Being April

Dean took a few days off work this past week, just to use his vacation days before the fiscal year ended. Tuesday and Wednesday he spent cleaning, and rearanging the boys' bedroom, and planting a tree, mowing the lawn, and just getting a bunch of other jobs done that he has been putting off for a while. Thursday he was just going to take for himself to play games and hang out with friends etc. Thursday morning I walked Deano to school, leaving Isaac and Andrew with Dean. It was a long hike home up steep hills, and my belly and back were aching pretty badly by the time I got back. I collapsed on the couch next to Dean, dreading the rest of the days work if I was already feeling like this. Then Dean dropped the bombshell. He had received a phone call while I was gone telling him that he would be deploying, leaving in just three weeks. At first I thought he was kidding. I begged him to just be kidding. Then my pregnancy hormones kicked in and the tears started. I don't usually cry...

Deano started kindergarten a couple of days ago, and things around here have changed. Our easy going days where the kids watch movies while I get my morning nap are gone. I no longer get to stay in my pajamas all day long (because those are the only comfortable pants I have right now). Deano is gone for most of the day every day, and I don't get to see him until the afternoon. I have missed having him around, but I am also loving that he is growing up. Even just in the last two days, he has been acting more mature. Deano hasn't told me much about what is actually going on while he is at school other than that he had lunch time, and he played outside, and he didn't learn anything. He hasn't been eating his lunch during lunch time though, he eats just a few bites, and then finishes it off as an afternoon snack when he gets home from school. I expected that he would be really tied after a full day of school, especially because even before he started school he would of...

For the last month and a half I've  been working on making this video. I was only able to finish it yesterday when I got the final piece of information to finish it off in an exciting way. I used to make movies when I was a teenager with the help of siblings and friends, and I really enjoyed that. I've been trying to think of ways that I can capture my old self, my old talents and hobbies and continue to do them now. I am still in essence the same person I used to be, and while I have changed a lot, I do still enjoy a lot of the same things I used to. I had forgotten about that though. I used to love making movies, and even took a video production class in eighth grade. At that point I was seriously considering going on and studying filmography, but that idea quickly faded, and while I still enjoyed making movies, I never did it as much as I would like to have. I loved making this one because it combined something that I loved doing in my youth, with my children who are basi...

Dean took Deano and Andrew to Missouri this weekend. they got up at 4am on friday morning and drove all day long and got to Springfield around 1am Saturday morning. They spent today with Dean's sister and her husband in the hospital, and then they will be leaving extremely early tomorrow morning and driving all the way back home, hoping to be home in time for him to get some sleep before going back to work on Monday. Dean took his dad with him because he hasn't seen Dean's sister in some time, and his Dad just needed to get away for a bit because his wife died two weeks ago. Dean will also be giving his mom a ride back home, since she drove her car out to give to Dean's sister. It has been really good for Dean to be able to spend some time with his family, especially his dad. And the boys are definitely enjoying time with grandpa which they haven't had a ton of in the past. Isaac and I stayed at home. I had forgotten what it was like to just have one small kid. ...

She is sixty two years old. She has three children, and nine grandchildren, plus two stepchildren, and three step-grandchildren, and one on the way. She is dying. She has no health insurance. She has no life insurance. She can't afford to stay in the hospital, so her husband hasn't been to work in two months so he can take care of her. She is getting worse all the time. No one knows for sure how long she'll live. A day. A week. A month. Three months. No one has much hope beyond that. Does it matter that she hasn't gone to church since she was 18 except once for the blessing of a grandchild? Does it matter that she has been an alcoholic for all of her adult life? Her step-grandkids know her as grandma: provider of toys and hours of fun. They love her. Her step-son tolerates her, even though he still blames her for destroying his parent's marriage. Her husband is slowely sliding into depression, and turning to the alcoholism that he has been fighting for decades. His...

Dean won't be deploying after all! Hooray! This means he won't be gone when baby#4 arrives. He won't miss out on the first year of his/her life. He won't have to leave me with four small children all by myself! Hooray! Of course, nothing about this is certain. For some reason he is still on the list to go to the month long training in August. We suspect so that it's either a mistake, or they want him to teach someone else how to do his job, since he won't be going. There is also the chance that they will change their minds and decide that they want him to come after all. And there is always always the possibility that things will escalate, or war will break out elsewhere and he will be sent out with very little notice at any time. Dean is pretty upset that he won't be going, mostly because he was supposed to be getting a battlefield promotion, that would put him into a leadership position, that he was really really looking forward to doing. They can'...

On Memorial Day we drove about an hour away to Farson Wyoming, where Dean got to participate in a Memorial Day ceremony at the cemetery. It started out with some singing, and a speaker, and then a bunch of kids played guitar. It would have been really nice if my kids hadn't been bored and wanting to run around. After that the Honor Guard provided by the Sheriff's department did a rifle salute and played taps. It was really cool. Dean was the one who got to play the bugle. Many people were impressed with his bugle playing skills, but we didn't tell anyone that it was a special bugle that plays the song all by itself. It is actually the very same bugle that Dean takes to do the military honors at veteran funerals.     After it was over, they provided doughnuts and juice and we met up with Dean. Isaac took a little while to recognize him in his uniform, but when he did, Isaac immediately wriggled down from me, ran to his daddy and gave him a good two minut...

It was a few weeks. So tired, all the time, barely able to get anything done. Then finally, I was able to have a few good days interspersed with the bad days, and now I've had three good days in a row. I even managed to get through today without a nap, and I'm not even feeling like a zombie at the end of the day. I really hope that the worst is behind me and it won't start up again. We took the kids bowling last week on one of my good days. They had a blast. Deano won. Andrew decided early on that he would rather not use the ramp. They both had a great time. Isaac was having a hard time though because he just wanted to play with the balls, and was extremely frustrated that we wouldn't let him. One of the people that worked there gave him a few rubber balls to play with instead. That helped a little, it was a good thing we brought grandma along to keep him entertained.

So, trying to think of what has been going on in my life, and things that I should blog about, I'm not coming up with much. Just one big thing, that I have been avoiding talking about, and it's getting harder and harder not to bring up, because it really has been the focus of my life this last month or so. What has been going on with me? not much. I'm just pregnant. I've been pregnant before, this is nothing new, I thought I knew what to expect. I know they say that every pregnancy is different, and yeah, they all have been, but they've been pretty close. This one is different though, and I am not enjoying it. I am tired. So tired. That's pretty much been the focus of my life these last few weeks. When can I get a nap? is it quiet time yet? Are the boys in bed? can I go to bed now? here, watch a movie so I can take another nap. I need to clean my house... nope taking a nap. Should I start on dinner, or try to sleep some more? ummm, sleep it is. As a result, my ...

This past weekend I got to attend a girls retreat with some friends. We met at a friend's home, which was good because it was close enough that those of us with kids and other responsibilities could come and go at our availability. Her husband had taken her kids down to Utah for the weekend, and her mother and a couple of sisters came up from Utah to attend the retreat as well.  I was able to go after Dean got home from work on Friday, spent the night there, spent all day Saturday there, and came home late Saturday night, then after church on Sunday I was able to go back over for a few hours. The retreat continued through Tuesday, but I was grateful to have been able to go for as long as I did.  She was calling it a 'scrap retreat,' ideally for everyone to come and hang out together while they did their scrap booking, but so many people came with so many different projects. Many were scrapbooking, but some were sewing, painting, and a variety of other projects....

My friends talked me into taking a watercolor class to follow up the drawing class I took last fall. It was fun, and I was definitely learning things, but I decided that painting really isn't my thing. Maybe I'll try again sometime in the future, but for now I'm done painting. I especially liked getting out of the house for a couple hours every week for the last ten weeks. Now that it's over I'm going to miss it. These are some of the paintings I did. Some were in class with instruction all along the way, others were at home, with me experimenting and trying to do new things, some turned out okay, others not so great. When I scanned them in, all of the colors were a little off, and there are weird shadows on them in places where the paper had buckled.  These are in no particular order.

Dean has been working with the sheriff's department for about two years now, and for the most part he has been enjoying it. There are a few things that he hasn't liked so much about it... like the hours, and the pay isn't quite where we'd like it to be, but otherwise he has fun with it. He also has been working for the Army national Guard since getting off active duty more than three years ago. With them he has just been driving out to Cheyenne for one weekend every month, and two weeks of training during the summer. In the last year, occasionally he has been helping out doing military honors at funerals. This last week he got a position doing those funerals full time. I'm not sure what he's going to end up doing full time, since there are only funerals occasionally, but they're paying him to be there full time. So far since starting this last Wednesday, he has done one funeral, and sat around his office, organized some papers, and cut his hand trying to o...

For the second time in less than a week, my boys have emptied an entire tube of toothpaste all over their toys, all over the walls, the carpet, their beds... And if it's not toothpaste they fill buckets or cups to dump all over their toys, beds, clean laundry, etc. I tried just locking their bathroom door, but then they have accidents. I finally thought to move their toothbrushes and toothpaste to the other bathroom, but what else can I do? How do I teach them? How can I teach them to respect their belongings? If I have them clean up the mess it takes forever, and they just end up spreading the mess. They don't care. They won't do it. I feel like they don't respect anything. They don't respect me. They don't respect their belongings. They don't care about anything at all. I try to talk to them about making good choices and about consequences, but they don't care. Today they laughed the whole time they were supposedly cleaning the mess, and they laughed ...

Thursday and Friday, we spent in Utah with family, to see Mom and Dad one last time before their two year mission to Argentina. It is always so much fun spending time with family, but we had to leave earlier than we hoped because we had to rush home on Saturday to go to a ball! For the past five Saturdays, our stake put on some dance classes, taught by a good friend of mine in preparation for this ball. Dean and I were only able to go to two of the five classes, but managed to get a quick recap of the others, and we learned to foxtrot, waltz, cha-cha, and swing (not that we could actually remember much by the time the actual dance arrived. We missed the final class which was a review of everything.) So the dance was awaited with eager anticipation.  We got home from Utah around 3 in the afternoon, just in time to shower, and head over to a friend's house where she and another friend helped me get ready for the dance. I am hopeless when it comes to hair, and I don...

I just got done watching Mary Poppins with the boys. While I was watching, I had a few realizations. It has been much longer since I have seen this movie than I thought. I thought I knew the movie pretty well, but thinking back, I don't think I understood a lot of the jokes that were made. I totally missed the whole women's suffrage thing. I don't think I had any idea what Mrs. Banks was talking about through the entire movie. I totally missed the entire point of the movie, about Mr. Banks. Once it started focusing less on the kids I think I stopped paying attention. I don't think I often watched to the end of the movie. I think I must have wandered off during the 'Feed the Birds' song, and often didn't come back in until 'Let's Go Fly a Kite.' Despite having been so long since seeing the movie, I still remembered most of the songs perfectly. Although I only vaguely remember the song the bankers sang, and I think I totally missed the point of ...

I've never been a particularly organized person. Stacks of paper, junk drawers, 'corner counter'... these things have always been more my style. The past few years I have been trying to break that habit. It has been hard, and I have largely been unsuccessful. My excuse is always that we don't have enough storage space, and while I would like to have a home for everything, we just didn't have enough cupboards, drawers, shelves, etc. for that to be realistic... so: mess. Little by little, one thing at a time, I've been trying to find homes for everything. I bought shelves for our bathroom. We got a shoe hanger thingy to manage shoes everywhere. We got a couple of extra book shelves. Still though, the major mess areas remained. One of those areas being the desk/office area. Yesterday we bought a desk! It's a big one with lots of drawers and cupboards. We were up until midnight moving everything, sorting everything, and finding a home for all of our office junk...

Last July, I lost my wedding rings. My hands had swollen a lot when I was pregnant with Isaac, so I had been wearing my rings on my pinky finger, because they fit better. By July though, I had lost enough weight that I probably should have put them back on my ring finger, but I just hadn't yet. At some point, they simply vanished. I had no idea where I had lost them, assuming that they had just fallen off as I was walking around. I had also been doing swimming lessons with Andrew, so I was worried they had fallen off in the pool. I called the rec center asking them to look for it; they didn't find anything. I searched my house, completely cleaned my bedroom. I looked everywhere. By the end of summer I pretty much gave up, resigned to the fact that I would never see them again. In October Dean bought me a cheap replacement ring as a place holder until he could find something better. Then, for Christmas, Dean surprised me with a new ring. A couple of days ago, we moved our couch ...

Yesterday morning, Isaac woke up for the day a little earlier than I wanted, so I brought him into the living room, closed the gate to the stairs, put a chair in front of the kitchen doorway, and proceeded to doze on the couch while he played with toys. I would open my eyes briefly to check on him periodically, and I listened closely so I would have some idea of what he was doing. After about 15 minutes of this I opened my eyes because he had just made a happy sound and started crawling quickly, and I wanted to know what had piqued his interest. He had spotted a sippy cup that he had dropped the night before. If the sippy cup had just had water in it, I probably would have just let him have it, but it had milk. Milk that had more than likely curdled overnight, and he really shouldn't be drinking it. Immediately I told him "No Isaac," but being so intent on what he was after, he didn't listen to me. At the same time I said no, I also jumped up from the couch and hu...

Would it be too ambitious to try and write at least once every week? Probably, especially since when I do sit down to write I can't really think of anything to write, and when I do think of something to write I forget what it was before I actually get a chance to. It's 9 days into the new year, and that had me thinking about last year. What happened last year? I want to say, not a whole lot! Isaac was born at the end of 2013, so 2014 was kept pretty low key as he grew up from a tiny newborn into the super fun almost toddler that he is now. Dean went to and graduated from the police academy. Isaac and I went to Nauvoo and saw all of my family. I took an Art class. Anything else? Has the whole year passed with so few things to make note of? Dean got in a car accident and wrecked the car, then we had to buy a new one. Dean and I went on the honeymoon we never had leaving the kids with Dean's mom for one night. What else? It's really kinda sad that I can think of so litt...

There are 24 hours in a day.  I would like to spend nine of those sleeping, although it usually ends up being more like six. I spend quite a bit of time on meal prep and clean up, three times a day plus at least two snacks, usually more because Andrew is a bottomless pit. I spend time every day doing laundry, dishes, clutter pick up, vacuuming, etc. I hate doing this stuff, so it is usually done while I listen to a book, and is usually frequently interrupted by anything else I can think to do A good chunk of my mornings are spent trying to talk the boys into doing their jobs. I've been trying to exercise for 30 minutes every day, but it's really hit and miss whether I ever get around to that. I try to spend some time studying my scriptures every day, but more often than not it's skimming a chapter before I go to bed at night just to say that I did it.  I'd like to spend more time writing, or drawing, or doing something creative every day, but more often than not,...