Month: May 2018

Today Abe had a crazy, insane day at work. He was very stressed out about it last night, but now we are on the other end of the day and he survived! I am so proud of him.

I worked on my Mormon Symposium paper in the morning and then after lunch took the kids to This is the Place Park. I love that park. It feels like we’ve stepped back in time, and we were practically the only people there.

After dinner Abe and I took a long walk and jog. I read Abe what I’d written, and he helped me figure out that the scope of my current paper is way too large. I’m going to have to narrow it down, and I feel really overwhelmed and intimidated.

Today we had a play date with Heather and Olivia. I love them and will miss them so much when they move soon.

Monday was our eighth anniversary! The whole day felt so peaceful and full of love. Abe took the day off of work and we spent the morning at home with the kids, cleaning, overseeing music practice, and spending time together.

Abe read me a beautiful poem he wrote for our anniversary and gave me a beautiful tree of life necklace. The tree of life has four green stones to symbolize our four children, and then other stones to symbolize fruit in the vine of Christ. He also wanted me to have a tree of life to remember Heavenly Mother and all that we’ve learned about her this year.

Then in the afternoon we all, including my mom, took a drive into the mountains and had a picnic at South Fork Park. The weather was perfect and everything was lush and green. One of our favorite parts, honestly, was picking up all the trash people left in the park after their Memorial Day picnics. The part where we picnicked was clean, but right over the hill there were disgusting sections. It was actually really fun to clean them up. I thought about Heavenly Mother while we cleaned and expressed my love for her by trying to pick up every scrap of garbage I saw.

After our picnic, we went to the libraries and home, where I fed Clarissa and watched Ammon play outside while Abe returned to the library again to get himself a library card and check out a ton of new books for Lydia. Lydia has gone totally bonkers for the Rainbow Magic Fairy series, and we could not be more grateful. Bless you, whoever invented the magic fairies. Thank you.

Also, Bob the Anniversary Elf made his annual visit:

Then we sat on the grass and discussed polygamy, my favorite topic of late. I am presenting a paper on it in two months–but I haven’t even written the paper yet!!! So I really appreciate the chance to talk out the thoughts that I hope to write, er, really soon.

Then we put the kids to bed and Abe and I went to Barnes and Noble to pick out our annual audio book. Every anniversary I pick out an audiobook for Abe, and this year I picked All the Light We Cannot See, since that book changed my life.

Afterward we went to Pizzeria 712 and then came home. Poor Abe’s allergies were killing him, but we were still so happy and full of peace, joy, and love. It has been wonderful to be married to Abe. I always go overboard blogging about him, so I am going to practice some self-restraint. It’s so hard!

But: I love him. He’s the best. I know for a fact there is no one better for me on the face of the planet, either now or at any point in history–backwards or forwards. All praise and glory to God, somehow I won the husband lottery. Thank You for sending me Abe and giving me eight glorious years with him!

…well, it was happy for almost everyone! I guess it was happy for me too, but I really have not felt well for two days, and so most of this day consisted of me lying facedown in the backyard while Abe gardened. Clarissa and the older girls were crawling all over me, such as the piglets do to their mother sow. I was pretty unresponsive while they pulled and tugged my hair and exposed love handles. They loved patting my fat and listening to the noise that made.

We then took the show inside where I planted myself on the couch while Abe either cleaned or cooked or both. I have no idea what he was doing because I was out of it.

Then we had Karin and Jay over for dinner, which honestly was wonderful. We have been trying to get together for months, but we have difficulty coordinating our schedules. So it was nice to finally coordinate.

I made potato salad and a trifle. Abe took a picture of the trifle. It is on his phone, which is elsewhere. I am blogging in spite of that handicap because I fear getting behind again. Abe was up until 12:30 am last night catching the blog up! I don’t want his good efforts to go to waste.

And here are the photos!

 

Today was an awesome Sunday. Lily and I were up until 1:00 in the morning talking about her most recent thoughts about prophets and prophetic fallibility, so it was particularly painful when Clarissa woke up at 6:00 which is her regular wake time.

Like a saint, Lily went to Clarissa, fed her and put her down which gave us another hour or so.  Around 7:30, when the day was inevitably upon us, Lily went to Clarissa while I got ready for the day.  Then Lily and I got all the kids ready for church.  Then Lily cooked for lunch and tonight’s dinner while I helped to tidy the house. I also slipped in one chapter from Jeremiah. In short, it was a fairly routing morning.

Church was quite good. In Elder’s quorum, Brother Moon shared a story. It’s so amazing that I will summarize it here:

While in a marketplace near Machupichu, he noticed a group of women would always rush up to the tour buses to sell items to people as they got off the buses. One woman in this group was always getting pushed away, and she never had a chance to sell her items to the people exiting the buses. Brother moon felt an impression to talk to that woman. He did talk to her and it turned out she was selling a book he wanted. He and friends from his tour group all bought books from her (Marta was her name). The other women in the group were jealous that Brother Moon was buying so much from Marta, and they asked why he wasn’t buying anything from them. Brother Moon explained he wasn’t buying anything from them because of how mean they were to Marta, but said he would buy a book from each of them if they would promise to be nice to Marta. Then Marta asked brother Moon to be the Godfather of her baby, since the father left them.  Brother Moon agreed, got a picture with her and got her address.  At home, Brother Moon printed the picture and mailed it to her, but never heard anything back from her. Ten years later, Brother Moon was visiting Machipichu again and went to the same market and asked some in the market where Marta was. He was pointed to Marta. They talked and Marta said that she kept his picture 3 years, but took it down when he never returned any of her letters. Brother Moon never received any letters, so there must have been a problem with the mail or address. Marta said that the sons father came around and got her pregnant and then left again. When she had the new baby, her boy (Freddy) was so distraught, that she took Brother Moon’s picture out again and told Freddy that he had a Godfather that was going to visit him. This consoled Freddy.  Then Marta said that they had moved, but one week ago she had a dream that Brother Moon was going to visit her. She figured he would look for her in the place where they first met, so she spent her life savings to travel to the marketplace where they were then standing, and there was brother Moon.

I had to leave class early because of Clarissa so I didn’t catch the rest, but the point is that God definitely takes care of His children in powerful and mysterious ways, and it is often by prompting those who will listen to be tools in his hands.

After church, Lily and I prepared for dinner with Jake. Jake came over tonight for dinner as a prize for a competition he won at work. We have a weekly prospecting competition with zero budget for it so prizes are simple. I especially was so excited for my family to learn more about Jake because he is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. He’s from South Caroline. He is incredibly genuine, passionate, kind and determined to succeed. Qualtrics has been a hard path for him so far and now he has major health challenges, but he refuses to quit. Now he’s just starting to see some great success. He is an inspiration! Dinner was a lot of fun!

After dinner, Josh and Katie came by and entertained Ammon for an hour with their different professional grade animal sounds. Ammon was so hyper with all the attention, and I felt so grateful for him to be getting so much attention!

 

 

I had an awesome Saturday.  I got a quick workout in the morning. Lily and I tidied the house, and Lydia and Mary each got a one hour music practice.

Then we ran errands as a family. There was a lot of shopping to do because of all the events we had to prepare for (Josh’s pot luck celebration, dinner with Jake Sunday, dinner with my mom Monday).

After errands, Lily, Georgia and I went to a temple sealing for our friends Josh and Katie Jackson. It was a beautiful ceremony and it was so nice to be a part of it. After the ceremony, we stopped by my friend Nick’s house to briefly visit him and help him with a situation he was having.

Then, at home, I helped with the kids, and I helped to clean while Lily prepared the shishkabob skewers for Josh and Katie’s post sealing party.  After I grilled the skewers, I went to the party with the girls. Georgia had already headed over, and Lily stayed back (with her aching feet) to take care of Ammon and put Clarissa to sleep.

It was a fun party. I did not know many people, but the food was super good and I had a ton of fun with the music. There was a live band that was covering rock and hip-hop songs that I used to listen to as a kid. “I wish” by skeelo, “Regulators” by Warren G, “Gettin Jiggy Wit it” by Will Smith, “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith, “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice all were on the list.  The band was great, and even greater will all the dancing children in the pavilion. I just sat back and enjoyed watching the kids dance and especially enjoying watching my daughters dance. I joined in for the last song.

It was also really fun to watch Katie serenade Josh on the Ukulele with “I can’t help falling in love with you.”

 

(This is Abe.) The main thing to report about Friday is that I went to dinner with my friend Nick. I’ve known Nick almost 10 years. I met him in Chicago, and a few years ago he moved to Utah, about 10 minutes away.  He is one of my very best friends and we keep in touch a lot. He’s had a hard life, and has struggled financially and with his career. He is crazy good at beat boxing, and he has a beautiful and kind heart.  He’s been super down on his luck lately because he lost his job and also because of some other challenges he’s been dealing with.

We went to the King Buffet near Smith’s just to hang out. It started out pretty somber, but lightened up once we got talking about Marvel movies and Star Wars. By the end, I think we both would agree that a good time was had, but Nick was still very discouraged.  I was stuffed out of my mind, since I had dinner at home right before going to the King Buffet…Ugh, my diet has been sooooo bad lately.

Thursday of this week was set up to be an awesome day. I had cleared my schedule and planned to take the day off of work.  As a family, we were all going to go to Lagoon. The idea was that we would go before school got out for everyone. We wanted to beat the crowds.

After an hour of gathering things for our day at lagoon (diapers, wipes, snacks, sun screen, 6 swim suits, a towel, formula etc), and driving an hour, we arrived at Lagoon only to learn that it was closed to the public, and available only to a certain school district that was having their lagoon day.

We were so set on beating the crowds that we didn’t even stop to consider that crowds to some extent might be necessary for a theme park to be open to the public. Oops!

But as silly as this might sound, the drive down to Lagoon and the drive back was glorious. Finances have been a little tight and also with having a new baby, we really haven’t traveled much in the last year. I LOVE traveling with my family and car talk time with Lily is one of my favorite parts of every trip, and I just got to chat and that was so fun. I’ve missed not traveling much lately, but two hours in the car with my family actually scratched the itch a bit for me. It was nice 🙂

Also awesome was that we then had the entire day free to plan the fruit trees we had purchased earlier in the week.  Lily also got to plant some of the things she purchased at Cook’s. As for the trees, we planted a dwarf apricot, a plumb, a Honeycrisp apple and a Rome Beauty apple. Despite days worth of my allergies flaring up afterwards, I loved being in the yard and planting the trees. It was quite a project and Lily and I barely finished in time to catch our Adam Miller lecture in Provo.

Except when we got there, we realized we got the day wrong. The lecture had happened the day before. Whoops! So, since we had a sitter and Lily and I were already out, we just went to a Thai restaurant, and walked around downtown afterwords. We just talked and talked about things like grace, Lily’s recent spiritual journey, mindfulness, what it means to be Christian etc. I had such an amazing time talking to that woman who is beautiful inside and out. Her mind and heart inspire and fascinate me. It was so incredibly fun just to hang out with her on a beautiful evening. Honestly, one of my favorite dates I’ve ever been on with her.

Honestly, I can’t imagine that this day could have been any better, even if Lagoon were open, and if Adam Miller did present at the time we went to see him.

I left off the “e” in the title to reflect the fact that Lily and I finished watching the Justice League, except that right as we were in the final battle of the entire movie, our 48 hour rental period, or whatever the time frame was, expired, so Lily and I literally sat there trying to decide if we should pay another $5 just to watch the last 10-15 minutes of the movie. We decided to save the money and read the ending on Wikipeidia. So we saw almost the whole thing.

Lily and I go through stages of superhero movie obsession and super hero movie burnout. I suspect this is a common phenomenon given the plethora of recent super hero movies. We are back in obsession mode again. We also just saw Black Panther and it was amazing.

I should also mention that Wednesday was a very intense playdate/babysitting day for Lily.  I actually don’t know all the details, but a combination of neighborhood friends, other friends, and one of Mary’s classmates (I think) all were over at our house at one point. Lydia suggested there were 20 kids at our house, which may not have been too far off. When I got home, the house was spotless, and Lily was pooped, but I also know that a ton of fun was had by all.

The other thing worth noting about last Wednesday is that we invited the Tahoe’s over to eat desert with us. Ethline couldn’t make it, but Taki came and he brought his children. The desert was simple and yummy; popsicles and ice cream bars. The conversation was so wonderful. I got to know Taki so much better than I have been able to before. We also learned that Ty Nui, his son, get excepted into the One Voice choir, which is amazing and travels around the world. We had a great time talking!

 

 

Tuesday was an eventful day. I got into work and was informed that I was giving a training about recruiting. It was never put on my calendar, but I was expected to attend and share for about 20 minutes, which I did.

At home, Lily took a hilarious picture of Ammon napping on his floor. He has two modes. Completely conked out, and going at 100 miles an hour.

Later in the day, Lily took the kids to the park.  She was very worried about how to get Ammon to the car when it was time to be  done, because he is so hard to manage, but it all worked out!

I met Lily at home at 5:20, and we went straight to a team Barbeque at Joe Harper’s house. The weather mostly cooperated (it did start to rain, so there were no sports in the yard), but the highlight was the incredible food and company. I had not met the significant others for multiple people on my team so it was awesome to talk with them. Also, Jaden, a sales development rep that I’m trying to recruit to my team, and his wife Mallory were there.

Lily listens to me talk all the time about how much I love my team, what good and fun people they are and about how good of friends we all are. It was so fun hanging out with all of them. And the food was delicious.

Also, often when we attend parties with Ammon, it is hard to socialize because we are so focused on managing him. At this party, Joe introduced Ammon to his automated bubble-blowing gun. Ammon was in heaven and was occupied for almost the entire party blowing bubbles. It was wonderful! Lily had a horrible headache during the party, but she powered through it and got to interact with a lot of my co-workers and their significant others. Also, Lily’s cookies were a hit!