I SKI U!

Doug just called me from the Apex Express chair lift...he and Case are having a blast on the slopes at Solitude. Both my boys are amply impressed with one another's mad skiing/snowboarding skills...(*gasp*)

Today is the boys day out! I love that Doug is so old school...when he went to rent his ski's, the style he requested is so seldom rented, they offered to sell them to him for $25 bucks! Sweet.

Looks like they had a great time!

Lions, Tigers and... Young Women's ...Oh My!

I was recently called to be in the young women's presidency in our ward and although I'm super excited...I'm a bit terrified! I haven't had anything to do with the YW program since I was in YW! I had/have no idea who the young women in our ward even are! I've subbed in primary a few times and Jennah has friends in our ward and is active in our primary, so I know the "little" kids... I've been teaching Relief Society pretty much since we moved in, so I know all the mom's...just not any of their daughters! I'm totally up for the challenge and know it will be a blast! I wasn't the worlds greatest "young women" during my time...In fact, I think that by the time I was a mia maid, I'd kinda, sorta quit going to YW altogether. Not for any particular reason...other than that I was just being a bratty kid who wanted to go home rather than be at church! But right before I turned 18, I began to realize just how much I'd missed out on!

We had our first big activity tonight combined with the young men. It seemed to go off without a hitch and was actually a lot of fun! (I really had no idea what I was doing, but I was getting out there and trying to talk to the girls..."A" for effort!) I'm looking forward to getting to know them...I truly am. And, I'm looking forward to forging even greater friendships with Angie, Leslie, Britt, Tiff, Sandra and Samantha. My life has taken me all sorts of places, both good and bad and if there's one thing I can offer these young girls, it experience... I hope that I will become their life long friend and someone that they can look up to in a time of need. For the time that I was active in YW, I had some great advisors...one of which I'm still in contact with today. She had a great impact on my life and I love her! I hope to do the same for these girls. Maybe I'll even still be in the presidency when my own little young women turns 12. How sweet that will be...to share young women's with my girl!

So, get ready you girls of the Major Meadows Ward... cause here I come!

Momma loves YOU!

I wanted to blog about my two awesome kids...how blessed we are to have them in our lives!

Our sweet boy Case, who is so loving and thoughtful...rare is a time when we pass by him...in the hall, in the kitchen, wherever we are... and he doesn't reach out to hug us. Never does he let a moment go...to thank us for anything and everything. When I met Case, he was a shy 10 year old boy who clung to his Dad's side. Now...he's a confident young man, who confides in me the secrets of his heart.

I remember a time when he was too young to sit in the front seat of our car...now he sits in the drivers seat...

Our beautiful girl Jenn, who is so tender and sweet...I watched last weekend as she took all the dollar bills she'd saved from her allowance over the last few weeks and put them into our Christmas charity jar. The jar sits on our kitchen counter so that it's never "out of sight, out of mind". It will be filled throughout the year and come November, all the money will be given to a family in need. The precious part is that she did it when she thought no one was looking. Always looking out for others...always making sure we know she loves us.

I remember the first time I felt her move in my belly...now she can barely fit on my lap...

How we love these kids...words can't even express. They are our absolute treasures...they are our life and our love. Two of the best kids on the planet! We love you kiddos and are always thinking about you!

Just incase you were thinking about breaking into my house...

Bogey, our 8 month old, 85 lb lab sleeps in our room.

We always knew he would be an indoor dog. Big as he was going to get, he was instantly part of our family and we wanted him to live in the house with us. When he was a pup we had to put him in our bathroom at night to keep him from going potty on the carpet. Slowly, as he became house trained, we'd let him find a place to sleep on our bedroom floor. Now...he starts the night out on the floor but then ends up on our bed. (little stinker) I don't mind if he sleeps on the bed, as long as it's at the foot of the bed...but picture this...an almost 90 lb, not fat...just huge... dog sleeping on your bed. He's almost twice the weight of Jennah and is taller than her, end to end when he's laying down. He takes up the whole back seat of our car and his paw is as big as the palm of my hand. He's a monster! but...a sweet monster. No matter what we do, no matter how many times we kick him off, at some point while we are asleep, he will jump up on our bed and sack out.

Out of "dog training" habit, we sleep with our bedroom door shut...once he was potty trained and we could let him out of the bathroom at night, we'd shut our bedroom door to keep him from getting into mischief in other parts of the house while we were sleeping. When the kids are here, we leave the door open and Bogey will take turns going to each room, sleeping next to the kids beds.

Last night, we shut the door and went to bed like normal. Around 1:00 am I woke up to him barking. It took Doug all of two seconds to tell him to be quiet and before I knew it, I was back to sleep. He barked again probably half an hour later...this time when Doug told him to be quiet, he meant business and Bogey new it. The third time he barked was at 3:00am. I rolled over and asked Doug to open the bedroom door and let Bogey go investigate whatever he was barking at. I knew everything was ok...it wasn't a "panic" kind of bark, but I was too tired to try and figure out what kind of bark it was. So Doug opened the door and Bogey went out maybe mid hall and came back to my side of the bed. He rests his head on the mattress near my face. Tired or not, I realized that going back to sleep wasn't an option. I get up and he bolts out the door only half way again...making sure I'm still behind him, then he runs to the back door. I get there behind him and flip on the back light. Nothing... No cats, no burglars...no nothing. I open the door just enough to let him decide whether or not he wants to brave the cold to investigate. He scrambles through the small opening going full speed, gets to the middle of the yard where he promptly squats to...poop. Woopsy.

He did his business and came back in, tail wagging. I climb back into bed and inform Doug that it had been a "potty bark". I snuggled in next to him, while Boge gets cozy on the floor and we all fall back to sleep. I woke up a few hours later, this time wedged in next to Doug. As usual, Boge had climbed up onto the bed and this time was right next to me, sleeping soundly. I carefully slid out of bed, careful not to disturb either of my sleeping monsters and decided to snap a photo. One click of the flash woke Boge up...he stared at me curiously for a second, then scooted in closer to Doug. Sweet, spoiled dog... we love you.

Life and Death

In a few short days it will have been 6 years since my Dad passed away. There's a specific type of pain associated with death. It's the heartache that comes when you remember that a particular person is no longer physically there. Having someone you love so dearly...just not be there anymore is difficult and death is difficult, but it is divine as well. He was relatively young...It didn't feel like an old person had died at all. Not like it felt when my grandparents died. All the dreams I had of him for the first year after he was gone were of him as a younger man, maybe in his early thirties. In my dreams he was always wearing some ridiculous 70's-ish style of clothing...the polyester suits with printed shirts that had huge collars and pearl snap buttons... I think it's because I felt like he was too young to die. One of the things that hit me the hardest after his passing was seeing his things laying about my parents house. His shoes where he'd taken them off the night before...his glasses and his watch. His coat draped over the kitchen chair. A man not knowing that those few hours were his last and that he'd never need that coat, those shoes, the watch and his glasses... ever again. It haunted me. How could his stuff be here and him be gone? How could someone so full of life, be so sick and die? It wasn't even like a hospital death...it was so fast and unexpected.

I don't know that I was ever afraid to die...more like I was afraid of how I'd die and even then, it was a fear that was manageable. Manageable until that day...doctors running about me in an effort to get my heart to slow down. Something about that moment changed my life...first for the worse and then for the better. I've said this before...two summers ago, was the hardest time in my life. Harder than anything I've ever been through. Not that specific day in and of itself, but the uncertainty that seemed to be my constant companion those few months. Was I on the edge of death that day in the hospital? No, probably not. Was it really that big of deal? Nope it actually wasn't. No code blue, no ICU, no rushing me into surgery...but no answers either. No one that could tell me definitively "why my heart reacted the way it did." The result? I lost trust in my bodies ability to function like it should. I feared that if it had happened once, it would happen again...and when it did happen again, I wouldn't make it through...just like my Dad.

Thank goodness for time. Thank goodness for my husband, children and our families. Thank goodness for good friends and thank goodness for the gospel. I'm not so afraid anymore...my faith and my confidence have been restored. I can only do what I can to take care of my body...good care of it, but I know that hearts fail, cancer strikes, cars crash, accidents happen and disease ravages. I have faith that no matter what happens...it will be ok, because I have a Savior. A Savior who loves me. As cliche as this statement has become, death really isn't the end...I know where my Dad is and I know that I will see him again. For all it's perils and pitfalls, life is truly beautiful and plentiful and just like death...it is divine.

That's MY Song!

Have you ever heard a song that you felt belonged to you? Not necessarily one that describes you...not your anthem...not your favorite song, but a song that you love in a way that makes it your song. It could be a song that radio stations play ad nauseum... or it could be some obscure song, sung by some obscure band.

I'm blogging about this because I was surprised to hear my song played to a national audience in the movie, "The Lovely Bones". I felt excited and oddly, a bit over protective when I heard it. I even looked at Doug sort of incredulously and said "I have this song!" Like "wow, they're playing my song...how dare they!" Yah, I'm dumb. ;)

I started getting my own musical tastes at about 10 years old. I liked alot of different music even then, but I had my heavies too. My first love was Duran Duran...I moved onto Adam Ant and shortly thereafter, thanks to my brother Aaron, I discovered groups like Depeche Mode and The Cure. Aaron was kind of a musical guru for me. His tastes evolved and mine went with his...for the most part. ;) I fell in love with his music... Marc Almond, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Love and Rockets, Peter Murphy, This mortal Coil, Yaz...etc, etc...

This Mortal Coil sings my song..."Song to the siren." It's a song written by Tim Buckley, who is a far more main stream artist than TMC, but whose version of the song, falls pretty flat. This Mortal Coil is a collection of artists... two of which are Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie from the Cocteau Twins...(another favorite) They are the voices to the version of "song to the siren" that I love. I was probably 14 the first time I heard it. It was a horrible copy of a copy of a copy on cassette tape. I sat in my room in our house on 10th east listening to it, rewinding it and listening to it again and again. Umm...try not to envision Glenn Close sitting on the floor switching the light on and off while listening to Madam Butterfly. I wasn't that obsessed... ;) For years and years, that crappy tape was the only copy I had and for no particular reason, I loved it. No one in my circle of friends knew this song...it wasn't played on the radio...it was just my song. A really great song on a really overdubbed tape. I kept the tape but after the advent of CD's and a new love for grunge music... I didn't get back to it that often. However, when I got my ipod and my itunes account, it was at the top of my list of songs to down load... but I could never find it!

Finally, sometime last year after a quick search, there it was. HECK YES! I down loaded it that second and found myself playing it over and over again...this time I was switching the lights on and off. Ha-ha...kidding ;)

Now here it is, playing in the part of the movie when Susie meets George Harvey's others victims... Through all these years and for it's legion of fans, (check out "This Mortal Coil - Song to the Siren" on youtube...lots of lovely bones fans just bawling their eyes out!) I'm happy that my song really isn't my song and it never was. I still love it though...you should check it out, you might like it too...:)

And BTW...the movie was good, but not as good as the book...(they never are!) Stanley Tucci was a show stealer...terrific acting that was super creepy.

Terrific TV!

This is where I have to admit that Doug and I are American Idol fans...not die hard fans...but we definitely enjoy watching all the good, bad and ugly that Idol has to offer. I was super excited to get home tonight, if only to plant my butt in front of the tv. (after my Wii fit workout of course...which I did along with a half hour on the treadmill...woot, woot.) My brother Tom got his hands (legally...he's got connections... No really!) on copies of the movies, "The Lovely Bones", and "The Time Travelers Wife". I read "The lovely Bones" several years ago and loved it. In fact, I closed the book and wondered if enjoying a book about a murdered little girl was normal! It didn't take me long to find out that I wasn't the only fan. I haven't read time travelers yet, but my sister-in-law says its her favorite and Eric Bana? Can't go wrong there...

I'd actually planned on seeing Lovely Bones on Friday, but thanks to Tom and Beth, it looks like Doug's gotten himself out of a date night. ;) So it's a TV toss up tonight...Idol, Lovely Bones or Time Travelers? Maybe some Idol tonight, some travelers tomorrow and then it's date night from the comfort of our own couch...enjoying the same premier that everyone else is, only with better popcorn...triple woot. No spoiler alert here, but Tom says that Stanley Tucci did an amazing job as the uber creepy George Harvey. Eeeeeee! Can't wait for all three!

P.S.
Speaking of TV, if you happen to be like us and you haven't seen a commercial in it's entirety since the advent of DVR's...I've got one for you to check out.
While you're on perma fast forward, if you happen to see even a millisecond of a "Progresso Soup" soup commercial, STOP and watch it. If it's the new weight watchers one with the husband leaning up against a wall, you won't be disappointed. So, super funny...Enjoy it!