Bring Your (Inner) Child to Work Day....

Look how good Max's drawing is of Alex the Lion!  I was so impressed!

I hope Dreamworks follows this up with a "Bring Your Spouse to Work Day" because I am more than a little jealous!

Landslide

I just had one of those moments in the car where old song lyrics finally made sense.  That old Dixie Chicks song-- Landslide.

 "Well I've been afraid of changing, 

'Cause I built my life around you.  

Well time makes you bolder,

 and children grow older,

 and I'm getting older too.  

Yes, I'm getting older too."

The past eight months have been interesting.  Actually, make that the past two years.  Two years ago I had brutal experience that I wish to never relive.  I feel like I am waiting on time and feeling God's love for me to heal it up and move forward being less affected by what others may or may not think.  But I digress.

The second change has been feeling my body shift.  My metabolism is different.  I lost a lot of hair for 8 months straight.  I'm having signs of macular degeneration and am assigned to see a specialist.  I have to ice my knees on occasion after I go running.  People no longer comment on how young I look.  I am spending every other month on a diet trying to get back to where my weight had stayed for the past 14 years.  Last night, I was showing old pictures on my phone to a very sick Jonas.  Max saw one of them and I said "Max, look how young you look!".  He then said, "Mom, look how young YOU look!".  

Stop time.

When did this happen?  When did I grow up with my children (I may not mean that in a maturity level... I often feel so insufficient to actually be someone's mother.  I wish I could go back and tell my mother thank you.  I expected her to be perfect, and now that I realize that conceiving and bearing children does NOT come with  a perfecting cloak-- I wish I could go back and acknowledge the million things she did that were beyond great.)

I think that whole Dixie Chicks verse speaks to me except the "time makes you bolder".  Maybe that will be part of what comes with this next page of life.   How do we settle into being ourselves and letting others be fine or not fine with that?  I find I am terribly hurt when others are not fine with my best efforts.

I think the hardest part of that verse is the line "I've been afraid of changing, 'Cause I built my life around you".  I didn't like to realize that "you" was actually "me".  That's why aging and changing is so hard for me.  I think too much about myself.  I wish it were more simple to "forget yourself and go to work".  I can do it temporarily, but I always round back to thinking of myself again.  Will age make that easier to let go of too?

Well, while these darling cherubs have been aging, it apparently came as an epiphany to me today that doesn't happen without their mother aging too.  Why is that something hard to accept?  

Ali so chic in her dollar store glasses :)

Max makes me gifts all the time out of legos... animals, necklaces and bracelets, etc.
It's very sweet. A perfect way he chose to show me he loves me.  I love that little hand around my neck.

Getting to snuggle with my sick little boy while I tell him the tale of  the day we met the blue dragon, fed him an Oreo, and saw his fire light  up his rainbow-jewel crusted cave.
 That, by the way, is the look of a woman who has had a little boy throwing up all morning.

These are some of our missionaries-- we love our missionaries!
Max has an awesome Mr. Bean face here....

Shauna.

I just love Shauna.  Isn't she pretty?  The other day when she came to visit, we practiced Prom hair-do's just in case I needed to help with a mutual activity that night.  I think it looks great on her!  What I love when I see this pic is remembering padding the bath tub with pillows and letting her baby girl play with bath toys as we crammed into my bathroom to try to escape (good luck- the kids quickly found us and needed one thing or another!).  I am grateful for a fun friend to feel like a girl with!

Hiking

We had a fun dinner date with our friends the Roans the other day.  Kana and Taylor are dear- he is an MIT graduate and inventor by profession, she is from Japan where she had been a nurse and is pregnant with her fourth little one in five years.  She, of course, does not complain.  Their beautiful kids understand both Japanese and English and are SO cute!  We love it when we get together. The other day after dinner we decided to all go on a quick hike.

It felt so good to be out in nature again- to hear frogs croak (is that the right spelling?), find a hawk perched in a tree, and watch the sun go down.  Glenn is anxious to get back up there right away.  I second the motion.

Ali's Tonsils...

Do you see that?

I discovered the other day that my baby girls' tonsils are HUGE.  The doctor said maybe she'd grow into them.  Wow. That's a lot of growing to be had.  

I think I vote for an eventual tonsillectomy. 

Suddenly it is dawning on me that I had mine out before I was in Kindergarten...was I  like this, Dad?

I can't help but wonder if this is why she has a raspy, 'smoker's' voice.  It's stinking cute on a two year old...

He's Sweet!

(*This is for my end of year book, sorry to the world for posting it up, but if I don't put it here, I won't remember to put in the book!)

I've always thought the best time for flowers was for nothing at all.

So nice.

I am keeping this boy. Pretty sure I don't deserve him.  I might feel better about it if I give him a long head tickle tonight.  He holds still like a dog when I touch his head... doesn't want to do anything to make it stop!

Time to go whip up something  good for dinner for this fella!

Sure love him.

*As a side note, as I've been typing this, Ali has poured yet ANOTHER bottle of bubbles all over the floor.  Argh.  

Easter...

This Easter has been a sweet time of watching birds build nests outside our windows, dying eggs, making marshmallow eggs (and subsequent massive messes!), devotionals on the cleansing and enabling power of the atonement, getting children over walking pneumonia, fun baskets, bubbles, desperately trying to get an Easter picture of the kids, and an Easter Egg hunt with our new neighbors from England...

One of my favorite parts of this Easter was the PIANO we got the night before!  I've wanted one for years, and we decided to really get serious about it this time.  Thank you to my sweet Glenn for being so supportive and buying me something that just feels so right in our home.  The kids love it -- and so do I! 

*Yesterday Jonas sat at the piano and played something while making up a song...  He sang, "It's hard to be a lizard..."(then some more stuff I couldn't quite hear). He claims the song was about a Wizard, not a lizard... either way, it was adorable!