I apologize for this being a day late. Yesterday was the March 10th (that Portia has been talking about for weeks without knowing what it really meant)! The “birthday coming up March!” the “my birthday coming up ‘lowly!'” finally actually arrived!

A moment that I feel nicely describes this day in Portia’s eyes is when the whole family went into her room to wake her up by singing “Happy Birthday.” At the end of the song, she still looked thoroughly confused. So I enthusiastically informed her that it was her birthday! She responded with “Yeah! Coming up!” But we assured her that no longer was it coming up. It was HERE! It took her most of the day to get a real grasp on the idea. 🙂

We tried for multiple weeks to figure out what she might want for her birthday besides cake and ice-cream, but we never got any suggestions for gifts or activities. She is only two after all. So we just tried our best to do things she would enjoy. We did presents, ate some foods we know she loves (like cheese), had loving visitors, and went to the park to enjoy the springy weather. Then came the what she really wanted all along.

At the end of cake eating, Portia decided she wanted to just take some bites straight off the cake. We started taking pictures and laughing and loving it, so Fay wanted a turn. Fay said “I want a taste!” to which Portia replied “Nope. Mine birthday.” and continued munching away. So, in the end, she did grasp the birthday concept!

We had a lot of fun celebrating Portia’s day! But what is way more fun is just having Portia around!

Portia is currently our best eater. She will usually eat whatever you give her. But her true love in the food world is cheese. She would probably eat just cheese for every meal if we let her. She loves to have cheddar cheese in a sandwich of crackers. She says “crackers and cheese and samich” which is just about the cutest thing ever … the first 8 times she says it during snack time. 🙂 She did get just that with her lunch on her birthday, and was very pleased!

Something I love about Portia is that so far she acts quite left-handed. Lots of brilliant people are/were left-handed like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and my dad/his whole family; and I have always wanted a lefty! So, even though people like to fuss about how we live in a right-handed world, I am super excited that she currently favors her left hand!

Portia is a super fun playmate for the other kids right now because she gets excited about anything her older siblings love. She loves being a princess with Fay, and she also loves super heroes with Carter (She named her neck Steve Rogers a few weeks ago.)

Another thing we love about Portia is that she is endlessly enthusiastic. She responds with super excitement to anything you ask her. Whether the question be “Did you have a good sleep last night?” or “Do you want to go to your favorite museum?” or “Do you need some more cheese?” The answer is a giant “YEAH!!!!!!!!!!”

But she doesn’t love everything. And she dislikes with just as much passion as she likes. Some things she dislikes with passion include: going to nursery (she threw up on a nursery leader because she was so upset at being there), when you play with her toys the “wrong way,” when you tell her she can’t have that candy she wants, when she doesn’t get the bench at dinner, etc. She still has some of that screech left in her from before she could talk, and it comes out clearly when she isn’t pleased.

We love our little fireball! And we are so grateful to have had her in our lives for two years!

 

I made a shocking and horrifying discovery today. I went through the entire month of February and never. posted. a picture. of. the. mantel!!!!!!!!! I’m sure you all wondered what was wrong with me!

Here is my Valentine’s mantel for this year. It brought us lots of joy this season of love!

If you recognize some of the pieces from the Valentine’s tablescape, just know that the table was the thief. I decorated the table in haste on the 13th and my creativity wasn’t at its peak. But I don’t think either the table or the mantel really minded. 🙂

I feel all sorts of better about life now. I’m glad I cleared all this up!

 

Sorry for missing last week. Mostly I am sorry to Mary whose only request from me for her mission was to be able to read the blog. So here it is, Mary. I hope you know I love you and that I think of you even while you are far away.

I don’t feel like there is much of anything super momentous to report for the past little bit, but my kids continue to be cute and Josh and I continue to amuse ourselves making stuff, etc. So here’s what’s up.

Josh was practicing the banjo the other evening and Carter decided he needed to play something too. He had the idea of adding a strap to the ukulele all by himself and Josh made it a reality.

Then, of course, Fay had to have a turn, too.

Cute little musicians!

Carter came down with a cough early this past week and so we took a sick day. Sick days are some of the only days where the kids actually get to watch an entire movie in one go, so it was fun. Carter chose Cars 3. Here they all are watching it. It made me happy to watch them smile at it.

If you haven’t been around Portia lately you don’t know that she talks like CRAZY! She has always been a “communicator” and we are happy that she has now mostly exchanged words and simple sentences for the shrieks and screaming she used to use to communicate. She loves to talk about her birthday. She will frequently declare “My birthday coming up March!” And though I’m pretty sure she doesn’t really understand what it all means, it is still fun to hear her talk about it. Here is a glimpse of her and her chatting.

As for Josh and me: the other evening, Kathryn called us and asked how we felt about recreating this little dangle toy she found on Etsy. She was going to buy it and Steve told her he thought we could make it and it would be more fun to pay us to do it than to pay Etsy people to do it. So we made it! Josh did the construction, I helped with sanding and specifics about the design and made the dangles. We were pleased with how it turned out, but were even more pleased to see that Kathryn and Daniel were pleased. Plus, it was fun to make.

 

I love little holidays! I feel like it is so good to have a day where, for no practical reason, you just do things a little special! (Is special an adverb?) I also love any reason to dress up my cuties and decorate the table! So Valentine’s Day is just fun for me!

Also, I have been taking this photography class, and I thought festive photos were a great way to get in some extra practice. I had a little photoshoot with my kids in their Valentine’s outfits and invited my sister to bring her adorable baby, Daniel, to join. Not a ton of the pictures turned out great; but here are some decent ones.

Portia made herself a casualty in another way because as soon as we were done with the group pictures; she high-tailed it out of there to go eat the pizza Grandmother had brought. I promise we love her just as much as the other two; she just loved pizza more than getting photographed.

We did the photoshoot last week; but on Valentine’s Day itself we did the real celebrating!

I decorated the table for breakfast, and we had festive foods! I think it is an extra bit of fun for the kids to wake up to special stuff. They all seemed quite excited about Valentine’s breakfast. 🙂

See! What’s not to love about Valentine’s Day?! I am also pleased to report that I am more in love than ever with my Valentine! Josh really is so good and he is rather effortless to adore and cherish! I wish I had a good recent picture of him to show; but I have mostly focused on the kids. 🙁 I will have to repent and get more pictures of him and me on here.

 

Last Friday I was driving home from the park with the kids thinking I needed to get away somewhere.  January always seems to wear me out by the end and I was just feeling antsy.  Approximately 2 minutes after having that thought, Josh called me. When I answered and asked what was up, he asked how spontaneous I was feeling. I replied that I was feeling up for pretty much anything! He asked “Even if it means not sleeping at our house tonight?” And I said “Sure!”

So only an hour and a half later, we packed everyone up in the car and started heading south to St. George! We knew it was only going to be about a 24 hour trip because we needed to be back to fulfill callings and all that Sunday jazz; and considering the spontaneity and rapidity of the trip, I feel like it was pretty fantastic! Here’s what we did:

When we arrived, we checked into our hotel and walked across the parking lot to a restaurant for dinner. After dinner, we took the kids to the hotel pool–their most favorite part of any trip! After splashing and playing, we dried everybody off and went to bed.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel–another thing the kids were incredibly stoked about–followed by returning to the pool! Though, this time around they mostly just wanted to hang out in the hot-tub because it was pretty chilly first thing in the morning.

After the pool, packing, and checking out, we went to the children’s museum. It was really fun and the kids loved it!

After the museum, we grabbed lunch and took it to a seriously cool park. It was GORGEOUS weather and we had a delightful picnic on the grass! Then we played on the toys for an hour or so before packing up and heading north again.

It was short and sweet; but it was just what we needed to help us recover from January!

 

This past week has been busy. Friday got here and we didn’t really have plans. Josh usually comes up with all the cool stuff for us to do. but this time I told him I would do it. So we had an indoor campout!

We had a picnic dinner of hotdogs, fresh fruit, salad, and chips. (Doesn’t it just sound like summer?!) Then we set up the tent in the family room and gathered almost all the sleeping bags, pillows, and blankets we have and just let the kids party it up in the tent! Then Josh brought out the banjo and we sang campfire songs together! It was pretty great! But then the kids wanted to sleep in the tent, and the parents wanted them to sleep in their beds. We made a compromise of the kids sleeping in the little tent in Portia’s room. That turned out to be really bad. Carter was up raging for about 2 hours in the middle of the night because he couldn’t get comfortable in the tent, but refused to move to his bed. Finally we got him to sleep in his bed! But it was definitely a struggle.

So despite the fact that the kids loved every minute of the campout, we probably won’t be doing it again any time soon. 🙂

On a different note: I am, during the month of February, taking a continuing ed photography class. I am mostly learning better how to use the different functions of my camera, which is just what I was wanting. So this means, hopefully, that the quality of some of pictures I display will increase. But, after two of my 4 classes and lots of picture taking, I have noticed some things: Just because I am more knowledgable about how to work a camera, it doesn’t mean that my pictures are magically all turning out fabulous. Another thing I have noticed is that taking pictures of moving kids with only indoor lighting is probably just always going to turn out sub-par for the most part. Also, I do this blog primarily as a family history, not as a showcase for flawless art, so if a less-great picture is showing what I want to remember, I am going to use it anyway.  So, I’m hoping that with continued learning and practice the general quality of the pictures will improve, but I’m not going to place my personal value in my ability to have a blog with exclusively perfect pictures.

Though, I would like to mention that I am particularly proud of the picture of the family in the hot-tub. Feel free to go take another look at it. 🙂

Also, here are some cute kids.

 

In my head this past week was just full of being sick. But we actually only had one real sick day, and looking back at the pictures I took this week I see that we actually did have some fun, too. So that is good and encouraging!

On Monday for family party Josh had a surprise for everyone. He gave a lesson on asking Heavenly Father when we have questions, then we had the assignment of asking Josh questions about what the surprise in the bag was. The kids loved it! And I hope the message stuck, too.  The surprise ended up being mini MnMs, then Josh had some fun games to play with them. One game was to blow the MnMs across the bench with a straw. It was cute, but got a little spitty after awhile. 🙂

We went to the library one day. The kids always love the library and so do I! They had their fun photo ops set up again, so naturally we had to take pictures!

Another day, we went to the playplace at the mall. It is a pretty basic sort of play area, but the kids get really excited about it. Here they are waiting for me to get to the mall entrance doors and being adorable.

But we also were sick. I kept Fay home from school on Wednesday and Carter stayed on home on Thursday. Then on Friday I came down with a cough. I thought things were getting a little better yesterday, but then I had a really hard time sleeping last night and woke up this morning feeling like a train-wreck. Josh has taken care of me and the house and the kids all day today! I am so grateful for him and his goodness!

 

This weekend has been such fun! It snowed like crazy Friday night and half of Saturday, so we kind of hunkered down at home on Saturday. Josh said it kind of felt like we were on Christmas vacation and I agreed. We could go somewhere if we really wanted to, but we didn’t have any obligations, so we mostly just played together alternating between the snow and the warm house.

Today church was a little bit hilarious as far as Portia was concerned. She refused to fall asleep until after 9:00 last night and so was super tired. Plus church now interrupts her nap-time perfectly. PLUS, she has recently decided that she hates nursery. So, right as I was starting singing time in primary, Josh showed up to tell me she had just thrown up twice because of how angry she was to be in nursery. What he didn’t tell me then was that she threw up all over her nursery leader. He was BEYOND a good sport about it, telling us he just felt bad for her. I’m pretty sure we owe him something big…

After church Josh had a fun idea to build a city out of a bunch of our building toys and drive cars around it. It turned out to be really cool.

Also, we did pedicures for the kids tonight. They all loved soaking their feet in the water! And they were all so cute getting their feet lotioned. I didn’t think to take any pictures until we were on the last one. But here’s what I have.

I promise I really was here for all of this; I just always ended up behind the camera this time.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is my New Year’s mantel. My favorite part is the black board-sign. I made it using stickers Josh got me for Christmas. I feel like it looks so professional thanks to the perfect letters!

This year has gotten off to a lovely little start. We’ve done a lot of the usual sort of stuff–school, work, ignoring dirty dishes, etc.–and some less usual stuff.

The one extra unusual thing we did was take a break from the kids last weekend. My parents (mostly Mother) watched the cuties while Josh and I had a little staycation! We stayed at a hotel downtown, went out to eat, played games in our room, and enjoyed the downtown scene for the evening. After we checked out of our room the next morning, we still had some time to spend together before we had to go get the kids and we didn’t want to waste it. But we have found that we have a hard time knowing what to do with free time. We decided to get pedicures, (Josh was totally on board, which I thought was studly!) but we didn’t think about reservations and they were packed, so that idea fell through. We went back to our house to brainstorm and finally came up with the perfect thing! It was something both of us enjoy and can’t be done very well with the kids. We decided to build something!  Josh drew up plans and we headed to Home Depot, and though we didn’t finish that day, we made some decent progress before we went to retrieve our cuties.

The project is something I have been dreaming of for a good number of months. It is a entryway table with cabinet doors (I call it a hutch, but I don’t know if it fully qualifies as such). I wanted it so there would be a place for Josh, Fay, and I to put our backpacks out of sight but still highly accessibly. And, it gives me another surface to decorate!  And it is an extra special project because Josh and I really did do it together! We put in approximately the same number of hours on it and Josh made sure I used all the power tools! So now I have at least some experience with the table saw, miter saw, band saw, circular saw, drill, impact driver, and nail gun. Not bad for a single project!

We have used any evening time we’ve had this past week to work on it, and we used WAY too much of what should have been family time yesterday, and now it is done! The kids helped with the painting which they loved and Josh and I survived. 🙂 But it is up and in use now! I am really excited about it! Check it out!

Anyway, that was the out-of-the-ordinary bit. Now for the ordinary parts of our life. They are also sweet and delightful.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I have been super excited about a new theme for 2018. I felt like Delight was just what I needed in 2017! And even though I know a single word can’t reasonably receive credit for the miracles I saw in my life in 2017, I think it was still a good springboard for them. If nothing else, it put me in a good mindset to allow the miracles to occur. And so now I have the opportunity to have a new theme. My hope was to choose a word that would help me retain what I gained from Delight, but to take it a step further.

Delight really was all about feeling. I wanted to feel peace, contentment, and joy in the life I have and also feel hope for the future. But this year, I want to use those feelings I am working to establish to do good. I want to act on the hope I have for the future to create that future one step at a time. It took me a long time to find a word that I felt really captured those things, but I believe this word does: Engage.

Let me introduce you!

Some of Merriam-Webster’s definitions for the word engage include

• to do or take part in something
• to give attention to something 

Here is how I want to embrace Engage this year:

I want to Engage more with my children. I want to spend more quality time with them on a daily basis making more good memories together. I have found that when I am really engaged in what my children are doing I feel way better about my job. It is a lot easier to just let them go play by themselves while I try to figure out my own agenda; but at the end of that kind of day I feel guilt and regret. Not delightful. But when I am working hard to be part of their play, their learning, their agenda I feel like maybe my occupation really is a mighty partnership with God.

I want to Engage more in my own interests. This might sound like it goes contrary to what I said in the last paragraph; but I think the proper engagement in my own personal development will dramatically increase my ability to do the first. Like I said, being engaged with my kids takes a lot of effort, and if that was all I did, I would definitely burn out (aka: have burnt out many times previously). So my hope is to balance that extra effort for them with extra focus on the things I really want to be doing. When I end a day that feels like it was drudgery, I don’t have motivation to pursue my actual interests. I just veg on pinterest or something similarly useless. But if I plan in advance for things that I really want to be learning and doing, I have more energy during the day for my cuties and at the end of the day for that thing I wanted to do. So, I am signed up for a class I’m really excited about and have other plans to make sure I have the opportunity to feel like a real-live adult on a regular basis.

Another way I want to Engage this year is by engaging in changes. When I see an area of my life I want to improve, I want to do something to act on that desire straight away instead of shelving it as something that just has to wait until my kids are bigger. I am a big hoper in the idea that “some change is better than no change.” So even if I only get one week’s laundry folded and put away because of my effort to engage in that change, that is still better than no weeks.

I am really excited to see how an effort to engage more in my current life can increase my delight therein and also pave the way for future delight. I feel like being able to look back and feel like I really gave each stage of life everything I had will help me to better enjoy the next stage of life and have no regret.

 

This post will be mostly pictures with some explanation.

Last Friday we had the annual Christmas Progressive Party! It was a huge, long night of all the treats, all the family, and so much fun! The kids were especially excited to meet one special someone!

A few days ago, Fay decided to be Santa with a beard. I had nothing to do with the idea, but I was very pleased to be part of executing it.

 

Carter also had some tooth drama. He had to get a crown on one of his molars because it didn’t fully develop. He had to get a semi-sedative because it was such a big procedure for such a little guy. But now he’s got a silver tooth and it’s a pretty good conversation piece for him; so he’s good!

Yesterday was our ward Christmas party. They had an ugly sweater contest again. (You may recall that Josh was the winner last year.) Well, it was all too perfect because our neighbor who had almost the same sweater as Josh last year showed up in almost the same suit as Josh this year! There was no collaboration either time. It was all just so delightful!

Tonight we had our traditional drive to look at Christmas lights. Last year all the kids fell asleep about two minutes in, so we just went home and put them to bed. But tonight was awesome! We found a bunch of neighborhoods where people really went all out! It was a ton of fun!

Also, here are some cuties.