2008 was the year. . . .

Warning: This post is mostly for my own amusement & memory-- In other words you probably won't find it remotely interesting-- feel free to skip it. :) Since I've only just started blogging & have been quite sparse this is my attempt to document 2008. This was a big year, full of good & bad, some big & some small, but I want to remember all of it. You know how Grandma & Grandpa say things like "That was in 1952." I always wonder how they do that. Maybe this will help me.

Anyway. . . 2008 was the year that:

*We discovered "Lost" in January at my in-laws and watched all 3 seasons of it on DVD to catch up.

*Josh turned 9 in January.

*Isaac turned 2 in February.

*Eliza turned 6 in March.

*Ian turned 12 in April!

*Sue & Scott came to visit us in Feb. What joy!

*I had my 3rd miscarriage in March at 16 weeks & delivered the baby at 19 weeks. That was the 6th baby boy that we conceived! Discovered I had a homozygous mutation of the MTHFR gene. (long story)

*Ian became a Deacon in April.

*Curtis became a High Priest in May & was put in the bishopric.

*His parents came down so his dad could set him apart.

*Ian & Josh played basketball & then flag football & then did swim team & then Ian did Pop Warner & Josh did soccer. (Whew! That's one solid year of sports!)

*Eliza did dance & gymnastics.

*Ali & Dagen spent the spring in Australia filming a movie.

*Ali did a triathalon.

*Annie & Doug spent the summer in AZ before heading off to TX for Doug to go to medical school at Baylor. Annie & other angels saved Callin from drowning.

*Zach graduated from nursing school. They moved into mom & dad's house & rented their own home to pay off student loans.

*In May we went with the Gwilliams to their beach house in Rosarito, Mexico. A blast!

*In June Ian & Aimee went on our stake Pioneer trek up near Greer. Had a wonderful time! Got super dirty.

*In July we spent 3 weeks in Seattle. Heaven. I read Gone with the Wind.

*Heidi came for a visit. So great to see them.

*Josh graduated from medical school & they moved to Georgia.

*Brent started his own country band, "Slade," and we girls joined Emily as groupies.

*Steve & Laura sent Keith on his mission to Minnesota.

*Nathan started a new job, but he & Sarah are still in WY.

*Scott had a heart scare & lost tons of weigh. Sue had a throat scare & surgery & got a bad virus & lost tons of weight. Sue also lost something else very important, but found it. :)

*Mom & Dad entered their 3rd and final year as mission presidents in Mozambique. We started to count down the months. Just 6 more now!

*In July, Curt (& several other attorneys) switched back to their old firm-- Gallagher & Kennedy & Curt became a partner.

*The real estate market went haywire and the stock market followed resulting in a recession.

*Ian started Jr. High & developed a "cool" attitude which I have been trying to cure.

*In September, Michael Hess, who was one of Curt's priests when we lived in Illinois, passed away following a car accident. His dad, Scott is one of Curt's best friends & Curtis flew to Utah to speak at the funeral. They are an amazing and strong family.

*Also in September we celebrated our 14th anniversary, coincidentally on the same weekend G&K was having a retreat in Laguna Beach. We enjoyed ourselves at the Montage, a 5 star resort & even got to see our friends the Cranneys.

*We went with our dear friends the Mortensens to their cabin in Show Low. I clogged their toilet & we had to buy a plunger. Nice. Incidentally, if we are talking waking hours, Eliza probably spent more time at their house this year than she did at ours. No joke.

*In September Heidi's brother Christian & his wife Stephanie were in a plane crash. They survived but were badly burned. I became engrossed in their story & started to read Stephanie's blog & also her sister's-- cjanerun.blogspot.com. Gladly they are both recovering well, but we continue to pray for them everyday.

*Autumn & Jamie & I started a dinner group. I cook for us all on Mondays, Autumn cooks on Tuesdays & Jamie cooks on Wednesdays. They are both great cooks & I love the variety & days off in the kitchen.

*Grandma came down to stay with us for awhile. Then she went to San Jose for Thanksgiving & didn't come back. :) (JK She's coming back when we get home)

*In November I went to DC to visit Kimberly. It was the week before the election.

*Barack Obama was elected to be the next president of the United States! I didn't vote for him, but it was kind of cool to witness such a historic moment.

*Wendy Whitacre took our family pictures.

*I tried to be faithful to Calli's aerobics class. I did my best.

*Grandpa Rob came for Thanksgiving & we had it at Emily's.

*After 3 years, I got released from being the stake cub scout guru when our stake primary presidency was dissolved at stake conference. I loved it & will miss working with those great people. Despite my request to be the nursery music coordinator, I just got called to teach RS. Scary.

*Just 5 days before Christmas the Greenes (a family in our ward who live just north of us) had their house burn down. The next day in the space of 4 hours our ward cleaned, furnished & decorated a rental home for them to move into. People brought furniture, bedding, household goods & food to stock the pantry & fridge. It was a tragedy for sure, but also a beautiful chance for our ward to pull together.

*On Christmas day the boys played video games & the girls worked on a 1500 piece puzzle. For about 5 hours. New tradition?

*We also surprised our kids with a trip to Seattle. We left on the 26th & we are us at Ward & Carol's enjoying the 3 feet of snow that they just got! Curt took the boys & their cousins skiing yesterday. It's so fun to be here in this winter wonderland!

A Few of My Favorite Things

It's Christmas Eve 5 am & I can't sleep already--I'm already so excited & keyed up about it all, so I thought I'd post a few of my favorite things about my kids.  I love their everyday "funnyness."  

Ian:  Here he is on a snow campout last weekend.  (Can you think of anything more miserable.  I'm not sure I can.)  The boys have started their usual tactics to negotiate a time to wake up on Christmas morning.  We said 7, they said 6:30.  Then last night he sent me this email:

6:45 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PPPPPPPPLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAASSSSSSEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! X10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

OR ELSE

Josh:  the serious student.   (Insert picture of him in his new glasses.)   He has the craziest language homework.  (I've even been in to talk to the principle about it, but that is another story.)  Usually it will say something like this:  Compose a complex sentence with the spelling word "attorney" that contains a prepositional phrase and an adverb and an adjective and a proper noun and supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.  Anyway sometimes it leads you to come up with some pretty funny sentences just to fit the criteria.  But you've got to love this one, especially if you are Curtis, that he came up with for his homework last week:

"Go under your bed because the attorney is coming."

  

Eliza:  Here she is reading to Isaac.  The other day while driving her and her 4 little girlfriends to gymnastics I overheard the following conversation about one of the girls' moms who did in vitro.

"She had to get a baby put in her tummy." 

"Why?" 

"Well I guess there was a baby and it needed someplace to be put. So they put it in her tummy."  

"Everybody has babies in their tummy."  

"No not everyone."  

"Well, not kids or babies, just grownups.  All grownups have babies in their tummies."  

Eliza, "Not my mom.  She doesn't have a baby in her tummy."    

 

Isaac:  Yesterday Ian & Josh & their friends were out having an airsoft gun war in the dirt hills.  He was not to be left out.  He got on these snow boots (in our case "mudboots") and found an old gun downstairs.  He pushed the highchair to the door and climbed up on it so he could undo the high latch I installed to keep him inside and headed out the garage to join the army.  

I know he may look harmless, but he has a quite a serious record of cleptomania.  It's really only one thing that he steals.  Keys.  Make that 2.  Keys and candy.   Here is a picture of the contents of his pocket after spending a little time at Autumn's.  

If you can't tell those are the keys to their riding lawn mower.  We have moved the hiding place of our lawn mower keys at least 10 times and he always finds them.  It's uncanny how he does this.  You can only wonder what this means for his future life. . . .   

Keller's Kodak Moments

The truth is sometimes those Kodak moments are just a little painful to come by. Anyway, everyone survived and I think that Wendy did a great job capturing the light in my children's eyes. I particularly like the one of Curt & Eliza which reminds me a little of a picture of me & my dad walking together in Hobble Creek Canyon. These kids are so precious to me-- as is my very handsome hubby. I have been thinking today that I am so incredibly blessed to have such a wonderful family, both the family that I come from & the family that God has now blessed me with. They fill our home with joy & love and that is everything that is good in the world to me.

Grandma's Moves In & Other Random Events

So I guess I can't change my wallpaper to a Christmas theme, if my last post is from Halloween. It's just that I'm finding that I'm much more a blog READER than a blog WRITER. I just can't think of much to report, but here are a few of the random things that have been happening in our lives recently...


This is my darling soon to be 89 year old Grandma--Prudence "Donna" Packard. Even though she goes by Donna,-- Prudence fits her so well. She is the queen of "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."


I think I have a little bit of that in me as well--don't you think I am a bit of an old soul? However, I have also come to realize that I have a long way to go to be up to Grandma's standard. (Main lesson: don't even think about trying to clean out the fridge when she is around.)


We are so happy that she gets to spend part of the winter with us. It has been interesting to learn more about her life from hearing her stories. Also, despite my protests, she is such a big help to me. She takes her morning walk every morning with Isaac on his big wheel leading the way. She rarely lets a dish sit in the sink for more than 3 seconds. Right now she is in San Jose spending the holidays with her son and I am finding it is much harder to keep up with the laundry & kitchen without her! Plus I have no idea what's going on on The Young and the Restless, which she watches everyday at 11:00. :)




As if we don't have enough commotion in our house in the morning. . . here is a scene in front of my house recently at about 5:45 am. We were rudely awoken at that crazy hour by all our fire alarms going off. They are SUPER LOUD! I didn't smell smoke, but I couldn't turn them off either. What could I do? I had to call the fire department. They came (& saw me in my bathrobe--lovely!) and determined... that they had no idea why they went off...dust might have triggered them?



I'm just including this picture because Curt loves it. It's a slice of life in our kitchen. Isaac is just laying on the bar watching Josh make his own egg salad sandwich (which his Grandma Keller taught him how to do-- Thank you very much Carol!)

These would be the eggs that he has just hard boiled & yes they are from our chickens! Hooray! I have stopped buying eggs for the most part.

This would be the sand that finally replaced the weeds as groundcover in our playground. Yeay! Even Ian likes to spend a lot of time out there. I think there must be something therapeutic about sand, or maybe he is just trying to avoid practicing the piano.... But there is definitely something magnetic about the sand that makes it stick to my children & come inside my house (in pockets, shoes, dumptrucks etc.) I do however think it's a worthwhile price to pay to get the kids to play outside. And that water is not a lake, but simply flood irrigation which is how we water our backyard every two weeks. Are you getting the picture? Dogs & kids & sand & water and dirty kitchen floors. But my mom did it somehow & I don't remember her complaining. (Well maybe just occasionally. :)

Well, I'm going back to gearing up for Christmas. I need to get wrapping! Merry Christmas everyone-- chances are you won't hear from me again on the blog until 2009!

Happy Retro Halloween

Do these costumes look familiar anyone? I feel very lucky that I was at Mom's house when she was cleaning out the attic & I got to inherit lots of gems like these from her costume box. I told the kids this year that we weren't buying halloween costumes-- we have so many to choose from already. They did ok I think.

Isaac started out as a dog, but it was a little too small, so he ended up as the clown. Ian didn't want to dress up at all, but I told him if he was too old to dress up, he was too old to trick or treat. He went as Curtis in high school-- notice the mullet. He brought home a mere 11 pounds of candy, that will now serve our family as movie candy for the next year or until it gets stale.

Here is us pumpkin carving. We ate fresh pumpkin for the first time this year (not these). But it isn't too bad-- a little like spagetti squash. I'm also loving butternut squash. I discovered that you can microwave it so easily. Just poke holes in the squash (leave it whole) and microwave it for about 10 minutes. If it isn't really tender, do one minute more at a time. Then cut it in half and scoop out the seeds & discard. Scoop out the flesh & mash it with a little butter, salt & pepper and a couple spoonfuls of cream (or milk). Wow! So easy & yummy.

DC in Election Season

At the FDR Memorial.

Kimberly and her friends are working hard for the cause

Eating chowder at the "Tackle Box" in Georgetown

This is taken from the FDR memorial. Loved the fall colors there.

This is Kimberly's street, Q Street, right in front of her house.

Last weekend I went to visit one of my oldest friends, well she's not old-- in fact she is 10 days younger than me, something she is now very proud of. But our friendship is old. We just turned 37 and we have been friends for at least 23 years. I think having lived apart for many years now, we are still very surprised that we ever became friends, back in Jr. High & High school. Some things were easier then. We just took Ferris days from school & drove around everywhere in her 69 cream VW beetle. Kim knew a lot about the world and good music and good food and good times. I knew a lot about the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we shared what we knew & both ended up the wiser I think. Now Kimberly lives in DC and she knows everything about the world and the government & politics. I'm still just a country girl, living in Gilbert and I am only an expert on a couple things, like changing diapers and Cub scouting. It might be harder to share what we know now. We still go together about as well as oil and water, Obama & McCain.... or should I say gasoline and matches. As usual, we didn't see eye to eye on everything, in fact, maybe only 3 or 4 things, but I am still glad to see the world through the lense of my "most ethnic" friend.

We had a fun bike ride on the Mount Vernon trail, but it was cut short by the rain, and perhaps partly by my inexperience :) We really got poured on several times on Saturday. We did some driving/walking tours, and some shopping. We ate at Potbelly's-- which I have dearly missed since our chicago days. I loved going to her ward on Sunday and meeting some of her friends. What an amazing place to live. I also loved seeing Kimberly's new fabulous house! She has done a terrific job & has a great garden in back as well. She also introduced me to my favorite new breakfast-- plain yogurt, grape nuts, frozen berries & maple syrup-- delish! Thanks again Kimberly.

Sedona Trip

The kids have fall break this week.  We talked Curtis into taking Columbus Day off  for our 2nd annual hike up the West Fork Trail of Oak Creek Canyon in Sedona.  This is one of my favorite hikes ever.  It was a beautiful fall day & we really had a wonderful time.  Isaac spent most of the time in the pack on Curt's back, but he was fearless when we turned him loose.   We are a hiking family!  

We crossed Oak Creek about 15 times on the trail.  

My 10 Rules

Do Mom's have rules? Unstructured people like me (unlike people like Clark Kent) sometimes try to make rules for themselves, in some kind of desperate attempt to obtain more order in their lives. (Thinking, if it's a RULE then maybe I will actually DO it?)

I was just trying to clean off my desk & wading through my mounds of paperwork. (And if you know me, you already know how much I HATE PAPERWORK and therefore you can see how I would jump at the chance to blog my way out of this job.) (By the way we DO have a rule in our house that we never say we HATE anything, but I DO HATE paperwork, so there goes that rule-- out the window.)

Anyway, as I was throwing away papers, I found a list of Rules (that I made for myself) that I had scribled on the back cardboard part of my trusty yellow legal pad which contains all my to-do lists--(thank you Ward). I know I was thinking that the cardboard part was a "safe" place to put these rules. :)

RULES

1) Exercise 3x's a week (I am doing ok on this right now, but I must have made this a rule because of my tendency at times to take a short break from exercise-- like 6 months off)

2) Do jobs on the right day before 3pm
This means that Monday is laundry, Tues is house cleaning, Wed. is shopping & Thursday is paperwork & Friday is catch up. Now I confess, I'm not sure if those are the right days, because

a. I can't find the notebook that tells me what day is what and

b. I change them everyweek anyway, and

c. no matter what I never, ever seem to fit in the day for paperwork. I have actually managed to skip it for like a month now. (The before 3pm is because after my kids get home from school nothing gets done, since I am just in "putting out fires" & "driving my taxi" mode.)

3) Prepare dinner (or as much as I can) in the morning. I like this rule & try to keep to it if possible. But a new rule, or maybe a byline of this is "Just eat leftovers as often as we can" which also makes me eat less because I don't really care about leftovers.

4) Read Ensign or scriptures every day.

5) Clean Kitchen and Family Room before going to bed, so I can start fresh tomorrow. (This one comes from my wonderful mother who was always so good at this. I am improving in this area, but still need work.)

6) Bathe my children (at least) on Tues. Thurs & Sat. nights. Noel taught me this. Thanks Noel! That way, I don't fall into that confusion over "How long has it been since you last had a bath?" and the kids are at least pretty clean for church on Sunday. (By the way, in the summer, a late afternoon swim counts as a bath! Bonus!)

7) Monthly Food Calendar-- (I confess I don't even know what this is? What was I thinking? Let's just change it to weekly menu, shall we? That is even a stretch, but more doable.)

8) Paperwork and Budget Report every Tuesday-- Oh! I guess Tuesday was supposed to be my paperwork day-- but I had to change that all around so I would go to aerobics. At any rate, I AM trying to do this, but like I said, that is what I am supposed to be doing right at this moment.... so I guess this still needs improvement.

9) Fast Sunday-- make it a day of rest, prayer, reading & journal writing. This is my excuse for not having anyone to dinner on that one Sunday a month, which Curtis, being born of goodly parents, would like us to do at least 4 nights a week.

10) Read with Eliza every day. (I had to make that a rule, because unlike with Ian & Josh, I just keep letting it slip through the cracks & she needs to catch up. I was relieved when I found out that her teacher requires her to read 10 minutes for homework every night so we are doing just fine now.)

I think I might have to add one more: No blogging until my paperwork is done!

Do you have any good rules to share? :)

I'm 7 years older than G & K...

These tide pools are full of fun anemones & sea life.

Shopping in London.... oops, I mean Laguna

Going to the firm's big banquet dinner at the resort

The view from our room's balcony

The Montage

This beach here is so cool. I love this natural arch.

Gallagher & Kennedy turned 30 & they took us all to Laguna Beach to celebrate at the 5 star resort "Montage." It was Spectacular! We almost didn't go because Clark Kent (CK) thought he was too busy at work & also wanted to go camping with Ian's scout troop (on my birthday!-- what?) So I cancelled the tickets, but then his mom called him up and helped him see the light! Hooray for Carol! We had a wonderful time walking the town, combing the tide pools, eating FAB food, swimming & enjoying our luxurious room complete with plush robes, slippers & 17 different bath potions. CK works witht the coolest people & I love their wives! One night we ate at Cafe Zoolu which boasts the best swordfish on the planet (says Zagat) and the worst waitress (says us). We called her the Swordfish Nazi, but dinner was worth it.

(Note to self--who has the worst memory I know--) Things I want to remember: sharing Nacho's & reading Goose Girl while Superman works, seeing Kevin & Karsen Cranney & their beautiful girls for a few hours of beach & swimming, eating lunch at the Greek Aegean Cafe, the lemongrass lotion in our room, meeting Dana Reynolds at dinner & talking religion (she's Jewish & married to a Catholic), the fresh granola, yogurt & berries for breakfast, and flying home with Beth Broadfoot who has airplane fears combined with a healthy sense of superstition and has worn the same exact outfit (including underwear) each & every time she has flown for the past 18 years. (Lucky for her I think those stirrup pants are coming back in style!) Best of all, getting 2 full days & nights with the best husband in the world!

My Favorite Chicken Farmers

One day while Ali was here, we were getting ready to go somewhere, but we couldn't find Isaac & JoJo so we all went looking.  Here is where we finally found them! . . .  If you can't tell from the picture, they are inside the chicken coop.