Yule Ball 2015

Our stake's annual Yule Ball is a big deal at our house. We have helped with it since the very first year when Brandon was a senior in high school. That year and every year since then Dan has been in charge of the music and program. It is a magical night and a great opportunity for all the older youth to experience a formal dance and get to know a number of people.  

Bailey invited any interested young women to get ready at our house during the afternoon before the dance.  That required some SERIOUS deep cleaning of all the bathrooms since they were completely taken over by makeup and hair preparations.

We were so sad that it was pouring rain outside and we couldn't take pictures of the girls outside.  The inside pictures are shadowy and grainy, but better than nothing!

 The "blue" group"

 Bailey and her friends Emma and Nina

 The lovely helpers (not quite old enough to go to the dance themselves)

 These two cute couples drove together to the dance. 

 After the group of girls left our house, Aubrey, Joseph and I got ready to help Dan at the dance. This is the first year that Joseph helped, and he was very excited to be included in the festivities.

 Dan the deejay man.

 Aubrey was the official "deejay helper" until she was tapped to stand in for one of the girls who had just had surgery on her knee.  She was pretty excited to be an official part of the dance!

 And Joseph was thrilled to be the new deejay helper.  

I am a very lucky mother.

 Cute Joseph has practiced the waltz with me in the kitchen for years, so he was more than ready to show off his skills with his very willing sisters.  

 My iphone was not great at capturing pictures in the dim light.

Here all the youth are doing a line dance, including Bailey and Aubrey on the front row!


And deejay Dan is explaining the next dance/activity

Everyone agreed that it was the best year yet for the Yule Ball. We were lucky to be involved with an activity which involved so many amazing youth!

Valentine's Day 2015

Valentine's Day Dinner

The Love Holiday wouldn't be complete without our special dinner. We use china and crystal and everything must be heart shaped, red, or pink.  It was basically a carb and sugar fest, which is just fine.

I seriously need my son who is now an expert on colorizing film/pictures to show me how to effectively remove the yellowy color cast I get when I take pictures inside our house.

We were all trying not to think about the fact that this is probably the last Valentine's Day Dinner Bailey will be able to enjoy with us. Starting next year she will be having fun college adventures.

Dan got a little giddy near the end of the meal and tried to catch a jello heart as it rolled off his forehead toward his mouth . . .

Joseph made a special creation for dessert, eaten as we watched Annie Get Your Gun as a family.

Valentine's treats for the kids

I visited Joseph's school for the mayhem Valentine's party. Such fun chaos!

No Sugar Week

Bailey challenged me to go sugar free with her for a week starting the Monday after Valentine's Day. We both were successful, and it was pretty enlightening to realize how often we reach for a sugary treat when we are bored/stressed.  We decided that moderation is the key, and we don't want to go sugar free forever, but do want to be more intentional about when we have treats.

Speaking of which, this is the first year as far back as I can remember that I did not buy any of my favorite Brach's candy hearts.  I didn't eat even one.  Dan surprised me with a wonderful treat/flowers every day in the week leading up to Valentine's Day and one day brought me some Sweethearts candy hearts. Shhhhh, don't tell him, but I only like the Brach's hearts.  And I don't  just like them, I am addicted to them. So I was pretty proud of myself for avoiding the very sweet and delicious temptation this year!

February tidbits

Dan celebrated the last of his 40s birthdays the end of January. Very unfortunately for him, he had to go to work, but the kids had a day off school for semester break. The kids and I made him a big card and bought some decorations and birthday bling for him at the Dollar Store. Then we surprised him at work to celebrate for a minute. Afterward, the kids and I headed to go shopping for awhile before meeting up with Dan for a birthday dinner.

Walking through Sunshine

We have had an incredible amount of sunshine this winter and very little rain. This has been true across the Western United States, while the East has been pounded with a cold and snowy winter. While I know that a lack of rain will not be a good thing in the summer, right now we are enjoying the beautiful weather. I have been going for 5 mile walks a few days a week with a friend.  Last Monday the kids were off school for President's Day and Bailey agreed to walk and talk with me. She was a fantastic walking partner!

This is what almost all of our gloves look like, with decapitated fingers. This might just be because Joseph consistently needs fingerless gloves for his endless games of spy/ninja warrior/Pokemon trainer.

A few weeks ago Aubrey sang a beautiful duet with Ashley Z at a ward talent show. Ashley also played the ukelele.

I don't want to encourage defacement and graffiti, but this made me giggle. Joseph added "or foe" beneath the "Friend" title on all the magazines in our church bag.  On other covers he also drew beards on all of the people.  He is obviously using his church time wisely.

 The other day I looked at the Superhero menagerie lining the tub in my bathroom and I wanted to freeze time. I love this age and I will miss it someday.

  Last Sunday Joseph set up an art station and worked on drawing for awhile. He offered to give me a drawing lesson "for a dollar."  What I agreed he unsuccessfully tried to up the cost to $5.  He taught me a very helpful lesson about shading, which he had learned from his sister Aubrey.  On the right is my attempt at shading a sphere.

 That same day Aubrey decided she wanted to learn how to play cello, so Joseph happily taught her the basics. In no time at all she picked up the keys and played a simple song!

The Dinner Dilemma

When I was kid and imagined my future life as a wife and mom, one of the things I did NOT look forward to was the prospect of preparing meals three times a day.  My frequent babysitting stints had taught me that kids expected to eat again mere hours after eating a meal, and it took considerable effort to prepare and clean up meal after meal.  And this monotony continued on, every day and forever.

I was right and wrong in my predictions. Preparing food every day is definitely hard and is sometimes boring, although I've actually learned to enjoy cooking and baking and I love to see my family enjoy food I have prepared.  But I way underestimated how monumentally difficult the task of feeding my family would actually be.

I had lots of texture/taste/smell food issues as a kid. In the 1970s I was the classic "picky eater." Now I recognize that my pickiness was the result of a hyperactive tactile sensory system.  Trying to feed me caused my parents lots of grief during my growing up years and I have very few positive memories of mealtimes as a child.

Payback is a bummer.  Genetics have prevailed and each of my kids has tactile defensiveness and other sensory issues, which results in some seriously picky eating.

Trying to provide healthy food for 6 (well, 5 now that Brandon is grown) very different people is a challenge, but these are the things I wrestle with every day which turn it into a perplexing and sometimes frustrating puzzle:

• I really value healthy eating and feel like this is incredibly strong preventive medicine. This means a variety of foods.
• Everyone in the family eats healthy foods but few eat the same healthy foods. They don't even all like the same fruits and vegetables.  Everyone has a few core meals they enjoy and most would be pretty happy to eat the same few meals over and over. 
• But the meals each kid likes don't intersect at all. There isn't a single meal I can make which every single person likes.  Not one.
• I do not want to be a short order cook, preparing 4 different meals. But I also value the positive effects of meal time together, talking and sharing stories about our day. This kind of camaraderie simply does not happen when the anxiety level rises and food becomes a battle.
• And yet, I know from personal experience that the only way to improve issues with foods is repeated exposures to unfamiliar foods. By doing this for most of my life I've learned to like most foods and to love many foods I wouldn't have dreamed of eating as a child. In fact, I'm kind of a "foodie" now and I crave unique, unfamiliar, and ethnic foods. There are still some things I don't like and that's okay. I can work around it. I really try to teach my kids that we all have some foods we may never enjoy, but there is another big category comprised of foods which aren't our favorites but which we can still make ourselves eat.  It's within this category that we can push the limits of what foods we will eat.
• Back to my list of complexities .  . .  our schedule is crazy busy. Just figuring out how to get food prepared at all means that I have to be proactive, prepared, and intentional about menu plans. Last year Bailey suggested that we make a two week calendar of meals (because she has learned to really like new recipes, and she knew that I would never make something new if it wasn't planned way ahead of time).  I have been doing the two week menu, and it has definitely expanded our culinary horizons.
• Except it really hasn't, because a high percentage of family members won't try any new recipes. So I'm back to square one. Going to the extra effort to make something new or fun and also preparing several other meals.
• I've tried every single thing in the picky eating parenting books, to little avail. The long list includes requiring kids to make their own healthy but boring meal if they don't like what we are eating, requiring kids to make a meal every week, asking kids to find recipes for foods they want to try, encouraging them to expand their food repertoire with "lateral moves," foods that are similar to ones they already eat but different in some unique way; incentivizing food bravery, attaching a punishment to the refusal to eat dinner.  Dan and I are always strategizing what we could do differently and trying to figure out why everything we try goes awry. We generally go around in circles and end up at the same few key points:

1. Kids need to eat. Regularly. They also need to learn good health habits regarding food.
2. Kids need to learn to eat food that other people eat so they can co-exist in the real world.
3. We don't want food to be a stressful thing and we don't want mealtimes to be a battleground. At the same time, we do want kids to push themselves to try new foods.
4. The kids are probably not going to push themselves to try those new foods, so it's up to us to enforce it.
5. And now we're back to the crux of the food battles. We have to constantly push something which is really difficult, while at the same time encouraging everyone to eat healthy and well balanced meals and enjoy mealtime. Three times a day.  Whew.

I will say that each of the kids has improved considerably as they have gotten older. It gives me hope for everyone. I can foresee a time when figuring out what to prepare for dinner doesn't require an Excel spreadsheet.

In my lowest moments (and believe me, I have them) I remind myself that I know from personal experience that is is scary and almost painful to confront food issues which are created by misfiring sensory systems and reinforced by anxiety. I truly have empathy for my kids. I also know, and I remind them frequently, that it can get better, but they have to be willing to experience discomfort. I am glad that I have this knowledge so I can do my best to help them. I also know that these will be issues they will continue to work on all their lives. I also have to have hope that somehow it will all work out. That they will grow up to be functional and healthy eating adults who can tackle the picky eating conundrum with their own kids. And when I am the grandma I get to NOT be the bad guy.  Cookies for dinner?  Grandma says yes!

End of January thoughts

Excuse the inevitable typos, because I'm typing with hands that are numb and half frozen.  I just returned from a fantastic 5 1/2 mile walk outside through the fog and light misty rain. It felt so good to really push myself physically, and I had a good talk with a new friend while I walked.

Joseph asked the other day why I haven't updated our blog in awhile. Who knew that he reads it faithfully?  To be honest, not only has life been clipping along at a brisk pace, but there hasn't been anything really notable to document. I plan to upload some pictures from our Christmas trip to Florida, but it has taken me FOREVER to edit them. I took a lot of pictures because I was the only one with a camera.  Here are some random tidbits from our month before we begin February.

New Year's Eve Party . . . Not

Dan was the deejay for the stake youth dance on New Year's Eve, so he and the girls were gone all night (reportedly the dance was very fun).  Joseph and I debated different entertainment options, and were even invited over to hang out at a friend's house. However, what really sounded good to us was staying inside on a cold night and reading our respective books next to eachother in my bed! I love that Joseph has learned to love reading (right now he is reading the Lightning Thief and Heroes of Olympus series'). Whenever he sees me stretched out on the couch with a book he grabs his own book and cuddles next to me.

New Semester

We spent the first few weeks of January getting settled back into school after pulling the kids out for a full week before Christmas. We were so glad to have that time for our vacation, but despite our best efforts to be proactive it has been a painful catch-up time for several of the kids. Somehow, we all survived. 

Today is the first day of the second semester.  That means Aubrey is done with High School Health class and never ever has to be in another awkward health class discussion!  She is very relieved about that fact and has some pretty interesting stories to share about some of the things the students brought up. Things I'm not necessarily going to put on the blog, but ask her if you're interested. Let's just say that she goes to a school where kids feel very comfortable talking about anything and everything.  Which is generally a good thing.   

The vast appeal of English accents

This month I finally caught the Downton Abbey bug, after hearing about it from friends for years.  I don't love every single plot point, but I have fallen in love with the depiction of the era.  The characters, the costumes, the sense of history.  My new Downton Abbey diversion has made ironing 11 dress shirts a week much more bearable for me!

New Years Resolutions

I've also been getting back into exercise after being very lazy over the holidays (except for the fact that we walked over 9 miles a day at Disneyworld!). I wish I loved exercise more. My favorite type of exercise is walking outside, and I enjoy that immensely more when I have someone to talk to. Any other type of exercise requires superhuman effort for me to put away my list of excuses.  I have been doing a reasonably decent job dragging myself to the gym a few times a week as for an intense weights/interval training class. I hate every minute of it but I'm always proud of myself for doing it.  

Relief at the Pump

Gas prices - Wow!  I haven't seen gas this low in a decade.  Our prices are always higher than most of the country (I really don't know why that is the case, other than higher taxes . . .), but I got gas for $1.81 the other day which was a great feeling and left extra cash for the Starbucks hot cocoa I wanted.

The end of an era

In other news, I cleaned out the crayons/playdough/crafty area in a kitchen cabinet this last week and gave away our last coloring books.  I had to confront the fact that no one in our house plays with playdough or colors in coloring books any more.  So sad.

The same day I finally removed all the picture books from Joseph's shelf to make room for the Percy Jackson and Lost Hero books he loves. I have been taking away the  picture books in stages, but recently I realized that he really isn't going to open a picture book to read, no matter how wonderful the story or pictures. Most of the books have joined the many hundreds other books stuffed under every bed and in boxes in the garage.  I will have the best Grandma library someday.

This is how we spend our Friday nights

Joseph  has a basketball game every Friday evening at 6 pm, 7 pm, or 8 pm.  By 9 pm on Friday night Dan and I are walking dead, after running on early morning Seminary schedule all week.  Joseph just finished the first session of 4th grade basketball with the Boys and Girls Club and is starting the second session. This year he has really improved his defense, offense and dribbling skills! It has been so fun to watch him, and we always follow up the games with a trip to get McDonalds ice cream for Joseph and best friend/teammate Alex.

Vocabulary Fun

It's no secret to my family that I like big words. I read so many books as a child that I amassed a big vocabulary, although I didn't always know how to pronounce the words or use them correctly! This year in her pre-AP English class Aubrey had to find 10 challenging vocabulary words per week to analyze and define. I was excited to help her find big words and kept a running list on my phone when I heard or thought of a good word.  I know, I'm a nerd.  Here are some pages from her vocabulary notebook. She had to explain where she found each of the words.

(Commensurate - got it from mom (notice, my dad does not have as good of a vocab. That's probably where I get it from).

 Ubiquitous - my Mom uses it all. the. time.  (hee hee - it's true. Such a cool word).

Recipe failure and successes

Bailey and I have been trying to find new healthy recipes. Some have been great, others not so good. We should have known these "chocolate" black bean cookies would be nasty when the recipe suggested we reserve some of the whole black beans to "decorate" each cookie.  Seriously, who wants a whole black bean on a cookie as decoration? For that matter, who wants mashed up black beans inside a cookie? Not us, I can tell you.

I did find a recipe I love though, and it's my new go-to healthy snack. I roast chickpeas with olive oil, lime juice, cumin, chili powder, and other spices. The end result is kind of crunchy and spicy. Bailey and Dan think they taste like sawdust, but I think it's a yummy snack which keeps me full for a long time!

Siblings

I love this picture of Aubrey and Joseph after Joseph's basketball game in early January. Dan's face is saying "please, please let me go to sleep."

Huh?

I walked in one day to see the big Lovesac beanbag on top of Joseph? Do you see his feet sticking out like the Wicked Witch of the East when a house fell on her? Apparently he was bored and wanted to know what it would feel like to have a beanbag on his head.

Opening Sibling Gifts

I've been working backward through  my pictures in January, and I just noticed that we didn't open sibling gifts until January 2nd. ? The kids did a great job finding thoughtful gifts for each other.

I love the way Joseph is wiping Bailey's kiss off his face!

New 'dos for a New Year

Finally, the end of December both girls decided to make a big change and get a lot of hair cut off. They were excited about a change and happy with the results. A few weeks after these photos Bailey went back and paid to have some blond highlights added. Look at all the hair on the ground in this photo!

The picture of Aubrey shows her new haircut during a shopping trip later that day.