The Price of Beauty

Brayden

7:45 a.m.

Brayden

10:20 a.m.

Pickup Sticks, Phase Conquest & Discovery

After waiting by your computers for days, you'll be pleased to know that the snake pit is finito!! A few words to describe our feat? Strength, bravery, a certain good-lookingness, stamina... and you'll NEVER believe what we found! Our fascinating journey in photos:

BEFORE

SO wishing we could just throw a match in

Brayden building quick truck walls

After the first trip of hauling branches on a tarp to the truck out front, we wisely opted to take apart the fence and bring the truck to the pile

Temperate skies

My job was compression--think less glamourous version of grape squishing

One of FOUR enormous (and expertly compacted) loads to the dump

The muscle, ready for load #2
(That is one hunk of man you see there. I'm talking serious strength.)

Enter day 2, Memorial Day and our 14th Anniversary!
The lawn was soft from major weekend rain, so we hauled it to the truck to up our workout

A few hours later and the end is in sight...

Look, the ground!! We're celebrating on the inside.

And now for the shocking discoveries:

NO dead animals

NO live animals NO small children

NO snakeageddon

A gaggle of relatively aggressive snails

A whole lotta creepy crawlies (shudder)

A heavy, off-white ping pong ball that couldn't possibly have been a snake egg

AND...300 newly discovered square feet of our backyard! Wahoo!

AFTER

We. are. awesome.

Pickup Sticks, Phase Terrifying

WAY more daunting than it appears (the snake pit, not the boys)

Today's the day.

It's us or you, snake pit.

My friend offered her bear spray. I fear we will need it.

The Day the Calendar Imploded

a.k.a. Saturday, May 16th.

We have been joking for months at this day and laughing everytime another event was scheduled on no day other than May 16th. Well, the day came, the day went and we made it through smiling. It really wasn't that bad since we simply opted out of all sorts of things (including Fisher's birthday, but I'll get to that in a minute).

We started the weekend with Rick, Connor, and Brayden going camping on a stake father-son overnighter. Maddie invited an old friend over for a lateover and I...did heaps of laundry I'd neglected all week. Yay me!

On Saturday, Maddie & I spent the day together at her national dance competition at Lagoon:


She's in two team dances, both of which have won first place at two previous competitions, and the result at nationals? Drumroll, please...they took 2nd place on "Grease" and 1st place and an overall award for "Get Your Shine On"!! WOW, way to go Maddie & team! They did such a great job and I am such an awesome mom that I forgot the camcorder AND the camera!? You'll just have to imagine what a cute clogger she is. She's smiley and dances hard and doesn't get the least bit nervous. Lucky girl! The two of us had a fun girls day with lunch, getting lost in Kaysville, and birthday shopping between the dancing.

A few other May 16th events? Two soccer games (they made it to one), two wedding receptions (we made it to one), a stake first aid camp clinic (nope), a stake camp cleanup assignment (nope), two things that happily got cancelled (hooray!)...and I don't remember what else because I stopped writing things down. Certainly the most important event we skipped was Fisher's 3rd birthday!! We planned to celebrate on the 17th instead (so it would last longer than 7 1/2 minutes) and he was clueless and super happy. SO happy that I will give him his own post for it later. :)

HOORAY! We lived through May 16th without spontaneously combusting! Go team.

Rejoice!

I just discovered this old post about the YW training I was so stressed about! When I wrote about it, I got a little carried away and ran out of time...and forgot to get back to publish it... So, here's my belated report in all it's wordy glory:

April 23, 2009
That's right, I've been rejoicing for a week! The meeting went beautifully--as good as I could have hoped for. There is no question that the spirit guided and I felt completely humbled to be "teaching" these amazing women that lead the girls in our stake. We talked a lot about ministering. We have a prophet who ministers and we can follow his example. Really, that is just loving & serving each girl individually, not as a group--getting to know them, interacting one-on-one, putting our arms around them, looking them in the eye, calling them by name, and praying for how we can affect them knowing that as we prepare spiritually each day, the Lord will tell us what to do and when to do it on individual levels. I could tell you my entire lesson and get excited all over again, but I will spare you! We were THRILLED to hear feedback that everyone left feeling encouraged and inspired. Totally what we were going for. Hooray!! What a relief.

I really love the young women's program. My testimony of it gets deeper the longer I serve in it. I love the girls throughout our stake, many I know, many more I'm trying to get familiar with, but somehow I have a soft spot for each of them. It touches me how strong many of them are and what an impact one virtuous girl can have on those around her. I love that I get to be involved with them, even from a more distant stake position. They make me want to be a better person so that any time any one of them sees me anywhere, I can be a positive example. They get pulled in so many directions--they just need to feel our love as women in the church, be told how great they are, and see that we have joy because we live the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are so blessed to have it and we have an enormous responsibility to impress that on our youth. I'm thankful I get to be apart of all of it.

If you need a lift, I highly recommend watching the most recent YW General Broadcast from Mar 09. Young woman or not, it's worth hearing.

Pickup Sticks

This weekend we played an enormous game of pickup sticks. Actually we play this game every week during the summer with our backyard trees. The wind blows and dead sticks from these overgrown monsters litter the ground. We give them a good pruning once or twice a summer, but they grow like wildfire. This weekend's game was a bit bigger than mere pickup sticks--more like prune/clean out/saw down huge limbs, then clean up afterward. It took hours and we were sunburned, scratched up, and exhausted (just in time to chaperone the stake dance that night), but it was long overdue.

The kids LOVE climbing these trees because there are so many low branches. Since they were planted too low in the ground (not by us, as though we'd know better,) we've had to wait til they grew big enough to support cutting off major branches at the base.

during...getting overwhelmed at this point...

Our awesome neighbor helping us out with his chainsaw. We totally owe him.

The larger than life pile of pickup sticks--this overwhelms us the most


And the deceivingly large pile of firewood chopped up from the limbs that filled two loads in the back of our suburban

All cleaned up! We were amazed with how much the backyard grew and we're hoping this saves us hours of 'pickup sticks' this summer. We can see the sky again, hooray!

Well, we took care of the firewood pile for FHE activity Monday night, hauling it over to the scout closet at the church. The beaver den/snake pit in the corner is next on the list and we're getting the guts up to tackle it next weekend. A few years of pruning and relentless pickup sticks has gotten out of control and grown well beyond anything get-ridable in any normal way. I'm certain there's an analogy there. Not so certain I want to see what's living at the bottom of the pile, but if it's no more mortifying than the pile itself, perhaps I'll post a picture once we discover... It'll be news to me because I'm pretty sure I want nothing to do with uncovering the mystery. A girl can dream.

"Sadness but not Despair"

Little Man K's funeral was yesterday. I had the privilege of being there and even playing the piano. I mean it when I say privilege. His parents did a beautiful job expressing their love and pain and faith. I have been thinking so much about them and my cousin who buried her little man just a few weeks ago. I got to see her last week and she simply amazed me. Her words to me were that she feels sadness, but not despair. I can't think of when I'll stop praying for my cousin and also Little Man K's family. I pray they will find the same feeling in their hearts--of sadness, but not despair. Thank you, Monette, for your simple and incredible faith.

Here are the fitting words Little Man's mom read yesterday and here is the song the slideshow was set to, called Fly. Hope you don't mind the link, H. I know good people. :)

I, one of God's noble spirits, came to earth one day
Lingered just a moment,then hastened on my way.
But I left a little body in face and form complete
That must be buried tenderly in earth for quiet sleep
And because two hearts were aching they could not hear me say,
"I'll claim it, my darling parents, on Resurrection Day."
Thank you, Father and Mother, for giving it to me
With it I'll know progression through all eternity.
With it, I'll be your son, and make you proud and glad
While waiting, I'll be learning so strive not to be sad.
Others will be with you my parents, who will love and stay with you.
I had to hurry onward, I had other work to do.
But remember I'll be waiting. Prove true to your earthly test
And when we meet we'll smile and say,"What Father does is best."

Satisfaction

Guess what? I cleaned out my refrigerator!

It looks exactly like this

I feel so satisfied even though I haven't gotten to the freezer side yet. (That's why the door is closed.) I think I'll go have some scrumptious looking cake and some sort of orange blender beverage to reward myself.

Sadness

Some of you know about the sweet, sick baby born to friends in our ward in March. He passed away late last night at home in his parents' arms and we are just heartsick for them. A young couple to pray for tonight.

M.D., you're included btw. Can't get you off my mind!