Cool Stuff

Ok so Jolyn rocks and she told me about this Bountiful Basket thing and I got one. So basically it's a co-op and you end up with a bunch of fruit and veggies at a really great price. So I got my basket home and immediately chopped and bagged whatever I could to make them into easy, convenient snack sized servings. Here's what I got.

I thought it was pretty cool for a pretty good deal. Thanks Jo!


Ok so the other thing... Z and I sat down on Sunday and made a bit of a chore chart (which we are already behind in following) partly to get ready for a visit from his friends from Tucson. So the idea was for each day, there would be chore(s) and then an activity(ies) once we got through the chores. Z gets excited when he knows what we will be doing after school so it's kinda fun for him! So this is what it ended up looking like:





















Ok so the picture doesn't really do it justice and it was probably more fun to make with Z than to follow it... but it was fun!!

Happy Tuesday everyone!

Happy Monday

We finally got the key to the neighborhood pool and it rained today. I had promised Z that we could go swimming and since I couldn't make good on the promise due to the storm, we went to the park. So here's a few shots from the park that's just right over our back wall (aka... my huge backyard that I don't have to maintain!!)

First we played some football. Z's got good form:

Whitney came with us (she's living with us):

Z loves it when I drive his bike and he sits on the handle bars when we go down the hills!

Here's a shot of the storm that kept us out of the pool but that didn't stop us from tossing around the pig skin (aka nerf football!):

Life Is Cute (It's Hot)

So I just wanted to say, life is great, it's cute! It's so much fun! The things I love:

My son:

• He is in swim lessons and doing wonderful! He's a brave no fear kinda kid!
• He likes his school!
• His teachers always comment on how well he does and how attentive he is and how much he likes participate.
• He likes reading and helps me remember to read books every night.

My job:

• I'm being challenged and growing in new ways
• I am learning new systems and applying previously acquired skills to facilate my performance at this job
• I get along with my coleauges and have a lot of fun
• I get to work with the higher ups in the department and get to be privy to some of the behind the scenes programming of the department (and the University)

My family:

• They just rock straight out!
• My dad's such a great guy who loves his kids
• My sibs all rock and we are all so tight even when we don't get along!
• My aunt and uncle are the bomb and have helped me so much!!!
• My cousins are like some of my best friends ever and are so awesome to me!

My house:

• Oh my gosh! I'm a homeowner and I love my house!! It's still not perfect but it is so great!
• I have a garage
• I have a backyard
• I finally got the key to my community pool (that I don't have to maintain!!)
• I have the most awesome park just over my back fence (that I don't have to maintain!!)
• I have two stories
• I have a fireplace!
• I have a really cool bedspread!

My life:

• It just is the best! I just can't believe that it keeps getting better and better!!!

Swimming

So my son loves the water and we live in a community now with a community pool and we live in the heat of Arizona but it's sad to say that my son still does not know how to swim but I know that he really needs to. So I'm excited to say that today we signed him up for swimming lessons. They are a little on the expensive side and I wish I could just get him into a community class but it'll just be him and two other kids in the class and hey, he'll finally be learning how to swim!

We went into today for an evaluation to see what class he should be in. I knew that he would be in the very beginner class because he only swims with floaties but you have to go through the motions. So the guy that did the eval with Zach was really great with kids and Zach loved it! So I think he's really going to like this class.

It's funny how I expect that I will do things exactly like my parents until it finally just sets in that I can't. I think I was the only one of my sibs that had swim lessons. I learned how to swim when I was about 10 because Aly Beste's mom taught lessons at the Pinetop Country Club and I would always go with to swim but couldn't so she finally just taught me. So my son is four, I've put this off long enough. But you just wait, three months tops (per the website) and he's gonna be an old pro!! Yea!

My Son

A lot of people tell me I'm lucky that my son's father is so involved in his life. I wish I could explain to those people that even though on the surface it seems like a positive thing, it is actually quite frightening to me. To understand that statement you would have to understand some of what we have gone through. Yesterday would have been my 8th wedding anniversary and while I am grateful for my current status of not married to my son's father, I still at times look back at the major moments and wish things could have turned out differently.

I picked up my son Sunday night after a weekend with his dad and after he went to sleep that night, I crept into his room and simply stared at his tiny frame, knowing that he should have had better than what he has. I wonder many times about what his fate would have been if I had married someone else or if I had stayed with his dad. It seems like a kid should be entitled to a family life with two parents that love each other and the kid(s) where there is stability and peace. It's hard not to feel like I have cheated my boy out of that basic entitlement.

I wonder what he will be like when he is older. I wonder if he will ever ask for my side of the story, the story that marked his beginnings. I wonder if he will not understand how much I love him until he has a child of his own. I wonder if he will get divorced or just grow up fearing commitment. I wonder what difficulties he will have to face.

I just hope he knows, always, that I love him.

Running

I used to run pretty regularly and use it to get in shape. Well I started hanging out more with family and got a lot more lazy and stopped doing it. So now I’m back into running again. I’m trying to run every day and at a bare minimum, at least three times a week. So this week, I ran Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I got to Thursday and had dropped Zach off an hour away with his dad and Jolyn came with me (:D) and I tried calling April and one way or the other, by the time I got home, I was ready to just chill out on the couch and not do anything. The problem was there wasn’t really anything worthwhile on TV – so annoying. I’m trying to veg and I can’t even do it properly.

So I was looking at my pedometer, trying to justify taking a day off from running. Well I aim to get in about 10,000 steps a day and yesterday by 8:30 pm, I only had 4,700. I recently got a better parking spot at work so it’s cut down my walk by about ½ mile each way so that really cuts into my daily steps. So I decided that I would just walk on the treadmill to up my step count but still take it easy. So I got on the treadmill and was walking at a pace of 3 miles an hour. Ok after three minutes of that, I was just bored. I normally do a two to three minute warm up and then jog for a minute and then walk for 1 ½ minutes and repeat that cycle for 20 more minutes. So I’m 5 minutes into this attempt at walking and finally decide to just start running. I took it easy and was jogging at a 12-minute mile pace and after one minute of it, just decided to keep going. So I jogged a mile in 12 minutes. Which I haven’t done in more than a year.

I’ve decided that for my next 5K I want to do it in under 30 minutes. So I’ve been tracking my time this week with my jog/walk routine (and with that, I jog at a 10-minute mile pace) and two days this week, I’ve gotten my mile under 13 minutes even with the walking mixed in (which is done at about a 15 to 17-minute mile pace.) So it’s kinda funny that I was actually running at a slower pace last night than I normally do but I still got where I wanted to go faster.

Just goes to show that we push ourselves and push ourselves but sometimes, the best thing we can do is just pull back a tad and take a breather and give ourselves a break.

My House

So I took some pictures and my house is far from done but just thought it might be fun to show before:

And after:

RS Lesson

Ok so I was asked to help teach part of the lesson on Sunday (chapter 14) and I got the part about parents who lose children in death. So I figured I would use this medium to explore my thoughts on the topic (April if you read this, you're not allowed to cry)

There is the quote that "the only difference between the old and young dying is, one lives longer in heaven and eternal light and glory than the other, and is freed a little sooner from this miserable, wicked world." J. Smith also says, "They were too pure, too lovely, to live on earth; therefore, if rightly considered, instead of mourning we have reason to rejoice as they are delivered from evil..." This is the perspective that I have heard all my life. Because we have an eternal perspective, we can embrace, even welcome death. We celebrate it as we know that the angels that we loose too early in this life are simply returning to another, better world.

But I really appreciate the comment that comes after the first (above) quote... "Notwithstanding all this glory, we for a moment lose sight of it, and mourn the loss, but we do not mourn as those without hope." To me, this might be the most important line in here. We are presented with the reasons for which we should find peace and even joy in death, particularly as it relates to those who go to early or tragically. But it is as if he is justifying us when we mourn. After having been taught all my life that death was a good thing, it was quite a shock to find out how much it really hurts to lose like that. We are reminded of the eternal nature of our lives, the pain of this life, and the joy of "graduating" to the next. But what about those of us left behind.

To me, it's a bit like when April graduated from high school. Being just a grade younger than her (and feeling like we should've been twins or something) her graduation was a bit on the devastating side of things for me. Here we had gone year after year with me tailing her, always close enough to enjoy being around her (and annoy her!) and then next thing you know, she's in another world (the college world.) It's not like I ever begrudged her the experiences she was having or wished that she was back in high school with me. I mourned for my loss. I mourned because my life was a little bit harder with out her there. I knew where she was, I knew she was in a good place doing good things, I knew that I could talk to her even. But I was just sad that things were different and that my access to her and her influence in my life had been limited.

That is how death is. I know where we're going after this life. I believe in heaven. I believe life in heaven is so much better than life on this earth. Let's face it, this earth life has the potential to be very unpleasant. But when someone takes that final journey, whether young or old, my pain is not for them... it's for me. For the late night phone calls that dial into empty space; for the stories that are erased for the lack of ever being told; for my favorite recipe that no one knows how to recreate; for the picnic in a grassy field under a soft blue summer sky where we sit and talk until the dusk captured the horizon.. that we never take. The what ifs. The what nows. The why's and the ow's.

So yes I have hope in a brighter and more complete future. I have peace in knowing my loved ones lost are not far from me and I even believe it when people say the viel is thinner than we know and our loved ones are closer than we can understand. But until they pick up the phone when I call... no matter how much time passes, in the bottom recesses of my heart, it will still ache.

A new Today (someday I'll come up with better titles)

Just got back from the family reunion (with the sibs and dad) last night. Funny story - my dad was supposed to fly in an hour and a half after me from Phx to SLC but ended up missing his flight. So he spent the night in a bathroom at the airport. He tried to talk me into checking it out on my return trip to Phx - to prove that it had a couch in it and could be a semi-comfortable place to sleep if you were as desperate as him.

So anyway, it was a good reunion. We got eaten alive by misquitos but had a lot of fun. And my second youngest brother Greg got his eagle. It was really great. I'm quite proud of him for that.

I had a strange thing happen today. I've been in my ward for about 4 weeks now. As far as I know, they haven't even read in my records. But I've already been asked to be a VT (which I've accepted) and I've already gone Visiting Teaching. I've also been visit taught (the former mayor of Gilbert is my VT) and today I got a phone call from someone I don't think I've met yet asking me to help with the lesson this Sunday. Of course I agreed but it's still quite suprising to me. Who are these people? This is not the normal mormom response I'm getting here. Maybe my leperous sores, my scarlet D, has finally faded enough that people are actually seeing me as a human. Hmm... odd. Well the lesson is on death. My first thought of course was about my mom. Then she explained further and said she wanted me to talk about death of little children. I haven't read the part of the lesson yet but then all I could think of was the baby I lost... wow it's been more than 5 1/2 years now since I lost him. We'll see if it comes up or if it applies or what will happen. Who knows!?!!?

Well goodnight. Gotta work in the morning and who knows what another day will bring!

Some pics:

Zach as the ring bearer at my cousin's wedding:

Me at my last day of work at UA, looking as brilliant as ever! (Er uh duh.?!?) :P