Date night

Please tell me we're not the only people in the world whose date night involves standing in front of a Valentine display calling our kids to find out which ones they want to pass out and if they are SURE we can't make cute "Thumbody loves you" ones...ah, the grocery store. That repository of romance and inevitable stop on every date. :-)

1) Always fun to eat a dinner I didn't cook, especially if it's delicious Thai food! Neil was working from home today, but it still felt like I hadn't talked to him in ages. Anything is delightful when I'm with him. Even buying Star Wars Valentines. And Abigail is a stellar babysitter who is thrilled to be paid in sushi! :-)

2) One of my goals for January was to work on making my bedroom a peaceful haven again. I repainted and bought a new duvet cover, but unfortunately Matthew and his baby paraphernalia are still in there (I told my mom yesterday that I would put him in his real crib last night...all that happened was that I moved his bassinet up next to my side of the bed so I didn't even have to get out of bed to get him...so dang tired from his "I will wake up SIX times a night now!" thing). But I listed my storage hutch (which used to be in the kitchen and then got moved to my room and I so hated it being there!) on Craigslist and today someone bought it and took it away, so I waved goodbye to it with a mental thank-you for the 13 years I loved it--but a big sigh of relief that it's someone else's to love now. :-)

3) Last night I was doing my usual check of sleeping kids and found Nathan and Abigail tucked in together. They've started doing this on Friday nights (since that's the only night we have neither school nor church early the next day) and it's pretty cute. Abigail sure loves her littlest brothers--she always wants to hold Matthew or put him down for a nap or get him up, and yesterday as she was taking him into his room for a nap I saw her kiss his cheek over and over and whisper into his ear, "Oh Matty, I love you so so so much! You are the best baby in the world!"

4) I did yoga today after my run--I wanted to run a couple of extra miles just to bump up my weekly mileage (from 40 to 42) but I knew that the better long-term choice was to spend that time on really stretching and working on the painful spots. I don't always make this choice so I'm pretty proud of my maturity when I do. ;-)

5) I took the kids to the library this afternoon to give Neil some peace and quiet, and we picked up a couple of holds for Abigail that she has been anticipating for quite awhile. When we checked them out, I told her that she needed to finish a book for her English class before getting immersed in all the library books, since it would make it much harder to do well on the AR quiz for her assigned book if she took a big break in the middle. I knew she was not happy about this, but she took a deep breath, and said, "You're right--I will finish it first." And I was SO PROUD that she didn't make a fuss about it and just took it in stride! Parenting victory!!

books, books, books

Last week I went around our house with a laundry basket and filled it up with some age-appropriate books for Abigail, then reorganized our bookcases to give her a couple of shelves replete with fun Abigail books.  As I was doing this, I just felt so excited about watching her launch out into the wonderful world of books.  So many fantastic books!  So many wonderful characters!  I love reading so much, and I was honestly getting a little choked up thinking about how excited I am for her to discover all of these stories and characters and worlds.  It has been so neat to watch her just explode into this passionate little reader.  She told me today, "There is one world, and so many stories in it." 

So anyway, today was the first time I've ventured out with myself with all four of the kiddos.  We went to the health food store and the library, and it was so great!  Luke slept the whole time (which is why it went well) and it was so nice to be out with the kiddos stocking up on pumpkin seeds and fairy tales.  And teaching Abigail about how to use the library catalog, and how to find your books, and watching her get just as excited as I was to see that there's a library sale this weekend...she and I are dissimilar in many ways, but we definitely bond over our books.  :-)  I've been reading scriptures with her in the evenings lately (we trade off reading verses) and it's one of the nicest parts of my day. 

And speaking of books, Jules and Isaac each have a stack and are waiting, so I'm off!

cleanliness is next to godliness? discuss!

Yesterday afternoon around six, I just quit.  I was exhausted, Neil was working late, and the kids were driving me crazy.  I'd sliced a big chunk out of my thumb early on in the morning (cutting up apples for Jules with a knife that Neil had sharpened the day before, which I had forgotten) and every time I jarred it, it started bleeding all over everything again (like a LOT, so much, for instance, that I thought one of the kids had dumped grape juice all over a puzzle when I wasn't looking).  So after dinner, I just sat down and let the chaos build around me while I tried to block it out.  When Neil got home, I ran 5 miles, then went straight to bed, ignoring the sticky floors and all the rest.

This morning when I got up, I realized that the house really and truly was a mess.  Mostly the kitchen--the dishes from dinner were washed but that was it.  I hadn't finished putting away laundry (kept bleeding on it!), and everything needed to be vacuumed or swept and mopped.  Everyone was hungry and grumpy and the mess seemed to exacerbate it.  I was irritated with myself when I realized that I had to make up for everything I hadn't done the previous night, plus run this morning and go to the grocery store so I had something to feed the missionaries this evening. 

I read a couple of weeks ago a quote that struck me, "Cleaning house with small children is like shoveling during a snowstorm."  I've also heard, "Don't worry about the mess, your kids won't remember it when they're older" and "cleanliness is next to godliness." 

My personal inclination is to keep my living spaces as clean as possible.  And yes, this does entail some frustration as the mother of 3 small children with less time and more mess than I'd like.  I've got a pretty good system figured out, but I do devote a fair amount of my "free" time to keeping things orderly.  Some of this, I think, simply has to happen in order for life to function smoothly (laundry, dishes, etc.) but some (such as disinfecting the counters or organizing closets) may just be icing on the cake.  Personally, I get really stressed if there are messes, so I feel it's worth the trade-off for my children to have less time with me if I'm cleaning but for that time to be more quality time since I'm not frantic about the sticky floor we're sitting on (I do also try to involve them in the home upkeep).  I do worry, however, that we're missing out on fun things because I always want to get the work done first.  (This is a big worry for me:  I want them to remember their childhoods as fun, not just "broom in hand," but I also want them to learn how to keep things clean and orderly). 

What do you think about all of this?  Do you feel that a clean home helps your family to be more calm and happy?  Do you think that the season of small children is not the season to be dusting and mopping?  How do you balance the care of your living space with everything else you have to do?  Did you have a clean or messy home growing up?  Did you notice?  Do you live differently now?

books part II

In answer to your question, Ashley, (after some modifications and deleting and adding) I ended up purchasing these books (Neil's very thoughtful "thank you for doing our taxes, why don't you pick out some of your favorite books" gift).

I should say that while I am super excited for all of these books, we already have quite a large children's book collection, which holds many of my favorites. So this isn't necessarily the list of the books I would first recommend to build your stash. I should also say that we are definite bookworms around here, and regard books as a sound investment. :-) Our kids will literally sit for hours--HOURS--looking at books, so the sticker shock is something that we're willing to work with. Not excited about, but recognizing that it's a trade-off. Some people buy shoes or necklaces or CDs, we buy books. Just one of those things.

• Trina Shart Hyman's The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Merlin and the Making of the King--possibly my favorite illustrator ever. Unfortunately, just about everything she's done except for Saint George and the Dragon and The Kitchen Knight is now out of print or prohibitively expensive. Incidentally, Saint George was one of the first two books in our children's library [Bread and Jam for Frances was the other, of course]. But if you don't have those, they are very affordable at Amazon.
  
• The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren
• The Polar Express by Chris van Allsburg
• The Year at Maple Hill Farm (Provensen)
• Night Tree (Eve Bunting)
• The Little Pig (Judy Dunn--not a literary classic, but I remember reading it over and over when I was little)
• Doctor de Soto (William Steig)
• When I Was Young in the Mountains (Cynthia Rylant)
• Owl Moon (Jane Yolen)
• Twelve Days of Christmas (Hilary Knight--absolutely entrancing illustrations)
• Veganomicon (a cookbook for me!)
• The Ox-Cart Man (Barbara Cooney, also the author of my very favorite book Miss Rumphius)
• The Big Red Barn (Margaret Brown--this is a replacement copy because we have loved the other one to shreds)
• The Little Brute Family (Russell Hoban--this is seriously one of the awesomest books I have ever read, by the author of the Frances books. I laugh on every page of this book).
  
• James Herriot's Treasury for Children (love, love, love his books for adults. so excited for this!!)
  

If you're just starting out, I would highly recommend checking the children's book lots on eBay. Look for award-winners, you can usually get a great batch!! Plus the library book sales are the cheapest way to go; our library sells children's books for 50 cents each and I just went to one last weekend in my parents' town where they were 3/$1. We're just at the stage now where we have most of the popular ones that are sold at these kind of sales, so I'm having to do more searching and paying closer to full price to get the ones I'm really hankering after.

And now I must go add all these to my Excel home library catalog!

some thoughts

with one smack from the bathtub, Juliet draws nearer to her dream of becoming a unicorn

Monday nights are sometimes hard for me. Our church has asked that Monday evenings be reserved for Family Home Evening; every semester Neil has had mandatory-you-cannot-miss-and-still-have-a-job meetings that fall right smack between dinnertime and bedtime. Every single Monday. Result: Daddy gets home when everyone is in bed. Sometimes before midnight.

Some nights I am totally worn out and we have pancakes for dinner and everyone goes to bed early.

Some nights (like tonight) we have rosemary rolls, split-pea soup (which the kids love), and we go to the library. Or do something fun all together.

I try for the second option. It doesn't always happen, but I try. It makes me feel a little less guilty about postponing family home evening to another night.

Tonight was interesting. Maybe in an effort to make up for the spiritual lesson that all her little friends all over the world were getting, Abigail kept bringing up new topics of conversation and we ended up talking all the way to the library about the following:

• how everyone is a child of God
• how Heavenly Father is the father of our spirit
• the war in heaven
• the plan of salvation
• the Creation
• promptings of the Holy Ghost
  

I was thinking during this conversation about a lesson we'd had in Relief Society a few weeks back about taking the opportunity to bear our testimonies to our children. And thinking about Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, which I was reading this afternoon, and how grateful I am that--even though motherhood is praised with the lips but not with economic rewards--I can have the time with my children to have conversations like this that just happen casually without any effort on my part (btw, you really should read that book).

So while I was thinking about these things, we were in the library, and while I was catching up with the children's librarian, who we hadn't chatted with in awhile, she asked me if we had our new library card yet. I said no, and she said that all I needed was my old library card and my driver's license.

Confession: I leave my driver's license at home all the time (Mom, don't yell at me!)

I take it when I'm planning to spend money, but I often leave my wallet at home when, for instance, I'm going to the library and I don't want to have to keep track of my wallet AND the kids AND the books. Just one less thing to worry about.

But this evening as I was loading the kids into the car, I thought Get your wallet.

And I thought back, No way. I'll lose it.

And again that little voice said, Go get your wallet.

And I thought, Why? Am I going to get pulled over? I will drive very slowly.

And again, Rachael, go get your wallet.

So I went back into the house and I got my wallet. And I had it with me so that I could get my new library card, and so that we could check out the enormous stack of books the kids picked out, instead of having to go home bookless.

I told the kids about this on the way home. We talked about recognizing promptings and listening to your thoughts and how the Holy Ghost can help us to make good choices even in small things.

It turned out to be a pretty good family home evening after all. And I'm just really thankful for things like this.

That's all.

answers, with some pictures too

What do I want for Christmas? (subtle, Mom)
A food processor. A dehydrator. A Victorio strainer. Cute jewelry. Tongs. A silicone whisk. Yoga classes. More time. A good waterbottle. A Bernina sewing machine. A big thing of maple flavoring because I'm tired of buying a little bottle every month [edit: bought this last weekend]. A short-sleeved button-front sweater that matches everything I currently own. Cute shoes. A really awesome camera. A yellow Le Creuset pitcher. But honestly, now that I've given that list, I really don't need anything, because I'm running out of room. (Maybe yoga classes.)

What's your typical outfit for any given day?
Jeans, a shirt that falls somewhere in between a exercise-worthy T-shirt and a teaching-appropriate Banana Republic buttondown (in other words, something attractive but very washable), my Acorn sheepskin slippers, and a French braid. And right now, I wear my BR red trench coat everywhere--I adore that coat.

What's the most enjoyable book you read this year?
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

If I [my sister Mary Beth] were to come and visit you for a day, what would we do? What if you came to visit me?
We would cook. A lot. Visit the Russian or the Asian grocer. Take the kids to the playground. Stay up late talking and then go for a walk when the stars are out.And if I came to visit you, we would go to Cafe Rio, and then we would go hiking in the mountains. Or I would sit in your carrel and watch you study, which is probably more likely at this point in the semester. :-)

What's one dish you currently want to learn how to cook?
Risotto! But it's hard to find a time when I can just stir something for 30 minutes.

How much time do you typically spend on meal preparation?
Around an hour, but I'm also frequently starting things earlier in the day (like chopping things while the kids eat lunch or mixing up bread right after naptime). Generally I start full-scale dinner prep about forty-five minutes before I want to eat.

What is your favorite way to relax? (Answer cannot be exercise. That is not true relaxing.) :-)
Reading, in my bed, with a little bowl of almonds and Craisins.

What do you want to do when Neil finishes school?
Ideally, we'd like to live somewhere in the West where there are awesome ski resorts, lots of sun, and good gardening weather (we're not asking for much, are we?) Colorado looks nice. As far as jobs go, we're thinking government or private research, but eventually Neil would like to teach. My dream is that we will both end up at BYU as dollar-a-year professors, and we will live in a cabin up Sundance canyon and ski a lot.

How many kids do you want?
When we were first married, we decided we wanted upwards of five. However, after Isaac was born, my doctor gave me a set time frame before I could even start thinking about getting pregnant again and suggested a consultation with general and vascular surgeons beforehand. She also told me I have a good chance of seriously increased complications with subsequent pregnancies...so I guess we'll see.

What do you both do [in terms of employment, I'm guessing?]
The short answer here is that Neil is a doctoral student in mechanical engineering. He works as a teaching assistant for a program centered on engineering in community service, which he loves, because he's teaching undergrads how to solve engineering conundrums. His research area is laser-aided manufacturing, which is the topic for his dissertation--so when I talk about him working in the lab, that's what he's doing.

My teaching is through the university where Neil is doing his doctorate. Up until next semester, I've taught traditional classroom courses in advanced technical and business writing; next semester I'm giving online teaching a whirl. I also do freelance editing and instructional design, which basically means I take a whole bunch of materials about, say, a medical device, and create a voiceover script with visual implementation so that instead of sitting through a PowerPoint presentation on ankle replacement, a surgeon can use an interactive online training module to learn more about how a certain device would change the procedure.

Recipes forthcoming on the recipe blog

Kid food for lunch and snacks
Honestly, most days my kids just eat various raw fruits and veggies for lunch. Any assortment of grapes, peaches, plums, oranges, pears, apples, pomegranates, grapefruits, tomatoes, edamame, sugar snap peas, carrots, corn, beans, celery, etc. I don't think they've ever met a vegetable or fruit they didn't like, including last night's Brussels sprouts. Mostly I just cut up fruits and vegetables until they're full, and whatever they eat on a certain day depends on what I have on hand. Occasionally we will add in cheese or some bread, but mostly it's just the fruit and vegetables. They don't really like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but they do like tuna fish mixed with red onion, craisins, celery, and apples, which they call "mermaid lunch."

For snacks, if we eat crackers it's usually Goldfish, which isn't my favorite option, but it's HFCS-free. Sometimes we will bake pretzels, banana bread, or pumpkin muffins, which Jules is obsessed with. They eat a lot of raisins and craisins. And clementines.

How many boys did you kiss before Neil?
Neil was the eighth, although truth be told, I've probably kissed Isaac more in four and half months than I've kissed Neil in seven years. Which is what happens when you have a baby with ultra-chubby kissable cheeks who will giggle like crazy if you kiss him really fast all over his face. Ooh, I love those cheeks!

this is my thousandth post

I post all the time about food, and cooking, and how much I love cooking. And I thought I should share a little bit of what dinnertime ends up looking like about half the time...


Q: What to do when your parents have spent almost three hours working on a really elaborate dinner?

A: Cry. Refuse dinner.



Eat snot.

i love my job

Q: Why is being a stay-at-home mom awesome?

A: Because you have the time (and the opportunity) to watch your kids wake up from naps. To

gently rub tiny shoulders. To smooth sleep-tousled damp curls. To watch little hazel eyes open up, and have chubby arms thrown around your neck in drowsy delight. To hear a little voice chirp, "I hadda good seep, Mommy. What we do now, huh? Yuv you."

gettin' ready

All of a sudden, I'm realizing that this next baby will be here before we know it--the summer seems to be flying by. Seven and a half weeks still sounds like a long time away, but then when I think "okay, one week until swimming lessons starts, and then the cherries come on, and then we're meeting up with Mary Beth, and oh we need to go to the temple next weekend, and I promised the girls we would go to the waterpark..." it goes fast.

This week I made a list of everything I needed to do/buy/prepare before those last couple of weeks, and so we've been starting to check off items and add things like newborn diapers to our grocery list (which I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about and we would have had no diapers except I glanced at an old "get before the baby" list from one of my pregnancy books--well-thumbed when I was pregnant with Abigail, totally gathering dust now). For some reason I was thinking I really wouldn't need to do that much in advance, because after all, this is the third baby, and you'd think that we'd be reasonably set, but then I look at my list and it's things like "FIND (and sterilize!!) pacifiers!" because the girls have been using them as toys for their dolls. Or "new washcloths" because a surprising number of our baby washcloths have been used to apply wood stain or the like. Hmm. And making my standard two months' worth of meals and grocery lists, plus freezer meals, is considerably more difficult, since we're starting to get fairly divisive food preferences in our family (question: do you have any recipes for freezer meals that do not involve ground beef or cream soups or black beans? It's quite the challenge).

All in all, though, I'm grateful for this planning phase. I think it's a good adjustment period for all of us, since it helps me feel more calm about adding a third baby to our home, since I know I'm reasonably well-prepared in most ways (too bad you can't store up sleep and patience in the freezer too!) and I really love watching how excited the girls are to put together the baby mobile and fold teeny little socks and the like (and, of course, eavesdropping on their conversation where they discussed the likelihood of a pink-frosted cake at their "big sister party." Love those two).

On a completely unrelated note, I tried to start running again this week. I figured I'd had almost 8 weeks to recover after surgery, and my doctor approved exercise at a "comfortable" level. BIG MISTAKE, as I found out about ten hours later. Let me tell you, even the most wimpy run (2 minutes running, 3 minutes walking, repeated for half an hour) was not welcomed with joy by my abused abdominal ligaments. I was so saddened by this, because I felt absolutely fantastic while I was running, and I had so much energy the rest of the day--it was kind of difficult to make myself stop at the 2-minute mark, and I was really hoping that I'd be able to run for longer the next day, and the next, etc. I keep thinking back to my pregnancy with Juliet and how fabulous it was to be working out and lifting weights all through, whereas this one has been considerably more challenging. On the positive side, I've come a long way since my surgery, when I had shin splints all day after walking a mile when I first came off bedrest. And even if I can't run the way I'd like to, I'm still able to exercise, and that is a very good thing. (And also I think that if I go for some nice long runs around 39 weeks, that baby will make its entrance pretty dang quick.)

31 weeks

my feelings about pregnancy right now are as follows:

My name is Juliet and I am almost two

Sleep deprivation (from bouncing around, playing games involving who can laugh, yell, fake-snore, sneeze, and cough more loudly, etc.) has stolen away my sweet little Juliet and replaced her with a howling banshee, who banshee-howled her way through the entire morning (including the obstretician's office and the grocery store) and made life miserable for everyone concerned.

Any wise words on this whole sharing-rooms thing? Our problem seems to be that no matter how tired they are and no matter what time they go to bed, they won't fall asleep until it's completely dark and wake up in the morning at the first sign of dawn (blankets over the windows aren't helping with this).

Plus, now I've got a kid who goes around muttering, "Quiet, devil baby" to herself (said by me under my breath in a moment of weakness when trying to get dinner ready to take to another family with a screeching Juliet leech as my companion in the kitchen).

Should go right along with the "Dam bread!" that electrified the missionaries last week when Jules requested jam on her bread at dinner.

these things are good

This morning while we were folding laundry Abigail said to me, "You're really happy to be a mom and have kids, huh Mommy?" and I said, "I am so happy." And then I thought about that some more, and about how much delight my kids bring me on a daily basis.

can i tell you how much it delights my orderly little heart to watch this kid fold her laundry and put it away?

Last night after dinner Abigail said it was the perfect day for Family Home Evening (her code for "I want to play all night,") and she was right, it was. We did the dinner dishes super fast and headed out to the greenhouse, where we had the loveliest time just wandering around all the plants. Abigail went crazy over all the roses, and kept running around saying, "Mommy, come check this smell! It is the most beautiful in the world!" We left with a raspberry bush and one more stripey heirloom tomato plant and went to Chick Fil A, because we had coupons for free berry smoothies (which was pretty sweet, because the smoothies are about $4 each and we each got one for free!) Then we watched the kids play in the playplace--I loved watching Abigail help Juliet up to each new level so that Juliet could get to the slide, which was just a bit out of her climbing reach (good thing she had Abigail there to push on her little backside).

Here is our dinner: paninis (chicken, grilled onions, arugula, pickles, tomatoes, and Muenster) with grilled vinegar-cooked potatoes (from the most recent MS Living) and grilled asparagus, tossed with olive oil, salt, and a grind or two of pepper. Delicious and perfect.

This morning has been very ordinary--stories, lots of housework, Lincoln Logs--but I've just been reflecting on how grateful I am for the chance to watch my kids learn and grow up and become such fascinating and endearing little people. I'm really grateful that they have each other, because I think they're learning a lot of lessons from one another--sharing, of course, but for instance yesterday Juliet was running around and fell down with her backside right smack in the middle of Abigail's beloved corn patch. I, of course, was like, "Aaahhh! Jules! You killed Abigail's corn!" and Abigail calmly said, "It's okay, Mom. There's still lots left. It doesn't matter."

I love that perspective.

And I love, love, love playing Lincoln Logs with Abigail (when I was a kid I wanted to be an architect), because her inventiveness constantly delights me. For instance, this little cabin--she built individual pens for each of her animals (built as a part of the house and into the foundation), constructed a little garden off to the side (that's the long line of logs near the gate), popped a swimming pool into the backyard (the blue door) with a swingset nearby, and surrounded the whole thing with a fence to "keep out the wolves." And, of course, as she's building this she also builds Juliet "smash houses," so that Juliet will wreck that house and not the one Abigail is building.

Pretty smart kid, if you ask me.

Mother's Day

Dearest little people,

Thank you for making me a mommy. I love watching you learn and grow so much. My days are often long, but there are shining moments that make them all worthwhile--like today, when I watched all the Primary children go up to sing to their mothers, and thought about how neat it will be next year to watch Abigail go up too...and then they began to sing "Love is Spoken Here," and you turned to me, Abigail, and said excitedly, "Mommy, it's your song!" because every night you ask for a song about Mommy and every night Daddy sings that song to you, and then you sang the whole song sitting on my lap along with the older children. That made me cry into your fluffy little blonde head, and when you sat on my lap for the whole song and didn't wiggle off until you were done singing, that made me cry more.

And then I cried some more when you said the blessing on dinner and specifically said, "thank you for Mommy being a mother and it is Mother's Day" (and by the way, you got really upset every time I cried, because you thought you'd done something to upset me, at which point Daddy explained, "Mommies cry when they are happy. That's the difference between mommies and daddies.") In any case, you've told me "Happy Mother's Day!" about every five minutes today.

I sure love you two and your daddy.

food for thought

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the spiritual nurturing of our children, especially after Conference. While I feel like we do pretty well on having family scriptures/prayer and individual prayers with both children, I'm curious as to what you/your parents do/did to really teach your children about the gospel. What do you feel is most effective? What is hardest for you to implement? Where do you feel like you're really making a difference? Please comment, because I'd love to know what's working for you.

One of our goals is to be more regular with Family Home Evenings. Our evenings are generally really busy, and for the last semester Neil's had to work late on Monday evenings anyway, so sad to say, the formal FHE hasn't been happening as regularly as we'd like it to. So we're stepping up to the plate this summer. We've also found it most effective to have family scriptures at 7 am together before Neil leaves for work (last semester we did it in the evenings since I left so early and it was much harder to be regular).

One area where I feel we're really doing well is in talking to our children about what/why we're doing church-related things and including them as much as possible as we fulfill our responsibilities. For instance, I always take the children with me when I go visiting teaching, and Neil often will take them home teaching as well. When I heard Abigail explaining to Juliet that we were going to be leaving in a few moments to "go take my friend's mommy a dinner, 'cause she is sick and that is a nice thing to do to help her out," I really felt like I'd accomplished something that day in teaching my children about compassion and service.

On a semi-related note (related to me because it was a rough morning that required a lot of patience!), here's one of my new favorite quotes (from Elder Russell M. Nelson) on child-rearing with the Spirit: "Do not try to control your children. Instead, listen to them, help them to learn the gospel, inspire them, and lead them toward eternal life. You are God's agents in the care of children He has entrusted to you. Let His divine influence remain in your hearts as you teach and persuade."

And on a completely unrelated note, last night the wind really hit our crabapple tree. While I'm sad to see the blossoms go, I fell in love with the aftermath--doesn't it look like a (pink) fairy garden? Beautiful!