Merry Christmas!  

This year has been so full, and happy, and BUSY.  Even when we don’t have anything on the calendar, with so many people in the house, it always feels alive and BUSY.  But that is a good thing!

Nick moved work positions this year.  I never know his “official” title, because they seem overly complicated and politically correct and this one is no different.  He was put over an expansion project at this Kellogg’s plant.  This past month and for the next two weeks is the execution period and it has been busy and stressful for him.  We have hardly seen him and we have had lots of popcorn for dinner with a pajama party-movie night to help  keep me sane when he leaves before we are up and comes home after we are in bed.  With all of that, he still seems to manage to find some time for us and all the other obligations he has.

Brynli is in 6th grade this year.  I think she is excited that it is her last year in Elementary School!  She is doing great in school.  Everyone tells her that she looks just like her mom and she is young enough to still take that as a compliment!  She loves to dress up for school and accessorize (she might look like me, but she is much more fashionable than her mom).  Other than fashion, Bryn loves to cook and bake and I love it.  She is such a big help with everything, but especially with feeding this bunch of wild banshees.

Arwyn is in 5th this year.  While she and Brynli usually get a long well, Ari likes to make sure that her interests are different from her sister!  If we let her, her only interests would be watching tv and playing video games.  Luckily for her, she rarely gets to do those things, so she is enjoying  (forcibly) piano and (of her own volition) basketball.  All of the kids like to read, but Ari, more than anyone, can usually be found hiding from mom somewhere (trying to avoid conscription to some chore) reading a book.  

Chance is in 3rd grade.  While the girls seem to enjoy school, Chance tolerates it.  He is good at it, but insists he is bored.  Then again, Chance is bored a lot at home, so it probably isn’t just School.  For all that Chance tries very hard to cultivate a real reputation as a clown, a boy and a tease, he has a soft heart and people are always telling me what a sweet, good boy he is!

Chase is five and missed the Kindergarten cutoff by only a few weeks.  I am happy he missed it.  I love having Pierce and him home with me to keep me entertained and to play with each other.  Going places during school won’t be the same when Chase isn’t with me.  Chase makes friends with everyone, everywhere we go.  He loves to talk, and if he doesn’t have something to say, he’ll make something up just so he can say it.  He is a bright boy, so while it is obvious, at times, that what he is saying is pure…. um….. imagination, he says it in such a way and with such assurance that it is hard not believe his blarney.  It is even harder not to laugh!

Pierce is well loved and he returns that love on all of us with smiles and hugs and words.  He loves to run and does it everywhere, always starting out with a superhero pose and swing, before taking off.  He always tells us “I won,” even when we didn’t know we were competing!  Pierce is also a bright one, with a good vocabulary.  I don’t know if it was because of a plugged ear drum (we hope) or something else, but despite his vocabulary it is hard to understand what he is saying.  It is made harder by the fact that I’m trying to interpret his speech into simple phrases and he is using words I don’t expect him to know.  If Chase doesn’t having me laughing, Pierce does!

There isn’t much to share about me.  All the chaos and my advancing age has me loosing a little bit of my mind everyday- but I couldn’t be happier.  My life is pretty simple, caring for my family and trying to do a few other things along the way, so there isn’t much to share.  

We got the Christmas decorations out dunning Thanksgiving break.  We have two nativity sets and the girls helped to set them up.  Since the moment they have been set up, we have fought a battle with the younger boys to keep them from messing with the nativity.  I finally gave up, but Brynli kept fixing the figures so they were evenly spaced and facing forward.  She would then rant and rail at her younger brothers and as soon as her back was turned, they would crowed the masses back around the baby Jesus, with their backs to us.  One day, after Brynli had again fixed the set, it was obvious that the boys had come behind and “fixed” her fix.  I shook my head and wondered why, with all the Christmas decorations and presents to bother, this was the one that they kept messing up.  Why couldn’t they leave the figurines evenly spaced and facing outward?  And then what had been obvious to me since they started it, finally clicked in by mind and heart.  They were making sure that the focus of the nativity scene, and all of its’ characters, is on the Christ Child.  I hope that when our family has the opportunity to see our Savior and worship him, that we don’t do it evenly spaced and facing outward, in order to look our best.  I hope we crowd forward and in, close to Him.

Merry Christmas!

Happy, late, Thanksgiving!  Ours was a really low-key day, but it was great!  Since my sister moved back West, we don’t have family near and although we invited some friends, they already had plans- so it was just our family for Thanksgiving.  Nick, who is in the middle of a work project he is in charge of, spent a lot of the day ironing out kicks with work, so the kids and I worked on food and then played.  The weather was beautiful! and we weren’t tied to a schedule, so we had a very nice day.

Arwyn won an art contest for entering a picture of a “fat eagle” (her words) in the Veteran’s Day contest.  She won the GRAND prize, along with $150.  She was and is soo excited and has been plotting how she can spend her money.  It is amazing to me how her confidence in her artistic ability has taken off.  Once she saw that her art was appreciated (and had a fiscal reward) she hasn’t stopped drawing!  Her picture has been on display at the library.

Art isn’t the only talent my kids have.  I’ve recently discovered that Chase will listen to music on the radio and then can sing it back to you.  His memory is quite good for lyrics, although he doesn’t always understand what is being said and fills in gaps he doesn’t understand with his own words.  It makes for great entertainment, but has made me much more picky about what I listen to in the car.  Their most recent song is a pop song that has the refrain, “I’m going to break, break, break, break your heart” (repeated several times).  Chase (5) and Pierce (2) go around singing it all the time.  They thought it was really funny when I asked them to NOT break MY heart and it only egged them on to sing and say it to me more.  When Pierce is in a loving mood, he now tells me, “I not break your heart, Mom!”

I’ve already done a lot of Christmas shopping, here and there, and with the kids home from school, we got the tree up and have started putting presents under it.  I love Christmas.  I love seeing presents under the tree and I’m excited to see the kids open up their presents.  While I love these things, they also fill me with a sense of sadness and guilt!  Even as we strive to keep Christ at the center of this holiday, it seems like things and money so easily crowd out what is more important.  We are not rich, or even close, but we have so many blessings and while I’m filled with gratitude for all we have, I know I also take so much that I have for granted.  Seeing our Christmas bounty laid out, waiting for us, makes me feel a real need to look outside of our family to all those in the world who don’t enjoy all the blessings we do.

Nick and I were talking about this last night.  This last conference, three new Apostles were called to fill positions in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  One of these new Apostles, Elder Dale Renlund, told of an experience he had in the Democratic Republic on Congo.  Elder Renlund had asked the Saints at a meeting, what their challenges were.  He related that, “an older gentleman stood up and said, ‘Elder Renlund, how can we have challenges?  We have the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  Now, my faith isn’t as strong as that African brother’s, I have the gospel, but I KNOW I still have challenges.  At the same time, I do know (but need to constantly remind myself) that my challengers are nothing compared to the blessings I have been given, especially those that come from the Gospel.  Elder Renlund concluded that those African Saints “look like they have nothing, but they have everything.”

Life has felt crazy lately.  It is funny how my life frequently feels “more” crazy than usual, when in fact I think it is a rather constant stream of craziness that I should be used to.  I feel like I should acclimate to all the chaos, but maybe in the end it isn’t a good think to have crazy be normal.

Nick was out of town again last week.  He has had to travel a lot lately.  The night before he left, he got home early- even before the kids were home- so he could pack.  After the kids were home, I was unpacking  their backpacks, and I have always thrown the empty bags by the back door, until I am done and then I pick them up and hang them in the garage.  Well, the bags are nylon and I was in sock…. I was hurrying by them, doing something, when I caught the edge of one of the bags and slipped.  I’m not exactly sure how it all happened, the kids were sitting at the counter, but no one really noticed until I was already down.  Somehow I eded up laying in the opposite direction and my head, not my hands, met the hardwood floor first.  I sat up, whimpering a little, because it hurt, when my hands came away covered in blood!  I was happy Nick was home and the kids got him from outside and he got to look at the mess before me!

I have a good fish hook sized and shaped cut over my left eye, which quickly swelled up into a good sized egg.  The cut will scar, but luckily it wasn’t too deep and we super glued it together.  I also had a bruise along the middle of my forehead (I must have bounced!).  The egg has since gone down, but the blood has just drained down, giving me a pretty impressive black eye!  I’ve been thinking about taking it easy since then, I know it gave me a little of a concussion, but taking it easy is hard to do!

After about a month of no success and work, Pierce seems to be officially potty trained.  One day, he just started using the toilet.  Trying to teach him was miserable, but when he decided he wanted to do it, he has done great!  About the same time he decided he was a big boy, and not a baby, he has started telling me: “I love you, Mom.”  As I wrote that line, he is sitting on my lap and turned around, almost like he could read what I was writing and said, “Mom,” long pause to get my attention, “I love you.” 

He is two and a half and I love to hear those words, but it has made me think a lot about love and how he even knows what love is.  Love is such an abstract concept, how can anyone so young, who’s vocabulary consists mostly of nouns, understand?  I think that he knows what love is because love can be felt.  It is in reality a very tangible, intangible substance.  I know when someone loves me.  Beyond knowing that someone loves me, there are those moments when those feelings of love seem to hang so heavy in the air you can see and touch them.  As I have held him and loved him up until this point, when I felt that overflowing feeling of love I have kissed him and told him I loved him and he has felt it and he now understands and returns that love.

It makes me think of 1 John 4:19: “We love him, because he first loved us.”  I don’t think I ever understood that before, but Pierce has taught me a little about what it means.  We love God and really can only understand the concept of Love itself, because of the love we have felt from our Heavenly Father.  Just as Pierce has felt my love for him and because of that has learned what it means to say, “I love you,”  I have felt God’s love- and compassion- for me and because of that I can begin to say that I love him and others.  

It feels like forever since I have sat down to write.  Part of that is that it has been a while, and part of that is that we have been so busy and doing so much that it has made it seem like it must have been a long time since I last wrote!  We got home about a week ago from the West.  We went to my moms family’s reunion in Wyoming and then we drove to Colorado for a few days for Nick’s family reunion.  Nick had to fly home for work in the middle of that, so we drove back to Wyoming and spent several more days with my family before the kids and I made the 24 hour drive back (not in a straight shot, but in two days!) to Ohio.

It was so much fun and so much work all rolled into one!  It is really important to me that my kids know and love their extended family, and since we live so far from them, it is so nice to be with them.  We canoed and zip lined and made our own water park.  We went off roading and camped and got really really dirty.  At one point, the kids and I even ended up stranded in a ditch.  The GPS took us a bad route to my in laws new house and I couldn’t get anyone on the phone.  We ended up on an ungroomed country road that had been washed out.  It was an adventure, and thankfully we weren’t stuck for long.  I have pictures to remember it by, although I’m positive that the kids won’t let me forget about it either.

As I was stuck, with the five kids, in a ditch, waiting for rescue, I realized that I’ve grown and have more life experience than I used to.  When I was younger the whole stressful experience would have precipitated some stress crying, but I made it through dry eyed- although there was still a little stress involved!

One of my favorite things is going to my moms family’s reunion.  My grandparents joined the church when they were young and they taught their family to love God and do good.  That tradition has continued.  My grandma has Alzheimer's now, and Grandpa wasn’t able to be there for a lot of the days, but I loved seeing all my aunts and uncles and cousins and their children and the strength that the gospel has brought to all of our lives and our families.  We all have struggles, and there are some that have chosen different spiritual paths, but the love we all feel for each other is so strong, and it is because of that shared heritage of love and faith.  I hope that my children and my children’s children will have that same heritage.  They are awfully big footsteps to fill!

In the last general conference, Elder Christofferson quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian that was executed in a concentration camp because of his criticism of Natzi Germany.  I love this quote about family, and felt it at out family reunion.  Bonhoeffer said in a letter to a newly engaged niece: “Marriage is more than your love for each other….  In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory….   In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind.  Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal- it is a status, and office.”  I felt that as I was with my family, I felt the links of our generations and it was a beautiful feeling.

School starts in two days.  We are very ready and at the exact same time not ready at all.  Just like so many other things in life!  Ready or not, it comes and we are excited for it.

It is another rainy day out today.  In some ways I’ve enjoyed the cooler weather and the rain.  The kids have played outside a lot more than they do when it is blistering hot.  The downside is that the pool has been closed a lot.  Even that has a bright side though- when we do make it to the pool on the rainy, cooler days, there is no one else there and we have the pool all to ourselves!  

The three older ones swim really well and usually play well together, so they have a good time at the pool.  Chase wants to swim really, really badly, but he is afraid to give up his floaties and do it on his own.  I know he could take off, but he is hanging on to his mismatched (half girly) floaties for dear life!  Ari wants to learn to dive.  When I can, I’ve spent some time with her working on her form and timing.  I love to swim and dive, but I never took a lot of lessons- my form is my own and what I know is mostly self taught.  Ari doesn’t know any of that, and to her I know everything there is to know about diving and swimming.  It feels great to have her have such confidence in me, but it is also a little frightening.  I barely know what I’m doing!

This summer is flying by too quickly!  We have a family reunion in Wyoming and then one in Colorado the first week of August.  We are all really excited to go and see family and play.  I’m the only one that is also a little overwhelmed with the logistics of getting our family there and back!

Pierce has officially entered his terrible twos.  He is almost two and a half- does this mean that I have only a year of this, or does it mean because it started late it will go late?  He is still unbelievably cute and sweet 85% of the time.  The other 15% he is pure stubbornness.  All of the sudden he is a picky eater and eats TONS of what he likes and will not eat anything that he doesn’t like or that he doesn’t recognize.  You would think that with him being my fifth I would have this figured out, right?  Really, I just think that I am worn down and I have to try really hard to not just avoid all battles by only eating Pierce friendly foods.

Brynli’s birthday is in two weeks.  She will be 11.  She is pretty excited and keeps asking if we have gotten all of her presents.  More than the presents, I think that she is excited about her cake.  Brynli loves to cook and she loves to watch all kinds of baking and cooking shows.  Lets just say that her expectations for her cake are far beyond her or my abilities!  Hopefully she will be content to help me make an average looking birthday cake.

I find that the line from A Tale of Two Cities seems to apply to my life this summer.  This really seems like the best and worst of times all rolled up into one.  With everyone home and so much outdoor and family time, life is good and happy.  At the same time, with everyone home and running around and fighting and all the chaos that comes with that, I have very little time to myself and sometimes it feels like the worst of times.  I try to remember a quote by Elder Uchtdorf: “Heavenly Father is constantly raining blessings upon us.  It is our fear, doubt, and sin that, like an umbrella, block these blessings from reaching us.”  I know that is true in my life and in all our lives.  The thing that makes a difference in making my days, hours and minutes good and bad is not what happens, but my attitude.  When I am willing to see this chaotic summer as a blessing, I am happy.  When I try to ward the chaos off with the space provided by an umbrella I find myself stressed and unhappy.  Unfortunately, having the right perspective is easier to talk about than to have!

I hope this letter finds you without an umbrella, happy and enjoying the rain.

Spring is here! And I am so happy it is.  I’ve always thought that I loved all the seasons equally, but this year I’m loving Spring a lot more than Winter.  We have been outside taking walks and the kids have been asking to go outside and play.  The only down side is that their school has been holding their annual cookie sale and the kids have wanted to see if our neighbors would buy cookies.  With good weather, I had no excuse to not walk around the neighborhood with them.  I hate asking neighbors to pay for things they probably don’t want, but may feel obligated to buy.  At the same time, I think it is really good for the kids to learn to talk to people and be brave.

With the weather getting nice, Pierce has discovered how much he loves being outside and a monster has been born.  He is already always telling me “ierce, side,” which means “Pierce, outside.”  I love being outside and it is fun to watch him, but I still have too much I have to do inside and I don’t want to have to fight a two year old when we can’t go outside.

Chance turns 8 tomorrow.  He has been so excited for his birthday!  Sadly, for me, 8 year old boys are very hard to get presents for!  He is too young for a lot of gifts, but too old for “baby” gifts!  Chance isn’t picky, he will take what he gets and be very grateful, but he is very... particular about his things.  I usually decorate a cake for the kids on their birthday.  I’m not very good, but they like picking out what kind of cake they want and I enjoy trying to make it into something.  The school also lets parents send in cupcakes for their child’s birthday, so Chance reminded me, yesterday, that he wanted cupcakes for his class on Monday.

Cupcakes don’t take long, and my older girls have really gotten into baking, so I hardly have to do anything to get them ready, but finding out HOW Chance wanted his cupcakes decorated was impossible!  He wanted superhero cupcakes, which were all far beyond my meager decorating abilities, and all the cute ideas I found online were too “baby” for him.  So on Monday Chance is taking 24 vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting (boring, but that is what he wanted) decorated with a piece of cheese.  Chance really love reading the Dairy of a Wimpey Kid books and in the first one there was a piece of stinky cheese outside of the school that would give kids the “cheese touch.”  The cheese on the cupcakes looks real, it just looks out of place on a cupcake.  Chance is happy.  He’s also really excited about his baptism.