Love Day 2018

Our family's holiday traditions are getting increasingly poignant as our kids are growing up, because it's sad to not have all our favorite faces around the table when we gather. This was Aubrey's last Valentine's Day at home. We partied the very best way we know how.

The morning started with a few gifts, heart-shaped pancakes, and pictures before school. 

That night we had our traditional Valentine's Dinner. We loved having Elder Porter and Elder Pilling with us, and it was fun to share our traditions with them.

 After dinner we took a few pictures and had an impromptu piano recital (Aubrey and Joseph both played a piece).

Last week I helped with a Valentine's PTA fundraiser at Joseph's middle school. It was so great to get to see him in his school environment! Here he is, writing a Candygram to one of his friends.

And that's it. Happy Love Day!

Mid-February thoughts

Master Thespian

Aubrey did three different performances at the state Thespian's competition (for us non-theater people, that means performances of monologues, group theater pieces, and vocal performances). She received ribbons in each of her performances and was advanced to region and national level on two of her pieces!

Sugar Woes

It is good news for me that Brach's company changed the flavors of their conversation hearts. Because I don't love the new flavors as much so I'm finishing less of the bag this year. I'm sure they think they are improving things by changing the flavors, but I contend that they should not have messed with perfection. Especially yellow. They should not have tweaked yellow at all. I never did like the green flavor, and I still don't. But now I don't like pink either. And purple is kind of weird too. But, that's actually a good thing, because even though I limited myself to one bag of conversation hearts this year, that is still a crazy amount of sugar for one person to consume!

More woes - this time car-related

This has not been a good week for car issues in our home. Monday I realized as Joseph and I were dashing out the door to his school that my battery was dead. AAA came out and charged the battery but told me not to turn the car off until the battery was replaced by my mechanic. So, my plans to go to the gym went out the window and I drove to drop off the car. The rest of my plans for the day were pretty much shot as I figured out how to get myself and others where we needed to go when we were short one car. First world problems, for sure. Then, on Tuesday on my way to get Joseph from piano lessons I ran over some sort of big bolt, which punctured my tire. I limped home and crossed my fingers that the tire would hold enough air overnight so I could get it to the repair place in the morning. Nope. Totally flat by morning, and I had to run first thing to watch a friend's adorable 2 year old most of the day. So, I took Aubrey's car and Dan and Aubrey put my spare tire on the car. When my babysitting duties end I'll try to figure out the tire issue before finishing making our Valentine's Day dinner. I think that all these car issues are an indication that instead of driving places I am supposed to be hanging out at home eating conversation hearts and reading books.

There is Sunshine in My Soul

After the sunniest (and warmest) winter I remember in Vancouver, we did get pretty cold over the last few days, and last night many areas got Valentine's Day snow! We got rain, but enjoyed seeing snow pictures sent from friends.

My relationship with books

From my earliest memories, books were a big deal to me. I remember being very young and sitting on laps to listen to storybooks. I remember sitting with Great-Grandma Bailey at her kitchen table, learning  how to decipher the letters and turn them into words. Once I owned the magic of reading, I couldn't get enough of books. My favorite family outing was to the public library, where I checked out a stack of books and settled into the carpeted clawfoot tub in the library to sample them until it was time to leave. Walking out of the library weighed down by my pile of books gave me a thrill, because I held the portal to different times, places, and people's perspectives. I still feel this way.

I have lots of stories about books from my elementary years. Like the times I held a book in front of me and read while walking the 6 or so blocks to the school bus (peripheral vision is a great asset). The year in 3rd grade when my teacher sent me to the library every day when I finished my work, so I decided to read the entire library, starting at Aaron the Aardvark. (There were some seriously weird books in my 1970s school library. It turns out that reading non-selectively results in an uneven reading experience.) The time I read a book straight through the class Halloween party (I was perplexed when my teacher found this to be strange. I mean, the party was not as exciting as my current book, so it wasn't even a tough decision). The time in 5th grade when my best friend Julianne and I transformed a big box into a two-person "book" Halloween costume.

As a teenager I consumed books when I could, which wasn't as often as I wanted because my schedule was packed. And I had a lot of books to read for my English classes. Some of those books have become my lifetime favorites (Les Miserables and Jane Eyre). But, whenever time allowed, I grabbed a "for fun" book and huddled in my sweats with my feet shoved between the back of the couch and the couch cushion and I read books straight through. I still have some of my favorite teenager books on my bookshelf, and I will never give them away.

All my adult life I have continued to be an avid reader. The time I have had to read has varied greatly, but reading has been a constant. We have bookshelves in every single room except the dining room and bathrooms. Despite the large number of books we own, I'm actually really picky about what books I buy. A book has to have staying power and potential re-readability to earn a spot on my shelf. So, most of the time I check out books at the library. I have always been an avid consumer of the amazing library resources. Our kids got their own library cards when they were 5 and we always have a stack of to-read books at home. At this point most of Aubrey's books are either audiobooks (which she prefers) or books for school. So, I maximize the checkout limits on each family member's library card to check out many books at a time, some for Joseph to read alone, some for us to read together, and many for me. I love having a towering pile of to-read books in my house, so that I always have a book available for every mood. In addition to library books, I also have books on my shelves which I haven't read yet, and this vexes me greatly. But I never feel like I can get to the books which don't have a "return by" date from the library.

My mom was always in a book club when I was growing up, and I looked forward to growing up to be in my own book club. Everywhere I have lived I have started book clubs. I have always been the perpetual organizer of the clubs - sending out reminder emails every month and (currently) recommending many of the books. It doesn't bother me at all to be in charge. I like organizing things  and I want to make sure that the book clubs keep going. I feel bad sometimes about choosing so many of the book club books, but I'm a little arrogant about the fact that I think I understand what makes a good book club book, and I've usually read many more books than the other participants in the club. I really, really love it when we get into some good book discussions at the monthly gatherings, but I'm also OK with the fact that most of the women aren't as ardent of book lovers and mostly attend the bookclub for the socializing  I like the socializing too, and it's a bonus to get to talk about books. Currently I run two book clubs, one in the daytime and one in the evening. The attendance of both clubs has surged and ebbed over the years, but right now the nighttime bookclub is crazy popular, and we are having a hard time finding a restaurant with space for us and quiet enough for our discussion (everyone voted years ago to go out to eat rather than take turns hosting).

In the past I have started mother/daughter bookclubs. There was a magical time when we lived in Utah when I hand-picked 4 mothers with daughters Bailey's age and we held monthly mother daughter book clubs. Bailey and I still fondly remember many of the books chosen by the participants and the fun activities planned to support the theme. It was an amazing 2 or so years and probably helped Bailey cement her own love of reading. And then we moved to Washington and we tried to re-create the mother daughter bookgroup for Bailey and Aubrey with no success. At that time I was unable to find enough people committed or interested enough in the idea. I have also done library bookclubs with each of the kids, and those have been fun and netted us some good (free) books for our home collection.

For a brief time I was enrolled in a Masters of Library Science program. I thought it would be a great fit, since I love books and love locating and understanding information. But, I got the strongest feeling as I attended classes that this was not the right graduate program for me. I found it stultifyingly dull, which is strange.

I like to read books with/to my kids, and have so many happy memories of reading Harry Potter, Tuck Everlasting, Lightning Thief, Princess Academy, Fablehaven, etc. Joseph and I still read together often, and currently are working our way through the Mastermind series. I try to often read books which would be of interest to my kids so we can talk about them and so I can stay in touch with their world. In addition to book written for the adult audience, I often like well-written middle grade and YA novels, as they are (usually) clean, can have intriguing storylines, and don't take forever to finish. My favorite genre is definitely historical fiction, but I am also a sucker for anything medical.

I track my reading on Goodreads, and try to post reviews and ratings of the books I read. This helps me remember what I read and what I thought about the books. I especially like the "to read" shelf on Goodreads, which gives me a ready list of what to reserve next at the library. I like reading on my ipad whenever I go out of time, but don't choose to read digitally when I have the choice to read a paper book. I listen to books rarely, and usually find this frustrating. I think that's because I read really fast and the narrators don't speak as fast as I would like them to. I try speeding up the narration, but then the reader sounds like Minnie Mouse.

I do read fast, and that sometimes is my downfall. I think I could do a better job of stopping to think about and internalize and evaluate the words I'm reading. Most of the time I'm reading for information and content and I speed read so fast that I inevitably miss details. This makes me not always the best at book club discussions (plus, I have usually read the book months before the bookclub and I just don't remember details that well.)

Last week I organized my Goodreads "read" bookshelf and discovered that I read 86 books last year. I set a goal to read 100 books this year, and I don't think that will be a problem. Six weeks into 2018 I'm at 30 books! I am feeling a little competitive pride about how many books I've read the last few years, and I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

I have realized lately that I love to read for many reasons, including the opportunity to get lost in a story. Sometimes that's a much-needed escape from frustrations. Reading also provides me better understanding of the world and the people in it. I don't think I will ever get tired of learning about the perspectives of others and how the world works. And, underscoring all these is the fact that I really like to learn things. I feel like every day I'm an information gatherer. Thanks to the wonders of DVRs, internet streaming, and smartphones, my days are also filled with with information from Conference talks, BYU devotionals, news shows, history programs (my favorite is American Eperience on PBS), and podcasts. Podcasts have been a game changer. There's so much information and so many perspectives available - I love it! I even listen to a few podcasts about books, and the books recommended on the podcasts constantly add to my tbr list (that's "to be read," in case you aren't up on the latest nerd vernacular).

And, those are my book loving thoughts for the day. Maybe someday my great-grandkids will wonder what kept Grandma's brain sharp well into her 90s, and I hope the answer will be BOOKS!

Life Lately

I have been wrapped up in organizing the past lately and have neglected to record the present. So I'm going to quickly write a few things about our right now.

Joseph floats

Joseph got a hoverboard for Christmas, and it is a wonder to see how he has mastered it! He floats around the house and the wheels of the hoverboard are like an extension of his body.

What we do on the Treadmill

The answer for Dan is . . . watch shows! He has really enjoyed watching episodes of The Good Doctor and Blue Bloods and now is starting on This is Us. He is finding that walking for an hour or so while getting lost in a show has been a great stress reliever for him (and he needs that - his job has been pretty darn stressful lately) while also giving him some good exercise. Aubrey has also liked watching shows while exercising on the treadmill.

The answer for me is . . . . read books! I have tried watching shows. I watched The Good Doctor and several episodes of The Crown. But then I discovered that if I get large print books and use a towel to help hold my book open, I can easily read books while speed walking. This has been a game changer for me. I always, always have a huge pile of to-be-read books. While I try to find some time to read each day, my free time hasn't been enough for me to move through books as quickly as I would like. Now, ta-da! I can easily read a book every two days, while getting a great workout and not even noticing that I am walking! 

Preparing for a sad goodbye

I have attended a few of Aubrey's school events lately at VSAA and I am getting teary every time I am in the building. We have had a child attending that wonderful school for ten years. And now Aubrey will be graduating in a few short months and our VSAA days will be over, because Joseph attends a different school. I am so grateful for the experiences our girls have had there and sad to lose that connection with a truly unique educational experiment (it's not perfect, but it's very good).

Changes at Church

A month ago our stake was re-aligned, dissolving one ward and dramatically changing most of the ward boundaries. Our ward was a surprise exception, in that we had very few changes despite having more than enough members to spare. But, because Dan and I are both serving with the stake, we have been busy helping with the changes in other wards. My presidency and I (and Dan) have been going to wards as needed to do whatever . . . sharing time, teaching primary classes that didn't have a teacher yet, encouraging overwhelmed primary presidents. It has been fun to be hands-on and teaching. I really like teaching (and I know Dan does too). We miss teaching on a regular basis. Actually, I guess I miss that most, because Dan gets to teach mission prep every two weeks.

Speaking of mission prep, we have had the chance to host it in our home for the past few months. We serve a big breakfast and then the lesson lasts about an hour. I love getting to watch the kids learn and interact. Our current full-time missionaries (who are truly amazing) have been attending, and they help as the youth learn how to effectively teach and testify. Dan is an exceptional teacher, and he helps them search for truth and learn how to communicate with love. They have had some great experiences. 

Other church changes: we have been receiving a strong message in our stake to "reduce and simplify," evaluating all activities to see if they are meeting the goal of strengthening families and individuals and allowing families time to be together. I made some very tough decisions this year. The most dramatic is we will be doing stake Activity Day Camp every other year. That was a hard decision, as Activity Day Camp is a very GOOD thing and definitely helps the girls gain testimonies, but it also requires a lot of time from a lot of people, and that puts a strain on a lot of families. There are some fairly big changes happening with Cub Scouts too, in that we are making sure that we are not doing "extra" activities just because they are tradition, but are only doing them if they are meeting the goals of strengthening testimonies and families. 

Family Historian

I just now decided that I am going to title myself "family historian." That summarizes and gives weight to something which takes a lot of my time. 

I do feel a great impetus to organize and document our family's experiences and growth. This has taken many forms over the years. I wish I could say that I've kept great journals, but I haven't. I have a smattering of journals. Right now I have a scripture journal and a journal where I record gratitude thoughts and where I see the hand of the Lord in my life. But I haven't consistently kept a journal of the events of our lives. But, I have kept up photobooks of various types, and I am hoping that the text I add to explain the pictures is doing enough to document events and experiences.  From about 1995 to 2004 I was an avid scrapbooker. I pretty much scrapbooked every picture for awhile (around the time of Bailey's birth) until I got better at picking the best pictures to add to the books. Consequently, I have 26 big scrapbooks which take up the bottom rows of one of my bookshelves.

Then, around the time Joseph was born I fell off the scrapbook wagon, intending to climb back on once I got used to being a mom of four kids. But, then in 2006 we quite suddenly moved to a different state and the intensity of life ratcheted up even further. Scrapbooking was so far down my list of things to do that I didn't even think about it for years.

By the time I was ready to start picking up my scrapbook supplies again, the scrapbooking mania had really died down in favor of digital scrapbooking. I started doing digital books, where I created pages with our pictures and then printed out the books. I have about 30 of these books. Many are from family vacations. For a brief time (2007-2009), I made and gave each child their own personalized digital book documenting the previous year. Ha - that didn't last! I found it SO tedious to re-work the same events four times over to make four different books. And, I never made a "family" book of those years for me to keep.

Around that time blogging became a thing, and I started this blog. It has proven to be an fun way for me to document our family events and some of my thoughts and share them with family living far away. When blogging was hot, there were companies who transferred blogs into digital books for print. I created one of these books, bringing us from 2009 to halfway through 2010.

I have been on and off with keeping up the blog, but overall have documented most of our family events. I have not been good about creating books from blogposts since 2010, and the services to directly transfer blogs to books have disappeared. So, for the last year I have been painstakingly copying and pasting pictures and text into pages of a Bookwright program. I am almost done formatting the pages for 2016 and 2017 and then I will have the book printed. Over the next few years I will go back and finish transferring the blog from 2010-2016, plus hopefully keep up with transferring current posts into a book.

This has been a serviceable way to document life, but it's a little sad that in order to keep things simple, I don't even add any colored backgrounds to the pages of my blogbooks. I just print on white pages and cram the pages with photos and text. I don't find the process of making digital books very fun or creative, but I'm glad that the option exists. At the same time, I have also been trying to go back to finish some of the other digital books I missed, including books of our Europe vacations, etc.

Then, in a very unexpected way, scrapbooking has returned to my life. Over Christmas Aubrey wanted to do a job to earn money. I asked her to organize two huge storage bins into which I have been throwing memorabilia and pictures for the past decade. She did a good job, and I found myself helping her fine tune our new amazing organization system. As I did, I found a stack of scrapbook pages which I had prepped about 11 years ago (with pictures laid out on pages but not glued in). I decided to pull out my scrapbook supplies and quickly complete those pages. And, as I did, I remembered how much I love the process of scrapbooking. There is something about the tactile experience of touching the photos and paper which satisfies my creative needs more than digital books do. So, after finishing those few pages I kept organizing old photos in the storage bins and found more stacks of pictures which need to be scrapbooked. That led to me pulling down smaller photo storage boxes I had stored in a closet and I sorted through and organized those photos, pulling out even more photos to scrapbook. It has been a month of big messes, with piles of pictures stacked in every room.

At this point I have set up a scrapbook station in my bedroom. I am trying some time each day working on pages while watching or listening to something. Recently Aubrey and I have been watching the 6 hour Pride and Prejudice while I scrapbook! My goal is to catch up those years which are missing from all of our photo books, parts of 2005-2007 and everything from 2008-2010. A big part of this will be FINALLY documenting the pictures from Joseph's first few years, essentially creating his baby book.

I'm a little scattered, it is true. It is also true that it might be easier for me to focus on one project or era at a time. (I won't even talk about how I also have decided to paint and redocorate most of the house, so there are paint splotches on the walls in most of the rooms, as well as scrapbook supplies and pictures strewn everywhere.) But, in addition to trying to blog/document current events, I am really enjoying documenting the pictures of an earlier era of our lives, when we were so YOUNG and we had all four kids home and life was chaotic and busy and overwhelming and (I can clearly see now) so precious and monumental.

Because I'm a list person and because I have a lot of things I'm trying to fit into each day, I set a goal each day to work a little bit on each of my family historian projects. By the end of this year, I hope to have some true family treasures completed!

28 years!

Dan and I got away to the coast overnight to celebrate 28 years! Aubrey and Joseph took care of each other at home.

We stayed at the Starfish Manor Hotel, which is right on the beach in Lincoln City. Our room was amazing, with a jetted tub hanging out over the beach and a jacuzzi outside on the deck overlooking the ocean.

We drove to the coast through a driving rainstorm and it was bleak, grey, and wet outside. After checking in, we braved the storm to go to dinner. We followed Yelp recommendations to one of the worst Mexican restaurants ever. So disappointing, but it serves us right for trying to find good Mexican food on the Oregon coast. When we got into the hot tub on the deck that night, we watched the strong wind move the sand along the beach so dramatically that the sand looked like water. It was fun to watch the storm! 

The next morning the storm ended and the weather was beautiful. We walked down to the beach for awhile and wished we had arranged to stay for two nights so we could enjoy that day on the beach. 

We packed up and went to lunch at The Wildflower, another highly rated restaurant, which was supposed to have amazing breakfasts, and this time the reviews were totally accurate! We had amazing omelettes, french toast, and hot chocolate. 

We headed home after brunch, grateful for the chance to get away. We'll be back!