12th Birthday Extravaganza

Aubrey had a really hard time thinking of anything she wanted for her birthday this year.  Inspired by a trip her cousin Brynlie took with her mom Ali, Aubrey suggested that maybe she would like to spend time with me alone for a little girl's trip for her birthday gift.

So that's what we did.  Dan and I decided to incorporate some theater into the trip, as Aubrey loves all things theater, especially musical theater.  I looked at all the possibilities for plays in the immediate and not-too-far-flung vicinity, and settled on Utah, where we could see two plays at the Hale Center Theaters and stay with my parents.

On Tuesday, April 3rd Aubrey and I flew to Salt Lake City on the same flight as Grandma and Grandpa Springer, who had visited us for five days to see Aubrey's play.  Once we landed, I rented a car and we loaded up and headed toward a very important destination.

That's right . . . . Cafe Rio.  All of you out there who have a Cafe Rio nearby, we are very jealous.  We dream about the stuff.  And we make knock-off versions Cafe Rio dishes, but they are never quite the same.  Yum.

 

We then headed to Grandma and Grandpa's house, where we got settled in the guest room. Within a few hours, Aubrey and I left to go to our first play . . . Zorro the Musical.

This was the U.S. debut of a musical which has been a huge hit overseas.  It was amazing.  Seriously amazing.  The singing, dancing, staging, and spectacle was just great.  One of our favorites (after the all-time favorites: Les Mis and Wicked).
 
On the way to the play we stopped at Great Harvest Bread to get some cookie treats.  And the nice salesperson gave us cookies for free!

I loved everything about the evening.  The play, the food, and especially the fabulous company.

The next day we slept in a bit (which was heavenly), so Grandma and Grandpa were gone. In fact, we didn't really see them much for the rest of the trip, because they left early in the morning for work and were asleep by the time we got back from our plays each night.

We ate Cafe Rio leftovers and then took off shopping at the newly remodeled Fashion Place mall.  We bought Aubrey some Toms shoes (which we returned the next week because they formed holes over the toes after five days).  We also did a mini-makeover at Sephora and bought some basic makeup for Aubrey.

Aubrey was super-duper anxious to go pick up her best friend Breanne, so we headed back to Sandy. After the enthusiastic reuniting with Breanne (they have been best friends since they were 2 years old), we drove to Provo.

 Where we shopped for a few hours.  Trying on all the high heels the girls could find

And looking at all the fun stuff in the Disney Store.  How is that for a juxtaposition . . . two girls caught between a love of little girl toys toys and a desire to grow up and wear high heels.

And here is "Belle" pictured next to a singing Belle doll.  The doll sang off tune.  Aubrey, aka "Belle" sang right on tune!
 

Finally, we enjoyed dinner at Aubrey's favorite restaurant, Olive Garden.

And then we drove to Hale Center Theater in Orem for a presentation of Xanadu.  It was fun - a perfect movie for two almost-teenagers and one Mom who remembers the 80s really well.

 

And then it was home to Sandy for an Aubrey and Breanne sleepover.  I had to remind them about 1,000 times to keep their giggles down so Grandma and Grandpa could sleep upstairs! 

The next morning we drove to the Trax station and rode the train to downtown Salt Lake.  The new City Creek outdoor mall had just opened (right across the street from the Salt Lake Temple), so we checked it out. It was beautiful, upscale, and very crowded!

 There is a really cool fountain which does an elaborate show on the hour.

 A picture in front of Tiffany & Co.

The gates of the Salt Lake Temple grounds are directly opposite the opening of the City Creek Center.  It is a really classy development and makes the area south of the temple a continuation of the beauty across the street.

 We had to try some Godiva chocolate.  I think it was something like $3 a truffle.  Expensive but worth it!

 A cool sculpture in the center of City Creek.

 Wow - look at the movie star!

 Aubrey is a big fan of cute hats.

 

 

 

Our final stop was the Conference Center, which neither Breanne nor Aubrey had ever visited.  We took a quick personalized tour, since we knew we had to get to the airport within a little over an hour.

 

Then, just before this picture was taken I got a text telling me that our flight was delayed three hours.  So, we took our time and saw all the art galleries.

 We loved this statue of God the Father and Jesus Christ appearing to Joseph Smith. When the statue rotates around, you can see that the Father has His arm around His Son.

 

 We checked out out the Friberg paintings up close, marveling at the layered brush strokes.

 

 And, the beautiful room-sized painting of the Savior appearing to the Nephites.

 One final stop before our flight home . . . Cafe Rio, of course!

It was a privilege to spend a few days alone with my favorite Aubrey. I consider it a great blessing to be her mother!

Trying to catch up . . . . Conference and Easter

I'm still woefully behind.  Doing my best.  Sorry for the glimpses back into the spring when most of the U.S. is firmly planted in summer.

Grandma and Grandpa Springer were at our house for Conference this year (and Aubrey's play).  They were very helpful, and we loved having them visit.  This year we tried something new instead of Conference Bingo.  Dan typed up some topics which might be mentioned in Conference, and Joseph cut them into individual strips.  We filled bowls with different types of candy and put them by the fireplace. Every time the kids heard the topic mentioned they ran up to get a piece of the correlating candy.  It was a hit!

 

 

We also wrote the topics of the talks on papers, which we posted by the pictures of the General Authorities on the fireplace.

And Joseph and Dan built a tent fort, with an opening so Joseph could see the TV.  Inbetween Conference sessions (and Aubrey's performances) Joseph entertained himself by playing with the "Talking Tom" app on Grandma's iphone. He loved it. Did we love hearing Tom parrot everything we said for hours on end? Hmmmm, let me think about that one.

Oh, and at one point Joseph created a fake bloody injury on his arm.  Very cool and entertaining.

And now on to Easter.  I could only talk two of the kids into decorating Easter eggs, but they did a fantastic job of it.

And, once again, only the youngest two would take pictures next to their Easter baskets.

Below, the letter exchange between Joseph and the Easter Bunny.

 

Aubrey and Joseph hunting eggs in the grass in the back yard.

 

 

 

 

 It was a lovely Easter Sunday!

Fleece sheets all year long

On this rainy, chilly June morning (is there any other type of weather in June in Vancouver?) I am remembering an incident when my sister Ali and family visited us last August.  Ali wanted to take a nap in a quiet place, so she slipped into Brandon's old bedroom.  But, it was a nice warm day, and she was too warm to sleep.  She pointed out to me that it must have been because we had forgotten to take the fleece sheets off the bed in Brandon's room when he left on his mission in May.

And then I had to stop and seriously re-orient to what is reality for everyone else in the U.S. Because ALL our beds were still made up with fleece sheets.  At the beginning of August. Not just the bed belonging to the child who had been gone for three months.

Because, with the exception of a few weeks at the end of July/beginning of August,  it is chilly enough for fleece sheets every night, all year long.  And the chill in the Pacific NW is a very particular kind of cold, which gets into your bones and requires gallons of Starbucks dark chocolate hot cocoa to rectify. 

So, if you come visit us (and please visit us!) we promise you lots of rain, beautiful green everywhere, possibly a little sunshine, and soft fleece sheets.

A sad birthday tale and other stories of a crazy day

I can't believe my baby girl turned 15 years old. I have lots of sentimental and mushy things to say, all of which will purposely embarrass her completely, but I will save those for another post.  This is a different sort of post, a story about a birthday filled with tears and laughter.

We'll start at the end, because that was the most significant part.  Bailey enthusiastically went to Mutual on the eve of her birthday, dressed in her cute new birthday clothes.  It was an outdoor Olympics-themed joint activity with the young men.  In completing the activities, her super spectacular new sparkly boat shoes got muddy.  But wait . . . it gets worse, much worse.

Near the end of the Mutual activity Bailey, along with three friends, was running across the parking lot.  She tripped on a loose piece of metal grate (cutting up her ankle pretty badly) and then fell HARD off the sidewalk curb and onto the asphalt parking lot. It happened so fast that she couldn't use her hands to catch her fall, so her chin hit the ground first.  Followed by some skidding across the ground which roughed up her arm and knee.  People who were watching said that the impact caused her legs to go up backwards toward her head.

Bailey reports that at first she just felt embarrassed to have fallen, and she stood up and thought she was pretty much okay.  It was when everyone around her gasped in horror at the blood coming from her chin that she knew there was a problem.  Even then, she was pretty calm until some leaders started to explain in detail how serious it looked, and that she would definitely need stitches.

Pause the story for a moment.  I would like to point out that we made it through 20 years and 3 months of parenting without ever having a child need stitches.  In fact, I was the first person to need stitches in our family, when I had an unfortunate run-in with a hedge trimmer last fall.  Bailey was pretty understandably freaked out by the idea of needles and blood and pain. 

Young Women leaders immediately started calling Dan and I to come to get Bailey. Unfortunately, we were standing in our entryway talking about alarm systems (more on this in a minute), so we didn't hear the calls for awhile. Finally, Dan looked down at his phone and noticed an urgent text, at which point I jumped into the car, raced to the church, and found Bailey with at least 25 people gathered around her.  Very unfortunately, our Bishop who is a doctor and is OUR doctor, wasn't at this activity.  So, the leaders in charge did their best to put pressure on the wound with a baby wipe while the young women tried to distract Bailey with funny stories.

Bailey and I took off quickly to the closest emergency room, where we waited for half an hour.  Last fall I got a lot quicker response when I showed up at the Urgent Care to get stitches in my hand, but that might be because I was actively bleeding all over the check-in counter. Unfortunately or fortunately for Bailey, the blood flow had slowed, so we weren't #1 priority.

We amused ourselves by taking pictures:

Bailey wouldn't let me take any pictures of the most serious injury on her chin.  Just use your imagination as you look at this picture of her applying pressure with gauze.

Bailey also quickly realized that she could utilize the power of facebook to get sympathy, so she posted this:

For the next two hours in the ER she distracted herself by checking facebook on her ipod repeatedly to see who had commented on her status update.

Once we were back in the pediatric ER (Bailey takes exception to being classified as a pediatric patient)., the nurse set to work picking gravel out of her wounds.  Luckily, they first poured a wonderful numbing elixir onto the wounds - and she never felt a thing!

Dan joined us in the treatment room after picking up Aubrey from a theater practice and getting the kids situated at home. 

We made sure to tell everyone who entered the room that it was Bailey's birthday.  Ya gotta get your birthday fun somehow, right?

Once Bailey realized that the stitches weren't going to hurt at all, she was back to her optimistic and cheery self. We did a lot of laughing while we waited.  I also love what she said on the way home: "Today I got a lot of attention at school for it being my birthday. Well, tomorrow I plan to milk it and get even more attention for getting injured on my birthday!"  And she did.

At about 11 p.m. we finally were able to go home with her battle wounds.  After we got home and settled the younger kids to bed, Bailey and I enjoyed a slice of her amazing chocolate cheesecake (at midnight) and she opened her presents.

A little postscript: when we arrived home Aubrey and Joseph were still awake. We couldn't possibly be upset that they hadn't gone to sleep, though, because they spent hours straightening the house, including Bailey's bedroom, and left Bailey sweet notes and messages all over the house.

Now, if anyone is till reading, I am going to record a little bit about the rest of the crazy day.

It's the end of the school year, and that means that every day is filled with homework projects to finish, tests to take, and programs at the elementary school. Add to that the frenetic end to the baseball season, piano recitals, "tech week" for the show Aubrey is in this weekend, AND, of course a birthday.  It was quite a day.  Starting at 5:30 a.m. with breakfast in bed for the birthday girl. Inbetween everything else during the day, I ran to the Dollar Store to get some bday decorations for the house, ran to the grocery store to get supplies for Bailey's fancy birthday dinner, and made a triple chocolate cheesecake (for the first time!).

We had to go into overdrive to fit in the birthday dinner before we had to leave to take Joseph to his first "playoff" baseball game.  So Dan got home early and we started eating at 4:45 p.m.  We ran out of time to have cheesecake and for Bailey to open her sibling gifts, so we decided to save those for after Mutual. Aubrey had rehearsal after dinner, but Bailey really wanted to go to Mutual on her birthday.  So she did.

Meanwhile, Dan and I were watching baseball.  Two of Joseph's buddies were watching the game with us.  At the end of the game we brought home the two buddies, plus we picked up three more little boys from a friend at the church (she needed someone to watch her kids while she was at Mutual).  We brought all six boys home to find . . . .

Brother D waiting on our doorstep. You see, a few months ago when I was Nevada with my mom and sisters, Dan attended the YW Service Auction fundraiser.  He was very supportive of the fundraiser and bought all sorts of things, including a "home inspection and safety evaluation" from Brother D who is a police officer.

Somehow we forgot that Dan had scheduled the safety evaluation for this very night, the night that we had six extra kids.  And a huge birthday mess/busy week mess throughout the house.  And I mean BIG mess. It had been so crazy that there were piles of laundry, clean and dirty, in our bedroom, and the remains of our big dinner we ate in a big hurry still all over the kitchen.  So Brother D proceeded to do the safety inspection, which necessitated walking through almost every room of our house to inspect the windows, doors, etc.  I was so humiliated.  I seriously have nightmares about people unexpectedly dropping by my house and walking through a huge mess. Several times I excused myself to "check on the kids" (who were doing fine) so I could go into an adjoining room and scoop stuff out of the way. It was an agonizing experience for me to sit and talk about security systems and door locks for an hour and a half while walking through my messy house while six rowdy boys raced in and out of the house. 

We were still standing in the entryway talking about home invasions and burglary and other cheery stuff when we heard our phone ring. We ignored it.  But then cell phones started going off repeatedly.  Finally Dan looked down at his phone and noticed that we were getting urgent messages from the church: "Come quickly - Bailey has been hurt."

So, now we're back to where I began my very long tale.  I ran to pick up Bailey.  Dan waited until parents could pick up the extra kids and then retrieved Aubrey from practice before meeting us at the ER.

And that's apparently how we do birthdays around here. Thank goodness birthdays only come once a year - I can't handle all the excitement!

Book Club Fun

Two months ago our family was invited to join a "family book club."  Previously this book club had included three families who live in the area who meet once a month to discuss a book. Everyone 12 and older is invited to "host" a month by choosing the book and planning the meal and activities to coordinate with the theme of the book.  Before we joined the group, everyone in the book club was related - the three women are sisters, so it was truly a family book club.  I've been secretly envious for awhile - because discussing books is one of my favorite things to do. Discussing books along with my husband and kids is over-the-top awesome. I have been impressed over the years with the very intellectual books they have discussed, and I think it's a great experience for teenagers to be part of the discussion.  The families have reported that their older teenagers have been able to use their increased knowledge about books to help them in high school and at college.  Also, I really miss loud and chaotic family get-togethers that happen when family lives nearby; eating together, laughing, visiting, and younger kids running in and out and making lots of happy noise.

So, we were pretty excited when the book club voted to envelope the Porter family into the book-themed fun.

One more notable thing about these book clubs:  the families involved are very dramatic, super creative, very opinionated and really into the "theme" part of the book club/dinner.  We knew we had to come up with something fun when it was our turn.

This last week we hosted book club.  We chose the book The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  It is a classic book, made up of letters from Screwtape, a master devil, to his nephew Wormwood, with advice about all the sneaky ways devils can tempt humans.  We had owned the book for at least a decade, have heard it quoted in Conference almost every year, but had never read it.

This is the email we sent out a week before the event:

Attention

You have been summoned to a meeting of the Heavenly Hosts

On June 3rd at 3 p.m. at the Porter Home

Dear Heavenly Hosts,

It has come to our attention that one of Lucifer’s minions is sending letters to his nephew detailing mortal frailties.  These letters have been intercepted and bound into a book called The Screwtape Letters.  Since we found these letters early there is still plenty of time to prepare our loved ones for these specific temptations.  We need to devise defensive tactics which will be used to combat these attacks.  As one of the Generals in Zion’s Army, you are invited to a strategy meeting.

Please read at least a few of these letters and come prepared to discuss some of the greatest threats to Zion leveled by our nefarious foe.  Be ready to present any counter-offenses we should mount to help our loved ones avoid these attacks.  If you would like, you can bring quotes, scriptures, etc. which will support your planned counter-offense.  We encourage you to come in uniform (any white shirt or T-shirt).

Sincerely,

General Tiffany

General Daniel

This was Dan's book - I'll get my turn to choose another book in September - so he planned the activity. We set up a "war room" in our family room, complete with a table filled with battle ships and army guys.  Dan prepared folders for each of the participants of the War Council:

Inside was a strategy sheet.  As fellow angels attending the meeting of Heavenly Hosts, Dan led a lively discussion about the types of threats that the devil "Screwtape" and his counterparts were leveling at humans.  Once we identified the threat, we talked about the appropriate defenses. Dan took notes on a big white board and everyone else took notes on their strategy sheet.  It was a great discussion, and uplifting, also. I especially liked seeing the teenagers involved and excited about the things they had read in The Screwtape Letters.

Before we discussed we ate dinner.   Bailey and Aubrey created a menu to post by the food.  They referenced the virtues talked about in the book:

The girls really enjoyed helping to prepare the menu and the food. Joseph had fun running around with the other kids his age while the big people talked.

It was awesome - a really happy day!