What's Obvious

Hi Friends!
I just wanted to share some thoughts...
The visiting teaching lesson this month was on "Standing strong and immovable in the Faith" Sis. Beck commented on how we need to do the most essential things first. (She had a list of eight things, see this month's VT message in the Ensign). One of them was family scripture and prayer. We used to be good at this. Every night, no matter what, even on vacation, we would have scripture and prayer. We've read through the Book of Mormon three times as a family. Lately I have gotten lazy and half the time we'll just have prayer, because by the time I "get around to it" it's "too late" or I'm "too tired" so I just have prayer with the girls and send them to bed.
Know what is essential to me? Doing the dishes after dinner. Because I can see them all messy sitting there. And the leftovers would spoil. And what if someone stops by and see my mess. And I don't want to have to deal with it in the morning. So I almost always rally the forces after dinner and we all spend 15-20 minutes doing the dishes and putting the food away.
So what is really more essential, dinner dishes or family scripture reading? Well, that's obvious.
So it occurred to me, what if someone could walk into my house and look around and say, "Wow, you haven't had scriptures tonight, have you? What a mess!" That certainly would motivate me to read the scriptures :) So my new strategy whenever I am tempted to send the kids to bed without our family reading (like tonight!) is to think about the dishes. I wouldn't leave my dishes all over the table, because it obviously needs to be done. How much more needed is our family scripture time, even though it's not so outwardly apparent. It is absolutely vital to my childrens' spiritual nourishment, and I (and Mike) are the only ones who can give this to them, they won't get it anywhere else. How vital is that!
Next I need to work on personal prayers with them. Should I still be helping kids at 7 (almost 8) and 10 say their prayers at night? I remind them now and then, but don't really follow up. I am hoping they follow my example, as they see me praying in the evening, but most of the time they are already in bed by the time I pray.
This parenting thing is exhausting!
Speaking of that, Katie and Liz are exhausting me with plans for the 8th birthday party. The theme keeps changing. Right now it's a music party where they play the piano and sing to their guests, LOL. And I'm making a butterfly and a ladybug cake, I've been informed.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Since I directed people on my Christmas letter to my blog - I figure I best get busy and update it!
The best part of Christmas this year was that it was WHITE! Big wet flakes fell from the sky on Christmas day for a few hours, carpeting the already white ground with another few inches of snow. Instead of playing with our Christmas toys, we went outside and played in our Christmas snow. The week before Christmas the kids only had one day of school due to the weather. This has been one LOOOOONG vacation!

Our snow angels!

Katie, Liz, and Ally

Scenes from around the neighborhood: some of these were taken the week before Christmas during our first snowfall(s), then others taken the week of Christmas when we got a lot more snow!


The favorite toys of the season: a remote control tarantula (Liz wanted a real one!), a pogo stick, a complete set of Warrior Books, a metal detector, a doctor kit, a phoenix bird toy, and Webkinz stuffed animals. I had fun making three online books, one for Jeanne and Frank, one for our Arizona Adventure Vacation, and one for Grandma's camp. I am really enjoying my new Settlers of Catan game and also my Romance DVD Collection that includes the long A&E version of Pride and Prejudice. I'm grateful for those snow days so I could have an excuse to watch it already!


Some of our family activities got canceled, like graham cracker house making with the Robrechts. We were sad, but made the best of it and took our candy and crackers over to Chris & Kirstin's house next door and put them to good use. And our Robrecht family Christmas Eve breakfast gathering turned into a slumber party! With lots of snow on the ground and more expected, many of us just decided to spend the night the day before. We had fun playing Settlers (it was so fun because I won!), watching movies, doing puzzles, and playing in the snow fort that Uncle Dan build in Em & Joe's front yard. Thank You so much Em & Joe for hosting the big crowd. Jeff and Janet even made it with their four little ones and a newborn in the falling snow that morning. We are so grateful for family and that we were actually able to get together.


The metal detector proved very useful. A few days after Christmas Frank (Mike's Dad) called me and said a lady was coming in to his doctor's office with "possibly" a needle in her foot. She had kicked something in her carpet the day before, felt a stabbing pain, but couldn't see anything sticking out of her foot. She found a part of a needle in her carpet. Frank didn't want to start digging around in her foot without knowing for sure something was in it, so he wondered if the metal detector could work to see if there was a needle in her foot. I wasn't sure, but drove to his office with the new toy. I turned it on and held it over the lady's foot and sure enough, it beeped, signifying that there was something metal in her foot! Who knew this little toy would prove useful in a real way! The girls are excited for the snow to melt and to go treasure hunting in our own backyard.


We loved hanging out with the Card family - Sterling and Arien arrived the day after Christmas and we spend a fun evening doing the nativity play and opening gifts, and then the next day we had an adventure getting our pictures taken in the snow and rain. Why did I even try to do my hair??? It was really fun to hang out as a family for three days in a row!

Attack of the Tarantula!

A little orphan girl

Jeanne and Frank bought tickets to take the girls to see a high school play - Anne of Green Gables.
Katie and Liz had never heard of it before. "What is it about?" they asked me. I told them it was about a little orphan girl who gets adopted.
I then sent them upstairs to change out of their school clothes and into something dressier. Katie comes downstairs a few minutes later.
She has on a long sleeve turquoise shirt, a cordoroy jumper that has red patches sewn on it (from Ally's Pippi Longstocking costume), pink socks, and brown shoes.
"Um, Thank you for changing Katie, but that really doesn't match," I said as gently as possible.
"But Mom, I was trying to look like an orphan girl. Will you put two braids in my hair?"
I smiled and didn't have the heart to tell her to go change.
Hopefully, Grandma and Grandpa didn't mind taking an orphan girl to the play.

Halloween Costumes

A little late, but here are the kids in costume for those that didn't see the pictures posted on facebook. Liz wanted to be an apple tree - so I sewed a black felt hole on a brown shirt and we put a little squirrel in it, a bird on her shoulder, some fake greenery, and apples pinned all over her. Katie was an apple from Liz's tree, which I made by making a sandwich board out of foam, spray adhesived red fabric to it, and making a little worm she could use like a puppet to pick up candy. Ally designed her wolf costume herself, after she fell in love with the wolf fake fur at the fabric store. We bought a gray sweatshirt at Goodwill and she cut out the pieces and told me how she wanted it sewed on the shirt, tail and all! We looked online and found a u-tube tutorial on how to paint a wolf face. She looked pretty scarry! The girls had a fun halloween trick-or-treating and then selling us back lots of their candy, they made about $15.00 each. They set up a little candy store and we come with our change jar and whatever candy they are willing to sell. Then we gave them a $5.00 bonus at the end.

The Lord's Tender Mercies

The background:
A few years ago Elder Bednar gave a conference talk titled "The Lord's Tender Mercies". This talk really touched my heart. I thought about it a few days ago, and felt prompted to read it again. So I printed it off the internet, read it, and it was fresh in my mind.

More background:
A few days ago, Ally lost a book. It was a book she had only had for a day and only read it once. She really wanted this book, looked EVERYWHERE for it, had us pray for her to find it during family prayer, and I even tried to help her find it. (Mom's magic finding finger rarely fails, but it did in this case.)

October 22nd, 2008:
After the girls left for school in the morning, I went out to take the chickens some kitchen scraps and found one of them dead. It looked it like it had been killed by an animal (racoon or skunk or something) in the night. I don't really know the chickens by name like Mike and Ally do, so I wasn't sure which one it was. It was one of the smaller of our three black and white ones, so I knew it was either Ally's chicken Holly (named after the fairy hero in the Artemis Fowl series) or Liz's chicken. These hens are more like pets than just egg providers. Ally collects the eggs and cares for them every day. Just the day before she and Liz were outside with Holly and Liz's chicken in their laps petting them and holding them. Ally will run and the whole flock will run behind her.

I told the girls when I brought them home from school about the chicken and that I didn't know which one it was. Ally said if it was Liz's chicken she was going to be really sad, but if it was her chicken she was going to be really, really sad. Al ran to the backyard. I followed her. When I got out there she was playing in the coop area. I asked her if she figured out which chicken it was, but she said "no" and ran to the other side of the coop. She picked up the remaining small black and white chicken. She could tell by the color of the legs that it was Liz's chicken. I went to hug her, but she ran away and curled up on the grass in the corner of the yard. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she ran to the other corner of the yard (the chickens all running after her) and curled up in a ball. So I just went inside and left her alone, wishing I could do something to help her, but knowing she would have to go through the pain of loosing a pet and a friend.

She came in with red puffy eyes about half an hour later. She still didn't want to talk to me, but I heard searching around in our book closet (a little closet under the stairs with book shelves and kids books). I was in the kitchen preparing dinner. She held a book around the corner of the wall, so I couldn't see her, just the book. It was the missing book! The one that had been missing for several days, the one we had prayed over, the one that we had both looked for at least five times in that very same bookshelf! I said, "Oh! Where was it??" She peeked around the corner, smiling through her tears, "In the bookshelf!"

I said, "Come here, I want to talk with you." We came into the living room together, I put my arm around her and said, "Ally, Heavenly Father knows you are in pain. He knows you lost a friend. And he knew if you found this book at this time, it would comfort you. It is one of the Lord's tender mercies in your life - a way He helps you and shows He loves you. It won't take away all the hurt, but it will help, and God knew it would help." We both had tears coming down our faces, her for chicken and me for the knowledge of the Lord's tender mercies in my daughter's life at a time when she really needed it. I couldn't help her pain, but He could.

Pumpkin Patch Pics!

The pumpkin patch group!

Michelle and Tabitha on the hay ride. (Spencer in the back ground)

Nana & Lilly

Tabitha & Liz

Ally and her pumpkin

My beautiful girls!

Katie and her pumpkin

Liz and her pumpkin.

Six Weird and Random Things about me

I was tagged! Six weird and random things about me!

The rules are:

* Link to the person who tagged you (adventuresofthedomesticengineer.blogspot.com )
* Post the rules on your blog
* Write six random things/unspectacular quirks about yourself
* Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them
* Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog
* Let the tagger know when your entry is posted

Weird things about myself, in no particular order:

1. I enjoy walking into a room in my house that is particularly clean, just to look at it.  It's not like I need anything from the living room, I just walk into it, look around, take a nice deep breath, smile, and think to myself, "what a nice clean room."  I do that also with a drawer or closet I've recently organized, "ahh, what a nice organized silverware drawer."  Try it!  Or maybe you already do and it's not that weird :)
2.  I'm addicted to sour cream.  Could be worse, right?  My husband calls me the sour cream pusher, always asking my family, "Did you want some sour cream on that?"  Sour cream really makes the potato (or soup or nachos or whatever)!
3.  I am compulsive about making list of things I need to do.  The best thing is to cross things off the list.  Sometimes I write things down I did, that I had not put on my list in the first place, just to cross them off.  Sometimes making my list for the day takes ten or fifteen minutes.  Hmmm, I should put making my list on my list of things to do so I can cross it off too!
4.  I really don't like babies.  I know, I'm a terrible person!  They just don't do anything for me.  I love it when they get about one year old and are starting to say words and toddling around and such.  I'm just not one of those, "ooohhh, can I hold your baby???" kind of girls, and I've never gotten baby hungry a day in my life.  But I do love toddlers and older kids!!
5.  I've always wanted to have a chimpanzee as a pet. 
6. Some mountains just call to me to be climbed. Mt Hood, for example, was like a beacon, its snow capped peak calling me to stand at the very top and celebrate life. And I remember feeling so alive and so complete standing at the top of South Sister, as the wind whipped around me and I could see for miles and miles.

TAG!!! You're IT!

1. Stacey
2. Kim
3. Airen
4. Trish
5. Jodie
6. Dedra