Happy Birthday Ethan!

We celebrated Ethan's party with our friends at Jungle Jims Playland. We love that place. At two-years-old, Ethan is in love with anything trains right now...

"choo, choo"

I get by with a little help from my friends.






How thoughtful! A corner of an ad. But not just any corner. A corner with a tiny picture of a plant carefully chosen by K especially for Ethan on his birthday. And on the other side? Light bulbs for me! :) He cut it out and wrapped it himself. Thanks, buddy!

All aboard!

A good day!

Grandma K and Grandpa J

Last week was Jason's final week of class for his PhD. He was swamped with a research paper to finish. Being the loving wife that I am, I decided to help him (and myself) through this week by taking the kids to Grandma K and Grandpa J's house :) It was so nice to relax! Thank you, Mom and Dad for holding Asher, making meals, cleaning up after meals, letting me walk the aisles of the music store at my own leisure....I was extremely lazy! I didn't help like I should have. I really appreciated the break. Natalie was there from California with her Mom, Grandma and kids (dropping her brother off at college), Brooke came down with her kids. Ashley was there. We got to see Jason and Tiffany between all their busy-ness (with Jason finishing up his Masters). We also got to see Grandma and Grandpa Craner a few times. Fun! It was good to see all of you. Here are some pictures of our stay.

Notice Ashers bigger-than-life smile with dimple. It's so cute!!!

Thanks for the huge chunk of chocolate, Aunt Brooke!

This was so cute. Sam found a ladybug and the kids were captivated by it. This is why we should become like little children. The miracles that Heavenly Father blesses us with daily don't go unnoticed or unappreciated by them.

O.k., yes, I have an excessive amount of pictures of Ethan. I think he's the cutest kid there is. It may have something to do with the fact that he's a small replica of his dad, and that he's obsessed with trains "choo, choo-t!", and that he rattles off in his own language that we're slowly starting to understand, and that I can usually make him laugh right out of a good hearty pouty face, and that......one day while we were at Grandma and Grandpa's house he was playing games in the basement with Grandpa. He came all the way upstairs to find me and said, with a concerned look on his face, "Mom, I hii-.....Ma, I hi-". What? Is he telling me that he hit? He grabbed my hand to drag me all the way downstairs to where Grandpa was sitting and then rubbed Grandpa's arm extra softly. Sure enough he had hit Grandpa and wanted me to witness the apology.

McKenzie and Mallory had a blast together. They were two peas in a pod. How fun for McKenzie to have girl cousins to play dolls with, to giggle with, and to talk to!

Grandma helped the grandchildren make their very own books with markers and sticker. Of course McKenzie loved it! She loves to draw and tell stories, and is an amazing artist and story-teller at that! Sometimes I have to remind myself to stop whatever important thing I'm doing so I can stare intently into her eyes and listen to every word her little-big imagination want to let out (she loves to talk and loves to be heard). She is so adorable! However, don't you dare wrinkle one of her drawings even a little bit! You will not live it down for awhile. I can't believe she's going to school next year. She wishes she could go this year and is completely ready in every way. But her mom is completely not ready in every way so it's a good we have another year to prepare. McKenzie knows all of her letters and writes them well. Sometimes she chooses to do lowercase letters and always informs me of this important decision when I tell her which letter to write.

I enjoyed staying up 'til 2 or 4 a.m. chatting, eating, watching movies, playing games, watching American Idol, relaxing, relaxing, and relaxing. I also enjoyed getting back to Jason. We missed him! And his class is done!!!!!! I can't believe it. He still needs to get his paper published and do a dissertation.......but, the light at the end of the tunnel is almost blinding me now so I guess I'll go put on some shades and smile big.

Hablan Espanol?

I love my wife for many reasons, but one of them has always been her desire to help those in need. Another that I am growing to appreciate is how adept she is at demonstrating cultural sensitivity - as shall be illustrated below:

For instance, today a lady who was lost pulled her car over to us as we were on a family walk. The woman only spoke Spanish so Amy wanted to clarify where she wanted to go.

Amy spoke very slowly and loudly (as one must always do when speaking in a language that the other person will not understand anyway), "Did you mean '7-0-0-0' or '7-0-0'?" The woman looked a bit confused and so Amy spoke more slowly and loudly than previously and also added some very helpful hand gestures (mostly for the zeros).

Now, I have no desire to poke fun of anyone trying to give a helping hand - but the comical part of this is that it all came after Amy had listened to me have a whole conversation - in Spanish - with this poor woman. Now, I don't know if the woman we were helping knew exactly what this strange Gringa was attempting to do - but then again, I'm not sure I do either.

Anyway - it provided us plenty of fun conversation and ribbing as we drove (and the woman followed) to (and read along very, very loudly and very, very slowly - with appropriate gestures) '7-0-0 South and 7-0-0 East'.

We LOVE Grandparents

My grandparents came to visit last week. They came for my cousin's wedding and traveled all over the place visiting their numerous children/grandchildren in the valley. How sweet of them to come to us even after we offered to meet them somewhere! We loved having them here. They are amazing! Of course they experience the regular aches and pains that are the trade-off for wisdom. But you will not find that stopping these two! They are always busy. They get honey from their own bees, Grandma makes a stained-glass lamp, from scratch, for every grandchild for their wedding, and Grandpa has been digging out under their house to put support beams and a food storage space under there. What? When I asked him how he does that he said, "One bucket full at a time". They are such an example to me of working hard and enjoying life. As you can see, Grandma even rode ponies with McKenzie and Ethan (yes, they like to pretend our swim noodles are ponies. It's an FHE family favorite, if you're looking for ideas. Jason always remembers to close the blinds after a few minutes of vigorous galloping. A few minutes too late, if you ask me. Perhaps too soon, if you ask our neighbors who are seated with buckets of popcorn and binoculars on Monday nights, 7 p.m. sharp). Anyway, back to Grandma galloping on her pony which she named "Jumper" of all things. I think I would have named mine "Sleeper". You can see that even when McKenzie and Ethan needed "a break" Grandma was still riding.

Go, Kenzie, go! And please remember to incorporate that into our next show.

Petting the horses

"Just need a little break." What? Are you joking? Where did this come from? Where were my overabundance of unfinished projects when this occurred? When do 2 and 4-year-olds EVER stop to catch their breaths? (We're pulling out the ponies tomorrow and I'm naming mine Jumper).

If you have not recieved a hug from Grandma, you simply have not recieved a hug.

Grandma and Grandpa, thank you so much for coming! We love you!

This post leaves me feeling so thankful to Heavenly Father for blessing us with families: people of all ages, stages, experiences and personalities put together with a commonality that can't be ignored - even in the rare and fleeting occurance that you would want to ignore it. Families teach us how to love, laugh, forgive, love, be stronger, be kinder, not judge and love. So to all my family out there - I love you! I love that this blogging is keeping me in touch with those of you I'm not able to see much. I'm grateful for the insights and examples I gain from peeking into your worlds. I love that we're all together on life's journey just doing the best we can and then picking ourselves up and trying to do better. Yes it's late (11:46 p.m. in attempt #1432 to quit blogging when my children are awake) and I'm getting sappy. Sappy, but sincere. Because, really, what's better than a group of people that were forced together on this earth to be eachother's fan club ... and comic relief ... and target for destruction on a particularly bad day? Nothing. And coming in close second to that are friends: people that you admire enough to hope they will join your fan club and perhaps provide a little comic relief...and forgive you of your bad days. LOVE TO ALL!