Heaven on San Juan Island

Today we packed the minivan up to the brim with suitcases, about three dozen bags of groceries, two coolers, and a bunch of kids and made our way up north to the amazingly gorgeous San Juan Islands.  We are renting a house near Friday Harbor for four days this week for the kids' Spring Break. We also brought along one of Heidi's friends from church, Rachel.  I am in heaven.  Not only is the scenery beautiful, the house is comfortable and there is a wonderful hot tub right outside the back door.

Like I said, heaven.

Unfortunately my camera, which has been on the fritz for the last year, has not been replaced yet.  I feel like I am missing a vital appendage.  How can I have a vacation without the proper documentation through fun and crazy photos??  My cell phone camera will have to do. Don't judge me for my grainy vacation pictures...

I guess that I am a photo snob.

We got in tonight close to dinner time.  I threw dinner in the oven while the kids played in the hot tub.  Then after we ate, I hopped in the tub with the kids.  We had a great time laughing together and embarrassing Ethan with female jokes and stories. He tried to outmatch us with a "scary" story from his Scout campout last weekend, about miners who were trapped underground for a year and then emerged with pale white eyes, but it was more comical than terrifying. While we were enjoying the bubbling jets of water and admiring the dark night sky, a deer came prancing up almost to the deck.  He checked us out for about a minute, then moved on.

I thought about how much I am grateful for my family and the fun memories that we can create together. I thought about this beautiful earth that God created for us.  I thought about how lucky we are to be able to experience it and explore it together.

Like I said, heaven.

Project Man

Ethan has been keeping himself busy with some projects of his own lately.

Ethan found an old swiss army knife that was missing a handle at a previous scout camp.  He decided to fabricate his own handle for it out of popsicle sticks.  He glued a stack of them together with wood glue, then cut them in half length-wise, making two equal sides.  He then carved each side to fit the knife, securing them on with super glue.  

Once the handles were in place, he sanded them smooth. Eric found a can of stain and they stained them together.

Ethan's next project was a rubber band gun. He has played with one before, and saw how the mechanism worked to load and fire a series of rubber bands, so he decided to make one for himself. From memory, he assembled his own version out of--what else--popsicle sticks.

The pictures don't do this gun justice. It is full of moving parts that shift and slide next to each other to make the next band descend to be fired.

Ethan's most recent project has been a miniature Millennium Falcon which is laser cut from metal sheets. He punched the pieces out and assembled them, following the blue-print instructions. The packaging said for 14 years and up, so we had to give him a hard time about not being old enough to assemble it, which was laughable.  He had the thing completed in several hours.

I am continually amazed with what this kid comes up with. Most of it is on his own, without any guidance from me or Eric. He has a unique way of looking at things and how they operate, calculating ways to replicate them or even make them better. I love his creative mind and intense focus. It is a pretty inspiring sight to watch him when he is in "the zone."

 

I can only imagine what this little man of mine is capable of achieving....anything!

My Most Excellent Man

Today Eric is in Louisville, Kentucky to receive an award for Excellence in Managed Care at Kindred Healthcare. One of the heads of the company called him personally to notify him of the honor.  Eric, along with other award recipients and the heads of Kindred, will enjoy a special recognition dinner tonight.  I wish that I could be there to share this special night with him.

I hope that Eric knows what a truly excellent man he is.  He could receive an equally prestigious award for Excellence in Service, or Excellence in Fatherhood, or my personal favorite, Excellence in Partnership.  He is reliable, generous, kind, thinks only the best of everyone, and somehow puts up with all my crazy ideas.  He is my very best friend. I don't know where I would be without him.

I am very proud of Eric, and happy that he is receiving recognition for the wonderful, hard-working, innovative man that he is.  But I don't need the head of Kindred Healthcare to tell me how excellent he is.  I discovered that for myself over twenty years ago, as he reached across and took my hand at a church roller-skating party, changing the future of my life forever.  

Birthday Girl

 

My girl is no longer a little girl. She is a beautiful young woman.  The same age that I was when I moved on to the excitement of college and a new world of possibilities. The same age that I was when I met the man of my dreams and got engaged. 

 

Now I'm really scared! :) 

 

My beautiful, smart, courageous, amazingly warm and generous young lady.  You mean the world to me. And this crazy world is so much the better for having you in it.

 

Happy Birthday, Heidi!

Loads of Fun

When you are blessed to live in a household of six active, very dirty people as I am, at some point you find yourself to inevitably be surrounded by laundry.  I can't seem to escape it.  I am drowning in dirty towels, jeans, scrubs, sheets, blankets, socks, and panties.  And even when I finally manage to get caught up with the dirty stuff, I end up with a very large pile of clean stuff.  My family room couch is continually bearing the burden of loads of clean laundry, anxiously waiting to be folded and nestled away somewhere in a drawer.

 Yet it never seems to happen.  There they stay on the couch until they are plucked up and used again, ever subject to the dirty/clean cycle.

 

Don't even get me started on the socks.  They are the bane to my existence.

 

 

 I love how laundry detergent commercials depict doing laundry like it is a happy family event.  Oh how sweet, the little girl is happily helping her mother out in their pristinely white laundry room.

 

 

This is a little more accurate depiction.

 

 

And of course I never have a smile on my face after smelling my laundry, as it is generally done in order to determine if something has been cleaned or not.  It is never clean.  It always stinks.  Bad.

 



I must say that I am grateful that my laundry day does not look like this.  I am ever so grateful for modern appliances.

 



I cannot promise that my face doesn't ever look like this, however, especially after trying to unroll Ethan's crusted stinky socks.  Seriously?  You want me to touch that?!

Just Around the Corner

A cute random kid I found on the internet... :)

We are in the middle of looking for housing for Heidi to attend BYU-Idaho in the fall. We are lucky, because Heidi's cousin Kaylee will be on the same tracks as her (fall and spring terms), and they are excited to be roommates together. Also, Kaylee and her family live near BYU-I so they have been able to scout out the housing situation for us.

The only problem is, I feel like I have entered the Twilight Zone.

When did this child of mine grow to be old enough to leave the nest? I didn't give her permission to grow up so soon, she did it all on her own. I don't remember agreeing to this part of the bargain. It seems like she should still be a cute little thing, barely big enough to lug around her suitcase with a sticker proclaiming "Off to Gramma's House!" on it.

The problem is, I know that I did agree to this part of the plan. From the moment this tiny little bundle was handed into my arms nearly eighteen years ago, I knew that someday I was going to have to let go.

It doesn't make it any easier, of course.

These eighteen years have made it all that much harder to let go. Every day I have had the privilege of watching her go from a teetering toddler, full of smiles and laughs, to a beautiful young woman, full of promise and courage. I have seen her struggles and triumphs, her heartaches and growth. Watching it all, I have had the opportunity to love her more every day.

Yes, she may still be just a cute little thing, barely big enough to lug around her suitcase (she is mine, after all), but now it will be emblazoned with a sticker shouting "Off to COLLEGE!" The collection of beloved dolls and stuffed animals are now replaced with a collection of fashionable scarves and bright bottles of nail polish.

It is just around the corner, and she will be off to start her own adventures, but she will always be my sweet little girl.

This one's my girl!

Wisdom Teeth

On Thursday morning, I took Heidi to the oral surgeon's office to have her wisdom teeth extracted. When we set up the appointment, we had joked about how it was the day before Valentine's Day, which meant she would not be having any special dates on that romantic holiday.  We even envisioned her, with cheeks swollen, and bloody gauze hanging out of her mouth, saying, "Do you wanna be my Valentine?"  Yes, we have a sick sense of humor.

Heidi made it through the procedure just fine.  They put her to sleep for it, so she doesn't remember anything from it.  Ethan was disappointed that she wasn't acting silly or saying anything embarrassing.  She was just sleepy.

Yesterday she did get a cute Valentine in the mail from a special friend, however.  I am sure it made her day.

She has been eating homemade chicken soup, ice cream, and popsicles since Thursday, and getting tired of it.  I noticed today that her jaw is a little more swollen.

Eric likes to remind me of when I had my wisdom teeth extracted.  It was one month before we were married. Since we were living on opposite sides of the state during our engagement, he wasn't there when I had the surgery done.  When he came to visit that weekend, however, he said that he couldn't believe how huge my cheeks were, and that there was a significant amount of bruising on my jaw.

We went to see the new Disney movie "The Lion King" in the theater with my family, since I didn't feel up to doing much else.  I remember that it hurt to laugh.  I think that was the hardest part, because I love to laugh.

Here's to hoping for a speedy recovery for my girl that shares my same crazy sense of humor, bloody gums and all.

The Saratov Approach

We recently took the opportunity to see a movie recently released by a fellow LDS director, called the Saratov Approach.  There are a number of "Mormon movies" made, most of them humorous depictions of Mormon culture, but this one was different.

This movie portrayed the true life story of two Mormon missionaries who, while serving their two-year missions in Russia 1998, were captured and held for ransom.  It shows the struggles they and their families faced while being held captive, and the relationships that they were able to create with their captors.  By trusting in their faith, and relying on the understanding of a higher purpose for their circumstance, they were able to remain safe against all odds.

"The Saratov Approach" truly was an inspirational film.  I was so excited that our local movie theater played it for two weeks straight, despite the fact that it had an obvious religious message.  The movie continues to set records, as a Mormon-based film, in viewing theaters around the country and amount of money made.  I highly recommend watching it.  The message it gave was universal, not to Mormons only, about the power that the faith of a community and nation can create.