Grocery Issues

I ran into Martha last week while shopping at Kroger. (Not literally, thank you very much!) She persuaded me that I really needed to buy some green bags so that my produce would stay fresh longer.

I was not very moved by her pointing out how much longer my bananas would stay fresh; there are so many monkeys living in my house that the bananas rarely get ripe enough for banana bread. Every now and then I'll spy a banana that seems to be about ready to die of old age and I'll start planning a baking session, but invariably the next time I walk through the kitchen the banana is gone.

I did think that perhaps the bags would help keep our salad and spinach fresh a little longer and so I bought them. I'll let you know what I think.

In the meantime, I bought these bananas at Costco that same day last week, thinking that they would ripen in a few days. Here are my Costco bananas, 7.5 days later.

Do they have a bag for that??

Family Night Magic

Before General Conference in November I read a big blog post about ideas for making conference more meaningful. One that caught my attention was the mother who said that she purchased a copy of the conference Ensign and a highlighter for each of her children. She said that every week for Family Home Evening they read and discussed one talk from conference. She said that even her little kids got to have a copy, and that they colored in it with their highlighters and that was ok with her because she wanted them to be involved in the activity.

I thought this sounded like a great idea, and went online to the distribution center website and ordered 6 more copies of the conference Ensign.

Conference came and went, and it was weeks before my extra issues arrived. By then we were in the midst of Christmas madness and I had no time to think about Family Home Evenings involving anything other than Christmas.

This morning I started thinking about what to do for family night tonight. I wasn't in the mood to prepare a lesson, and as I walked through my bedroom I saw the stack of magazines sitting on the floor. "Sure," I thought, "Why not."

I wondered, though, how this idea would be received.

-----

I should have realized that any idea accompanied by highlighters for everyone had a high probability of success. What I was not expecting was the response from the little kids.

I decided that we would start with Elder Holland's impassioned talk about the Book of Mormon. We each took turns reading a paragraph, and after each paragraph I explained what it meant to the little kids. When he mentioned the allegory at the beginning of the Book of Mormon and said that Sister Dibb had talked about it in the morning session of conference, we turned back a few pages and read several paragraphs from her talk. (And talked about how cool it was that Sister Dibb was in one of the other Durham wards this weekend, visiting her son & his wife.)

We ended up reading the first page of Elder Holland's talk, and then deciding it was time for bed. The girls were sitting close to me and I could seem them highlighting a line or two of text from time to time. As we finished and knelt down for prayer, Jared was still marking rather vigorously with his highlighter. When he finished and set his copy of the magazine down, he said in a serious voice, "Mom, I just loved this talk." He had highlighted the entire page.

I am blown away. Why has it never occurred to me before to go through the conference talks (later) and explain what they mean to my little kids? I have no idea. But I am grateful tonight to whoever's idea that was, and excited for family nights to come...

dessert was ginormous chocolate chip cookies...yum!

Alarming Trends

I'm starting to work on making a blurb book out of my blog. I think it's going to be a long and somewhat tedious project, but I'm excited to have all of my thoughts, adventures, and family moments in one book.

I just pulled out some picture cd's from January of 2007 to find additional pictures for one page. I laughed out loud when I got to this picture.


You may wonder why that picture caused me to laugh. Well, it's because just 3 weeks ago I took this picture.


So I am wondering now....

Exactly what does this mean about my children?

And should I be worried???

All Tied Up

Quite often when I finish another cute sewing project for the girls I feel some guilt that I so infrequently make something for Jared. (Russ points out that he doesn't look good in dresses, which is so true!) For the last few weeks I've been thinking that it might be fun to try to make Jared coordinating ties to go with the girls Christmas dresses.

I made ties when Cindy Lynn got married, but Russ said they were more like disposable ties than real ties. I wanted these ties to be functional for quite a while. I decided that the main difference was that I didn't have the stiff stuff on the inside of my ties that real ties have. I bought a couple of ties from Goodwill and took them apart so that I could re-use the stiff fabric. Friday I finally had a chance to work on them, and I was so excited about how they turned out. I think Jared was too!

Book Review: Into Thin Air

Recently my sister told me I should read "Into Thin Air," a book about climbing Mr. Everest. As she talked about it I remembered faintly what the book was about; a survivor's story of two expeditions to the top of Mr. Everest that were caught in a sudden horrific storm. I had wondered at the time (1996) what would ever impel a person to put themselves into such precarious circumstances, so I was interested to read the book.

Let's just say — I'll not be climbing Everest anytime soon!

The author was a mountain climbing addict who wrote for a sporting magazine to make a living. He proposed to the magazine that they pay for him to make the climb (not a cheap proposition — approximately $65,000 at that time to climb Everest) and he would write an article for their magazine about it. They agreed and he was off, but not without some reservations. These reservations increased when he was flying into Nepal and realized that his jet was flying level with the top of Everest. 29,000 and some odd feet.

His account of the experience was both fascinating and bewildering to me. Fascinating to see the enormous operation an excursion to climb Everest is, especially the base camp and other camps. Fascinating to see how difficult it was to acclimate their bodies to the high altitude. And bewildering. Why on EARTH would anyone decide they wanted to climb a mountain 29,000 feet high? Why would they be willing to live for several weeks in the base camp in boredom, surrounded by trash and excrement? Why would they want an experience that culminated in such oxygen deprivation (even with supplemental oxygen) that the moment of reaching the summit was only slightly registered by the oxygen-starved brain? And why would they put themselves in such danger?

Hopefully I will never understand. And I'm serving notice right now. Russ, kids — no one is climbing Everest!

Brain Misfire

When I found myself behind this car at a light the other day, my first thought was

Wii is making cars now???

Carolina Snowstorm

When we went to sleep on Friday night we had only a little snow, so we were excited to look out the windows Saturday morning and see what had happened. We've had too many "winter warnings" that have produced negligible amounts of snow, but this time we were really hopeful.

I hoped I hadn't jinxed things by putting up my snowpeople flag on my new flagpole.

This is the sight that greeted us Saturday morning—

Before we could even get everyone bundled up to go and play out in the snow, Josh had run out barefoot, thinking that he would "ski" down the driveway in his bare feet. He repented of that thought pretty quick, but he never did wear winter clothes outside.

Yes, he is insane. No, I don't know why!!!

Rachel was more than willing to dress warmly!

Russ enjoyed a little relaxation out in the snow.

This is a sight not often seen from our driveway.

or this

We were quite sad on Saturday to realize that the snow that had fallen was not much good for anything fun. It didn't pack, it didn't slide, it was just cold. And so we retired to the house for movies and reading and for Russ to make yummy food in his new birthday apron.

Sunday was blue and beautiful.

We are not normally a recreation-on-the-Sabbath kind of family, but for snow we have been known to make an exception. First the girls tried sliding on our street.

Then we went to a steeper street on the other side of our neighborhood and found sledding nirvanah.

Unless you were carrying a 60 lb kid on your back, that is...

We all had a great time sliding down the hill, except for Russ. He tried it once and decided he'd rather wait for his ski trip in Utah next weekend.

After the sledding came the snow angels

And the snow fights using great big chunks of snow.

A great time was had by all!