First Day of Track-off after Christmas

So, Christmas is over and we still have 8 days before the big kids head back to school and 30 more days before the middle children head back. Will this track-off descend into chaos? No, no! Allen got everyone to write down three lists and fill in a schedule at the beginning of the vacation. List 1: What fun things to you want to do? List 2: What friends do you want to play with? List 3: What are your top requests for presents? He included a calendar on everybody's planning sheet so we could all sit down and see where playdates made sense, in the context of activities already scheduled.

Chaos doesn't stand a chance. My Flylady routines are finally sticking, helping me dig out from under the holidays. Everybody's expectations are a little broader and more sensible - Wii is not the only activity out there, and we can have fun in the space between our house walls and the big street up the hill.

So today, we have some friends over who've been abroad for the last 6 months. Just the kids, so I can clean around them and not feel guilty. Or post on my blog and not feel antisocial. I may even post some fun holiday pictures. :) Happy Track-Off!

Wyoming's big enough for all of us

Our Whitaker Reunion was more informal this year - Grandpa and Grandma, Monica and her family, Melody and her family, the Hart families and Noel and her family couldn't come. The rest of us planned to rendezvous in Yellowstone at the southeast entrance for camping, hiking, and driving fun. We live in Denver, so we drove north on I25 to I80, then west to Rawlins to catch US287 NW. At Muddy Gap we left civilization behind for several hours.

Then came the best surprise of the trip - a visitor's center around the 6th crossing of the Sweetwater River on the Mormon Trail! The site honors the members of both the Willie and Martin Handcart companies (1856), but particularly the Willie company which was rescued there by those dedicated mortal angels who left Salt Lake City to brave the winter weather in the mountains and on the plains to answer Brigham Young's call.

Our favorite part was riding in the handcarts. It's a beautiful site with a section of the Mormon trail preserved for youth conference treks.











Yellowstone looked nothing like I remembered. I was about 9 when my grandparents (Chidester) took us there. We stayed in 1920s-era cabins and drove and drove. There were bison and elk everywhere and we saw moose (a little too close up - Grandpa tried to feed one a handful of weeds) and a bear or two. Old Faithful seemed way bigger, closer, and more intimate. A trail between the mudpots seemed unbearably fragile (how did they know the boardwalk was secure?). It was a memorable trip.

This time, we watched Old Faithful from benches 100 yds away with 1500 other people. The wide, caldera floor was built up with several huge lodges and more under construction. Does it sound like I'm complaining? Really, the geyser walk was phenomenal. Another hike took us 3 miles to a lake (Nathan and Samuel made it about 3/4 mile in, melted down asking for water - Marion had the water backpack and we had the food backpack ( poor planning ) - and had to turn around for the car). The pine forests were thick and beautiful. We saw two chipmunks and lots of streams and wildflowers.

Another hike took us along the north rim of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. Green and churning at the bottom of the canyon, the Yellowstone River has cut a stunning and multi-colored path through the stone mountains. The trail ran unnervingly along the drop-off in several places. Thirty years ago, an earthquake shook off part of a road that had followed the edge for decades. It's still visible in spots and heads eerily off the edge in one place in particular. Hiking that trail was another of the highlights of the trip for me. Nathan and Samuel made this hike very well, with no meltdowns. It was a little longer than the distance they'd gone the day before and they started out with a lot of enthusiasm so I was encouraged that they were becoming good little hikers. It's a good thing because I can't carry them for any length of time anymore. They're both 50 pounds.

My two brothers' families and my sister's family camped right next to us, so we got in lots of visiting time. One of my favorite times was the family untalent show. We commandeered the restroom steps for a stage and circled our camp chairs. 7 boy cousins had put together a crime drama, practicing every spare moment, and were delightful! Samuel wanted to steal the show, singing every song everybody else was singing, with his own twist (Book of Mormon stories ... are about the selfish boy from far across the sea). You can imagine. We let him have the spotlight for '1st Grade, 1st Grade' to the tune of 'New York, New York' - watch out Frankie!

We brought our creative cooking implements - reflector oven Allen made when he was 13, dutch oven, and toaster sticks. The cinnamon rolls were fluffy and golden brown, fresh from the reflector oven. Sirloin tips and rice were well-cooked and flavorful from the dutch oven. Marshmallows puffy, chewy and melty from the toaster sticks. Yummy! My brother had a toaster platform for his one-burner top-of-the-propane-bottle stove which turned out beautiful toast - crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. Amazing!

Enough for today!

Easter Season

I think about celebrating Lent every year. You know, giving something up. This year, I decided to temper my self-indulgence. It was a good experiment. Sometimes I called a friend instead of playing a game on the computer. Other times I read the scriptures instead of the newspaper. Little things that kept Jesus on my mind.

The scouts are camping tonight and I have a migraine. Philosophy and migraines don't mix, but if I close my eyes halfway, I can pretend time is standing still. Embrace the pain. Live in the moment. But don't close your eyes because it'll hurt when you open them again. Just halfway. Pink Floyd moment, sorry.

The boys, they're not babies anymore, Sam and Nathan went to sleep right on time. Dinner, a bath, and bed. Worked like magic, even though Nathan had a nap this afternoon. We walked our neighbor's dogs this afternoon, though it feels like I'm pulling 4 puppies on leashes, not just two. It's kind of funny, unless the medication hasn't kicked in yet. The dogs can unwind themselves when they get all tied up in the leash but Nathan and Samuel always send me to my knees when they get tied up in the leash. True, they're holding me around the knees, so it makes sense that when they lose their balance, I have nowhere to go but down. Samuel painted the swing in mud today, and his clothes, hands, and ears. We've had to water the yard for 3 weeks now, so the mud was inevitable. But the weather has been unbelievable! Blue skies, light breezes, and sun, sun, sun! I got out my tanning moisturizer two months early (to take the edge off my fluorescent legs) so I could wear my capris without injuring anyone with glare-sensitive eyes.

So the scouts went camping tonight. You should know that I feel really loved, not abandoned, because the scouts went camping tonight. Allen's the scoutmaster, so he's in charge of the scout calendar. They were originally scheduled to camp next weekend to make up for a campout that had to be cancelled in April. Next weekend, I was hoping all of us would be in Utah to visit my parents for a couple of days before Allen had to be back in CO for the quarter close starting April 1. A couple of weeks ago, I brought up the conflict in family council (highly recommend) and Allen started right then to talk about rescheduling the campout. He also has a court of honor this weekend, which means shopping for badges and arranging reviews, so this was not an easy weekend to have a campout. But he was willing to do it so we could all drive to Utah in a week. Isn't he great?! Sigh. I feel loved.

Marion's theater career is off to a flying start! She played the China Princess in OZ!, her middle school's musical this semester. She was a principal throughout one whole scene, even though she didn't have a song. Several parents told me what a good job she did, how cute her actions were and beautiful she was. Marion says, "I look like a creeper in my white makeup, dark black eyes, and really itchy and uncomfortable wedding dress." I think she looked very expressive. I'll post pictures soon.

January

My elementary school kids have 5 weeks off starting the week before Christmas.


What can I say after that?

Actually, it's historically (the last 5 years anyway) been by turns chaotic and wonderful. Just like you'd think, it depends on your perspective. Which is not fair at all. If I'm suffering of course it has to be chaotic and too long and where is that cavalry (the mounted soldiers riding to my rescue)? My house, oh, my house may never recover. And yet, this year (I know, it's the antidepressants) there have been some bright rays of light. One - the variety in the weather really lifted my spirits. Two - a friend loaned me a book about busy activities for busy Toddlers or something like that. Even though I only have one mostly outgrown Toddler left, the book started out so positively and with such practical ideas (a crazy can for the time when dinner isn't quite on the table yet) that I felt the possibilities start to bubble up like carbonation in my favorite root beer. Surprisingly, reading about Willa Cather left me a little mad and anxious - discontent. I walked around with a scowl a lot. Reading about toddlers put that discontent back on the road to productivity because it's all about creativity. Especially the discontent. Believe it or not, mothers have to be creative all the time to keep up with, and occasionally get ahead of, their Junior Anarchists. Whose needs often supersede their mothers' creative efforts. Back to Willa Cather. As part of that book review, I read some about Minerva Teichert, an LDS contemporary and fellow artist, though in painting. Cather was widely published and well-known and Teichert's paintings grace the interior walls of the Manti Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Two women who worked hard for their art and saw a measure of success in their lifetimes. While Cather never married or had children, Teichert raised 4 children on a ranch in Wyoming while painting, cooking for the ranch hands, and keeping house. So, back to me, I am neither a world-class writer or painter or musician, but I have talents - creative things I like to do. We need to continually create in order to stay alive - to keep the cobwebs at bay. I picked 5 projects to work on before the children went back to school and we had a great time finishing two of them. We painted, perler-beaded, sanded, made plate designs,sang, read, danced, and somehow the house is coming back together and I don't feel anxious and discontent anymore. O, pioneers!

Ode to a Double Stroller

I owe my sanity to my double stroller. We had three kids, 3 and under. The oldest had ADHD and followed his nose unless it led to me. My hero had one seat with a strap, one bench and a kickplate in the back. The baby could sit in the seat, the 2-year-old on the bench with her feet in the basket and the 3-year-old standing on the kickplate with the back strap across his back. Aah. We could stand in line at the DMV with nothing but a bag of licorice and wait in line for 45 minutes. We could wait at the podiatrist's office for an hour with nothing but a bag of jelly beans and Veggie Tales recitations to occupy us. Well-child and sick-child visits at the pediatrician's were a piece of cake. By the time the baby was 3 and I was pregnant with number 4, everybody could remember to stay by me, use quiet voices, and not touch anything in the store. The double stroller limped, the handle wobbled, and the sunshade supports had broken. It was time to retire my faithful companion. I had Allen set it out by the garbage one day when I wasn't looking.

Anniversary Angst

I'm reviewing for our book group this month - Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark. While skimming a biography of Cather, this gem stood out:

"A Midwestern farm couple have ceased to talk to each other with any intimacy because roles and family loyalties have divided them. The husband is concerned with his farm work, the wife with her children; over the years their conversations have been reduced to negotiations 'almost wholly confined to questions of economy and expense.' As Hester haggles in behalf of her sons, Cather delicately and understatedly describes the emergence of buried affection between husband and wife. In trying to persuade her penurious husband to let the boys attend a traveling circus, Hester discovers that--unknown to each other--she and William had attended a circus together back in Virginia, their childhood home. This revelation opens the floodgates of memory, and the two begin to share other stories and recollections:

"They talked on and on; of old neighbors, of old familiar faces in the valley where they had grown up, of long forgotten incidents of their youths--weddings, picnics, sleighing parties and baptisms. For years they had talked of nothing else but butter and eggs and the price of things, and now they had as much to say to each other as people who meet after a long separation."

"Their conversation leads to a reawakened love based in shared experience, understanding, and memory. As a result of this renewed connection, Cather implies, family allegiances will shift. Hester will no longer always place her sons before her husband: she feels a 'throb of allegiance' to William, and her sons sense that they have lost a "powerful ally." (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Sharon O'Brien)

Listening to one dear friend talk about her anniversary, the desolate winds of winter blew through her words, even though her anniversary was in August. I'm probably reading too much into things, but sometimes family responsibilities, church callings, work, and selfishness take precedence over cherishing our spouses. It can happen to anyone and an anniversary is just a day, but it happens on the same day every year and it's for both of you, not just one. It's your spouse's anniversary, too, so you make the plan and carry it out.