Author: Abe Darais

Lately Lydia has been creating comics. They are adorable, just like her. Here are two pages she made.

While I was working (I assume) the three youngest kids played “ring around the rosy”. Here is a video Lily captured.

One of the things I really like about working from home is that I get to be around Lily, Georgia and the kids a lot more. Lily and Georgia know when I’m at work or in a meeting, and they respect my need to not be interrupted, especially when I’m on a video conference. The kids are not quite as respectful of those boundaries. Sometimes, I’m a bit embarrassed on a call when a kid wanders in my room and interrupts me, but honestly, everyone understands since we are all working from home. I actually enjoy being interrupted here and there by my sweet family. I’ve felt more with them and connected to them during this working from home period. I also get this amazing view out of my bedroom office window 🙂

Also, this evening, I hopped on a group call with Jon and a bunch of his friends to wish him happy birthday and have a virtual get-together. It was so nice to see Jon, and so many our mutual friends that I rarely connect with 🙂

Sunday was a cozy day, it always is, and that is why I love it 🙂

This Sunday was especially cozy because Clarissa fell asleep next to me, I think while I was reading a book. I plopped her on me, and just rested while that sweet little puppy slept on me. She is so sweet, warm, and cuddly and I felt like liquid love and sunshine were seeping into me from her. I love my little Clarissa!

At 2:00 we all watched a session of General Conference. Yesterday, I didn’t watch any or try to get the kids to watch any because it felt like a lot of logistical pain to go through and I was struggling to see the value the kids and I would get out of it, especially considering the chaos involved.

That said, at the end of Saturday, I felt a loss, like I missed something. There is a lot in the church I don’t necessarily agree with or believe in, but there is still a lot there that I do love, and do believe and do agree with, or at minimum, that I value and cherish. It felt like I missed a family reunion. Something familiar and cherished.

On Sunday, I asked Lily if we could all watch conference together. She was 100% supportive. I told her she did not need to join us if it would be triggering or upsetting for her, but she joined us. It was wonderful to all watch together. Yes, conference did have its pain. Pretty much all church pain for me happens when the church points to and builds up itself as a tribe, to the exclusion and pain of outsiders, instead of simply pointing to God and love. But still, interwoven with painful, or messages I felt were immature, were also beautiful messages, comforting messages, a sense of belonging and community, and renewed faith in God. I especially loved President Nelson’s invitation to “Hear Him”. It reminded me a ton of Glennon Doyle’s book “untamed” where she talks a lot about getting quiet and hearing God. Just like Barbara Brown Taylor says, so many different religions and spiritual guides are all pointing at the moon. There is no need to argue who has the best finger 🙂

I will say, though, that conference was also triggering for both me and Lily. It probably took me about a day to process the messages, and think through what I want to take with me and what I want to reject, and how I feel about my LDS faith in general. Lily spent the next few days in deep conversations with friends on Facebook processing it, especially a comment that Elder Uchtdorf made referencing some people who leave the church as “headstrong and unruly” or something like that. Ultimately, Lily made a post that I was so profoundly proud of. Lily has really worked hard to arrive at a place of love after leaving the church in the face of so much of what can feel disrespectful. Here is her post:

“This morning I woke up and discovered that in a worldwide conference one of my former favorite church leaders described post-Mormons (like me) as angry people who, like headstrong children, have packed their bags and rejected God and his church.

I have sat all morning allowing myself to feel and process the pain of these words, labels, and stigma. The way post-Mormons are characterized is a regular feature in LDS meetings, but the sting of feeling these adjectives applied to me from the church’s most powerful pulpit feels fresh.

After hours of meditation, I have two things to say to my believing friends and family.

1. I love you.
2. I am sorry for all of the negative energy and cynicism I have added to this unfortunate feud. I have done more than my share of misunderstanding, mischaracterizing, and mislabeling you. Please forgive me.

One of my first instincts upon learning of this talk was to think that if I just put a live-cam in every room in my house, my life itself would speak some kind of spell to dispel these labels. But, obviously, that’s silly. Here’s what I can say, though.

As a believing Mormon I was:
happy
valued love, service, and kindness
believed in education and pursued it vigorously
loved my family
felt motivated by the Church to be my best and truest self

As a post Mormon I am:
happy
value love, service, and kindness
believe in education and pursue it vigorously
love my family
feel liberated to be my best and truest self

Our common humanity and values are more important than our differences. It is hard work to see each other as people first, categories second. It is hard, hard, hard for me. But I love you, and I want to do better by you. So let’s walk this life together, shall we? In love, please and always.”

Anyway, I am blown away by the energy and love in this post, and it inspires me when I read it. Later in the week (I forget which day) Lily and Georgia had the sweetest conversation together in which there was so much acceptance and reconciliation.

Anyway, conference was intense yet (for me at least) comforting. I’ll leave it at that.

I was dying to get out of the house. After conference, we all set out to drive the Alpine loop. We didn’t get very far before we realized it was still closed for the winter. We turned around, a little disappointed, but quickly found ourselves delighted when we got a very up-close show from a Turkey.

Here is a video of the turkey.

Here is another video of the turkey.

Here are pictures!

Then we set out to go to my favorite spot up Squaw Peak Canyon. We almost immediately found that that road was closed. There were very few people, so we walked up the road a bit and found a trail that nobody appeared to be on. We had the most wonderful hike, and it was so lovely to get out in nature. We only past two people at the very end of the trail. Otherwise, it was completely desolate. I loved it so much. And the kids had fun too! Ammon is such a fun adventurer. He has gotten very wrapped up in the idea of looking for snakes so if I remember correctly, he spent a fair share of the hike focusing on that. He’s also been looking for snakes in our yard. That activity generally involves a stick and digging. It was so fun to hike with him, Clarissa, and Lydia. Mary was asleep in the car with Lily (who wasn’t feeling great). Here are the photos from our hike!

Lately Lily purchased marsh-mellows and Rice-Crispies in order to make Rice Crispy treats for the kids. First of all, Clarissa is a master marsh-mellow heister. She can beg cutely, and if that doesn’t work, she’s not afraid to go into the pantry find the bag and plunder away.

But even more hilarious than that is that somehow Clarissa thinks that the way to say rice crispies is, “Christmas Trees”. She kept asking for and talking about “Christmas Trees” and I thought it was so hilarious. I caught it on video here. It reminds me of how she used to call an elephant “ephleant” then “ephelant”. I loooove the way she says things. She is sooo adorable :).

I took it very easy on Saturday. I was very tired from the efforts on Friday. I forgot to mention this on yesterday’s post, but I worked very hard Friday after work completely clearing out our basement to make a really nice play area for the kids.

I think it may have been today (Saturday) that I caught Ammon running in circles repeatedly as he said to me, “I’m doing my job”. I think he was trying to say he was doing his jog. At any rate, it is a beautifully big space the kids now have to play in.

Lily and I also put in our bedroom rug on Saturday. It looks great! It required us to completely dismantle the bed. We also put down a rug in the big unfinished basement area to make it a little more inviting for play.

Aside from that, the day just consisted of rest and being with family. I also caught some hoops :).

Lily started the day by making a delicious chocolate cake. Also, the kids have been loving their new art area and all of the art supplies Lily purchased for them. They have especially been utilizing the clay.

Today I went to Qualtrics to pick up my monitor, my keyboard, my mouse and other office supplies. I did this because my back was starting to hurt always hunching over and looking down at my laptop. To get access to the office, I had to e-mail and schedule the time I was coming. When I arrived, the building was completely empty except for the receptionist and the cleaning crew. It strikes me how so many workers aren’t able to shelter in place the way that I can. My heart feels for people in that situation, especially for my friend Elena on the cleaning crew. She is so friendly to me in the office and tells me about her grandkids. I hope that she and all of the workers who still have to go out into the world every day can be OK.

On the way home, I had the idea to buy pizzas from Papa Murphey’s. Either I’ve never shared Papa Murphey’s with the family, or we’ve all forgotten that I did at one point. Either way, tonight felt like a first. Why is Papa Murphey’s significant to me? Because after my parents divorced, it was one of the go-to dinners for my dad (I assume on nights when he didn’t have much time or energy to cook). Even though it probably felt like a cop-out to my dad, it was exciting for us kids. My favorite memory is eating the two-layer Chicago style pizza. My family liked the pizza well-enough. It was yummy, nothing mind-blowing, but a sweet walk down memory lane for me. Thanks dad for all the fun memories you created for us!

Lily has been reading a Shakespeare speech to the family over and over again during meals to help the kids memorize the speech. Tonight, Lily was playing YouTube videos of the speech. Clarissa was laughing at the speech and we were very amused by it.

Here is a video of Clarissa laughing at the video. At this point I think she realized we were all amused by her laughing, so she is fake laughing just to get attention. I love that girl 🙂

Below are more clay creations 🙂

Lately Lily and I have been working on the basement now that our bedroom wing is complete except for the finishing touches. I’ve been clearing out boxes, objects and dust from the basement so it can be a nice open space to play, and Lily set up an art station and a bubble machine. Ammon and Clarissa love the bubble machine!

Also, Lily and I have been loving our new walk-in closet, and we have been spending time moving our clothes into it little by little. Lydia also likes our closet (and my hoodie) and can be found using it for a quiet place to read. I completely get it, because I have already had wonderful experiences meditating in the closet.

When I got breakfast today, Lydia asked me to look in the bread bag. I did, and I found “moldy” bread that she created (with marker I think)as an April fools joke. What a sweet silly girl!

Here is a picture of Lydia doing her harp practice. This week, Lily has really gotten the kids on a schedule, and things are going like clockwork. I’m amazing at both Lily and Lydia and Mary for being so productive during this Covid time. When I come up stairs from work, I’m often finding both Lily and the children anxiously engaged in something productive. Great going! Harp is not Lydia’s favorite thing, but she’s determined to keep it up:

I took a much easier day than usual because of the intensity of yesterday. That allowed me to keep an eye on the kids while Lily took Georgia to a doctor appointment. After my work, and after dinner, we decided to all have s’mores at the firepit outside. It was a bit of an unintended April fools day joke. Even though I turned on the gas to the pit just days ago, it wasn’t working tonight. Clarissa keeps playing with the key to turn the gas on, so we wondered if she put a pebble in the shaft where the key goes, because the problem was that the key would not catch the square bolt to turn on the gas. I even used a vacuum to try to suck anything out of the shaft that might be in there. After twenty minutes of trying we gave up. It was a bit cold and windy anyway. We went inside, and had a really fun time eating s’mores made over the stove so it all worked out. We even made a s’more with butterscotch chips for Georgia.

Before signing off, I just need to share something that someone from my work posted about the best April fools joke ever played on him:

One April 1st, my partner convinced me that she had unilaterally adopted a big, wild dog on a whim. I came home from work to find a very large and very wild dog sitting on my couch in our small apartment. Initially I was pretty mad – we hadn’t even discussed it. After a few hours, I came to terms with it. After a long discussion, my partner convinced me that it needed us and that we had to “save it”. It was a stressful few hours, but finally she had me convinced it was the right thing to do. Later that evening, I was accepting things and I had just started to get friendly with the dog. Suddenly, I was surprised by a knock on the door. When I opened it, my partner said “April Fools”, and I was greeted by a neighbor who couldn’t help but laugh at the confused look on my face. She had come to collect her dog.

Today was a super eventful day, both for me at work, and for Lily, Georgia and the kids at home.

For me it was the end of my sales quarter. All of our forecasts dropped dramatically due to the number of deals that stalled because of the market uncertainty created by Covid-19. Many businesses do not want to sign a new contract without knowing better how their business will fair over the next four months. Still though, my team had three important deals on the table, and I was involved with all of them. Two reps were inches away from promoting and they were the two reps that still had deals in play. My day was nuts because aside from plenty of other stuff hitting me, I was on the phone with my reps, my manager and customers until the deals were in. It was an amazing day because all three deals came in. Ryan earned his promotion and so did Max. I couldn’t be happier for them. Max’s promotion was an amazing journey. He missed his promotion by $7,000 in bookings (very small amount) last quarter, and this quarter he was at risk of narrowly missing it again. If he didn’t promote this quarter, is big Q4 would fall off, and he would basically need to start from scratch to try to promote. He’s been with the company two and a half years and has worked very hard, but has had some setbacks and had not promoted as fast as he had hoped. This felt like a must win situation for him. He had a deal that he needed to go through and today, in the morning, he talked to the President of the company who flat out told him, “no” that he wasn’t going to move forward because of how crazy things were with the Covid situation. He thought that all of his leaders were too constrained dealing with Covid to try to implement something new. Max kept talking to him and by the end of the call, he said his Phoenix office has not really been too affected by Covid and maybe they could implement. He said he would think about it. We sent him a targeted e-mail in the middle of the day to sweeten the deal for him, just to make it that much easier for him to sign. By 4:00 he was telling us he would move forward and we were beside ourselves with happiness. Then we sent over the paperwork, and we got an immediate response that we didn’t understand. It seemed like he was irritated or passive aggressively accusing us of misleading him. We replied to the e-mail, inviting him to talk. We called him. We texted him. For nearly two hours there was no response. Max and I were freaking out thinking the deal was lost. Then we finally got him on the phone and learned that he simply missed the last page of the docusign by mistake. He said he’d sign it right away and everything was good. Max and I were freaking out with joy. We couldn’t believe he got the deal and earned his long awaited promotion. Times like that, I LOVE BEING A MANAGER. I had additional work and calls after Max’s deal wrapped up a little before 8:00, and one of my reps had an issue processing his deal that lasted until 9:00 or so. I don’t remember when I finished my day, but it may have been around 9:30. It was a crazy crazy intense and fun day.

Little did I know that Lily and the family were having an equally eventful day around the house. Before I get into that, here is a display of all of the vitamins that Lily has been using for me and her and the kids to try to help us to all be healthy. Thanks for helping our health sweetie!!

OK, so back to the eventfulness of everyone else’s day while I was working. It all started when our friend Sarah, out of the goodness of her heart decided to come and deliver to us a fresh lobster. Notice the social distancing. Yup, we are still in the heart of Covid-19. It was so nice of her. Thank you Sarah!!

I wasn’t there, but Lily reported that the kids were absolutely enthralled. They took turns holding it.

They fed it some apple.

And ultimately, they cooked it.

Here are some videos of the events:

Ammon and the lobster

The lobster is eating apple

Lily cooking the lobster

I don’t remember what happened this day, but here is a picture of Lydia reading.

Over the weekend (I think?) we moved our bed to our new room in the basement. We absolutely love it! Here is a picture of me working in my office space in our ever evolving new bedroom:

Lily and I have still been under the weather (Lily especially) and it has given our older children to show their responsible and caring side as they led out and did activities with the younger children. Here is Lydia baking with Ammon and Clarissa. The cookies turned out great!

Here is a picture of Mary reading to Ammon and here is a video of her reading to him.

Then, later in the day, I had an experience that caused me to reflect how responsible my oldest two children really are. I’ve been more involved in Lydia’s harp practice lately, and today when I told it was time to practice, she threw a major grumbly fit (which happens most of the time). I was feeling so tired and overwhelmed from all that is hitting our family that I spontaneously looked at her and we had the following conversation:

Dad: “Fine, quit harp. Just quit it. I am way too tired to force you to do it.”

Lydia: “No dad, I don’t want to quit harp. I just hate practice!”

Dad: “Practice is most of what harp is, and I’m way too tired to keep making you do it. I’m exhausted. Let’s just be done.”

Lydia: “No dad, I want to keep doing harp. O-K, fine I’ll do it! Will you do it with me?”

It’s like wants the counter-pressure was gone and I wasn’t forcing her to do it, a part of her brain realized, “Holy Cow, dad’s gone rogue….but the harp has to get done….but if he’s not going to make me do it…..who will? I will…I will make sure I do my harp!”

I had a very similar experience with Mary the other day. They both protest so much (especially Lydia), but deep down inside they are responsible, they are good, and they do want to work. I see that every time I try reverse psychology. I’m being careful with it though. One day Lydia might say, “fine I’m done.” I haven’t quite planned out what to do yet in that scenario…….

During harp Lydia told me. “I don’t want to quit harp because then I can’t brag about being able to play it.”

Rather than reprimanding her motives (which was tempting to do), I sat back and felt pleased at her self-awareness and transparency. I considered how bragging rights was a fine place to start if it got her through her harp practice. Motives can improve over time. Right now, I’m wanting her to learn a skill.

Isn’t life like that? I do so much of the same stuff I have always done, but now for such different reasons. It’s amazing how God gives us time for our hearts to grow into our actions.

After harp practice, I took Lydia to the garage to do the values activity I’ve been talking to her about. Starting at age 9, I want each of my kids to pick one value every year on their birthday that they think is central to their identity. Then they write the value on a wooden block. The goal for me is that when they leave to college, they will have a token of their first best stab at who they are and what they value, written out in blocks, to help guide them in their life on their own.

Lydia chose determination. I thought about it and it made complete sense. She just finished crushing it in the school reading competition by reading 5 or so hours a day for several days in a row. Two years ago, after scoring a low reading grade, she single-handedly decided to become an amazing reader, and worked at it (on her own) until she read the entire Harry Potter series. And harp is yet one more example of this girl who simply wont quit. Lydia, I am so so proud of you and I pray your determination takes you so so far in life 🙂