High five.

Rachel turned five this week. Her request: A rainbow cake. "A rainbow chip cake?", I asked, desperately hoping that an affirmative answer would make the job ever so much easier than the rainbow cake I had made for her sister a year or two earlier.
No luck. She wanted a rainbow-shaped cake. Thanks to my best friend, the internet, and the lovely people who post their creativity thereon, Rachel got her wish.



This year she got a "family" party where she got to choose a special activity as a means of celebration. We went horse-back riding. After dusk. On the coldest day of the year, thus far. The girls didn't seem to mind.







Even Eve got in on the action.



I cannot say enough good about you, Rachel. One of our favorite family stories is of your birth - you landed on the bed, thanks to a couple of nurses who thought I didn't know what I was talking about when I said you were coming. Eh, it was the night shift, so I cut them a bit of slack.

You are a peacemaker (but not a pushover), you love to help your mother, you keep a tidy room (can anyone else say this about any of their children... anyone?), you are smart, and fun, and beautiful, and agile, and affectionate, and gracious and, and, ... Like I said, I cannot say enough about you. Happy fifth birthday, my dear. Now just stop growing up, will you?

Road trip Sunday.

Tim is the new Scoutmaster at church. Which means monthly campouts til' the end of kingdom come. We've dabbled in family camping while here in Idaho, but haven't scoured the area for good sites by any stretch of the imagination. Enter a new family tradition: Road Trip Sunday.

The first Sunday of each month is now dedicated to driving to various recommended areas and staking out a couple of possible campsites for upcoming scout trips. Super fun.

November's road trip took us out to CJ Strike Reservoir. We did a whole lot of wandering, snacking on leftover Halloween candy and chips, getting lost, and bonding over Family Story Hour and Scripture Rock on the CD player.

A few highlights:

Eve taking a leak for the first time in a vault toilet.

Anna offering a silent prayer in the backseat after we told her we had no idea where we were.

Eve mentioning at bedtime that we never did make it to Grandma and Grandpa's house (apparently the length of the trip suggested to her that's where we were headed).

Girls weekend.

Fifteen minutes before I walked out the door, Eve peed on me. What a send-off. I was looking forward to spending time away from my girls and getting together with my other girls (aka: high school buddies) for the weekend, but she really sealed the deal.

I listened to conference all the way down to Orem. Then I enjoyed a 3 1/2 hour drive down to St. George catching up with three of the five friends I'd be meeting up with. And then the party began.

We booked the Honeymoon Suite:





Notice the transparency of the shower glass - add to that the fact that there was no door to the bathroom and that translates into some serious bonding. Not that we were wandering around with nothing but a towel on our heads but we did take a moment to compare stretch marks.

I slept on the floor both nights. Make that one night. The first night, after chatting until five in the morning I decided to pull my very first all-nighter since I was about twenty and headed to the temple. So much for pulling an all-nighter, if you know what I mean. :)

We attended Time Out for Women, which was refreshing in more ways than one, did a bit of shopping and eating out and called it quits. Darned families actually missed us.

Two main things I came away with over the weekend:
1. I need more music in my home. I need my children to develop a love for good music. Thank you Jenny Oaks Baker. You were amazing.

2. Women have great potential to strengthen one another. It's unfortunate that we often cast judgment at one another's methods when we could learn so much from each other. My friends and I are as different as can be. We don't feel threatened by the fact that some of us are creative geniuses, others are organizational fools, and still others possess an uncanny emotional intelligence. We simply appreciate what is good in ourselves and take notes on what is good in others so that we can improve. Duh.

It was AWESOME. Next year can't come soon enough!

A Christ-centered home.

My house is about as far from a page out of a Pottery Barn catalog as one can imagine. The cheapskate in me takes a wee bit of pride in the bareness of my walls and the mismatched furniture. Somehow, I've never been able to justify spending money on aesthetics. Add to that the fact that I've little talent in the area of interior decorating. And, I've spent much of the last eight years cleaning crayon off the walls - why would I invest any time or money into something that is destined to be destroyed by little munchkins?

Then I read a talk that counseled us to hang a picture of the temple in each room of the house. And I listened to other talks and lessons that advised creating a Christ-centered home, one with visual reminders of what we hold dear.

Decorating is by no means the only way to establish a Christ-centered home. It just so happens to be the area in which I am utterly lacking. So I'm proud today to say that I am one step (or one wall, if you will) closer to having a Christ-centered home.

Here is Exhibit A:



Ta da!

We had a series of family home evening lessons several months ago on the paragraph in The Family: A Proclamation to the World that outlines all the principles upon which successful families ought to be based. I decided I wanted these displayed somehow. Thanks to a friend with way more design talent than I, the word cloud was created, printed, matted, framed and now fills one of many bare walls in my house.

Hopefully within the coming months I will have an Exhibit B to blog about.

Signing off.

I give it my all, every day. I put up with the messes, the tears, the screams, the endless chores, and alas, the disobedience. For crying out loud, the disobedience! So when it continues after that magical hour of eight o-clock when all the little ones are supposed to be tucked into their beds, I make no promises of patience, or kindness, or even civility, for that matter. Oh brother, I do my best yelling at night. It doesn't help that Tim is gone for two, sometimes three nights a week, leaving me to handle baths, scripture study, and bedtime stories for four girls all by my lonesome. Man, how do single moms do it?

So, if you want to break down crying and tell me you had a really bad day at 8:30 (while at the same time, biting your sister's head off and ignoring my polite requests for you to march yourself off to bed), my sympathy is limited, at best. In fact, I may just lose it. Come to think of it, I just did. I'm sure I'll feel very sorry about it when you're zonked out from your sugar coma and, in my somewhat decompressed state, I find you sleeping peacefully. Yes, I'm sure I will like you more then.

But, in the future, please remember that this mom turns into a pumpkin at 8:00. Sharp. Poof!

And now for the onslaught of pictures.

Tea Pah-ty.

Joy School Halloween Party.

Anna's Halloween party with friends.





Halloween trick-or-treating.


Lily took her sweet time eating dinner and doing her after-dinner chore so she missed the first street. Lucky for her, they came back just after she finished applying her face makeup to head out again.

One and a half hours later:

Happy Halloween! Phew. Fun as it was, I'm glad that's over.