A little slice of our days

Picture taking is not my forte, actually I'm pretty terrible at it, but I was looking at the pictures on my phone from this last week, and bad as they are, I wanted to save them here. Do you ever feel nostalgic for something you are in the middle of? I guess that's how I'm feeling today, so in an effort to capture our life, here are a few pictures from this last week that are pretty typical of our life right now

Karl LOVES Food. This baby can put food down like no other baby I've known. He will eat a couple pancakes, a bowl of yogurt and a whole banana for breakfast, and then be hungry as soon as he wakes up from his morning nap.

This smile melts me every time. Here is his newest trick of standing on his head and then trying to do flips on our new rug. It is super soft, and he loves playing on it. 

Duncan is such a social little guy and LOVES his friends. Every day after preschool he asks whose house we are going to, and is traumatized that we are hardly ever going to someones house, ha ha. Here are his best friends at a little Valentines party we had on Valentines day

I found a paper he had been writing/drawing on the other day, and he'd written his name on it, I had no idea he knew how to write his name!

He loves his "glass cups", and is sad when I give him the kid plastic cups. He always asks now "Can I please have a drink of water IN A GLASS CUP"

Jefferson decided he wanted to make a "quilt" for his pony Snowflake a while ago, and we finally got around to making it this week. He chose the fabrics, I helped him draft the pattern, and then he told me the widths and I cut the strips with the rotary cutter, then he pinned and sewed them together, then pinned the pattern on, cut it out, and then sewed a back on, and turned and topstitched it (he had a few areas where the topstitching swayed in from the edge, and he said "I did it on purpose, to make it look extra fancy"). He did it almost all by himself, I was amazed at his patience with this project!

All finished!

My Thoughts are Fragile

One night as I was trying to get dinner on the table Jefferson was telling me about an episode of something he had watched on PBS kids. He was explaining each scene of the show in detail, and I have to admit I was not really listening as I worked around the kitchen. I stopped him, and asked him to clear his project off the dinner table and put his shoes in the closet. He did those things, then came back, paused, then looked at me and declared "You made me forget what I was saying to you! My thoughts are fragile, you can't stop me when I'm in the middle of telling you something!"

I love how he phrases things.

Several times recently I've seen this quote floating around the internet:
"Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big. Because to them, all of it has always been big stuff" Catherine M. Wallace

Sadly, I have always been much better at making noise then listening. From the time I was little I've been a non-stop chatter-box. I remember my grandma always saying "You just never stop talking!"

Jefferson takes after me in that way, and processes things by talking through them. He wakes up talking and falls asleep mid-sentence sometimes, and then talks in his sleep during the night.

I'm trying to figure out ways to set times of when I can give full attention to him and still encourage him talking to me, but also have some time when I am "off the clock", if that makes sense. I don't feel capable of "listening eagerly" all day (I wish I did!!), but I do want him to feel loved and like I want to hear things that are important to him.

I am wondering if I set aside small portions of time where I'm listening to him with all my attention, if he will feel heard enough then that he won't feel as needy at the other times? For now that is going to be my goal, a set "Jefferson" time each day when my focus is just him, and then see how that goes and go from there.

Being Happy Now

Today in church in Relief Society (our womens group) we talked about this talk.

Two things really struck me. The first thing she focused on was the enabling power of the atonement, which she said is also called Grace. Recently I've been feeling frustrated at the slowness of change in my life. I just couldn't see that I was making forward progress, even though I really desired and was trying for change.

I think in the past whenever I heard or read the word "grace" I viewed it as a form of pity. Because God felt bad for us, He would still love us, even as imperfect as we were. Today I realized that it is not a form of pity, but a source of power. Because God loves me, He wants me to be powerful and whole, as He is. Further, He knows precisely what I need to become that way, and He offers me His grace to enable me to accomplish that change in ways that I couldn't on my own.

I loved this quote from Elder David  Bednar that the teacher used:
"The gospel of the Savior is not simply about avoiding bad in our lives; it also is essentially about doing and becoming good. And the Atonement provides help for us to overcome and avoid bad and to do and become good. Help from the Savior is available for the entire journey of mortality—from bad to good to better and to change our very nature." (from this talk)

The second thing that struck me was when we talked about this principle: "All that is unfair in life can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ".

The teacher talked about what being "made right" means. That it's not just that we can survive hard things, and in the next life all will be well. But that through the atonement, in THIS life, His love can truly make all things right. It won't solve all our problems, but we can be just as happy and just as full of love as if our lives were "perfect". I realized that often I put off happiness, saying "after such-and-such happens, I will feel so much happier", but it really struck me that I will never be any happier than I am today. Or I guess I should say my capacity for peace and happiness in my life is complete today, that through Christ I can have full joy in my life today, and it's a choice I need to make, not something external that needs to happen in my life.

I am feeling very grateful today for God's love for me, for His patience and continued reaching out and lifting up. I feel hopeful that through His love I CAN change, and can become a better, kinder person, more like Him.

Block Party. Or Blocks and Partys.

I seem to have a case of writers block. If you can have writers block and not even be a proper writer. Every time I sit down to write a post I get overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, or discouraged, and have a small slew of unpublished posts building up. So I'm going to hit publish today, that is my goal.

This Saturday we're hosting a 4th of July breakfast party. This is the first real party I've hosted in my life, and I'm pretty nervous. I keep thinking through all the steps of each thing I need to make, obsessing over if I've forgotten anything important. I'm sure I will have forgotten something when all is said and done, but I really hope I've remembered enough that things will go smoothly. But I'm determined not to stress about it, and just have fun with it. I will return and report with my notes from what I learned for next year after the party.

The 4th of July has been my favorite holiday for most my life. My memories of the 4th while growing up are filled with hiking, swimming, water fights, bbq's and homemade ice cream. I think the thing that I enjoyed the most about the holiday is it never felt stressful. While I liked Christmas, there was an element of stress surrounding it that I didn't like. The 4th was also full of family time and good food, but without the stress, and it wasn't cold outside, win-win.


Anyway, I don't really have a point to this post, so I'll just say - Here's to a happy stress-free 4th of July :)

Amazing Grace

Last week I was reading the April 2012 Ensign, and there was an article titled "Amazing Grace". In it, the author says "Consider writing in your journal and sharing with your family about times when you have felt the Lord's grace healing, helping, or strengthening you".

When I read that I realized I haven't written down how much I have felt helped this year. I really forgot how hard it is to function on not much sleep, and how time consuming newborns really are. And there have been a few times since Karl has been born that I felt really depressed that I just couldn't do it. But consistently every time I have started the day while reading my scriptures while I'm nursing instead of reading my emails or blogs or whatever, I have been amazed at how well I have been able to cope with how little sleep I've had, and I truly feel it has been because He is helping me do things I could not do alone.

One instance in particular where I powerfully felt that help is while we were in Utah. On the day Erin was getting married,  when Karl woke up at 4:00 to eat, I was reading my scriptures while he nursed. I read some verses about the Lord strengthening the people of Nephi. I thought that there were probably ways I could serve that day, and the Lord could strengthen me too. So instead of going back to sleep I got ready and then when I heard people up and about downstairs I went down and was able to help with a few things down there. It really was more for me then anyone else, but I was so happy to be able to be there as Erin got ready to go to the temple, it was a really awesome sister time. The whole day was long and busy, but I had energy all day long, and although it was hard at time with the boys, we made it, and had a really great day.

So that's my little journal entry of when I've felt His grace strengthening me :)

Cereal

I found this on my computer today, I wrote it right after Grant and I got married. The memories made me smile and I decided to post it since I can't seem to write anything today :)

I try to be healthy. I try and exercise on a regular basis. I eat my vegetables, and always ignore my inner child and buy the bread that’s brown with the crunchy stuff in it instead of wonder bread. So when we went shopping yesterday, as Grant picked up his box of chocolate and peanut butter cereal, I dutifully walked over to the “grown-up” cereal section and picked up a granola-y looking concoction of “multigrain clusters”, because it told me it was a "healthy way to start my day".

So this morning, as I crunch on my “healthy” cereal, which, by the way, has a weird aftertaste, I start reading my cereal box. Unlike my husbands chocolate cereal, that had games on the back, mine only had an advertisement for energy bars. So for lack of anything better to do, I turn my box to the nutrition information. First thing I see is that my cereal has 13g of sugar. Not being any kind of dietician, I don’t know what that means, but it must be good, because it’s on healthy cereal, so I’m guessing that’s a low amount. Just for the sake of comparison, I grab my husbands cereal box. Sugar, 13g. Wait a second, that must be some kind of mistake (double check…..), nope, both cereals have the same amount of sugar. I keep reading, thinking somewhere my cereal will come out on top. Calories in mine:190. Calories in his: 130. Okay, it will get better, I’m sure, next on the list is Fat. Mine: 3g, His 3g. Hm. Neither of them have any cholesterol, his cereal has 23g of Carbohydrates, mine has 36g. His has more Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Vitamin D, actually, it has more of every beneficial looking item on the list. The ONLY place my cereal seems to come out on top is Sodium. Mine: 95mg, his: 180mg.

By the time I had finished this comparison, my husband was feeling pretty smug, and I was feeling pretty sheepish. I guess I’m going to have to go back to eating cheerios every morning. Until then, I had something important to do. I walked to the sink, and watched with satisfaction as the disposal ground up those healthy little multi-grain clusters into oblivion, and poured myself a big bowl of chocolate peanut butter cereal. Boy was it good.

Quick quote

"You cannot drive people to do things which are right, but you can love them into doing them, if your example is of such a character that they can see you mean what you say" - George Albert Smith