Patience: Step 3 & 4

I meant to post this last night but Paul and I were chatting and then I got distracted b/c he and I were listening to a conference talk and this just didn't happen. :) So, I'm going it now. What was step three? "Become sensitive to the examples of patience and of impatience that occur around us every day. We should strive to emulate those individuals we consider to be patient."

I tried very hard yesterday to be conscious of myself. I was actually proud of myself. Yesterday was Sunday so we had the ole' get ready for church morning. It actually went okay. Instead of expecting my poor husband to read my mind I asked him to help me with things. For the most part, the kids cooperated but when Collin decided he'd rather play with his cars than eat his breakfast, I remained calm. I didn't freak out or anything. I even felt calm. I wasn't just holding it in, well, there were times that I was holding it in but mostly, I really was calm. Everyone ate, dressed and we made it to church in time for me to set up the primary room and be in our seats before sacrament meeting started.

Throughout the day, I saw so many examples around me. I continued to try hard. There were a few times during the day where I had to grit my teeth and take a deep breath but I was really proud of myself. YAY!!

Now, for step 4. Step 4 is going to last the rest of my life --- step three probably will too. Step 4 is to "Recommit each day to become more patient, and be certain to keep our selected family members involved in our patience project." Paul knows all about it and so do my kiddos so hopefully together we'll do okay and I will be more patient with them and my husband. :)

Momentous Day in 2011

No, I'm not talking about my birthday (although, I am 28 today!) but I am referring to the fact that today is the first day that all four of us have gone to church and were healthy in the year 2011. I know that sounds bad but we keep getting sick and then sharing it. One day, I went in early for ward council, then went home with the sick child so Paul and Collin could go to sacrament mtg, then they came home and then Collin and I went back for primary. LOL! We had several days where we alternated like that. It was really quite interesting. Anyways, we all made it to church today and I am soooo glad!! That's probably why the kids were wiggle worms. It's the first time they've both been in the seats together for a month.

Patience: Step 2

Step 2 in achieving patience according to Robert C Oaks is to "Evaluate ourselves to determine where we stand on the patience continuum. How much more patience do we need to become more Christlike? This self-assessment is difficult. We might ask our spouse or another family member to help us."

I talked to Paul and my mom and they were no help. They both think that I have a lot of patience. However, I know better. Here are the times that Paul and I came up with that cause me to lose my temper and then I tried to come up with ways to fix those problems.

• When the kids disobey.
• This one is really hard for me. I don't understand why they won't just obey the first time. Sometimes I have to ask and ask and put them in timeout and ask some more. So, we need a better discipline system I guess. I have ordered a book called "The Children I Want With the Kids I Have". Don't misinterpret me by the title. I absolutely adore my kids. They are the loves of my life but I would really like for them to obey. Hopefully I'll learn something from there. Also, I think I need to be more consistent and maybe a bit more creativity will help as well. 
• When I am trying to do something and the kids want my attention.
• I need to make sure that the kids and I spend quality time together BEFORE homework or chores. When I am trying to do something, I am very good at ignoring the kiddos. I mean, I know exactly where they are and what they are doing but I block out the sounds. This doesn't always lead to great endings. I'm hoping that if I give them the attention first or wait for them to nap or bed time to do it then we'll end some of the drama. Maybe when working on chores I can get them more involved. I also think this may help out a bit more with the obedience issue mentioned previously.
• When Paul doesn't help me when I think he should be helping me.
• This one frustrates both myself and Paul. I think that we need better communication then. I need to tell him exactly what I need from him instead of expecting him to guess. Normally, this is when we're getting ready to go to church or something and are in a hurry.

 Now you know a bunch of my faults but I'm hoping that making this public I'll be more likely to follow through with it and to improve on my patience. Make sure you hold me accountable!

Patience: Step 1

In our ward, we are doing a class for young mothers once a month. For January, it was on Patience! I thought this was perfect b/c with young children, everyone can use a healthy dose of patience. There was one talk that we used as a resource called The Power of Patience. In this talk, the reader is given four steps. The first step is to read each of the scriptures in the Topical Guide listed under the topic "patience" and then ponder Christ's patient examples. This is what I was working on tonight. I thought I'd share some of my favorite scriptures:

• Proverbs 14:29, "He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly."
• Luke 21:19, "In your patience possess ye your soulds."
• Romans 5:3, "... we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience."
• Hebrews 10:36, "For ye have the need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, he might receive the promise."
• Hebrews 12:1, "... let us run with patience the race that is set before us."

There are many more cool ones in the scriptures but these are the ones that stuck out to me the most. 

Messes and rocking herself to sleep

 This is what happens when my children decide to play train. They don't play with the wooden trains and track, oh no! That would be too simple. They dump out the toy boxes and line them up and sit in them and drive them all over the world. This was actually a lot of fun for them.... it was the aftermath that wasn't quite as enjoyable. ;)

 Ronni goes to bed before Collin so by the time he climbs into his top bunk, Ronni is out on the bottom bunk. Well, the other day I went in there to take Collin and Ronni wasn't in bed. I couldn't find her. Then I noticed this strange pile of blankets on the rocking cow. I lifted up the blanket and there she was. Apparently she fell asleep while rocking...??? hehe!

Patriots Point

This weekend we took some stuff to my mom at her new home. While we were there, the five of us went to Patriots Point. It was very cool, the kids were SO excited about it.

 Here we are walking out to the ship.

 My kids, the fighter pilots. Ronni had to sit on her knees for us to get her in the picture. hehe!

 Paul explaining to the kids how the generator worked.

 An F-15... Collin was really excited about the cartoon image of Felix the Cat on this plane. He's one of Collin's favorite cartoons.

 We HAD to go on the flight simulator while we were there. The four of us were the only ones on it for our turn too. I had Collin with me and he was smiling and laughing the entire time. I think Ronni had fun too but I didn't get to see her face.

 My kids and the big gun!

 Throughout the tour Ronni was looking for a helicopter. We FINALLY found one and she claimed it as HER helicopter so we had to get a picture of it. :)

Below: Paul and Collin. The engine was no longer in the plane so it was just a long tunnel. :)

 The Captain's Chair!!!

Now, time to explore the submarine!

 These are what Paul referred to as Hobbit Doors. Actually, I think he said they were too small for Hobbit doors. LOL! He had a hard time with them. :)

 Here is a sample of how tight parts of the sub were. Paul is in the background feeling a bit claustrophobic. hehe!

I am so excited that my mom now lives near so many great things. Hopefully we'll get to visit these fun places more often!! :)

Oh man oh man! I just watched this movie. Let me just say AMAZING!!! I have never heard of it before but it reminds me a lot of Dead Poet's Society. It's a school for boys on the sea. It's sort of a coming of age story for the boys then a storm hits and trouble comes and they must all stick together or everything will fall apart. It was really a fabulous story. There was a little bit of foul language in it however.... just a warning.

A Young, Feminist Athiest who is addicted to Mormon Housewife blogs!

I thought this was really interesting so I decided to share. Let me know what you think. :)

 

Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs

I'm a young, feminist atheist who can't bake a cupcake. Why am I addicted to the shiny, happy lives of these women?

BY EMILY MATCHAR

At first glance, Naomi and Stacie and Stephanie and Liz appear to be members of the species known as the "Hipster Mommy Blogger," though perhaps a bit more cheerful and wholesome than most. They have bangs like Zooey Deschanel and closets full of cool vintage dresses. Their houses look like Anthropologie catalogs. Their kids look like Baby Gap models. Their husbands look like young graphic designers, all cute lumberjack shirts and square-framed glasses. They spend their days doing fun craft projects (vintage-y owl throw pillow! Recycled button earrings! Hand-stamped linen napkins!). They spend their weekends throwing big, whimsical dinner parties for their friends, all of whom have equally adorable kids and husbands.
But as you page through their blog archives, you notice certain "tells." They're super-young (like, four-kids-at-29 young). They mention relatives in Utah. They drink a suspicious amount of hot chocolate. Finally, you see it: a subtly placed widget with a picture of a temple, or a hyperlink on the word "faith" or "belief." You click the link and up pops the official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Yep, Naomi and Stacie and Stephanie and Liz are Mormons. They're members of a large, close-knit network of Mormon lifestyle bloggers -- young stay-at-home-moms who blog about home and hearth, Latter-day Saint-style. From Rockstar Diaries (Naomi) to Underaged and Engaged(Stacie) to Nie Nie Dialogues (Stephanie) to Say Yes to Hoboken (Liz), Mormon lifestyle bloggers occupy their very own corner of the blogosphere.
Their lives are nothing like mine -- I'm your standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist -- yet I'm completely obsessed with their blogs. On an average day, I'll skim through a half-dozen Mormon blogs, looking at Polaroids of dogs in raincoats or kids in bow ties, reading gratitude lists, admiring sewing projects.
I'm not alone, either. Two of my closest friends -- both chronically overworked Ph.D. candidates -- procrastinate for hours poring over Nat the Fat Rat or C. Jane Enjoy It. A recent discussion of Mormonism on the blog Jezebel unleashed a waterfall of confessions in the comments section from other young non-religious women similarly riveted by the shiny, happy domestic lives of their Latter-day Saint sisters.
"They have lovely homes, picture-perfect kids, loving, super-attentive husbands, and things seem very normal and calm," writes a commenter named BrookeD, who admits to reading five Mormon blogs daily.
"I thought I was the only one!!" responds another commenter.
"THANK YOU," adds a third. "I'm another closet non-Mormon reader of Mormon mommy blogs."
So why, exactly, are these blogs so fascinating to women like us -- secular, childless women who may have never so much as baked a cupcake, let alone reupholstered our own ottomans with thrifted fabric and vintage grosgrain ribbon? It's not as though we're sniffing around the dark side of the faith, à la "Big Love." And it's not about religion. As someone married to a former Saint (my husband left the church as a teenager), I certainly have no illusions about what life as a Mormon would be like, and I'm sure it's not for me, which makes my obsession with these blogs all the more startling.
Well, to use a word that makes me cringe, these blogs are weirdly "uplifting." To read Mormon lifestyle blogs is to peer into a strange and fascinating world where the most fraught issues of modern living -- marriage and child rearing -- appear completely unproblematic. This seems practically subversive to someone like me, weaned on an endless media parade of fretful stories about "work-life balance" and soaring divorce rates and the perils of marrying too young/too old/too whatever. And don't even get me started on the Mommy Blogs, which make parenthood seem like a vale of judgment and anxiety, full of words like "guilt" and "chaos" and "BPA-free" and "episiotomy." Read enough of these, and you'll be ready to remove your own ovaries with a butter knife.
"It seems that a lot of popular culture wants to portray marriage and motherhood as demeaning, restrictive or simple, but in the LDS church, motherhood is a very important job, and it's treated with a lot of respect," says Natalie Holbrook, the New York-based author of the popular blog Nat the Fat Rat. "Most of my readers are non-LDS women in their late 20s and early 30s, college educated, many earning secondary degrees on the postgraduate level, and a comment I often get is, 'You are making me want kids, and I've never wanted kids!'"
Indeed, Mormon bloggers like Holbrook make marriage and motherhood seem, well, fun. Easy. Joyful. These women seem relaxed and untouched by cynicism. They throw elaborate astronaut-themed birthday parties for their kids and go on Sunday family drives to see the fall leaves change and get mani-pedis with their friends. They often have close, large extended families; moms and sisters are always dropping in to watch the kids or help out with cake decorating. Their lives seem adorable and old-fashioned and comforting.
"I've gotten e-mails from readers thanking me for putting a positive spin on marriage and family," Holbrook says. "It's important to acknowledge the hard parts -- and I think we all do -- but why not focus more on the lovely and the beautiful? That positive attitude is a very common theme throughout all aspects of the Mormon faith."
This focus on the positive is especially alluring when your own life seems anything but easy. As my friend G. says, of her fascination with Mormon lifestyle blogs, "I'm just jealous. I want to arrange flowers all day too!" She doesn't, really. She's just tired from long days spent in the lab, from a decade of living in a tiny apartment because she's too poor from student loans to buy a house, from constant negotiations about breadwinning status with her artist husband. It's not that she or I  want to quit our jobs to bake brownies or sew kiddie Halloween costumes. It's just that for G., Mormon blogs are an escapist fantasy, a way to imagine a sweeter, simpler life.
There's been a lot of talk in recent years about "the New Domesticity" -- an increasing interest in old-fashioned, traditionally female tasks like sewing, crafts and jam making. Some pundits see this as a sign that young women yearn to return to some kind of 1950s Ozzie and Harriet existence, that feminism has "failed," that women are realizing they can't have it all, after all. That view is utterly nonsense, in my opinion, but I do think women of my generation are looking to the past in an effort to create fulfilling, happy domestic lives, since the modern world doesn't offer much of a road map. Our parents -- divorced, stressed-out baby boomers -- are hardly paragons of domestic bliss. Nor are the Gen X "Mommy War" soldiers, busy winging snowballs of judgment at each other from across the Internet. (Formula is poison! Baby wearing is child abuse!)
If those are the options, I'll take a pass, thanks.
Enter the Mormon bloggers, with their picture-perfect catalog lives. It is possible to be happy, they seem to whisper. We love our homes. We love our husbands.
Of course, the larger question is, are these women's lives really as sweet and simple as they appear? Blogs have always been a way to mediate and prettify your own life; you'd be a fool to compare your real self to someone else's carefully arranged surface self. And Mormons are particularly famous for their "put on a happy face" attitude. The church teaches that the Gospel is the only authentic path to true happiness. So if you're a faithful follower, you better be happy, right?
The phenomenon of the happier-than-thou Mormon housewife blogger is so well-recognized it's even spawned a parody blog, Seriously So Blessed, whose fictional author brays things like "We have non-stop fun all the time and are LOVING married life!" and "Speaking of fall, I kind of sometimes want to start a non-profit to help moms who go all of fall without blogging pics of their kids in pumpkin patches, because it seriously breaks my heart!"
So why are Mormon women such prolific bloggers? "It probably has something to do with the fact that Mormons are the world's biggest journal-keepers," says my husband, offering a partial explanation. Church elders have long encouraged members to keep regular journals for the dual purposes of historical record-keeping and promoting spiritual insight, and as a result Mormons are champion journalers and scrapbookers. In the 2000s, church elders began officially promoting new media technologies like blogs as a way of spreading the gospel, and the Mormon blogging community soon became so large it earned itself a punny nickname: the Bloggernacle.
For many LDS women, blogging about the domestic arts is a natural fit. As ex-Mormon designer Emily Henderson explains on her blog, The Brass Petal, growing up in large families engenders an attitude of make-do thriftiness -- homemade bread, recycled soda can Christmas ornaments, Salvation Army fashion. With the rise of DIY culture across secular America, all of a sudden those skills have become trendy, even bankable.
"Blogging is something they/we can do that feels productive, can potentially make money for our families and can be done from the home at any time," Henderson writes. For young Mormon women, who face immense cultural pressure to stay home with children rather than pursue a career, blogging about their adventures in homemaking becomes a sort of creative outlet, a way of contributing to the larger world beyond the home.
The bloggers I read may be as happy with their lot as they seem. Or not. While some Mormon women prosper under the cultural norms for wife- and mother-dom, others chafe. Utah is, after all, the state with the highest rate of prescription antidepressant use, a statistic the president of the Utah Psychiatric Association attributes to the pressure among Mormon women to be ideal wives and mothers. The creator of Seriously So Blessed, an anonymous Mormon woman, addresses this pressure in an online archive of Mormon women interviews called the Mormon Women Project: "In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way," she says. "You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area."
Clearly, life for the Mormon wife is not all crafts and cupcakes. Even if it were, I seriously doubt that crafts and cupcakes are all that much fun when you do them all day, every day.
But the basic messages expressed in these blogs -- family is wonderful, life is meant to be enjoyed, celebrate the small things -- are still lovely. And if they help women like me envision a life in which marriage and motherhood could potentially be something other than a miserable, soul-destroying trap, I say, "Right on." I won't be inviting the missionaries inside for hot cocoa now or ever, but I don't plan on stopping my blog habit any time soon.

warmer without heat???

Yeah, so, I'm sitting in the house all wrapped up in a blanket. Why? Well, because I'm cold. It was warmer in this house without working heat, I think. Maybe it was because if I got cold then I just walked over to the fire and sat by it. Now, I don't have that option. I think I miss our constantly burning fire. hehe!

Christmas, New Year, Ice Storm

Yeah, so, I've gotten a bit behind. Our life has pretty much been go go go!! since Thanksgiving. We went to TX for Thanksgiving then came home for two days and then the kids and I left for NY to pick up my mom. We came back and then we just kept going. Kami stayed with us during her Christmas break too so we had 6 ppl living in our 2 bedroom, 1 bath home. It was a bit tight. haha!

Christmas was fun though! Ronni and I spent Christmas Eve day at the doctor's office. She had strep throat and I had an ear infection so we weren't able to go to the family's house that evening. On Christmas Day my sis, her hubby and their 4 kids were at our house. If you did your math correctly then you figured out that meant 12 ppl in our little home. 6 of them were 6 or under. It was great being all together though, even if the conditions were a bit tight. :) The day after Christmas (Kami's 17th b-day) we had SNOW!!!

New Years was just my mom and us. My sis and family were back home and Kami went to Greenville so there were only 5 of us in our home. We didn't really do anything exciting.We had fried rice and egg rolls for dinner so a very untraditional meal.My mom and I were the only ones who stayed up to welcome in the New Year. We stayed up watching Tin Man. LOL!

My mom now has a job in Charleston so she's there, we are all (somewhat) healthy again and we thought life would finally get back to normal but yesterday we woke up to a white world and everything was closed! Even Paul's work. So we were home all day as the snow storm came in. Today, everything is closed again b/c of all the ice. It seems to be melting now and we've kept power the whole time so that's a plus. The set back is that our heater decided to start working yesterday morning. Boo!!! Now we have to pay for that. It has been fun all being together with a white world around us and a hot fire to snuggle up by. Here are some pics:

Here are the kids having fun in the "snow".... I guess it was actually sleet. :)

The ice was just too pretty not to take a picture of it and share.

This was just a perfect picture for SC. Last week the weather was almost 70 degrees so it is a nice, green holly bush with berries and icicles hanging from them. haha!

The kids snuggled up by the fire to warm up. :) Aren't they cute! Aren't you jealous that you're not there? haha!