What we did the week before Easter

We returned late Saturday night from a wonderful trip to Missouri to visit Ellefsens and reluctantly jumped squarely back into a hectic week.  These are some of the things that happened that week:

Dan - got off the plane and, in between helping unpack, do laundry, and grab groceries, started preparing Seminary lessons for the coming week. 

Aubrey - is in the final two weeks of her play Into the Woods. Before Spring Break she had rehearsals 3-4 days a week. On Monday she began daily afterschool practices until 9 p.m. and all day Saturday. This has/will continue(d) for 3 more weeks, except now rehearsal ends at 10 p.m. and performance days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week and next week) she won't be home until 11 p.m.  This is a lot of driving on my part - at this point my car could probably find its way to and from her school without my assistance.

Joseph -is continuing soccer practices and games. The day before Easter I was at the beauty school with Bailey who was getting a prom updo while Dan was at a soccer game with Joseph. It rained so hard that the kids looked like they had jumped in a pool. But in Washington they never cancel soccer for mere rain! 

This week he also began practices for flag football, which he is trying for the first time. He had the same coach a few years ago for soccer and two of his buddies are on the team. After every practice they are muddy!

Tiffany - early morning Monday I was at our church building to start helping with the setup for our stake's annual Life of Christ event. It is so amazing - I can't even describe how unique and elaborate this event is. This is the first year I was the main person in charge of my area (in the past I was a helper in the same area). It was much more time intensive to be the "person in charge," and it still makes me tired to think about that week. I was at the church setting up (putting together the tomb, shoveling dirt, moving rocks, placing arts and plants, etc.) all day every day that week. On Saturday (the night before Easter) I was at the church until midnight, taking down the exhibit.

I was going to add pictures from this year but for some reason can't find them on my computer. So,  moving on.

Bailey - jumped back into preparation for her 4 AP tests and infinitely more fun preparations for Prom. Before we left out of town she had ordered a custom prom dress online from a company based in China. For a really great deal (half the price of most prom dresses) she was able to get a dress which fit her body and was really well made. We don't want to think about what kind of wage the seamstresses were paid to sew the dress. The package from China arrived when we were out of town, so she was excited to try it on.  It looked beautiful.

But she felt like it needed something to give it more "bling." On Wednesday afternoon Bailey and I did a "power shop" at the mall. We looked for (cheap) blingy jewelry, sparkly shoes, and other necessities to make her look her very best. We also borrowed the sash from the dress she bought for Brandon and Angela's wedding. 

But, more about Prom in a separate post.  Bailey also immediately  began preparations for her campaign for senior class activities director: posters, Tshirts, a speech, etc.

And there is a snapshot of our slightly crazy but wonderful life.  Now I need to go run to my exercise class!

The Easter celebration that almost wasn't

We had a busy week last week. The kind of week that had us staggering to the finish line and exhausted at the thought of Monday coming again so soon.  I'm going to let that fact take the blame for our pathetic Easter celebration.  

Before I list some of the things that kept us so busy during the week, I'll describe our Easter Sunday.

7 a.m. - In the interest of neighborly camaraderie, I dragged myself out of bed after getting to bed very late and threw together some breakfast-type food to take to the annual early morning Easter egg hunt held in our cul-de-sac.

8 a.m. - I tried to get family members to get up, but they were all also very tired, and only Dan and Joseph slowly made their way downstairs. In the meantime, some neighborhood kids knocked on the door to tell us that we were late and were holding up everyone's egg hunt. We made it across the street almost half an hour late.  Joseph found his 9 eggs and we talked to neighbors for a bit and then headed back to the house.

Joseph was the only kid who really cared about what was in his Easter basket. Coincidentally, he is the only kid who has a picture of himself by his Easter basket. He received a furry bear friend he has dubbed "Lee Bear."  Lee Bear likes to read, snuggle, and just hang out amiably.

10:50 a.m. - We careened out of the house toward the church building, almost late but with everyone awake and dressed for church. We did not, however, have time to take an Easter morning picture of everyone in their finery. It's the first time in the history of our family that we haven't taken an Easter morning picture. I told everyone we are taking one next week and pretending it is Easter.

2:30 p.m. - Home from church. Dan stumbled up the stairs and collapsed on the bed, oblivious to the need for food. I threw a few random food items at children in the vicinity and then staggered up to bed as well. In fact, everyone was asleep in short order (except for poor Bailey, who had been so busy all weekend she hadn't addressed the homework for her 4 AP classes, so she spent the afternoon studying).  Joseph actually fell asleep face down on the floor. Do you think we were all a little tired??

6:40 p.m. - I opened my eyes slowly, wondering where and who I was. It took a few minutes for me to realize that we had slept the day away. We had slept EASTER afternoon away. And, sadly, no nice little elves had cooked us our Easter dinner. We also hadn't done anything else Easter-related the entire week, so we had several must-do traditions still on the docket for the evening. 

The night before Easter I had arrived home past midnight and Dan and I then assisted the Easter bunny by hunting down our Easter baskets in the garage. Luckily, we set out the baskets in time for the bunny to fill them with candy, books, and a few small gifts. 

In the week before Easter we did manage to focus our scripture study on the Savior's last week before His crucifixion and resurrection.  We also covered the fireplace with pictures of Jesus and watched some fantastic movies about Christ's life earlier in the week.


7:00 p.m. - Now wide awake and slightly panicked as the sun was beginning to set, I quickly dumped out the candy from everyone's plastic Easter eggs and stuffed them with coins. Then I threw the eggs out in the backyard and summoned the kids for the traditional family egg hunt in the backyard. Excited about the prospect of some extra coins for the piggy bank, Joseph and Aubrey joined me for the hunt.

 Joseph was the lucky one who found pesos from Mexico mixed into the coins in his egg. Oops!

We pulled together a passably decent Easter dinner with impressive speed, and at 8:00 p.m. we finally sat down to eat. 

Joseph was in charge of decorating the table, and he did a great job, even making "Happy Easter" signs for each place setting.

 We call this the "Logan Ellefsen smile." When I finally get the Missouri pictures posted, it will be clear why that is the case!  

 Bailey was at the table too but declined to be captured in a photo.

 Ham, potatoes, various fruits and veggies, rosemary garlic bread, and strawberry shortcake for dessert!

During dinner we had a really fun gospel discussion, with the kids all posing questions they have been wondering about. I love those kind of discussions.

Finally dinner was done and more or less cleaned up, and at 
9:30 p.m. on Easter evening we colored Easter eggs. Why bother at that point?  So we could take a picture of it, of course, and so our 9 year old didn't feel cheated.

And now, I have so much more to say about our busy week but this post is getting ridiculously long. So I'll start fresh with a new post. 

Here's to Easter 2014, a year in which we didn't do everything perfectly, but did focus on what really matters . . . our Savior Jesus Christ and our family.

March

And, a few random March (non birthday) events:

I have been patting myself on the back for being the mean Mom who requires children to take piano lessons, drives them to uncounted lessons over the years, and calmly ignores their protests and pleas to stop lessons. All of the kids love music, and lately some beautiful solos and duets are happening in our house!

When Brandon lived at home we had a birthday celebration every St. Patrick's Day, but now that he is off on his own we aren't able to party with him.  Instead, we had a special St. Patrick's Day dinner. When Joseph saw me preparing the green food, he decided that we needed to have a Porter Restaurant, and he would be the very official looking maitre'd.  He set up a table to greet guests, complete with a plant, a notebook to track availability at the tables, and a bell to ring.

February

A roundup of some of our February 2014 activities:

One or two Battle of the Books competitions per week for Joseph:

Basketball games every Friday night for Joseph, in which we were able to see him put into practice many of the new basketball skills he has worked so hard on:

Next in the Birthday Month lineup, Joseph's actual birthday (two weeks after his birthday party)

Joseph's birthday started very early in the morning for me. I remembered during the night that he had requested white powdered donuts as part of his birthday meal (which also included strawberries, muffins, and bacon.) I had forgotten to buy the oh-so-important donuts, so after I got Dan and Bailey off to Seminary I dashed over to the nearby Minit Mart and grabbed an incredibly overpriced package of donuts.

And, it turns out, the Franz brand donuts are not nearly as preferred by the Porter kids as is the Hostess brand. Thus, my early morning donut run was in vain and no one ate them.

I think this next series of pictures is funny. We brought in Joseph's tray of food and sang him happy birthday and then I started taking some pictures. First it looked like he couldn't even open his eyes.

March birthdays marched onward . . . Aubrey turned 14!

Aubrey's birthday fell on Fast Sunday this year, which meant that she didn't have the traditional breakfast in bed. Instead, we planned to have her come home from church, climb into pjs, and then receive her "breakfast in bed" at 2 p.m.

It didn't quite work out that way, but she was flexible.  At church we realized that some good friends needed to spend the day in the hospital with their oldest son, so we invited their four younger kids to come over to our house. When the friends came to drop the younger kids off, we invited them to share some of our piping hot french toast with buttermilk syrup. They were happy to get some lunch, but poor Aubrey . . . we had her breakfast in bed tray ready to transport upstairs but got distracted by the company. Eventually she came downstairs where she enjoyed her brunch with the rest of us.

Everything is Awesome . . . Joseph's 9th birthday

Joseph had a fantastic birthday, starting with a party a few weeks before his birthday. We timed the party to coincide with the release of the new Lego movie.

 Dan and I worked together to decorate for the party

As each of the eight kids arrived they were greeted and handed a scorecard for six fun activities. When they had completed all six they could earn a prize (candy for the Lego movie).

Update on life

We wore what in the 1980s?

Today at Joseph's school it was "dress like the 70s and 80s day" for a spirit week activity. I have to admit that I was stumped by this one. I mean, I lived through the 70s and 80s, and as far as I remember the boys dressed pretty much like they dress now - jeans and Tshirts.  Joseph told me that I was wrong, and in the 70s and 80s everyone (boys and girls) wore tie-dye shirts and neon pink headbands around their heads.  When we got to the school, sure enough, everyone had on neon headbands and tie-dye. How strange it is to have lived long enough to see extreme and convoluted interpretations of fashions of a particular era. Wait . . . does that mean that in the 50s they didn't all wear poodle skirts and ponytails or white Tshirts with leather jackets every day??

I have passed 3rd grade three more times

50 wonderful years!

Going back to the last weekend in January . . . .  Dan's parents were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. They were adamant that they didn't want a party, but Dan bought tickets anyway to go down on the anniversary weekend. I bought tickets also but we didn't tell them yet since we weren't sure it would work out for both of us to go.  (And it wouldn't have worked out if there hadn't been a last minute change to the date of Bailey's formal dance, which freed up both Dan and I on that weekend.)

As far as the parents knew, only Dan was coming, and he wasn't coming until two days after the anniversary. They called their daughter Jenny and told her to get the kids who were in town together to go to dinner with Dan on Saturday night while he was visiting.

What they didn't know was that Dan's sister Julie came up with a plan whereby all the kids/spouses would come to town SECRETLY. 

A partially documented life

I am sort of a failure at personal history documentation. I haven't been consistent at journal keeping since I was 10, but a few times a year my guilt and desire to leave a record of my life and thoughts inspires me to start a fresh journal/gratitude journal. Then after a few days I inevitably forget about it. I have a lot of mostly empty journals.

I am a little better about documenting the events in our family, but I've been inconsistent over the years. I used to scrapbook back when it was the hippest thing to do. I did enjoy the crafting process, although I was never an expert. But I liked both the times I worked on it alone because it was a break from early mothering life and the times scrapbooking was a social event, especially when my sisters and I would gather and scrapbook and laugh while our little kiddos ran around behind us.  But scrapbooking ended for me about the time Joseph was born and we moved to Washington. I feel kind of bad about this, especially since Bailey and Brandon literally have a scrapbook for every 6 months of their early childhood, Aubrey has quite a few books of her life, and Joseph has . . . not much.

I dabble in other ways to document our family, such as printing our digital photo books. I started with the goal of creating one book per kid per year. I think I did this for 3 years and made it through 2009, so I believe I'm a little behind.

And I have been trying to keep up this family blog and then print out a blog book as as record for our family.  Except I haven't actually printed out a blog book since 2010. I WILL though, I'm sure of it. I do feel good about having documented the basics of our lives in some form on this blog, but I am constantly behind. Even when I give extra time and Herculean effort to get caught up (like I did in January and February of this year), once my attention is diverted by actually living our hectic and crazy life rather than writing about it I am instantly behind again.

What is truly missing, though, is a habit and plan for me to document things other than the events of our lives. I try to do this on the family blog now and then, but the truth is that I can't even keep up on documenting what happens, so I rarely get around to talking about what I think about things or other interesting topics. 

I have all these ideas for blog posts floating around my mind, things that would give my future posterity insight into me and our family, something more than the usual litany of events. But, so far I haven't found time to actually write any of these posts. I keep a list on my phone, though, for that magical moment when I am caught up on blogging events and have free time (ha ha ha ha).  

Someday I hope to talk about

• All the technologies that I insisted that I didn't need or want and Dan bought me anyway and now I can't live without. And why I love them so much and why I love my husband who sees through my protestations of frugality to what will really make my life easier.
• Random facts about me. Like the fact that I read newspapers and magazines from the back page to the front. And I always take the stairs two at a time. Everyone else posts random facts on facebook, but I have a phobia about posting on facebook so I thought I would post them somewhere where no one will read them. Maybe I should actually do a post someday about why I have such a fear about posting on facebook?
• Sunrise, Sunset  .  .  . the reason why I sing this song from Fiddler on the Roof all the time and feel happy and sad and bittersweet about our kids growing up. And the advice that I would give to myself as a new mother, if I could travel back in time. 
• My obsession with juggling a crazy number of book clubs and reading 6-7 books simultaneously. I think I need an intervention.

My Grandma Springer was one of my favorite people ever - there are so many amazing things about her. I remember her being a great journal writer and I believe she wrote something in her journal almost every day, at least in her later years. One day when I was about 10 I was staying with Grandma and Grandpa in Utah for a few weeks. I was a very curious child, and one day I couldn't help but peek into Grandma's journal, sitting next to her recliner. I expected that my glimpse into the mind and world of an adult would be really intriguing. The two page spread I sneaked a look at was filled with a few lines for each day, on which Grandma had recorded the weather, the time of the sunrise and sunset, and who had stopped by that day. I remember being so disappointed. This was exciting life of an adult and this was adult journal writing? Maybe that's why I stopped keeping up my own journal about that same time?  No, probably not. I never saw any of Grandma's journals after she passed away, and maybe she regularly shared things from her heart and I just happened to see a really boring week, but I've always remembered my sneaky peek into her personal record (sorry Grandma).

Sometimes I wonder what a historian would infer about me as a person by piecing together the documentation I will leave behind. I'm guessing that it will be easy to make inferences about what is important to me and what I enjoy by the types of things I write about our family, but I'm not sure there will be much in the way of a "primary source." I want my descendants to know that I was a real person with real thoughts and struggles and feelings.  I do shy away from blogging about some struggles which consume my attention, particularly regarding parenting, because a blog on the internet which my kids and anyone else can read does not feel like the appropriate forum.  But these are important thoughts for me to record, and my kids will probably find value in reading them in future years when they are figuring out their own parenting puzzles. 

A few years ago I received a heavenly reprimand for my failure to write down important things. There was a little occurrence in my life which I could clearly see was the hand of the Lord in directing my life and a tender mercy. At the time I had the distinct impression to go write it down so I could reflect on it later. I didn't do it, even with repeated promptings to do so. A few weeks later I suddenly realized that I could not remember anything about the tender mercy I was supposed to record. Nothing. I could remember everything about how I was prompted to record it, but the memory I was supposed to record was gone. I knew very definitely at that time and now that this was a lesson for me. The Lord has specifically directed me to write down something of value, and my failure to do so had deprived me of a chance to remember it.

This is a weakness of mine, and one I should keep working on. I keep thinking that someday when life isn't so busy I will start seriously writing a personal history/memories/journal. But what are the chances that life is ever going to slow down and if/when it does I will still remember anything interesting?

I've been fascinated lately by reading some of the life stories and first hand journal accounts from some of my ancestors (on familysearch.org - such a cool feature!) It is one thing to see the name and statistical facts of ancestors on paper and another thing altogether to read something that gives insights into their lives. I want to someday leave an interesting legacy for my descendants so I will be more than a name and a birthdate on paper.

So, what to do?  I don't know. I will keep trying. I will attempt to keep up the family blog and probably will keep feeling guilty when I fall behind.  I will continue my practice of placing journals in every convenient spot where I might grab them and write in them . . . next to my scriptures, on my bedside table, in my church bag. I will keep setting the same New Year's goal every year: "write in my journal at least once a week." It is likely that despite all my efforts I will still leave a disjointed legacy and record of my thoughts, but I hold out hope that my partially documented life will be enough.