A FaNtAsTiC SURPISE!!!

Last weekend I had a very nice surprise.  My Mom and Dad and Sister, Heather surprised me by coming to Kansas for the weekend.  Although things didn't go exactly as planned...Matthew and Ken had H1N1 and Matthew had pneumonia on top of that...we were still able to do some fun things.

The pictures below are on top of the Rock Monument in Pawnee Rock.  From the top of this Momument, you can see MANY of the surrounding towns.  The weather that weekend was pretty crumby, but it was still fun to go up there with Heather.  My Mom and Dad stayed in the car--they were FREEZING and had been up there before.

While they were here, we drove them around Great Bend and Larend so they could see where we used to live and where we go to school and work now, as well as just to show them where we call home now.

They were impressed with the fast pace life Kansans lead...20 minutes at Wendy's to get 3 frosty's and a milkshake. 

My favorite part of the visit was when we were just hanging out at their hotel and visiting while my Dad and I did a jigsaw puzzle together.  He mostly rearranged the pieces while I put it together, but we were a good team. 

They were able to go to church with us on Sunday and then Monday before they left, we went to Hoisington and ate lunch at a mennonite restaurant.  It was a fun weekend and I cried when they had to go back home.  Hopefull next time they come, we'll all be in better health and can spend more time together.

Thanks for coming you guys!  I LOVE YOU!

Too early for flapjacks?

We make pancakes for breakfast A LOT at our house.  When I am feeling like letting the nice Mom out for a while, I cut the pancakes into shapes they like using cookie cutters.

Matthew LOVES airplanes.  The cirlce is a cloud...in theory.

Nicole is super excited about Halloween.

Ken LOVE Mickey Mouse.  The heart is because I love him.

I know you are dying to know what shape I enjoy eating my pancakes...afterall it wouldn't be fair for them to get awesome shaped flapjacks and mine are just boring circles.  Have no fear though...mine are the coolest of all...

AWESOME right??  Having trouble figuring them out?  Here's another photo.

Seriously, even nice Mom is not going to waste food and according to my THREE children eating at the dinner table this morning, those were ruined.  :)

Whenever we eat pancakes, I always think about the part of the movie 'Groundhog Day' when Phil is driving drunk thru town and the police are chasing him.  Here's a clip for you if you've never seen the BEST MOVIE EVER MADE.

10-08-2009

Ken has H1N1
Dedra needs a nap
Matthew was pneumonia
Nicole is doing AWESOME playing the clarinet

Tender Mercies

It's kind of a long story...

When we were in Utah last month Gina took our family pictures. I decided the clothes we would wear before we left Kansas and although I like all of us to match, this time I decided that Nicole would wear a different color. When we were all getting ready Gina commented that she thought it was weird that Nicole didn't match the rest of us. The pictures ended up turning out nice and I liked how it looked with her in a different color. I didn't think anymore of it.

This is the time of the year when things that have happened in our life gets to me. I LOVE the holiday season but there are some bittersweet memories that come along with it. As I was watching conference this weekend, I wrote down some of the things I've been thinking about lately in hopes of finding answers from the talks. A couple of the questions were about Robert, our son who passed away almost 8 years ago.

Before Robert was born I was very judgemental about family. I thought it was ridiculous that a family would only have 2 or 3 children. I was not thoughtful to women who had miscarried babies or had delivered stillbirths. If a woman lost her baby because of own addictions I did not feel bad for them, even if they were truly upset about their loss. I just didn't know better. When Robert died, I was moved to the receiving side of such judgements. I have been asked in the last month why we only have 2 children. (We have 3 actually, and I can't get pregnant.) People have asked about our son and when I told them he lived 2 hours, they disregaurded the whole story. Here are a few things that I had never thought about...

A miscarriage, stillbirth and infant death is a horrible loss. Just because a child wasn't known on this life for very long, or at all, there were dreams and hopes for the lost person. A chair is still empty at the dinner table. If a woman loses her baby because she has an addiction, she still loses a part of her. ok, enough of my soapbox...

This season I have wondered how I am doing as a mother. I know I do my best with Nicole and Matthew but I am also a mother to a perfect little boy who is not on this earth. The questions that has eaten at me are, Am I a good mom to Robert? Is it wrong that I say I have 2 children when asked? How can I make sure that my children remember they have a little brother? I thought about these things this weekend but nothing came to me.

Today Nicole, Matthew and Ken are all sick. We've had fevers, hacking coughs, loads of kleenexes used and it's not very fun here today.

When I got the mail this afternoon, a midst all the bills and boring mail was a padded envelope from an address I didn't recognize right away. It was from Orem, UT. The kids thought maybe it was from my sister, Gina. After a second I told them it actually looks like my friend Trishelle's handwriting. I guessed correctly.

Trishelle is a dear friend of mine and I do not deserve her friendship. I am VERY blessed to have it though. She wrote our family a love note and enclosed a treasure she found at a yard sale. It is an angel ornament with the name Robert written on it.
When I read her note and saw the ornament, I immediately felt that she was an answer to my prayers. This beautiful little ornament is the perfect way to help my kids, and me, remember our sweet little baby. I decided to hang it on the wall, next to our family picture. The neatest part about that is...

the wings on the ornament are the exact same color as Nicole's shirt.

This is one example of the Lord's tender mercies in my life. If you have stories to tell, I encourage you to share them on your blog too. I'd love to read them.

Happiness is...

...bestmen that take their own pictures at weddings
...straw phones that you can talk to yourself on

...people who ruin all the pictures...most of the time

...swimming in your clothes

...putting your sister in a headlock

...Surprise!! I just love this picture. It makes me laugh.

...Nicole holding the dog like a baby. He lets her do it too!

...matching flip flops!

...Spaghetti Tacos. Okay, not really, but Matthew wanted one and he ate it. He said it was good.

...beds that are made

These are a few of my favorite things

Double Yellow Lines

There is a littler town right next to our little town. They had construction on their main street for a few months and everytime I drove thru, I laughed at the double yellow lines they construction people had painted. I actually videoed it...

swimming this summer...ish

These were taken this summer. We bought this pool frmo a friend of mine and we got a GREAT deal. Unfortunately, it had a plethora of leaks in it. In this serries of photos, we were filling up the pool and Matthew couldn't wait for it to be full.

We ended up patching and refilling the pool THREE times before murdering it with kitchen knives and throwing it away. Lesson learned...by a summer pass!

300th post

In honor of my 300th post, I want to tell you how much I LOVE General Conference!

In my mind General Conference is the kick off to the best part of the year. This weekend is the beginning of my holiday season. I've got our home decorated for fall. Now we have Conference. Next my birthday, Halloween (bleh), I LOVE THANKSGIVING...it's my FaVoRiTe!! Then of course Christmas, which I also enjoy.

I loved this morning's session of conferece so much. So many of the words spoken were exactly what I needed and many were answers to the prayers I have had lately. I feel blessed to be able to watch conference and the feel the spirit so strongly. I am thankful that there are still 3 more sessions that I get to watch this weekend.

If you missed this morning, I hope you watch it as soon as it is available online. Also, tune in this afternoon and tomorrow. I know that if you do, you'll feel the spirit so strongly and it will help to make your burden lighter, your testimony stronger and your faith and hope brighter.

You can click on 'General Conference' at the top or here to watch Conference live. I'll link the videos once they are available, later on in the week.

Enjoy the rest of your Conference Weekend!!

random pictures of children I know...

Some of these pictures are of children from school so I had to distort their faces. You get the general idea of each photo though. As you can tell, I associate with geniuses!

Matthew's ice cream cone...don't ask me why he did that!
This is a 1st graders socks during P.E. He didn't understand why I wanted a photo of it.

One of the girls from my class, 'playing' on the monkey bars...kind of.

A boy and girl from my class...

Piano Lessons...

Sometimes they don't go as well as I want them to.

Random Happenings

I was going through my pictures this morning and I came across some events that I never blogged about. Some of these are almost a year old, but they are blogworthy.

Meet David. I love him! He is one of the cutest and sweetest little boys I've ever known. If we have a daughter in the next little while, I would want him to marry her. Not only is David cute and sweet, he is also very talented. You see, David has a knack for finding things we didn't know we had and them using them in anyway he feels like it. For instance...

We didn't know we had any paintballs! We had a bunch of them, but David came over one time and decided it would be fun to walk on them, on a blanket we had. We ended up getting rid of the rest of them and the blanket did come clean. Fast forward 1 month. We had a New Years Eve Party. When David's Mom and Dad walked in the house, one of the first things they asked was if we had any paintballs and we assured them that we had gotten rid of them.

We were in the middle of playing a game when we were interupted by Nicole yelling, Oh NO! David hit the brand new TV with a paintball!! It was true. He found a paintball that was deep in outerdarkness (probably under Matthew's bed or the couch) and threw it at the television.
I cleaned all the paint off and the tv was good as new. A little side note about this tv...3 weeks before this party, Ken had decided he wanted to go to Walmart to buy some chips and salsa. It was about 10 in the evening. When he came home an hour later, he had a new television and no chips and salsa...nice

Memory Lane

I'm a para at an elementary school and I work in a special ed classroom. We have children in 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th grade. Throughout the day, we take each grade group to the regular ed classroom for different subjects such as Music, P.E., Social Studies, Science and Handwriting. Our 1st grader also gets to go for story time.

In the 4th grade class, they are making timelines of their life. It's really neat to see the children tell about the events in their lives that are important to them, as 9 year olds. It is also sad to see the children from my class who have no memory of yesterday, let alone what they did in 1st grade or even last week!

I've decided to share a couple of memories from when I was in elementary school. If you don't really care...stay tuned, I have some funny pictures I'll be posting in a little bit.

Kindergarten...I went to Kindergarten at Meridian Primary in Meridian, Idaho. My teacher was Mrs. Dahl. I remember getting up on my first day of school and I my Mom took my picture in front of the curtains in the 'Blue Room'. I walked to school with a girl who's Grandma lived down the street. That winter when the snow was finally starting to melt, I remember walking home from school and falling down on my rear no less than 20 times. My friends and I would make it a goal to take 5 steps without falling. Sometimes we walked in homeowners grass, but there was a really mean guy who always yelled at us, so we stayed out of his yard. One day I fell 3 times walking back his house. My teacher gave us grahama crackers with frosting everyday for snack and our own carton of milk. I only went to school half-day so that was very exciting to me. I remember that last day of school. I didn't know it was the last day until we was hugging us all goodbye and one little girl gave our teacher a gift. I told her I would bring her a gift the next day but she said school was over and I wouldn't be able to.

A quick little update

Since I last blogged...

We took a quick trip to Utah for my brother in law's wedding
Ken's been sick
Matthew's been sick
The dog got a haircut
We all got haircuts
I've met with the principal TWO TIMES!!
We've had a half a day suspension
Meetings with a teacher
Bought groceries
Made curtains
Taught Relief Society
Started reading the Doctrine and Convenants
Got a cat to be a mouser
Got rid of the cat...I hate mousers
Nicole learned we will rock you on the clarinet
Decorated the house for fall
Went swimming fully clothed with Gina and my friend Jessica
I burned dinner
We ate chinese food
I've watched 'Lost in Austen' FIVE TIMES!! If you love Pride and Prejudice, you MUST MUST MUST watch this movie!!!

I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff, but there's an update. Hopefully between sessions of General Conference, I can update and post a few pictures.

Have a great day!