Dear Fellow Visiting Teachers,

This month the message was about contemplating the sacrament.  It was about searching ourselves to see the things that we need to work on and remembering the coventants we made at baptism and recommit to every time we partake of the sacrament.  (Is it okay that I just jumped right into the meat of it?) (Were you hungry?)

I said "was" because today is almost the last day of June.  "By the skin of my teeth, " isn't that what they say?  (that's kinda gross.)  But I went to the church website and read the message at the beginning of the month.  It's something that I've thought about and taken seriously.  Seriously.  Every Sunday as I attempted to keep the children quiet and in the pew.  While I watched one of the babies choke on the water and the other grab an extra piece of bread as the tray went by.  Well, let's just say that I took it more seriously as I contemplated it later, while I was alone.  Alone is key.

After all, I alone am the one who is responsible for my actions, my re-actions, my words, my choices.  I have the responsabilty of stopping and checking if I feel the spirit.  I alone can feel His presence, or the lack of it.  I alone am either partaking in the Gift of the Holy Ghost or taking it for granted or not participating in that relationship at all.  I am repsonsible for me.

So there is a challenge for us:



Yours,

Brittany


For the June Visiting Teaching message go here.

For more about what Visiting Teaching and Relief Society are, go here.

Feel free to download the quote and email it to your girls or print it out.  It's for you and your own personal Visiting Teaching pleasure.

15 things I did last week

1. Found that I love Ender as much at 35 as I did when he was a kid.

2. Ate a lot of chocolate.

3. Went to a movie. In the theater. It was a kid movie, and a matinee, but it was a movie. In the theater.

4. Made ice cream.

5. Took a walk with someone on a scooter scooting next to me.

6. Played on the beach.

7. Became an auntie for the second in one week. Hello, little Hazel and Norah. I love you already.

8. Stood outside under the full moon. Well, it was the day before the actual full moon, but it felt like the full moon. And it was so beautiful.

9. Learned some Spanish with my Spanish tutor app.

10. Planned to read on the hammock. Actually wrote it down on the chalk board, but I had to read while stirring dinner in the pot and following babies around the back yard because they wouldn’t lie on the hammock.

11. Cleaned my mudroom closet. Wow.

12. Tried to sleep with knots in my hair so it would be cute and curly when I awakened fresh and ethereal in the morning. Pulled it out in the middle of the night after much tossing and turning resulting in half curls, half frizz and not so fresh and not at all ethereal.

13. Ooogled over So You Think You Can Dance.

14. Gave lots of baths and enforced showers. All that sand and sweat!

15. Sweated. That cursed sweat gene.
Hello summer. I’m trying to enjoy you. I’m a little overwhelmed still, but you’re wonderful. I have just one request: could you ease up on the humidity? It’s just that I have this weird sweat gene…

beach love

Thursday was the last day of school.  My daughter's 5th grade teacher loves the beach.  I said, "I heard your teacher loves the beach.  What does she love about it?  The sun?  The sand?  Reading?"  She said, "She likes to go there and listen to the waves and the wind.  She likes the feel of the sand on her feet.  She likes how when the sun is setting over the ocean, it all blends together and you can't tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins."  I said, "Did you learn about that during your poetry section?"  "Yes." 

Isn't that so cool that her teacher planted that image so clearly that she could recall it to me like that?  I love poetry.  I love teachers.  I painted this little tiny painting for her. 

I send my children away from me during the school year, five days a week, and it is a comforting knowing that they are spending time with good people who care about them.

Yesterday was our first beach day of the summer.

One baby ran straight out to where her brother and sisters were playing.  The tide was waaaaay out and the waves were small and lapping and the sand was hard and wet and rippled.  She chased seagulls and loved every second. 

The other baby clung to me.  Every time I put her feet in the sand she was unsure would look up at me, her hat framing her adorable face.  I would pick her up and she would look around with her worried eyes and her pointer finger in her mouth, biting her little tiny nail, holding me tight. 

We came home sandy and hot and happy and tired.

Hello, summer.  I'm glad you're here.


ps--my sister Krista had her baby!  She's a tiny little adorable girl.  They haven't settled on a name yet, but she'll have the perfect one for her soon enough.  Congratulations, Krista and Dallas!  I'm so happy to have a new niece!

sandboxes and sprinklers

We had some boys over this afternoon.  They were awesome. 
They ran and yelled and played.  They were loud and beautiful.  They had the brightest eyes and biggest smiles. 

I loved hearing bits of their conversations.  These six squares right here on my stomach?  They were nice to my girls and nice to me.  They stayed happy for hours.  HOURS!  They played in the sandbox for over an hour!  The sandbox!  Who knew?

Look, they even were reading aloud to each other on the hammock:

Until they realized that I was taking pictures of them:

(what?  I couldn't resist.  want. to. pinch.)

another piece of conversation that I caught:

The most disgusting would be scab flavor.

Ew.

Toilet flavor!

Aaaaah.

No, no! Kissing flavor!

Eeeeeeeew!

Sewer flavor!

uuuuuh.

Kitty litter!

Eeeew.

(I wouldn't mind trying kissing flavor...)

These boys were a perfect end to my hard week.  They put my head back on straight and tweeked my mood so the sun could make rainbows.  They were like a deep breath of childhood and fresh cut grass.
(Oh, wait, that really was fresh cut grass.)

meow

On Sunday I only made it through about five minutes at church when I had to take the loud and flailing babies out into the foyer. One sat beside me on the couch looking at books and the little trouble maker was on my lap, legs straddled around my waist. I held her tight as she tried to wiggle free. I put a little stuffed kitten on the top of my head and looked at her with big eyes. “Where’s the kitty!?” I asked with a gasp. “Meow.”

She stopped wiggling and struggling and I dropped my chin a little and the kitty came sliding off my head into her lap. She giggled and the kitty went on top of her head this time. “Meow,” she said.



Yesterday I laid her down on our family room rug to change a stinky yucky poopy diaper and in the middle of our business I felt a whisper of a wiggle on the top of my head and suddenly a huge gigantic spiderish beetle-y thing fell off of my head onto the baby!

I screamed and quickly swiped the spider off her exposed belly (with what may or may not have been a poop smeared wipey) and it flew through the air and landed on her sister who was standing next to us. I screamed again looking at this huge spider sticking to my baby’s dress and crawling across her belly and instinctively batted at the thing aiming to kill while not hurting the child. The nasty thing disappeared. Gone. What? Where did it go?!? And as I took a quick inventory of the situation I saw two babies staring at me with wide eyes, not breathing, not moving, and I struggled to stay calm. If I stood up, the poopy bottom would go running off, and that’s never a good thing. I had to soften my face and I said in a smooth animated voice, “Where did that nasty thing go?” The little faces looked relieved as I sat there and searched for a creepy crawly under all the diapers that Little Honey had strewn over the floor. Nothing.

After the business was finished I searched again with little involuntary shudders, but I never found that nasty thing.

For the rest of the day any time I felt a tickle I would jump and check. No nasty thing.

My six year old comes to me several times a day and twirls slowly in a circle while she asks, “Are there any bugs on me?” and I roll my eyes to myself and half heartedly check her out. Now that doesn’t seem like such a strange thing to do. I found myself spinning for my children, “Are there any bugs on me?”

I saw that little kitten and put it on my head, but it reminded me of that nasty thing falling off my head.

“Meow.”

Dear Reader,

I am reading a book that makes me wish that I were a letter writer. That I had correspondents with whom I communicated with through pen and paper, although I can’t imagine when I would have the time. This week I was planning on coming to this space to write about a million little things. Like when the sweet ex nun who lives down the street stopped to give me geraniums to plant in my flower garden and tell me that my children are growing before her eyes.
    
I was going to ask you what the deal is with social media. Why don’t I get it? We’re learning about it in the (great) class that I’m taking and I keep hearing from all kinds of sources how important social media is to grow your business, but I can’t make myself care. Am I weird? Do you love it? Does it float your boat? Do you see a witty tweet and then go buy something?  Do you love checking your facebook page to see what's going on with your friends?  How in the world would I find the extra time to socialize so much? 
    
I was going to write about my oldest sweetheart of a child. She is growing up—going to middle school in the fall—and the only thing she’s anxious about is opening her combination lock. (She says she tried five times and didn’t get it once.  So I bought her one that we can practice with over the summer.  I know, I'm awesome like that.) She’s not worried about the fact that she’ll be the youngest in the school or that there are about 1400 other kids there or that so much changes in the next few years; she’s leaving that to her mother. I was on the floor in tears, in fits of laughter, when she was telling me about her embarrassing moment in school. It makes me giggle every time I think about it and then feel all protective-mommy-ish and wish I could take it all away for her.


Yours,

Brittany

don't listen to the meanies.

So I recently submitted paintings for the squam art show. I thought I was more prepared this time. I even wrote a guest post about it, encouraging others to submit. But there they are again, those little meanies: “You didn’t have enough time in your barn. Those pieces aren’t good enough. They should be more meaningful pieces. Why can’t you paint the light better?” and on and on.

But then I look at my life and see how full it is. I see that I have the amazing blessing of motherhood and I’d be silly to neglect that. Of course I have a hard time getting to my barn/studio. But at least my days are full of little faces and bodies and voices that I adore. At least I can get into my bed all exhausted and snuggle up to the love of my life. In fact it was hearing my son say, “That one is so awesome. It’s my favorite” that gave me the courage to push send. It was remembering the poem that my daughter wrote about one of my paintings in her poetry unit at school that helped me lift my chin and walk away from the computer feeling ready to move on with my day.

Time is hard to balance. And more time in my barn is coming as sure as the fireflies appear on warm nights in my back yard. I’ll get practice and learn and maybe someday I’ll be able to stop pretending that I’m an artist and really truly feel like one.


Post edit:  I just wanted to be more clear here:  the meanies are my own negative thoughts.  Some of us refer to them as "gremlins."  No one has actually said those things to me...unless you count myself.  But that's the point--we all are meanies to ourselves sometimes, and life is all about learning to balance it out.  Sometimes I think I'm pretty awesome too:)

heaven help me. what will I do in 10 years from now?

While washing my hands after holding back my poor child’s hair while her lunch exited her body into the toilet (which incidentally did not prevent me from getting sick as I would find later that night), I received a phone call from my good friend who lives down the street. “Did you know that [your 6-year-old] is here?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

You see, not ten minutes previous there had been a conversation with me and my middle child in which I told her that if she wanted to play outside she needed to play in the back yard so that I would know where she was while I was attending to her sick older sister. This conversation was sealed with what I thought was an angelic smile and an “okay, mommy.”

I guess I need a lesson on the subtle differences between

 a mischievous and an angelic smile.

She did a good job dealing with the consequences of her choice and now she’s enjoying playdates again and supposedly will not ever sneak away again.

ps--The child pictured above is indeed the culprit.  Handwashing the dishes is one of the chores she loves to do  and was not part of her consequences for wandering the wild streets of our country town.

Hey there! I feel like I have disappeared from this space.  I have wanted to share so many things the past few weeks, but life has been very large.  Sometimes it can be hard to work around something so huge!  Even now I am typing with a grumpy little person wanting my attention, so I'll be quick.

It's hard to start blogging after an absence.  It's like I can't decide which parts to write about first or what is the most important to record here, so then I get overwhelmed with the whole thing.  So I decided to just make the leap and not take myself too seriously.

here are some pictures from the past couple weeks...


picnicing and playing


My dad stopped through on his way home from his world travels.  It was great to have him here.


sand box babies



The birthday girl tuned 11. ELEVEN!  Hard to believe how fast time is flying.  Here she is making a wish--she requested brownie sundaes instead of cake.  She wanted to get her ears pierced (which is a whole post in and of itself).






so sweet.



For Memorial Day Jake smoked about a million ribs and the three oldest jumproped in the parade and we had a family gathering in a beautiful setting.











and lots more!  But now I have to go comfort some little people. 

ps - I have a new computer monitor and all these pictures look so tiny now!  Do you all have these big ol' montitors?  Should I format my blog bigger or does this format work?  what do you think?  I want to hear what you think...