Large Loomers

In life there are those people who loom large. Quite possibly the largest loomer of all the large loomers I know is my Dad. Tonight he is in the hospital awaiting heart surgery the extent of which is yet to be decided. I am so glad I was just in Gilbert, Arizona a week ago witnessing his last council meeting as a councilman there. Words fall short of expressing who he is or what he means to me but last December my siblings and I (mostly my sister, Sarah) put together a blog for him for his birthday and Christmas present where we made an effort to convey the largeness of his looming in our lives. Scroll down to the last entry which is a video and then you might catch a teeny-tiny glimpse of the man that is my Dad. http://vote4mydad.blogspot.com/

Endings

I was sad last September when Corban turned 3. I have LOVED being the mom to my babies. It was the end of the baby era, an era that had lasted 21 years. I am seeing a lot of ends lately but I am happy about the one that is the subject of this post--Corban's rearend. He is out of diapers and by extension our family is out of diapers. If I were a better mathmetician I would do the math on the number of diapers we have changed but I'm not so I won't. Let me just say we have done our share of diapering and I'm okay

with this particular end.

Spring has sprung

April 24th, 2009

This is our annual "the-flowering-almond-bush-is-blooming photo". We have only missed one year since 1993. (I think it was the year 2000. It rained so hard that the blossoms all dropped off before we could get the picture.) This particular day was the Friday morning that Samantha left to go to BYU study abroad in London. I had just brought her back from SUU the night before. I was hoping that the timing would be right so that the bush would be blooming during the 12 hours that Samantha was home and it WAS! A nice little miracle. It usually blooms closer to the 18th. No one was dressed up but I got the picture with all of the available offspring! (Minus the missionary-but that couldn't be helped.) Okay, so Jeremiah isn't really there in the emotionally/mentally present sense of the word but he is physically in the picture. I am hoping that through the years I can get a few more pictures with most or all of my children in them.

Yep, it's me again....and again....

A good sense of humor can be a tremendous blessing.

I crawled into bed sometime in the wee hours of the morning on Valentine's day. I snuggled up close to my husband of 21 and 3/4 years who had been in bed for quite a while. Scott is a pretty deep sleeper and just to lay a little ground work here, he can say some pretty crazy things then have no recollection of it the next day. He turned over towards me and mumbled something about alarm systems and timers (work stuff). I asked him what he was talking about. He stopped mumbling looked at me and queried, "You again?"

I am sure there are a number of possible reactions to such a question. It cracked me up. It helped that the flowers came first.

Rocky Mountain High (Road trip-part 1)

June 2008-I took a little trip through the Rocky Mountains. I listened to John Denver music which is essential to really experiencing that part of the country. I stayed the night in a nice hotel with a supremely comfortable bed in Denver. Drove around the city at night which was very cool until I got lost. So I called my Dad, who knows everything, and we talked until I found myself back in semi-familiar territory.

I was driving the Tippett's car that needed to be relocated from Springville, Utah to Dallas, Texas. They were going to pay some impersonal company to ship it out but that just seemed silly seeing as how there was a perfectly willing, capable, volunteer that would come in at or below the cost of the shipping company AND had not been out to Texas to visit said family in the 5 years that they had lived in that state. (Not to mention I totally bonded with their vehicle.)

I swung by Junction City, Kansas "on my way". (The art of "swinging by" was first introduced in the early 1960's by either Don and/or Sylvia Skousen and then perfected in 1986 by their son, Gerry when we "swung by" New York City "on our way" to Florida for Grant and Keri's wedding reception.) We lived in this little mobile home for about a year and a half while Scott was in the Army at Ft. Riley. Samantha lost her front tooth on the front porch when she was 18 months old. Good times there. I forgot how humid humidity is.
After Scott got back from Saudi Arabia we finally got into On-post Housing and what a sweet deal that was! It was rather like hitting the jackpot. We lived in this cute little 4 bedroom apartment for about a year until Scott took the early out option and we moved back to Utah. Sarah stayed with us for a little while there while she was homeschooled during the end of 8th grade (?) Wow, I hadn't ever really thought of it like that. (Mom and Sarah, you started me on the home schooling venture all those years ago. Thanks.) We also had visits from other family members and we made some good friends there. Below is a picture of our backyard which was simply fantastic. It's hard to really get a good visual on it though because all that white is humidity, I think. Clearly humidity is a big deal to this southwestern girl.
I am so glad that I got to go back to Ft. Riley and Junction City. It brought back a flood of memories. It took me a while to get my bearings straight and a lot of things had changed. It would have been nice to have more time so that I could have visited a few more places but it was already afternoon and I was way behind schedule.

OOOOklahoma (Road trip-part dos)

(This is the second of three installments about a trip I took in June 2008. I am not currently in Oklahoma. I am catching up on my blog posts.)

Here is a map of my trip. Very fun. My last post left off in Kansas. From there I went South. This was pretty much my view from the window for many miles across the flatlands. Very beautiful.

Sarah had a number of fantastic CD's in the car for my listening pleasure. One of the CD's had a number of top songs from top musicals but I don't think Oklahoma was amongst them although I could be mistaken. I was very content with my options for listening on the trip.

I have a brother and sister-in-law who have lived in Oklahoma for a while and their town looked like it was pretty close to where I was driving anyway so I thought I could just, you know, "swing by" and say hello. I wanted to totally surprise them. Just drive up and be all like, "Hey I was in the neighborhood. Thought I'd drop in". Or do the creepy stalker thing, "Looks like you guys are all just sitting down to have dinner and it looks like you're havin' fish sticks with corn...." but since I misjudged the distance and I took too long of a trip down memory lane in Kansas I called and gave them a heads up. Which turned out to be a good thing because there was no way I would have found their place without their directions and I almost didn't find it with their directions. I showed up at their house at 10:30 or 11:00 at night. They graciously invited me in, fed me key lime pie, and talked to me well into the wee hours of the morning. We had a splendid visit. The next morning I got to take pictures.

They live on this cute little country lane.

No. That's not the house. That is the tornado shelter (?) I think. I better confirm that.
This is Beth's incredible garden. Her green thumb is on steroids there in Oklahoma but she even managed to produce a good garden in the drought stricken Arizona desert.

That is my sister-in-law, Beth and her youngest son, Isaiah on the back porch.

The front room. The whole house is beautifully decorated and so well organized which is no small task for a home schooling, homesteading, stay-at-home Mother of 6. I slept so comfortably. I have but one complaint which is that the visit was much too short.
There is my nephew Sam googling the best route for me on the next leg of my journey which I will tell about on another day.

Signing off from the land of the road trippers

DALLAS--(Road Trip part 3)

(I am not presently on a road trip. If anyone at work reads this and thinks that I am not really sick but vacationing that is not the case. This happened in June of 2008.)
I left Tecumseh, Oklahoma and kept driving South with just one thought in mind. "I can not wait to see my little sister." Well, that's a lie. Partly. I was also thinking that maybe I could just swing by Florida and see the other in-laws while I was out in the general vicinity but decided that would be pushing the bonds of sisterhood beyond reasonable limits so I focused on the last leg of the driving portion of my journey. It was absolutely a perfect trip. I LOVED every moment. I LOVE to drive. I like to drive with the window down sometimes so I can stick my arm out. I like to drive with the music on and then with the music off. I like to get some good, serious thinking in while I'm driving. I love to see all of the cool places that other people live and wonder how we all end up in the spots that we end up in. I try to picture what it is really like in that town or this town because you can't really know until you live there. It was a great day. Around 3:30 I was approaching the Dallas area. Sarah guided me into Dallas over the cell phone. I was astounded. First of all it's enormous. I thought it was beautiful as well. I'm not sure what I was expecting, more brown, less green, maybe but I thought it was really pretty and exciting. As I got closer to the center of the city I talked to Sarah again and she gave me great directions to her house. I am not very good at remembering to take pictures of important things like Dallas and all of the cool places that Sarah and I went together but I did remember to take a few of the inside of her home.
This is the guest room/den where I stayed the night I was there. Very nice. I highly recommend the Tippetts hospitality and their decorator is to die for.


This table was our Uncle Jerry's. He bought it for his house in Mexico. Then it was moved to his house in Arizona. Then my Dad's house in Gilbert. Then to Sarah's house in Texas where it looks like it was meant to be. Perfecto
My cute niece Deli who is incapable of movement that does not incorporate modern dance steps is here showing me the hall and lunging simultaneously. (Very nice Adelle.)

And here again is Adelle, joined by her darling sister Tess in what might possibly be the most fantastic child's bedroom on the planet. SOO cute and the windows are so perfect. That decorator....I'm tellin' you she has done one great job in that house but especially the girl's room. It almost made me want to be a child again.


Out the girl's windows is a great view of the backyard. Which is also beautiful. The gardener is just about up to par with the decorator.

As if getting to see Sarah and the girls and where they live wasn't good enough we then drove around Dallas and she showed me some of the sights. She knows Dallas. Tom came home and we got to chat for a minute which is always exhilarating because I am always afraid I will say something really dumb around him and I usually do so it's exciting to see how far I can get into a conversation before that happens. He and the girls got to stay home and watch Star Wars while Sarah and I hit the town. We went to dinner and to see a film (The Visitor) which I quite liked. We also hit the town the next day too before she took me to the airport. We went to Half Price Books which is an enormous second hand bookstore. FANTASTIC! We drove around some more looking at houses and schools and neighborhoods. We had the most incredible sushi and she took me to Sprinkles for cupcakes. Who knew a cupcake could taste that good. Not me. She sent me home with some for the family. What a trip. What an experience. What a sister and brother-in-law for giving me the chance. Seriously it more than made up for all of those years of taking care of her and worrying about her and being displaced as the youngest child and only daughter to being a middle child with a sister......Way to over compensate Sister.