Resolutions

It's funny how resolutions are so easily set aside amidst the everydayness of life (and yes, I just made up that word).  I really did want to keep up this blog, but writing a blog just doesn't seem to be my forte.  There are so many things that happen in my life, most of them not blog worthy.  But, since I have created no less than eight blogs in my lifetime as the world's worst blogger, I really should strive to keep at least one up-to-date, shouldn't I?

So, with that last paragraph in mind, I make a goal - not a resolution - to keep this blog slightly more up-to-date than has been previously accomplished.  (Doing this may require adding bits about school into the mix, or I'm likely to keep only that blog written in!)

We are headed into another birthday celebration of my eldest bairn this Saturday.  I was able to procure some tickets to a Broadway touring show for dirt cheap, so she got to go see "The Wizard of Oz" last Friday with myself and her daddy, who happens to be one of the world's biggest fans of the Judy Garland movie,  from which the musical is derived.  I kept it a surprise until we got there.  She knew we were going to a play, but didn't know which one.  As we walked toward the building, she looked at all the massive posters declaring the season and spied the one for Wizard and I knew she was hooked: that was what she wanted to see.  So, when we went inside and I let her see the tickets, jubilation ensued once suspicions were confirmed.  There was no one more excited in that momen than my daughter.  And they all wonder why I love surprises so much!

My lovely twins are turning eight in September.  In Church, this means that January and February are months that involve an evening devoted to "Eight is Great!"  My girls are blessed in that they have now been able to attend two such meetings - one the week before we moved and one the week after we moved.  It's fun to watch how differently they react to it.  One twin is very serious about the entire thing - baptism is serious business and all the information must be accumulated and digested appropriately.  The other twin is content with the information heard in the first meeting and no longer feels anxious, so this last meeting was a trifle boring ("When do we get to have cupcakes?" boring; "We've already sung this song a thousand times, it's getting boring" boring).  But they are both a heap more excited about the whole baptism and Faith in God award program than the eldest one ever was.  She was excited for Achievement Days (now called the rather blase Activity Days or the even worse 'Young Girls'), anxious about baptism and no one ever explained the Faith in God program to her so she doesn't care about it at all.  (That I shall be endeavoring to change this year as I help her set plently of goals to accomplish so that she can earn the award before she's twelve.)  I believe I shall have great success with helping the twins learn everything they can about baptism and ordinances and everything else associated, and we will have lovely evidences of learning for them to show people at their baptism.  Plans are brewing strong in my head!

We moved into a lovely home almost two weeks ago, after being told we needed to move unexpectedly.  I love how the Lord has His ways of moving us where we need to be when the time is right.  It was an excellent experience for me to teach my girls about the power of prayer coupled with hard work.  We must have looked at nearly twenty houses before we saw this one...after we had put down money on an application for another.  And then there was that instant feeling of "this is it, where we need to be" before running into roadblock after seeming roadblock trying to get in.  But, finally, we are here and about half-way unpacked (or slightly more) and loving the space and the light that this house has to offer.  There are children aplenty for my girls to play with - not all of them male like the last street (a fact that I didn't mind very much, they were lovely boys, but my girls need some feminine examples right now) and a much larger primary at Church.  I have room in which to begin those businesses I really want to get off the ground.  Don has room for both of his businesses without taking over the family room again...so many wonderful things about this home!  And the ward.  The ward is just what I needed.  Just what I've craved for a long time.  Intellectually and spiritually stimulating and filling.  At least last Sunday was.  I'm hopeful for a continuation!  The Relief Society presidency came to visit tonight and we actually had a wonderfully lovely chat.  And I didn't feel like a weirdo or outcast at the end of it, like I'm wont to do after meeting with people from church normally.  Is there hope for me?  I'm so filled with optimism, you've no idea.

Girls have their day away tomorrow so I shall work hard at getting their rooms organized whilst their occupied elsewhere.  Surprise them will lovely put-together rooms on their return.  Sounds like a lovely idea.  To quote Nephi from "Liken the Scriptures": Life could not be better!

Happy Birthday, Rora Grace!

Last Wednesday my eldest daughter turned the ripe old age of eight years old.  It has been so fun and quite an honor as her mother to watch her the last six months as so many things started to 'click'.

Birthday Pie!

We decided to have a friend party on the Saturday, when all those that attend school could come, so for our family party she chose to have pie.  Pumpkin pie.  And she was happy.  The gifts from the grands were opened and loved, gifts from sisters played with, and gift from Mum & Dad delighted in.  This is the gift I hunted down:

She outgrew her 1/8-size violin awhile ago, but having the money for a new one proved very tricky.  I did, however, recently discover a great guy named Todd who sells violins out of the back of a church 30 minutes away, and only charges $65-$75 for the violin, bow and case.  That is where I got this beautiful violin (the picture can't do justice to the beauty of this instrument!) for the extra $10.  Hoorah!

Saturday's party was sort-of based around the American Girl dolls.  For invitations I found a fun picture online with with eight first dolls all listed with their dates and a caption above that said, "Choose your favorite American Girl".  Well, the challenge was on!  I added Aurora's picture on the side with the year of her birth (2004, the four matched the fours in the dates of all the dolls), and bigger than the other dolls.  If I have energy to put a picture on at some point, I will.  The info was at the bottom of the invitation.  Aurora handed these out to her favorite people, including our 25 year-old neighbor and two couples that are in their sixties and winter in Arizona.  The winter visitors were such sports to come; I made them quiche in appreciation. :-)

Aurora's favorite doll is Kirsten (it's the doll she owns), so I turned our Holly Hobbie cake pan into as close an approximation of Kirsten as I could.  (The yellow frosting is meant to be her braids....)

I decided to play a couple of games from America's past with the children who came.  We played one called "Corners" (there are four corners the children run to while "it" counts to ten with eyes closed, then calls out a number.  All children at that corner are out and must come to the center.  You play until there is one left...if you can get there within a few calls) and another one she requested called "How Many Miles to Babylon" (a variation of Crack the Whip with a dialogue-d rhyme at the beginning).  After those games, we had a relay race.  This is where it comes in handy to be the wife of a reenactor.  I hauled out our dresses and aprons and had the girls race by threes to put them on, then run back and tag another girl (or boy, we had one at that point), run back with them, undress while the next girl dressed, and then run over and build a log cabin out of lincoln logs.

Here are some of the kids with the dresses...












                 ...and building the log cabins!







The last project before having cake was to make a journal, since the best way to know about anyone from history is reading their journals.  These were my own invention and really easy.  I cut some white paper about 1/2" on two sides and then used card stock for the covers.  Take five pieces of paper and one cover, fold them all in half.  Center the white papers inside the cover paper and the Paper punch one hole in each end, through all the paper.  Take a piece of string (about 18" long) and thread the paper from the inside so you can tie it on the outside.  I tie in a square knot first, then put on a bow.  Last part is to decorate the cover however you choose.  One ended up looking like this:

Ending in cake and presents, then giving each girl a baggie and letting them raid the leftover Valentine's candy rounded out the party and each girl left happy.  And I don't have to be creative like that for another few months...the twins are old enough now to ask for a party all their own and haven't had one yet so I don't mind.  

A couple of things Rora got for her birthday are books about baptism.  That is our curriculum for the next two weeks: learning all about baptism, its covenants, and its meanings.  She's excited and eager to learn, which makes me excited to share with her all of my love and knowledge of the subject.  Yippee!

A New Year, A New Resolve

Our family has been working diligently to get on a regular schedule with our stewardships.  The girls have been trying hard to remember to keep things tidy and help clean the house.  We have officially combined a few different "chore" systems to help the girls manage their stewardships: Accountable Kids, HAnnDi Household Work System, with ideas from Values Driven Family, and "The Parenting Breakthrough" as well as a checklist I made myself (yeah, how ever did I do something myself with all these books and systems to guide my path?) and the combination just might work.  We'll see!  At least the downstairs has maintained a level of tidiness it hasn't seen in a while (since Aurora grew old enough to drop things wherever she wanted to on the floor and would do that repeatedly until the floor could no longer be seen - all within the space of one minute).

I think it might also help that I have more vocal/piano/violin students and my new children's choir classes meeting here and I have to stay more on top of making sure they follow through with putting things away (and only getting one item out at a time).  Hopefully we will all get the hang of the newish system relatively soon so that we can get more actual school time in.  We've been slipping in our school time because I can't think in chaos and I've needed to get rid of clutter and mess.  Goodwill has profited greatly from my need to be less cluttered!

Speaking of my new choir classes...I am rather pleased with how the first classes went this last week.  We went over proper posture and breathing; matching pitches; listening and following directions; then we learned "Hot Cross Buns" (our first technical piece).  At first I didn't know how quickly we'd be able to progress, but I have great hopes of moving quickly...if I can get the youngers to gather some better focus.

Aurora is starting to get serious and worried about getting baptised (and yes, I know that is spelled "wrong" according to American reasoning, but you will discover my British spellings scattered throughout this blog when the mood hits me!).  We are going to be spending a lot of time the next couple of months talking about the doctrines and principles and ordinances of our faith, then defining terms and defining those definitions and writing it all down, then reasoning everything and writing that down until she understands as well as possible the commitment of baptism and wants to make that commitment.  (We are also studying the virtues of honesty and kindness in the same manner....)

The twins are so excited about learning, and that makes me excited again!  It's been so long that I've been struggling with Aurora's antagonism toward "official" learning that a lot of my spark disappeared.  It's returning in full force (partly because of my house becoming a nearly livable space, too, I admit) and my time is spent gearing up for some exciting prospects.  One plan is to start a trip around the world: I am making passports and world adventure books for the girls, so we can begin our journey soon.  Other plans are a bit more hush-hush for now, but it's good to be excited again - thanks Aria and Belle!

Back from Vacation

Not really a vacation, but rather a forced hiatus of over a year!  My poor laptop gave up the ghost about fourteen months ago, and my time online has been very limited since.  But thanks to the unexpected receipt of a check from a lab company due to overpayment of charges five years ago I have finally been able to obtain a new, wonderful, beautiful laptop!  My obsessive researching capabilities found me just about exactly what I wanted for less than half the original price.  Yippee!  I am one with the living yet again!

That said, a year of stolen moments on the computer has taught me just how unnecessary much time on the computer is.  My time now is very measured when I make time to get on the computer.  I must now complete a schedule that allows me to accomplish the work that needs to be done on the computer with a running list of those things so that I don't forget and aimlessly wander or fall into careless ways.

But the purpose of this little entry is to give thanks for a way to continue this blog so that family and friends might be able to catch up with our little family.  (But not so late at night, because thinking and writing gets supremely difficult when one's brain is half-dead.)

Conference Days

Don is in California selling art again this weekend (and hopefully making LOTS of money that we can use to keep the wolves from the door) and the weather is reminding me that we are in Arizona by maintaining 100*+ temperatures.  We have been going a little bit stir-crazy, but we are enjoying Conference as much as our lap top and its hearty efforts at maintaining a live stream.  We lost it a couple of times today, and spent a good five minutes figuring out how to get audio when the Church team forgot to turn on the speaker's microphones for their stream (finally ran radio.lds.org with the video from new.lds.org until they realized and turned on the volume).  Aurora had fun with her Conference packet (I downloaded every possible packet and printed my favorite) and even sneaked into her daddy's office and watched the last session wrapped up in a blanket in Daddy's chair, alone with his large-screened computer.

Tomorrow we are headed to the Stake Center to watch on the BIG screen (and get out of the house...and feel a bit more Sabbath-like).  I'm excited.  Conference packets for the twins all ready to go and Rora has her scripture tote ready to go.  (Bought her a new set of scriptures (her first) and a nice scripture tote (looks like a lunchbox) for school.  She's excited about it.  I love it when my children get excited about anything religious!

The Memory Box

I read last year about someone who had a good system for memorizing, but it involved a box.  Boxes for 4x6 index cards can be really pricey!  I hunted for months for one that I could afford (basically, next to nothing), but couldn't find anything.  Finally, I asked my husband if he could make me a memory box and showed him what I needed.  It was the best present I've received in a long time when he finished it for me!  A couple of pictures and explanation about how I use it.

This is the box.  It looks and feels heavy-duty with the wood and large brass, doesn't it?

The inside of the box has three compartments (next time I would probably go with four compartments; my only change).  The first compartment holds the memory items we go over every day.  The second compartment (right now holding our continent and planet flashcards) will hold items that we have mastered to the point that we feel once a week is enough.  I will put dividers in there when we are ready which each have a day of the week on them.  The last compartment right now holds pieces that we have yet to work on.  Later it will hold items that we only need to go over once a month (dividers for each day of the month).  My ideal fourth compartment would be used for what I am using the third compartment for now.  In the corner of each card, I put a letter to represent what that item represents: S for scripture, K for knowledge (general), M for music, P for poem.  Thinking about it now, I might change that around a bit...it's just something to help me quickly pull out a card from a certain subject.

The twins wanted to do school this morning, so they pulled out the letter flashcards and we went through them, covering the letters and all their sounds.  Then we pulled out the math manipulatives and counted circles, then guessed how many pieces would fill a circle (in fourths, twelfths, fifths, etc).  They can't get enough of learning, and it's exciting to watch!  Now if I can just rekindle that excitement in my somewhat lazy six year-old....

Turning Four!

Yesterday the twins turned the ripe old age of four.  This is a big step for my girls, which didn't go unnoticed by them.  As Aria informed me, "When you're four, you don't take naps; when you're four you don't suck your thumb".  A bit of nice self-motivation there!

To begin the day, I asked Daddy to make them some crowns to wear.  They kept them on the entire day (and even have been wearing them today).

After lunch we headed out, venturing into the heat to find some amusement for the afternoon.  I had printed off coupons from Chuck E Cheese (they have some great promotions if you check out their website and sign up for the birthday list), so we headed there for their twenty free birthday tokens.  They shared some with their older sister and played and played, even getting to "meet" the overgrown mouse in person!

(One great thing about homeschooling is that places like this are ALL yours during school hours!)

After the fun time at Chuck E Cheese, we drove on over to the mall and played in their playplace for a little bit, looked at the puppies, and got samples from the chocolate store.

We had one more place to stop at before going home: Walgreens.  It was there that I let them each pick out their birthday present.  The one and only thing that they have wanted and craved and begged for many months now: A Pillow Pet.  The mall had them, but at a much higher price.  So, $20 a girl and dreams came true.  Happiness for a four year-old!

I was a bit worried about what I would do for a "cake" since our oven is broken, but finally struck gold (after a suggestion from my  mother; thanks,  Mum!) at the infamous Waldemart when I happened upon a couple of loaf size angel food cakes.  Sliced in half, slathered in strawberry jam and covered in cool-whip and flower sprinkles and stabbed with curly candles, they each got a cake, making their day absolutely complete in their eyes.  (The cakes were strawberry flavored, so they were pink, and we served them with strawberries and strawberry ice cream.  See a theme yet?)

Aurora gave them each a princess puzzle and a birthday card, then gave them each a headband that she had decorated with barrettes and pieces of paper (there is no stopping that girl!) and our birthday celebrations were completed.  All in all, a good day (even if the drive was super hot, darn the broken air-conditioning)!

Sinful Pleasure

We made the most perfect recipe for a Godiva-like dark chocolate ice cream the other night and I just have to share it.

7 oz bittersweet chocolate, broken
1 1/2 c heavy cream
3 egg yolks
1/3 c water
1/4 c sugar

1- Whip the cream in a chilled bowl until soft - not stiff.  Set aside.

2- Beat the egg yolks until they appear to be the color of a lemon.

3- Dissolve the sugar in the water in a medium saucepan over high heat.  Let boil about 2 minutes, not letting the water evaporate.  Turn off heat and stir in chocolate until completely melted. (Will be thick.)

4- Add the hot chocolate mixture to the egg yolks; beat until smooth and thick.  Continue stirring until the mixture comes to room temperature.

5- Stir about 2 Tbs of the cream into the chocolate mixture.  Continue adding 2 Tbs of cream at a time until the mixture is the same consistency as the cream.  Then fold the chocolate into the rest of the cream.

6- At this point you can add to an ice cream maker and let freeze.  If you don't have an ice cream maker, you can pour into ice cube trays, cover with foil, and freeze for about 2-4 hours.

Absolutely lovely with a raspberry coulis.  Very rich and perfect in small doses.  We girls really liked it!

What We Did on our Summer 'Vacation'...

Alright, it was a working vacation, first to California and then to Utah to sell art.  Work for Don, play for the rest of us, most of the time....

Aurora churning butter.  Isn't her hat adorable?  I spent hours on it, saving it from its near-death state and turning it into a period correct piece of attire.  Wouldn't you know she promptly lost it between California and Utah?

Rora working at her lemonade stand.  Her repeated cries of "Lemonade and water - only one dollar!" helped her sell out...twice...in less than thirty minutes.

The wonderful couple who own and run The Yankee Reb mercantile got themselves a dog, part dalmation and part chihuahua, and named her Belle.  Of course Belle thought the dog was her own dog - wouldn't you at three?

Forgot the camera when we went to the beach, but our next stop in the journey was the bridge over the Grand Canyon on 89A.

Spent a lovely Sunday afternoon at Temple Square.  Aurora was disappointed that we couldn't go inside and get sealed, or at least touch the temple.  One day....

A couple of pictures from This Is The Place...

In Orderville (finally - we got to stop in Orderville, yay!), riding into Bedrock.

And finally, a couple of other milestones from the summer:

Don't knock it - this is a MAJOR milestone with the twins!  (She'll kill me in ten years, but it's worth it!)

How was your summer?

New Dresses!

Here are some photos of the latest dresses I made my daughters.  I bought the fabric a year or two ago and have been waiting for the perfect pattern to present itsself.  I love it when everything comes together perfectly!The girls are pleased with their new outfits, and I must say that I love the thought of 1870's fashion that is in the dresses.  Happy mama, happy girls....

Our Fun Educational Parties

Last fall we began hosting a history party once a month for our Ancient World studies.  (Loosely) following the outline of the Story of the World - Volume One we decided to celebrate and learn about different periods of ancient history and their locations by joining with some other families and playing games of the place/period, making crafts or doing activities, and eating food.  It's been monstrous fun.  A lot of work, mind you, but a lot of fun, too.  So far we have done:

Archeology - Our introductory party, to help introduce the children to the history of the ancient world the way archeologists learn about it.  For this party we set up a dig for the kids, gridding the sand at the park with string and burying bones, dinosaur eggs, and pottery shards for them to find.  One lucky kid even found a coin!  Then we made our own aboriginal hand print paintings by spitting kool-aid over our hands.  We ate food that we had to 'dig', like 7 layer dip.  It was a favorite party: mine still talk about it sometimes.

Ancient Egypt - Aurora dressed like an Egyptian princess and we made Egyptian necklaces out of paper plates, painting them in jewel colors.  We made our own little mummies using egg cartons as the sarcophogus and little cardboard people as our base to wrap in strips of white cloth.  The food wasn't as much of a hit, you can imagine, with figs and dates for the kids to try. 

Ancient China - The children learned how to play the game Go and they each tried their hand at Chinese calligraphy.  I served them quinoa with molasses, rice and stir fried vegetables and rice sticks.  There weren't any leftovers.  :-P

The First Thanksgiving - To break it up (and also to fill in enough months) and go along with our overview of American history (it's first grade; overviews are great!) we celebrated the First Thanksgiving in part by eating succotash and learning Five Men's Morris. 

Ancient America - We didn't want to overlook the ancient Americans!  We deciphered Native heirogyphs, made our own totem poles, and even ran the gauntlet (whilst being pelted with mini marshmallows)!  By this time I couldn't find any more authentic native recipes from the time period so we celebrated with a feast of Navajo Tacos (the kids weren't complaining!), everyone bringing a part to share.

Ancient Greece - Our last party was about ancient Greece so I decided it would be fun to have an authentic Olympic Games for the children to compete in, minus the naked wrestling, of course.  We had two distance races, standing jump, long jump, javelin toss and discus throw.  Then we made laurel wreaths for our heads.  The athletes feasted this time on some great Greek food: spanakopita, baklava, rice pilaf, pita & hummus and olives with grape juice to wash it all down.

Monday is our celebration of the Revolutionary War time period and I need to do some hurried research to fill in enough appropriate games, crafts and food for the eager children. 

Like I said: fun, but a lot of work!

Spinning Heads

Do you realize how many ways there are of learning the exact same material? And how many different people and companies have come out with books and other things to help learn that material? It is seriously enough to make one's head spin! Just when I think I have things pretty figured out with what I want to use, what I want the girls to learn, and how I am going to apply all of the methods I've read about...I read again and discover that there are yet more things to look at! This last week I found out about some more people with LDS curricula. Hmm...ever so tempting. Just wish I could look at everything and see which ones will work best for our family before I save the money and buy some of these!

Part of the problem comes with my being too ambitious. They must learn everything, and learn it NOW!

Yesterday Aurora developed a rather sudden interest in karate and has been pestering me to learn it for school. Couldn't make me happier, I can tell you! I have been dying to teach her some TaeKwon-Do, and for her to have an interest in it will make it that much easier.

Today for school we made a book. This came about because yesterday Aurora decided to write one. She cut up pieces of paper (all sizes, all small) and would draw a picture on it, then come to me and ask me to write down what she wanted to say for that page. Turned out the story was about a ballet and all the different people coming onto the stage. Very well thought-out for a five year-old. I was impressed. So today I thought we'd make an official book to put it in. Then we had company for awhile, whilst I babysat for a neighbor and ended up making a book for each of them, writing new stories. This is when I became really impressed with Rora. She drew pictures and narrated to me the story of "The Nutcracker", which I diligently wrote down for her. The neighbor girl's story was much shorter (Red Riding Hood climbed a mountain and then went to a party with Clara from Rora's story). After the neighbors left, I made a book for Rora's first book and we mounted all her little pages on construction paper within it. While I was cutting out the construction paper, though, Rora was hard at work on another piece of paper, drawing the binding for a hardcover book, then insisted that I put that as the cover for her book, so we had to mount that inside the binding of our little paper book. It was so cute and she was so proud!

It's moments like that which make the head spinning worth it.

How Early is Too Early?

You might think this question is only about the twins, who have decided to start waking up earlier and earlier. It's definitely harder to train two that 5:30 or 6:00 is too early for wee little girls to be awake than it was just one. Granted, I am really tired. Constantly. But the question is only partly about that. It is also about Aurora. When should I teach her certain things, and do I want to do too much too early? Goodness knows, I don't want to push her and turn her off learning. I also don't want to stick her on a conveyor belt of my own making. But I do expect a lot from my children and want to give them the best education possible, in academics, as well as in spirituality and in life.

The last month has involved my freaking out. Considerably freaking out. I think it would behoove me to sit down and calm down, praying for a few more weeks before taking a drastic measure and sticking Rora in a charter school (I've looked at around twenty in the last two weeks) just so I stop freaking out. The best advice I have received about this is that Rora is only just five and home schooling is supposed to be fun, so CALM DOWN! It is true. There are so many fun ways to learn those things that are important to learn. And, with the Culture Passes from the Library, we will have many, many fieldtrips to remember that learning is fun.

And I can always try making black-out curtains for the twins' room to fool them into thinking it's night time.

Introducing the Jolleys

My name is Aubree Jolley. I am wife to Don and mother to Aurora, five and precocious, and Aria & Isabelle, identical two year-old twins. We live in Arizona, cramming five people and two businesses into a little three bedroom condo, but at least we have a roof over our heads, as Don says! Don is a self-employed architect who works out of the house (bye-bye bedroom!) and also an ink-line artist who sells his art mainly to the history loving crowd - more specifically, the Civil War loving crowd; most specifically to Civil War reenactors. Don is a Civil War reenactor himself. I would term myself a living historian. I like the clothes, food, and day-to-day activities of history: the part that makes history actually live.

I home school the children, which is a funny thing to say when the oldest isn't even old enough to officially "be in" kindergarten. But we are half-way through a kindergarten curriculum, and the twins are getting their letters and sounds down, which is rather funny because they know their alphabet and letter sounds, but you can't understand most of what they say yet. My home school philosophy is slowly gathering shape. I've been researching and researching and researching and researching different philosophies to form my own from the best of each separate theory. There are so many similarities in the best philosophies that it is becoming fairly easy to see what needs to be done. I follow the best ideas from Thomas Jefferson/Leadership, Classical, Montessori, Suzuki, and Charlotte Mason. The core beliefs of each have a lot of similarities, such as surrounding young children with greatness, through literature, music, and example. Cram their heads with foundational or core knowledge repeatedly until that knowledge is imbedded deeply enough so know conscious thought is required when it is needed. Let them be self-motivating and the masters of their own education so that it becomes a life-long love affair with learning. Use great mentors and be a great mentor yourself. Don't move from one thing to the next until the concept is mastered, no matter how long you need to stay with that concept. I could go on and on about the similarities I've discovered! The biggest thing is to escape the conveyor belt mentality, because it is there even in different branches of home school philosophies. There are fanatics out there who only ascribe to one philosophy with all the rigor of a religious zealot and can't see beyond that to find the good in anything else, thereby creating their own conveyor belt without realizing it. I try to, as Aurora would say (quoting "Bridge to Terabithia"), "keep your mind wide open".

We are LDS and as such are devoted to the cause of Christ. I love being LDS and knowing who I am, where I came from and where I'm going. Since I've been blessed to have this knowledge from birth, I sometimes take it for granted. But I am working feverishly to try and make our house a sacred, special haven where the peace of the Spirit can abide and our children can grow into capable and eager disciples of Christ.

These posts will contain a smattering of this and that, hopefully becoming an all-around portrait of our family. Speaking of family...there are a couple of two year-olds who are smack dab in the middle of mischief stage trying earnestly to destroy the house. I'd better go and put family first....