That One Time We Went to Disneyland

Traveling with kids is not for the faint of heart. This trip was almost two years ago, so I'll do my best to remember the highlights and the not so great things that happened. My parents and my baby brother Easton came as well as my brother Matt and Ali and their boy Camden. My parents and my brother and his wife drove. Brannon and I decided flying would be the best option for us so Brannon wouldn't have to miss too much work. Flying was awful with two kids. The kids were actually not too bad, but packing around luggage and carseats and backpacks and kitties and blankies and sippies all over the airport was less than ideal to say the least! We also took a late flight and didn't actually make it to our hotel until about midnight. That would have been okay if our Magic Morning wouldn't have been the very next morning.  After about four or five hours of sleep, we woke up early and even though we were way too short on sleep, we were all full of energy and way to excited to notice how tired we were.

Disneyland was a blast the first two days. We pretty much had no wait times on the rides and the weather was awesome. Taj loved just about every single ride, except for the Tower of Terror. I still can't believe we took him on that! He didn't cry or make a peep on the ride, but he did say he didn't want to go on that one again. Haiven cried on EVERY SINGLE RIDE except for the lame caterpillar one that just goes around in a single circle and lasts about 30 seconds. There was that one time on the second day we were there that Haiven puked up goldfish crackers while we were waiting in line for the Toy Story Ride. Her aim was so accurate, she covered everybody's shoes and legs within a 20 foot radius in all directions. I was mortified, especially when I saw that her closest victims were wearing open-toed shoes. Yeah, they were not happy. I think Easton got some of the worst of it too because he was holding her when it happened. I just wanted to leave, but my mom came to the rescue and began distributing wipes to everyone who was in the splash zone. I think she was just a little hot and maybe had some motion sickness. Thank goodness that was the worst of it!

The last day at the park was a nightmare! I don't know how we managed to do it twice, but we did, we came the same weekend as Gay Days TWICE! The first time it was just me and Brannon, so it wasn't too bad navigating the crowds, but this time around there were more people than ever at the park! You could not even walk from one end of the park to the other without it taking about an hour. The lines were so bad, that even the fast pass lines were a TWO HOUR wait. It was so awful that we gave up and decided to go to the beach instead. That was fun! We ate some mediocre beach stand burgers and chicken and played in the sand and water for about two hours. We wish we would have just bagged Disneyland for the whole day and had more time to play at the beach. It was such a fun trip. We will definitely be going back soon! And we will definitely be going a different weekend too!

 Headed out bright and early to the park! I think Papa was the most excited of all, haha!

 It was all decked out for Halloween, seriously the coolest time to go!

 There is no way in Hades we will ever ride the teacups, but this did make for a good photo op!

 This was one of Taj's favorite rides! He loves Halloween of course!

 Waiting to ride the tractor ride, which is pretty darn close to that darn teacup ride. You get dizzy and you get whiplash! Go on this very last if you don't want to deal with a headache and nausea for the entire day!

 Being in radiator springs was probably one of the best parts of the whole trip!

 An epic moment for Taj.

 Meeting Mater was probably even better because Mater is a truck who can tow stuff!

 She hated the beach too. We could not win with her! She didn't like the sand on her feet, haha

 He didn't like the way the water stings your feet and legs.

 Also the waves were too loud and scary. My gosh, a generation of wimps we are raising!

 Probably one of my favorite pics from the whole trip.

 See those two yoyos in the background? Those are my brothers Matt and Easton going out way too far and this is shortly before the lifeguards made everyone get out of the water. There was some kind of insane riptide coming in. Smart call lifeguards! Save the dumb tourists!

 He was much better after grandma buried him in the sand.

My brother Matt and his wife Ali and their son Camden. He tolerated the beach a heck of a lot better than my lot!

When the Tooth Fairy Comes to Visit

So I cannot believe Taj is already losing teeth! He's actually lost three more since this picture was taken in October. He is about to be the toothless wonder. I didn't lose a tooth until the first grade and even then I only lost one tooth. The tooth fairy brought him a big silver dollar and even left pixie dust all over it. He was kind of annoyed that there were so many sparkles making his bed a mess, haha. Maybe the sparkle touch was a little too "girly" for our boy.

Halloween Carnival Birthday Bash

We decided we could get away with combining Taj and Haiven's birthdays again this year (actually last year because this post is SO LATE!). Our kids absolutely love Halloween, so we decided we'd do a Halloween carnival-themed birthday party for them. Holy crap! I had no idea how crazy it can be with 20+ kids all on a massive sugar and pizza high. It was two hours of chaos, but there wasn't a single kid there without a smile on his/her face. I'd call it a success and an every-other-year sort of party. Taj turned the big 06 and Haiven graduated to the Torrential Threes. Here are a few pics to commemorate the occasion!

 Obviously the weather was still unusually warm for October! I like her style. I think the boots are a perfect neutral accent to the hot pink  flower and frills and the polka dots.

 She still can't ride this bike. Doesn't get the whole "pedal" concept. Maybe this summer!

 This bike was a little too big back in October, but he OWNS it now! (After a lot of falling over in the backyard too many times to count and scolding us for getting him a bike that is WAY TOO BIG for him, haha)

 My best friend from my childhood, Sinamin, holding Sawyer boy while we conduct the chaos. She's the best!

 They were so excited they got to wear their Halloween costumes BEFORE Halloween

The last picture we have of Haiven with her binkie. Her teeth were glad to see that go!

A Resolution

Ever since I was young, I wanted to change the world. Put my stamp on it, mark my place in it, so everyone would know that I was here. That I lived. I remember at 15-years-old sitting at the foot of my parents bed, like I did every night before bed, and telling them that I was going to be somebody someday. I didn't mean that I would be famous, but that I would be somebody that people would remember. I was thoroughly convinced that God had straight-laced plan laid out for me and that I only had to discover it. It became my mission, my mantra: Find out what it is you are meant to do in this life. I wanted a single answer, a grand one, one that would change countless lives for the better. I took several aptitude tests in school and in college and found them irritating and constricting. Why did I have to be one kind of person? Why did I have to fit inside a box so the computer could tell me what job was best suited for my personality? I actually failed these aptitude tests. The results were always inconclusive. "You do not fit in our box" the computers told me and I was left feeling confident that I was so unique that even a computer could't pinpoint me and yet I was also frustrated because I was no closer to finding out my purpose in life.
I graduated with my Associate's Degree before I graduated from high school, which left me in a unique position. I would enter college as a sophomore and I had no time to dabble in electives to figure out where I belonged in this world. I chose a safe career, a practical one for a mom because I'd always assumed I would be a mother, which I am. Teaching was safe. You get out of school when your kids gets out. You get the holidays off. You get summer! Those are all the "perks" that everyone who is not a teacher will tell you. What they do not know is that it is a full-time job, very stressful, and let's face it, we are working with everybody else's children for 8 hours a day and then our work is still not finished. There is always more planning and for an English teacher, mountains of written work to grade always. The thing is, I don't know that it was my passion. I never liked to waste time and I was eager to begin my college career and get out of there and onto the real world as quickly as possible.  I found out teaching was hard, but that was okay. I had always liked a challenge. I loved the kids that I worked for, but I didn't love the job itself.
When I quit teaching to stay home and raise my kids, I had a personal crisis. Becoming a mother was something I had always planned on doing, but I didn't plan on how it would make me feel. I felt love like I never knew I could and I began to worry like I never thought possible. I also began to doubt my place in this world and wonder if this, being a mother, was all I was ever destined to be. It sounds harsh, even ungrateful, but that is how I've felt and it's something I still struggle with today. I felt I had never found my path in life and what I do feel for sure is the passing of time and watching everyone else's lives go on around me. Sometimes I feel like maybe God isn't hearing my prayers. I still feel like that more often that I'd like to admit. It is my biggest struggle even now. I have invested so much of my life and myself into finding out who I am and where I belong and what path is the best one for me that I have let it consume me and tear me down. Enter in depression, the cherry on top, the piece de resistance that makes this conundrum more dramatic than it should be.  I perceive that God is not answering my prayers, but I have faith enough to know that He is, just in ways that I am not ready to see yet.
Looking back on my life, I realize that a lot of the choices I made in life were to make other people around me happy. I realize now that I have lived too long trying to get others to like me or be proud of me and in doing that I lost a sense of self. I am not so naive as to not have considered that perhaps I am already on the path that God wants me to be on and maybe I am. Why can't I see that?  I am smart enough to know that I do not want to sentence myself to a long life of being a wanderer and life-long obsession with catching hold of that perfect rainbow and consequently missing out on what is happening in the now. The life I live now is very anti-climatic in comparison to what I had imagined for myself. I was going to be digging the pyramids of Egypt and discovering new treasures--I was going to be the first person to survive going through a black hole in space--I was going to be that top notch lawyer that helped those who couldn't help themselves and to put "bad guys" in their place. The list goes on and on. It's ridiculous because none of those things would ever replace my kids or my husband and the love that we have. Maybe at the age of 29 I am finally realizing that those dreams are not what will bring me happiness in life.  Maybe, no, I know, that I already have everything I need to be happy. And so my task now is to accept that and to let go of this notion that there is one particular path in this life for me and that I must find it. I am not going to fit into a box, so I am going to stop trying to do that. I am going to trust that I am where I am needed most right now and work to not let the world tell me otherwise. I'm still going to continue doing the things I love to do because I think we all need to do that, but I won't let those things come before my more important things, which aren't things at all, but little people actually and one big kid who I call husband.

Black Island Farm Pumpkin Patch



If you live in the Salt Lake City area, I would highly recommend taking a trip to Black Island Farm in Syracuse.  We bought our discounted passes on KSL deals for $9 bucks! That included the wagon ride out to the pumpkin patch, the corn maze, and the many activities they have for kids (slides, train ride, etc.). The only con to this trip were the mosquitos! There was basically a cloud that followed us out to the pumpkin patch and they are aggressive buggers. I got bit at least four times. So if you go out in the evening, spray on that bug spray and light a few dozen citronella candles to hand out to everyone on the wagon ride and you should be fine. Seriously though, bring bug spray. One woman even joked, "Don't like mosquitos? Didn't you know that mosquitos are Black Island's state bird?" I could only half-way laugh at that because I was in a panic trying to swat the pests away. FYI they DO bite through clothing like leggings, easily, in fact I think they are attracted to people who wear leggings, like me. Minus the mosquitos, it was a great evening. The kids loved picking out their own pumpkins and being pulled by a tractor. It was a beautiful fall evening and worth the bites just to have some Halloween fun.

 

 

 

 Sawyer boy was a good sport, even when he had a mosquito sucking the life blood out of his forehead. That is quite the landing strip for a mosquito though isn't it?

 Taj found his good friend Ryder from school and they were so excited to get to ride next to each other, well at least Taj was, haha.

 There were hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins. They have a ton of patches too, this was only one of them.

 The man driving the tractor picked out a baby pumpkin for Sawyer. They have really nice people working for them!

 Taj was pretty proud of his picks. He of course picked the biggest one for himself and then he chose mine for me since I waited with Sawyer on the wagon.

 

 

Blessing Day

Sawyer was blessed on September 7th this year at our ward in Kaysville. I wanted to at least document the day with some pictures for our family history. I've been doing family history on Sundays and I've run into some pretty cool stories about my ancestors. I wish all of them would have taken the time to at least record who they were, what they did for a living, what they did with their lives, etc. It's made me realize that someday my great great grandkids will want to hear our stories, so I'm making it a point to do better with recording life as we live it.

Sawyer was blessed by his daddy Brannon--he did such a good job! Sawyer's grandpas and his uncle Matt stood in the circle. I remember that fast and testimony meeting being especially spiritual. Everyone kept commenting afterwards how strongly they felt the spirit there. I love Sundays like that! We have the best friends and family ever!

 

 

She never swings with us, but she got brave for papa.

 See that nicely painted shed in the background? Brannon, my dad, and my brother Matt painted it in one afternoon. I was worried they wouldn't get it done before the blessing the next day, but they pulled it off and it looks great! Good job boys:)

 See this is what we really look like 90% of the time. I think she had a nasty booger or what Taj calls "burgers."

 

 Here's our best family of five picture. Better not stare too closely into Medusa's eyes!

 Papa Clint came to town. Taj immediately donned his cowboy gear for the occasion after church to impress Papa Clint, haha.

 We had to get a girls pic with the little man. We are missing my sister Marci--usually she is the one behind the camera at these kinds of things. Man I love my sisters and my mom! Makes me want to consider having a sister for Haiv so that she can know what it feels like to have a sister. Now hurry, someone talk me out of it!

 More drama from Medusa.

 We had all the grandkids here for the blessing except for little Miss Cora Bear.

 Sawyer with his Morse grandpas.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Sawyer's blessing day. It's hard to tell a person's personality based on a photograph with pasted on smiles, so I love candids like this that portray personalities. Candids are the most accurate photos of all at detailing the human experience.

Coming Undone

Something strange happened to me today. I looked at the laundry in my room and realized that I've been trying to get all the laundry done at once for the last two weeks. My mind usually will not rest until all the laundry is done at once, all the house cleaning is done at once, all the shopping is done at once. Today I realized that maybe it's okay not to have it all done at once, that maybe it's okay to stop trying to be perfect. Maybe the Lord is trying to teach me something because it seems like I can't keep any of the balls in the air anymore. Every time I turn around someone is reminding me of something I forgot to do and just when I thought I had everything under control. It's strange to me to feel like my life is a hurricane swirling around me and I'm only able to focus on the debris that hits me in the head on it's way around. It seems like every day I wake up and start working and I don't stop until it's well past my bedtime and even then, there are 100 things that I meant to get done, but that didn't even come close to glancing my radar. It's almost like I have so many distractions (some good, some better, some not so good at all) hitting me on all sides and I'm finding that I'm having a hard time choosing which things are the BEST to confront each day. I'm realizing that time has seemingly sped up even faster, leaving me less time each day to accomplish the things that I think should be done. It's almost like I'm being tested, ("Here's another thing you forgot! or Look here, you haven't checked anything off this list and instead of getting smaller, it's getting bigger, like HUGE!") All of this has made me aware of my weaknesses as a mortal. I will never be able to keep up with it all. It is just not possible to give 100% to every single thing that life requires of us. Some of you may disagree, but I am who I am and I cannot keep up with it all and today I finally decided that it's ok. I don't have to be perfect. I just have to take care of the things that are the most important. Even doing that is hard, but I'm finding that this feeling of being overloaded has shifted my perspective and I feel that with so much going on, I am being forced to choose the BEST of each day because I don't have time for anything more.

Basically I don't care anymore that I don't appear to have it all together. Have you heard that song "Secrets"? I like that song a lot. The premise of the song focuses on our constant need to hide our imperfections and the things we don't like about ourselves from other people. Why try to force yourself to be somebody you are not? Why do we as human beings feel the need to put on a front around everyone else and give the appearance of perfection? Like we have it all together and we don't make mistakes? Why are we so afraid of other people seeing our weaknesses? Is it because we are so hard on each other? Because there is always someone there ready to point a finger of blame or to criticize? Do we expect perfection not only of ourselves, but from other people as well? Is it because as a society we are generally unforgiving and quick to take offense? Isn't life hard enough in itself without us making it harder for each other? I know I can't change the way other people think, but I can change the way I think. Having a third child has helped me to realize that it is of no worth to me or my family to try to keep up with everything just so I can feel like I'm just as good a mom as that lady on Facebook that posts one moment of bliss right after the other. 

A typical day for me starts with hitting the snooze button at least once or twice and then dragging myself out of bed after a long night with my sweet baby or my stubborn 3-year-old who has decided that she now only needs five hours of sleep and shrieks like a banshee when we tell her that "No, you may not watch a movie at three in the morning!" and said episode usually ends when I cram by postpartum body onto her toddler bed with her and pray that the creaking and cracking sounds are not signs that the bed is about to give way and unload the both of us onto the floor. Anyway, I wake up tired, but I am determined to get Taj to school on time. I have a bad habit of being on time. I don't know why either because I came from a family who's motto was "If you're not early, you're late!"

Here are some of my secrets:  I don't make my kids hot breakfast in the morning (shock! horror!), I'm late to a lot of places, sometimes I lose my temper and yell at my kids, I have a pile of clutter junk on the counter, I haven't dusted my van since we bough it in January, I don't post on my blog regularly even though I want to because I'm too damn tired when I finally get a break, I haven't washed the sheets on the beds for three weeks (disgusting, right?), and the list goes on. Do you know how liberating it was admitting to some of those things? I can hear some people now, "Well if that's all you have to worry about, your life is great!" like life is some competition where we are all vying for trophies that say "I have more problems than you" or "I have more pain than you," all the while exempting ourselves from being sympathetic towards those who we feel are living the "good life" or who "have no reason to complain whatsoever."  Having a third child has helped me realize that nobody has it all together and that no matter how good you think someone else's life is, they have their own struggles too that feel just as painful as yours. Nobody has a monopoly on pain in this life, except for the Savior Himself, because He did feel ALL of our pain and He knows EXACTLY how we all feel. 

Could we all be a little kinder, more forgiving, more sympathetic to those in our sphere? Nobody has it all together and appearances ARE deceiving. Everyone has a silent struggle that they are going through. Shouldn't we help each other out instead of driving the daggers deeper with cold criticism? I had two experiences in the last week that restored my faith in humanity. The first is when I foolishly made a trip to Shopko with three kids (I was desperate to find a wrap of some sort to stuff my post-pregnancy belly in and eliminate further inquiries from strangers about when my baby was due) and while checking out, I had Taj and Haiven pulling me from both sides begging me to open their Ring Pops at the same time the cashier is telling me my card had insufficient funds (due to a bank error). I paid with another card and while fumbling with my wallet and trying to get a binkie in Sawyer's mouth so he would quite crying, I saw the cashier pull out a pair of scissors and beckon my kids over so that she could open their Ring Pops for them. I looked at her and before I could say thanks she said, "Everyone needs a hand once in a while." Whoa! Am I that far gone?! Then I swallowed my pride and said "Yes, yes they do." Lesson learned? I am not perfect and it's okay for people to see that and to help me.

The second event occurred two days ago at the grocery story when I had no other choice BUT to take my three kids with me to get some things for dinner that night or there would be no dinner. Taj and Haiven both insisted on pushing their own cart, you know the little ones for when you only need a gallon of milk and some bread, and I had a big cart with Sawyer's carseat in it and no room for groceries. We got through the checkout line and I realized that I now had three carts to get back out to my car parked in the far corner of the parking lot. I had bought the kids a little treat for being so good and they were no longer interested in pushing the carts. As I grabbed my receipt from the cashier and turned to try to finagle my three carts, I saw a lovely woman standing there waiting and watching us. She had a smile on her face and it was like she radiated light. She said, "Can I please help you to your car?" And she walked over and grabbed one of the carts. Not only did she help me get the carts to my car, but she helped me unload my groceries and then took the carts for me so that I could get my kids buckled in. It was perhaps a small act of service in her eyes, but to me, it was the Lord telling me that He is aware of me because He sent her to help me with such a little problem. If He is concerned with even our smallest problems, then shouldn't we be more open to helping others out with theirs?

In a nutshell motherhood has helped me realize that 1) It's okay to not be perfect. 2) It's okay to let others help you. 3) You never know what silent struggle someone is going through, so don't be quick to judge. Be quick to lend a helping hand and a smile.