President Gordon B. Hinkley has passed on.

President Gordon B. Hinkley passed on last night. He was surrounded by family members at his home. I feel such a sweet sadness. Sad because we will miss him, and sweet because he is home again and reunited with his loving wife who passed away almost 4 years ago. I can imagine they are having a wonderful reunion with each other now.

I remember when he was sustained as the prophet. I was in Highschool and me and a group of my best friends drove up the night before and "camped" outside the walls of Temple Square to try and get into the session in the Tabernacle the next day for his sustaining. Around 3 am we had counted how many people were ahead of us in the line, and figured out that we would not be able to get seats inside the tabernacle. We all drove back down to Orem and crashed downstairs in the family room of this guys house. (My first and only "co-ed" sleepover- we all just covered the floor with blankets and pillows- and crashed). The next morning we sat and watched conference together. It was a real bonding experience spiritually and is a huge memory for me of the wonderful friends I had in highschool.

President Hinkley traveled more than any other previous President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and dedicated more temples. He was an integral member of the first presidency of the church for almost my entire lifetime. He was loved by all who came in contact with him, and had an amazing persona about him. He will be missed greatly.

Up above

There's this little neat geography thing... try it out. It's big, so I'm only going to leave it here for a few days.

I've been tagged

A: The rules of the game are posted at the beginning.
B: Each player answers the questions about themselves.
C: At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.


10 years ago...
Rich and I were newlyweds... I was working full-time and he was going to school full-time, and we just found out that we were expecting our first child!


5 things on my to do list today...
well it's the end of the day, so nothing... except sleep. lol! But here's what was on my list for today.
1~ Exercise
2~ Grocery Shopping
3~ Pick up Rich's suit from the cleaners (I got there too late- it closes at 3pm on Saturday!!)- it's a good thing he has another pair of church pants!)
4~ take Ashley shopping for church shoes
5~ try to tackle some laundry


Snacks I enjoy...
Chocolate... crackers... chips... all the things I'm trying to AVOID right now... lol!

What would I do if I were suddenly made a billionaire...
Stop stressing over money?? :) I would be able to go and travel all over the world... all the places I'd love to go, but probably never will visit 1/4th of them.

3 of my bad habits...
1~ The computer! I do tend to loose track of time and spend too much time on it.
2~ Snacking... I snack way too much.
3~ I procrastinate on a lot of things and then stress when I have to make things happen at the last minute.

5 places I have lived... well I'll just do since we've been married.
1~ Orem, Utah
2~ Provo, Utah
3~ Lowell, Arkansas
4~ The Woodlands, TX
5~ Edmond Oklahoma

5 jobs I have had...
1~ Sears Customer Service Telephone rep.
2~ Grocery Store Cashier and Deli/meat dept
3~ Receptionist
4~ Group travel planner
5~ Mom


Things people don't know about me...
I don't like to talk on the phone. I will rarely pick up the phone and just call someone, but when I do I love talking to them and wonder why I don't just pick up the phone and call people more often!
Oh... and I flunked GYM class my senior year in Highschool and had to do a BYU independent study bowling course in 3 weeks to get credit so I could graduate with my senior class. OOPS!!

I am tagging...
Robyn , Shawna , Kim, Stacey, and Shanna

Just another day...

Well I wasn't able to go to the Y on Wed, since Alyssa had a fever. Yesterday morning I had planned on going early (5:45am) so I could exercise and come back home before Rich had to go to work. Angela decided to wake up at 3am and not go back to sleep. Finally at 5am I turned the tv on right next to our room and laid back down in bed to "listen" to her. Of course I fell fast asleep and when the alarm went off at 5:45 there was no way I was getting up to go exercise. lol! Angela crawled up into bed with me around 6:30 and went back to sleep and we slept in till 8am... the kids missed the bus, but Rich was able to take them to school so I didn't have to wake her up and drag her and Alyssa out in the cold to take them.

Since I wasn't able to exercise that morning, I got my exercise in last night at the Y. The dynamic is a lot different in the evenings there. There were lots of teenagers there. When I usually go during the day it's probably 2/3 mom's and 1/3 older men- not many teenagers at all. It was definitly different. :)

This morning Alyssa and Angela were both awake at 6am... they both wanted me to lay with them in their beds with them. Hearing each other and fighting over me - they both completely woke up and I was able to get them to play together upstairs. Alex's teacher mentioned yesterday that we might get some ice on the roads during the night so he was very dissapointed that school wasn't cancelled today. He just wanted to stay home all day and play on the computer. ha ha...

Today I'll keep Alyssa home again. She seems to be feeling much better, but she still had the fever last night so I'll keep her home today.

Time out for Women

Time out for Women is coming to Oklahoma City this year! http://deseretbook.com/time-out/event?event_id=349

Last time I went I was a little dissapointed in the speakers, but this year the speakers look like ones I'll like better.

It's the weekend before my birthday, so I think I'm going to give my self a birthday present and plan on going to the Friday and Saturday parts of the event. I might even get a hotel downtown with some friends and spend the night down there just for fun! :) (if you live here... and want to do this with me... just let me know!) I think it actually would make it easier for Rich- if I didn't stay down there I would come in late, and then be up and out of the house early the next morning... this way the kids don't see me for just a minute or two that morning and complain about me leaving again. :)

I was getting dressed this morning after my shower and Alyssa and Angela were in the closet telling me what shirt to wear. Angela is going through the t-shirts hanging up and one at a time looking at them and looking at me and say “no, no” and then she choose one for me to wear and pulled it out and handed it to me… then she kept moving the shirts to look at each one and came to my blue polo style shirt that has white stripes and a pulled it out.

“uh oh!! Up there!”

I wasn’t paying much attention and just said “huh?”

She waves it in front of me and say’s

“no, no! Daddies, Up there!” pointing to where Rich's clothes are hanging up.

I asked her if she thought it was daddy’s shirt and she said “uh huh! (yes)”

I told her it looks just like daddy’s shirt, but it’s mommy’s…

She laughed and said "oh..." then put it back on the clothes rod…

Well... I got two days of good exercise in a row in... I went to the Y on Monday, and then I went again on Tuesday. Tuesday I got a good workout on the elliptical, and then worked on building back up to running on the treadmill. I did 20 minutes of intervals and was feeling much better after it than I did on Monday! :)

I am sore though... the muscles are definitly protesting, but I just have to get through this initial first two weeks and then the day to day soreness is much less and I'm just sore if I really max out the muscles with weights.

Today will have to be a DVD at home though. Alyssa woke up in the middle of the night with a yucky cough, and a fever. The fever is gone this morning, but she still sounds pretty bad- so she'll be staying home from school today, and we'll be staying home from the Y this morning.

I'm really trying not to let the little voice in my head get me discouraged. It's saying "again... just as I'm getting into a routine someone gets sick and interrupts it- why do I try..." I'm ignoring it... what happens, happens and if I can't get to the Y because of a legitimate reason (kids are sick) it is not me failing at keeping my goal of exerciseing. I'll just have to make a bigger effort to get some exercise in at home on these days.

I'm back in the runnin...

Well trying to at least...

I'm getting back into my exercise routine that I've lapsed on for the last month and a half. I was grumpy on Saturday and Rich told me that I needed to go to the Y and get out some of my frustrations... he was right, it really does make a difference in my day to day stress level... :)

So I went Saturday, and I went again today... and my goal is to get back to the Y every day this week... except Sunday, and maybe Saturday... if I get there all the weekdays I think taking the weekend off will be fine.

Report Card Day

The kids brought home report cards today. They did great. Alex got straight A's, Ashley needs to work a little bit on Math, but is doing great, and Alyssa's report card said that she is coming out of her shell and being more social at school. :)

We had a bad scare on Saturday...

Saturday morning Rich and I woke up to Ashley running into our room around 8am telling us that Alyssa and Angela were eating medicine. We went out to the kitchen and there was packaging all over the floor. As I called the poison control, Rich was trying to make piles of all the packaging to figure out what they had gotten into. 8 sudafed's tablets were missing from their packaging, 2 childrens benadryl, 2 childrens tylenol, 1 youth tylenol, and 4 childrens dimetapp chewables. Both Alyssa and Angela had been sitting in the floor in the middle of this, so we didn't know who had eaten what, so they had to calculate the danger if either of them had ingested all of the medicine. It put them over the kilo/gram percentage that they felt comfortable having us observe at home, so they told us we needed to take the girls into the ER for observation.

Of course Rich and I are scared to death at this point. Rich was ready to load the girls up and take them by himself to the ER- when I told him that we could wait 5 minutes to call someone to come and stay with Alex and Ashley so both of us would be able to go. I called our friends, and woke them up out of bed and told them what had happened. By the time we had changed the girls out of their nighttime pull-ups and into clothes, our friends had arrived. Steve and Rich gave each of the girls a quick blessing, and then we were off to the ER.

Our local ER is great. We walked in, and registered and they had us back in an exam room before the registration was complete. The girls had to drink activated charcoal- We were able to get Angela to drink enough through the straw, but Alyssa refused. Later she told us it tasted like oil (motor oil, not cooking oil). So they had to hold her down and use a syringe and squirt it into her mouth and down her throat. That stuff is messy... and the nurse wound up with a lot of it on her arms as well as all over Alyssa's mouth and neck and chest. Then they had to hold her down to get a catheter urine sample, and to put in an iv line and draw blood for testing. Once they got done with Alyssa, we then had to hold Angela down for the catheter and iv as well. Our little girls were not cooperative at all (who can blame them?) so it took a lot of hands to keep them still for those proceedures. They might be small, but they are pretty strong and wiggly!
After all of that they were exhausted and cuddled up in Rich and I'd arms in a rocking chair and on the bed and took naps for a little bit.

By then the Relief Society network had been activated, and my visiting teacher had called to see what she could do. We had a four hour wait until they would have to take another blood draw, so we asked her if she could stop at our house and get a dvd player so the girls could watch some movies to pass the time. The ER had ordered some lunch trays for us so we had something to eat.

We watched movies and played and when the four hours were up the girls had another blood sample taken. They still resisted, but not as much as earlier that day. Then we had to wait about another hour to get the results back from that and find out if the levels of medicine were low enough that they were fine. Thankfully the levels were fine and nothing else needed to be done. We were released around 3:30 in the afternoon.

Alex got to hang out with our friends family for the day. Their kids are all older, so he got to help them help their daughter set up her classroom, and just hang out with them for the day. Ashley had previously made plans to go spend part of the day with a friend, so that friends mom just kept her for the whole day when she found out what happened.

We went home and just spent the afternoon cuddling the girls. Angela fell asleep around 5pm and slept straight through till 5am the next morning. I think she probably had eaten more medicine than Alyssa... she was telling me her tummy hurt while we were at the hospital, and was a little hyperactive that morning when we found them.

The medicine was in the cabinet over the microwave oven/hood combination that is installed above the stove. Alyssa must have climbed up on the cabinet and then just barely been able to reach the doors and pull the medicines down from up there. There were medicines that would have been much worse that they could have gotten into, so we were lucky that the ones they got into did not have any long term effects on them. I'm sure Alyssa has learned her lesson, but Angela is young enough that I don't think she fully understands what happened. For now the medicine is all boxed up and on the very top shelp in Rich and I's closet. I have to climb on a chair and onto a table to barely reach it, so it's safe up there until we find a combination lock and box that we can lock it up in.

It's friday...

It's friday and this has been a long/short week. It's been long, but all of a sudden I'm like- it's Friday ALREADY???? I feel like I haven't gotten anything accomplished this week. My house is a wreck, we barely have clean clothes for everyone. Our meals that I had so carefully planned out last week- never materialized due to people being sick, or plans being changed.

But... it's fine though. I didn't accomplish the nicely made meals, the clean house and clean clothes, but I hope I accomplished letting each of my family know how much I love them and care for them. Rich was pretty sick this week, so most of the help that he does each day for me didn't happen and I had to try and make up for that. He is such a wonderful Dad and really does relate to the kids much better than I do most of the time. He knows how to diffuse their anger when they get upset- and how to really get down and play with them. So... with him being pretty out of it for a few days I felt the pressure to keep things calm with the kids without his help.

I found myself sitting on the floor playing with the girls more. I found myself counting in my head before I raised my voice more- and subsequently not raising my voice (not to say I was perfect and didn't yell at all... but I felt more in control and less out of control when the kids were stressing me out).

So... I didn't get the tangible things done this week, but I guess I still got some intangible things taken care of.

Back to school, back to normal

Or is it? Is it ever normal around here? lol!

I'm just going to do some journaling stuff down here. This is really what I keep this blog for. To journal and remember things that happen- just everyday things that make a difference in my day.

Rich was sick yesterday so I took the kids to church without him. I think I did pretty good getting us all to church only 10 minutes late. Being it was the first Sunday we have moved to the morning schedule, and I had planned my wake up time based on how long it would take to get everyone ready with Rich's help- so with him in bed sick I was still able to get everyone ready and they even ate breakfast and we were only 10 minutes late. We walked in right as they were starting the sacrament hymn.

So we were at church and I was holding Angela. The whole family has been battling colds, but I thought all the kids were pretty much clearing up and feeling better (which is why I took them all). During the middle of the meeting I realized that Angela was just barely awake and very lethargic and running a fever. So when Sacrament meeting was over, the big kids went to their primary classes, and I thought I would just stay out in the foyer with Angela. She was feverish and had snotty gunk backing up into her eye cavities. A friend walked by and noticed Angela's face and eyes. Her dh is a Dr, so she went and pulled him out of sunday school and had him take a look at her. He said it's a good chance that she has a sinus infection and if we want him to he could phone something into the pharmacy that afternoon after he got home. I thanked him and told him that I would take her home and give her some tylenol for the fever and see how she was doing and call him later that afternoon.

So since Rich was at home sick already- I took her home and left her with him and then came back to church to pick up the kids. I was able to go into Relief Society and hear the last 1/2 hour of the lesson. It was a great lesson, and I need to find out what it was out of so I can read the first part of it that I missed. :)

By the time I got home with the older kids Angela was bouncing around and feeling better, so I never did call and get him to phone something in for her. This morning her eyes look much better- there isn't any gunky stuff in her eyes at all. This morning he called to see how she was doing. It is such a nice feeling to know that we have friends and aquaintances that are there to turn to if there really was an emergency need.

Today Rich is home again. He usually avoids getting most of the kids colds, but when he actually does get them he can really get buldozed over by the illnesses. Hopefully another day of rest and he'll feel a little better tomorrow and be able to go back to work. (not that I don't like having him home- he just has work he needs to do! :))

Grocery List

So we are at home, and before our trip my trips to the grocery store were very short sighted- grab what I need imediately for that night, or the next night. I didn't have very many long term thoughts.

So this week we have had some interesting combinations for dinner. (The begining of the week I just really didn't want to go out to the grocery store, and then on Wed night Rich's car broke down, so yesterday and today he's had my car at work and I couldn't go to the grocery store- except for a quick trip on Wed night to grab a couple things)

The first night back was fettuchini alfredo, with one chicken breast (the last one in the freezer) for Rich and I to split and some frozen corn. Tuesday night we had meatloaf and a potato casserole I made up with frozen hashbrowns and cream of chicken soup, heavy cream, and cheddar cheese. It was okay- but not up to our normal potato casserole that I usually make (I didn't have sour cream). Wed night I put a box of frozen taquito's and layered it with cream of chicken and taco sauce (my idea was to use enchilada sauce, but I was out of that so I improvised) and cheddar cheese. We had cornbread and creamed corn with that. Last night was leftovers of the previous nights. Tonight we'll have spaghetti and french bread and brocolli (I got the french bread and brocolli Wed night after going to "rescue" Rich at work with his dead car).

So... today I'm making out my grocery shopping list. I'm planning out meals that make sense and go together and are generally a balanced meal.

I've been craving my sisters pasta dish, so this is going on my grocery list- I thought I would share it because I like it so much!

Bowties in sausage cream sauce

1 (12 ounce) package bow tie pasta
2 Tbs olive oil
1 lb sweet Italian
sausage, casings removed and crumbled (my sister does this 1/2 shredded chicken,
and 1/2 sausage- it's flexible, but I like all sausage)
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 cup diced onion
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 (28 ounce) can
Italian-style plum tomatoes, drained and coarsely chopped (I just get the
pre-diced tomato's to skip a step)
1 1/2 cups heavy cream (you can also use half n half, or milk {I like to use alfredo sauce to make it an even thicker and richer sauce})
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbs minced fresh basil (I don't have this, so sometimes I add some dried, and other times I just leave it out- I don't notice it much)

1- Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook pasta in boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente; drain.
2- Heat oil in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Cook sausage and pepper flakes until sausage is evenly brown. Stir in onion and garlic, and cook until onion is tender. Stir in tomatoes, cream, and salt. Simmer until mixture thickens, 8 to 10 minutes.
3- Stir cooked pasta into sauce, and heat through. Sprinkle with basil.


Servings: 6

My kids don't particularly care for this, so I boil the whole box of bow tie pasta, and leave half of the pasta for them and just put alfredo sauce on it. The other half I add into the sauce above and stir it in.

A side dish and a little bit of french bread to clean up the plate with, and it is sooo yummmy!!

Trip Pictures

The pictures from our trip are up on my other blog...

http://newtonaaaa.blogspot.com/

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

We are home! We had a fun trip out to Utah to be with my family for Christmas and my sisters wedding. I'll post some pictures later when I get a chance. As much fun as it is to travel, we are glad to be home again. I'm also glad we have a few days here at the house to take it easy before school starts up again and we have to get back into that routine. :)