Family Treasures, Lost and Found

Yesterday, as I was picking up Noah from school, his friend Sam was trying to give him a paper and he was refusing to take it. Sam threw the paper on the ground and walked away, so Noah finally picked it up. As we were walking to the car I asked him about the paper and he gave it to me. It was a letter that he had written and given to Sam, and then Sam was giving it back. Here's the text of the letter, including his spelling:

"Dear Sam,
You should be nice to evrewon (everyone). It would be nice to stop fighting Sam. You're mean to evrewon okay. You should be nice to Jalen, Josh, Kaidin, and me. We are all children of are parentes we should lisin and obay. Sam, Dr. Marten Lothe King Jr. said, We shoulde'nt figt with hands We shou fight with words. he said, to all of us. Sam you neve now whos wachen you boy you are in jail. lesen to me okay sam. You're hungrey arent you Sam. I know youre hungrey Sam okay.

Sincerly,
Steve Nash=
Noah"

So I was dying. My first grader wrote a letter telling another kid to be nice and quoted Dr. King!!! Where does he get it? And I thought it was going to say, "We are all children of God" but instead "children of our parents"! And what the heck is up with the hungry part at the end? (By the way, Noah LOVES Steve Nash and always calls himself Steve Nash.) For the record, Sam is actually a pretty good kid, although I think he's a little bit physically aggressive. Noah said he wrote the letter on Sunday when I made the kids go in their beds and take a quiet time after stake conference. Aside from the letter being completely hilarious, I am really proud of him for standing up for himself. This letter is definitely going to be saved, and I now consider it a family treasure. I'm just glad that Sam gave it back so I could have it.

This morning, Kendall was sitting on my lap at the desk and she sliced the letter with my paper cutter into about five different pieces. After freaking out I found all the pieces and put them back together. I am going to put it away now so nothing happens to it.

So Far in 2009 . . .

Hannah won her district spelling bee, so on to regionals it is.

Noah learned how to ride without training wheels.

Kendall and I had a great time at the Phoenix Children's Museum.

Joey celebrated his birthday (no he's not three, that's just how many candles I had!)

We celebrated by spending a weekend up north without the kiddos. It was great. Even standing in the snow it really wasn't that cold, but the scenery was beautiful.

I think we're off to a good start.

Good Riddance, September!

Beware: I needed to vent!


I thought I was never going to make it out of September alive! It was honestly one of the busiest months I've had in a loooong time. Getting back into the routine of school, with Kendall in preschool and a new carpool schedule. Working more because I started a third survey for the Census Bureau (what, you didn't even know I had an actual J-O-B?), I worked about 60 hours in September and put 800 miles on my car just for work (that's about double my usual work schedule)! Even though it was nice to make the extra money, we spent a good chunk of it eating out because we were so busy. Yuck. I'm sick of fast food. Busy as ever with my calling of Enrichment Counselor, as we had our quarterly enrichment meeting and I made most of the food for the dinner, on top of teaching the first Sunday lesson as well. We also had doctor and dentist appointments all around, I reviewed a book for the school's library committee and I'm working on another one, threw out my back for a few days at the end of the month, got most of my visiting teaching done, shopped for a lot of Coupon Sense deals (I have toiletries and granola bars and Powerade galore!), did some serious reorganization in my house (kinda unfinished though), went on a Dysart bus tour (and got my picture in the paper), almost switched my kids' school, chauffered Hannah to her ever increasing activities/lessons, and just tried to keep up with the normal housework, homework, etc. Thankfully Joey helped out with a lot of that stuff, but I felt like I headed out the door almost every night after he got home and we hardly saw each other. I'm craving a family vacation or a weekend without the kids (guiltily though, because I feel like I haven't seen them enough lately). And I'm going to be just as busy with work at least through December, so I don't even know how I could possibly get away for the weekend! The good news is that I'm mostly done Christmas shopping, so the fact that the holidays are coming doesn't stress me out so much this year. And by the way, September was hot! So I'm just glad to be in a new month and looking forward to cooler weather and fun holidays.


This week Noah had to do his first book report (which he received 100% on, good job!). I sat with him while he did the writing portion of it, and then I had him start drawing the picture while I got some things done around the house. When I came back to check on his finished product, I couldn't help but laugh. See if you can figure out why:



Do you see something out of place there?

In case you couldn't figure it out, check out the "Parent Signature" line. He's hopefully not heading into a career of forgery. It gave me a good laugh though.

How was your September?

Remembering . . .

Not to be cheesy, but since I was just listening to people on the radio share their "Where were you?" stories from September 11, 2001, I thought that I should record mine. Even though I'm sure my own experience is not significant to anyone but me, I think that it is an event that we will always reflect on and think about throughout our lifetimes and someday I probably won't recall the details that I still remember now, seven years later.

At the time, we were living in Joey's parents' house, and his sister Kristi and her husband Mike were living there with us (his parents had already moved to New Mexico). I was in my first year of teaching at Barcelona Middle School and Hannah was in kindergarten. I remember that I was blow drying my hair in the bathroom and Joey walked in and told me to come look at the TV. We sat in our bedroom for awhile and watched the events unfolding, still really uncertain of what was going on.

I would take Hannah to my parents' house on my way to work so that she could ride the bus to school with Andrew, and as I dropped her off I got really emotional. I was terrified of planes flying into buildings across the country, imagining that it would keep happening all day long. Since my parents both worked downtown I was afraid for them, and I was also scared of letting Hannah go to school and being away from her. I remember that we said a prayer with my mom before I left for work.

Being in an 8th grade classroom that day was an interesting experience. As teachers, we just felt speechless and shellshocked. We would listen to the radio and check the internet periodically throughout the day, trying to find out more but without having access to a TV I felt a little bit in the dark. I spent a lot of time just talking to my students, trying to explain the facts that I knew and trying to disspell the junior high rumors that had already started spreading. It was similar to the day I spent as an intern in another classroom on the day of the Columbine shootings. I felt a great responsibility to my students on those days.

I of course remember the terror and the disbelief and the sadness, and just being glued to the TV, trying to understand why this would happen. I remember being grateful that we had just returned from a trip to Kentucky for my grandma's 80th birthday celebration, and that if the party would have taken place on her actual birthday (September 18th) then we wouldn't have been able to fly there. And I couldn't forget the amazing stories of patriotism and love and kindness that came out of September 11th.

It just so happened that we were trying to conceive at that time. It must have happened within days after, because about a month later I found out that I was pregnant with Noah. There was a little baby boom at that time, and when I was delivering him the stories were all over the news about how hospitals all over the place were overflowing with deliveries from what they called "September 11th babies". I've never considered that anything but a coincidence since we were already trying before September 11th, but I love the idea of all of these sweet spirits being sent to earth at that time to bring comfort and love and help people remember what really matters.

Visiting "Ground Zero" in 2005 was an interesting experience. It was hard to connect that big hole in the ground with what I had seen on TV. It was a solemn experience but I had a difficult time making an emotional connection when it looked completely different from what was on TV (and thank goodness, because if it looked the same it would have been overwhelming). I felt that it was necessary to go there, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time there. It was a sad, empty place.

On a happy note, I love America! I feel so fortunate to live in this country.

The end.

A Great Weekend . . .

Joey and Noah went on the Father and Son's Outing from Thursday-Saturday, (where apparently my foil dinners were the envy of the camp--who knew?!)

so imagine my surprise when the doorbell rang Friday morning and these

were delivered to my door. It actually made me tear up when I read the sweet card from Joey and the kids. You have to understand that getting flowers from my husband is a rare occasion. (He gives a great back rub, but is not great in the gift department. Most of the time, I'd rather have the back rub and pick out my own gifts anyway.) Apparently my Noah has been urging Daddy to get me flowers for weeks now. Haven't I trained him well?

Friday night we celebrated Hannah's birthday with a few friends by going to Dramagenics, a new family-friendly improv club. It is just starting up, so our group of 6 made up about half the audience, but it was a really fun time. The girls loved it, and some of them even got to go on stage and participate. They all got t-shirts too. It would be a fun date night or even night out with the family. (They also had buy one, get one free coupons in the Val-pak mailer a few weeks ago!). The birthday party turned into an unplanned slumber party where I went to bed and the girls stayed up way too late, which I suppose is the way slumber parties are supposed to be. We've found it's the perfect opportunity to do this when the boys are out of the house!

Sunday morning I got to sleep in while Joey made breakfast. Of course we ended up being late for church because of it, but it was worth it. He's rarely home before church because he has so many meetings, but it seems like whenever he is home we are late. I'm not blaming it on him, it's just that I get lazy and think I have more time since he's here. At church, my kids did the traditional Mother's Day singing with the Primary, and it was the last time all of my kids will be in Primary together. Makes me a little sad. My kids also showered me with fun homemade gifts, but I forgot to wear my "Super Mom: Hero of the Universe" button to church.

After church, we enjoyed a nice dinner with my family and Noah finally lost that tooth. Then he literally lost the tooth. Lucky for him, we have some good connections with the tooth fairy and she came anyway.

(Hi Randi, I know you're stalking my blog!)

My Sweet Boy

Noah has big news: a loose tooth. He has been waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting to have a loose tooth ever since he started kindergarten and saw other kids losing teeth. He noticed it was loose on Saturday, and by Sunday morning he wanted it pulled out with pliers (his friend Robbie's preferred method). We explained that it has to be much looser first, or it would hurt. So he will wiggle and wait.

A funny conversation we had on Saturday.

Background: The kids have been playing with a silver "rope" type chain necklace they found in my room, it was actually a gag gift. Noah put it on Saturday just before leaving for the aforementioned birthday party.

Me: Take that necklace off, you're not wearing it to the party.

Noah: Awww, I like it mom.

Me: It makes you look like a gangster.

Noah: I am a gangster.

Me (trying not to laugh): Do you know what a gangster is?

Noah: Someone who plays jokes on people.

Me: No, that's a jokester.

Noah: Then what's a gangster?

Me: A person who does bad things, even kills people sometimes. (That was the best I could come up with).

Noah: Oh, okay. (Takes off necklace).

Now I just hope that he doesn't see someone with a necklace like that and call them a gangster. It's so hard sometimes to teach your kids about the bad things in the world without giving them too much information.

A Great Example

I don't remember exactly when or how it started. All of a sudden, maybe a year ago, whenever we said prayers our little Noah (age 5) would pray for President Hinckley. It must have been after he had the cancer surgery that we suggested to our children that we should pray for the prophet. Not a prayer was said by that little boy that he did not pray for President Hinckley's health. He was also quick to remind us if we forgot President Hinckley in our prayers. Pretty soon we were all praying for the prophet with great regularity. Noah's love for him increased through seeing him on General Conference (our hard and fast rule for the kids: when the prophet speaks, you must come and listen).

When President Faust passed away last year, we realized that we better explain to Noah that even though we pray for his health, President Hinckley would eventually pass on as well. We knew that it would be upsetting for Noah, and we hoped we could prepare him a little.

His reaction on Sunday night was heartbreaking. He asked if he could pray after family prayer was over, and all he could say was, "Thank you for everything President Hinckley did for us" before breaking down in tears. We all cried for Noah, for he had lost his hero.

I never had the opportunity to be in his presence (although Joey did in Honduras), but I always felt a special connection with him. I know he was a prophet of God. What's amazing is how much my love for him grew as I saw him through the eyes of a child.

As children do, Noah has already started to forget his sadness. But what will not be forgotten is the example that my little boy showed me of following the prophet.