Flat Stanley's Canadian Adventure

We had a visitor arrive from across the seas today(Wednesday, January 22)!  Flat Stanley has come to us from Ireland! Sadly he arrived freezing cold as he was slightly under dressed for our freezing temperatures. We got to work right away making him some proper clothing. A winter jacket, snow pants, a toque, boots and mittens. Now he's ready to go out and play in the snow. Welcome to Milk River Alberta Canada!

We had to put pink snow pants on him, that's all we had, after all we are a house full of mostly girls.

Kathryn had a basketball game, so we thought Flat Stanley might like to come and watch. We all had a great time. Kathryn's team won 50-8.

On Thursday Flat Stanley went with Kymberly to school. He spent the day with her Grade 1 class learning all kinds of interesting things. The kids were excited to have a Flat Stanley visit because they had just finished reading one of his books. Mrs Takagi tells me that he was very well behaved and welcome to come again another day. 

Journaling to quiet the children and a 100 day challenge.

Oh yes, this is definitely going to be a new Sunday routine. It is so wonderfully quiet right now. The kids were just getting at each other and the decibels were rising quickly. So I called all the kids together and told them that we needed to start doing more "Sunday" like thing on Sunday. For instance, writing in their journals. So they all got out their journals and started writing. Oh how lovely. And since they are writing in theirs, I thought I'd better write in mine...or make a blog post as the case may be. I've actually been writing every day on my other blog...the blog that I don't tell any one about, the blog that I've kinda been keeping off and on for the past couple of years, the blog that is extremely personal and extremely hard to even admit that I have, the blog I'm not even sure I want anyone I actually know to read. But a blog that recently I've been thinking I need to share to really get the most out of it, and not knowing how best to share it. This blog is about my weight loss journey. If you are going to go over and visit it, start with this blog post.

Eleven days ago I started a new challenge, a 100 day Challenge. If you want all the details, I lay it out in this post. The idea is that I will follow my laid out exercise plan for 100 days and document it every day on my other blog. You can follow along if you want. For the most part, it isn't really exciting. There will be at times some really insightful posts, but mostly it is just a place for me to record my efforts each day, with the hope that at some point I'll see results.

Four days ago, I decided to add a new 100 day challenge to my life. My sis-in-law posted the following quote on Facebook the other day and it got me thinking...

I may have a problem.

I was so excited with idea of getting rid of baby things now that I feel certain that our family has reached its proper size. And for the most part I've been great at just getting rid of things when Ella no longer needs them. It's made especially easy when I have people that I know and care about that I can pass the stuff on to. However, I have come to realize that I may have attachment issues when it comes to baby clothes. In particular clothes that all 4 of my girls have worn. There are so many memories attached to each piece of clothing, memories for each of the girls. Memories that I may or may not be afraid will disappear if I don't have those clothes to remind me of them. And so every time I go through clothes that Ella has out grown, it takes forever. I have to talk myself into putting them into a give away box. And then there are some, that I just can't part with. The biggest culprit are things that I have created. I once posted about my obsession with fabric. It seems as though that obsession extends to the things that I create from that fabric. These things that I have made for my baby girls, I just can't put in a box to give away, they are far to precious. I might be OK if I gave them to a family member and then they always stayed in the family so that I could see my lovely nieces wearing clothes that I have created...but I'm not even sure that I am ready for that. I have this tote, it.s a fairly large tote, that I have designated as my baby keep sake box. I told myself that once it was full, I'd just have to give the rest away. Do you know how many dresses and things I have created over the past 11 years? Neither do I, but I know it's more than a few. The box is full, and Ella isn't yet one. I'm going to have to get another one...maybe just a temporary one, until the day comes that I can part with some of my obsessions.

A New Year Adventure

For New Years Daniel and I decided to do something different, something adventurous, something spontaneous. All we needed was someone to watch our kids. My sister was just crazy enough to say yes, even though she would also be watching my brothers four kids in addition to her own five. So at my sisters house for three days were 2 adults (my sis and her husband),  3 teenagers (ages; 17, 15, 13) and then eleven kids under the age of twelve(ages; 11,9,9,8,7,6,6,5,3,2,<1). I mention this only to illustrate that my sister is the real Super Woman. I shall also mention, that Ella cut two molars while staying with my sister....and she doesn't cut teeth gracefully.

Meanwhile, Daniel and I headed down to Greatfalls to catch a 10am flight on Dec 30th to Phoenix. When we arrived we were informed that our flight was canceled because the pilot had called in sick and was not rescheduled until 3:45pm on the following day. This was not going to work for us, as we were planning on going to the Coyotes VS Oilers hockey game on New Years Eve and coming back home on the afternoon of New Years Day. Lucky for us, there was a flight out of Missoula that night. All we needed to do was rent a car and drive across Montana two and a half hours to catch that flight. So instead of spending the afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona we spent an entire day in Montana.

Beautiful as it is, I have spent most of my life enjoying adventures in this part of the country and would have really rather been enjoying an adventure in a place I had never yet been. We did arrive in Phoenix late that night, on our way to the hotel, we took a detour and drove past the Mesa, Arizona Temple. I was looking forward to visiting it the following day.

A Courthouse Christmas

Every year I try to do something different for our Christmas Advent. This year we decided to do a random Act of  Christmas Kindness for each day of advent. I got the idea from TSJ Photography blog. However, I just realised that this post is just going to have to wait until Christmas Day. I would hate to spoil the fun for anybody that might be a recipient of our Random Acts of Christmas Kindness.  We live in a pretty tiny town and word spreads quickly. So although I am typing some of this post on a blizzardy December 2nd, it will just have to sit in Draft form until Christmas Day.

Here is a list of some of the Random Acts of Christmas Kindness that we did this year

Tape candy canes to random post office boxes and to ATM machines. We did this when ever it was too cold to do anything else.
Shovel somebodies sidewalk (we did this today, a very blizzardy day...twice...for the same neighbours, not sure if they will even notice a difference in the morning)

 Dec 5 -  Oh my Kymberly is so sweet. I've been pinned to the chair in the living room by two sick kids today. Both Ella and James have been sick and needing mom to hold them. Kathryn and Tansley had a church activity to go to this evening so all that was left was Kymberly and she was concerned about what we were going to do for our random act of kindness. I suggested that maybe we would just have to do double the next day. But she said that she could go out and shovel somebodies sidewalk. I told her it was kind of dark and cold, but that did not deter her. She got all bundled up and went out to shovel the neighbours sidewalk. She wasn't gone long, but she said that she had gone across the street and worked on the sidewalk. I told her she was awesome and that she had done a good job. It wasn't much, but it was what my darling 6 year old could offer, and that is good enough. Brings tears to a momma's eyes.

Kathryn dropped off a set of paper plates, cups, napkins and plastic cutlery with a note that said "Our Christmas wish to you is less dishes to do!" to the librarian one day after school. We dropped off the same gift to one of the post office ladies after she had commented to me that she was getting tired of the craziness of the Christmas rush.
Leave a treat on doorsteps around town we did this one many times, it was probably the kids favorite.
We went to Legacy Lodge where my Grandma Paxman is living and read Christmas stories to her. We had planned to invite others to come join us, but there wasn't anyone else around in the dining area to invite.
We left wrapping paper and Tape on vehicles with a note that read "You've been shopping since November, Barely sleeping, hardly stopping. Now it's late, you're in a scrape out of paper out of tape. Hope this wrap helps save the day! Have a Happy Holiday!"
On Christmas Eve we handed out roses at the Wal-mart in Lethbridge to random folks as we finished off a little bit of Christmas shopping.

We had so much fun with this Christmas Advent. It will be something we do again.

For Christmas Eve we went into Lethbridge to hang out with our Court Family. The Boys played street hockey complete with the singing of the National Anthem

We then ate lots of food and opened a few presents.

Each family had made a video to present. This was our video attempt,

 Complete chaos. Joseph refused to cooperate and the Angel became a little cranky. Other than that it went perfectly.

 Christmas day was spent at home. The kids slept in until 8am. It's funny. Every other day of the year I have kids waking up early, but with out fail, every Christmas they sleep in. I love them.

We opened gifts and then enjoyed our traditional Christmas breakfast of pancakes, bacon, sausages, eggs, eggnog, chocolate milk, orange juice, fruit and whip cream. The rest of the day was spent lazying about enjoying our new treasures. Oh, yes and a crazy google hangout call with all of my family including my baby brother serving a mission in Florida and my parents serving a mission in Ireland. Our computer is slow and stupid, so it was all kind of choppy on our end, but we were able to get the gist of it. Happy Day, we ordered a new computer for our Family Christmas gift!!  All in all, a perfect Christmas.

So What's the Plan?

This morning after the kids headed to school I read this letter from my missionary father

On Saturday, mom went to a ward Relief Society party so I had a couple of hours to spend by myself. I went to a store that was near where the party was and looked around. When we were decorating the Rosetta building, we found a ceramic nativity set that had a wise man with his head broken off. So I saw some Super glue and thought I should buy some to fix it some time. I was going to go to another shopping centre nearby and spend the rest of the time but as I started to drive, I had the thought that I should drive over to Rosetta and fix the wise man. So even though it would take me quite aways away, I thought that it would be worth it to have the complete nativity set. So off I went. I got to Rosetta and searched everywhere, but could not find the wise man who had lost his head. I was quite disgusted. I could not imagine why it was not around somewhere. I had driven out of my way to get here and now could not even do what I came to do. Since I still had some time to spend, I decided I would do some indexing while I was there. So I went to log onto the computer. But there was not any internet access!!! What?? Things were definitely not going my way. I tried to troubleshoot but could find nothing wrong except there was no internet access. So I decided to reboot the router. Turned it off,
waited 10 seconds, turned it back on. Watched the internet icon. After the computer got through all the start up process, there was still no access. I was quite put out. I decided to go to the kitchen and get something to eat. But before I ate anything, I thought that I had better go back and turn off the computer, since we are not supposed to leave them running. I went back and lo and behold there was now internet access. It had taken almost 5 minutes for it to redo whatever it had to redo. Well just then the phone rang and it was mom saying that she was done and that I could come and pick her up. So, I thought to myself, this has been one totally wasted hour+. I did not get any shopping done, did not get the wise man fixed and did not do any indexing and now I have a 15 minute drive to get back to pick up mom. Why oh why did I come over here?????
Fast forward to this morning. We were to take two sisters to the ferry to go to Scotland to the mission home prior to returning to their homes after 18 months of valiant service. One was Sister Morgan, who was here in Belfast when we arrived. She had spent 9 months of her mission here. The other was Sister Hanson who had been her companion here at some time and had also spent 9 months here. They were Sister Training Leaders here in Ireland and had been given permission to come back to Belfast to attend the Holywood Road Ward on Sunday before heading to Scotland. We also had an appointment for servicing our car. The sisters had to be at the ferry before 10 and our appointment was for 10:30, so we figured we could do it. So we showed up to pick up the sisters at 9:15. They had just returned from Rosetta where they had gone to print their ferry tickets. But ... They reported that the internet was down and they were unable to print their tickets nd they were quite dejected since they had no other place to print the tickets. I asked if they had rebooted the router and Sister Morgan said she had but it had not helped. I asked if she had waited 4 or 5 minutes and she said no. I then told her of my experience on Saturday and we drove back to Rosetta. Sure enough, there was internet access.
I now knew why I had gone to Rosetta Saturday. Not to fix the wise man and not to do indexing, but so that I would know that we just needed to wait for the internet to have access. A SMALL thing? Yes. But so important to the sisters. So when I am tempted to ask WHY???, I will try to be more patient and wait for the hand of the Lord to be revealed. By the way, the wise man was in mom’s purse!!! She had put it there so we could fix it. And we did. I know who is in control. We just need to be patient and rely on His all knowing plan.

This is what I had in my mind as I headed out the door at 9:30am to go to Lethbridge to do some grocery shopping that I had been trying to do since LAST Monday. One thing after another had kept me from making the trip to Lethbridge. First, two crazy days of snow that shut everything down. And then came the days of sick kids. So today, with Daniel home for the day I decided that I would go to Lethbridge ALONE in Daniel's car to do the needed shopping. It was windy and the snow was blowing across the highway, but not so bad as to cause much of a problem. I never could get the car to go much over 100km/hr but I wasn't too worried about it in the wind and blowing snow. I did start to be concerned when the care started to slow down to the point that it wasn't going faster than 50km/hr. I pulled over and sent a text to Daniel telling him what was going on. I was a little more than half way to Lethrbidge, pulled over on a service road waiting for my hubby to come and rescue me. As I sat there, the visibility got worse and worse.  Mean while Daniel was at home bundling up the two kids so he could come rescue me.

As I sat waiting for Daniel to arrive, I began to wonder, Why? Why had I felt like today was the day to go shopping? in Daniel's car? Alone? We could have all gone together in the van and got some other errands taken care of? After all, we were all going to end up in Lethbridge now anyways. I started to think about my dad's letter that I had read that morning, and wondered "So what's the Plan? What does Heavenly Father have in mind for us in this little adventure? What's the purpose in all of this? So far, I don't have an answer. Daniel was able to drive his car slowly the rest of the way into Lethrbridge. So even if he had been headed to work tomorrow, he would still have made to work....late yes, and even with his car in the shop, he would have been able to use the Bert and Mac's truck to get back home so he wouldn't have been stranded in Lethbridge...so as of yet, I'm not quite sure why, maybe that will come once we know what is wrong with the car, or maybe it will be one of those things when you just never know what the "Plan" was.

Whatever it is, I was grateful that I had read my dad's letter before I had ventured out. Because of my dad's words I was able to endure the adventure with patience and sit and ponder on Heavenly Father's plan for me. Thanks Dad, for your help today!

Let the 3 year old take care of dinner

So I am standing in the kitchen this evening and I say to myself "What should we do for supper?" James comes around the corner and stands beside me and says "Hmmm? Have supper for supper!" I laugh, and thanked him for the insight. He then goes to the fridge and opens it up and stands there looking in it. Then he pulls out some cheese, and then the pickles, and the cold water, and the pop, and margarine, and a cucumber, and the cheese whiz, and some left over home made chicken noodle soup. I laughed and said "Alright James, lets make some supper with this."

 So here is supper. We heated up the chicken noodle soup. We made cheese and pickle sandwiches, melty cheese sandwiches, sliced up the cucumbers and set out the pickles. And James, well he wanted a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

Good job James! Supper was delicious!