Author: lilydarais

On Friday evening Abe went to a hockey game with his team while the kids and I baked banana bread and watched Coco. During the emotional climax when Miguel starts singing to his Grandma Coco, Mary started shuddering next to me. I turned and discovered tears streaming down her face. As the song progressed Mary started to sob, reaching underneath her little red glasses to wipe away her crocodile tears.

Then Mary buried her head in me and wailed, and my heart just melted. I also felt stricken with remorse and grief, because I realized in that moment that for two years I have been assuming Mary’s frequent meltdowns were something she could control. I don’t know why I’ve been so stupid, but as I watched her tender heart break for movie characters, I realized that Mary is genuinely sensitive and needs tender treatment.

I spent the rest of the evening petting, hugging, and cuddling with all of the kids. After the movie was over I let them eat warm banana bread while we all had silly conversations. I marveled at how beautiful they all are.

I am so lucky to be their mom.

Tonight we had the missionaries over for dinner. Elder Amari used to be a violent drug dealer from the Atlanta projects and was featured in the show, Scared Straight. He spent most of his middle school years in prison. When he got home from prison at the age of sixteen, he opened the door to his home and saw his mother on the couch. When she saw him, she dropped to her knees and prayed out loud for the first time. She prayed that God would send someone or something into his life to change him forever.

She prayed this prayer every day for two months, and one day when Elder Amari was sitting on his couch high on drugs, the missionaries came to his door. He thought they were the FBI and cursed them out. They calmly told him that they had been sent to him from God to “change his life forever.” Elder Amari was baptized weeks later and is now an incredible missionary.

I love his story. Jesus and his gospel have the power to forever change the bleakest life. Elder Amari is on a completely different trajectory now, and his future family will be so blessed.

On another note, I felt incredibly loved today. Out of the blue, UPS rang the doorbell and handed me…tickets to Hamilton. I tried two times to buy tickets and it didn’t work either time. Abe and I know for a fact we have not been charged for tickets, but somehow there must have been a mix up along the way–and now we’re going to Hamilton! Abe’s integrity is piqued so he is currently trying to track down whatever vendor sent us the tickets so we can pay for them.

In the meantime, I am viewing the tickets as a love note from God.

Abe took the day off of work, and we all headed to This is the Place park. It is a recreation of a pioneer-times village with people in period costume, and kids can ride a train, pan for gold, visit a Native American Village, do a ton of crafts, ride ponies, and do farm chores. We didn’t do all of that, but we got a membership so we can go back and do all of the stuff we missed. Abe and I were busy talking to each other for a lot of the outing, and then we ran into our beautiful friend, Kathryn Sonntag, so I spent a lot of time talking with her.

Kathryn  writes poems, including this one, which is one of my top favorite poems EVER. For me, “As a Mother” is right up there with “God’s Grandeur,” my favorite poem of all time. Kathryn and I spent the next hour reconnecting and talking about everything. I just love her and wish she lived closer.

Here’s what we did when I wasn’t visiting with Kathryn:

After the outing, we drove through In-N-Out and fed the kids outside before baths and pj’s.

Then we all watched The Greatest Showman together.

Abe and I spent most of the day talking, talking, talking. We worked through our new-normal of being completely exhausted and burned out all the time. I forsook my diet a long time ago and have been stress eating like crazy, which makes me feel even worse than normal. During the last month we’ve had more tense moments than in our whole marriage, (at least it seems that way), but we’ve also talked our way into deeper love, compassion and understanding for each other. Abe is my hero.

On Tuesday the girls did their practicing and then we all went to the mall to return some things. After our errands, the kids played in the mall playground. Ammon screamed and cried when it was time to go, but we placated him by letting him have some pretzel dogs and a cup of pretzel bites before leaving.

By the time we got home, he was asleep. While he slept, I took care of Clarissa and watched part of The Greatest Showman with the girls.

Then we ate “dinner” at 3pm and headed to the Museum of Natural Curiosity. I didn’t take any pictures all day because I was overwhelmed at the prospect of having to upload them to the blog, but if I had taken a picture, I would have taken one of Lydia helping Ammon in the museum. She gave him boosts through the whole ropes course, and in the play areas she guided him everywhere with her hand on his back. When he was determined to run the wrong way or make a break for the fire exit, she would grab him by the shoulders and point him in the right direction, and he trustingly followed her lead.

Lydia is such an outstanding big sister, and her patience with Ammon touched my heart. Also, she made the outing possible. I couldn’t have taken all four kids anywhere without Lydia’s help. As it was, leaving any fun place is a challenge with Ammon. I was wearing Clarissa while physically wrestling with a kicking, screaming, exceptionally strong two-year-old Ammon. It’s always a spectacle that ends with him sobbing and me sweating.

After the museum we drove through Krispy Kreme for dinner or dessert, depending on how you look at it. It was dinnertime, but since I fed them three meals before we left, I justified it as dessert. The kids happily said it was the “best day ever.”

Monday was the first day of spring break. We celebrated by having full-length music practices (okay, that part was a celebration to only me) and stayed home because Lydia woke up pretty sick. She and Mary wanted to stay home anyway so they could play with Lydia’s new birthday toys and crafts. Mary and I played her new flower matching game she got for Easter while Lydia crafted. Clarissa and Ammon took great naps, and the girls watched The Greatest Showman twice.

After everyone was in bed I went to the mall to try to find Lydia some pants. Because she wears school uniforms, she has exactly two pairs of jeans that sort of fit, and one of them is full of holes (not the fashionable kind) and honestly looks like a rag. I figured if she was going to be home for a whole week, she needed something to wear.

By the time I came home it was late. Abe and I watched twenty minutes of The Crown and hightailed it to bed.

Mary declared that this was “the best Easter ever!” I think it might have been.

The kids were so excited to wake up and find their baskets and eggs galore. Ammon basically ate a pound of chocolate and candy before lunch. He thought he was in heaven.

After the kids did their hunt, we re-hid a bunch of the eggs and made a lot more eggs for our friends, the Martineaus. They were in town for the Friday Save the Children March, and they drove down to see us around noon. We were so excited to see them! It’s been too long, and our visit was the highlight of the day.

First we did an egg hunt and then dyed eggs out in the sunshine.

Then the grown-ups sat around and talked while the kids literally played in the dirt. Abe and I kept exclaiming for the rest of day how fun it was to see Ben and Candace again.

After the Martineaus left, we listened to the rest of Conference and then drove down to the Miners.

The kids played with bubbles, had an egg hunt, and celebrated March birthdays. Lydia was SO excited to have her birthday celebrated. She’s been looking forward to it for weeks. Everyone had a great time.

On Saturday Abe and I put the kids down right at 7, made sure they were all actually either sleeping or falling asleep, and then hightailed it outta there to go on a date.

It was a much needed break. Both of us feel like we are falling apart from all of the demands of life. We shopped for birthday presents, got some incredible deals on cookbooks at Barnes and Noble, ate and In-N-Out, drove through Dairy Queen, and talked a ton.

I took pictures of a couple books I want to check out at the library:

We came home and played the Easter Bunny. After we had filled the eggs, prepped the baskets, and hidden a ton of eggs, Abe stepped outside and just started throwing handfuls of eggs all over the lawn for good measure. We love being the Easter Bunny’s helpers.

Earlier in the day we listened to both sessions of General Conference, although we were late for the second session because the shower broke and almost flooded the house.

My favorite part of Conference was snuggling with Lydia in bed while watching it on my laptop. Everyone else was watching in the basement and it was nice to watch with Lydia.

My other favorite talk of the day was this one by Larry Echo Hawk.

Abe hit his quota today! It was another nail biter, and we were all so proud of him.

I finished the book I got when I went out Wednesday night. I loved it! It was Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

Abe and I watched the most recent Star Wars movie to celebrate the day. We watched the whole thing at a time, which is almost unheard of — for us.

On Thursday my neighbor came over at 7pm to see if I would come visiting teaching with her. She happened to come in just as everything in the house was falling apart. Not only was every inch of the house a complete disaster, but the girls decided to have their worst fight of the week. They were yelling at each other à la Anastasia and Drusella from Cinderella, filling the halls with their high-pitched insults and screams. Clarissa was augmenting those lovely sounds with her own full-throated screams, and Abe trying his best to extricate himself from the mess as fast as possible so he could be on time to basketball.

My neighbor and I had to yell at each other to hear above the noise, and even then we couldn’t hear each other. Somehow (I wonder how?) she came to the conclusion that I was unavailable for the evening.

After she left, everything calmed down and got sorted out, and when everyone was asleep and the house was clean, I sat down to stress-eat and reflect on the day. My first instinct was to be embarrassed that I had been caught in such a low moment, but my next thought was that it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

On Thursday my neighbor got to see our whole family in complete chaos. In today’s world of social media, it is a gift to see anything imperfect. The high moments that we see and share are probably, for the most part, just as real as the low moments, but real life is full of highs, lows, and the mundane in-between. As long as we’re sharing segments, we might as well share reflections of the balance.

The balance is beautiful.

On Wednesday I tried to put the kids and myself in front of a movie from 5:30 until bedtime so I could calm down after the homework-piano-harp-dinner-clean-up-bath rush, but bedtime hit and I was still feeling fried crisp. After the kids were in bed I ran out the door without my phone (which is perpetually lost). Abe asked where I was going and I called back that I didn’t know. That scared the bajeebers out of Abe who thought I was going to jump off a cliff!

In fact I was hungry because I hadn’t had a minute to sit down and eat all day. I went to In-N-Out, Barnes and Noble, and Dairy Queen to calm down.

When I arrived back I found Abe pacing the cul-de-sac convinced I was dead. We had a long talk and afterward we all felt better.