My Favorite Things

What I really love about this photo is it shows, at the same time - two of my most favorite things to do - being near my children, and celebrating Christmas.
And I think it's cool that some of us are standing in front of a 100 foot tall  Christmas (no, NOT a Holiday) tree in flip flops.
I hope that this Christmas season gives each of you the chance to make lots of wonderful memories with the people you love most.

What Makes Me Proud

It was great to see so many of you this Thanksgiving weekend on Catalina Island.
For those of you who were there and for those of you who weren't, it makes me proud to see such a wonderful growing family and such good decisions being made.
As little Jack says so well, 'Thank you!'
Keep up the good work. I love you all.

Gramps

What I am grateful for

I am grateful for the great place I live in here at Provo, Utah...apartment C309 of the Elms apartments. I like it here alot more than in Helaman Halls where I lived my first year. I am also grateful for all of my roommates. They have been great! I am also grateful for the thanksgiving break I had. It was great being in LA and on Catalina Island. I had a great time getting to see the little boys and I could finally see the Puentes' place. I am grateful that Rachel and I could eat at In-N-Out Burger in LA and in Orem. The In-N-Out is better in LA, but it is still pretty good here in Utah. Anyhow, those are some of the things that I am grateful for.

Long Way Round

I'm not sure if everyone has heard yet (although I’m guessing most have) but it looks as though Char and I are headed to Edmonton in January!! I’ve managed to land a job with EY in Edmonton that starts in mid January and having found out only last week we both can’t believe that our time here in the UK has almost ended. It’s been a little over 5 years now since we first arrived in the UK during which time we’ve lived in all of Oxford, Southampton, Eastleigh and now Aberdeen.

I was thinking just the other day how our journey in some ways feels like the one taken on the BBC TV series called Long Way Round. Maybe some of you saw it but it featured two Brits, Ewan Macgregor and his friend Charlie Boorman, starting from London on motorcycles and then making their way across the whole globe (apart from oceans!) through Europe, Asia, N America, ending in NYC and then flying back across the Atlantic to London. Although our journey to the UK wasn’t quite as adventurous, especially compared to the parts in the series where they travelled across the more remote places, ie Kazakhstan, Mongolia and the Road of Bones in Siberia, I still feel like our journey has been similar to theirs in some ways. I thought that after graduating from UofA things could have easily ended up that we stayed in Edmonton and enjoyed living there for the next little while. But overall, living in the UK has been a huge and welcome adventure for us. We’ve certainly had our stretches of good roads / bad roads, tough terrain and unfamiliar territory etc. But like Ewan and Charlie were when they got to the final stretch of the journey, we are also very glad now that we’re coming home, starting up where we were only a short time ago but with incredible journeys and a lot more adventure under our belts from being able to live here.

I'm grateful for my nursing bra.

Having had such a difficult pregnancy I now feel it my solemn duty to pay attention to the prego ladies I come in contact with and make sure that they are alright. I listen, I validate, I tell them they look amazing and acknowledge how horrible heartburn, backaches, desperate fatigue, water retention and emotional instability is. About a month ago, sitting in Relief Society, I turned to one such woman (Sarah) who was heavily pregnant with her first and I asked how she was feeling. She burst into tears. We sat at the back of the room and whispered to each other throughout a good part of the lesson and then exchanged phone numbers. She came and visited me in the mother's lounge the next Sunday and mentioned that she was nervous about having a baby and didn't know if she would know what to do with the baby once it came. She asked me about breastfeeding and since I struggled with that as well, I was more than excited to tell her what I had learned. I thought that when the baby was born I would be able to help her with that.

Three weeks ago she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. During the delivery she suffered a stroke and a week after the delivery she died. The Sunday after she passed, the Relief Society president handed me a bag filled with a few nursing related items, amoung the items was a pretty navy and white nursing bra. I had no idea where the items had come from as there are a number of young mothers in the ward and when I thanked her and asked if she wanted any money for the things she said "well, no, these things weren't able to be used for their intended purpose so....." And then I realized that these were Sarah's and it was absolutely tragic for me to think that Sarah didn't get a chance to nurse her little one. At first, I wasn't very keen on wearing the bra because I thought it would remind me of the tragedy but I decided to wear it to remind myself of how lucky I am to be able to mother my children.

I invited Sarah's husband over for dinner this evening. He brought his little baby Logan with him and I held and kissed and cuddled that little boy and I wanted to cry thinking that his mother isn't here to hold and kiss and cuddle him. At one point in the evening the baby started fussing and I knew he was hungry so I asked if I could try feeding him. I took little Logan into my bedroom, unclasped Sarah's pretty navy and white bra, and nursed him.

"The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine." ~Mignon McLaughlin.
I'm grateful I'm alive, I'm grateful Jordan is alive, I'm grateful for every day I have with my children. I'm grateful for my nursing bra.
Seize the Day by Carolyn Arends and Alive by Edwin. These songs are old favorites of mine. If any of you know any songs, poems, stories, movies etc. that celebrate the gift of life I'd love it if you shared.

Falltime

We had such a wonderful time going to the pumpkin patch this year, and just celebrating the seasons and the holidays we have to go with them. Julian discovered his shadow when he was playing at hay maze and it was so cute to see him rocking out to the music so he could see his shadow dancing (a few people even stopped to watch him, which was kind of funny). The boys also loved playing in the corn maze with Auntie, and picking out pumpkins. I'm really excited for Thanksgiving this year (we did have a Canadian Thanksgiving in October with three other Canadian families, which was really fun too). The boys had I have been reading books about where the holiday comes from. They don't completely understand the story, and it's definitely not as exciting of a holiday as Halloween, but hopefully it's something they'll get as they grow older.

Tacky Party

Last night I went to a tacky birthday party for my friend Tessa. I had never been to one before! The only rule was to dress in the tackiest clothes you could find. I don't have any pictures of us yet, but I will try to put one in my next post because they're not on my camera. But needless to say, we all looked pretty awesome! There was a Heritage Halls dance that Sydney and I stopped at after the party (still dressed in our tacky threads) and we definitely got a few compliments on our outfits. I really think everyone should just dress tacky once in a while, it's very liberating wearing an outfit that you know is so ugly that people do double takes as you walk by... and not caring about it at all! :)