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!