Carma is FIVE!

Ohhh man, this is the first year that Carma has really understood her Birthday. Like, she's been counting down to it for quite a while. She created a guest list of about twenty five people sometime in January. Girlfriend had a LOT of expectations about her birthday and what 'being five years old' was going to mean.

That morning she came in and showed me how tall she was. She then put her hand in the middle of her forehead to show me how tall she had been yesterday hahahahaha.

Carma's actual birthday was pretty busy - Grandma's house in the morning, preschool graduation, afternoon with Mama, swimming lessons that evening. We compromised on a 'party' and she invited her two bffs McKay and Andy over on Friday afternoon.

 Ohhh Carma June. You are brilliant and fun and musical and happy and change clothes multiple times a day and still eat Nutella sandwiches multiple meals a day and graduated from speech therapy which means YOU NEVER STOP TALKING and you object heartily to getting in trouble - you generally cry at any redirection... which is tricky since we're in the midst of curbing your sassy/borderline bossy and rude attitude. We love how spirited you are but there's a chance you think you're in charge around here and have gotten a little too dictator-ish in your demands haha. Overall you are a complete delight and you have a way of bringing joy to those around you as you dance and sing and smile and laugh. Five year old Carma is just so fun and we're so glad she's ours.

Carma is FOUR!

Aaaaand just like that, our baby girlie is four. Carma continues to keep us on our toes - sometimes she's a girly girl, all sparkles and makeup and princesses; the next moment she's rough and tumble, dirt and bugs, determined to keep up with her big brothers. We are so grateful that she is unabashedly herself and is still unaffected by outside pressures or influences.

I had worked alllll day Tuesday at the elections, so I was definitely a lame, lazy mama on her bday. Thankfully her amazing Sunbeam teacher 'Sister Karlina' dropped by a treat:

We celebrated as a family a few days after the fact, which (hopefully!) made up for a pretty quiet Wednesday. Carma June is anything but quiet - her laugh and voice and personality are a very loud presence in our home and we couldn't be happier!

April All the Things

Quinn and Eden's family came to visit for part of their Spring Break, hooray! These girlies found lots of time to play in Grandma Pam's dollhouse:

... when they weren't out for walks with Albie and Grandma, of course.

I've taken a lot of pictures of Quinn and Chuck over the years, these might be the ones that make me laugh the most though:

Allll the nostagia - lots of childhood memories of playing basketball with cousins and uncles in front yards, backyards, and churches after family dinners.

This was between general conference sessions on Saturday, so everyone had lots of stored up energy to burn:

Some more fun at Grandma Pam's house - Chuck and Quinn teamed up for a laundry room project, Isaac and Jack commandeered the kitchen table for arts and crafts, and Eden and Clyde declared the living room a quiet place to read.

Random cute pictures of Will and Carma June:

I don't remember the circumstance around this cool magnet robot looking thing BUT Will is creative and darling, so there ya go!

Once upon a time in March Paulina and Brad bought this amazing house and we all forbid her from moving UNLESS we got to be included in all the fixing upping and such.

So one Saturday in April Chuck and I loaded up the kids and drove out to be nosy and look around under the guise of "helping". Chuck actually proved himself an asset (as usual) and helped Brad in the front room. I did some therapeutic ripping of wallpaper off of the stairwell - let me just say, there is nothing like that moment when you finally get a good corner and a big piece just pulls right off. The kids had the best time ever running all over and playing and watching shows with the wee Jenks children.

For girls' night in April, we made a return trip and continued to conquer in the battle vs. Wallpaper. We also ate delicious treats. Because... girls' night.

This is just an early glimpse of the paint transformation in the front room. We all love Paulina's house and also Paulina's willingness to drive to Nampa so often to see us!

Katie had a birthday in April! And a birthday party! Clyde was psyched to get an invite and slightly less psyched when I made him pose for a picture when I picked him up. Whatever, it's what I do. Katie is a doll and she and Clyde have developed a way cool friendship this year.

Cute little Cray-Cray going to preschool with her shoes on the wrong feet.

One of Jack and Carma's favorite activities: playing 'camping' in her room with her awesome lamp.

Of course, it's hard to get a good night's sleep after a campout, so sometimes you have to take over Mom and Dad's bed, grrrr.

Random pictures from an afternoon with Carma:

I didn't pick this up at the thrift store even though it's accurate... I just feel like it would ruin the surprise- I like to catch Chuck a little off guard with my crazy ;).

Make Way - we got a pet duckling! Well, really he got us - he randomly showed up in our driveway one afternoon. Carma and Jack immediately fell in love and christened him Joe-Joe.

Sadly, we quickly remembered that a) we have a no pet policy and b) ducklings aren't really pets anyways, so we optimistically led Joe-Joe back over to the path and I guess assumed he would roll down the banks and into the water and flap a wing to say good-bye?

Alas, he did not. He just stayed on the path and followed Carma and Jack around. I also didn't see any duck families nearby in the water. At this point my phone battery was low (possibly due to how many pictures I was taking??) and I was about to be late to pick up Clyde from tennis and some sketchy door-to-door salesman came over and were a little TOO interested in the duck.

After a few phone calls, I was instructed to put Joe-Joe in a box and walk along the path until I found a duck family with ducklings around the same size and stick Joe-Joe in with them and then make a run for it. We commenced with the plan, although we recruited our cute neighbor Jazzy down the street to do the actual 'stick Joe-Joe in with them' bit. Joe-Joe still writes occasionally and checks in with us around the holidays :).

I always feel bad when we road trip without Chuck, but then I see pictures like this on the photo stream which assure me he was juuuuust fine in our absence:

Check up for the new ten-year-old. Happy and healthy and hilarious - he helped me fill out the screening questionnaire and when it came to a section about school, he suggested we disclose his tendency to be tardy there ;).

Pulled this off facebook (without credit, sorry!!). Love.

This picture is somewhat misleading since I VERY much prefer Great Value chocolate milk from Walmart, but the ratio of my chocolate milk to everyone else's chocolate milk is accurate.

Pulled this off facebook one day (with credit! positivelypresent.com). Obviously these ideas vary in effectiveness based on a number of factors including severity of anxiety. I can see a few of these helping when I feel anxious about something:

Um, have I mentioned how lame it is to live several hours away from most of our nieces and nephews? SEND ME CUTE PICTURES OF THEM PLEASE.

I don't remember the context of this conversation, but it was clear that D.I. wasn't in the plan and I sneaked it in anyways haha. So glad Chuck knows me so well ;).

Peace out, April! You were awesome!

april: Utah trip to be a book geek with Eden!

In general, I'm not a wanderlust soul or a nomad or a world traveler.

Spring 2018 weekends were a bit of an anomaly: Elko, Utah, Utah, Utah, two week break, Utah. Every trip was absolutely worth it though. 

This particular Utah weekend trip came about a few weeks prior. I had just gotten Eden addicted to cheesy (clean!) romances when I saw an announcement about a book party/luncheon with a couple of our favorite authors in Utah on a Saturday. I immediately texted Eden ("Look at this! We have to go!") and Chuck ("Look at this! I have to go! You work that weekend! I'll take the kids! Thanks! Love you!") and Eden and I bought tickets and off we went:

We drove down Friday afternoon (I pulled the kids out of school a pinch early) so that we could make it to the Jordan River Temple Open House - conveniently Nicole lives riiiight next to the temple so we sneaked in a visit with our favorite Daniels fam and they walked us over to the temple.

Prettiest tulips EVER! I was sure my kids would look darling next to them for a picture:

Didn't quite pan out, so we opted for a couple before heading into the tour. Still a little sketchy.

The tour of the temple was really neat - I love being inside temples and I want to make sure my kids get as many chances as possible to understand the beauty and spirit of temples. Here is a link to the official news release with pictures of the inside of the Jordan River temple: https://www.lds.org/church/news/see-inside-newly-renovated-jordan-river-utah-temple?lang=eng 

Photo op attempt #3 as we left the temple open house - failed to factor in the bright sunshine haha:

I hadn't been to the Jordan River temple before, but I know several couples who were married here. So beautiful - I'm excited to go back sometime with Chuck.

One last attempt at a cute sibling picture as we walked back to our car at Nicole's house - I literally have no idea why Carma and Jack were leaning backwards but it makes me laugh. 

Once I got this picture via email from the open house area after the tour, it all made sense - no picture could outdo this one. I'm looking up, Carma and Will are looking down, Jack's looking off to the side and Clyde ALONE is looking at the camera. So grateful that families are forever... it might take us that long to take a good family picture!!

We rolled into Lehi just in time to crash the end of Isaac's birthday party and get in on the water balloon action: 

Jack was thrilled to celebrate his cousin/buddy. And that picture of Will is because he didn't believe me that he had dirt on his face... which leads us to one of my favorite movie quotes: "You've got dirt on your nose, by the way, did you know?" Anyone?

The rest of the evening was spent cajoling Uncle Quinn into pushing the on the tire swing:

While I had mini heart attacks as my children sailed through the air haha.

The next morning it was GO time! Eden and I got all dressed up and fancy and ditched alll the children with Quinn (who possibly had to coach a soccer game for Isaac's team? It's cool, Quinn's a rockstar and handled it all) and headed to our luncheon... where we immediately spotted this couple and knew we were amongst our own people hahahaha:

I can't look at this picture with laughing. We are such dorks! SO fun though. 

I've been to book signings before, but this was our first time at this kind of luncheon/book signing rodeo. We figured out pretty quick that the beginning portion was just for mingling and we were totally allowed - and encouraged - to wander up to authors and chat. Eden and I had a quick freak out session and then marched over and introduced ourselves to the one and only Sarah Eden:

Instagram caption: Absolutely worth driving to Utah to be a total dork fangirl with Eden at a luncheon/book signing yesterday 🤩📚. Best moment: Eden and Sarah Eden bonding over their shared name. Look at how close they are in this picture👯‍♀️. #bestfriendgoals#ProperRomanceSoiree

So, the luncheon was so fun. Good food, an author panel with questions and answers and sooo much laughing. Another of our favorite authors, Julianne Donaldson, couldn't be there in person so she made a video instead which was way fun to watch. 

We made friends with our tablemates (we randomly sat with Nancy Campbell Allen, which was way cool) and with some of the Shadow Mountain staff and with the fun people around us in line as we waited for Sarah Eden to sign our books. As always, I opted to smile serenely and nod and not say ANYTHING when I got up close to an author because I legit get starstruck and act like a yahoo otherwise. Like, if you and I sat down right now I could walk you through the plotlines and characters of all these books but if I'm talking to the author, I can't remember reading a book ever in my life. I have no idea titles of books they've written. If perchance I'm able to produce the name of a character in one of their books, I would absolutely reference it with a character from a completely unrelated book. My normal chill manner and decent communication skills abandon me altogether - so yeah, the rarely encountered Quiet Jana makes an appearance haha.

Total dorks and we are A-okay with it ;).

The rest of Saturday was spent sleeping to get ready for a night shift at the hospital (Nurse Eden) and vacating the house so she could sleep (the rest of us). We headed over to Sam's for more cousin fun - although Clyde miiiight dispute the 'fun' part... 

If it makes him feel better, the young ones just seemed to enjoy running/scootering around like a swarm of bees with anyone or anything as their target... so I don't think it was personal ;).

Ahhhh I love cousin pictures:

Terri and Sam very generously offered to keep Carma overnight, so we left her happily ensconced in all things princess and pretty with those four girl cousins and I subjected my boys to a late-evening D.I. run haha. And enjoy this photo evidence that my curls stayed alllll day long! Eden is a wizard!

Sunday morning brought some more bonding, including Will creating a speaker out of recyclable materials with guidance from Mr. Braden:

And then we hit up Quinn and Eden's ward for church! Quick sibling selfie :). Only one person mistook me for Quinn's wife, so that was good hahaha. 

And then we grabbed Carma Junie, who quite possibly had The Best time ever at her sleepover, and hit the road home to Nampa. Yay for snacks and Imagine Dragons for helping us survive the drive home; we were so happy to be reunited with Chuck but had an amazing time in Utah. Love y'all!