Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas..........From Our Home to Yours!

Gentle Giants

We had just gathered the children tonight to have a quick Family Home Evening. All of us have some form of sickness going on or recovering from so I knew it would need to be quick. I thought maybe a quick Christmas story about the birth of the Savior. We sang a Christmas hymn and I started to get ready to read the story. C was struggling to get quiet because he wanted to share something he had made at school. I thought for sure, my story would be much more meaningful and I tried to put him off. He continued to be impatient so my husband said "Let's just let him share first." It was interesting because there was this piece of paper that said "The True Meaning of Christmas" by C. Brown with a scan code on it for a smart phone. We scanned it and the next thing we hear is C's voice. He talked about how the true meaning of Christmas was loving our family and friends and treating them well. Then he says " I wrote a poem about it and then starts singing the primary song I'm Trying to Be Like Jesus. He sings the chorus part: Love one another as Jesus loves you. Try to show kindness in all that you do. Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought, For these are the things Jesus taught. Hilarious that he took credit for writing the primary song. I must say it brought a little tear to my eye that he sat there and sang that song about Jesus to his teacher. When he thought about the TRUE meaning of Christmas, he didn't even mention Santa. Hmm..maybe we are doing something right. Either way, awesome C...just awesome. Each week C is supposed to share a book that he has read. Make a small puppet about the main characters and use it to retell the story in front of the class. We have been reading a lot of Christmas books at home so he chose The Three Trees to share. He made little puppet trees and told his class about how much each tree wants to be something special. He told me that when he told the kids that the first tree got to hold the baby Jesus, all his friends got so excited. C's best friend is not a member of our church. He told his mom that he wanted to go to church with C so he could see C and get closer to Jesus. I think it's true. Children help us get closer to Jesus if we let them. How often one of my small children will grab my face with their little hands just so I will pay attention to them. In the wake of the horrible tragedy in Connecticut, I find myself just staring at my kids, listening to them, cuddling them more, wanting them close, praying for those families who won't get to hold their little ones. Our hearts and prayers are with you.

Hurry and Help!!!!!

My dear friend Cindy is doing an awesome thing. She is trying to help a little girl's dream come true by personally delivering 10,000 letters to Macy's so they will donate that money The Make a Wish Foundation. Please please help!! Write as many letters to Santa as you can and email them to my friend at CindySantaLetter@yahoo.com and she will put them in an envelope and get them to Macy's! Her note is below....She is taking them TOMORROW!!! So write them TODAY!! Thanks and loves to you all!! "There is a girl named Gabriella in our community that has inoperable brain cancer. She is the family friend of one of Bridger's therapists. Gabriella is collecting letters to Santa to deliver to Macy's, who will donate $1 million dollars to Make-a-Wish if one million letters are received this Christmas. Gabriella wants to personally deliver 10,000 letters. Bridger's therapist requested that I help them. I made a goal to collect 500 letters by next Tuesday. This supports me as I feel this is a way to return the love and devotion that this therapist has shown to Bridger. It is a way to comfort the therapist's daughter, who is a friend of Gabriella. To give the letters to this daughter, who can then pass them along to her sick friend, is helping her feel the power of being a "Sam" and how, despite the grief she feels for her friend, that she can carry her friend when she can't carry her ring. I created an email account to receive the letters I will present to her in Bridger's therapy session next Tuesday. Email letters to CindySantaLetter@yahoo.com. Type the text directly in an email or scan the letter and attach it to the email and I will put it in an envelope. Letters can be from old or young and need not be anything beyond simple."

Holiday Evidence

If you look at this blog then you might think we are still walking around with Halloween costumes. You might think Thanksgiving never happened at all. You might also think that surely we haven't moved on to Christmas merriment. Well...here is some evidence that we have moved on to Christmas merriment. Lots of it. We had a lovely Thanksgiving with my parents, sister and cousin. We took family pictures that day that turned into our Christmas card this year. I will post that later. Our tradition is to always put up our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving night but since we were at my folks house, we ended up putting up my parent's tree. Little T really, really wanted to put the ornaments on but grandma wasn't up for that much. Either way it was a great ending to a great day. Since then we have been putting up Christmas decorations to the very delight of our little girl. Every time she sees any Christmas decoration around town, she yells " I just saw Christmas!!!" and gets so excited. She actually saw Santa in the mall today. You could tell her little brain was working. She stared at him for awhile and then said "He hasn't come to our house yet Mama." Perhaps if I gave her a chance to get closer, she would have given Santa a scolding. I assured her it was too soon.

We continued our tradition of having two trees. It was funny when we went to buy the real tree, our boys kept going through the tunnel of trees saying it was like going into Narnia! The fake tree has all the shiny bulbs and the fake one has the homemade ornaments. I love having them and wouldn't even mind adding more. I love white lights all around the house. We cover the front porch with the lights and Christmas wreaths in all the windows. I like how it looks. Very calming. The one thing we didn't have for the first couple of days was an advent calendar. For whatever reason, we have never really bought one that is wooden, or homemade. We just get the ones filled with chocolate for a couple of dollars. This year K surprised me with the biggest one filled with amazingly yummy German chocolates and there are two chocolates for every day. It seriously cost as much as our real tree! But so worth it!! We have two holiday parties this weekend. The Brown Family Christmas weekend at the lake the following weekend and then on to the real thing the next thing. I know it goes by way too fast. K and I like to light a fire as many nights as we can and relax while sipping some yummy hot chocolate. He even indulges me and watches some sappy holiday love stories on the Hallmark channel. Here's to hoping you can feel the joy of the season :)

Halloween 2012

Everything about Halloween this year felt weird. We had spent most of the weekend celebrating K's birthday and then getting ready for the Frankenstorm coming our way. Monday afternoon the winds and rain began to howl and sure enough just as I was making dinner, the power went out. If I had only been more on top of things, we would have had a warm meal in our tummys and would have been able to at least enjoy the fire that night. Instead we had peanut butter sandwiches, yogurt that we didn't want to go bad and whatever snacks we could find. Then I used a flashlight to put away all the crazy amounts of clothes I had washed that day to prepare. I came down to find K and the kids watching Snow Ball Express on the smallest battery tv meant for a car in front of the fire. That night as we tried to go to sleep, I felt like our house was in a car wash and couldn't get out. We literally went to bed wondering if a tree would come crashing through our windows. We were lucky! No trees but no power either. We were cold, hungry and really wanting a shower so we headed to my mom's for all of it since she had heat and food. We stayed there all day until the power came back on. The next day was Halloween. We were so not ready for the day but this is what we threw together! Little T is super girl, C is a power ranger, H is a knight from some video game, and big T was our old man scaregrow that sat on the poor and freaked people out when they came up for candy. He was awesome!

Seriously??

So we had a jam packed Saturday with two birthday parties and a baptism to go to. K and I have been fighting the lovely cold that our little T gave us. At some point during that day I snagged my thumb nail on something. It was torn deep so I trimmed the rest of the nail the best I could so it wouldn't get snagged any worse. It hurt but it wasn't too bad and I went on with my day. Saturday night I kept waking up with the horrible pain in my thumb. I kept thinking that I had a bandaid on too tight. When I woke up that morning I remembered that I didn't have a bandaid on at all. When I looked at my thumb it was double in size and hard as a rock. K was up getting ready for early morning church meetings. I showed him my thumb and compared it to my other thumb and he said you better go to the urgent care. So off he went to his meetings. Off I went to urgent care. An hour later I had a shot in my shoulder for tetnus, prescription for antibiotics and was told to take four motrin every 6 hrs cause it was gonna hurt for awhile. She wasn't kidding!! I guess I should have put a bandaid on my thumb after the nail got wripped because in less than 12 hours I had a horrible infection that made me feel like I had broken my thumb. The last two days/nights have been ridiculous between the pain coming from the shot in my shoulder and the shooting pain coming from my thumb. And by the way, don't even get me started on how many things you can't do without your thumbs. Try putting in contacts and buttoning your pants for starters! I have to walk around with my hand up because if I hang it down like a normal person, all the blood goes rushing to it and 4 motrin is not enough. Oh and it has started to ooze all kinds of pretty slime. Awesome! And yesterday trying to make dinner I cut my other thumb. Awesome! I would post pics but I like you guys too much :)

Tenacious!

There is A LOT going on with this kid right now. He is holding up remarkably well and I kind of wish I could push a pause button on his life right now. Not have to send him to school or anything else. First it all started when we went to the dentist in July and they told us he needed to start braces. He just has them on the top six or so teeth but they hurt a lot and he tells us all the time that he thinks they are crushing his other teeth. He will probably have them on for a year. This is phase one. I guess he will have to go through phase two in a couple of years. He actually seemed excited about getting them on until they were on. I believe it was day two and he asked if we could take them off. Hopefully he won't try that one himself. Braces are expensive. We do have good insurance for this but it's still a lot and coordinating all the appointments is getting crazy.

Then comes part two. H has struggled with reading and writing for years. Years of him going to reading specialists, tutors, talking to anyone who would listen. I have had monthly meetings at his school with his teachers to see how he is doing. They would always say he was one of their hardest workers in the class. He was always very attentive and you could tell he really, really wanted to learn. Then test time would come and the information just didn't seem to make it's way to the paper fast enough or in handwriting that anyone could really read. It's been hard on him. It's been hard on all of us. Every night homework is a bear and I spend most of my time with H trying to get it done while C and big T are left to pretty much do their homework on their own. From the hours of 4-7p it is very tense in our house. So.... I was talking to my visiting teacher about a month ago about this. Saying I was nervous for H to be in 4th grade where things would get harder and harder. She listened and said she would pray for us. About two weeks later she stopped me in the hall at church and mentioned that she was talking to a neighbor. The neighbor had said that her daughter had a hard time with reading and tracking while she was reading and now she is going to a vision therapist and it's helping. A light bulb went on in my head. Tracking is something I knew the specialist were trying to help H do. I got on line that day and started looking up vision therapists in my area. I got to this one doctor's website and started reading. I started to cry. They were describing my H in every way. I knew I had found the right place. Insurance was the next hoop to jump through. The doc doesn't take insurance but through some persistence, I got our insurance to put this doc in our network since H will need to go once a week. We had our first meeting with the doc and he evaluated H for two hours. Within the first 10 minutes, he turned and looked at us and asked "did you know your son sees double?" Did you know he is in a lot of pain when he tries to focus things on regular basis? All I could say was "no...I had no idea" It's kind of hard to explain everything but he said our eye muscles are the last muscles to develop. If you have any developmental delay in any other muscle areas, then the eye muscles that help bring the picture into one picture and not two, doesn't develop and you end up seeing double. He showed us through a couple of weird exercises that H has some reflexes that should have gone away many years ago and that is why his eye muscles have been slow to strengthen and develop. The more he talked, the more every little quirk about H made sense. I mean EVERY LITTLE QUIRK MADE SENSE. He would ask us if we knew why H wanted to stand up while he did his homework and then would proceed to tell us why. It was like seeing my nine year old son through totally different eyes. I have bad eye sight. I know how frustrated I feel when my contacts aren't working well. I can only imagine how he has felt for all these years when he can't explain why the letters always look double and blurry no matter what he does with his glasses. It explains a lot about why h has always been my more hot tempered one. Why he seems to bounce off the walls at times. They told us kids with this issue tend to keep moving because if they stop, they notice even more that things are double. Well, now we go to the therapy once a week. We have vision homework four days a week. H got bifocals to help his eyes retrain to focus close and far away. Soon I will have a meeting with all the teachers to explain what they can do to help H excel even with these issues. When people have found out all they do is shake their heads and say "I can't believe he has done so well for so long with this." Even with this he is mostly an A/B student. A friend of mine once watched H trying to learn something new. She had been watching him for a while. He was learning how to do a back flip. Some other kids were learning at the same time but only H really stuck with it that day. He was relentless. She said "Man that kid is tenacious!" Yes...my H is very tenacious!

T is the big 12!

This is a big birthday. You have waited for this one for along time. Big changes! Today you are 12. Today you have your last day of 11 year old scouts and move up to the big Deacon’s Quorum. You will receive the Priesthood on Sunday and we are so proud of you. You are totally excited to have a birthday party with a bunch of your friends this Friday night. I’m excited for all your new adventures. You are fun to be with. You keep your mom and dad hopping. You help us out a ton. You are super smart and serve your family well. You are an awesome student and work hard to get straight A’s all the time even in your Honors classes. You have started playing the trombone and even though it makes your little sister scream, you are getting better all the time. We love you big guy!!

Growing up

Someone told my kids it was okay to grow up. Someone told my sweet little baby girl that it was okay to go to preschool. Someone told her to not even get a little teary eyed and go confidently with her new teacher. I am glad she had a good first day. I don't think I could have handled it if she cried. I just miss my babies a little today.

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Someone else told my dear oldest son that it was also okay to grow up. He has started middle school. I knew this would bring change. He went from the kid in elementary school who was blissfully unaware of others opinions, to caring way too much about his friends in middle school. He does have a good group of friends. He does well in school. This mom is just noticing little things and it's making me miss my little boy. He turns 12 in two weeks and more change will come. He will go join the Boy Scouts, join YM, and receive the priesthood. All huge deals. All wonderful. All telling me he is is again growing up. It's just me and him for a whole 10 minutes on the way to school. I have him read in the Book of Mormon to me on the way. I like knowing that is how he is starting his day. I know it will help. He jumped in the front seat the other day on the way to school. I asked him why he did that since it's not exactly easy for him to do that in our garage. He just shrugged his shoulders. I noticed when we got to school that most of the kids get out of the front seat. He is noticing things. Little things. Not things that will change our life. He is just noticing and then following his peers. That scares me! I will say the next day he didn't get in the front seat. I think he realized it was a whole lot of work for no real reason. Either way, this mama is daily trying to figure this all out and be the type of mom he can come to and the same one that will set rules and guidelines that will keep him safe. Man it's exhausting. Makes me miss this kid....

Someone told my second son that it was okay to grow up as well. Today I got a call from the principal's office. I was stunned as I listened to him say that H had been in the bathroom when he saw a kid climbing the stall. He told him to get down cause he was going to get hurt. The other kid proceeded to hit my son in the head. When the principal said those words, my heart sank and I pictured my poor little H hurt and scared. He said that my son was okay and not really hurt. The other kid apologized and the principle mentioned that H was very mature in how he handled the entire thing. I went to pick him up from the bus 20 minutes later and as soon as I saw Hayden, I knew he was fine. He smiled and didn't have any bruises or blood on him. In fact, he didn't even say anything. ANYTHING. I was stunned. I went and told his dad the situation and finally we couldn't stand it any more. We had to ask him what happened. He told us that the other boy was a special needs kid. He said it did hurt some but that he knew the other child didn't totally understand what he had done. He forgave him and moved on. Again...my kids are growing up. These are older kids situations...this mama's heart can't handle it. Miss this baby too....

And I can't leave out little C. Man that kid cracks me up. He cries a lot around here. That is how I know he has his own growing pains. He is either so happy over the moon about something or bawling his eyes out. He recently lost his first tooth. He was soooo excited about this. As it was loose for a couple of days, he walked around telling anyone that would listen, that he had a "loosened tooth". The big night finally came. I thought it was about the money. We put the tooth in our tooth fairy pillow. He went to sleep and luck would have it, the tooth fairy had a gold dollar for that special boy. Then at about 3am I awake to hear someone crying. I go into the boy's bathroom and C is holding the tooth fairy pillow. I ask him if he didn't like the money he got, he said "I just really want to see my tooth again just for a little bit. Do you think you could talk to the tooth fairy and ask her to please, please let me see it just for a few minutes." Oh boy. My heart broke for the little guy. Either this was the biggest scam to call me out on being the tooth fairy, or I might just have the most sentimental guy on the planet. And just so you know, C was able to "visit" his tooth a couple times before the tooth fairy took it for good. Man alive these guys are growin!!

So someone tell them to stop....please!

Summer gone...new beginnings

I'm not sure how the summer is gone for us. Honestly, it feels like we just got back from our beach trip and yet my kids have already had a week of school. Wrong I tell you...wrong! I'm not sure I could even recap our summer. July is mostly a blur. I even checked back on my camera and I have no pictures to prove that July happened. I do remember lots of camps and a work trip for K. We had two scout camps this year and big T was invited to a Governor's School summer quest program that he went to for two weeks. He absolutely LOVED it! In that short two weeks he became fast friends with these super smart kids from five other counties. It was hard to get into so you know the kids really wanted to be there. We went to a performance on the last day and it was awesome. (and yes I left my camera in the car!!) oh well..maybe next year:) August had two trips for me that were super fun. One was with some of my friends from my ward and it was as usual, awesome. What happens at the beach, stays at the beach so no pics to share with that trip. The other trip was something my sisters, mom and I have started doing every time someone turns 40. It's a girls trip. The first one was a surprise for my oldest sister and it was in Vegas. This last one was in Seattle. I had never been to Seattle. Just heard it rains a whole lot. Now after having been there...well we are moving. At least while we were there is was absolutely beautiful. I left muggy 100 degree weather and for those four days we had 75 degrees, no humidity, and sun, sun, sun. This is why my sister chose this destination. She is not a fan of the heat so we tried to get some place cooler. It did not disappoint. It was so fun to all be in this cool apartment, right in the city, right above the most amazing (and rated best in Seattle) cafe and bakery. We took an underground tour of the Seattle (super cool and creepy), we went to this cook rock band museum since so many cool bands come from Seattle, we took an awesome ferry over to this island for dinner. We also got super close to the Space Needle. I say that cause I planned on going up. No one else cared to pay the price but I still was willing to do it. Only problem, when I got there everyone else in Seattle was there. As in the line was like 4 hrs long. So I got my space needle charm, took a picture, and was on my way.

The whole time I was there, I kept thinking, this is beautiful, my family could totally live here. We would love all the water, and green and beauty. Oh and Mt. Ranier...hello gorgeous!! It's this amazing snow peaked mountain, straight out of movie that just sits to the side of the Seattle skyline. I kept saying it was Russia. Ya know..cause Seattle is super close to Russia.:) When I got back from the trip, I had an insane week of appointments, school tours, shopping trips to get the kids ready for school. We have a middle schooler (yikes!!!), one in fourth, one in 1st grade and one starting 3yr old preschool in a couple of weeks. It means my days starts at 6am and I'm helping someone get ready, fix breakfast, and take them to school for almost 3 hrs straight. By the time little T comes home from preschool, big T will almost be on his way home. Crazy.

Another change, is K has started working from home. That has and continues to be an adjustment. It's better now that we don't have the boys home making noise all the time. It still feels weird to have him home while I'm doing my normal daily stuff. But I'm sure there are perks too and hopefully it will make for a more relaxing work environment. We could all use that!