I Do It Myself

We have a not-so-tall person at our house who thinks he's quite big and able to do things without help like get himself dressed and serve his own food out of the fridge.

In related news, we are now using a fridge lock.

 

Dragging to the Finish Line

I present to you Sophie, finishing her final school assignment before spring break. It was a long week to get to this point and I'm happy we made it. Both girls are on break now, hopefully the boys will join them tomorrow.

Are You Being Served?

I was prepared to serve cold cereal for dinner tonight when Bryan saved the day and cooked hot dogs instead. Topher was sitting at the table, ready to start dinner, when this conversation took place. Keep in mind, words that start with the letter l sound like they start with a w when they come out of Topher's mouth.

Topher: Are we having hot dogs for dinner?

Me: Yes we are.

Topher: I love hot dogs! (grinning, he bends his arm at a 90 degree angle and excitedly swings it in front of his chest) Diggity dog!

Then, a little later in the meal, I offered him a pickle.

Topher: I love pickles. Pickles are my favorite.

Topher has been exceptionally picky lately about what he'll eat. Maybe we just haven't been serving enough pickles and hot dogs?

The Countdown

A perk of our cyber school is that, for the first time since we moved to Pennsylvania, we have an actual spring break. For the entire week before Easter and the Monday after, we have no school. I am unreasonably excited about it.

Let me be clear, we're still staying home. We have no big plans, no fun places to go, no people to see. But, my oh my, I am looking forward to the rest from schoolwork.

Maybe it's because we're so close to the break, maybe it's because we're still adjusting to the time change, maybe it's because it's officially spring and we've got cabin fever (despite all the walks we've taken), but the first two days of this week have felt so long. Sooooo long. Getting through school for a few of the kids has required much more work from me than usual.

Just a few more days...

Close Up

Somebody learned how to take selfies on my camera. These are my favorites.

As Easy as ABC

Topher loves the alphabet. He loves singing it, he loves pointing out letters on clothing and boxes, and he really loves playing with this letter puzzle. He's learned a few letters and will stop me while I'm reading to him and point out every o and i on the page. 

Bring Your Brother to School Day

 

No Luck

We celebrated St. Patrick's Day by eating special green marshmallow Lucky Charms for breakfast, wearing green, and eating delicious potato soup and soda bread.

And I didn't take pictures of any of it.

Oh well, it was fun, even if we don't have photographic evidence.

Keep Your Focus on the Temple

The Primary Presidency in our ward dropped off a bag of homemade playdough at each home with kids under the age of twelve. They challenged the kids to work together with their siblings or families to sculpt a Temple, then take a picture and share it with the Primary President.

On Sunday afternoon Phoebe and Sophie looked through pictures of Temples online and picked one to recreate. They found the rendering of the in-progress Layton, Utah Temple (which is near where some of their cousins live) and went to work.

I think they did a great job.

Real Life

I've begun to feel that I'm living two lives: the life I document here on the blog and the actual life I'm living. I don't like that disparity. I aim for authenticity and transparency. I don't want to be one thing and pretend to be another. The life I record in these posts is real, but it's sanitized, the good parts version.

Why do I hold some things back? In part, because it's not all mine to share. I can write about struggles that my kids have when they're little, those stories are relatable and cute and only mildly embarrassing but not in a way that will cause harm in the future. Big kid struggles are different. Teenager struggles are different. They are part of a bigger story, one that the protagonist may not wish to remember.

Another reason is that real life is hard. So so so so hard. I've marveled recently that we had the foresight (which came from inspiration) to adopt We Can Do Hard Things as our family motto so many years ago. We had no idea how often we would need to refer back to it. I know the past year has been especially hard for so many people. I feel that our family keeps getting hit with bigger and harder trials. We move through one, or into the beginning of one, and I think, "How are we going to deal with this? How are we going to get through this?" And then we're hit with something even bigger.

The overwhelm that I feel on a daily basis is suffocating. I consciously narrow my vision so I can see the trials directly in front of me, otherwise I would drown.

And that's why I don't write about it too much. This real life business is not so pleasant to read about. Even when I do talk about it, it's usually with a laugh and a joke as a way to be honest, but not so honest that I drive people away, or worse, become someone's project.

In the past when people have asked me how I'm doing I have been known to answer, "How honest do you want me to be?" And that's a problem, because honesty is very important to me. But few people are truly interested in that kind of honesty, or are prepared to hear it.

I realize I'm painting a bleak picture. This is the part of the post where I would normally find something positive to write, some kind of silver lining about all of these hard things that I'm vaguely referencing. That's what I do. I lighten the hard things. I make them more palatable. I don't want people to worry.

But I need to get this down, I need to be able to look back at this time and remember these hard things. These hard things help me to have understanding and compassion for other people experiencing their own hard things. These hard things connect me to the Atonement. There's always a lesson in the hard things, I just have trouble seeing the lesson while I'm in the middle of it, but I can often see it when I look back.