We, Ourselves & Us

So I am a terrible blogger. I’m going to stop trying to “do better” because then I do way worse. I will now finally post about Christmas.

We had a fun Christmas Eve, opening presents. Kyr got her geek on with many a Doctor Who item.

And here she is opening her special present from Dad.

She’s gotten to take it out for a spin a couple of times since then and had a lot of fun. She’s quite the shot; I guess she really does take after her mom.

We spent Christmas Day with Rob’s family. We always have so much fun with them. We have especially enjoyed seeing how much the excitement levels go up as we’ve added more and more adorable children to the gaggle. They are all a hoot. Here are Christian & Meggan’s twins, our newest additions, Polaris & Lorna:

The other children are very fast so they mostly show up as blurs in my pictures. However, I did get this cute shot of Lex (R), Lorna on Grandma’s lap, and Morgan sitting on Daddy Matt’s lap.

We were very surprised to see it starting to snow just a bit…and then a bit more…and then quite a bit more…and then like a real amount of snow. It was quite the surprise. We had lots of fun driving home in it. It only added about 30-40 minutes to our 90 minutes drive. Ick. It was so worth it, though. We had a wonderful day and really enjoyed our time with family.

So today I turned 40 years old. So. Weird. I don’t mind it; it’s just weird that it happened. I don’t feel like enough of a grown up to be at this point. Unfortunately, the last several weeks have been pretty miserable for me. I’ve hit a cruddy run of not-so-fun health stuff. Luckily, today was finally a good day…but even during the cruddy weeks there were a lot of good things. I was reminded of just how amazingly awesome my husband is at taking care of me, especially when I’m feeling super wimpy and whiney. I was also reminded of how incredibly thoughtful, compassionate, and just crazy sweet my dear daughter is. She spoils me rotten.

Case in point…because I’ve felt so yucky and been so immobile, the living room has been pretty cluttered and we’ve had no Christmas decorations up. I wait all year for Christmas. I LOVE to walk into my living room and see holiday décor all over the place. It has made me sad that it wasn’t coming together. We decided yesterday that we really wanted to get at least our tree up and decorated. Rob cleaned up the living room and got the tree in place yesterday. We were going to decorate today. So, I get up this morning and go out into my living room…and unexpectedly find my daughter. (She normally goes home from seminary to her best friend’s house and I pick her up later.) Last night, she’d arranged for her friend’s mom to drive her home to our house after seminary. Not only had she decorated the tree, she’d had Rob get more of the decorations down and decorated most of the living room. She also cleaned the kitchen and changed our guinea pigs’ cage. Happy birthday to me!! She almost made me cry! I probably would have if I hadn’t been so surprised. How did I get such an angel?

I had fun finally getting to go spend some time with my bff today which was so nice after being stuck in my house for quite a while. I didn’t feel up to going out for lunch so she spoiled me by going and picking up some lunch. I woke up to over 20 Happy Birthday messages and they kept coming all day. That was crazy fun.

This was definitely a good birthday to remember what amazing people I know…especially the two I live with. Life is good…all 40 years of it.

So, I have often thought that, at some future point, I’d go back to school and earn a degree…in something. I’m not especially interesting in gaining a paying profession since I love the flexibility of time I have to pursue my excessive number of crafting/homemaking interests. However, between common sense & the oft-repeated encouragement of Church leaders, I do feel like that would be a good idea. It did make it hard to think of what I’d like to get a degree in, though. Mostly it’s been kicking around in the back of my head to be decided at some future point.

More recently, I’ve been looking for something to offer my life a little more focus. I’ve really been struggling to feel like I can get myself out of neutral. I realize that it is a side effect of some feelings of depression I’ve been struggling with since being diagnosed with diabetes a couple years ago. It’s mostly manifested itself with this blah feeling. It would be bad timing at any point but it feels like especially so with where Kyr is right now. This is our time to get some pretty specific things done…driver’s ed, catching her up to grade level with math, etc. I can make all these great plans and then just can’t get them going. I’ve been praying and pondering on how to get things going.

Enter BYU-Idaho’s Pathway program. I’d heard it announced at church but had no idea what it was. Since Rob’s in the elders’ quorum presidency, he had to attend a meeting on it. When he came home from that, he mentioned a couple of things about it and I started realizing I was kind of interested. It’s a program designed to give people a chance to further their education through BYU-I’s online program.

To participate in it, they require that you have 15 credits on campus. For those who don’t have that, they created Academic Start. It’s a year-long program that basically helps you meet that requirement without having to go to Rexburg. You do 5 credits for each of 3 semesters. You do most of it online but have a 1-hour weekly gathering with other students. After the 3 semesters of Academic Start, you can transfer to being a full-time online student. You can continue through to a degree, all with a discounted Pathway rate that’s about 1/3 the normal tuition rate.

I’m so excited to get to do this. This is actually where I spent my one semester of college, although it was still called Ricks College then. There was much that I enjoyed about being there. Even though I’m sure lots of things have changed, I’m looking forward to the fact that the classes will integrate the things I believe in. I’m hoping that having this class providing a schedule of things that have to be done by a certain time, will help me be better about following through with my planning with Kyr and just generally get my brain going.

This also neat because this is a rapidly expanding program for BYU-I. They’ve almost doubled the number of locations offering this option in the US and adding more outside the US too. They’re also working hard to expand the choices that are available to people who want to earn the degree completely online. It’s so cool to think of the opportunities this can provide.

So I register for class tomorrow and start class September 10. For anyone who is interested, you can check it out at http://www.byui.edu/online/pathway.

Sorry if this prattled on but I’m really excited about this. I feel like it’s an answer to my prayers and just a generally good thing. I wish it was September 10 tomorrow!! (It doesn’t hurt that it would mean summer was ending, too.)

So today my darling girl is receiving her Young Womanhood Recognition Award.

This is awesome. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it’s basically our church’s equivalent of an Eagle Scout for the young ladies. It focuses more on personal development than Scout skills but still requires a huge amount of time and commitment. She’s been working on it since she turned 12. I’m very proud of her especially because I’ve been really bad about working with her so she’s had to be far more self motivated than is really the plan.

When I think of how much she’s grown and changed since turning 12 and entering the Young Women’s program 3-1/2 years ago, I definitely get the mommy tears going. There is so little left of my little girl in there and so much of my future adult daughter showing through. It’s excitingly horrible and wonderful all together. She makes me laugh; she makes me smile; she makes me wonder where she came from but always in a good way. I’ve often said that she’s just what we asked for in a child but that’s not really the whole truth. She is just what we would have asked for plus so, so much more that we wouldn’t have dared to ask for. She has such a thoughtful nature and enjoys being good.

It’s been very interesting to watch her develop her own unique sets of interests and skills. As many of you know, I enjoy a lot of paper & sewing crafts. She has found her own home in drawing, writing, some painting, and computer game design. It’s so fun to see what she manages to produce.

I sometimes look at her and feel the utter panic of someone who can’t stop the sands of time from running through her fingers. (Kind of like in Krull when they were dealing with Widow of the Web and the big white spider. Ew.) I see so much grown up in there but she will always be my little baby. I love you, Kyrieanna Banana and I am so proud to be your mom.

So our little guinea pig babies are a week old now. It’s been years and years since we had piggy babies and boy, have I missed it. I can’t believe how cute these little guys are. It’s so funny to watch how well developed they are, looking largely like little grown ups, and then see how baby they can be with wanting to stay all together and going to sleep when you wrap them up in something.

They’ve had the fun of having a couple of friends come visit with their little kids. I’m not sure who has more fun, the moms or the kids. If anyone in the area is interested in bringing their kids to meet them, just let me know. We like to share. :-)

So here’s some more pictures and little video clips. Just know, they’re cuter in person.

So we were sitting around in our living room tonight and I realized I was hearing baby piggy noises coming from our guinea pig cage. I jumped up and ran over there and saw this:

I looked over in the corner and saw another baby tucked up under Mommy Melody. She moved back a bit and I saw another one laying underneath her that appeared to not be moving. Looks like it was a stillbirth. After another minute or two, I discovered there was yet another baby tucked under Mom for a total of 4 living babies. I wouldn’t have guessed she was going to have so many!

Here are some pictures of the different babies, all within the first hour or so after they were born. We’ll have names for them soon. We’re including quite a lot of pictures and video of them because we’ve had a lot of interest expressed so please just skip over them if you’re not that interested. :-)

I can’t believe how much cuter they’re already getting as they get dried off. They love to huddle up under Melody. We’re loving the colors they’ve turned out to be. It’s definitely helping me remember how much we love having baby piggers. Here’s one more shot of one of the babies I took just a few minutes ago at less than 3 hours old.

Love the white toes and what will be a cute rosette right on top of his head, just like Daddy’s.

I love Thanksgiving and especially Christmas so I’m always glad to get to Halloween  because that means we’re heading into those holidays. We’ve enjoyed our Halloween/fall stuff this year and thought we’d share.

We did some pumpkin carving this year…far more than our usual one. We bought actual pumpkin carving tools and found the carving much more fun than we previously have. Looking forward to trying something more fancy next year.

We also participated in the chili cook-off & Trunk or Treat at  church. We were lucky enough to  have almost all of Rob’s family there with us, including 2 of our 3-year-old nieces and an almost one-year-old nephew (of whom I apparently have no photos).

Maude’s dragon is roaring and trying to get us.

Vee is the cutest little witch you’d want to see.

The Cute Cousins

Kyrie shows you can look cute even if you survive an apocalypse of some type. Rob’s showing off the cowboy version of his evil twin identity. (He grew the goatee just for this and we dyed it black.)