Just Stuff

It's starting to warm up! It gets above freezing every day, so the roads are starting to melt! We still have at least a foot and a half of snow on the grass, but the busy roads are all clear so it makes driving easier. They call this time of year "the break off" or "melt", instead of spring. While watching General Conference we were admiring the beautiful blossoms on tv, and watching the snow fall outside our window. The sun sets later and later every day, it's crazy. It's 9:30 p.m. right now and it's still not totally dark outside.

Madison is 16 months old today. We've been having a rough time lately. She is not only getting more and more independent and wants to do everything her siblings can (without help), but she's pretty feisty. She likes to get reactions out of people and is often picking a fight. She'll walk up to Bryn and just hit her, or they'll be playing together and she pulls her hair or hits her. She likes to chant (or scream) "No! No! No! No!" Or "don't! don't! don't!" Is it obvious what words she's heard a lot in the last couple months? We're trying to eliminate them from our vocabulary when we are talking to her, but it's difficult sometimes because she does sooo many things that she shouldn't. We've had to go to the doctor 3 different times this week and it's pretty tricky. She refuses to hold my hand in the parking lot, and prefers to run away from us or just stop walking altogether. But she is pretty heavy, especially when I only have one arm to hold/wrestle her with since I am carrying Kelsey in her car seat with my other arm. But I am trying to spend more time with her, give her more one-on-one time (when at all possible) and lots of loves. She is normally such a sweet girl, we are just going through a hard time. She gives me lots of opportunities every day to practice patience, and obviously I haven't learned my lesson yet :).

I mentioned we went to the doctor's 3 times this week. Ty and Bryn had their well visits (5 and 3 yr.) and Kelsey had an appt. too. She weighed 9 pounds, 9 ounces, a day before she turned 5 weeks. I'm so grateful to have 4 healthy, happy, and beautiful children.

Last night I went to the grocery store and there were 2 moose in the parking lot. Cool.

Tyler has been playing soccer the last few weeks. Every Thursday night and Saturday morning. They don't really play much soccer at all, at least not the normal soccer games. They just play different games like freeze tag, and learn different techniques like dribbling and kicking. But it's still lots of fun for him, and probably better this way. Normally Kenny just takes him and I stay home wiht the girls, but one time I got to go and I love to watch him run his little heart out and have so much fun.

My license expired on my birthday back in February, so this week I finally got around to going to the DMV and got an Alaskan license. I guess I'm official now--and legal too, which is always good.

I am constantly behind on everything and can't seem to keep up with cleaning and what not. But I've decided it's only as stressful of a situation as I make it. I'm the only one who feels anxiety when the house is messy, so if I can just learn to chill out, things run much smoother. I love on the movie The Incredibles when the mom calls Mr. Incredible at work and says "we are officially moved in!" And he's confused because they've lived there for 3 years, but she says, I just unpacked the last box, so now it's official. That's probably going to be us too haha.

It turns out I have a second cousin that lives here with her husband and son. My mom put me in touch with her and it's so nice to have some kind of family, and a friend. She's been really kind to invite us to things and help me get a little more settled in. Ironically, her ward was the ward we went to for the first two weeks we were here, while staying in the vacation rental. We went over to their house for dinner and FHE a couple weeks ago. I also went to a gymnastics place for the kids to have "open gym" with her and her son, David last Friday. And I went with her to her ward's book club the other night, and joined them for this month.

I'm sure there's more I wanted to write about but I can't think of it now, and Kelsey's asleep so I better catch a few minutes while I can.