I'm a little slow on reading and anything long makes me lose track real easy so here's the simple version of our life last week. We had a relaxing week, hung out at the beach, lakes, rivers, cray fishing. The usual stuff.
Dan the Lifeguard guarding his the crawdad trap that he made.
Reena the Lifeguard.
Big News! Dan decided to try contacts. He looks amazing. I've always loved his deep set eyes and taking out those glasses truly reveal he's got gorgeous eyes. Dan's also been busy 3D modeling our house and island up. He's creative, just in his nerdy sort of way :)
Brie, she's a really funny character. She often calls for Micah. She finally gets it. Micah's coming up to Washington. Our kids love Lon's kids and we are so excited to see Lon this weekend and show him beautiful Seattle. We're also excited to have GayLynn and the kids come up, too!!
Her dress is backward, her shoes are on the wrong feet, she's sucking on the wrong end of the straw.
And when she does get it right, it's only with mommy's shoes.
I had a girls night out with the girlfriends. It was so much FUN! We went karaoke and then had Frozen yogurt at Yogurt Land. Good bonding times.
My girls, my girls.So a little while ago I decided that what I'm having my girls do seem a little brainless. We read entirely way too many books about fairies, princesses, and Dora. I didn't want them to read too many of those types of books. I wanted nonfiction. I wanted them to learn facts not fairy tales. So I checked out books about dinosaurs and prehistoric life. From then on, Reena has learned so much about dinosaurs and she absolutely loves them. She asked me one day "mamma, there are girl dinosaurs, too, right?" Absolutely yes was my answer. She then proceeds to tell me that she wants a girl dinosaur birthday party. She and Brie both love dinosaurs. They play dress up a lot in their cute tiaras and fancy shoes, tutus and such still, but a hilarious sight of them is dressed up like fairies but playing with dinosaurs.
Reena is such a cute little girl. She saw how fun Debrie's birthday was so she's been planning her birthday party.
The House. Yay!!! The view was better than we thought! It's spectacular. We could see the Space Needle and we're 20 miles out. We could watch the 4th of July fireworks from our house. We could also see the Temple and that's pretty sweet.
I'm very excited as I'm getting closer to being done with my Real Estate class. 3 months of studying makes me feel a bit smarter. I've been using my right brain a lot but creativity doesn't make you feel so smart and after months of not using that side, I'm picking up on math again and learning about adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), amortized loan, balloon payment, blanket loan, buydown, computerized loan origination (CLO), construction loan, conventional loans, Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), Fannie Mae, Farm Credit System (Farm Credit), Farmer Mac, Farm Service Agency (FSA), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), federal funds rate, Federal Reserve System (the Fed), FHA loan, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc... I can tell you what these are! I've been telling Dan that when I'm 30, I want to be as smart as him. He's amazing with the computer and programing, I'm not going that route but I can at least do something that gets both sides of my brain working. But I'm mostly excited to use my people skills in more ways than counseling and listening to sad stories I hear at the House of Hope.
It's amazing how much you become like your spouse after being married for a while. It's a good thing because that means you become one in a sense. But at the same time, it's creepy.
Today a guy in our ward shared his testimony about family history and in it he emphasized how important it is that we record not only the events in our lives but our feelings and thoughts in our journal. Our posterity will know us more through how we feel about certain things than the every day events in our life. I've decided that this weeks' post will be more along the line of what he was talking about. So I've decided to pick the following topics.
Please don't feel obligated to read this. It's really LONG and just for our family history purposes.
Two weeks ago we had a fireside in our stake about living a simple life. This was really good for Dan and I especially because this is the week we are finalizing all of our picks for the house. Keeping or omitting ugrades if you will. We've been trying to focus on what we could do to apply this principle spoken of in that fireside. Of course it would be easier to be humble when everyone around you is humble. But it isn't that way around here. People live in million dollar homes. Home prices on average are about half a million. On Wednesdays I go and visit the homeless because personally I need it. Seeing those people helps a lot. You can see through our blog that I go all out to entertain my children and sometimes a reminder like this is needed. Children don't need much to be entertained. Hearing Dan's brother trying to downsize and seeing where our hearts have been, we're thankful for good reminders so our hearts could be in the right place.
Along the same topic...
Our ward had a Spring cleaning plus scout project on Memorial weekend. It was a full event starting with breakfast and then a lot of weeding, raking, digging and such to beautify the place. Dan volunteered to cook the breakfast food (he's become an amazing cook. Seriously, his cheese crisps have become full of food like bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, and cooked in the oven!). Apparently the church have gotten rid of committees such as these because things have gotten so elaborate and people are so involved in busy work that they have less time to work on what's more important. The Relief Society presidencies have sent out letters asking that the sisters giving the lessons focus more on the lesson itself rather than the DECOR and such related things. The primary is no different. My friend JoLynn told me when we had a talk about this topic in April said that her friend was a secretary for the Primary in the ward and the president gave her a huge list of things to do for a small primary event that was comparable to a list of things to do for a reception. My question is why? My answer: The media and technology. With blogs and facebook being so prominent, everyone tries to be better than everyone else. My ward does this and her ward did this and the list just keeps on getting bigger and wards are competing with wards and people are forgetting the simple life. Not to say we're not guilty of this, but a reminder is good. Also
, how could you visit the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked when you're so busy getting decorations for the Ward's party? How could we attend to our family if we spent most of our time in busy work.
Blogging is so much fun, because at the end of the year I print it out and it becomes our family history. I get a full page full of comments and chats with my friends on facebook but I don't really print that stuff out. It's the things we do together as a family, not our busy work that counts.
2. Reena, my tap and ballerina girl had her dance recital at a beautiful theater in Seattle. She performed quite well for being in front of hundreds of people. She had a great time and she looked beautiful.
Daddy brought flowers while mommy was the stage mom and surprised us with a huge bouquet of flowers from Pike Place Market. $7. Wow. Love that place!
Our house is coming along quite nicely. More and more I'm less and less nervous. Our big focus when we were designing it was character and distinction, not size. Dan has read in a designing book that what makes people most happy is that their house has character to it rather than a big box or more room. I hope the rest of the house will turn out the way we intended it to be.
3. We had a visit from uncle Lon. We showed him our house and took him to Alki. The kids adore him. Brie would call out "uncle Lon uncle Lon" just to get his attention. Lon and Dan, I think are the most alike. They could talk all night nonstop. After a little while of not being able to talk to uncle Lon, Reena came to me and asked "Why does daddy talk so much to uncle Lon? I want daddy to stop so I could talk to uncle Lon" She then got a dinosaur book out and started scooting next to Uncle Lon to get his attention. It was so cute. She also said something so funny that got both her daddy and uncle Lon to laugh to tears. We were reading the book of Mormon stories and she asked her daddy about a couple pictures and her daddy told her that we're reading this square and we'll get to those other squares in a little while. Reena took a little thought and then said "well daddy, these are actually not squares, they're rectangle!" I thought it was funny but Dan and Lon just thought that was the funniest thing ever and laughed so hard they had to wipe the tears from their eyes. Oh we had such a great time with Lon and can't wait to build more wonderful memories with him, GayLynn and the boys!
