Vintage suitcases hung on the wall....

Over the weekend my sweet husband and I worked on a project that I have been dreaming about for about a year now. I saw in Flea Market magazine last year a project that I fell in love with. So for the last little while I have been collecting suitcases. I did not want to pay very much for them because I was going to cut them in half. Cut them you say, yes cut them. I wanted to make shelves out of them. I wanted to fill a bigger space and also have room to hang some pictures. It is not finished but the rough idea of what I wanted is done. I am really happy with the look and it looks amazing in my upstairs family room.

Suitcases all cut and ready to go. It was a team effort to figure out how we wanted to hang them on the wall. It took a little thinking out, but in the end we merged our ideas and came up with a solution that ended up costing us nothing.

David was nervous cutting the suitcases but once we did one it was easy! I have to say I did have a little anxiety over it but had to keep telling myself this is the reason I bought them. It has been one of the funnest projects we have worked together on in a long time. I think it helped he got to watch all of the football game before we got started.... Just sayin....

Toshia's new FHE blog

Toshia has started a wonderful new blog to help us all out with FHE this year. She has taken the new curriculum and created FHE lessons to go with the monthly themes. I have been doing it for the last three weeks and the kids are loving the videos and activities. I am inviting anyone who follows my blog to hop on over to comefollowmefhe.blogspot.com  and look it over. While you are there sign up to follow her. She has done a great job of having things for little kids as well as the older ones. Thank you Toshia for sharing with us your love of the Savior and for helping us be organized with our FHE for 2013.

Winter Ball

This year Noah went to winter ball with Alyna. She looked so cute and I like how casual this picture is . Noah looked so handsome, it is so hard to believe he is 17 and so grown up.

This is the group they went with. It sure looks cold outside. I am so grateful that Alyna's mom got these pictures. We were on our "Grandparent" date and so she really helped me out. Noah said it was a lot of fun and he had a really good time. It was so nice to be waiting up for him and that he came home and shared with us all that they did. He's such a great kid!

January's Grandparent Date

So these pictures are a little out of order.....but here are some photos from our first "grandparent date" of 2013. For Christmas we decided to give the gift of time to the grand kids. Toshia has done the "12 dates if Christmas" with Andrew every year so we decided to follow her example and do "12 dates of Christmas" Grandma and Grandpa style. For January we wanted to take them to the snow. We did not tell them where we were going, just that we were going to go play in the snow. We ended up at Mt. Hood near government camp. It was a beautiful day! A lot warmer there in the snow than at home that was for sure. Here Adrian is trying to help Jonathan back up the embankment where they sled down from.

Adrian seemed to spend a lot of time either running into trees or falling into holes. He was having a lot of fun. It only took him a few times going down the hill before he figured out how to steer the toboggan better. 

Jonathan went down the hill a lot with Grandpa but soon spent most of his time making a fort for the snowball fight he was planning and eating snow. Every time I looked at him he was eating snow...I hope it was OK.....

Here's a cute group shot. Of course, I am not in it because I am taking the picture. I prefer that anyway...not very photogenic. Anyway, aren't they just the cutest little gang of grand kids ever?

I think Luke was having a blast sledding and digging in the snow. Our snowball fight did not turn into anything that big. The snow was not the best for making into snowballs. He did have the funniest line of the day when Grandpa tried to throw a snowball at him he said, "Yeah, well I'm the one who added the dodge to dodge ball." I don't think he ever got hit with one....he dodged all the snowballs!

Here they are in the car at the beginning of our trip. Aren't they just adorable! They were so excited. We were only on the road five minutes when Reagan said, "I'm hungry...." We heard that the whole way up. Silly girl.

I just had to throw this picture in. She sure has won her grandpa's heart that is for sure. I think he took her down the hill at least 20 times which meant he had to bring her back up the hill that many times.

I can hardly wait until next months date......

Christmas Morning 2012

 

Christmas morning we started with breakfast. Everyone got to the house around 10:30 and then we ate. It is kind of fun having older kids that have the patience to wait to open presents. I think this is the first year we were able to do this. Anyway, after breakfast we went upstairs were Santa had left his mark with presents for everyone. Apparently everyone was good because there was no coal to be found. I think it was a little overwhelming for my Mom and Papa John. The room is big but not that big when you have the biggest tree found in the forest (it's funny how small they look when you're picking it out) and 11 children and 4 grandchildren and spouses and boyfriends and grandparents. Needless to say, we had a room full. It is tradition for us to go slow and enjoy each others gifts with them. I love that Christmas lasts for a long while. I overheard some of the children saying that Santa got it right this year - hum... maybe he was listening very carefully. After we were finished we opening gifts we spent time together as a family enjoying one other and playing with some of the thing Santa brought. I have to say I have heard from almost everyone and they say it was the best Christmas ever! I have to agree it was fun and such a blessing to have everyone home this year and together. I think that is the best gift of all!!!!!



Christmas with the Weitzel's

As promised a few pictures from Christmas. We had a lot of fun this year and lots of family time. We celebrated with the Weitzel family at Rich's house the a couple of  Saturdays before Christmas. It is always a big gathering and very fun because it is one of the few times in the year that all the cousins get to see each other all at the same time. We went to the park to try and get a big family shot, only a couple people were not there to be in the picture. we enjoyed appetizers and each others company. The cousins did something really special this year. Instead of presents they donated money that would have been spent on gifts to the Cystic Fibrosis foundation. This they wanted to do to honor their cousin Rory who passed away from the disease when the older ones were younger. Then those that wanted to brought small lego sets and did a little white elephant exchange with them. This was also in memory of Rory because of his love for legos. They spent time building the legos together. It was fun to see the little ones having such a great time. I really enjoyed spending time with everyone.

Next post will be about getting our tree-{it was a big one}-and the celebrations that took place at our house.

One little word...HAPPY

Let me warn you on the onset this may be a long post-but worth the read. To begin with the holidays were fabulous! We had such a great time being together as a family and I will post about that in a couple of days complete with pictures.

It is hard sometimes to share on my blog things from my heart. It makes me vulnerable and I don't like that. But last year in seminary I learned that it takes courage to be vulnerable and it is OK to open up. I just had to wait until I was ready to articulate all of my feelings. To be honest I did not even know how I was feeling most of last year. My word for 2012 was purpose and I choose that word to try not only to put my house in order but to live an uncluttered life. I went on a completely different path though as my year began to unfold. Never in a million years could anyone have told me that a few choices made by a couple of  my children would send me into a complete tailspin. First, the good choice of Ashleigh getting married to a very good guy - Nick. He really has made her happy and I can see her growing in many ways because of this union with him. So lots of planning and helping and doing what I could to make her day a very happy and memorable one kept me busy. As good as all of this was a little corner of my heart was sad because it was not a temple wedding. I say this only because of my belief of it being forever and ever when it takes place in the temple and not for any other reason. And I have to say she did everything to make it the sweetest, nicest, most beautiful wedding that I have attended outside of the temple. So I tucked away that little bit of sad in my heart. Chad's situation was completely opposite. A time that we should have been preparing for his mission was spent just praying he would graduate from high school. This completely through me for a loop and I fell into despair as my heart ached for him to make better choices and figure life out. My purpose for several months was just to make it through the day only to be followed by sleepless nights worrying and praying and crying. I had to move through this because it really was not the end of the world. I had been through things with Paige and so I knew I could do this hard thing but in reality I was slowly giving up on parenting. Why try? Nothing I seemed to do was working and I really turned inward. Then a blessing happened and I have had the wonderful experience of having my mom and step dad move here. The reasons why are not important and probably don't even matter much but it was an answer to a prayer coming to me in a very unexpected way.  I really had to put on my game face and work hard to help them. It helped me a lot to move out of a dark place. So then my purpose became to serve them and look for others I could serve. I realized that I was putting to much emphasis on "me" and that my other children at home really needed me to continue to teach them and love them as if the choices of Chad were not going on. Does that make sense? I learned through these three events that happened in 2012 that I really have more purpose than I realized. Also, that as I tried to be uncluttered with things I allowed my spirituality to become cluttered with noises from the adversary. Let me say I did not allow this to go on for very long - fortunately by staying in the scriptures every day I was able to override those noises with the joyful news that the gospel brings. Which brings me to my word for this year.

Happy. I needed my children at home and my sweet husband to see happy. I was not smiling as much and even when happy things were going on around me I found it hard to look happy. I actually began thinking about this word in October. As I was studying one day I came across a happy scripture. And the word just caught hold of me and I continued to read the scripture over and over again when I realized that the happy I was thinking I needed to be was not the happy that the Lord wants me to be. I was finding it hard to celebrate when others were getting their mission calls, or going off to college, or finding seemingly great jobs. I was telling myself that the great choices these kids were making should be the ones that my kids should have made. That they would only be happy if..... Well, what the Lord wanted me to discover I think was that there is a difference between joy and pleasure. Happy by the world's standards deals with pleasure - for yourself or giving pleasure to others. My children will have to discover this difference on their own. I make it harder for them to discover it if I don't live it. I want them to see that my joy, my happiness comes from obedience and that true happiness includes Heavenly Father and all that He has to offer me if I live according to His word. In December I was at the church bookstore buying a gift. My eye caught the title of a small book that sums up what I had been thinking I wanted to do with my word this year. "Happy Like Jesus-Lessons from Jesus Christ on how to live" by D. Kelly Ogden. As I flipped through the pages and then went to the table of contents I decided I had to have this book. So, Merry Christmas to me - I bought it.

Now my plan for the year:

The book has 18 two word chapter titles e.g. Be Happy, Be Holy, Be Humble, etc. I am going to combine a few of them but have each one be my word for the month. So for instance, the month of January I am going to work on Be Holy and Be Spiritually Minded. I am keeping a separate journal for my word this year and I think what I am going to end up doing is making a sort of smash journal. I want to find scriptures and quotes but most importantly record how I applied these words in my life.  I want to walk with Jesus all year long and give greater attention studying him not just his circumstances. Studying his personality, teachings and behaviors, his character traits - how he acts. The author of the book says that if we study him, "we will look to him and try to become like him so that we may live". I also am going to blog about this journey as well. One of the things that makes me happy is writing and last year I just found it so hard to write about anything let alone the everyday happenings of a mother of eleven....so I am recommitting to my blog and other things that I let sit on a shelf all of 2012.

So Happy New Year and I hope you all have found your word by now and are formulating a plan on how to use that word to lift you and bring you real joy and happiness.......