Giving Thanks

I am grateful for....

This guy.


He's funny, happy, and downright good. He works hard for our family, and has a lot on his shoulders being a student with all the worries of providing for three others. He loves each of us, and we all know it. He loves getting our babies from their beds to play, loves giving shoulder rides, squeezes, and playing pretend. He loves slow dancing with me in the living room after the kids go to bed, reliving songs from back when we were first dating. I love that we still consider ourselves "dating," largely because of him.

He truly deeply loves taking his little girl on dates. They've been on bus rides, out for ice cream, McDonald's (per Rachie request), out for on tap root beer, and now her first time bowling. These pictures are from their last date a few weeks ago.

I am grateful for this little girl.


She brings so much spice to my life. She brings out the more fun side of me. She is also the person who made me a mother, and I will always be thankful for her because of that. What a privilege it is to raise and learn from someone with so much empathy and passion.


(Practicing cutting and gluing.)

(A new favorite activity...play dough.)

I'm grateful for this little boy.


He is my littlest sweetie, my baby. Before I had him I wondered how I could fit more room into loving another child the way I love Rachel, and it is truly a remarkable thing how it is done. It's especially easy to love someone like Alden, who gives THE best hugs in all the world. Since Alden was just a new baby I've always felt that he has something really important to do in his life. It's been a rough going babyhood for him with particularly hard challenges from near constant teething pain from cysts, ear infections, sleep problems, and just general fussiness. But when this kid is rested and healthy, I feel like I see the true him. Happy and goofy. He has helped me become a more flexible, resilient person. He has taught me to let things go and prioritize my life so I'm doing the most important things (because that's all he gave me time for!). I love him for it.


I'm grateful to be part of a supportive, wonderful extended family. My parents and in-laws, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and little nephew are all reasons to be grateful for life.

I'm grateful to be an American. Jason and I have been watching Ken Burn's WWII documentary and other WWII movies lately and I have felt an intense gratitude for those many families who gave their fathers, sons, and brothers, and those men and women who gave theirs lives in that war and many others who sacrifice so much defending our country today. I'm proud to be from a family with a heritage of military service.

I'm grateful for a home, clothes, food, roads and transportation, cameras, telephones, and so many hundreds of things that make our lives so much easier and comfortable.

And finally, I'm grateful to know their is a God. I'm grateful for the things I understand about religion, because they put all of the other things I'm grateful for into perspective. I can catch glimpses of the end from the beginning, and see the point of this thing called life. And having that perspective really does change everything.

"Fangled Eggs," Car Noises, Sleeping (ah sleeping), and Growth

So I took the kids on a little photo shoot the other day at New Quarter Park. Some of them turned out cute, but most turned out like this:

And this...
And this...
But some turned out like this:
And this...
And this...
Not exactly frame-able, but still worth the frolic through the fall air. Poor Rachel was just disappointed towards the end when she found out this was just a walking park, with no slides and no swings (the audacity!).

And for good measure, a Halloween picture to record the event. My little blue-haired babies. They are really so much like Thing 1 and Thing 2.


To start off, last post I said I'd record some things about each of the kids and what they are doing and saying lately.

Rachel is constantly making us laugh. One funny thing she says a lot is "it's/that's/you're/he's buggering me," instead of "bugging" me. She says it whenever something's annoying her, and you just can't help but smile when it comes out. Another saying of hers is, "fangled eggs." One morning Jase was making her scrambled eggs and she was sitting at the table waiting and she said to him, "Are you going to ask me, (quoting in her mock Jason voice) "You want some fangled eggs or some-ping (something)?" Jason asked her if fangled eggs meant scrambled eggs, and she said, no, those were the bad eggs. She wanted good eggs (which turned out to be scrambled eggs). Who knows. That silly girl. One funny story that happened awhile ago was when we were driving in the car and Jase stopped at a red light. Promptly from the back seat we heard a mumbled "dang it!" Both Jase and I looked at each other and I asked her where she learned to say that. She replied with the utmost honesty, "Well that's what you say at a red light!" Oops....parenting fail? I guess it could have been something worse. We still had a good laugh about it later.

On to Alden...my favorite thing he does lately is give you this little squeeze. He goes to hug you and because his hands and arms don't make it all the way around you, he squeezes with his fingers. It is the cutest thing. He also shrugs his shoulders if you ask him to (he knows we think this so cute), and he swings his arms when he walks as if he's really got somewhere to go. He makes dinosaur noises (growling) on command, and makes car noises when he plays with his hot wheels. He knows so many words now! He can understand much more than these, but he consistently says car (his favorite thing), mama, dada, ada (Rachel, he also has a name sign for her), bath, duck, milk, shoes, dance, Jesus, water, all done, more, help me (the sign, mostly), and cracker. I think there are probably more, but I don't remember them all at the moment.

Alden's finally sleeping!!! I can't even believe it myself, but this boy has to go to bed early in order to sleep in until 6 (yes that is the absolute latest I can push my children). He goes down at 6:30 and wakes up at 6 (Rachel goes down at 7:30). It is a huge pain sometimes to make sure he gets down that early, but apparently he needs that much sleep because he does it without complaint. Before we switched him so early he was going to sleep between 7-8 and waking up around 4 (ouch). Not only that, but he was always so tired. I couldn't get him to take two naps anymore (he'd just scream through one of them), and so we switched him to one mid-day two hour nap plus the 6:30 bed time and within about a day it solved all of his sleep problems. The child doesn't scream all the time anymore!!! Oh happiness. I am a believer that a lot of my children's behavioral problems (at least crankiness related things) can be solved by taking a look at one thing: are they getting enough, consistent, quality sleep? I had no idea coming into motherhood how important sleep was, but wow. It's the truest thing I've learned lately.

As for Jase and I, we still do what we've done for awhile--school, home, work. It's really not a bad life. We're waiting on a few job prospects and preparing to apply to others. We still remain hopeful. Jason had an epiphany of sorts just before his last job interview. Previous to this, we've been working and praying constantly to have Heavenly Father help us find a job. Numerations to this also included helping us know where to apply, and after each job interview we've basically been asking to please just let us have the job. Jason's thought process that day was this: that all along we've basically just been asking God to change our circumstances, without really asking for help to change ourselves-to help us to have more patience through this time, to become more qualified, to be more in tune with the Spirit so we might know where and how to apply. That day he asked God to help him do better in the interview than he normally would of his own accord--and he believes he had help that day. From this we've learned that there are things we can control--our faith, our prayers, our own efforts, and there are things we can't--the economy, other people's decisions about jobs, etc.

I suppose the point of life isn't to ask God to change all of our circumstances, but rather to make us equal to them. If those with health problems or money problems or any other type of problem just asked for it to be removed, where would be the challenge? The growth?

Elder Hales in LDS General Conference talked a bit about this. In an answer to my thoughts above, he said, "Why such terrible tribulation? To what end? For what purpose? As we ask these questions, we realize that the purpose of our life on earth is the grow, develop, and be strengthened through our own experiences. How do we do this? ...we wait upon the Lord. Tests and trials are given to all of us. These mortal challenges allow us and our Heavenly Father to see whether we will exercise our agency to follow His son." There was so much wonderful guidance found in this talk (find it here), and I read it just when I needed it.