In with the new.

And don't forget "out with the old". In fact, I would venture to say that one of the few aspects of Christmas that offsets the disgusting onslaught of toys and clothes that, let's face it, no one really needs is the fact that I can finally declutter. Admittedly, it's probably one of the few obsessions I have. It took Tim at least a year after we were married to get used to the fact that, if he left a piece of paper(or anything else with no apparent value) sitting on a surface that was otherwise clear, it would be gone within 24 hours. Having 3 kids has worked wonders in tempering my compulsive nature but through and through, I am still my father's daughter and I LOVE order.

On Christmas Day, my kids were, not surprisingly, distracted by the items gifted to them by none other than their well-intentioned parents and grandparents. I saw the perfect opportunity to start piling into boxes used toys, books, clothes, and games that, as I saw it, were simply taking up space. Up until this point, each time I have suggested giving a few things away to the needy (I have to jazz up the phrase "getting rid of" somehow), my sweet children boldly proclaim how they can't live without this doll (that has been marked up with a pen), or that stuffed animal (to whom they haven't even bothered to give a name), or the book that has sat under their bed undetected for months. Consequently, I typically find a time to discreetly stow a few seldom-used items in a box until I can donate them and hope that the girls don't notice.

Not on Christmas. As they played happily, I filled 3-4 huge boxes with stuff and barely got so much as a glance my way. I thought I was done for when Anna remarked, "Mom, are we giving those to the needy people?" I answered hesitantly..."Yes." To which she responded, absently, "Oh." and went on playing with the latest and greatest. So my kids are spoiled and I'm actually happy about it. For now. Because my house is just a bit more organized.

I'll give you a more complete Christmas update soon... with pictures.

BYU vs. UCLA

When Tim and I were young married students at BYU, we faithfully attended BYU home games, having purchased an all-sports pass both years we attended for a mere $60. If only cable TV in Boise could be found at such a bargain price. Our minimal TV-viewing habits has not justified the investment in cable or satellite, so we have a cute set of rabbit ears atop our entertainment center that provides us with 6 or 7 channels, on a good day.

Apparently, we have a few fellow BYU alumni friends here in Boise that are as cheap as we are. We all expressed our devotion to the Cougars last Saturday night by going to a local restaurant/sports bar to watch the Las Vegas bowl (BYU vs. UCLA). I'm sure that the owners dread people requesting any game where BYU is one of the contenders since they will neither be generating any alcohol revenue from those customers nor do they have any guarantee that these guests will bother ordering anything from the menu (in fact, a shameless few might opt to bring in their own food?). Let's face it, we Mormons are cheap.

Not having exhausted the meager "eating out" portion of our monthly budget, and having the luxury of a free babysitter that night (thanks Jill), Tim and I went the whole nine yards and ordered an appetizer first, an entree at halftime, and a chocolate milkshake for dessert during the fourth quarter. My body could not support such gluttony. I honestly cannot remember a time in my life when I imagined a race to the bathroom to unload my dinner into the toilet and it sounded like an attractive option. I vow never to eat like that again (except maybe when I'm eating for two).

Dinner aside, BYU displayed its characteristic disappointment in the fourth quarter, having allowed UCLA to get within field goal range when BYU was only up by one point. But, they also, in classic cougar style, surprised us by blocking what should have been an easy kick into the end zone. Pretty sure we were the only fans clapping in the restaurant.

It's time to ask my doctor about Imitrex.

At last, I have found something redeeming about pregnancy and nursing. Besides the fact that my skin glows, my hair thickens, and I think that everything my husband says is hilarious, that is. I quit nursing Rachel over a month ago and my life has been blessed with 4-5 migraines since then. I had one on Saturday night that stretched into Sunday morning, peaked at about 10:30 a.m. and finally subsided at about 2:30 in the afternoon. It was one of those make-it-stop-or-shoot-me-now headaches. In fact, I'm still contemplating whether or not I would rather be in labor than have a migraine of this magnitude again. At least labor pains come and go. This... this, was unrelenting pain, an agony akin to having someone drill a hole into the side of your head. Oh, and have I told you that migraines really hurt?

Anyway, I'm thinking that estrogen is my new best friend. I read an article confirming the correlation between pregnancy/nursing and a decrease in migraine frequency and I was almost inspired to become a wet nurse.

Come to think of it, maybe I'll just ask my doctor about Imitrex.

At least I know the smoke alarms work.

Yesterday, I was changing Rachel's diaper when the shrill sound of our smoke alarms tried to compete with the volume my girls were generating while playing. Clearly, they won. The smoke alarms, I mean. Usually I know exactly what the culprit is when the smoke alarm goes off. In fact, 9 times out of 10, it is when someone is cooking bacon and has neglected to turn the stove fan on. And yes, we love bacon around here, for those of you cringing at the thought of eating straight fat.

This time, however, I had no clue what was causing the clamour and rushed downstairs to put it all to an end and spare everyone's ears and nerves further damage. To make a long story short, Lily had put a couple of plastic measuring cups in the oven and I, of course, didn't check inside the oven before preheating it to 400 degrees (who does?). She had been pretending to bake cookies. Now, those cookies were oozing down my oven racks and all over the bottom shelf. All I could think of was how grateful I was that I had ignored the inkling I'd had earlier in the day to clean my oven. I guess sometimes laziness really does pay off.


On a completely different note, last night the doorbell rang after 7 pm, and Tim's immediate response was, "Yea, cookies!" Don't you just love the holidays?

Quarantined.

That's right. Winter season is in full force and we are stuck inside our home because my kids neither wash their hands consistently, nor cover their mouths when they cough, nor go to bed when they are told to. You know, all the techniques that would typically prevent illness. Lily's pretty cute about it, though. She's come to grips with the fact that when anyone is sick, we say no to friends. Her way to handle the situation: boldly proclaim her health every few minutes. "Mom, I'm not sick anymore. I slept really good last night. Look mom, I'm not coughing. No more boogers." All the while the snot is streaming from her nose.
Those of you who live near can rest assured that I will not invite your child over in the midst of the petri dish that is currently our home. However, I will not spare the random strangers who frequent the same stores as me. I'm a busy mom! I have errands to run! So you might want to steer clear of ShopKo, Costco, and Walmart this week. My kids left their germs everywhere.

Anna Elisabeth Egbert.

I take the naming of my children very seriously. I figured that if my daughters have to endure 20+ years of being an Egbert (I'm kidding, Steve and Paula) they might as well have a first name that does not evoke laughter. Tim and I play it safe and give our children classic, Biblically-based names: Anna Elisabeth, Lily Rebekah, Rachel Jean... and so it goes. They are strong names, full of meaning, and represented by some of the most remarkable women in history.

So you can imagine my initial reaction today when Anna ponderingly said to me in the car today: "Mom, I don't like my name". Pause. "You shouldn't have named me Anna." Pause again. I'm thinking: I can't believe I'm hearing this from my firstborn, the one to whom I gave the two top names on my list. Anna, widow for 84 years, one of the first to greet the infant Jesus in the temple; meaning gracious. She's not acting so gracious right now is she? Elisabeth, full of faith, mother of John the Baptist after years of barrenness, cousin to Mary, the mother of Jesus; meaning consecrated to God. Really, how much more meaningful can you get?

Rather than communicate my deep love for the names that I had chosen to bestow upon her, I enjoyed the moment a little longer, and said, "Okay, Anna, what do you wish I had named you?" Another pause. "I really like the name Cinderella."

By George, I think she's got it!

By about mid-November I was already tiring of trips to Costco. Don't get me wrong, driving twenty minutes to a giant warehouse and fitting 3 kids into a giant cart just to buy a couple of giant boxes of milk so that I don't have to pay the giant price tag other stores enjoy charging me for the same item is barrels of fun, normally. But it has been raining Christmas there since the beginning of October! And as much as I LOVE Christmas, my kids love it too. At least, they love telling me how much they want this toy, and that toy, oh, and that toy for Christmas. Trips to Costco have become very tiresome.

Anyway, in mid-November, I decided that Tim and I needed to come up with some way to remove the selfishness bug from our children and teach them how it feels to serve others during the holiday season. Almost one month, one Thanksgiving, and one trip to Maui later, I still had not come up with anything.

Thank heaven for Joy School. I had the pleasure of teaching this week, and our current unit on sharing and service included a lesson plan where we arrange a visit to a rest home to perform a small nativity program. It was quite an experience. Despite the fact that I had to twist arms to get the kids successfully through several practice runs at my home, it went superbly well. They sang their hearts out, were not shy about giving the "grandparents" the Christmas cards they had prepared for them, and I only had to carry one Joseph around the stage to do his part. It appeared that they had experienced the joy of giving of themselves.


I knew that the lesson had been ingrained when I had just finished my prep work for dinner and went to join the girls up in the play room. I walked in and found it completely spotless. Shocked and delighted, I exclaimed, "Wow! What happened?" Anna was beaming with pride and said, "Mom, we wanted to surprise you. It's called service." I told her how happy I was and, seizing the teaching moment, asked her how it made her feel inside, to which she responded, "Good, but my body is still kinda tired from all that work."

Later that day, we were driving up the street to take dinner to a family in our ward(congregation, for those of you not as familiar with Mormon lingo) whose mother had just had a baby and Anna exclaimed, "Mom, you're doing service too!" One can only hope that the lesson sticks next time we go to Costco just for milk and instead of getting bombarded with demands as I try to skirt past the toy section, I am greeted with silence. Wishful thinking...

Things I learned in Maui.

Tim and I took a late sixth anniversary trip (otherwise known as Susie's-neither-pregnant-nor-nursing-so-let's-get-out-of-town-trip) to Maui last week. A few things I learned while in the beautiful Valley Isle of Hawaii I list below:

1. I really do love my children. This is actually a disclaimer because many of the subsequent things I will list might have to do with the fact that they did not come on my trip. Truly, though, my kids enrich my life with meaning and purpose and I realized after six days without them that true fulfillment comes through serving them daily. I love them.

2. I still love my husband. He's not quite as obnoxious when I'm no longer sleep-deprived and I haven't faced days on end with little ones driving me crazy. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration (the part about him being obnoxious, that is). In fact, we have quite a bit of fun together. It's good to know that.

3. Tim is afraid of sharks. Having grown up in San Diego, I figured that he had spent enough days on the beach to get this one out of his system. But as we were snorkeling, I noticed that we could only go so far out before he got the willies and headed back to shore. He was the butt of many jokes for the rest of our trip.

4. My kids treat grandma WAY better than they treat me. Nevermind that I carried them, bore them, and wipe their boogers with my bare hands, if necessary. While we were gone, they only messed around at bedtime enough to get kicked out into the hallway once or twice, compared to pretty much every night when I'm around.

5. You don't have to sacrifice any of your limbs to pay for a trip to Hawaii. We got a beachfront condo for a steal that of course didn't have all the amenities that large hotel chains provide but was literally a stone's throw from the ocean. We were lulled to sleep by the waves every night. We ate in most days, thanks to Costco, avoided all of the costly island tours, and consequently undercut our budget by a few hundred dollars. Hurray.

6. Maui really is paradise. We hiked through tropical rainforests, swam in pools beneath waterfalls, snorkeled in what seemed to be an aquarium (though it was only a few feet from shore), and stood atop a towering 10,000 foot volcano that commanded a view of the ocean and the two Big Island volcanoes. It was simply breathtaking. If only our pictures could do it all justice.

Here they are:

A cave we discovered on a volcanic black sand beach.

Just before taking a dip in the Seven Sacred Pools.

A rainbow eucalyptus tree on the idyllic Road to Hana.

The temperature dropped 30 degrees on our drive up to Haleakala National Park. Go Cougars!

This was taken from our balcony, literally. We ate dinner to this view almost every night.

Back in the saddle.

On our return flight from Maui two days ago, Tim and I were relaxing in the comfort of coach class on ATA, sipping cranapple juice and gingerale(respectively, not mixed together) waiting patiently for the in-flight movie Evan Almighty to begin. I had already devoured half of the conference issue of the Ensign and couldn't help but think of how apropos the movie selection was, considering we were traveling on the Sabbath. (After all, God is one of the main characters, right?)

The pilot interrupted my thoughts to make an announcement over the intercom. It went something like this: "We have a somewhat unique (unique being the operative word, here) situation that we wish to inform you of. Apparently, our lavatory tanks were not serviced before leaving Kahului and have reached their full capacity. We've decided to turn around and go to Honolulu to have the tanks serviced. We apologize for the inconvenience and blah, blah, blah.

My first thought was, "Stop the beverage service and keep going! Good heavens, we're already two hours into the flight! I can hold it another three!" Tim, however, already had to go and momentarily stood up to occupy a place in line for the restroom. When he came back he shared this little tidbit: "There was a torpedo poking through the flapper - I didn't even bother to flush." Thanks honey. (You're probably wondering to yourself what it is about me and blog posts that involve bodily functions.)

24 hours later, we landed safely in Salt Lake City and still had to drive 4 1/2 hours to Boise. The upside to this whole encounter: we were not traveling with our children, we had 6 nights of uninterrupted sleep under our belts, and we acquired two free roundtrip tickets to anywhere in the U.S.

The downside: I had to stay in Vegas for a night (6 hours of which were spent waiting, just waiting... and only 4 hours sleeping) my hopes of seeing my sweet children were dashed until the following day, and I have the craziest week ahead of me!

Maui was wonderful - I'll post pictures soon.

One last thing: are airplanes the only place we call a restroom a lavatory anymore?