"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -- Ferris Bueller

Wow!  Life has been a whirlwind at our house lately.  (And the house and yard look it.)  My Swimmer moved out on her own in July.  She will graduate from high school at the beginning of June.


My Princess left to serve an LDS mission in the Arizona Pheonix mission in September.  She has served in Surprise and Glendale and is currently serving in the Prescott area.  She says it is beautiful there and is absolutely loving it!  We got to Skype with her last night for Mother's Day!  She sounds like she is having the time of her life.  Man, I miss this girl!








My Scholar returned from an LDS mission in the California San Fernando mission in December. He went back to college at BYU a few weeks later and just finished his second semester there.  He just got married this past weekend to a wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, talented, and amazing woman.  I am ecstatic to have her join our family.  They will continue their education at BYU and live happily ever after, of course.




 My Little Warrior (who is fifteen and a half now and wants me to drop the "little" off his moniker) is nearly as tall as I am. He has grown quite good-looking and is generally surrounded by girls.  I'm not really all that fond of this new development.  He is still always up for an adventure and loves anything that looks remotely dangerous to his mother.  I've been unsuccessfully trying to add some short videos of a couple of his adventures here, but I give up for now.

We have recently added a twenty-month-old niece to our household.  She is full of energy and really keeps me running.  (I had forgotten how busy little children make you feel.)  I can't post any pictures of her as she is in foster care at this time and that is against the rules, but she is a little doll.  It's fun to watch her growing and discovering new things all the time.  We don't know how long she will be a part of our family, but we will just keep enjoying her giggles and smiles and enduring those nearly-two-year-old tantrums while we have her.

The Man of My Dreams was released from his calling as the bishop in our LDS ward a little over a year ago and is currently loving being the Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout Troop.  I crocheted these beards for them to wear at the Klondike Derby in January.

In the past 16 months we have had more than 12 death's in our family:  my father-in-law, both of my grandparents on my father's side, two nephews, an aunt, two uncles, a great aunt, and several other extended family members.  All of them are very missed and each one touched my life for good.

My Little Miss M has finished her nap, so my computer time is up.  Don't forget to stop and look around once in a while.

Here's another partial that I found.

“If you take a book with you on a journey, " Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens:  The book begins collecting your memories.  And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it.  It will all come into your mind with the very first words:  the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it . . . yes, books are like flypaper -- memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.”  (From Inkheart by Cornelia Funke) 

That is so true!   It doesn't matter where I am or who I am with, each time I reread or hear the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I am transported to a giant boulder on the far end of Lake Cleveland in southern Idaho where I first became acquainted with them on a family camping trip.  I can still feel the smooth, coolness of that enormous gray rock against my back as I am carried away to the banks of the Mississippi.

"The difference in winning and losing is most often . . . not quitting." -- Walt Disney

I just got on here for the first time in forever and found this partially finished blog post.  It seems to really go with my life now, so I'm publishing it as is -- unfinished.  FYI, I did get the curtains and they are lovely.

Walt Disney said, "The difference in winning and losing is most often . . . not quitting."  Today I'm losing.  All I want to do today is sit.  I want to read.  I want to write.  I want to nap.  I want to play on my computer.  I do not want to work!!  But I am in the middle of  so  many projects that really need to be finished.  I want them to get done and I want to be the one who does them (so they are done the way I want them done), I just really don't want to finish them right now.  So instead I am going to write about them.

Project number one:  The living room.

Last fall I finally (after years of trying to decide) figured out what I wanted to do to redecorate our living room.  I slowly accumulated all the things I needed to be able to complete the project and finally at the end of November I was actually ready to start on it.  With the help of The Man of My Dreams, (he actually did most of the work.)  We repainted the living room.  We went from white walls and trim with one wall of dark paneling to a very light purple ceiling (it looks almost white in contrast with the walls) and deep earthy purple walls and creamy white trim and doors.  I love it!  Almost everyone who comes in loves it and asks, "How did you talk your husband into letting you paint the living room purple?"  He didn't tell me how nervous he was about the color, he just let me have my way.  (That is one of the reasons he is the man of my dreams.)  Even when he was painting it on, he was skeptical, but now he says he really likes it.  We also installed new curtain rods, but when we hung up the curtains I had bought, they did not look like the pretty pale ivory color they were in the store.  Next to the purple walls, they looked yellow.  Not a bright, sunny, cheerful yellow, but nasty, old people yellow like my grandmother's Tupperware.  So they went back to the store and I began my search for curtains.  We also installed a new pretty light fixture instead of that nasty lightless ceiling fan.  (I hate ceiling fans.  They are just dust collectors.  I'd rather be hot!)  Sounds like this project is pretty much done except for the curtains, right?  Well, sort of.  I still have not hung the pictures back on the wall.  I'm having a hard time deciding which pictures I want to put where.  I did finally hang one yesterday, but I'm not sure that I like it.  The problem is until I get the curtains -- curtains are so expensive, I want to be sure they are the right ones before I buy them -- it's hard to know how much wall the curtains will cover, so it's hard to know where to hang things near the windows