Heaven (At Least For 2 Boys I Know)

 Last Saturday, Rez and Ocean were in

 2012 Reading Marathon

at the local public library.  

 At 11 am  they went to a room at the library that was filled with books and they got to sit and read until 5 pm, no mom to tell them they needed to do their job or their homework or anything.  Just pizza, snacks, capri suns and BOOKS.  Every hour there were door prizes.

Ocean won Behind the Curtain.

Rez won Ender's Game and ear phones.

Poor babies, forced to sit and read for hours on end.

Less Food = Less Blogging Study Finds.

Apparently my blogging is tied to how many calories I eat.  The less calories I eat, the less I blog.  So, I am getting skinny, but you are not being kept up with our lives.  Luckily, I ate a lot of calories yesterday, so I can update you today:)  Look around, I want to keep things in order of when they happen, so some of the posts are backdated.

On the brighter side, I have lost 9 lbs this month, 3" off my waist and 2" off my hips.  Plus my arms and legs are thinner.  It just takes a while to track everything I eat and I have been trying to go to bed earlier, so no late night blogging.

This may not look like much, but I haven't been able to zip up this skirt for months.  It is nice to be getting my body back.

Scouts, Scouts Everywhere.

I think it is inevitable, when you have boys and are a member of the LDS church,  you will be involved in scouting.  Scouting takes up a lot or our lives.
Rez was a cub scout and is now a boy scout.
Ocean was a cub scout and is now a boy scout.
Mo is anxiously awaiting his 8th birthday, so he can become a cub scout.
Trip was a Cub Scout Den leader and is now on the scout committee, plus he is an Eagle scout.
Even Lily could not avoid it forever.  She is now the Cub Scout Committee Chairman as part of her calling in the Stake Primary.
We send (or take) our boys on camping trips and plan our summers around scout camp.  Right now we are preparing for the Klondike Derby next in a week and Rez and Trip going snow camping on Mt Rainer at the end of the month.  Lots of cold weather gear needed.

Even more amazing are all the people who have been involved in scouting through their lives and how they still support it.

The Chief Seattle Council and Seattle Mariners had a Friends of Scouting fundraiser luncheon today.  They wanted to have some actual scouts there sitting at each table, so Rez got to leave school for most of the day and go.

Some of the baseball players from the Mariners were helping to put it on, and from what I could glean from Rez, they were auctioning off tickets, they must have been really nice ticket and some other nice things because they raised $275,000

Here they are saying Thanks.

Chief Seattle Council's Facebook paige.

I want to add my thanks to all the community for supporting our boys in scouting.

Tights or Muppet, You Decide

Zelda got these awesome tights for Christmas from her Aunt and Uncle in Spain.

She is adorable in them.

Snow Is Falling...

all around.  On the roof top,

On the ground...

And on the chicken coop...

Monday there was no school for Martin Luther King day, then Tuesday school started 2 hours late, only to have it start snowing about the time the kids went to school and so they were sent home 2 hours early.  

Wednesday and Thursday the snow has been falling constantly.  The chickens won't come out of their coop, even when I left the door open.  I don't blame them.  I haven't been out much either.

The kids have been loving it.  They have been sledding, having snowball fights, building snowmen and generally having fun in the snow.

When they got tired of snowball fights.  They had nerf sword fights, in the snow.

There are icicles on the side of the house.

It has been fun, but I will be glad when it rains and melts all the snow:)

Snow Day!

Saturday afternoon I looked out the window and what did I see?

Snow, snow falling everywhere!

This is our first snow this winter, so the kids were very excited.

We pulled out all the snow clothes and boots 

and Zelda got her first play in the snow.

It snowed more during the night and on Sunday.  I was gone all morning to some meetings and Trip let the kids play in the snow all morning.  When I got home everyone was wet and exhausted.  I made them go to church anyway.  We were sent home from church after only Sacrament meeting.  Our meetings start at 1 and if we had them all, it would put us going home about sun down when things would get icy.

The kids had more time to play in the afternoon.  

Daphne is the only one that braved it.  

Luckily she had Ginger to keep her company.

 Some of the other chickens didn't walk in the snow.  They stayed under the trees where it was bare.

It is supposed to snow every day until Thursday when it is supposed to rain.  Oh glorious rain, I love you washing away the snow after the fun is over!  

Not a New Year's Resolution.

I have been pregnant or nursing almost constantly for the past 14 years and I am done.  I think our family is complete, so I am not planning on getting pregnant again (I am alway open if the Lord has other plans).  

Also, I weaned Zelda a few weeks ago.  She was biting me and then I needed to take some medicine that I couldn't take while nursing, so we unexpectedly went cold turkey.  She hasn't even missed it.  

Now, I am in the process of retraining my body how much food and exercise it needs.  When I was pregnant or nursing, I would get so ravenously hungry and I felt like there was a bottomless pit in my stomach.  I could eat and eat and eat.  It is amazing that I am not heavier than I am.  Also, I felt a responsibility to protect my body that was sustaining another life, I didn't want to do any exercises that I could get hurt.  Bike riding was out (I am not a good bike rider and so the possibility of me crashing is great), and I had also developed Plater Fasciitis, but I have been wearing Orthotics for 2 years now and my feet don't keep my from doing anything anymore.  

I am ready to reclaim my body.

One of the Christmas presents we got was a family membership to the YMCA.  I can exercise without the kids interrupting me or climbing on me.  Wow!  It takes longer since I have to drive there, find parking, get everyone out of the car and checked into the child care, etc.  But I am not nursing Zelda anymore, so I have some extra time.  (She regularly nursed for an hour at a time a few times a day.)  I also get to take any of the exercise classes they offer.  I have been going to a yoga class twice a week and love it.  

Along with all of this exercise, I have been tracking and limiting my calories with www.sparkpeople.com.  

I watched two of my sisters do it and their results were amazing.  I am not planning on doing it forever, or for even very long.  It takes a lot of time!  But it is a great tool for retraining my body how much food it needs,  learning portion sizes and being aware of the food choices I make.  I don't know that I have lost any weight yet, it has only been 1 1/2 weeks, but I have so much energy and some of the extra fluff around my middle is not so fluffy.  My face doesn't look puffy in the mornings like it was starting too.

The last part I should mention is that when I was starting all this, we had a lesson in Relief Society at church about repentance.  It was taken from Elder Christofferson's talk The Divine Gift Of Repentance, from the last General Conference.  One of the things he says in it is, 

"Without repentance, there is no real progress or improvement in life." 

I thought to myself, I want to make real progress, so I am going to repent.  I took my desires to make changes to my eating and exercising habits to the Lord and asked for help to take care of the body that he gave me. 

I have been so blessed.  I have not felt very hungry (certainly never ravenous) and I haven't felt deprived even though I am eating considerably less than I used to.  I often end the day a few hundred  calories short of my minimum.  It has been really fun to look a the numbers and see what I didn't get enough of that day, fat, protein or carbs and then find additional things to eat to balance it all out.  Some nights I have to eat a serving of ice cream because my fats are too low that day, and I really could use the extra calcium.  Another unexpected delight is that food tastes so good!

This happening right around new year is all coincidental because I don't really make new years resolutions, but here is to a new me!

Leo

After Daphne brought home Louie, Ocean really wanted a parakeet too.  He had to earn the money (which he did in a day) and he had to read the book (he did that in a day too, at least the parts we thought he needed to read).

Then we went to pick out another parakeet. 

We knew that if we wanted them both to be hand tame, that we should keep them apart, at least for a while.  Ocean started training Leo that day and by the end, he would sit on his finger and his head.  

The kids weren't very good at keeping them apart and by that night, they were both sleeping in the same larger cage we had just bought.  

Louie and Leo get along fabulously (they are from the same pet store).  And I am so glad they have each other.  They are a lot of fun.   When one gets out now, they both get out and are both pretty tame.  

They don't know any tricks yet, but they are starting to try to fly around (their wings are clipped though).

They will fly down from places and walk around the floor or the table.  They loved perching in the Christmas tree before I took it down.  

Here they are eating out of Harvey's hands.   

  

They have turned out to be really fun pets for the whole family.

I guess we are just a bird family.

 

Who Is That? or Fun With Hair Color

I tried out brown for a few weeks, but it just didn't look like me.  So, I had to bleach it out and add some high lights.

Louie

Ever since watching "Rio", Daphne has wanted a pet bird.  We did a little research and decided on a parakeet.  I told her she would have to buy it herself.  She saved her money and finally had enough for a bird, but not for the cage.  Santa gave her a bird cage for Christmas along with some parakeet care/training books.  

She spent the last week reading the books.  And then we went on a search for a parakeet.  We knew that we wanted a baby one, and from the books we knew how to tell if a bird was still very young and should hand tame easily.  (the black bands on their heads start at the cere).  We knew that there was a new Petco store that had recently opened close by, so we went there first thinking that they might have young birds and they did!  

They had about 20 young parakeets.  

Daphne picked out the one she wanted and named him Louie.  

(We don't know yet if Louie is a boy or a girl, as he gets older we will be able to tell by the color of his cere.  

Boys have blue ceres, right now his is purpley, another sign that he is young.)

It was so hard not to start training him right away.  But Daphne let him settle in and started his training first thing the next morning.  

(Good thing we changed to the 1-4 pm church schedule.)

She started out by using 2 perches and 

teaching him to step up to the next one when it was offered.

Then she moved on to having him perch on her fingers.

And other people's fingers.

Now he perches on her shoulder and is very at home there. 

He also loves to explore the Christmas tree and my potted plants.

Here I am when I had pet parakeets, Chipper and Osmosis.

Juggling

I have found that I can only juggle a finite number of things, and as new things come in, other things get dropped.  I really enjoy going to the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers camp that I belong to, but I only have gone once this year, I think.  It was low on the list for the year.  As Christmas time came in, with all the kids home and us busy, blogging got dropped and my Words With Friends game time was greatly curtailed (sorry everyone who is waiting for me to take my turn).
The kids go back to school tomorrow.  I should be able to get caught up:)