Merry Christmas Uncle Dave!!

Dear Uncle Dave,

Since you are currently in Afghanistan serving in the Special Forces, we wanted you to know that we are remembering you this Christmas. And since we can't mail anything to you because you're in a top-secret location, we wanted to make this video as a Christmas card for you. We want you to know that we pray for your safety every day, and the children also remember you in their individual prayers every day. The video is a little long and probably a bit boring, but hopefully you can feel our love from it!

Part one here.

Part two here.

Love,
Chuck, Linda, Hayden, Stewart & Adaline

My Little Princess

It was so exciting and unexpected to have a little girl after 2 boys. Adaline is, I believe, a sweet and mild-natured girl, as evidenced by her early personality. But it is so interesting the impact 2 older brothers have on her. They bring out a wild side that she simply does not manifest in their absence. Today there were 2 little episodes that had me laughing that illustrated my point perfectly (well, they don't involve anyone acting wild in this case, though that does happen in our home most every day.)

This morning the kids had friends over (we are in year-round school and are currently tracked out.) When the other moms came to pick up their children, I looked down and there I saw my daughter dressed in her Cinderella dress-up holding a toy pistol. That's my girl!

Then, while I was heating up dinner, the kids were playing in the kitchen. Adaline had her doll stroller loaded up with miscellaneous toys as she typically likes to do. She was sitting on the floor pretending to feed one of her dolls a bottle. In comes Stewart and I hear her saying, "Don't kill my baby!" He ignored her pleas and shot the doll anyway. She lamented that he killed her baby and went back to feeding it. Back he comes and shoots it again. This time I am turned their direction, so I see her begin to protest again. Then I see her pause and she turns and reached into the stroller behind her and pulls out the pistol from this morning and goes back to feeding her baby. Bottle in one hand, with the pistol in the other hand, and her arm cradling the baby. She's ready to defend herself!

Now THAT is a little princess with older brothers!

Cleaning Off My Desk

In May 2009 we had a reunion with my family in Kitty Hawk, NC. For FHE my sister Karen interviewed my parents so that the grandchildren could get to know their grandparents a little better. It was fun to hear some things about our parents that I hadn't heard before, so I asked if I could keep the answers. I finally realized this is the perfect place for me to put them so anyone in the family can get them easily. She only wrote down the aswers, so I'm using my best guess to fill in what the questions were:

1. Did you have a pet when you were a child?

Mom- Yes, 2 dogs. Heidi was a Collie and Midnight was a black lab. Also 1 bird called Cutie Pie

Dad- Yes, a dog named Ralph (Linda's edit- I think this was a Beagle?)

2. What was your best/favorite subject in school?

Both- Math

3. What did you enjoy doing as a child?

Dad- model trains, plastic models

Mom-sewing

4. Who was your best friend?

Mom- twins, Barbie & Debbie

Dad- Carl

5. What was your favorite food?

Dad- Ice cream

Mom-rolls. One night at dinner she ate 10 rolls!

6. Did you get an allowance?

Mom- Yes, 25c/week and $1 for each A on a report card

Dad- 25c/week

7. Who was your favorite historical figure?

Dad- Davy Crockett

Mom-Helen Keller

8. Do you remember a favorite Christmas present?

Mom- a Jan doll with clothes

Dad- a pistol with plastic bullets

9. What do kids have now that you didn't have then?

Both- Computers!

For Alice

This post is for Alice. My pictures are on a different computer than my email, so hopefully you can just download what you need from here. Can't wait to see the finished product....

Prayers & Memories

Yesterday evening Chuck read on the internet about the Perseides Meteor Shower which is occurring for several more days. You can read about it here. Last night from midnight until dawn this morning was supposed to be the part of the peak. So we got the children up at 5am this morning and laid on the lawn in our backyard with them for about 20 minutes watching the sky. (until Chuck had to leave to attend an early morning temple session and I wanted the kids to go back to sleep for another hour so they wouldn't be bears today.) I was particularly motivated to get them up since Hayden from time to time comments how he wishes he could see a shooting star, but had never seen one. Perfect opportunity. I used to have trouble falling asleep as a child and I remember spending hours staring out my window at the stars. I saw many shooting stars over the years. Thinking back, I'm sure I watched a couple of meteor showers but didn't know it at the time.

So this morning as we lay there we saw several in the first couple of minutes. But they were all over the sky, so it was easy to miss them in your were looking in the wrong direction. Hayden was getting disappointed because we'd all seen one or two except him. I said a silent prayer asking that he could see one too. Moments later there was a very bright one that flashed across the sky and we all saw it, including Hayden. I was so grateful that my small prayer had been answered and I told Hayden I had prayed for him to see one.

It may seem silly, but I can't even tell you how many of those small prayers I have answered. Even ones that aren't about really important things, but our kind Heavenly Father answers them because He loves us and they matter to us. Just like any loving parent, who doesn't give their child everything they ask for because it wouldn't be good for them, but does grant many of those small wishes that let the child know that they are loved. That is exactly what I believe He does for us.

Like my silly little prayer when I was trying to find a hamper in a store a few weeks ago. I had a furniture piece made for a hallway hamper, but ended up not being able to fit something in it as I'd planned. Multiple online and store searches had left me empty handed and even plans and efforts to make or modify something were not turning out successful. So while I was in Home Goods the other week I planned to swing by the hampers and said a quick little prayer that I could find something that worked. Even as I said it I thought I must be very silly for praying about such a thing. But I just didn't have any more time to spend on it and the piece of furniture was useless so far. I searched the 2 aisles and just as I turned the last corner, there on then end cap was a beautiful fabric & wire hamper that appeared to be just the right size. What's more - there were exactly 3, the exact number I needed! I couldn't believe it. I bought all 3 and tried not to get too excited until I could get home and confirm that they fit. Sure enough, they did fit with just 1/8 inch clearance on all sides. It was a small miracle to me, but a miracle nonetheless. Of all the silly things to pray about, yet it was answered.

And this mornings answered prayer meant so much more to me, because it was for my son's happiness. It was so exciting to watch the stars in the sky and see the occasional streaks of light. What a blessing it was that we could ALL see them and share that experience. It was a moment that I will remember and one that I hope will be a fond memory for my children as well.

Email Memos

Do you ever email yourself? I do. Is that kinda like talking to yourself? I don't know. I don't do too much of that, but every once in a while I'll say something out loud to myself. I'm not one to carry on a conversation with myself. But when there is something I want to remember, sometimes I'll email it to myself. I guess it's really like making a note, without the paper mess. But I feel similarly about email clutter as I do about paper clutter- I hate both, but who doesn't. I also struggle with both.
Well, tonight I'm trying to clean out my email inbox a little bit and I was scrolling through the dozens of messages to find ones that I could quickly delete without thinking about what I wanted to do with them. I found this one that I had emailed to myself back on April 30, 2009. (Yikes! that takes a lot of guts for me to admit that I still have emails in my inbox that old- but I don't have many of them.) I still found it amusing to read tonight. Here it is, cut and pasted directly from the email:

okay... Blogger doesn't allow cut and paste, so now I'm retyping it in, verbatim....Ugh...

So this morning at breakfast I asked Hayden not to rock in his chair. When he asked why not I explained that the chair was not made to be rocked and therefore it could damage the legs and break the chair. His response, "I want my own rocking chair. I know! I'll ask for one for Christmas, because you can get any kind of present for Christmas. Well, not ANY kind. If you're little and you want a remote control airplane, you'll get a remote control car instead, because that happened to me."
I couldn't help laughing.
Love it.

Bad Dreams

We're supposed to be packing right now to head out of town first thing in the morning, but Adaline is rinning a high fever, so our trip is on hold/possibly cancelled. She started running the fever yesterday afternoon and awoke this morning around 4am with a temp of 104.3. I gave her some Tylenol and stayed up for a while putting cool wet cloths on her forehead, neck, etc. trying to bring the fever down faster, since it was high enough that it was making me a little nervous. After a little while she said she was feeling better and she wasn't burning up so much so I told her I would tuck her back in so she could sleep. To this she replied

"When I close my eyes me see a show (aka TV or movie) and it's scary."

I asked her what her bad dream was about and she said something about Elmo and scary monsters so I tried to help her recreate the dream with a happy twist. And she was back off to dreamland for a few more hours...

Speaking of bad dreams last Saturday night I heard Stewart one night. His closet shares the wall with one side of our room and I awoke to what sounded like someone in the closet moving around the hangers. Then I could see the hall light turn on outside my closed door. So I got up to check on him and he was laying in his bed as if he'd never been up. He'd had a bad dream and didn't want to talk about it nor did he remember being in the closet. I turned off the hall light and turned on a small lamp in his room and he was asleep again in no time.

The next morning I asked about his dream and he still didn't want to talk about it. So I told him that I'd had a bad dream once when I was about his age that was so vivid and scary for me that I've still not forgotten about it. In the dream I was with my little sister, Karen, and we were in some industrial park type complex and it was getting dark. We found a little alley between two buildings with a chain link fence at the end and we curled up to sleep there for the night. When I woke up (in my dream) her arm had fallen through the chain link fence and was being eaten by dogs. I was so terrified that I think I woke up crying and for years I could feel the awful feeling in my stomache that I felt in my dream whenever I recalled it.

Sharing my dream seemed to help Stewart feel better about sharing his and he told us that he had been dreaming about baby tigers in the bushes and they were attacking him and Adaline. He said he had jumped on one and crushed its mouth.

Are you drawing the same conclusion that I did when I heard that? I'm thinking that the noise in the closet may have been my little sleepwalker checking the bushes for tigers...