Lydia pics – Page 22

Happy Birthday To Me!

Today was my thirtieth birthday and it feels like kindof a big deal. I feel like I just lost the last part of me that felt sort-of young. I mean, when I was in my twenties, I was lumped in with college undergrads etc., but now I’m lumped in with the thirties, which I’m sure is even a cooler group, but it does feel like a change!

Lily and I each had great days today. I had an awsome training session at work that gave me a lot of insight on how to succeed, and at home Lily was, well, accomplishing crazy amounts of stuff.

Her day started off with a two and a half hour playdate with Paige Anderson and her daughters Ada and ‘Liv. After that Lily somehow managed to practice piano, feed the children, clean the entire house, write me an incredibly touching birthday letter, make me a happy birthday door poster, paint me another happy birthday poster and finally set Lydia up with paints so she (Lydia) could paint me a happy birthday poster. The crazy thing is that when I arrived home, she said she was not tired because she had rested during the day…..um…….when?

But I have to say, all her efforts to make the day feel festive really changed the complexion of the day for me. At work, most people didn’t know it was my birthday, and so not much of a deal was made (I’m still very new), but at home I felt truly celebrated and I thank my sweet wife for that.

As soon as I got home, we had dinner with my mom and Jay at the Spaghetti factory (per my request). I love the Spaghetti factory at Trolly Square because spaghetti speaks to my inner child and yet the atmosphere is classic vintage. It’s hard to explain. I just love how it feels there and the food is great. Dinner conversation was very delightful with topics ranging from Obama raising the minimum wage to 3-D printing to why Payton Manning deserves to win the Super Bowl on moral grounds (because he’s such a dog gone awsome guy). At the very end of dinner, it was time to go, but Lydia wanted to eat more of her Spumoni ice cream. Lily told Lydia that she could take five more bites and then it would be time to go. Lydia quickly took four bites and then, before she could take the fifth, she froze and started gazing into space. We all assumed she had just acquired a massive brain freeze and then after her period of gazing she finally piped up, “I feel cold, does anyone else feel cold?” It is truly hard to recreate how funny it was when she said that, but we all got a great belly laugh.

Now it’s time for bed. I’m eager to get to work tomorrow and start applying what I learned in training. Pictures!!

grace

This morning I woke up and prayed a lot for strength to make it through the day. It seemed like there was a lot to do, and I was tired and a little overwhelmed. But I really felt God answering my prayer. I got most everything done on my to-do list, and I enjoyed doing it. It feels unusual, so I feel pretty confident there was divine intervention along the way.

The morning was filled with feeding children, cleaning, homework and practicing. At one point Mary was crying because she wanted my attention, so I picked her up and talked to her. I asked her if she wanted to read (vigorous head shake no), if she wanted to play with her bugaboos (slightly less vigorous head shake no) and if she wanted to play with her blocks (a little sound that sort of kind of sounded like “yes”). Hopeful that she wanted to play with blocks, I put her down.

Sure enough, off she toddled to her blocks and proceeded to play with them until Lydia announced that she loved Mary and wanted to play with her. This announcement was greeted with a squeal–nay, scream–of excitement, and the two of them spent the next half an hour playing happily together. I wanted nothing more than to watch, but I knew that would ruin the dynamic…and I had homework to do, so I just listened delightedly. When I was done with my homework, I sneaked into their room and caught a picture of them in play.

Then I folded laundry until our play date. I had scheduled a visiting teaching play date with my companion and visiting teachee, but I never informed our poor visiting teachee that the play date was at my house. I wanted to spare her the descent of five small children and two adults upon her home, but since I never relayed that intention, our play date included everyone but our visiting teachee and her daughter. Oops.

But here are the pictures from the play date:

Doesn’t Mary look a lot like those twins? They are a week younger than Mary, and the three of them look like they belong together.

Then I rushed off to cooking school. While I was learning about soups and eggs, Abe took the girls to a Thai restaurant in Lehi where they met up with Karin, Jay, and Jay’s kids to celebrate Jay’s birthday. Abe tells me the girls were perfectly behaved. I felt bad because I forgot they were going to do that, and I didn’t bother to put shoes on Mary when I loaded her into the car to go to school (where Abe and I meet and pass off the girls). She walked around the restaurant in her socks.

Oh, and at cooking school, my group decided to do our presentation on fried foods. I have never truly fried anything in my life (unless you count when the oil is barely a quarter inch deep), and I’m covering tempura. I just nodded and smiled like there’s nothing more in the world that I’d love more than to research and do tempura, but inside I was dying a little bit. But I do love to eat tempura, so maybe this won’t be so terrible…

boom, boom, boom, boom, zzzz….

After getting to bed after midnight last night, I woke up at 5:30 am, rushed out the door to yoga, met up with Misty, and did Bikram. It was so awesome to have Misty there–I was so excited that I lost my balance about a million times. Either that or the sleep deprivation made me extra clumsy. But it was so great to do Bikram with Misty, and I was DYING to know what she thought about it, but I had to skip out of class before the cool down so I could shower and make it to the competition team for culinary school.

The competition team is the best kept secret at school, as far as I can tell. You get free instruction from a chef on whatever you want to learn, and today the ratio was: 1 chef to 2 students. Yes. Chef told me that I could research anything I want to learn–as in, if I want to learn about lobster, let him know a couple days ahead of time, and he will have fresh lobsters for me to practice on. My jaw dropped. Can I repeat? This was free. Free instruction, free food, free practice, and the school will pay for all of my competition fees.

There is a catch, though, and that is until we start gearing up for the competition, I have to be in charge of what I want to practice. As I wandered through the storeroom, my mind felt completely blank. I couldn’t decide what skill I wanted to practice, so finally I just cut down three chickens and worked on making tamales with my teammate.

One of the competitions I will enter will be entirely about plating. I have a long way to go, right? Right.

One of the competition rounds I will enter is called a cold salon. All the food is inedible and coated with aspic, and most of the food that I saw looked like it would taste gross. But apparently preparing for this competition will enhance my knife skills and make me more competent at plating, so I’m game.

While I was at cooking school, Abe took the girls to the park. The three of them experienced sunshine for the first time in weeks. Abe was worried the girls would get cold, so in addition to dressing them in their snow pants, he put two coats on each of them. When they fell, they had to wait for Abe to come get them because they had so many layers on, they couldn’t get back up themselves. Mary was also excited that he put Lydia’s hat on her–it meant she got to chew the strings all morning long!

Then I came home and napped for a minute before we turned around and headed out to the Arnold Friberg exhibit at the Gateway. Tom has been telling us we should go for a while, and today we finally got a chance to go. It was incredible. I don’t think I fully appreciated Arnold Friberg today, but the exhibit is breathtaking. Arnold Friberg totally mastered the epic moment, and if we hadn’t been on a time schedule, I could have stayed there for hours. I seriously regret not taking more pictures of the paintings, but I am comforted that no pictures would have done the exhibit a hint of justice (although they might help preserve the memory for me!).

Lydia got into the exhibit when we started telling stories about the paintings and asking her questions. But she was hungry, and it took a lot of effort to stave off a tantrum.

After the exhibit, we drove to the library, only to realize our cards were at home. Dang. So we drove to Sprouts and did some grocery shopping before heading over to the Skarda family’s home for dinner.

We had so much fun with BOTH Skarda families! Jonathon and Michael are brothers and their families live in the same condo building, so we had a pretty full house between the six adults and six children. It was a total blast, and Abe and I left full of food and happy from the company. I felt like a hobbit after a happy feast.

Then it was groceries, gas, children to bed, and now, blog and bed. I am so excited to lie down and go to sleep.

Oh, also! I need to post my picture of Misty’s valentine hearts from yesterday. I didn’t help craft them at all, contrary to Abe’s report yesterday. No, instead I simply admired how cute and Pinterest appropriate they looked, and I took pictures on my now dead phone. Hopefully it will be recharged before I blog tomorrow.

Finishing week two of new routine

Abe here! I’m blogging in Lily’s place since she will be in school until almost midnight and then she is getting up at 5:30 am tomorrow to do hot yoga before a four-hour cooking school event. Yikes, she sure is packing it in!

Things are still going well after week two of our new routine. Lily has been rocking on her new reduced budget by being creative, frugal and frankly cooking lots and lots of beans, which I love, so it works out great! She is also enjoying her cooking school especially now that she is actually cooking.

Today Lily spent time at Misty’s house and she (as usual) gushed on the phone to me about how much she loves spending time with Misty. It sounds like the play-date went really well, other than the spinach-pineapple smoothie that Mary dumped all over herself (requiring her to return home half-naked under her coat). Lily has some really great photos of some crafting she did with Misty, and those pictures will be posted as soon as Lily gets them from her phone. After the play-date, Lily went home, fed the girls, read to them, played piano and worked on homework.

As for me, the new job is going really well. I love the company, love the product, love my co-workers and love the culture. I will also say that it is certainly harder than I expected, but I truly enjoy the challenge. Something about my ego makes me assume that I will walk into situations and naturally be better than everyone else. At Qualtrics, I’m finding that I’m surrounded by so much talent and drive, that quite frankly, if anything I will have to work harder than the next guy to get ahead. Yet, I am o-k with that. I really feel Qualtrics is where I’m supposed to be and it’s just so easy to feel good about a place that has unlimited free burritos and Seagram’s sparkling lemon water…..mmmmmmm………..

Pictures!!!!!

hat day, mother sauces, stock and chocolates

Oooh boy, these late night classes are late. I just got home and it is a quarter to midnight. Yikes! But I do love learning. Today we learned about the school’s competition team, which meets Saturday morning. I would love to join, but right now I feel so tired it’s hard to imagine trying to fit that in. I guess we’ll just have to see.

It feels like forever ago, but this morning I took the girls to the library for story time. The theme was “hats,” and at the end the librarians brought out a ton of hats for the kids to wear. They set up a little footstool next to a cardboard Woody so the kids could all have their pictures taken with Woody. Here are the girls:

Afterward, I let the girls play in one of the little play caves. There were a ton of kids there, and Mary really wanted to climb a popular set of stairs. She stood there staring longingly at them for a while until Lydia cleared a path for her. My shy little Lydia came over and in a loud, confident voice said to the kids, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Come on, Mary. Good job, Mary!!” She led Mary up and down the stairs, and the other children kindly cleared out of the way.

Then we came home and ate, read, and played. Mary took a short nap, and I didn’t want to believe her nap was over when she started crying, so I took her into bed with me. It worked, and she slept ten more minutes. I’ll take it. Plus, I got to cuddle my baby, so it was really a win-win.

My favorite quote from class today was, “Nutmeg is the thug of the spice world.” (We were making the mother sauces, and this was in reference to our treatment of the bechamel.) I actually didn’t practice any of the mother sauces because I ended up doing the class’s stock, and that took almost the whole time. Between the twenty chicken carcasses and attempting to deglaze giant sheet pans (while the fumes from the alcohol burst into flames all around the pans), I was a little busy. I am a wimp about fire, and I learned that I will have to get over that. The worst part was when a giant pan got stuck in one of the ovens; to get it out, you have to pull with ALL of your strength while your hands are in the hot oven. It feels…dangerous.

So anyway, I’ll see about Saturday. The team meets from 8am to noon, and that’s right when I try to make it to yoga. So either I could wake up earlier and go to the 6am yoga before the team meets, or I could just try running before hand and do yoga on a weeknight. Right now I just know I need to do something, because my class meets at the same time as the chocolates class, and they send plates upon plates of chocolates over to our kitchen. It’s alarming and delicious, all at the same time.

Happy

This morning, we went to preschool. Paige ran out for a minute to make copies, and in the meantime I experienced a bit of heaven. It looked like this:

These girls are collaborating on a puzzle. They're saying things like, "Sophia, do you think this goes here?" "Here, Lydia, I think it goes here." — These girls are collaborating on a puzzle. They’re saying things like, “Sophia, do you think this goes here?” “Here, Lydia, I think it goes here.”

I sat on the couch and felt happy.

Then Paige came back and read to the girls. They all loved that:

Ada tried on Lydia's coat and Audrey's boots. They suited her. — Ada tried on Lydia’s coat and Audrey’s boots. They suited her.

After preschool, we raced to the church because, guess what? Institute now has a nursery! I’ve never been to our stake institute class, and I was shocked to find the two parking lots so full that I struggled to find a spot. I was a little late, but today’s topic was Joseph Smith in the Kirtland years (from what I gathered). There was a lot of talk about how the writings of Paul are echoed in the articles of faith and in the Book of Mormon.

Then home for lunch, play, naps, homework, piano and reading (I am in the middle of The Fellowship of the Ring, and it was with the greatest reluctance that I set that aside to blog tonight).

Somewhere in there, I made another souffle (I am addicted), cleaned the kitchen, fed the girls dinner, and ran some soup over to Anique. We have a little exchange going on, and it was my turn. I am boring and always send over lentil soup, and she sends me all kinds. Maybe next week I’ll branch out…

Here are some pictures Abe took right before we put the girls to bed.

:Lydia got tickled. (And at one point, she jerked up and bonked my teeth. I feel so bad because I think she's going to bruise.) — :Lydia got tickled. (And at one point, she jerked up and bonked my teeth. I feel so bad because I think she’s going to bruise.)

Roomie reunion

This morning I practiced my knife skills by cutting a bunch of vegetables for lentil soup. The veggies came out noticeably uneven. Also, upon later consumption, I realized that the soup was unsalted and the veggies were practically raw. Yuck! Then I prepped a sweet potato souffle and rushed to play group with the kids. I forgot to bring Lydia’s bike, but that was okay since we didn’t stay long. My old roommates were in town, and as soon as they called, I rushed out of play group to meet them at home.

At one point I calculated that during my single years I had sixty-eight roommates. Granted, I counted my mission roommates, who would change up every six weeks. I also counted people I lived with for as short as a couple weeks. But I think it’s safe to say that those ten years had a variety of living situations, and during that time, my period with the roommates I saw today stands out in memory as one of the happiest living arrangements of my life. I loved my life with them, and it was truly uplifting to see these lovely, fun, funny, kind, intelligent, affirming women today. Vanessa is expecting baby Tessa in March, and Shandi has two kids, one a month older than Lydia and one GORGEOUS baby who is a couple months old.

Our kids got along great, and I loved, loved, loved visiting with Shandi and Vanessa. Shandi and I even got to play and sing together (she did the singing), and that was SO fun. She has a beeee-autiful voice, and I’d been looking forward to hearing it again for a while. Suffice it to say, I was sad when they left–but so glad that they came!

The rest of the day had some reading, some piano, some tantrums, lots of cleaning, and hopefully now some homework. Here are today’s pictures:

Since Mary is now on a one nap a day schedule, I can go to play group again! — Since Mary is now on a one nap a day schedule, we can go to play group again!

Vanessa, siting on the floor, is due in March. She can do stuff like sit on the floor and wear heels while pregnant. I'm jealous. — Shandi’s kids are Sebastian and Penelope. Vanessa remarked that Shandi could open a children’s boutique named “Sebastian and Penelope.” Can’t you picture it?

Abe watched the girls while I practiced tonight. From the sounds of it, they had some rough moments. But he did capture some good ones here:

Undone by being binky-free

Today started out strong, really. I deep cleaned the kitchen, did laundry, played with my kids, read to my kids, worked on reading with Lydia…and then came nap time. Mary is learning to sleep without her binky, so today nap time was severely truncated.

In its absence, I developed a pounding headache and by the end of the day I was in bed watching this (can you believe that the audience hissed at the premier?! This concerto–in its original 2 piano version– has been the equivalent of my musical comfort food since elementary school. I just can’t imagine a sound aesthetic where this seemed musically deviant!) while Abe tried to entertain the kids on speaker phone during his commute.

I had great plans to get all of my homework done today, but that will have to wait.

Here are today’s pictures:

Grandma, Mary played with those bugaboos you gave her all day. We literally played with them for an hour straight, and that was after she spent the whole morning wearing them around her neck. — Grandma, Mary played with those bugaboos you gave her a ton today. We literally played with them for an hour straight (all I did for 60 minutes was take them apart and put them back together again and again), and that was *after* she spent the whole morning wearing them around her neck.

The rest of the pictures are from FHE tonight, wherein Abe put on another puppet show about sharing. Per my request, he also threw in a skit about staying in your seat until you’re done eating. Grandma, do you recognize some of those puppets?

Abe got great feedback at work today and great feedback on the sermon he wrote for Jon and Shirley. It’s truly beautiful. If they allow me, I’ll post it after their wedding in May.

To bed, to bed.

Wherein Lily learns to distrust a cookbook

We were an hour late to church because Mary slept in a looooong time. I guess all that running around the church gym last night tired her out! It worked out, though, because we got to Skype with Sruthi (Swathi’s sister who lives in Calcutta). It was great to chat with her, and by the time we were done, Mary was just waking up.

I learned today in Sunday School that today marks the one hundred year anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. I remember a scene from The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper wherein one pioneer shoots a canon into a cloud of pigeons…for fun. And now, here we are one hundred years after the passing of the last of those birds. Some stewards of this glorious creation we’ve been.

On that note, we all took deliciously long naps this afternoon. At the end of it, both girls and Abe gave me a back massage. During my massage, I could not imagine heaven being one bit better. Maybe it is? But that was hard to beat.

And then my day came crashing down around this: brown butter icing. Joy of Cooking promises that this is a quick and easy recipe, and it also says not to make this too far in advance. I thought, terrific! A carrot cake with apricot preserves and brown butter icing flecked with orange zest. It sounded so yummy and pretty. And then, this happened:

You can’t see it, but there are grease pools on top of that cake. I was all in a frenzy because we were late and the cake looked like this, and Abe kept telling me it looked fine and we should just take it to the Miners’ as is.

It looked fine?

At that point, my response helped Abe decide to exit the kitchen. I made up some butter cream and smeared it all over this mess, and at that point I got really mad at Joy of Cooking because, thanks to their instructions, the hot brown butter icing melted the buttercream. But there was nothing left to do, so we took the unsightly blob to the Miners, stuck candles in it, sang to Abe, and cut it up. The cake itself tasted great, but the icing tasted only nominally better than it looked. Next time I will be sticking to cream cheese icing and consulting America’s Test Kitchen instead of that sub-par Rombauer publication.

Here are the pictures from the Miners’:

And one from earlier this morning at church:

Mary is growing up! We took away her binky tonight. It is sad and painful, and Lydia claims to remember how hard this was when we did this to her. She told Mary that it would be okay, but Mary doesn’t seem to agree at present.

Recovery and Talent Show

Lily is currently making my birthday cake (yum!!) for one of my birthday celebrations tomorrow and so I offered to blog in her place. We are both hoping to get to bed early tonight.

Today was the first weekend day after Lily and I have started our new schedules. We’ve both agreed that the new groove is going very well, and today we also agreed that especially with us both being sick, we should get a little R&R.

I spent a lot of time with the kids in the morning which was so lovely since I see them so little during the week. I’d like to say we did a bunch of activities, but actually most of what I did was feed them and let them wander around house and somehow that filled the morning. Lily has been quite sick today (much sicker than me!!) so she got a little rest in addition to helping with the kids.

Lily and I both rested while Mary napped and Lydia watched the Ipad. She’s watched it a lot lately, but Lily and I have really needed rest to kick our bugs so it has been nice for her to be entertained while we rest.

When we got up we did some quick errands and then we went to our ward talent show. It was absolutely amazing. I could not believe how much talent was on display in my ward. Someone sang “Marry me” by train and I swear his voice was every bit as good as Train’s. Mark Walton drew live caricatures of people and I heard a lady sing a song she wrote that could seriously air on the radio. Also, Lily played La Campanella by Liszt. The whole ward was floored by her talent. She got a really loud applause and she and I both got a flood of comments from people afterwords. I was so proud of her, especially the way that she played with passion and nailed the ending, which is definitely my favorite part.

Afterwords, we let our two children run around with other kids in the gymn for a long time. It was so great to see them running so much because it’s harder to get out of the house in the winter when it is so cold outside.

Qualtrics is going great so far. Thanks for reading!!!

Here are the pictures from today:

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
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4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30