Things that Made Me Smile This Holiday Season

The older we get, the more low-key our holidays become.   We are not on anyone's party invite list and it's frankly rather difficult to get excited by gift-giving when my kids are so specific with what they want.  It's been many years since I've had an ounce of confidence about buying an article of clothing or jewelry that my kids will actually wear and that's usually mostly what they want.  So they send me links and I try my best to also make sure they have something that's kind of a surprise to them.   I miss the days when I could get Lego sets, art supplies, or doll accessories, depending on the kid, and know that they would be totally happy.  

With Adam on his mission and Cami taking her turn with the in-laws, this holiday season we had 3 of our 5 kids here.  Combine the smaller crowd than usual with the fact that Glen only had a couple days off of work and Ellie left for Alabama on Christmas night (to help babysit Lucie), and it felt even more low-key than normal. 

Here are a few things that made me smile this holiday season...

Our Christmas tree is wild and crazy with a collection of ornaments from the last 30-years.   I keep thinking that I *could* get a second tree that we keep all fancy and matching, but, frankly, that's not me and I rather love our Tree of Memories.   We collect ornaments from our travels and special events from the year and it keeps getting more and more covered with ornaments every year. 

These missionary ornaments that we've gotten for each of our missionaries while they were serving, were making me extra smile this year.  This is our second Christmas without Adam at home and I found myself looking at that ornament a lot!   We did laugh when we put them side-by-side and saw the height differences between them.  Cami and Emma are both 5'5" in real life and Adam is 6'2", so the ornaments are definitely not to scale.  Haha!

 

I also really loved this ornament I found at the BYU-Idaho bookstore.  I love the artistic style of it and I love that BYU-Idaho is a new special place for our family now that Ellie attends there. 

 
Here's a collage of some more of our Christmas activities...a trip to Temple Square to see the lights, more treat making, our Christmas Eve devotional with my Mom and Heather, and some Christmas Eve pajama pics!  

 

We were completely charmed by the Christmas Eve Nativity pictures sent by Cami with their Christmas crew in Alabama.  Lucie was Garrett's parents' first grandchild too, but they now have four (almost five), while we are still anxiously awaiting number two! 

Christmas morning involved a delicious breakfast made by Emma! 

She could sell her  gluten free cinnamon rolls...they're amazing! 

Actual gift opening was  slow and pretty low-key...

We loved being able to talk with our missionary {and Cami, Garrett, and Lucie} for a while...

Some other Christmas break happenings, included a temple trip with Emma, Glen, and I....

Dropping Ellie off at the airport on Christmas night for a red-eye to Alabama so she could help babysit Lucie...

WE introduced my Mom and Heather to the game, Codenames, and totally laughed when both of our last names were *almost* in the first set of words! 

We saw a beautiful sunrise...

We saw our first American kestrel in the wild on one of our morning walks...

We ate a lot of good food, including this charcuterie board that Emma made us for NYE. 

I got a bee in my bonnet and took down the Christmas decorations before New Year's this year.  As much as I love our tree, I hadn't loved the way the rest of the decor came together this year, so I wanted it down while I actually had helpers in the house to make it happen.   I went straight for the Valentine's decor...

Also, I couldn't help but throw this great photo of Spence and Kiwi in here that my sister, Heather, took of them.  Much like when he was a teen, he still doesn't love sitting still for photos, so I'll take what I can get! 

Hope you all had an amazing holiday season filled with many happy memories!  

Welcoming in 2017

Anyone who knows us in person will likely not be surprised to find out that Glen and I have very sedate social lives.  I could do a whole blogpost on some of the reasons why, mostly having to do with the strong introverted tendencies of my spouse, but we'll save that for another day.   Suffice it to say, that New Year's this year was no exception to New Years of past and was quite sedate.  

Spence went to hang out with friends.   Emma and Adam went off to the New Year's dance at church and Glen also went to chaperone.   

Emma and Adam  had a great time there hanging out with friends and dancing the night away! 

But that left only Ellie, me, and Ellie's friend Caroline as the keepers of the home front.  I was teaching the lesson in YW the next day, so I kept to myself most of the night to keep preparing, and the girls watched a cheesy movie, ate snacks, and I joined them for the ball drop.    I couldn't figure out how to open the sparkling cider without a bottle opener, which was missing, or find the "poppers", so we just cheered.   Then went to bed.   Yay for 2017! 

The next day we went to church, then had our traditional "Dinner in Bethlehem".    It tasted delicious and I thought it looked so lovely on my brand new dishes.  

Here is all of us gathered to eat it.  

Adam made the baklava all by himself.  

Then on Monday, since it was technically a federal holiday because New Years was on a Sunday, we all went laser tagging.   It was quite fun, especially having Glen there.  He's been working long hours lately and we like spending time with him whenever we can.  

After that, there was a whole lot of this going on....

Happy New Year 2017!!!

Our 2015 Month-by-Month!

Here's a glimpse of our 2015 broken into month-by-month highlights!   Read to the end to find my big announcement. 

January--We found  super cheap plane tickets to CA and introduced the kids to their first taste of DisneyLand!

February--Cami got accepted to BYU!

March--Spence's Make-a-Wish trip finally came through and we all went to NEW ZEALAND!!!!

April--Emma went on her 8th grade trip to Turkey!

May--Spencer hit his 3-year mark of being in remission from leukemia!

June--Cami graduated from high school, gave the valedictory speech, received several scholarships, and in general left HS with a bang!

July--I spent my third year in a row at YW camp!

August--road trip to Idaho, Colorado, and Utah!  We enjoy spending time together as a family  before dropping Cami off at BYU.

September--We went to Michigan to witness what turned out to be BYU's biggest football flop of the season.   On the bright side, we got a super cute picture of our family, which had it included Spence and Cam, surely would have been on our Christmas card this year!

October--I stayed completely awake through all four sessions of General Conference and took detailed and colorful notes.  

November--Epic girls' trip to San Diego to celebrate my sister's 40th birthday, which was awesome,  even if it did mean that I lost my brain afterward.

December--Glen and I went on an awesome anniversary trip to NYC.  

And, finally why you're all reading this far in the first place, I have decided that after nearly nine years that it's time for me to retire from regularly posting on this blog.  It's simply too much of a distraction for me and less of a joy than it once was.  I still may post here occasionally for out-of-the-ordinary occurrences, but I will no longer  be challenging myself to blog about the day-to-day happenings in our family anymore.

Alright, alright...you can stop cheering now.

 I will truly miss this blog as an outlet and definitely miss the connection I feel from it.  

Now I will leave all of you, dear readers, with a little Lara silliness in the form of a video we made for my dad's fake birthday today:     

How Far Would You Drive for a Good Burger?

Glen has had a lot going on at work lately, which means that we didn't see much of him this Christmas break.     Even his nights and weekends were consumed with work and in the end he was only able to take three days off during the whole two-week break (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day).  

So when New Year's Day rolled around and we'd hardly seen Glen, we decided to take a little family trip to Baltimore for the day.   Glen's first job out of college was at an accounting firm there in Baltimore, and we lived there in the summers of 1995 and 1996, and full-time from 1997-1999.    His company had corporate passes to the zoo, science center, and aquarium and as such we visited all three on a very regular basis when we lived there.     

Despite the fact that Washington DC is only about 50 miles from Baltimore, in the fifteen years since we've lived here, we've only trekked back to downtown Baltimore a handful of times.  Especially since without those lovely corporate passes to see the sites, the admission prices are astronomical!  

So when  my brother Tim purchased us a family pass to the National Aquarium in Baltimore for Christmas, we were all VERY excited!    It's been a number of years since we've been there, and it was a delight to go back and introduce the Aquarium to the younger kids!   

Because of the holiday, it was pretty crowded, but not so crowded as to hinder our enjoyment of being there together.   We  oohed and ahed  the whole way through, but especially enjoyed the dolphins,  jellyfish, and rainforest exhibit!  

It's not often that we visit places all together as a family anymore and we thoroughly enjoyed our day at the aquarium and look forward to going back a few more times this year! 

After our visit to the Aquarium, we did a crazy thing.   

We drove an additional 80 miles past Baltimore to Pennsylvania so we could  eat here...

It's called Ruby's Diner and Spence and Glen have had a bit of a fascination with it since eating there one time on the way home from a BYU football game.  

The kids and I ate there just this past summer when Cami was up in Philadelphia  at her leadership conference, but it had been a few years since Glen and Spencer had been able to.    We were all quite excited to partake in this very unhealthy, but delicious meal of burgers, sweet potato fries, and milkshakes (with a lactose pill of course).   I'm sure the employees thought we were a little crazy for having come all the way from Virginia for burgers and fries, but everything was pretty darn tasty and what the heck?  New Year's only comes around once a year and it was a fun way to ring in 2015!

    I slept most of the 130-miles back home, which meant I arrived back home well-rested, well-fed, and well-satisfied at being able to spend an entire day together as a family!  

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Counting Our Blessings from 2013

Counting our Blessings

2013 in NUMB3RS

Glen and I celebrated 20 years of marriage in December

Spencer is 19 months in remission from leukemia

With Emma's 13th birthday in October, we became parents to 3 terrific teenagers

Ellie turned 8 and was baptized a member of our church

Spence graduated from 12th grade at FCHS and headed to JMU this past fall

I pulled the youngest 2 kids out of school to be homeschooled

We logged 3000+ miles this summer on a road trip to Boston, Acadia NP, PEI, and Quebec City
Lara has the privilege of spending time each week with 26 fabulous young women at church
We join with 5 other families to participate in a fun, educational homeschool co-op that is the key to mine and the kids' sanity this year

Cami left us for 2 weeks at Christmastime to help build houses in Mexico

We spent about 6 weeks without a kitchen, while ours got stripped down to the studs and rebuilt (we still need to paint and refinish the floors)
Glen gets to be the song leader for  100+ primary children each week
Cami is taking 3 AP classes which is about equal to the number of hours she sleeps each night
Emma finished the 6th grade and graduated from elementary school

We finally replaced the deck that sent Glen to the hospital last year to get 7 stitches

Adam won 1st place in the pinewood derby and went on to place 4th in districts
We consider the friendship and love of family and friends to be among our most PRICELESS blessings!

Happy New Year!!!!

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"We turn with hope...to Him who walked the dusty paths of villages we now reverently call the Holy Land, to Him who caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and the dead to live. To Him who tenderly and lovingly assured us, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life'(John 14:6)." 

The World's Most Boring New Year Celebrations

I have no doubt that a few of my more extroverted friends and family will cringe at the recap of this year's uneventful holiday celebrations (if they could even be called "celebrations"): 

The closest thing we got to going to a holiday party this year, was when I met up with 2 friends one morning and took the kids to Chuck E Cheese.  No food, only tokens. 

Then we spent New Year's Eve night at home, looking at recipes (me), copying the programs (Glen), and watching a movie (the kids).  At 10:30, when the kids were starting to act a little grumpy,  we did a sparkling cider in paper cups toast, then shlepped the kids off to bed.   Whereafter Glen and I spent the rest of the night fighting sleep while waiting for Spencer and Cami to return from the dance.

But guess what?  It sounds anticlimatic, but I frankly didn't mind a bit this year.  It was nice, mellow, and laid-back....just what I needed after a crazy December! 

Happy New Year!

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2011-- Month-by-Month

Here's a little glimpse of what  I may have put in the Christmas letter this year.  You know if 4-page single-spaced letters were still in vogue.  (they were at one point, right?)

January--We ate too much, exercised too little, and survived the ill-timed Commute-a-geddon snowstorm.  With numerous tales of hellish 8+ hour commutes, we've never been so grateful to live within walking distance of the Metro.

 

February-- Lara has become a certifiable wintertime wimp and breaks down and buys a "happy lamp" to help cope with the dark days. 

March--Our baby turned six.

Lara bores the world when she publishes a list of 101 random things about herself.


April-- After living a mere 2 hours away for 14 years, we took our first ever trip to Philadelphia during Spring Break.  We had a great time seeing all the historic sites, visiting an old friend,  and testing out the Philly Cheesesteaks, so I'm sure it will not take us another 14 years to get back there.   

We visit a bird sanctuary in Philadelphia and see some adorable baby owls.  Adam's second grade teacher has lit a bird-watching bug in us and we think it's one of the coolest parts of our trip. 

Lara wakes up on her birthday to her first cold sore in several years.  It was a lovely indicator of the day.

Spencer anticlimatically turns 16 and does not get his license and does not go on any dates. 


May--On a rainy day drive home from dropping the kids off at school after seminary, Glen totals our 2002 Corolla.  Thankfully, he is unhurt (other than his pride) and insurance pays us a mere $600 less than what we paid for it 8 years previously when we'd bought it on Ebay. 

June--We replace the Corolla and with another Toyota Sienna.  We figure that if we were going to replace one car, that we might as well replace the one that gets driven the most, so we now own two minivans.  We have mixed feelings about the new level of nerdiness this acquisition has raised us to, but I can't deny that it's nice having Spencer doing his practice driving in a 10-year-old Sienna rather than a new (or much smaller) car. 

Glen turns 40.  I'd like to say that it was a fun day and that we celebrated properly, but it wasn't and we didn't.  In fact, I daresay that this day easily goes into our family lore as the worst birthday in the history of mankind and that we still can't talk about it without one of us (usually both of us) getting irritated. 

July--With Girls Camp,  Youth Conference (Trek), EFY, and a High Adventure trip along the Appalachian Trail--it was a busy month for the teenagers of the house. 

Shlepping kids to swim team and youth conference planning keep the parents hopping.

Lara starts school supply shopping for 170.  It's her pet project for the elementary PTA and although it's a wildly successful fundraiser, Lara does not even consider doing it again next year.  

August--We sit front and center at the Kennedy Center and watch Wicked together as a family.   It was wickedly awesome. 

We embark on an epic road trip--Minnesota for Lara's 20-year high school reunion and a little anecdotal swearing, North Dakota (just to say we'd been there), South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Rapid City, Island Park, Idaho/Yellowstone to stay in a family cabin, then on to Nauvoo for a mad dash tour.

We had a great time together, but we were a little disappointed to have missed the big DC earthquake.  We did cut our trip short and rush back to make it back for the completely anti-climatic Hurricane Irene. 

September--The kids head back to school (Spencer-11th, Cami-9th, Emma-5th, Adam-3rd, Ellie-1st) and it is the first time that Lara does not have any kids at home with her during the day! 

Lara runs the Ragnar relay with 11 friends--200 miles, everyone runs 3 legs.  It turns out to be a fun experience and most importantly gives Lara the bug to keep running. 

Glen and Lara get called to be Stake Youth Conference Directors for summer 2012 in Palmyra, NY.  We are petrified, but excited. 

October--Cami runs on her high school cross country team and Lara gets teary and nostalgic for her own harrier days whenever she attends one of Cami's meets. 

After months and months of listening to the soundtrack nonstop, we take the family to an amazing performance of Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center. 

Afterward, Ellie can sing, "Castle on a Cloud" word-for-word, British accent and all. 

November--On a long weekend, we take the entire family and go on our first youth conference scouting trip to Palmyra.  It is a productive trip that gives us our first true glimpse at all that needs to be accomplished over the next several months.

Lara and Glen run the Richmond half-marathon together.  Lara was left with a bruise the size of a pancake on her hip afterward, but since she's taken almost 20 minutes off her previous best time and the bruise healed quickly, it's all good. 

Ellie's neurologist decides to discontinue one of her medications and almost double the amount of her other.  The numbers of seizures she has on a daily basis has dropped significantly in a matter of a couple weeks.  Additionally,  she seems more energetic, more creative, and she's having a much easier time in math.   Apparently her brain is enjoying not being interrupted every couple of minutes. 

December--Lara foolishly embarks on another goody-a-day posting schedule on her recipe blog.  It serves as a time-consuming distraction for her and has effectively caused the house to become a pitiful disaster and  delayed her Christmas shopping to epically late proportions, but hits on the blog are at an all-time high (19,000+ hits this month), so whatevs.

Lara finds the most spectacular Christmas pajamas EVER!

Spencer gets moccasins for Christmas.  They are awesome.