I do have pictures of Thanksgiving and Christmas and all those fun times, but It's such a pain converting them into jpeg, I just don't want to take the time.
Thanksgiving was fun. We went to Vernal and all my family was there, with the exception of the two missionaries that were still out at that time (Hayden and Keith). My nephew Daniel had arranged for the nieces and nephews and some of us aunts and uncles to play an assassins type game. Each person had the name of someone they were supposed to assassinate over the course of the weekend and once you "killed" your person, you would receive a new name and it went on until there was a winner. It lasted about an hour. It was crazy, seeing everyone being paranoid, wondering who would kill them. I got out really fast. I can't even remember who won, but it was fun. The littler kids wanted to do their own game, so Dan set up a game for the smaller ones. Owen won that one and Erin took second. They were pretty excited about that. It was fun to see everyone. We don't get to see my family too often and it was nice to be home for a while.
Christmas came and went without much fanfare this year. I actually kind of prefer it that way. I did a lot of homemade gifts for the kids this year. I made shirts, wooden people to play with and we tried to make bow and arrows for all of them, but they didn't work the way we wanted them to, so we turned them into sparring sticks. We got each of the children a board game and had fun Christmas day playing all their games they got. Reagan had been sick a week or so before Christmas, so she was still not feeling 100% and Erin got sick on Christmas. But wait, there's more! For the week after Christmas and New Years, ye got the flu at our house. Liam, Cameron and Reagan all fell victim to it. It wasn't a very exciting break for Cameron because he got sick. Owen started running a fever and was feeling pretty low for a day and I think we are all finally on the mend.
We did have a nice snowstorm here last week. We got about 2 feet of snow out of it. Cameron and I shoveled our huge driveway and decided it would be nice to get a snow blower. I do have pictures of the snow that I need to put on here also. Erin loves it and came out to help us shovel each time we would go out. Liam came home a little late from school one day and decided to shovel our driveway and our neighbor's driveway. He came in after it got dark and was pretty proud of himself. I was proud of him too.
Liam has joined the chess club at school and is liking that pretty well. One of his friends from the ward is also in the club and I think he likes that too. He's doing well in Scouts, he's almost earned his Wolf badge. He just has a couple of things left to do. He's learning multiplication and division in school and is loving Harry Potter. He's on the fourth book. It's fun to see him reading the books for the first time and being amazed at the secrets he finds out. We told him he doesn't get to watch the movies until he has finished the book. We need to set a night or two to watch the first three movies with him. He is going to start Karate at the rec center tomorrow.
Erin is really liking school. She is slowly liking to read a little better. She doesn't love it, but at least she doesn't hate it like she used to. She is learning adding and subtracting and how to spell in school. Her teacher was gone for two weeks while she was teaching kids in Thailand. She got to ride to school on an elephant and everything. Erin sure was excited when her teacher came back though. She really likes her teacher a lot. We are going to be signing Erin up for soccer in the next couple of weeks. She loved it last year and has asked to do it again. She is learning that patience takes work and that we can't always get exactly what we want and those are hard lessons for her to learn. She's a great friend to Reagan and Liam and tolerates Owen. Which he's okay with I think.
Owen is going to preschool three days a week. His birthday is coming up and he will be 5! He wants a zombie cake and doesn't care what gifts he gets. He is learning the days of the week in school. We are signing him up for Karate and Soccer too. He has energy to spare and doesn't ever stop running, dancing, jumping, hopping, racing, spinning, etc. until he goes to bed. He has been having growing pains at night. He's had them for a couple of years, but they seem to have gotten a little worse of late. I am tired of them, I'm sure he's REAL:LY tired of them. We'll have to watch for a growth spurt I guess. Owen and Reagan are good buddies and pal around together at home. He's usually pretty nice to her, but sometimes needs reminding to be gentle.
Reagan is fun to have at home. She is starting to talk a little better now, although a lot of the time I still have no idea what she's saying. She just likes to be with her brothers and sister and do whatever it is they are doing. She likes to help take the silverware out of the dishwasher and put it into the drawer. She doesn't quite get it where it's supposed to go, but she does try, so that's okay by me. She is spoiled, but I guess the baby gets that right?
Cameron is liking his work okay. They have been doing a lot of layoffs and restructuring. He says his job is safe though, so I'll have faith in him. He works hard and is trying to look for the good, especially with this weather. He doesn't like snow and would rather be in a warm climate. We've had an inversion plus "arctic air" and we haven't gotten above 25 degrees the last two weeks. I would like to see the sun again soon.
I am trying to be a good mom, good wife and a better person. I heard a comment in Relief Society the other day that really resonated with me. She said that we as an LDS community seem to want to have things perfect. The perfect clothes, the perfect house, the perfect children, the perfect meal, etc. and we need to remember that instead of being perfect outwardly, we can learn to live principles perfectly. Learning to forgive perfectly, learning to love perfectly, learning to pay tithing perfectly, etc. The teacher added to that comment saying that as an LDS culture, we try and make the outside look perfect, hoping that the inside will follow and it needs to be the other way around. I think that is so, SO true. I get tired of people trying to show how wonderful they are. Life is messy and cluttered and crazy and stupid sometimes. It also is happy and joyful sometimes. I have kids that fight. I have a messy house every day that I have to pick up. I have kids that say no to me and kids that have a hard time learning to do certain things. I have to push my kids to do things and lecture them endlessly about being kind an looking for the good and all that fun stuff. They don't know all the answers in Primary because I'm not on the ball enough to cover everything. I don't have a wonderful attitude about getting up and making lunches every morning. They don't get straight A's, I don't have endless bushels of patience, sometimes I just want to sit with my kids and watch TV. I don't approach making dinner every night with a heart full of song. We don't do crafts every slow moment of the day. We don't read the scriptures every single night. We try to, but sometimes, we just get crazy, or I just tell them all to go to bed. BUT...We do love each other. We do fight for each other. We pray together. We read scriptures together. We eat dinner together. We listen to each other (most of the time). We try together. We work together (sometimes with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth). It's not all fun and roses and unicorns, but there are times when my kids are playing together that I can see that we are trying and with Heavenly Father's help, we will be okay. Sometimes those times are few and far between, but I need to remember to look for them and not just pass them by and not let other people's "perfect" lives intrude on the happiness that I can find within my own family.
