He is the Dad

Anyone who knows Nels very well, knows that he likes music. This is a happy fact considering my own love of a wide and odd variety of songs - ranging across the genres. We are both masterful at making up songs to various different melodies floating through our brains at any given time. (Something that I inherited from my mama. One of Nels' claims to fame when we were dating was his ability to make up a song about anything.) It's not unusual to hear him belting out a Doors, Melvins, Judas Priest, or Queen of the Stone Age song with his own word substitutions - to me, the girls, or just himself. It's awesome. 


That being said, you would probably be surprised at hearing him sing "Glory of Love" to his kids . . . that is, until you heard the lyric modification. "I am the Dad, who will fight, off the mon--sters!"

Friday's Fabulous Five

1. V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N. We're gonna have a ball! :)
I LOVE that school is out for the summer! It's hard for me to think about Hazel going to 1st grade next year, but I am really ready for this school year to be over. I'm so excited for the summer. And I have faith that summer will come, eventually. The Mountain West has the weirdest weather.

2. Elsie goes through phases of calling me Miss Mama. I love it. "You dance with me, Miss MaMA!?" "You like me, Miss MaMA?" Yep, Baby. I really like you. :) She's also been doing a "Dancey, dancey, DANCE!" for the past two days. Cutest thing! I'll have to see if I can get a video to share. :)

3. I love having a strong, healthy body. I love to exercise. Feels so good. Nursing makes me CRAVE sugar and carbs and all wonderful eating things, but this time around, I am going to do this! I'm not going to gain weight AFTER having a baby! I can do it!

4. My baby has been sleeping for about 3 (or more?) hours! Oh, blessed child. Thank you. She's also been sleeping very well through the night. Occasionally wakes up once to eat, but other than that, has been allowing me to get my beauty rest. :)

5. Nels is going to come home sometime tonight. I don't know when, but sometime he will. AND he {probably} will have a full two days of not working! :) What? What's that you say? 'Hello? Rachel! Monday is Memorial Day. He doesn't have to work that day! Remember?' Oh, you naive little thing. You don't know my husband. You don't know Melaleuca. However, next Thursday, we're outta HERE!

Lashes

One of my favorite features on each of my children is (are?) their eyelashes. I love pretty eyelashes. I'm so lucky to have married a husband with lovely lashes to guarantee long-lash-ed-ladies. (It kind of makes up for the fact that none of my children have inherited my dimples. Kind of.) :)

Violet's eyelashes are growing longer and thicker everyday.

Love that little face.

Lilie -- Halloween 2007

Mascara is a wonderful thing for blonde-lashed girls. :)

Hazel -- Halloween 2007

Again, mascara. Halloween is fun.

The other day, I took the girls to the zoo for the first time this year. We had a wonderful time together. Elsie especially loved chasing the peacocks. (Which, by the way, are so incredible to me. It is amazing to me the many different designs and colors that the Lord has given to birds.)

Seriously, IMPOSSIBLE for me to get a picture with all of them looking at the camera! I swear, I tell them to smile and they start staring off all over the place -- except at me! :)

Elsie has recently decided that she needs to be a princess everyday. Which basically means she wants to wear either a dress or a skirt everyday. You would think that with four girls, this is something we'd be used to by now, but no. Elsie is my first girl to really love "girly" things -- you know, for more than 2 minutes at a time. She loves to carry around a purse (complete with keys and "lists" :) and wear spart-ly (sparkly) shoes. I love it. She was VERY put out yesterday that I wouldn't let her wear the same dress that she had worn the day before and to bed that night (because she refused to take it off --- she even wore she red glittery shoes to bed). She didn't think the food smears on it were as big a deal as I did, apparently. LOL.

This is the face that she now gives me every time I tell her to smile. :)

The funniest thing about this lovely smile is that it's the same one I used to make when I was her age. I love it. 

bigger pictures

I've had a couple of people ask how I make my pictures bigger. Blogger has an updated version that allows you to choose your picture size. If you click the "Customize" button and then "Settings", under "Basic", scroll down to "Select post editor" and "updated editor".

Not a Toy

Now?? Right now? Failure to do so can result in death or brain damage???!!!

This bag was in our house for 20 minutes before we even ready this. What kind of danger were we in?? Who knows what kind of unknown damage was done in those naive 20 minutes?!

Violey

We like nicknames at our house. Nels and I grew up with them - Smells & Oochie were the most popular from our childhood. In fact, our families still call us by these names. :) We call our kids all sorts of things: Crazy Hazie, Silly Lilie, Elsie Smellsie. It's fun.

Violet's got a lot of them going for her right now and Elsie is the initiator of most of them. We like V-V and Vi, but Elsie calls her Vi Vi and, her newest one, Violey. I think that Elsie secretly thinks Violet is her pet. :)

I love this picture of our little Smiley Violey.

K.I.S.S. - Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

When I'm browsing the internet and come across things I like, I bookmark it. I have bookmarks for things I would buy - if I had the money, bookmarks for websites I like - like design and recipes, but my biggest bookmark folder (by far) is for craft ideas. Things I want to make. It's a long, long list with lots of cool stuff. I first saw this idea while browsing "NieNie's" blog a year and a half ago. I thought it was one of the cutest ideas - a relatively simple concept - so I bookmarked it. And have been envisioning it on my girls' wall ever since. For some reason or another, although I can't seem to muster up the energy to tackle my laundry room, Thursday I decided it was time to make these. (a long explanation for me to just show off my hard work from the last few days)

They make me so happy and the girls love them. If you'd like some instruction and patterns for the animals, let me know and I'll happily email it to you. They are just scrapbooking paper cut out and ModPodged on painted canvases. "Relatively simple." 

I say "relatively" because I have realized that I think it's harder for me to keep a project simple than it is for me to go WAY overboard. It's almost embarrassing. Once I start a project, it has to be perfect and I obsess over it. My mind starts racing a million different directions of how to do it and what I can add to it and before I know, my "simple" project becomes the project from Hell that never ends. It's retarded. I just need to learn how to, in the words of Michael Scott, K.I.S.S. Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

SO. If you would like some instruction and, in fact, patterns for these little animals that were made in Illustrator and obsessed over for hours, I'd be happy to send them along. :)

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Along other creative lines, I have been working on decorating my bedroom for the past several years. Frankly, I love DIY projects, repurposing, and refinishing furniture. I love sewing and specializing things to my odd and eclectic tastes. I know that as far as sewing goes, I probably don't save any money and obviously don't save any time, but I love doing it and I've learned so much over the past few years. I've got numerous ongoing projects that I'm still completing for my bedroom, but - as alluded to previously - they're not done and I don't know when they will be. So since the majority of it is completed, I'll post what I've done so far.

I picked up this desk at a second hand store in town last Fall. I needed a new place for our computer - since Nels confiscated the desk downstairs - and because I love turquoise, I painted it. 

Ta-DA! I've been slowly completing all of this bedding for the past . . . 3 1/2 years now? Yep. that long. I made everything on my bed (except the sheets, of course). The pillows, the shams, the quilt, and the bed skirt. In FACT, I even designed the bed - and then Nels made it for me when he was working with my dad 6 years ago. The bedding is very traditional looking, but I love it. I love the colors. Someday, I'll decide it's time for a change and do something new, but for now I'm really happy.

I love these two pillows. The ruffly one was kind of fun to make and I love the texture of it. The other one is made out of some of my favorite fabric that I have EVER seen. There was supposed to be another matching pillow also made out of it, but because I loved it so much - and when I went back to the store to get more, they were all sold out - I turned my supposed-to-be-a-pillow fabric into . . . 

. . . a bag!
Which I also love. I hate diaper bags. After four kids, I've graduated from diaper bags. This does the trick nicely.

And speaking of loving fabric. I couldn't help myself but turn this little swatch into a mouse pad. SO SIMPLE. Even by a normal person's standards. :) You can find cork board at the craft store that has adhesive on the back. Cut it out into desired shape, stick desired fabric to it, and trim. Took all of five minutes. If that.

So there you have it. My cousin Amber has been hounding me for months to take pictures of my completed bedding and honestly, it's taken me this long to actually have my bedroom clean AND batteries in my camera AND remember to do it all at the same time. Hopefully in the coming months, I'll have more fun things to share, but for now, I'll just have to "WOW" you a little at a time. :)

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By the way, I'm finally feeling quite a lot better today. Thank you for asking. :) I think I've been sick every other week since having Violet. Mastitis then a UTI then another UTI then respiratory crud then mastitis again. Awesome, huh? I think having her did a number on my immune system and it just hasn't been able to catch up since. However, I think I'm pulling out of it. HOORAY!!! Maybe I'll have the energy to be a real mom again soon?? Is that too much to ask? No. Of course not. Somebody's got to do the laundry, for goodness sake, and I can guarantee that it's not going to be anyone else that lives in this house. However, "Anyone" has been doing an awesome job doing the dishes and helping with the kids and I really have no room to gripe. "Anyone" is wonderful and works incredibly hard.

We got the garden tilled and ready to plant today. I *think* I'm excited.

I love these little piggies!

Seriously one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

Sometime soon, I AM going to buy this pattern and make these little piggies! They would be so adorable in Elsie and Violet's room. I love them.

Heather Bailey makes some awesome fabric and patterns!

Mother's Day

Violet is sick. My poor little baby. Congested and coughing. Saturday Nels fell asleep earlier than I did and took Violet with him. Because I'm awesome, I decided to stay up longer and watch a few more episodes of 24. Around the time that I was ready to hit the sack, Nels brought her back down to me, saying that she seemed uncomfortable and was probably hungry. She also had a low-grade fever. After having to take Elsie to the hospital for a respiratory virus when she was a newborn, I get a {little} anxious about coughing babies. I was up with her until almost 5:00 making sure that she wasn't getting too hot and that she was still breathing okay.

I knew I wouldn't be taking her to church in the morning, so when the girls came into our room, hungry, at 8:00, I pulled myself from the depths enough to ask Nels to feed the girls. I vaguely remember him saying that he wasn't feeling good, but then he got out of bed and I once again succumbed to incoherency. 

Fifteen minutes later, Elsie was crawling on me, sticking her bony, little knees and elbows painfully into my bones while poking Violet's sleeping face and trying to make her clap. I sent her to go find her dad, but she immediately came back saying that Daddy was sleeping downstairs on the couch. I told her to go play with her sisters, but she refused. Resigned, I got out of bed. With Nels sick, I couldn't very well expect him to take care of Violet, (plus, he's not great at nursing) so I decided we'd be staying home from church. Besides, with three hours of noncontinuous sleep under my belt, I really wasn't up to getting ready and then wrestling with three little girls through Sacrament Meeting by myself. 

In a stupor, I entertained Elsie -- or rather kept her from "entertaining" Violet for about an hour, washed the day-old-stinking dishes, cleaned up the living room covered in Legos, blocks, play food, and dried up bread, changed Elsie's peed-on sheets, changed my puked-on sheets, and swept the floor. All the while, feeling mad about this stupid made-up holiday. Determining that in future years, we wouldn't be celebrating "Mother's Day." I decided that it was a retarded holiday, only serving to make me feel unsatisfied and disappointed when it turned out to be just another day. 

Who cares if Nels is sick?? I got three hours of sleep last night! I had a baby two months ago. I've been sick every other week for two months and haven't gotten a full night's rest in FOUR! I have a baby who I desperately love, but who wants be held almost non-stop. When I'm not feeling good, do I get to go sleep undisturbed in the dark basement? I . . . I . . . I . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me.

At that point, I decided that I didn't want to stay home having my self-proclaimed Pity Party, I'd like to go for a drive. Take the kids up in the mountains. So after lunch, I packed some apples and cheese sticks, loaded the girls in the van, and left Nels sleeping downstairs.

After an hour of "how much longer???" we arrived at Palisades Reservoir. We drove across the dam, checked out a campground, talked about landslides and boat trailers and ground squirrels, and finally ended up at the same spot we went to last Mother's Day. 

The water is much higher than last year, not leaving a lot of "beach" per se, but who needs sand anyway? Dirt and sticks are just as good. :) We ate our snack, rolled up their pants (or in Lilie's case, used my pocketknife to cut her pants into shorts :), and turned them loose.

See? Not much beach. :) The road here runs down to a much more sandy area, currently covered in water. 

They had a wonderful time together making "boats" out of driftwood and playing pirates and mermaids. Here Lilie is using her stick to dig diamonds (rocks) out of the dirt. :) I was sternly reprimanded for not bringing their shovels and swimsuits. :) Somehow or another, I didn't think 60 degrees and breezy was appropriate swimsuit weather. 

They were wet and happy. Lilie said that she wants to lived there. Hazel thanked me for teaching her about "stuff" like rockslides and hydropower. Elsie was happy that by the time we left, the water "wasn't cold anymore." Violet ate and then slept the whole time. After an hour and a half, I cleaned off their feet, stripped off their pants, and got them back in the van. On the way home, they said that it was a best day and that they were so happy. 

We got back home and while I set about making dinner for everyone, really talked to Nels for the first time all day. I apologized and repented for being such a stinker all day. He was still not feeling good. He's been under a lot of pressure at work (like always) - feeling frustrated with a demanding job that never seems to have an end in sight. I feel so bad for how short and snippy I was with him all day. He works so hard and is so good to us . . . to me. Why should one day of him being sick override all that he does for us each and every day?

If I have expectations that Mother's Day is supposed to be some glorious, work-free, praise-filled day, as often as not, I'll be disappointed. Instead I've realized that for me, Mother's Day needs to be a day that I get to be thankful to be a mother. A day that I can enjoy the service I give, rather than expect to be waited on. A day that I get to enjoy being a wife and being able to teach and to love these sweet little people. 

As the day finished out, I realized the three hours of sleep were catching up with me. Around the time that we finished family prayer, I felt the old familiar achy-ness that preempts my getting mastitis. I got some good solid sleep last night and have been gorging myself on Vitamin C. This morning, though not feeling tip-top, I'm not feeling any worse. 

I love being a mom. I love my kids. I'm so thankful to my sweet mother who I'm POSITIVE can sympathize with the lack of pampering that I felt today. She is such a good example to me of patient love and service. I hope that I can be just like her when I grow up.

In which I actually appear in a few pictures . . .

I love colors. I love to surround myself with lots of colors and I like to wear colors. Try as I might, I'm just not a "neutral" person. Unless, of course, turquoise is considered neutral. Or yellow. Can yellow be neutral?

Sometimes, even at 28 years-old, I still think that I'd kind of like to be able to dress like Punky Brewster (what do you want to bet that SOMEONE reading this doesn't even know who Punky Brewster is . . .) or maybe Rainbow Bright. There were some good things about the 80s. :) LOL!

I think that Lilie understands me. 

Isn't she cute? She looks so little.

Elsie's eyelashes are stunning. They are long and curly and black.

SO pretty.

Violet has been smiling for several weeks now. It is one of the best things in the world and absolutely heart-melting. She likes me. I love that she's happy to see me.

I love her double chin! :)

Sorry for the blurriness of some pictures. I just love them anyway.

I love being a mom so much. I look at my sweet little ladies and think "How does a person ever decide they're done having kids?" I can't imagine looking at my little baby and knowing that I would never again hold another of my sweet babies in my arms. I know many of you have been to that point and you'll tell me that you "just know", but I definitely don't know yet. I love having children of all ages that I get to enjoy. Now don't start cracking jokes about how I'm going to have 10 kids. I'm not. I'm just saying that I don't think we're done.

I'm so thankful for families. 

This last weekend Nels' parents, my parents, Ben, and Melissa (with children in tow) came up for Violet's blessing. It was so sweet. We chose to do it on Saturday because of schedule difficulties and I absolutely loved doing it that way. There was such a sweet spirit there as Nels blessed our little baby in his arms. (Despite her screaming and some toddler antics. :) I feel so very thankful that Nels is worthy to hold and exercise the Priesthood in our home. That he is able to act as a mouthpiece for the Lord when we need it. I love him. I'm so thankful for the blessings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives. I'm thankful for a loving Father who forgives me my shortcomings and still blesses me anyway. 

I love my role as a sister, a daughter, a mother, and a wife. 

Ben and his kids stayed the night Saturday and it was so nice to be able to spend some time with him. I love my brother so much. I even got the chance to put all eight kids to bed all by myself. And it went well - thanks to my deciding to not stress out. 

I just hope that he and his children didn't pick up the nasty crud that is going around our house. Today is going to have to be a low key day. It's hard to be a mom with no voice. Sadly my little Violet has also got this bug and has been coughing and having to breathe through her mouth -- not a fun thing for newborns. Hopefully it doesn't get any worse. Hazel missed three days of school this week. Elsie has put herself down for a nap the past four days in a row! She's definitely not feeling top notch.

Last night I got the chance to have a "Girls' Night Out" with a couple of friends - I can't even remember the last time I did that. We had a good time and it was really nice to hang out with such happy, upbeat gals. Tonight Nels wants to take me out. I'm so lucky! :) I guess I should say that he wants to take me AND Violet out. :) I suppose we'll see how lucky we are . . . :)

A Story about how My Brain is Turning to Mud

My brain is like mud.

Case in point: I am blogging right now, when I am so tired that my brain actually feels a bit more like sludge than mud. I don't know why I'm doing this at 1 o'clock in the morning, other than that I'm worried I will forget to write this random and rather uninteresting post.

Thursday was my day to pick of the kids for carpool after school. I remembered all morning . . . until I didn't. They get out at 11:25. I ran upstairs in a panic at 11:56, ready to run out the door with my other three kids -- all of us still in our pajamas. Grabbed the phone to call the school and the other moms, when I realized that one of the other moms had already called me exactly 5 minutes earlier, wondering where her child was and had already headed over to pick them up.

Thursday I had a full-page list of things to do to get ready for family to come visit this weekend for Violet's blessing. Among other (more important) things, were the items: clean up toys and wash Lilie's sheets. Pulled out the bed to get the sheets off, realized how ridiculously hard making her bed was in its present position and proceeded to change around the entire room -- including moving her dresser downstairs and moving the dresser from downstairs up. Started cleaning up the toys and decided that I needed to entirely go through all the toys and reorganize the closets. Go me! Forget my child at school? Check! Spend the whole day doing two of the least important cleaning projects on my list? Check! I'm awesome.

Tonight. Call mom at 11:00 to get the recipes for all the food I'm making tomorrow. Didn't call her yesterday so that I would be able to get the ingredients when I went to the store earlier today. Went to the store at 11:45 pm, remembering to get two Cokes because I was doubling the recipe. Got home, mixed it up. Realized that I forgot to get two cans of chilies as well. Return to the store at 12:20.

When I'm talking to someone and tell a story, I end up not able to verbalize half of what I want to, or forget large chunks of the events I participated in! I feel like there are thoughts floating around in this giant mud bubble over my head that I am trying to grasp, but I can't see them clear enough to find them.

It's been annoying. I could go on with more . . . . (trying to remember the word) . . . examples? Yes. Examples. ---- Actually I can't. Because I can't remember them. But I know they're there. I also know that more of them would bore you.

Hormones. Some people get postpartum depression. Me, I just get postpartum Sludge Head. It's bad.