Remember Me

It is so hard after a long absence to write a blog again, because where do I start.... so much has transpired since the last post of nearly a month ago. Namely Christmas, visit to family in Utah, the New Year.

It has all been fabulous. We had a great time in Utah, enjoying all of the snow that they have, and we haven't gotten much at all. We visited and played with cousins and had a great time.

Since returning Mikaela and Derek have gotten back into school and their hectic lives, David is back to work, and Kamryn, Anna, and I are enjoying our extended time off compliments of year-round school.

I enrolled them in swimming lessons at a swim lab, and it has been extremely helpful to both of them. Kamryn has gotten video tape analysis of her strokes to do them more efficiently. I tried critiqueing her stroke to help her swim straighter, but she wouldn't listen to me. When she can SEE what she is doing and how she is supposed to do it, it clicked and now she is doing it right after only 2 sessions. Anna did a group lesson to get that breathing thing down. She did 5 lessons in a row, and she can swim across the pool now. So I think it has been money well spent. For the next 2 weeks we are going to hit the lap pool and keep practicing. This is good for me too since I haven't been able to drag myself into a lap pool for the last 6 months.

We also got a new computer for Christmas, an iMac. Let's just say my learning curve is quite a bit longer than ALL of my kids. They had music, pictures, and movies all downloaded within hours of opening the box. My attempt at doing anything other than just opening the internet has brought me to a crashing halt. I attempted to download a movie of Kamryn swimming, but my kids are all asleep, so I failed.

Happy Birthday/ Anniversary

Yesterday was a BIG day around here. David and I celebrated 20 years of being married to each other and he celebrated his 4_ Birthday. He said in 2 more years he will have been married to me as long as not being married to me, so you do the math.

We always do Something for our anniversary, but it may not BE on our anniversary. Being the big 20 this year we had high aspirations to go on a cruise or somewhere, but then things we would like to have come along, and soon poof! the trip idea goes out the window. Since the completion of the bathroom the corner has been begging for a TV, so I got David a TV and wall mounter for his gift. We virtually do not have to come out of the bathroom anymore. With the heated floor it has been by far the warmest room in our house lately, so we pull up a chair and watch our favorite Christmas shows in the bathroom, or do like Kamryn & Anna and put pilliows in the bathtub and lay there.

As for me, for the last 5 years I have been thinking that on my 20th anniversary I "needed" to have a new wedding ring. I have waited patiently for 5 years for this time. I gave subtle hints over the last 5 years, which I don't think he ever really got. So a couple of weeks ago I started giving bigger hints, maybe not so subtle. He got the hint. We went ring shopping on Saturday, and I got a beautiful ring that I really love as much as the first one.

I Love You now David even more than when I married you 20 years ago. We have 20 years more wisdom and experience, and now we know each other so much better than when we married. We know just what each other needs to be happy, we know how to help each other through stress and hard times. You are my best friend that I turn to with good news and bad. I look forward to the next 20 + years!

David's work took him to lunch at an italian family style restaurant, then I made chinese food for dinner. He was full, but ate dinner to be polite. He wanted a simple chocolate cake this year, so that's what he got. Then of course he has to have ice cream with it. So after 2 big meals this was what he had room for desert.
Happy Birthday David!

It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas

Today's photo journal is brought to you by..... (I just had flashbacks to Sesame Street and telling you it was brought to you by the letters M, C and by the Number 8!) Okay, on with the photos.
This is a pre-view of our card we are sending. Benji wouldn't look at the camera, but it was good of the rest of us. Posed, but not too posed.

Yea! This was the year that I finally got my "pretty tree". But not without a lot of grief from my children that their ornaments had been downgraded. I wanted to get a live tree again this year, but the tree on the right was our first artificial tree bought on clearance in 1993. It has had a long life, and spent the last 5 years in our crawl space. It loses needles like water through a hose. David had a Charlie Brown moment and felt sorry for the tree and decided to give it one last harrah, so it became our kid tree this year. I think it is standing a little taller don't you? Even if it is a little bald on some of the branches, with all of the ornaments it looks very festive. Every year the kids get one ornament that says something about things they did or liked that year. So multiply that by 4 kids, with one being 18 Christmases, we have a lot of kid ornaments. Throw in all of the homemade ones from pre-school through Elementary school, and it is loaded. A lot of sentimental ornaments. This year Mikaela couldn't find 1997. She was very distraught that she couldn't remember what it was, so I guess the time has come to make a record of the ornaments lest we forget.

By the way, I love the pretty tree too, it is light green and brown. I got a lot of ornaments at after Christmas sales last year. The photo doesn't do it justice.

The first measurable snowfall, and no one wanted to go out with Anna to build a snowman, so she did it all by herself. Pretty good eh?

Grandma Molyneux brought a gingerbread house with her at Thanksgiving. This has become a tradition each year that we decorate a house. The kids thought up the powdered sugar snow to make it look wintery.

Today we put the lights on the outside of the house. I love Christmas Lights!

This was Kamryn's performance at the Littleton Downtown tree lighting. She disappeared while we were waiting. I found her waiting in line with all of the kids who wanted to go on stage and sing a song while we waited. She was the 2nd to last kid to go up, and she sang "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" She did a really good job, and wasn't the least bit nervous.

Stories in Hand

I reluctantly did an online class led by Jessica Sprague who I like to read her blog http://www.jessicasprague.com/ . She is a digital scrapbook teacher for Creating Keepsakes, and she has begun her own online digital scrapbooking classes. Anyway... the class was free so I thought what the heck. I am not a writer, but maybe it will help me to remember some of those forgotten stories I have hidden away in the dark recesses of my memory. It started last week, and I still haven't completed the binder that we were supposed to have printed and bound, and looking all cute, but I did get to the memory triggers. She compares getting our stories out to snorkeling and scuba diving. First you kind of flit around on the surface looking and remembering, and then you dive deep and find those stories. It worked! I started last night writing about the greatest life lesson I learned from my mom, and ended up writing about clothes that my mom made for me and even the time she really challenged herself and made down filled "puffy coats" for my sister and me. This was way before internet, so I am not sure how she ever found the resources for the down filled coats. This was in the 70's. My mom could make anything I thought, including down filled coats. Jump forward a few more years to when I was in junior high. My mom made my jeans. Unfortunately the jeans were harder to duplicate to the real designer thing. Even though she studied the pocket stiching and everything. She really tried, but the unappreciating teen that I was they weren't close enough. I wore the jeans until a boy brought attention to those jeans and caused me mortal embarrassment. I'm not sure what he said, but I remember the feeling I had. Isn't it funny that we can remember emotions like that so well.

Anyway hats off to mothers that do the very best they can for their children even when it can never be enough (according to the kids). I understand now that I am a mother how much you just want them to be happy.

Hallowe'en Chronicles

What a really fun, and busy Halloween weekend. The planets aligned so that we could have Halloween on a Friday AND very warm temperatures! It was the perfect night for mischief.


Because it was a weekend, we had all kinds of things going on...
Trick or Treaters for sure, Halloween scary movies with a basement full of teen-agers (sure why not), and maybe a birthday party.


Kamryn and Anna were Batgirl and Wonder Woman. They didn't even have to cover up their costumes with their winter parka's this year.


Derek and his friends all dressed up as "each other" He is dressed up as his friend Tyler (next to him) who is dressed up as another friend who used to go to a school with uniforms. Since they weren't allowed to "trick or treat" being 15 years old, they went "dance or treating" They had a pretty big group of kids, and they would ring the doorbell, then dance, then run away when they tried to give them candy. By they way the girl with the red wig and soccer jersey is supposed to be Derek. Some of the kids dressed as other things too, he doesn't really have a friend who is a clown, or a Barney fan club member.



















Mikaela and her friends had a party the week before where she dressed as her favorite singer
Bryce Avary from The Rocket Summer. Here she is standing by him, but apparantly I neglected to take a picture of her dressed like him.

On Saturday morning Derek informs me that his friends are all coming over that afternoon for a birthday party. This was after I have spent several weeks trying to pin him down on some details. So he texts everyone that morning, and then he works out what they are going to do. My job, to come up with a cake, and food. This is a prime example of why this kid drives me crazy. I don't work like this. I need a plan, I need details, I need more time! Is this too much to ask? Apparantly... I need to NOT make such a big deal of things, and just let it happen... according to Derek. In the end some of the kids couldn't come because they had to babysit, or they had other plans. But it was all right with him, they still had fun.

Happy 15th Derek!

Now he starts Driver's Ed next week, and before we know it, we will have another driver in the family! Wow how time flies!

Lessons Learned

Mikaela finished her cross country season last week, and it has taken me all week to find a good story. We will ultimately decide that it was a lesson learned for me.

Mikaela was very pumped for this race. It was like a gift to her because the week before had been a poor race for her, and she didn't finish very high. She thought she would not be racing at Regionals. Regionals decide who will race at State, and Mikaela has had her goal since early June to go to State this year for her final year of high school cross country. She had it written on her board and everything. So back to the gift... She was still fighting some congestion, but we were doing everything we could to break it up, and she was feeling better. She was even assigned a number with 2 "eights" in it. Her lucky number! Being in the JV race was good for her because she would know what the slowest runners got in Varsity, so she would know what time she had to beat to qualify for state. We put the time into her watch so she could pace herself. She did amazing for the first 2 miles. We ran to cheer her on at various check points, and her pace was perfect, not too fast, but enough to stay just in the lead. Then at the last check point before the finish at about .6 of a mile to go, she was starting to fade. We cheered, and tried to spur her on with her hopes of going to state. She was still in 2nd place, and could easily make it. By the last 100 yards she had slipped to 3rd, and we yelled to get her to pick up the speed, but her legs were lead by this point, and there was no telling them to go faster.

Being the competitor that I am, I was not sympathetic to leaded legs. I thought if she could just tell her legs to move it, they would. That is how it happens in all of the Disney movies right??? If you want it bad enough, then the body should comply. It wasn't a Disney finish as much as I wanted her to win for herself. In the end she let 2 more girls from her team whiz by her at the finish. She didn't beat herself up about it, she didn't cry, she was too tired. She gave it all that she had in her that day. Maybe she would have beat herself up, if I hadn't been giving her grief about "giving up". I was not the good supportive mom that I should have been. I was too busy being disappointed. How are mom's supposed to turn off how they are feeling, and say what they should, like "Good Job! What a tough race, I know you did your best!" I really wanted to say those things, but I just couldn't get it to come out.

A week ago when we thought she wouldn't be racing at regionals, I had said all kinds of supportive things like "Winning wasn't the most important thing you learned this season, learning to love running, and the friends you made, and the experiences you had, were more important." But I said those things when she finished really far back because of illness, this week was not the same.

So what did I learn? I should have remembered what my mom always told me "If you can't say something nice... don't say anything at all." But I didn't do that... and I just hope that I can earn my points back with her. Luckily she is a very forgiving girl, and I didn't teach her that either. A week later, I can say I wouldn't trade her for any State Champion runner.

Mission Accomplished!

Yea! My first marathon was a good experience on almost all accounts. After nearly 6 months of preparation for "the hill" and "the heat" I must have been prepared because I don't think they got the best of me this weekend. Okay... granted it was an unusually cold and rainy day in St. George. They seem to only have rain when I come to race there, or so I have heard. My last triathlon race there was cancelled due to slick roads. Oh well, as my preparation would have it I was well prepared in running in the rain. Both of my 2 longest runs were also in the rain, and I loved it. In fact I would say my 3 BFF's in this race were the rain, gravity, and Advil. All of them helped me to get way under my goal time of 4:30, (but secretly hoping for 4:15.) Actually I was able to run 4:11:17. As I was running I kept waiting for the infamous "wall" to hit me. When would I hit it? How hard would I hit it? How much would it hurt when I did hit it? And you know- I never hit it! I did feel tight in my legs, which I stopped to stretch a few times, but I think the Advil kept me from feeling the pain. When I crossed the finish line I was SO happy with how it went I gave the guy handing me my medal a hug. He said "You did it!" I said Yea! I did it!

It is kind of surreal to accomplish things that you have been working towards for so long. It has left me feeling a little empty the last few days. My SORE legs have kept the memory alive for me. I am just now able to go down my stairs facing forward and not backward to keep from screaming. As much as I have been in pain, I like the goal that the marathon gave me.

David made 2 of his 3 goals too. #1 he beat his goal time of 4 hours. He got 3:57: I am so proud of him! #2 he wanted to feel good at the end, as opposed to feeling awful after his last one in Houston when the temp was 80 plus degrees. He has been a little more stiff than me, but he feels good. #3 he will hopefully do, and that is to keep running after his recovery.

Partly intentional, and partly unintentional I didn't take my camera to the race, because I didn't have anyone to take pictures. I have some borrowed ones from my sister Kim (who is Boston marathon bound), and from my great running partner Shauna who also reached her goal of finishing her first marathon! Way to go girls!

BTW no pictures of David because he was off getting a massage when the camera's were out.

I think the best part of doing a marathon, or any competition is doing it with other people who you can share your pain, and your joy with! That is what makes it all worth it for me! Thanks peeps! You're the best!