2.24.08

In some ways it has been really nice to not have church until 1pm. This way, we have a lot of time to just spend together Sunday morning. The boys play with their toys, I can read or write on our blog, and Steph can make her wonderful wheat bread – it’s great. And today is supposed to be the warmest for about the last 2 weeks. It will be the first time that the temperatures get above freezing. The sun is out and it looks really pretty outside.

Yesterday we went to Chicago with Peter and Cynthia Hedgecock to go to the temple. We wanted to go in order to think about the rank list that we will be submitting this next week for dermatology and transitional year residencies. We have our list of preferences and just wanted to see if any changes came to mind. We both felt that we should keep the list as we have it. Now comes the waiting game and trusting in the Lord that we will end up where He wants us. We will find out on March 20th where we will be spending the next 4 years.

Steph has a whole stack of family names that need their work done and we were able to get about 50 initiatories completed during the morning with the help of other people in the temple. The Hedgecocks took the boys to Chuck E Cheese to play while we were inside, which they loved, and then we took them to Costco. We had to pick up some wipes and the boys got to try all the foods they always have out on Saturdays. Kolby actually refers to Costco as the “treat store.”

After finishing at the temple we stopped at Ikea to look around. We had been told it was relatively close and I had never been to one before, so we thought it would be fun to go. The place is enormous. The boys really liked the kids section where they played in a tent and on some egg chairs. We were all pretty tired when we got home last night. We were able to get the house cleaned up after dinner and get everything ready for Sunday. This month has been nice for me to be able to help clean up some of the clutter that has built up over the last few years, especially with getting all the piles cleared up off the floor in our bedroom.

Steph got some nice frames for pictures of the boys (her Christmas gift from me that she waited to get until we returned from our trip). We hung those up in our front room Friday afternoon and they look really nice. Friday night we had a birthday party for Eli. His birthday was the end of January, but since we were gone we didn’t do a party. We had a “Thomas the Train” theme and let the kids play with all the trains and tracks. It was another excuse for us to get together with friends.

Thursday night was Eli’s night out with Stephanie. He had some birthday money from Grandma Faun and Grandma Bradshaw so they went to Toys R Us and he chose a doctor kit and the movie, A Bugs Life.

Wednesday night it was my turn to go watch Kolby and Eli at their swim lessons. They both are so good in the water. Kolby is tall enough to touch the bottom, so after his class he was jumping from the side into the water, which Steph said he was doing for the first time. And Eli loves to play on the steps and do bobs. And Steph already mentioned about the crazy police incident from later on that night. That gave us quite the adrenaline rush.

Monday night for family home evening we taught the boys about the plan of salvation. Kolby has been asking a lot lately about what happens after we die, so we thought it would be good to tell them. I used a paper and drew some circles to represent our pre-earth life with Heavenly Father and Jesus; our life here on earth where we are supposed to CTR (Choose the Right); life in the spirit world after we die, where we are waiting to be resurrected; and then life after the judgment and resurrection, where we can either end up in the Celestial, Terrestrial, or Telestial Kingdoms or Hell, and how we want to end up in the Celestial Kingdom where Heavenly Father and Jesus live. I’m not sure how much of it all they understood, but they seemed to like it. For the activity we had them practice writing their names.

This week we decided to get the exhaust system fixed on our blue car so it can pass emissions. We found a mechanic that we really like and who seems pretty honest about his work. He had to replace the catalytic converter, some tubing, and the air filter, and he even took it back to the emissions center and got it passed for us. We hope that if we can keep up with maintenance on that car then it will last us for a few more years.

Well I better go get ready for church. We have to go a little early today because I am singing with the choir. We are going to have Kyle and Tracy Jensen over for a delicious salmon dinner – they are one of the families I home teach.

Car Problems and Fun with Friends

I feel like we got a lot accomplished this week – I almost feel like we are getting back up to date with all the little every-day things we need to get done since returning home. This week I was able to cross a lot of little things off of my ‘to do’ list including updating our food storage inventory, organizing the baby’s room, printing and sending some photos to Grandma Bev that she asked for, e-mailing a bunch of old German family documents to my mom so they could prepare for their trip to the Czech Republic, – I am so envious that they have the chance to go to some of the towns our ancestors are from and they might even find the places where they lived – and I also ground enough wheat for a month’s worth of whole wheat bread – I’m determined to make a batch (6 loaves) each Sunday, and am very glad that the batch I’m making right now looks like it is turning out well after last week’s batch tasted good but didn’t rise very well (wow, can you say, ‘run on sentence?’). Anyways, it always feels good to cross things off of my list as I accomplish each task.

So, this week was a fun one. A nice thing about our trips is that we got out of the habit of watching very much television, and since we’ve returned to Milwaukee we’ve tried to continue that. We’ve had more time for getting together with friends and playing with the boys.

On Monday I dropped the boys off at preschool and then my visiting teachers came by before I had to go pick them up again. It’s been really nice this month because Michael hasn’t had to be in until 9am, so he waits with Camden and Isaac while I drop off Kolby and Eli at school, and then I don’t have to lug all four of them in and out of the car.

On Tuesday it was Kolby’s night. We decided to start having one night a week be an individual night for one of the kids to go out with a parent. Kolby went with Michael to run a few errands, and then they went and read books at the library. While they were running errands they got some pretty flowers and a fun new board game, Carcassonne, for me for an early Valentine’s Day surprise. I was very pleasantly surprised, and it was fun that Kolby picked out the flowers. Michael seemed to enjoy it a lot too, because he says that I am so hard to surprise, but I didn’t expect it at all.

On Wednesday morning the boys had preschool again, and they did great. Eli has done well with preschool, he especially enjoys having Kolby there with him. Most days this week they haven’t even made a big deal of me leaving when I drop them off – they just say goodbye and that’s enough for them. Then Wednesday evening Michael had an AOA meeting and he took Isaac with him while I took the other boys to the YMCA. Camden went and played at their kid care while I watched Kolby and Eli’s swim lessons. It is the first time that Eli is in a class with us in the water with him, and he did great. The teacher seemed surprised when Eli willingly dunked his head under the water right when she asked the kids to do ‘bobs’ and she asked me if he had taken lessons before. Kolby did great too. And the nice thing this session is that they are in lessons at the same time, and their classes are right next to each other, so I can pull up a stool and sit right in the middle of the two to watch them both. After their lessons were over they wanted to stay and play in the water and they played for about 15 minutes more before we left. Eli loves to play on the steps and go under the water with his eyes open the whole time and Kolby was excited that he is tall enough to walk on the bottom even deeper into the pool than he used to be, so I kept having to remind him he couldn’t walk all the way to the middle of the pool. They had a lot of fun with that.

Thursday morning we took Michael’s car into the shop because it had failed the emissions test earlier in the week. We paid them $30 to tell us that we would need to pay $1000 to fix the entire emissions system, $450 to replace a rotted out radiator, and $400 for a major tune up – all for the little car that we paid $1500 for a year ago. So now we are really trying to figure out what to do. Do we get a different car that is a little newer and might not have so many major problems for a while (although we couldn’t afford the payments on anything much newer than the one we’ve got), or do we put money in and fix the car up because people say Toyotas are good little cars and we could get a lot more miles out of it if we put some money into it (or it could continue to have major problems that would cost us even more), or do we just fix the minimum to try to get it to pass emissions for one more year and then face those problems later on, or is there any possible way to make one car work at least until we move in the summer (but getting the kids up early each morning and late each night to go pick up Michael from his Surgery Sub-I rotation next month just seems like it would be awful). So, we don’t know what we’re going to do yet. Yuck! We don’t have very good luck with cars.

On Friday morning I took the boys to preschool and when I came back out of the YMCA the back of our van was all smashed in. I didn’t really know what to do since no cars were near my van at all when I came out and I thought the other driver had left. So I just stood there for a while and the driver of a semi truck parked a few car-lengths away from the van came and told me he had hit it. (I was really glad it wasn’t just a hit and run). He said that he was unloading things from the back of his truck and it started rolling and he ran and got the emergency brake on just as it hit the van. At least it seems like his company will cooperate and take care of everything with the insurance, we just have to wait until after the long weekend to get things rolling on that. But for now we can’t open the back door of the van. Luckily there wasn’t more of a problem than that – I’m glad it didn’t break the back window or anything, because it had been so cold that driving with our kids in the van with a broken window would be unbearable. Anyways, one more bit of our bad luck with cars. Oh well. So, Friday night the Kearls came over and we babysat Nathan and Katie while they went curling and then they stayed for games after they returned and the Wellses came and joined us for games too.

And then yesterday morning Michael went and helped Bishop Park to move some of their stuff into storage so they can sell their house. They are moving to Washington this summer. After lunch we went over and saw the Wells’ home for the first time and we played some games on their Wii. Jana also got out her violin and played some songs for the boys, which was very impressive – she could play any song that we named and each one sounded great. She said she started playing just before she turned 4 years old, so I guess we are behind. We told Kolby he could start taking piano lessons after we move. After that we dropped off our boys at the Kearls and went out to dinner for our Valentine’s Day date. We went to Habaneros, which we would recommend. They had great food, and we were surprised at how nice of a place it was inside – from the outside it looks like a small place in this little strip mall with neon beer signs in the windows, but when you go inside it is a very large room with vaulted ceilings and much more authentic-looking architecture and decorating than other Mexican places we’ve been to out here. It was a fun evening out together. After that we went over to the school for their annual Variety Fest talent show. We have gone to it each year since we’ve been here, and it was a really strange feeling to look around and not recognize many people there and realize that we were some of only a few 4th-years there. It felt really strange to be the “oldest” and realize we are going to be done with all of this soon. Afterwards we returned to the Kearls and played a game of Carcassonne and watched a fun movie called Stardust before taking the kids home to bed.

And today there have been reports of a bad storm that is supposed to come in later on, so church was cancelled. It doesn’t look too bad out now, but there was rain this morning that is supposed to make things very slippery and later on there is supposed to be about 6 inches of new snow. So, this morning we watched on the internet the recording of President Hinckley’s funeral services since we were traveling on the day of his funeral a couple weeks ago. Now Michael is training the person who is taking over his job as the one who schedules all of the events in the church building. And later on the Hedgecocks are coming for dinner and then we are going to play games afterwards and the Kearls may come too. So it should be a nice relaxing day. The boys are napping now, which is always nice to have a little break. Hope you all have a nice week.

Five Years

I came across this fun post on a friend’s blog, and thought it’d be nice to write one of my own. So, this last week Michael and I celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary. Five years sounds like such a long time – it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. Although I still feel like we are one of those newlywed couples, I guess we are really more like a “real family.” So, looking back now it is interesting to see what we’ve accomplished in the last five years:

We have lived in four different apartments: our first one south of campus at BYU, our second in Wymount married student housing at BYU, our third was our 2-bedroom apartment in Mayfair Manor apartments in Milwaukee, and our fourth (and current) apartment is our 3-bedroom place in the same complex in Milwaukee. (Maybe our next home will actually be a house – we’ll see).

We have had four boys (all born within four years of each other): Kolby, Eli, Camden, and Isaac. So, we have eight little shoes, forty little fingers and forty little toes, sometimes eight crying eyes at the same time, often four cute little smiles, and always several diapers to change each day.

We have had four jobs and two internships: When we met, Michael was working for BYU’s IT Services and I was working for The Museum of Peoples and Cultures on campus. When we lived in San Diego for a summer Michael had an internship with a company that produced skin grafts for burn victims and diabetes patients and I had a fun job working in a scrapbooking store. Before we moved to Milwaukee I had an internship at the family history library at BYU. And after Michael’s first year of medical school he had a summer research position conducting telephone surveys to pharmacies and eventually compiling his research in a paper.

We have been to eight places: Beside living in Provo, Utah and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we lived at my parents’ house in San Diego, California for a summer after we were married (and we had a fun day trip down to Tijuana, Mexico while we were there). We have also enjoyed fun trips to visit family in Boise, Idaho and Salt Lake City, Utah. And monthly trips to the temple in Chicago, Illinois makes that destination quite familiar to us. Other than the states that we drove through on our move out to Milwaukee and the places Michael has flown to for recent residency interviews, the other location we have visited is Nauvoo, Illinois for a fun family vacation a couple years ago.

We have received three degrees: Although I attended Ricks College in Idaho before I met Michael, I was still finishing up the last couple courses at BYU that I needed to transfer in order to receive my associate’s degree in social sciences from Ricks. Michael and I both later graduated from BYU – I got my bachelor’s degree in genealogy and Michael got his in microbiology with a minor in Spanish. And we are anticipating Michael’s degree from medical school in May 2008!

We have had five cars: We used Michael’s little red Ford Tempo while we were in Utah and Wisconsin until it died on us a couple years ago. We also had a blue Buick for a little while that my Grandma gave us when we were at BYU. When our friends, the Gordons, graduated and left Milwaukee they gave us their old car which we were able to sell for a few hundred dollars. After the Tempo died on us, we got a green Mercury Villager minivan. And then last year when Michael needed a car to get to and from his different rotations, we got a little blue Toyota Tercel from the Johnson’s when they were getting ready to graduate.

We have gone through four baby strollers: In preparation for having our first baby we got a little umbrella stroller and a bigger stroller that a car seat could hook into. And my friend gave us a hand-me-down double stroller when we had our second baby. Later on, after the double stroller was damaged on an airplane ride and the airline eventually paid to replace it, we got a triple stroller.

We have gone through five baby car seats: We had an infant seat that we used for Kolby, but when we were hit by a car the insurance company replaced that infant seat for us (Isaac’s car seat). We have also had two convertible toddler seats (now used by Camden and Eli), and a booster seat (Kolby’s).

We have had four computers: I had a computer during college and Michael had his dad’s old laptop (which we set up on top of a book shelf so Kolby couldn’t reach it when he was a toddler and he grabbed the chord and pulled it down and shattered the screen). We got our pc a couple years ago and Michael recently took advantage of the school’s offer to extend student loans to cover the cost of a laptop.

We have celebrated 17 birthdays: five each for Michael and I, four for Kolby, two for Eli, and one for Camden.

And we have had hundreds of hours of laughing and fun, thousands of smiles, and lots of happy memories.

It’s been a great five years. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what the next five years have in store for us.

Another Exciting Adventure

I had another 'fun adventure' [can you detect the sarcasm in my voice?] tonight -- we sure have been having our fare share of little adventures lately. So, after taking Kolby and Eli swimming at the YMCA, coaxing them to eat a late dinner, a pretty successful attempt at letting all the boys talk to their cousin Jaden on the webcam, and getting the boys all settled down in bed; Debbie suggested that I could use Dick's car to go to Toys'R'Us and some stores at the mall because she knew I wanted to get a little more Christmas shopping done. Not wanting to waist an opportunity to go get some shopping done without any children in tow, I headed off to Toys'R'Us around 9 pm. I got there and spent a relaxed time walking up and down each aisle (with no children begging to play with the trains, crying, or asking to use the bathroom). It was a nice little excursion and I found just the right set of toys that I was looking for to give the boys for Christmas.

So I went out to the car, considering going across the street to the mall before going home, when I found that I couldn't get the car to start. I couldn't get the key to turn in the ignition. I figured that I just needed to wiggle the key in just the right direction, but that didn't help. After attempting to turn the key while pushing on the brake, turning the steering wheel to either side, turning the key over, pushing the key in as hard as I could, making sure that the car was in park, and saying a prayer that I could get the car to start, I didn't know what else to do.

At this point I had been in the car about half an hour attempting to get the key to turn, so I decided to call Michael's dad to see if he knew any tricks for his car. I went back into the store and asked to use their phone (because Michael has our cell phone while he is on his interview trip right now). I was glad that I was so prepared and kept a little list of phone numbers in my purse for all of our family members. I went to dial Dick and Debbie's number, and realized that it was not correct. I had written those numbers down a couple of years ago, and hadn't used that list of numbers to contact Michael's parents since then because we usually use the cell phone for all of our calls and all the family numbers are programmed into the cell phone. But Dick and Debbie changed their home phone number a few months ago, and the cell phone number I had written down for them was also an old number (all of the other numbers on that list are still current, of course). I also tried calling Michael on the cell phone, but the phone in the store wouldn't let me call long distance. So, not knowing exactly what to do, I went back outside to try the key again.

After a few more unsuccessful attempts, I went back inside. I looked in the phone book, but Dick and Debbie's number in there was not the current one. So I looked up Bryce and Emily Christensen, Michael's old friends from high school, in the phone book and called them to get Dick and Debbie's number. I could tell by Emily's voice that I had woken her up, and by the fact that I could hear her daughter Abby in the background that I had likely woken up their entire family. I felt bad for calling so late (I think it must have been about 10:45 pm by that time), but I was very glad that she was able to find the phone number for me. So, I was able to call and Dick came out to pick me up.

As I was waiting for Dick to come, I was hoping that he would be able to get the car started (although I have to admit that I was dreading the possibility that he would drive all the way out there and turn the key immediately, proving my incompetence when it comes to cars). But when he arrived he couldn't do anything to get the key to turn either (at least it wasn't just me), and he had to call a tow truck. I felt pretty bad -- I don't think that I did anything to make that happen, but I still felt bad that it happened when I had the car. Oh well, at least I was eventually able to find their phone number so that I am not still stuck in a car that won't start, in a freezing parking lot, in a town where I don't know my way around and I only know a handful of people who live here -- thanks for saving me, Emily!

My hope right now is that we will not have any more adventures for a while -- no travel problems, no hospital visits, no car problems, no nothing. We'll see.