I did it again!

Okay, so I've had some terrible luck w/cellphones this year. LOL, a little over a year ago I lost my cellphone somewhere between my mom's house and ours. Mom looked all over her house and didn't find it; I searched our car and the ground around our house with no luck. We never found any parts in the road, and no charges showed up on our bill. Apparently, it got eaten :). So I had to replace it. But, it was almost 2 years from our initial contract signing, so it didn't cost me any money. However, I lost my phone again in June. And, again, could find no sign of it anywhere- not even calls made by the person who found it... But, thankfully, Jared had just replaced his phone [although he kept the old one], and hated his new phone. I had the Sprint store reprogram the phones, and spent no money ;).
Yesterday, while I was out running an errand, I called my mom. Phone worked fine, I put it in my pocket when I was done, and drove home. Pulled my phone out to make a call, and it was dead. Not turned off, but completely dead. Unresponsive. Jared got it to turn back on, but then the only keys that worked were 3, 6, 9, and "end". Not so good. LOL, of course, it went dead again, and I couldn't revive it. I thought I'd see if it could be fixed, but the repair place said the circuitboard was fried. ??Not really sure *how* that happened [maybe from small child putting phone in his mouth and drooling into it?]. Anyway, I now have my 4th phone in 13 months.
The non-working phone is the silver one. I'm thinking I'll keep it as a Myles toy. Or Jared could use it in one of his evil scientist set-ups.

And, just to make things more interesting, it started to snow about the same time I had to go pick up my un-fixable phone from the repair shop. Big, fluffy, wet flakes of snow. It was absolutely beautiful, and slightly terrifying to drive in. Jared encouraged me to take the Durango [4wd], and I was still slipping.
Of course, since I was already out in the snow, I decided to tempt fate and drive around more- to Barnes and Noble, and the grocery store. :)it made sense at the time...

Oh, the kids are out of school. They're pretty thrilled about it! I'm thinking they can spend tomorrow outside playing in the snow, and I'll try to clean up the house. :) Jared was working on a project, and the kids dragged all kinds of random things upstairs.

One last thing. Since my old phone is no longer speaking to anybody, I have no phone numbers. Please, please, call me [same phone #] and leave me a message so I know who called, and I can re-save your phone #. :)thank you :)

Gingerbread...

sidewalks?!?! :) so we're not quite traditional this year- didn't buy a kit, but did buy a whole lot of candy. Forgot to make gingerbread panels for houses, forgot to make "right" kind of frosting to stick graham crackers together with, ended up with flat panels of decorated graham crackers, and decided they looked like sidewalks. We won't win any awards for them, but they were fun and tasty to build!

grinning

I love this huge cheesy smile! I've been trying to capture it for a while- it's perfect w/those 4 teeth peeking out- but when he sees the camera he wants to touch it. I tricked him though ;)
I substituted another expensive electronic toy:
Yes, that is my cellphone. No, he hasn't broken it yet, but give him time :) And, since I let him play w/it once, he now believes it belongs to him, and wants to use it whenever he sees it. *sigh* Morgen was like that with our cordless phone. She wouldn't accept a toy one, she needed the real one.
Counting down to Christmas, our next outing is up to SLC to see the lights at Temple Square. :)

Brrr!

Well, I got my wish :)- it snowed all night last night, and most of today. And, due to the excessive amounts of wet, heavy snow, we were without power for about 8 hours! Seems like most of the Salt Lake Valley was w/out power for part of the day; at one point, the recorded message to update us on the status of restoring power said there were 19,000 people w/out power! That totally makes me grateful for all the power company employees, who had to work in that awful cold so I could have a nice, warm house tonight ;).
It was kind of an adventure- our house stayed pretty warm [we have a gas stove, and I made hot cocoa and grilled tuna sandwiches, and boiled water just to keep the unit on LOL]- the kids built a fort in the basement, and played "fox and geese" outside w/the neighbors. Jared surprised me and got home earlier than expected [Hooray!!!], and spent most of the day shoveling out other people's driveways and sidewalks. I wasn't worried- I knew we'd be fine :).
And tonight I am grateful that I don't have to burn wood to heat my house.

Snowing again

Last Saturday we got a lot of snow, and I was hoping it would stay around :). Yesterday and today, we were supposed to get more snow, but it was too warm for that, so we got rain instead :(. But it's snowing right now, again, and it's sticking!
I admit I'm easily amused LOL.

When we were driving down to get our tree, Morgen was singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." She sang "1... 2... 3... strikes you're out at the old ballgame..." then stopped and asked "so how many strikes is it in the *new* ballgame?"
That is such a Jared thing to say :)

The Golden Compass movie

If you've heard anything about the movie "The Golden Compass", and you have worries about it being anti-God, I'd suggest you check out this link. I don't actually know Albert Mohler, but was impressed with his thoughts and calm reaction.

:)I know, kind of random. I was up late because I couldn't sleep...

Oh Christmas tree...

that we chopped down ourselves! Yes we did.
Jared got home earlier on Friday than he expected. We'd been talking about getting our own tree for about a year- last December we thought about it, but the forest service had already sold all their permits by the time we got organized. This year, I got the info around Thanksgiving- where to go, which forests were off limits, how much the tag cost, etc. So we loaded the kids into our big blue Durango and set off for Fillmore, Utah. No, I didn't know where it was either. :) But if you drive south about 2 1/2 hours on the freeway, you'll see it. It took us about 3 hours to drive there, as it was raining [in the valley] or snowing [over the mountain pass] the entire way. But we made it, and paid our $10 for the tree permit, and got the list of rules. We stopped to get gas, and bought everybody a snack, then headed off into the forest. It was still snowing, of course, and we had to go further than 100 feet from the road to chop anything down. So we cruised the dirt roads, looking for promising clumps of trees. After about 30 minutes of driving, and hearing "Let's keep looking, but remember that spot in case we don't find anything further up", I mentioned that it was getting dark. Which it really was :). So we turned around and drove back to the [you guessed it!] first spot, then unloaded all 4 kids and trudged into the wet, snowy, dark, cold forest. Since I had Myles, I was a bit slow, but Walker and Morgen had the spotlight, and waited to show me one of their finds:


I saw a lot of beautiful evergreen trees. I found several that I liked, a lot, but I also discovered something: Jared is a tree snob! When he was a boy scout, one of their fundraisers was selling Christmas trees. And he'd go out w/his dad and the other scouts and pick the trees that they would cut down and transport back to town. He has a great eye, and I do like the tree he finally settled on :) I just found our conversation a bit silly:
me: "Oh, that's a pretty one!"
jared: "It's two trees- see how the trunk split?"
me: "That one's nice!"
jared: "Well, the trunk has a crook. Let's keep looking"
[are you seeing a pattern?]
me: "Hey, what about that one?"
jared: "Hmmm. The one side of the tree looks kind of sparse to me."
And on, and on.
It was really dark by now, and Myles was screaming because he wanted to get down and I wouldn't let him. Dark forest, slushy trail, steep drop-off next to the trail; I'm a horribly mean mother, don't you think? So Myles, Hyrum [who was shivering], and I all headed back to the car.
About 15 minutes later, Walker and Morgen returned. Walker was sulking [he had a conversation remarkably similar to mine with Jared] because "Dad didn't like my tree." We sat in the car with the heater turned on, warming up. Jared brought down his 'perfect tree,' which was pretty darn good-looking, and got it all wrapped and tied down to the top of the Durango. Then it was another 3-hour drive home, again in the still-falling snow/rain.

And now it's almost 9pm, and the kids are starving, so we ate and got them to bed, then Jared set up the tree for me. He left Saturday morning about 5:30am, for another trip, and will probably be home between 10 or 11pm next Saturday. But hey, he got the Christmas tree LOL!

Kim-chi chigye

Mmmmm! I made Kimchi soup [kimchi is a korean food, basically fermented pickled spicy cabbage- or sometimes they use other veggies] a few nights ago, and it is delicious!! It's hot and spicy, and perfect for those cold days when you need to be warmed from the inside out :). My kids weren't big fans, and since Jared's gone, I basically got the whole pot to myself. *sigh* perfect!

Born to Play

I took Thorunn's sketch and turned it sideways, so I could fit my wider photos.
Supply list:
EK Success Nostalgiques Burgundy paper, My Mind's Eye Tres Jolie "Adorable" polka dots and paisley papers, 7Gypsies circle journal stamp, Danelle Johnson Shotz Thoughtz Baby stickers, Magik Glitter silver glitter glue, American Crafts black pen, old tag, and Fiskers corner rounder.

Journaling:
9 Sept 2007
A week or so ago, I put Myles with the other boys to sleep at night. When I moved him into his new bed, I also moved all the toys from his old bed into the new one. His siblings had donated some things to keep him busy; it was pretty simple to see who gave what toy.
Walker gave this [fuzzy red dice]
& Morgen lent this [stuffed tiger]
this is Hyrum's idea of a good toy for Myles [nail]
NOW... which "toy" do you think Myles was playing with?
THE NAIL, of course!

Goodbye again

Today Jared left for another trip- he'll be home for about 16 hours Friday night to Saturday morning, then he's gone again. And, while I was feeling a bit sorry for myself [migraine headache + 3 noisy kids = terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day], I ran across a blog link on a site I surf for design ideas. Last week, this woman and her husband were in Italy celebrating their 10th anniversary. They have 3 kids, who stayed w/grandparents for the trip. Yesterday, she died. I guess there were complications with her cancer treatment. And I felt rather small for resenting, even a little bit, that my husband was sitting peacefully [my own interpretation, I know] in an airplane while I was wishing for a bit of truly quiet time. I know he'd rather be here. It's easy to believe that the grass is greener on his side of the fence, sometimes.
But we did have some good things happen today. While we were sitting in church, Hyrum pressed 2 of his fingers lightly against his ear, then turned to me and said, "Mom, I have to go save the day. But not till after church." I did manage not to giggle, but I'm afraid I had a totally inappropriate smile on my face :)

And I got pictures of Myles on the couch. See, he's too short to crawl onto couches or chairs. But he's come up with a way around that:
Of course he's terribly proud of himself, and he should be! At 14 months, he's figured out how to change his world. Hard to believe that one short year ago, he couldn't even roll over.