A Big Surprise!

Back in January when Eden and I went to Seattle overnight, during that day and a half Peter got to work on a surprise.

Our laundry room(the garage) was not in the best of states. We keep all the kid's dirty and clean clothes out there.  I had 6 plastic dressers lined up so that we could wash and put away all right there in the family closet.  We had talked over the years of renovating this area into a real laundry room/mud room.  Also, at the time one dryer was broken and the other was half working so doing the laundry was taking forever.  I was also in the market for a MUCH needed second fridge.  We buy a lot of produce and it just wasn't fitting very well so our kitchen fridge was always filled to the max and hard to maneuver.

So while I was gone Peter ordered and had delivered a dryer and a fridge.  He hired my brother in law and father in law to help for the day and they built this big wall to section off for the laundry room.  Our vans are too big to park in the garage so losing half of it for the laundry room is no loss.

When I drove up the the house I found this 12 foot wall happening:

I was so surprised, and so happy.  They also built a platform for the new fridge so when I open the door to the garage, it is just to the right and I don't even go down the stairs. 

The kids even got involved:

  We were able to pull down all of the different sizes of clothes out of the attic and organize them for rotation. Now it looks like this:

Yes, that is four rows of nine buckets! I LOVE having a countertop to use for folding clean laundry instead of the floor!  The dressers hold the current clothing and the buckets above are out of season and other sizes that we are saving.  In our family the girls are mixed throughout the boys so we can't just move them from one dresser down the the next when they grow (except Tanner and Carter). We gratefully get hand me downs a lot so now I can quickly file them away for later use. I also have buckets with things like soccer gear, hats and gloves, etc.  We also ended up getting one larger capacity dryer instead of 2 regular like we had before. 

This is so much more functional now! Not pictured, there is a big rod for hanging clothes on the wall directly opposite this one. There is still much more to do before this project is finished.  We still want to patch and paint all the walls in the garage because it is ugly aged sheet rock that was never painted. Then some laminated wood flooring, and finally we will make the other end of this room into a functioning mud room for coats, backpacks, and shoes.  This will be right by an exterior door so the school kids will use it for an entrance and we can stop having shoe and coat pile up by our main front door.

Whats on the other side of the wall you ask?  Now we have a large bike rack that we adopted from Peter's parents so the kids can open the garage door, get their bike and go!

I love making this house work better for us. 

Butterfly Garden

We had a fabulous time with our butterfly garden.  The garden came with a code to order the caterpillars so after a couple of weeks we got this container in the mail.  At that point the caterpillars were way smaller than this, like a quarter this size.  It was amazing how fast they grew. Every day they were noticeably bigger.  then one day they climbed to the top and hung there like this.

Once in this position they began to cocoon.  The would kind of spin around and suddenly they were motionless and smooth looking.  At this point we moved them to the butterfly garden and waited.  It took a week or so and sure enough, butterflies!  We couldn't release them because it was too cold still so we fed them sugar water and enjoyed looking at them for a couple of weeks.  

This was a great science experience! We plan on ordering another batch of caterpillars soon so that we can release them next time.

Journal

As I blew the cyber dust off my Blogger home page and clicked add post, I noticed that I have 1055 posts to date.  I felt a wave of thankfulness for 1055 memories that knowing my brain, would probably be gone by now if not for those posts.  Even my last post, a quote from Tanner, was new to me again.

We have been working on our family economy a lot lately.  A fresh system is always exciting and motivating.  I love seeing improvement and feeling intentional about life.

My goal of keeping my floors clean this year is hard.  It is like a baby, it needs constant care. I keep fumbling and starting again, but overall I am happy with improvement. 


The rest of this post is a lot of blah blah blah just to warn you. It may not even make sense to anyone else.

The joy of life lately, even though it is not perfect by any means, is just so wonderful.  I have come to the conclusion that having a bunch of kids was always for me.  Even before this life.   I know with all my heart that my desire to have this family was my pre-mortal calling for this earthly life (Mormons believe that our spirits existed before we were born). It must have been because is planted so deep in my heart that it could never be extinguished.  It is funny how I even subconsciously picked my husband out because I saw the same quality in him the first time we met.

The older I get the more I adjust to having a family.  It is silly to think that I didn't adjust as soon as we had our first baby, but for me this has been a journey of growing.  But I really seem to enjoy it more than I did in those earlier years.  Maybe because we have our "big" kids now.  I am not saying I haven't found joy in the journey because I have, but it seems different now.  I used to carry more resentment of being needed so much and it has turned into contentment and willingness and even eagerness.

When I think back in time, I feel that I was much more selfish. The playhouse is on example that has been on my mind. Lately I have loved watching our kids enjoy being outside more and more as the days warm up.  They are always jumping, swinging, sliding or hanging in the playhouse.  That playhouse is a wonderful cherished thing for our growing kids.  I am ashamed of how un-supportive I was at times as Peter and Dallin spent months working on it every weekend.  I knew it was good, but I hated the time that we could have spent cleaning or doing other house projects. I felt like I was taking the brunt of the childcare because of it.  How was I so blind to see what a wonderful thing it was for a father and son to not only build a playhouse, but a much more important father/son relationship. 

That is really what I am about these days.  Building relationships.  I want our family to have deeply loving relationships with each other.  Doing projects together, working together, adventures and playing together is really where it is at.  You know, the whole love is spelled T-I-M-E deal. 

As a mother, I want to give all of my Time(love) to my family.  Peter's parent's gave a fireside in Sherwood about raising a family with 13 kids a couple of weeks ago.  Peter went while I babysat the kids, but I was able to read the whole thing from their notes as well as Peter sharing the experience from his perspective. 

It was humbling to read the fireside as I really saw how much Larry and Lori gave(and still do)all of their time to their kids (Family: if you haven't read it yet, ask them to email it to you).  Lori went above and beyond so many times to ensure that her kids had success in life.  One time Peter was selling Scout Capade tickets and made a goal to be the winner with most tickets sold.   They figured out about how many they needed to sell (600) with a good cushion at the top.  She completely dedicated herself to his goal going out in the mornings and evenings and even picking him up during his school lunch time to take him selling. He won by a long shot by the way.

That is not an unusual example either. As long as I have known Lori, she has been fully involved in each of her children's lives. She takes on their projects and desires and helps them make it happen, however many all nighters it takes. Just the other day we were over at their house and she had been helping Lucy proof read a paper that was worth a big part of her grade.  She printed off extra copies and we all spent 2 hours looking over it, discussing, and making fixes to make it an "A" paper. That is the kind of mom I want to be.

I really enjoy reading parenting books by the Eyres.  They raised 9 kids and have so many great ideas. I mostly find their perspective about family refreshing. I was looking through the book A Joyful Mother of Children recently and came across her list of
"Ten Ways to Become a Joyful Mother".  I loved the second one which is Don't always be logical.  I have found that to be so true in our case.  It puts into words exactly what it takes to be the kind of mom I am talking about. She says,

Often logic just doesn't work when planning and dealing with a family.  If we had waited for a logical time to have a baby, when there was plenty of money, and extra room, and no outside demands, life wouldn't be nearly as exciting and fulfilling as it is today.  If I had waited to run away on a little get-away with Richard or to jump into a new idea when it was logical, I would have missed out on so much fun in life.

Reading that my my heart happy.  That explains exactly how I have always felt about our family. I think others may have seen or see us as illogical, but logic isn't always what we are going for.  I shudder to think of what or who we would have missed out on if we were always logical.