Loving Life

I overslept this morning and once again stood up my running partner Julie.  Oops.  I will have to call soon and profusely apologize.  I don't recall turning off my alarm this morning.  All I know is that if I hadn't, I would have had only 5 1/2 hours of sleep.  Not quite enough for me!  So my body let me know that it needed at least another hour of sleep before waking up.  So I didn't get my morning run in obviously.  I'll have to try to squeeze it in either tonight or tomorrow morning. We keep our house pretty cold overnight, so when we wake up, it always feels so cold when you get out of your nice, warm bed.  The kids immediately come downstairs and huddle over the vents to help warm themselves up.  Here is David from this morning.  He is huddling over the vent, hanging out with Joey, reading a book, while wearing an eyepatch.  I guess he's trying to strengthen his eye.  : )  I found it amusing. Abby came downstairs from "cleaning her room" wearing th

I had a glorious run this afternoon.  It was 39 degrees!  So lovely!  I ended up running in only a long sleeved shirt by the end of the run.  The sun was shining too.  I haven't run with the sun out for several months.  I forgot what a pleasure it is to run in daylight and warmth.  I felt so great that I went 6 miles - the longest I've gone in awhile too.  Now I'm happy.  I have my Vitamin D fix and running fix all in one.  Definitely a great run for today.  Can't wait for more spring-like weather!  All for now.  Gotta go.

I've definitely been having a good day today.  Nothing spectacular has happened, but good nonetheless.  I'll start off with a picture from yesterday's fun with Grace.  She has a weak eye and so she has to wear a patch over her glasses to help strengthen her eye.  My girls decided to join in and show solidarity with her.  Ana is sporting our one and only pirate eye patch.  Abby was not deterred by the lack of eye patches and swiftly put a pair of underwear on her head to pull down over one eye.  She also kindly lent Grace a pair of her underwear (clean) so Grace could also sport a cool hat like hers.  Abby is in favorite dress #3.  Ana is wearing her Indian princess dress and shawl.  Grace is borrowing a summer dress of Abby's to wear over her clothes. Later on in the day, Ana made a picture for Grace.  She cut out all the shapes from other colored paper and added some star stickers.  I thought it turned out pretty cool.  Ana was pleased with it too. This morning I clea

Look!  Two days in a row of blogging!  What a treat!  Aren't you so excited that you could just pee your pants?  I have Grace and Sophia here today.  Their new baby brother is jaundiced, so he has to spend the day in his little tanning bed in the hospital to get his level back down to where it should be.  Hopefully today will be all it takes and he can go back home by tonight.  But in the meantime, the girls are all having a blast together.  I've been hearing little snippets of play as they run by in various outfits.  Abby is a bad influence on Grace in the outfit changing scene.  Here are some things I've heard:  "Let's cut all the babies' heads off!" (yelled while waving a wooden sword around).  "We're running away from our pretend mom!"  "This is the best hamburger I've ever eaten in my life!"  (Grace told me this about my vegetarian black bean burger I made for lunch.  I was a bit worried about how she might react to it, b

Abby does not wear dresses in the summer when it is nice and warm out.  Instead, she prefers to wait until the middle of winter to wear her summer clothes.  When she wakes up in the morning, she gets dressed in her normal clothing for the day.  This set of clothes lasts from between 1-2 hours.  Then she spies a dress and decides that it is time to shuck the day's clothing and wear a summery, breezy outfit.  This happens nearly everyday.  She has about 5 different favorite dresses that she rotates as the fancy strikes her.  This first one makes the cut every once in awhile, but it is not a complete favorite.  It's still fun to be a princess every once in awhile. The Indian dress I made her for Halloween is in the top two.  Ana likes to wear hers as well when Abby decides to shuck traditional winter clothing.  Of course one does not wear warm clothes underneath while wearing this or any other dress.  I made them wear warm clothes underneath for Halloween trekking though. Abby di

We had a crazy awesome weekend here.  How was yours?  In my last post, I was dreaming of food due to our fast.  We ended it on Saturday evening when we met together as a church for some great time of prayer and worship together.  What a powerful night!  Amazing!  God did some pretty awesome things there.  And of course we got to end the night together enjoying a meal together - for some of us, the first taste of food in three days.  I struggled during the day as I made the food for the evening meal, but since I was already on the home stretch, I knew I could last a few more hours.  I made some homemade bread (made the house smell SOOOO good - if I could eat the air, I would have).  I also made some homemade chicken noodle soup.  I will admit that I sampled the broth a few times to make sure it was seasoned properly.  I didn't do that last year when we did this and I thought it tasted a little bland last year.  You don't want your first bite of food to be of bland soup.  So this

I truly apologize for my lack of blogging lately.  I'm not sure what has happened, but I haven't had any amazing experiences to write about lately and therefore, I don't have much to post about.  I'll see what I can dredge up tonight for you.  : )  Our church is doing a week of focused prayer and fasting as a congregation.  Some are fasting completely from food for a few days, others doing just partial fasts from certain foods, or fasting from certain things that tend to take up a lot of time.  We are doing this to seek God together for our church and to bring about new focus for this year.  We do it every year about this time and it's always been a good experience that helps me see how dependant I am on things other than God.  I decided to do a total three day fast this year.  Yesterday wasn't too bad.  Today has been harder.  I see food all around me.  I realize how mindlessly I pop food into my mouth just about all day long when I catch myself just about to

This morning, as I donned my running layers to stay warm while I ran, I wondered how much extra weight it made me carry around.  So I weighed myself before I got dressed and after.  I found out that I lug around 5 extra pounds of clothing while I run in the winter.  This does not include shoes - clothing only.  This morning's run was a bit treacherous.  We had a warmish day a few days ago filled with a lot of mushy sleet the entire day.  Then it got cold and all the mushy sleet froze into solid ice.  There were many moments - especially going up and down hills where our footing was quite filled with angst as we would slip and slide around.  We've run in worse - where we ended up skating on the roads instead of running.  There was definitely no hope for any sort of speed today.  So a slow shuffly trot it was. I made my new recipe for yummy squash again last night.  I will now finally post the recipe that I promised you all so long ago.  I know you've been waiting on pins a

I had a lovely day yesterday.  School was finished quickly in the morning and then after lunch, Aaron's folks took the kids up to the Children's Museum for the day.  What a treat for all!  The kids had a blast hanging out there with Grandma & Grandpa while I got to have a blissful afternoon all by myself.  I didn't do anything too spectacular.  Mainly just hung around home getting things done and making supper.  One thing I did allow myself to do was to watch TV while folding the mountain of laundry.  I don't watch TV much at all because usually I'd rather be doing something else than sitting down all day long.  I especially don't watch it during the daytime hours as the moment the TV gets turned on, all of my children seem to have this magnetic pull towards it and must stand there with half-glazed eyes as they inhale all that's being fed to them from the TV.  It's much easier to keep the TV off than to police what they watch.  The main things we let

Hmm... I haven't posted for awhile.  Sorry.  Things got super busy and I just haven't had the time.  Hopefully this week will be a little slower - which means more posts.  Or if I procastinate a lot, then I post more.  : )  Aaron's folks have been in town since Thursday, so we've been having lots of fun with extra grandpa/grandma time.  They came with the kids and me to a field trip to Des Moines on Friday.  We went to the Science Museum.  It was a lot of fun with lots of different activites.  They have a special Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit that we went to see.  All I can say was that man was an absolute genius!  Truly amazing ideas and observations well before his peers.  Wow.  I could have stood around and looked at everything there at great length.  However, a 4 year old and a 32 year old find different things fascinating, so we had to move on at times faster than I preferred and linger in places where I'd rather not linger as much.  Oh well.  It was fun.  The kids

This morning it was cold outside - like 7 degrees and a windchill below zero.  I didn't feel like braving the cold this morning, so I planned to run on the treadmill.  Since our house is kind of small, we keep our treadmill out on the back porch (three seasons porch) to give us a little more space indoors.  I suppose we could put it in our bedroom, but I'm sure Aaron wouldn't appreciate my early morning runs very much.  So apparently, it was too cold for even my treadmill to run this morning.  I usually start it off at a walk to help me and the treadmill both warm up.  It went for about 25 seconds before grinding to a stop.  I'm really hoping it was just cold this morning and didn't want to work out instead of dead.  I would be sad if it was dead.  Then I would have to go and brave the cold to go and run.  Although this morning I did not brave the cold.  I was already feeling too wimpy as it was (reason for wanting the treadmill run).  So I did the next best thing..

We travelled out to Indiana this past weekend.  Aaron's side of the family all got together for Christmas.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast type place - a little more than that, but more comfortable than a hotel.  It was a fun time.  The cousins all enjoyed hanging out together again and everyone got along quite well for the most part.  I guess that's what happens when you grow up.  : )  I took along my camera and gave it to Aaron to take pictures since I have the bad habit of toting it around but never taking any pictures.  (This blog has definitely been helpful to my picture taking issues.)  We had presents for the kids that they got to open up on Saturday morning.  Here are pictures of my three beautiful children.  Excuse the red eyes on Abby - I'm too lazy to edit at the moment. David likes to decorate himself with all the discarded Christmas trimmings. I think I look kind of nerdy here, but I thought I'd include it here anyway. Now I look really nerdy.  Just imag

Here is the interview with Ana that we did.  Enjoy! Why do you think that we named you Ariana? Because it's a really pretty name and you thought it was really good How many brothers and sisters would you like to have if you could choose? I would like one brother and one sister What is your favorite color? Pink and Blue and Purple What is God like? Really big and creates everything that there is.  He's really nice. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? China What do you want to be when you get bigger? I want to own my own restaurant What's your favorite thing to play? Princess What is one thing you like doing with Mom? going out to eat What is one thing you like doing with Dad? going to track meets Who is your best friend? T.J. or maybe Cara What is one thing that you wish you could do? Make a double batch of candy What is your favorite book? Lady with the Alligator Purse How old are Grandpa and Grandma? Great Grand

My good friend from high school posted a little interview with her middle child and it was so cute.  I've done this before with my kids, recording them on tape so we can remember their voices.  But I thought it would be fun to do this here for you to enjoy.  I took the questions directly from the previously mentioned blog.  So we'll start with youngest first.  I'll post the others in coming days.  Enjoy the thoughts of Abby! Why do you think that we named you Abby? because you thought that it was a nice name How many brothers and sisters would you like to have if you could choose? a billion What is your favorite color? pink and purple What is God like? a huge person who makes people and creates things If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? to see Grandma Kay and Grandpa Tom at their new house or go to Indiana What do you want to be when you get bigger? a grown up What's your favorite thing to play? Citadels (she really has no id

After miraculously pulling through a nasty eyeball issue , Abby's desire to buy him this toy , and my waffling over whether I should buy him more food and bedding since he was old and somewhat sick, our dear beloved Hamster passed away yesterday.  He was a good hamster and lived a good life. We found him early yesterday evening in his cage.  The kids were slightly sad, but Abby cheered up after about three seconds and yelled, "Yeah!  Now we can get fish and I get to name them!"  And yes, I took a picture of our dead hamster.  We held a very brief funeral this afternoon.  The ground is frozen, so we couldn't really dig a hole to put him in.  But we already had a slight depression area from where the kids dug a hole in the past few years and where we buried a random cat that decided to die in our yard.  So we placed Hamster in the hole above Lucy the Random Dead Cat and covered him with leaves and compost since that was our only loose material available.  So I guess

I haven't posted anything school related lately.  We've been having short weeks around the Christmas "break".  We don't take much by way of break because we know we will sorely be needing them in April and May when spring fever really hits us.  So below is a video of us making a volcano.  They thought it was pretty cool.  We did it again after this video because they wanted to watch it erupt once more.  And now for a post of randomness...  Ana has been wanting to grow her hair out for some time now, but she could never end up growing out the sides of her hair past chin length and she would end up having a mullet.  I couldn't figure out why and thought perhaps Ana was chewing on her hair like she did in the past (reason it got chopped in the first place).  I never saw her chewing on it, yet it didn't grow.  So when she got her two top teeth pulled last week, she realized that those were the teeth she was using to chew her hair.  We are hoping that this bre

Last month while Aaron and I were in Texas church gathering, we had a little exercise of writing down "perfect days" that you've ever had in your life.  I've had quite a few perfect, or nearly perfect days that have been so wonderful and enjoyable.  And, I just had another one yesterday to add to my list! It started off with a great morning of church.  I sure do enjoy the people there.  Great people, great church, great pastor (hee hee!).  It was a lovely morning. The fun continued for lunch when we had over our church leadership team for taco salad & ice cream!  The food was yummy, and the conversations were even more fun than the food.  I loved it.   Once the meeting part was over, the day got better when Aaron voluntarily did the piles of dishes sitting around.  Could the day get any better?  Yes!  Our friends, the Groffs, volunteered to babysit for our kids while Aaron and I went on an impromptu date!  We quickly left the house, and went and saw the newe

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you all had a great celebration last night.  We had a good night, but pretty low key.  We ended up not going anywhere this year as all of our friends seemed to be out of town.  David and Ana were both determined to stay up late to bring in the new year with us.  David made it all the way last year, but Ana dropped out after 10:00.  So this year there was no deterring her from her goal.  They got ready for staying up late by taking a nap in the afternoon, or what they termed, "A sleeping party under Ana's bed".  Yes, it was as successful as it sounds.  No sleeping actually took place, but they were mostly quiet under Ana's bed for the majority of two hours.  Then as I was making supper, I declared that no fun would take place tonight until they helped get the house cleaned up.  So they cheerfully cleaned things up while I finished making supper. Once supper was finished and out of the way, we got out some games and played together as