Recital

It's been over a month and I just now took the time to sit down and upload the video from our recital back in December.

Daria and I began taking piano lessons together two or two and half years ago (not counting the summertime as we don't take lessons then). I wish I had this much dedication and motivation as a young girl. I think we've both really enjoyed taking lessons, although I could really do without the whole recital requirement.


Daria and I are required to play two pieces each, but I chose my favorites to post. Amazingly enough I'm posting one of mine, which I've never done before. Why you ask? For the main reason that recitals and I do not mix well and quite frankly seem to put me into some state of pre traumatic stress. One would think being an adult I would be past all those "what if I make a mistake fears." So instead of looking like a blubbering fool on the world wide web I opted not to publish my previous recitals. I can still hear my friend's husband say "I thought you told me she could play?" he was somewhat joking but to be honest I thought the same thing about myself in that moment since I had played both pieces perfectly before I left the house, right before I entered the twilight zone that is. When I sat down I seriously forgot the piece and it seemed as though I had never seen nor played it before in my life. Horrifying I know. I almost quit piano because I was so horrified at how scared I get to perform. But I finally determined that I wanted to continue taking lessons and beat my fear or not, but not to let it stop me. This time Janalen had me go first and she didn't require me to memorize my pieces. This seemed to do the trick and amazingly I was able to push through both pieces! A personal victory. Although I must say it still makes me literally sick to my stomach to think of playing in front of anyone.

Blah, blah, blah

Can you believe that the word “blah” is actually in the dictionary? Better than that can you believe I actually looked it up?

Is it just me or am I the only one who is in some sort of humdrum non-motivated slump trying to get on track with the New Year? I feel so “Blah”. Because I can’t seem to get motivated for more worthy causes I did however begin tackling a goal I would like to achieve.

TO READ

Yes, I am one of those non-readers who collect books they one day plan to read. Not only do I collect books I one day will read I keep lists of books I would like to read. Ridiculous I know. It’s not that I’m a poor reader. The fact of the matter is I prefer non-fiction and in my opinion most non-fiction requires a bit more thinking skills which of course slows down the reading….at least in my case. Consider the book “War and Peace”; according to Amazon it weighs 3.8 lbs! That’s a lot of food for thought. Not that I’m planning on reading that book…at least for now. I’ll file it on my "to read" list under the “w’s”.

Amazingly I’ve been able to read two quick read books that I really enjoyed. Both recommended by friends. (to all you busy readers, this is an accomplishment for me)

The first is “A Three Dog Life” by Abigail Thomas. It’s a memoir recounting the tangled web of feelings, emotions, and experiences Abigail had while having to take care of her husband who suffered a severe brain injury. Very riveting and I recommend it. My stepfather sustained a brain injury and trauma back in 1996. He died in 2003 from heart disease. I think that most of the world around us thought my mom’s life changed in 2003 when he died, but it actually changed in 1996 when he lost part of his mind and who he was. While he could live what seemed a “normal” existence (because he could drive, cook, put on his clothes) his mind was truly altered. Quit frankly I think this book could apply to anyone who has encountered any physical or mental limitation in a loved one.

The second is “Confessions of a Slacker Mom”. I loved this one. Again, short, simple and easy to read. The term “slacker” refers to the fact that society wants us mother’s to believe that we are “slackers” if we do not have our kids in 20 activities, or provide them with every tiny inch of what might help them become some over achieving successful person in life. I call it the Oprah syndrome. I’m not an Oprah watcher, mainly for the fact that I’m really not a TV watcher. But the few times I’ve watched Oprah I feel like I’m just not doing enough. I’m not doing enough for my kids, for my husband for the world and then for myself (I have to remind myself that Oprah neither is married or has children and probably a LOT of time on her hands to think of things that we “slacker” moms should be doing so she can earn billions of dollars each year). No offense to Oprah. Anyway, this book is a funny book and the author sometimes gets on her tangents but the point was always well taken. While I didn’t agree with every insight, it did speak to my mothering soul that comes from centuries of natural instinct, like “less is more”, “natural consequences are the best teaches” and “we can’t protect our kids from disappointment or pain”..(like the middle school here who won’t allow the kids to play tag during recess because “Oh my, they might get hurt”). I would totally recommend it to anyone who is pregnant or with small children, and yes even older grown children.

While I’ve been in my slump, thanks to all of you who have been more diligent about keeping your blog updated….I’ve enjoyed “reading” them.

The Holiday Vacation is definitely over

The kids returned to school today with long faces. They said they would rather stay home and play all day. I agree but life is life and we must do the things we need to do.

It’s been a good holiday break, and it comes to a close with happy thoughts.

I admit, I was overcome with a small case of the “Grinch” attitude, or maybe it was an attitude of the true meaning of Christmas or maybe I’m just plum growing up. Do any of you know why Dr. Seuss wrote the book “How the Grinch Stole Christmas?” It was written in 1957 to protest the commercialization of Christmas. Interesting note I thought. Now don’t get me wrong, I like giving gifts and I admit I like getting gifts, but it boggles my mind why throngs of people spend hours and hours shopping, and buying an abundance of things for people they might do otherwise under different circumstances. (Sorry, that was the thought that ran through my head when I had to run an errand and got stuck in an hour of traffic near the mall which NEVER happens any other time of the year). To each their own of course, and don’t get me wrong I am not against gifts, we just wanted to scale ours down. This year Ken and I really wanted a simple holiday. When we asked the kids what they wanted they stared at us with blank looks (although I’m sure if I brought them to a store and asked what they wanted they would point to everything they could see). Finally after deep thought they both came up with only two things (which surprised me). Dustin wanted a Webkin and a Nerf Gun and Daria wanted 2 Webkins. Simple I might say. It worked out just fine because we discussed as a family that we wanted to minimize the gifts and focus more on the meaning of Christmas, more time with family and friends. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. The kids were delighted to open their two gifts and we then opened one gift for our whole family. I worried that there would be “wanting more gifts” but none came and I breathed a sigh of relief and could hear in my head “It came without ribbons, it came without tags, it came without packages, boxes or bags! Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store, maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more!” Daria and Dustin were happy. We also took on our Home Teachers challenge to write a note to each member of the family and place it in a gift bag under the tree. We opened those first. A fine tradition to repeat.

For the second year in a row we spent Christmas Eve with friends and with the kids re-enacting the Nativity while singing various Christmas songs.

Dustin as a shepherd

Daria as Mary

We also enjoyed Dustin's Kindergarten program, Daria’s choir concert, mine and Daria’s piano recital, celebrated Dustin’s birthday, enjoyed a nice ward party where Ken, Kat and Dustin had a part the entertainment, a visit to Ken’s family, picked pecans,

learned how to make Nancy's famous kolache's, a visit from close friends, and lastly a lot of eating and games with neighbor friends. Such a long run on sentence doesn’t make it sound like such a simple holiday does it!

having fun with cousins

Here is to 2008!!!

Midnight

One would ask themselves what they are doing up at 12 midnight on the computer. I ask the same question. Ridiculous I know. I feel wide awake. The problem is at 6am in the morning I won't feel wide awake and might be a bit cranky. I will remind myself that I can choose my attitude then.

I'm up late working on something for Enrichment. One of those "last minute Leah's" I call it. I've got a friend that no matter what she is planning she will come up with some amazing extra ideas at the last minute that would actually take a miracle to accomplish, which she usually pulls off and her name is Leah. Thus anytime something like this happens I have to name it after her. I've told her before, she laughs because she knows it's true.

Tonight while Dustin was taking a bath and playing in the tub we could hear him singing. Some broken version of Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer and a few added Santa's in there as well. It was to cute to pass up. So we hid behind the door and recorded the singing. When he was finished dressing and came out and saw us at first he was laughing, then his laugh turned into madness and he fell into a full blown tantrum. His reasoning in his own words to his dad "It was horrible, I only know 3 of the reindeer's names!!!!" It was all we could do to not bust out laughing so we did our best to be sympathetic. Besides neither of us know all the reindeer names either. That fact didn't make him feel any better.

A few Saturday's ago Daria went on her first date..... with her dad of course. The Faith in God girls (that's the church program for the girls ages 8-11) held a daddy daughter dance, complete with fantastic decorations, dinner, and dance lessons from two professionals. Ken even bought her a corsage. They had a blast! Ken said it was almost like prom they had it decorated so well. When they arrived home Daria looked like she was floating on air. They showed us some of the dance moves that they learned. It was so cute! It's a very cool thing to see these moments between a dad and his daughter.

A few days ago as I passed by Dustin's room I saw this on the floor. I just had to take a picture. No explanation needed.

For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a boy in the house, well the picture below says it all. I have no idea what type of experiment this might have been. It looks so organized. I found this several days after I found a small circle rock fire pit structure made from the rocks in our yard. It looked like it was made to build a fire. I did dismantle it and talked to the boys about the "fire" rules. Dustin is not a Scout but he does know that Scout's can light fires with rocks, and I've seen him try. It reminds me of a book I once read about raising boys. The first sentence said "your goal as a parent is to make sure he survives to his 18th birthday." Enough said!

The most DISGUSTING smell on earth….

The sentence makes one’s mind jump to any occasion one has had with a horrid smell. Maybe it’s rotten food, rotten baby diapers, the sewer, pig farms, or dead animals. Gross I know. But even with all of that I can guarantee that none of those smells alone or even combined can compete with the most disgusting smell in the world.

DURIAN

What is Durian you say? I said the same thing, now I wish I had some re-wind button to the days before even hearing the word Durian. Just the word makes me get a bit sick to my stomach, ok a lot sick to my stomach.

Durian is a thorny oval shaped fruit that can be found in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore. Somehow mixing the word fruit with this food seems so contradictory. Believe it or not this fruit is a delicacy to some. Personally I think their definition of delicacy and mine are very different, I would think of Durian more like self inflicted torture.

So let me explain, Friday night we piled in vehicles with 13 of our wonderful friends and headed down to China town to enjoy some authentic Chinese food.. It was a blast. This is tradition for us. Also tradition is heading over to the Chinese desert shop afterward. The shop smells fine, and includes some very interesting Asian deserts with huge Tapioca balls. Most of us ordered pretty familiar stuff, strawberry, papaya, watermelon, but Ino ordered a Durian shake. “Ino what’s Durian?” He said it tasted great but smells. Smell is an understatement. In fact the shop itself has to keep the fruit tightly sealed. I’m sure if they didn’t people wouldn’t even come in. Due to peer pressure I take Ino’s cup to smell it. It was all down hill from there. There is no word in this world to describe what the smell is like. In fact it was so bad it almost seemed unreal or impossible for something so putrid to exist. We passed the cup to everyone. Each person had the same violent reaction to its contents. By this time the whole shop smelled. When Michelle walked in she said “so what’s the general smell in here?” I think that was her polite way of saying “what in the world is that horrible smell”. Ino convinced us that the fruit tastes completely different than the smell. I’m still trying to figure out how that is possible. I’m also still trying to figure out why someone way back in the history of the world would have even attempted to eat such a smelly fruit. It makes reason stare!

So foolish me and Ken. We try a sip because Ino said it tastes great. Here’s the problem. In order to take a sip out of the straw you have to inhale to get the shake up, right? Well when you do that the smell comes into your mouth. He was right the taste was vastly different but I just couldn’t get past the smell that was now STUCK in my mouth. It was gross and made my stomach churn.

I just couldn’t believe it. So I searched the internet and found some funny comments on the fruit.

1. This delicacy has been described by its admirers as “smelling like hell and tasting like heaven.”

2. Each experience felt as though I had lost a bet. However, as emotionally scarring every bite was, durian is a cultural must-have and the locals will appreciate your efforts.

3. Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says: “its odor is best described as pig poop, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock. . Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.

The funniest thought of the whole evening was thinking of how fun it would be to surprise friends with a fruit like that, but I just can’t bring myself to even go near it! So friends, count yourself lucky!

Lame excuse

Well I had these grand plans of posting a neat little video to commemorate our 15th wedding anniversary which was last week. Unfortunately I had technical difficulties making the video. Along with that each day seems to be pretty busy and thus not allowing ample time at the computer to do what I'd like to do. I hate it when that happens.

To celebrate we spent the whole morning at the temple, this has become somewhat of a tradition for us and a perfect one at that. Very simple and a great way to renew the covenants we made with each other. We topped it off with a super awesome meal and a day together. I have to say that I feel so lucky to have been married to Ken for so many years and I look forward to many many more!!!! You rock Ken!

We live on a pretty fun street surrounded by great neighbors and kids. Friday night the "boyz" decided to have a camp out in one of the front yards. It was quite an activity. 3 tents, 7 boys, 3 dogs, and pizza. We women folk, all seven of us, joined in for the pizza, singing around no campfire, and games, then left the boys to their rugged camping ground to pamper ourselves with new fingernail polish and the movie Ever After. I love that movie.

I wonder what the HOA would say about this! Ha!

We stayed up entirely too late, but most everyone was up by 6:00am while Ken and Ino cooked eggs and sausage for breakfast. Who says we need a campground to camp!

Last night Ken and I attended a inter-faith Thanksgiving service that is hosted by a local community ministry that helps 100's of families in the greater city area. This is the first year the LDS church was asked to host it at their building, which is pretty monumental because for years and years the LDS church has helped this ministry out but we've not been invited to the big functions until 3 years ago. It's a pretty big event, consisting of some of the largest congregations here in the area, Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal, and Muslim, and I think maybe Jewish last year?? It was cool to watch all these people of different faiths come together for a cause (helping the poor, homeless, jobless, sick, etc). How the evening turned out was religious leaders from each group would get up, recite a song, poem, or reading from one of their sacred text, and then the congregation would sing a song. One of the other ministers used a song that was in our hymn book stating "because we share the same hymn". Our Stake President represented the LDS church and he read out of the Book of Mormon. Pretty awesome. Then we sang another song out of our hymn book. There was also an interfaith choir hosted by our ward choir, which sang several songs, one of which is my favorite "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", wonderful song. The only song that was not sung by the congregation was one of the Muslim songs which was performed by their children's youth choir because it was in a different language. They did a great job! These kids traveled over an hour to get here. They were so cute. I was glad the Muslim's were there. Their religion is so misrepresented by the media because of a group of fanatics. But you never hear about the good people in that religion. I suppose it bothers me because the same thing happens in our religion at times, where we are judged based off of some break off group or person from the church that completely mis-represents what we believe. After the service EVERYONE mingled in the cultural hall. It was so cool to see all sorts of different people, some in their religious clothing, or cultural clothing mingling, laughing, talking, shaking hands, in our own cultural hall.

The evening was very enjoyable and we will definitely attend next year.

Done

Is it just me or is there anyone else out there who is just dragging their feet on this time change??? I am SOOOOOOO tired.

I'm happy to report that this year I actually finished the costumes the day before Halloween instead of an hour before trick-r-treat time on Halloween day.

I was pleased with the outcome of each outfit but have to admit that I'm most pleased with Dustin's. Out of our family he is the one who loves to dress up the most. Once he is in an outfit he "believes" he is what he is wearing. I was so excited for him. Dustin and Logan were knights. Dustin was a black knight and Logan was a white knight. Real knights. Jenni researched actual armor and she was the mastermind behind the original design. Each piece were actual pieces a knight would have worn, such as pauldrons for the arms, cuisses for the leg, helm for the head, and a cuirass for the body. When I was making Dustin's I ended up staying up until midnight because all of the sudden I got these creative ideas and just didn't want to stop adjusting and manipulating the design. The more I worked on his costume the more excited I was for him to wear it. I thought the boys looked great!


Dustin the "Black Knight"

Logan the "White Knight"


The boys trying out their powers.

The biggest challenge was dressing Dustin. It was a process which would have been much easier for an adult than a 5 year old boy. Having him stand still was almost impossible and he whined the whole time. I reminded him that a "real" knight would have taken much longer to get in his armor so he should count himself lucky. I did however warn him to go to the bathroom before we put it on and if he needed to go later on he would need to give me a lot of notice because there was no way we would get this outfit off quickly.

Kat, Daria, and I went as Renaissance ladies. I have to toot Kat's horn because she sewed her own costume...again. I remember when she was 10 and she sewed her own pioneer dress. Amazing. I don't think there are a lot of 12 year olds who can sew this well. Her dress turned out fabulous! Jenni went as a commoner or peasant lady. Now someone who knows how to sew is Jenni. Ken went as an average man of that era.


Daria as a maiden

Kat and Daria as maidens

All of the girls

My dress turned out well, although it felt HUGE. I was gently reminded that the style back then was intended to have a lot of material and be HUGE. I suppose walking around with 5 yards or more of fabric on your body would make anyone look like a pillow. The model on the front of the pattern did NOT look like she was wearing a comforter or a pillow (darn marketing techniques). The sleeves were a challenge in themselves but I really liked how they turned out.

First we attended the trunk-r-treat up at church. All 7 of us (Ken, Dustin, Daria, Jenni, Kat, Logan, and I) one 1st prize for costumes. That was pretty cool. I admit I felt a little uncomfortable as an adult because I wasn't dressing for the contest. I was dressing up to have fun. I didn't want to steal attention away from the kids since that is who the trunk-r-treat is for. After the trunk-r-treat we came back home, ate tons of pizza with a bunch of friends, then went around the block for more trick-r-treating. All in all it was a very fun evening.


Daddy and Daria ???????

We worked hard on these costumes for two reasons. To dress up for Halloween but more importantly we want to attend the Renaissance Faire, and going in "Renaissance Garb" will be so fun.

Karie and Jenni, I liked our smiles in this picture better

This picture shows the detail on the dresses better