with pretty leaves as a backdrop. The trees that turn red were out but the ones that turn yellow were mostly still green. I think it might be worth another visit in a week or so.

Tuesday I also started reading Unlikely Heroes: Ordinary Men and Women Whose Courage Won the Revolution. It is a compilation of small stories and has been pretty good so far.

Wednesday turned into laundry day which usually goes something like this. I try to keep rotating through the machines during the day but don’t ever have time to fold it when it comes out of the dryer. So baskets of clean laundry pile up until after the kids go to bed. Then Michael turns on a episode of MacGyver (MacGyver is great laundry folding TV,) spreads a few big blankets out on the living room floor, folds our laundry and sorts the kids laundry into piles based on what drawer in will end up in (shirts, pants and pjs/underwear.) We gave up actually folding the kids clothes once they started dressing themselves because once they dig through a drawer to get what they want, folding becomes pointless. Usually the last load is coming out of the dryer while the rest of the laundry is being folded. I put the piles of clothes in to laundry baskets for each kid for them to put away the next morning.

Michael thought we needed a treat to eat while folding laundry so I made peach milkshakes which we ate out of the cool parfait glasses my grandma gave me this summer. I don’t think there is a treat that is more reminiscent of my childhood than peach milkshakes.  Chop up some frozen peaches, add milk, sugar and vanilla, blend. One of my favorite things in the world.

Today I am going to the park because it looks beautiful outside. Either tonight or tomorrow we are going to home depot to buy the tile for my new kitchen backsplash. Once it is completed my kitchen redo will be completed and I will post before and after pictures.

So what have you been doing this week?

Mud Run

Way back in the spring my awesome friend Amanda asked me to sign up to do a mud run with her. For those of you not familiar with mud runs they are basically a regular run (the one we did was a 5k) with a bunch of muddy obstacles thrown in.

I had been looking forward to the mud run all summer long. Mostly because as adults we don’t get many chances to play in mud. The particular mud run that we chose was called Kiss Me Dirty and was an all women mud run. Mud runs tend to attract a different group of people than your typical 5k. It really isn’t about speed at all so get a lot of people who would never want to do a normal 5k running in a mud run.

Shortly after we signed up Amanda said we needed to make some sort of costume. I thought it would be fun to stand out a bit from the crowd but it ended up that there were more people in costume than not.

It is hard to tell from this picture but we had capes on as well as knee high striped socks. We are the ones in the middle with the yellow shirts.

 

Crawling through a mud pit.

In the soap suds at the finish line.

We got pretty muddy but there were people even muddier. Overall it was a very fun run.

Kathryn and Parker were pretty jealous that we got to get completely muddy. Stephen was glad he didn’t have to get muddy. Amanda had a waterproof camera with her we used to to take pictures during the race. But it was a film camera and I don’t know if the pictures are developed yet.

When your hiking your happy

I am going to do a post about the coolest parts of my Glacier National Park trip but first I wanted to post about something a noticed over and over while on out trip last week.

Everyone that I met was happy and helpful. I didn’t meet a single grumpy rude person the entire trip. A maintenance man helped us put air in a low tire. We talked to some very friendly retirees on the shuttle, who found me to return my hiking pole after I left it in the shuttle. A hiker that we passed several times on our long highline trail hike gave us a ride back to our camp so we didn’t have to wait forever for a shuttle. There was the friendly biker gang  that Darcy got a picture with. And met a very friendly hippie who showed me how I could use my hiking pole as a didgeridoo and made sure I knew the dangers of pvc  (apparently it can give you cancer and give men a more feminine voice.)

All of the park rangers campers and hikers we met were fun to talk to and happy to be where they were.  I have wondered about the reason for this. Does being in such a beautiful setting make people happier? Are happy people more likely to go on a vacation to a national park? Or do grumpy people not like to go to beautiful places? Whatever the reason is I thoroughly in enjoyed spending a week around happy people.

Extreme Geocaching

 

“Geocaching is a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.”   http://www.geocaching.com/

My Dad and sister have been really into geocaching for quite a while ago. Darcy recently found her 800th cache and I think my Dad is past 2000 caches. Whenever they are together or away from home they can’t resist finding a few caches. As a result of hanging out with them I have found a decent amount of caches myself.

This summer Michael has been doing a lot of hiking and has gotten into caching as well. He likes to find the caches that require a long hike to get to. This week he found a few up on top of Y mountain.  When we go to a park with the kids he likes to look up a few caches nearby. Last week we went to the playground behind Provo Peaks Elementary to play a find a few caches.

Generally caches are hid in a place you can reach from standing on the ground. This one ended up being about 30 feet up the tree. I climbed trees like a monkey when I was a kid so I decided to try and get the cache.

That’s me, way up in the tree, holding the cache in my hand (it was a micro so it’s hard to see.) It was fun to climb a tree again, and my kids thought I was really cool, but I got sap all over my pants so I ‘m not sure if it was really worth it or not.

On Saturday Darcy came down to visit. We had some errands to do and after our errands we went caching. Michael had found a cache on a little island that you could wade out too. From pictures that people had posted it looked like it got about knee deep. So we decided to try it.

Here we are with the island we are wading to in the background. The water was a bit murky so it was hard to tell how deep it was.

Wading back. Its way more than knee deep. The cache ended up being on the opposite side of the island from where we went ashore. So we had to bush whack through prickly trees to get there. But we found the cache and Michael and Kathryn decided to wade out and get it too.

Kathryn was the only to find the cache and stay dry in the process.

Me and Michael after finding it. You can see from his shirt how deep the water got.

After our adventure Darcy and I were talking about it. She said if someone had said, “I will pay you ten dollars to wade through that slimy water out to the island.” She would have said no way. But for some reason decided on our own to do it because there was a cache on the island wasn’t that big of a deal.

Usually geocaching doesn’t involve wading through a lake or climbing a tree, but it was an exciting departure from the norm.

And just for kicks here is one more picture of Darcy and Michael finding a cache on our way home. I stayed in the car to watch the kids while Darcy and Michael got one more cache. I wonder what people who drove by thought when they saw  to adults, hanging out by a rock on the side of the road, with towels wrapped around there waist.

Why this blog will never be a mommy blog

You know how some moms start writing blogs and they get a bunch of people to start following their blog and after a while they actually make money by writing about how there toddler took off their diaper and smeared you-know-what all over the wall?

I have to come to the conclusion that this will never be my blog.  Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy reading a funny well written mommy blog, sometimes reading about the crazy things other moms have to put up with helps me appreciate my kids more, or not feel as frustrated when they do something crazy.  There are several mom blogs I read just because they are so hilarious, not because I actually know the mom. 

But my blog will never be a successful,  funny mom blog. I just can’t convince myself that people really want to hear all the details of potty training a kid or the embarrassing thing they said to a stranger. I don’t have a desire to write about my failures in motherhood. I like swapping crazy kid stories with my family and friends. But I don’t want to put it out there for the whole blog reading world to read about, comment on and criticize. I like to get other peoples take on things and to share and receive advice, but I want the advice to be from someone’s whose opinion I value and not some stranger in Ohio who knows a sure fire way to potty train a kid in a week.

It’s nice to be able to share my frustrating parenting moments with people who knowledge of me isn’t based only on the stories of my kids shenanigans that are funny enough to gain a following of readers. People who will be able to laugh when I tell them about the ridiculous fit my daughter threw because I wouldn’t carry her towel for her when we left the water park without thinking that I can’t control my kids, because they also see me the other 99% (ok maybe 90%) of the time when my kids are normal well behaved children.

I suppose I shouldn’t care if some random stranger thinks I am a horrible mom because the only time one of my sons gets veggies is when it is mixed into a fruity drink and  I’m sure there is probably somebody out there who would be happy to give me some advice on how I could change that. But the truth is that I do care what people think and I don’t want to hear what a stranger who has never met my kid thinks would be best. I am hard enough on myself when it comes to parenting and I don’t want to leave myself open to any extra advice or criticism by writing about my struggles as a mom where anyone can read them and comment on them.

So I hope my readers are not disappointed by a lack of  posts about motherhood because it is never going to happen on this blog. I hope you are all fine with occasional posts about me and whatever I happen to feel like sharing. If you want to hear about the crazy things my kids have done, or the funniest conversation about poop with a three year old you have ever heard, then next time you see me ask. I love talking with people who know me and care about me and are actually interested in my stories. We can swap stories, share cool tips that have worked for us and laugh about the ridiculous things that happen while trying to raise a kid.

Meanwhile I am glad that there are moms out there who know how to write well and enjoy documenting the ups and downs of parenting. Then I can keep reading my favorite mommy blogs without writing one of my own.

I am curious what other people think about mommy blogs. I am the only person who feels this way? Do you love them, hate them or write one yourself? Let me know what you think.

IVs

Prepare for a sappier than normal post.

I have often thought about how I am glad I was born when I was. I really enjoy modern technology. I am glad that even though my parents live over 500 miles away I can drive to see them in one (long) day. I think microwaves are amazing. I love that I can chat with Michael on my computer while he is at work. Being a parent without disposable diapers, wet wipes and onesies would be much more of a hassle. I'm sure I would have survived living without all these conveniences, but I'm glad I don't have to.

Last week a nasty virus made its way through our family. Everyone was affected somewhat but it hit Parker especially hard. After three days of being very sick Parker ended up in the hospital because he was extremely dehydrated. It took 7 different people at two and half hours and about 10 different pokes to successfully get an IV into him (he was so dehydrated it was very difficult to find a vein.)

 As the nurses were trying to get an IV into Parker I thought of my parents at the hospital about 30 years ago, in a much more serious situation, with my sister Darcy. When she was two she was diagnosed with leukemia. Her chance of survival were not incredibly high. I remember the story of one of the first times she was in the hospital and they poked her over 20 times before they were able to get an IV in. I remember my mom saying how helpless she felt and how hard it was to watch them hurt her little girl even though they were trying to make her better. As I sat on the hospital holding Parker on my lap, keeping the barf bag near his mouth while the nurses poked and prodded him, I got a glimpse of what my parents went through with my sister for several years. Despite the odds Darcy made a full recovery and now spends her time editing, geocaching and convincing my children that there is more than one name for what they call pajamas.

After about 24 hours of having an IV pump fluids him Parker was feeling much better. When I had to follow him around the pediatric floor of the hospital with his IV stand I knew he was ready to come home. After a day or two of resting and gradually eating more than crackers and apple juice Parker was back to normal.

But if we had lived a hundred years ago, or in a different part of the world today this story could have ended with Parker dying of the flu instead of spending a day in the hospital, in a private room watching Tarzan over and over, then going home and fully recovering. I know that I am very lucky that my children haven't had any serious health problems. And I am grateful for this. I also know that this might not always be true. I have friends and family who have spent many days at a hospital with their sick children. They are in my thoughts and prayers. And even with the amazing technology we have sometimes we still lose someone we love.

As far as medical technolgy goes I don't think getting an IV of fluids is very tricky. But it saved his life. Yes I am glad I live now when I can watch Netflix from my bluray player and send my dad pictures of my kids from my phone. But I am even more glad to be alive during a time of immunizations, chemotherapy, antibiotics and other lifesaving medical technology. I am glad loosing children in an accident or disease is a rare tragedy and not something that most woman have to deal with. I know this is still not the case throughout the world and I do my best to support the organzations and people who are fighting to change this.

So here is to technology, both medical and otherwise, and all the wonderful things it brings to my life.

Anticipation

 

   Right now I am waiting for the window guy to come and measure some windows so we can can get them replaced. And I am really excited. About windows. But it is more than just a few windows. It will be the last of the major things we want to improve on our house. It is something I have been anticipating for the nearly 6 years we have been in this house.

We moved into the house knowing there were a lot of things we would want to upgrade and we have slowly made our way through the list. Furnace, air conditioner, water heater, roof, doors and windows. They are all projects that were too big to do on our own.

I have been looking forward to finishing these projects since we bought the house. Each time we are able to complete one I get excited about the new improvement. I enjoyed the cool air flowing through the house when we got air conditioning and felt relief when we were able to replace our leaky roof. I felt like throwing a party when we replaced our front door and I was able to stop putting a rag in the gap too keep the cold air out in the winter. Hooray for doors you can’t see light and feel a breeze coming through!

Darcy came over last night to start planning out our, sure to be amazing, trip to Glacier Nation Park in August. It got me all pumped up to go, even though it is still three months away.

Planning our awesome trip and waiting for the window guy (who is getting close to being late) has made me spend sometime thinking about anticipation. Maybe I am just easily excitable but the anticipation of something is a big part of the enjoyment for me. I love looking forward to something, thinking about how much fun it will be and planning it. Sometimes I get so excited I have dreams about whatever it is I am anticipating. Dreams about new windows, amazing sales for kids stuff or hikes right on the side of a huge mountain.

I like to plan things I know I will enjoy way out in advance, then I have even longer to time to think about how awesome it is going to be. So here is my list of the biggest things I am currently anticipating.

1. Danl and Belinda moving to Utah for the summer. They will only be here for a few months, but I am so excited to have them near by. Less than two weeks! And getting to meet their baby girl who is due in September. Kathryn will get a girl cousin!

2. Replacing the last of the windows in our house! Which, according to the window guys I just talked to should be installed by May 25.

3. Kathryn’s dance recital and Stephen’s track meet. It will be a first for both of them and I am excited to see how they do.

4. Family reunion/ Moses Lake summer trip. One of the few bad things about Utah is that it is a long day’s drive away from Washington. I am so excited to hangout with my family.

5. Our awesome trip to Glacier National Park this summer. No kids are coming. It is going to be a blast.

6. The 5k mud run my super awesome friend Amanda and I are doing in August. I think a three mile muddy obstacle course sounds like a blast.

7. The really big, beautiful king sized quilt my awesome mother-in-law is making for me. It will be big enough to hang over the side of my king size bed. I picked out the pattern and colors (cream, light yellow and a really deep red.) She is going to hand quilt it and submit it in the Utah State Fair in August. I know it will turn out amazing.

8. Darcy making her trifle some time soon. I have been close to eating some twice in the past month but it hasn’t happened yet.

9. My kids being big enough to go on a family bike ride (not walking while the kids ride on their scooters and tricycles) on the Provo River Trail. This is a ways off, but it will be so cool.

I am getting excited just thinking about all the exciting things I have to be excited about!

So what are you anticipating now?