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I really want to be in Springfield, Illinois right now. That is where my grandmother is, and I have a feeling that I might not have much more time to hug my sweet grandma and tell her how much she means to me. But logistics…they are so complicated! And by logistics,  I mean these (adorable, ultra-loveable) two:

Although this picture looks calm, believe me, it would be a challenge to maintain any semblance of calm around my dear grandma if I trekked to Springfield with these little bundles of energy in tow. So here I am in Salt Lake, and there is nothing I want more right now than to give my grandmother a big hug.

Here’s my current wishlist: To give my grandma a hug, to tell my grandma how much she means to me, and to introduce my grandma to Mary, whom she has only met through Skype. (She met Lydia before we moved to Utah.) I mean, seriously, if this were your daughter, wouldn’t you want your grandma to meet her?

Since I can not have what I want, I guess I can still tell my grandma what she means to me. My mom promised to read her anything I wanted to write her, and so here goes:

Dear Grandma,

I know you are going to say when I tell you you are the world’s best grandma: You are going to ask me if I want a quarter. You always say that! And that’s part of why you are so wonderful. You just go about your quiet, good life without expecting any fanfare or attention.

When I was a child, I looked forward to every single visit at your house. I loved how the smell of freshly baked bread permeated every room, and how at the same time everything smelled so clean. Smelled? Everything WAS clean! Grandma, keeping things clean and tidy might appear to be merely a personality preference, but to a little girl who craved the atmosphere of your home, order felt like virtue. And I really believe that, at least in your circumstance, the two are fused together.

The order of your life always epitomized beauty and virtue to me. I loved the rhythm of life at your house: bread baking, fabric shopping and sewing, reading the comics together over homemade toast, swimming with you at the fancy hotel pool, doing all sorts of Abe Lincon-y stuff (it was Springfield, after all, and good prep for meeting my very own Abe!), practicing the piano at homes and churches you arranged just for my visit, eating canned beet salads with you on the back porch in the humid downstate air, reading late into the night on your sleeping porch, listening to Midwestern nighttime noises from my bed, daydreaming for hours upon hours because there was time.

So. much. time. There was always that luxury at your house. No matter how frantic or rushed or chaotic my life was elsewhere, with you I always felt like I had so much time, I could do crazy things like: spend an hour observing the branches and leaves on your backyard tree. Watch a million episodes of I Love Lucy and Bewitched (you had cable!!!!!!). Put together a jigsaw puzzle. Pick gooseberries from your bushes and then bake a pie with you.

Doesn’t it sound idyllic? Right now there’s a Norman Rockwell exhibit going on in Salt Lake, and I listened to some radio debate on whether his work is too idealistic to be respectable in contemporary circles of cynical snobs. Well, I wish I could have weighed in because I have an opinion, gosh darn it! I love his work because it resonates deeply with what I have experienced in my life with you.  I believe that aesthetic resonates with anyone acquainted with the life of an honest, kind, and deeply good soul. Your soul, for one perfectly specific example.

Grandma, right now I just want to wrap myself in that beautiful quilt you sewed me and, well, to be honest…I really want to cry. I want so badly to be with you, to hug you, to tell you so much more than you probably have energy to hear. But you will always be close to my heart and just as close to my thoughts. I know that this is not my last opportunity to tell you what is on my heart because I love you, you love me, and when a grandma is as good as you, she takes peeks from heaven to see what her grandchildren are thinking about. You will see how often I think about you, how much I am trying to be like you, and how I will continually remember you to my children.

Thank you for everything you have given me through your strength, your example and your goodness. Thank you for toiling over, praying for and raising my mother, who turned out to be an angel disguised as a normal person. Thank you for your love and for offering me periods of respite and refuge throughout my life. I know you will always be there for me, and I hope you will feel all of my love when my mom gives you this hug from me.

You make my life so beautiful. I love you, Grandma.

 

 

I know this is something EVERYONE probably has already figured out, but I am so excited! I am now typing my blogs in Word, and now it won’t take me a bajillion years to write a blog! No more uploading for hours (our uploading speed is sooooooooooo sloooooow), no more losing posts because the internet goes down, no more daydreams of tossing my computer out the window… and MORE posts about my beautiful children!! I am super jazzed up about family history right now, and the theme of the recent Roots Tech conference in Salt Lake was about family stories. As important as it is to get names and dates down, it is also important to create our stories for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One of the key note speakers posed this question: What would your great-great grandchildren want to know about you? And what would you want to share with them?

I hope my great-great grandchildren know me through my journals, but the easiest way they will know me is through these blogs. And so I have a renewed desire to document our family’s life in this form—especially now that the process is so much less cumbersome. Before I actually get to the fun part of blogging and picture-posting, can I just share some things that have been on my heart lately? I just feel like I have discovered the secret of life, and I want to share it with everyone—especially my great-great grandchildren! Well, these aren’t really secrets—in fact, we’re told about them all the time in church—but sometimes it takes a while for me to hear the message. I was reading my scriptures a while ago and I started pondering Nephi’s process of building a ship to come to the Promised Land. He says that during this process he prayed often and went to the mount often, and therefore the Lord showed him great things. In our church, we understand the “mount” to mean the temple, and I realized I need to go to the temple more often if I want to know great things. For me, “great things” means something really practical: How can I be the best mother possible for my children? This question presses on my mind constantly.

So I decided to commit to going to the temple once a week. There are no words to express what that change in my life has meant for me, other than to say I feel like God has been answering my prayers. This past Friday night when I left the temple, I really felt like I could sing God’s praises forever. Agh! Sorry—this is starting to sound like my journal, which I am sure will intensely bore my poor posterity. Anyway, the FIRST secret of life for me is: Go to the temple regularly. I think of my mother, who was so sleep deprived and working as a lawyer, with a husband who hated the church—and she managed to go to the temple every week. So surely, I, with my supportive husband, and a mother who is thrilled to help me achieve this goal when she can, can do the same!

My second secret of life (which again, is no secret if you actually listen in church—apparently, I struggle to do this…) is: Do family history regularly and with your children. In fact, saturate your family life and culture in family history. So many apostles have been coming out and saying that there is no better way to spiritually fortify our children than teaching them to do family history. I was thinking about my plans to do Suzuki with our children and all of the ways I intend on helping them to achieve academically, and I realized: I have all of these planned, intense programs that I will spend money and energy on, and why don’t I have a similar plan for my children’s spiritual education? What can I do that is planned, rigorous and purposeful to help them grow in their knowledge and love of God and their fellow human beings? I feel like the quest to answer that question will be continual, but I do feel like doing family history on my own AND with my children on a weekly basis is absolutely key. And so we have been doing it, and it’s been wonderful! Pictures to follow later.

The third secret of life for me is: regular scripture study AND scripture journaling. Abe gave me a blessing a while back that told me my family would be blessed in DIRECT PROPORTION to the amount of time and energy I put into studying my scriptures. Let me tell you, I read the ENTIRE standard works one and a half times (i.e., the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price) with their accompanying manuals and other commentary in a year. I finished that project about two months after Mary was born. And then…I floundered! I thought I would reread the Bible again, but partway into Genesis I started feeling like I should go a different direction…but how and where? So after prayer and another blessing, I realized I needed to start responding to my study in my journal. And wow, what a difference that has made. Even after that rigorous study, I can truly say there is nothing better than actually writing down my thoughts to what I read. I end up thinking about the scriptures and actually pondering them throughout the day, simply because I have clarified my thinking through a written response. I am still grouchy, impatient, and downright mean much of the time—to my great sorrow and shame!—but at least I have the word of God to pull me back and help me refocus, repent and try to do better. It is a process, and I feel slightly passionate about scripture journaling. I have high hopes that this process will help me become better than I am!

And since I have all of these secrets, the last follow-up to making space in my life for the temple, family history, and scriptures is this: Trust not in my own righteousness, but the righteousness of my Redeemer. When I arrived at the temple this Friday, I was feeling pretty self-satisfied. But then I remembered that although these good works ARE good and helpful in bringing me closer to God, the point is that every good thing comes from Christ, and since he is the source of every good thing in my life, He deserves the praise, the glory and credit for the peace and happiness that I feel. As I left the temple, I was so grateful to worship the one true, living God! What a miraculous blessing—to know He lives, to have access to his word and to believe in things I do not yet know but feel in my heart are true.

Okay, great-great grandchildren? I hope you read this because I want you to be believers too—or at the very least, know that your great-great grandma believed and felt blessed.

End journal entry and start fun blog recap that dates back to CHRISTMAS! I just have to go back that far because this past Christmas was the best one of my life. I wanted to memorialize it just a little bit. Abe and I were up all night putting together Lydia’s play kitchen and then after three hours of sleep I got up again to make cinnamon rolls from scratch and start steeping some apple juice in mulling spices. We had prepared and prepared Lydia for this morning, and we were so excited to see her joy and excitement! Mary enjoyed the day too, and she manifested her enthusiasm by sleeping through the whole affair. After Lydia opened her presents, Abe, Lydia and all of our brothers (plus some of the neighbor boys) built a giant snowman that only melted a couple weeks ago. Crazy! We had multiple get-togethers with different parts of Abe’s family, and we ended it all by having a great dinner with Abe’s mom, stepdad, grandma, grandpa and brothers. And my brother was there to boot! It was truly my idea of a perfect day, even though I was totally exhausted by the end.

Lydia didn’t want to open presents at first, so we sang Christmas carols and read this Norman Rockwell Christmas book until she felt less timid about her presents. (Once she started opening them, though, she didn’t want to stop. She even opened her Grandpa Jay’s Christmas present when we weren’t looking because she just wanted to keep going and going!)

Fast forward to March 8, 2013—Lydia’s second birthday!! We (I) had been planning her birthday for months, and I wanted her to feel special and loved all day long. I thought about throwing her a big party, but Lydia doesn’t really like big play groups because she is shy and ALWAYS the least aggressive child around, which means her toys always get stolen and, since in big groups moms talk to each other instead of monitor their kids, she never gets to play with any of the toys she would like to play with. The result is she usually hangs out by me and then melts down after someone pushes her or steals her toys for the umpteenth time. (Do I sound bitter? I might be a little. I do recognize that my child is not perfect—believe me, if you heard me constantly correcting her you would think I don’t even recognize I HAVE a good kid, but I can count on one hand the number of times I have ever seen her take a toy from another child, and I literally can’t count the number of times the reverse has happened.) SO ANYWAY! We kept her birthday small scale with two kids Lydia loves and two moms I love!

We started off by going to the zoo with Mary, Misty and Sophia—and ABE, who took the morning off. The girls had so much fun looking at all the animals and then ended up riding the carousel. So cute! After the zoo, we had a pizza party with Misty, Sophia, Cole and Candice (Cole was sick and so couldn’t make it to the zoo part). The pizza came from Café Amore, our absolute favorite pizza place in Salt Lake. They had Lydia’s birthday on their café calendar for a week before the event, and the chef there is super nice and talented. After that, Lydia napped and we had an impromptu play date with her friend Espen. Soon after that, we celebrated with a lovely birthday dinner with Abe’s mom and stepdad. Lydia had a wonderful day and still talks about her birthday even now! Here are some pics from that day.

Playing in the log at the zoo!

Having Abe there made it such a special morning.

There’s my happy birthday girl!

Since Lydia’s birthday, the girls and I have gone on some lovely outings. To take advantage of our proximity to Temple Square and to help augment their spiritual education, we have spent quite a bit of time at Temple Square and the Church History Museum. Here are some pics of the girls on a recent outing:

 

 

 

And finally, here is a picture of Mary and Grandma Forsythe on a recent family history outing we did! They are with their great-grandma on Abe’s side. She took Lydia on a wild ride in that wheelchair, and the girls LOVED their visit. We are documenting the life story of this amazing woman. Really, her life story reads like the book Unbroken. We just love her.

Finally, here is a picture of my little love muffin. I could kiss her cheeks all day long…oh wait, I do!

Mary is a month old today. She is the sweetest little baby we could ever imagine, and we just love her to pieces. She is so, so calm and self content–exactly the opposite of what I was expecting, given the amount she kicked in the womb. But it turns out she just likes to stretch her limbs. She is so easy that Abe has already made comments about the four other kids he hopes we have!

And since I never posted her birth story, here is the quick (graphic and gory–SERIOUSLY, so don’t read if you don’t want the gritty details!) run-down, with pictures of Mary throughout:

At 4:30am on September 27th, I rolled over in bed. All of the sudden, my water started to break. I didn’t realize it at the time (since Mary’s due date was October 16), so I just thought this was another pregnancy first–incontinence in bed!  But then when I got up at 7 and checked, I noticed that there was blood in my pants. I called Abe to come look, and as he entered the bathroom, my water totally broke. I know this is gross, but it becomes super relevant later in the story because if Abe hadn’t actually witnessed my water breaking, I would have thought I was crazy and gone home from the hospital on the assumption that I had been wrong about being in labor.

Anyway, first things first: We hadn’t yet set up the diaper station for Mary or the IKEA boxes for her clothes, so Abe and I spent the next hour doing that. After an hour, I started having more painful contractions, so we headed to the hospital. It was a beautiful day, and I have vivid memories of how happy I was to be there with Abe. Between contractions, we talked and laughed and felt so excited to soon meet Baby Mary.

The only damper was that the hospital nurse kept taking tests that indicated my water had not yet broken. They were just about to send me home when the final test they took registered that my water had indeed broken. It was great that they discovered that, because by that point I was in serious pain and ardently hoping they wouldn’t send me home. I explained to the nurse that I wanted an epidural right away because I progress fast and last time they barely got the epidural in on time. The nurse explained that the anesthesiologist was tied up in a c-section but would be available in an hour.

At that point, I cried. I knew that I would have to do most of the labor naturally, and I really, really hate pain. But I tried to resign myself to my fate, and sure enough, the anesthesiologist took so long and had so much trouble with my back (which was messed up by pregnancy) that by the time he got the needle in, I had pushed twice in total silence. (I didn’t want them to stop trying to give me the epidural, so I didn’t say a thing.) I guess the pregnancy had so tightened up my back bones that he actually thought I had a curvature in my back and couldn’t get the needle in. But finally he got it in. Once the needle was in, I asked the nurse to check me, and she realized I was ready to push. They asked me to hold off until the doctor came at 2pm, which I did.

When the doctor came, she joked that we better make it quick because she had a 2:45 pm appointment. She then got me in position and told me to push–and out popped Mary! In one contraction and less than a minute, our sweet baby just slid easily into the world. Abe joked to the doctor that she could make her 2:45 pm appointment because it was only 2:04.

Before Mary came, Abe and I had a hard time imagining a more special birth than Lydia’s. Lydia was born in the hospital I was born in, and I will never forget the wonderful nurses and doctor who welcomed her into the world. The spirit we felt at Lydia’s birth was so overwhelming, and we just couldn’t imagine anything better.

But Mary’s birth turned out to be equally special. Overall, the tone of the whole experience was just so happy. It was a beautiful day, and I have connections to LDS hospital too. Not only is it 5 minutes from our house, but I used to take sick sisters there on my mission–never dreaming that one day I would give birth there! Because I tore much less this time around, I was in pretty good shape after the labor and just thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the time there. I loved that first night with my baby after all the visitors had gone home and it was just Mary and me. I was so happy to have her that it was hard to sleep.

Also, it was hard to sleep because I was excited for the hospital kitchen to open again. At LDS hospital, the food is complimentary and you can order a meal every hour–which I did! The room service was soooooo happy to see me go, and the kitchen was starting to ask questions when I ordered my third lunch (after two breakfasts) right before I was discharged. What can I say? I am fully capable of thoroughly enjoying free hospital food.

Three weeks later we decided to see if the girls and I can still travel with Abe, so we took a trip to Moab.

And here’s a sneak peak of Halloween this year!

Here is a picture of us at the ward trunk-or-treat:

We are a house of sickness this weekend. But you wouldn’t know it from the three fairs/festivals we attended! On Thursday, our dear friends Ben and Candace and their daughter, Cadence, came down from Boise. So the next morning we decided to go the state fair.

Since Abe had to work on Friday (boo!), on Saturday morning we went to the Avenues Street Festival. Since Ben and Candace went to a wedding, we took their baby with us. Between Lydia in the stroller, Cadence in the baby carrier, and my big belly, we were a sight. The casual observer must have concluded that Abe and I had no concept of spacing (which is partially true even without the extra baby)!

And then after Lydia’s nap, she was ready to go again, so we took her to the Greek festival to get her in touch with her Greek heritage. She loved the Greek dancing, although you wouldn’t know it from this picture. Only when I put my camera away did she start stomping her feet and clapping to the music.

I lost my camera’s memory chip for a couple weeks, and then I simultaneously lost my oomph for blogging, so these next pictures are practically a month old.

We had a “baby Olympics” a couple Saturdays ago with some church friends. Lydia was the youngest participant, so she needed a little help from Abe.

And about two or three weeks ago, Abe and I took Lydia to a petting zoo with pony rides with the express intent of giving Lydia a pony ride, but she refused to sit on the pony. So we just looked at the animals instead.

 

On a different Saturday, we watched the daughters of one of my dear friends. Here’s a fun picture of Lydia, Abe, and Selah playing in the sprinklers on our front lawn. They were all so cute together!

And finally, we had a ward picnic a little while ago. Abe and Lydia hung out at the playground after they ate, and I found them in this position. I took this picture to remind Abe that Lydia is definitely his child, even though he occasionally claims he can’t see himself at all in her. Look at those pairs of matching long legs!

So…it turns out I am not Gretchen Rubin, and because I am not Gretchen, I have missed many precious photo opportunities in the past week. Ever since Lydia started taking one nap a day, I make sure (for my sanity) that we either have a play date or go on at least one fun outing per day. And most of the time, I forget my camera. So my treasure trove of happy memories from the last week went largely undocumented, but I did remember my camera a couple times, as demonstrated below.

Also, I don’t have gestational diabetes!!!!!!! Hip, hip, hooray!!!!! I thought I had it because my glucose test was high and I never got to speak to a doctor (long story, but the short story is: I have a toddler and my doctor routinely runs over an hour late), so I left the office thinking I was diabetic. A week later I took a four and a half hour test that showed I process sugar normally!!! I can’t even express how excited that news made me. To celebrate, I had a milkshake from Iceberg.

Okay, and now onto Lydia!

 

 

I forgot to take pictures of a baby shower I hosted this weekend, but I do have pictures of Lydia holding some of the decorations (after they were taken down) the next day. I guess I am not perfect at this document-your-life-through-photography- thing yet!  I feel kind of silly bringing my giant camera on play-dates and to Baby Book Club, but I keep reminding myself that I basically want to BE Gretchen Rubin, and she takes her camera everywhere. So I should too.

 

On Friday Abe’s nine year old cousin Isabella came over and we had lots of adventures at Liberty Park! First we fed the ducks, then we explored the splash pad (representing the seven canyons around Salt Lake City–so cool!), and finally we ended up at the playground. Each activity occupied us for over an hour, and by the time we left, I had turned into Liberty Park’s number one fan. I just love living in a child-friendly city that has so many fun, free things for children and parents to do together.

The next day Abe, Lydia and I all attended a family reunion in Mill Creek Canyon, and Lydia made (and ate) her very first smore. Lydia loves watching the July cover video for Martha Stewart Living on my Ipad, which just happens to be a video about making smores. She was excited to make her own after watching Martha do it about a million times!