2009 Family Goals

For family home evening yesterday we decided to make a few New Year’s resolutions as a family, type them up and print them, and hang them up on the wall. I tried to explain the idea of making goals to the boys, and I gave them an example – that we (the parents and kids) would all try harder not to yell at each other, and we talked about how we could remind each other about this goal and try to do better. Michael came up with the goal to not only read the illustrated scripture stories books with the boys, but to also read the scriptures together as a family each day. And Michael also wanted to include having a family trip sometime this year on the list, which sounded good to me. So, we asked the boys if they had any ideas for family goals. Kolby promptly answered, “Don’t go under cars.” And then he added, “And don’t walk in the middle of the street.” He even insisted that I write those goals on our paper. Eli’s idea of a goal was that he could play the piano with Kolby next time he was practicing (maybe a 3-year-old isn’t quite old enough to grasp the idea of New Year’s resolutions). But then Kolby came up with a great one by himself without any prompting from us: Be reverent in church. I liked that one. The last one we added to our list is something we’ve been working on a lot lately, and the boys are doing quite well with most of the time. It is that they need to ask what they can help with, and continue to ask and help until the job is done. It’s pretty cute – even Camden now has started to come up to me when I am getting lunch ready and say, “Mommy, what can I do to help?” And I’ll have him get out the milk or set bowls on the table. The boys really are good helpers. Anyways, those are our 2009 family goals. We’ve done pretty well with them so far (for the last day and a half).

Kolby Practicing the Piano

So, I had to record Kolby playing the new piano song that he learned this week, Merrily We Roll Along, just because Michael and I were so impressed that he could actually play a recognizable song with the right notes and correct timing and everything after only taking two lessons. I was only planning on recording that one song, but after I started recording, Kolby wanted to play the song three times (he is supposed to practice each of his songs three times a day), and then play the two songs that he learned before this one. After I finished recording him, he wanted to watch the video, and then he asked me if I would put it on the blog. Pretty cute! I think it's so fun that he enjoys practicing the piano, I'm really glad we started these lessons for him. He has his third lessons this afternoon, and he is excited to hopefully move on to learning the letters that go with each note (the first three songs he has learned in this piano book have numbers assigned to the child's different fingers, so they can learn which fingers go on which keys). Kolby has asked us several times to explain the letter notes to him that he sees on the next few songs in the book, but we keep trying to get him to just practice the songs his teacher assigned him for this week and let the teacher teach him the notes when she thinks he is ready. We'll see if that happens at his lesson today, or maybe next week. Now the hard thing will be to find a teacher that is as good, as inexpensive, and lives so conveniently close to us when we move to New York next year and Eli will be ready to start lessons too. (Eli has already asked me about piano lessons and has started his own little "piano practice" sessions some days when he pulls out the primary Children's Song Book and pretends to play the songs in it). And now Camden has even started to "play" the piano too -- the older two boys have enjoyed "playing" the piano for the last few months whenever we have family home evening, so they just play random notes and we sing the words of a church song -- and the last couple weeks Camden has insisted that he be able to play a song for family home evening too. It's fun to see the kids actually enjoying this -- I guess there really is something behind the idea of starting kids out young, because I remember not enjoying practicing my clarinet when I was in middle school and high school (and I never got very good at it because of my lack of practicing). Maybe if we start them all out when they are around age 5 and they think that practicing is still fun, then by the time they are older and might otherwise want to avoid practicing, maybe they will be good enough at playing the piano that they will actually enjoy it by that time. We'll see how it goes, but for now it is pretty fun to watch Kolby learning and liking it too.

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Carving Pumpkins

So, when Dick and Grandma Bradshaw came for dinner and family home evening we carved pumpkins for our activity. I enjoyed figuring out what the jack-o-lantern’s faces would look like, and I left the scooping of the pumpkin innards to the boys and the carving to Michael and his dad. I think they turned out pretty cute. I’ll have to get a better family picture of us all with the finished pumpkins – we took a silly one on our camera, and the only nice-looking one with the whole family ended up being on Dick’s camera.

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Picking Out Pumpkins

Two weeks ago for our Family Home Evening activity we wanted to go pick out pumpkins – Kolby and Eli each needed to bring a small pumpkin in to paint at preschool the week of Halloween, and we wanted to pick out a big one to carve as a family. We looked online, but couldn’t find any real pumpkin patches nearby that were open after dinner time, so we drove down to Redwood Road where Michael had seen some pumpkins for sale earlier in the week. We got there, and it was just perfect for our little family outing. It was just a little set-up in a parking lot, but it was all fenced in, there were hay bales and hay was spread all over the ground. There were corn stalks all over and a large Indian tee-pee that the kids could go inside. There were little Halloween decorations all around and the woman at the checkout stand was dressed as a witch. After taking lots of fun pictures of the boys, they picked out their pumpkins and we headed home. That was a nice little activity – just the right amount of time that we all enjoyed it, but it wasn’t too long to keep the kids’ attention.

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Family Night at Jacobus Park

We had a fun family night at Jacobus Park a couple weeks ago -- here are the pictures from that night.

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Plastic Surgery and Minivans

This week I started my last hard rotation of my last year of medical school. It is what the school calls the surgery sub-internship. I did my medicine sub-internship in September and that was very busy and taxing, so I assumed this would be similar. We enjoyed my free time last month and were preparing ourselves for having the kids not see much of me. So we were pleasantly surprised to find (at least this week) that things were not as bad as we had envisioned. True, I have had to wake up a lot earlier (around 4:30-5:00 each morning) and stay a little later, but it has usually been until 5 or 6 pm rather than the 9 or 10pm that we had thought. I only have to be on overnight call 3 weeknights during the month, and that is home call (which means I can go home and they will page me if they need me). I did my first home call Tuesday night and wasn’t called in. Then I have to go in 2 Saturday mornings this month, but I get all the rest of the weekend days off. That is mainly because there are two 3rd year medical students on this month as well, so we get to split up all the call between the 3 of us. I guess what I am saying is that I have had a lot more home time than we expected.

And the time at the hospital has been nice too. We have a really good team and everyone seems to get along great. Plus, I have come to find out that plastic surgeons get to do some pretty cool surgeries. This week I saw a couple of broken fingers that were fixed with titanium plates and screws; the start of breast reconstruction for a lady that had to have hers removed for breast cancer; a skin graft to a wound on a lady’s lower leg; and a medial thigh lift for a lady that had lost 100 pounds after having stomach bypass surgery and now had lots of leftover folds of skin. They have quite a variety of “toys” and so many things they need to know. So I have really been enjoying the time in the hospital as well.

I just wish the time would go by a little faster. This is because one week from tomorrow we will find out if we matched into a dermatology residency program, and one week from Thursday we will find out where we will be for the next 4 years (depending on how the match turns out). We feel really good about our choices, but it still is a time of high anxiety as we try to anticipate where the Lord will want us to be next.

This week we also had to make a big decision about our minivan. About 2 weeks ago the van was hit in the back while Steph was dropping off the boys at preschool. The insurance company of the man who hit the van had us drop it off at a body shop on Monday with the intent to replace the back door and bumper and gave us a rental car for a few days to get by. Well, they found that there was a lot more damage than anticipated, so ultimately, they decided that we could choose to have them do the work and give us the van back, or total the van and cut us a check. We think this mishap has come as a huge blessing, seeing as that van has given us so much trouble since we got it. So we plan to have it totaled, and with the money that they will give us, along with our tax refund, we decided to go out and look for a newer and nicer van to replace our old electrical lemon. We went out van shopping yesterday and found one that we really like. It is a gold 2001 Chrysler Town and Country Limited with automatic sliding doors, a 4 disc CD player, and many other nice gadgets and toys. And above all, it seems to run nicely and is in our price range. We are having the financial work processed this weekend, and if everything works out, we can probably get it sometime during this next week. We will have to make car payments for a little while, but it will be minimal because of the money we can put down. We are really excited for this change in fortune. Heavenly Father continues to watch out for our needs and finds ways to bless us when we try to do what is right.

We also had fun playing some games this week. We had the Kearls over Friday night and played lots of games. The kids get along so well and we have so much fun together. They watched our kids for us while we went van shopping Saturday morning, and then Tyce and I stayed at his place to watch some of the kids while Steph and Faith took the others to Sofia’s birthday party at Gymboree. Then we played some more games last night. It has been a very enjoyable weekend.

Monday for family home evening we decided to start memorizing a scripture each month, and we thought it would be good to start with the Articles of Faith, so we are working on the first one: “We believe in God the Eternal Father, and in His Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” I love these simple statements of what we believe. Steph did a lesson on service and we decided that we want to come up with a service project that we can do this next month for someone and help the boys to see how they feel when we do the service.

Today the theme in sacrament meeting was forgiveness. And in the last hour of classes we talked about repentance. In Sunday school we focused on some of the main teachings of Isaiah, including about temples, the gathering of Israel, and his testimony of Jesus as our Savior. I am so grateful for the scriptures we have and all the testimonies they contain about the mission of Jesus and why He should be of so much importance in our lives. We are so excited because Camden gets to start nursery classes next week – maybe we will be able to get even more out of our weekly meetings then!