Catch Up Part 3: Neighborhood Yuba Trip

Okay. Whew. Final catch-up post.

We finally got the boat out for its inaugural 09 trip a couple weekends ago--in fact, we headed out on our 17th anniversary. Spent our anniversary in a tent with all the kids. Romance! :-)

I decided to man up and do the tent thing with Wyatt. I was a little nervous about it because I'm not the best tent sleeper, and roaming toddlers in a tent aren't always conducive to healthy slumber either, but it went pretty well. We spent all afternoon Thursday on the water and had a good time, then set up camp on the beach and roasted marshmallows and enjoyed some yummy s'mores. I love myself a good s'more, don't you? We tried putting Wyatt in the tent with the big kids to see if he'd settle down and go to sleep, but he thought it would be a lot more fun to stomp around and holler. (We kept hearing giggle giggle, stomp, stomp . . . "WYATT!!"). Finally I decided I'd try snuggling with him by the fire. By then it was about 11 p.m. and he was exhausted, so we snuggled up with his blue blanket and he fell asleep on my shoulder, which is a rarity anymore. It was quite lovely, actually: warm summer night, twinkly stars, snuggly toddler, tummy full of s'mores. Mmmmm.

The next day some more friends from the ward showed up and we had a great time on the boat. The big accomplishment of the day was Ethan getting up on the wakeboard for the first time. We've never bought a kid-size wakeboard, but we thought Ethan might be big enough to use the smallish adult wakeboard . . . and he got right up! Here's a snippet of his first ride:



Then I went to go take some video of Forrest ripping it UP on the wakeboard (jumping both wakes, looking super studly) and the camera died. The camera ALWAYS dies when I try to take pictures of Forrest on the wakeboard. Maybe he's developed some bad wakeboarding juju? But I did get a few other good lake-y time photos. Here are some:



All three kids up on skis. Sorry about the bad backlighting, Ethan.

The campsite! Ah, the beauty of Utah scrub. Yes, sometimes I really miss Minnesota. That building off in the distance is a very handy bathroom facility, which adds to the overall ambiance, no? But, once you take the decidedly non-picturesque surroundings out of the equation, I'm still a Yuba fan. Nice beaches (by Utah standards at least), soft sand, warm water.

A boy and his sippy cup, enjoying the ride.
Also a common sight at Yuba: cows. Hit the beach, check out the cows! That Mama cow was eyeing the kids pretty aggressively, seeing as how they were rising up out of the water and coming straight at her calf. A few seconds after I took this picture she snorted and both cows ran up into the grass.

The obligatory "Hey kids, you're in the boat! Now smile!" photo.

And I include this one because, while I never did manage to get a picture of Forrest on the wakeboard, I did get a picture of him doing what he does for hours and hours and hours whenever we go out on the boat: in the drivers' seat, neck cranked back, watching while he pulls somebody on skis or kneeboard or wakeboard or tube. Thanks, hon, for making it so fun for everybody when we go out on the boat! I'm such a boat-driving wimp. (I HATE driving the boat. Okay, don't HATE it. But I really don't like it. Makes me nervous. Always afraid another boater is going to crash into me, or vice versa, or that I'll accidentally run over some skier, or at the very least that I'll drive so nervously that I'll jerk the poor wakeboarder behind me around so much they fall over. We all have our strengths, right? Boat driving isn't one of mine.)

So it was a good time. Enjoyed spending time with our friends and neighbors, nobody got too terribly sunburned, and I had a good time camping in a tent! Success!

Catch Up Part 2: The Segullah Retreat. Oh, and I'm in a Bad Mood Because I'm on Weight Watchers

Okay, before I vent about my weight-loss related irritability, let's talk about something fun.

SEGULLAH!



(And for those of you who are afraid to speak about Segullah to anyone in person because you can't pronounce it, first, know that you are not alone. Second, think "ooh, la la"--that's how you say it. You know, "Say-gooh-lah." Although I usually end up saying "luh" instead of "lah" at the end because saying "lah" at the end is so much dang work. Third, one of the great brainstorms to come out of our recent retreat is the idea to sell t-shirts that say: "Segullah. We can't pronounce it either.")

So, the weekend before last I loaded up the Mazda5 for its inaugural trip, up Provo canyon to Darlene's in-laws cabin for some sisterhood and cake. A random assortment of highlights:

-The temple. I met some of my Segullah friends for the first time, in person, in the celestial room. What a place to make a first impression.

-The drive. Yes, fun to drive the new car--and the little whatever-cylinder engine (4 cylinder I think? I told you last post I have absolutely no interest in such things) did a great job huffing up the mountain. But mostly I love driving with friends. Captive audiences, etc. Some of the best conversations happen in the car, imo. Darlene, Cheri, Brittney--who could ask for better ride-mates?

-The cabin itself. Nature. Animals. Saw a bunch of deer. I went out on the deck and looked into the eyes of a doe who just stood there, looking back, for a full two minutes. I think she was trying to tell me something.

-The beautiful women I'm lucky enough to call friends. And I mean it when I say beautiful. Some of these chickies border on supermodel quality, I'm not kidding. And they run marathons in just over three hours and bake delicious gourmet cakes and have New York based literary agents and win prestigious poetry awards and secure government grants to write South American mission memoirs and get accepted to European graduate schools and picnic with Barack and Michelle Obama (seriously!!) and sing like angels and paint masterpieces and write computer programs and own photography studios and teach college level chemistry courses. Among other things. Like being rock star mothers and wives. And pillars of spirituality. It's enough to make a girl a little insecure, which I might have been weren't every last one of them as kind and loving as you'd ever have the right to expect.

Yes, I'm being gushy. But seriously, these women? How I ever got the chance to be a part of such a group of women is one of the great blessings of my life.

-The conversations. Like last year, I stayed up until 4 am. And I'm not even going to apologize for it. WORTH IT. We laughed (my friend Jennie's story about her mother asking her to wrap her in plaster in order to make a life-sized cast she could sleep in for a year to cure her back problems had me laughing harder than I've laughed in, oh, years); we cried (of course we cried. Segullah women love crying). We solved the problems of the universe. Seriously. President Obama should give us a call. I'll give him our advice for free since he helped me out with the whole car purchase thing.

-The food. As I mentioned, Segullah women are incredibly talented, and the culinary arts are well represented. We had a greek lunch that was to die for, and did I mention the cakes? Oh, the cakes. Here's a picture I'm including even though I look slightly worse-for-wear. This was the morning AFTER staying up till 4 a.m., so I'm not necessarily daisy fresh. Anyway, it's not the people in the picture, but the cakes that I want you to notice:



Yes, that's THREE homemade specialty cakes, an assortment of gourmet cupcakes, and a plate of sugar cookies, for good measure.

Needless to say, it was a great, GREAT weekend. And I wasn't really counting my Weight Watchers points.

Which brings me to . . . yeah, I'm doing Weight Watchers (she says mopily). Not the full blown version with the meetings and everything--the idea of public weighing kind of weirds me out, no offense--but I'm doing it online.

We all know the saga of the metabolic testing, we all know my stories of "exercise to no weight loss avail," and we're all tired of it, I realize. But I haven't really buckled down and done a serious diet since Wyatt was born. Part of the reason is I'm suspicious of diets in general. I've done them in the past, suffered and groaned for a couple of months and lost (usually) three or four pounds, then bounced right back up to my set point about a week after I stop consciously dieting.

But last month I noticed that, whoopsie, I'd crept up by three pounds. Three pounds isn't a lot, but it was three pounds more than my set point and it wasn't just an anomaly. So I figured it was time to buckle down.

So I'm buckling.

The good news is that those three pounds came off the very first week I was on Weight Watchers. And this was even the week that included the Segullah retreat and the aforementioned cake. But since then? Since then I've been diligently recording my points, eating my salads and frozen Smart Ones! lunches, eschewing breads and candies (mostly), going to bed with a grumbly tummy. And keeping up with the exercise like usual. So today I got on the scale for my scheduled Tuesday weigh-in and WEIGHED EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE WEEK BEFORE.

#(@)@*#$*@)!&#

I have to have faith that if I stick with it I'll be able to make some more progress, and I am sticking with it. I committed to it and I'm not wimping out (which is part of the reason I'm putting it on my blog. Accountability and all that.) But I wish it wasn't so *#(@ hard for me to see progress. Even just one pound would have made me happy. Two pounds would have THRILLED me. Sticking with the diet itself isn't really all that hard, to be honest. I'm not eating that much differently that I usually do. It's the thinking about it all the time--counting, worrying, choosing--and the inability to, say, have a bunch of really good bread at dinner without feeling guilty that annoys me. But I could handle those small annoyances just fine if only I saw some progress.

Sigh.

It's only been a few weeks, I realize. Maybe my body's just saving up and next week I'll lose like five pounds or something.

But I doubt it.

And now I'm done complaining. And coming up next? Catch Up Part 3: Neighborhood Trip to Yuba. And I promise I won't whine about my diet one little bit next time, or talk about money, or mention politics. Just me, my kids, my hubby, a good night's sleep in tent (!) and the bright blue water. Safe for everybody, right?

Catching Up Part 1: My Birthday Present from Barack Obama

Has it really been two weeks since I posted last? Egads. Part of the reason I like to keep myself on a once a week schedule is it keeps all the bloggy news from piling up and overwhelming me . . . and you, my loyal six readers. So I'm going to break up the goings on of the last couple of weeks in a few separate posts. Hopefully I can keep them as concise as possible.

But you know me. I probably won't.

So, let's go chronologically and begin with event number one:

My birthday! Turned 37. Forrest presented me with some nice smelly lotions to commemorate the day. Oh, and Barack Obama helped buy me a new car.



Okay, well, the car wasn't really a birthday present. We just happened to buy it ON my birthday, with a little help from Mr. President.

And how did Barack Obama help you buy a car, you ask? Let me 'splain. First off, about a month ago we refinanced our house with the help of the HARP program ("Home Affordable Refinance Program"--gotta love those government acronyms). We hadn't been able to refinance earlier in the year when we wanted to because, although we have really good credit (is it uncouth to say we have really good credit? ah well), our home has lost over $100,000 in value over the last 18 months. Yeah, I know. I don't want to think about that either. Anyhoo, the value loss and tighter lending rules meant that we didn't have enough equity to qualify. Major bummer, since rates were quite a bit lower than they were when we bought this house. But a few months ago the administration passed the HARP program for people just like us and, being the good little Hallstrom Family Mortgage Specialist that I am--seriously, sometimes I think I could be a mortgage broker or something, if I had even one iota if interest in professional mortgage brokering, that is--I jumped on it, and we snagged a sweet 4.75% interest rate, which brought our monthly bill down by a little over $300.

(And what does this have to do with your birthday, you wonder? And didn't you say you would try to be succinct, you ask? And didn't I tell you I wouldn't be, I reply?)

Sooooo . . . then, the Jeep Cherokee Forrest's parents have been driving broke down for the, oh, nineteenth time in the last three months. Okay, exaggerating a bit, but it was really on its last legs. (Bad metaphor. Moving on.) Forrest is the go-to guy when the Jeep breaks and also the go-to guy to help out when his parents need a car and it was pretty apparent to everybody that his poor 68 year old mom couldn't keep driving a vehicle to work every day that randomly stalled at red lights. So we decided it would be best for everybody to give them our van and get something newer for ourselves. I would have been happy driving the denty and smelly but paid-for van for a few more years, but the proverbial ox was in the mire.

As luck (or providence, depending on how you look at things) would have it, we'd recently come in to an extra 300 a month. Yes, an extra 300 a month we were planning to put toward other debt, but still, it was handy given the circumstances. And then ANOTHER government stimulus program was passed, this one with the snappy acronym CARS . (Car Allowance Rebate System).

Basically this program made it possible for us to trade in the Cherokee and get a $4,500 rebate on a new car, just as long as the new car got 5 mpg better gas mileage than the clunker. (It's actually a pretty smart use of stimulus money, imo--it moves new cars and simultaneously reduces emissions and fuel consumption. But then again I'm prejudiced because I got a new car.) We probably would have bought a used car for me, but once we took into account the rebate it made more sense to go new. Luckily the Cherokee has been registered to and insured by us this whole time (it was originally our car) so we could qualify.

So I researched and researched and finally found the car I wanted: the Mazda 5. We have the Tahoe for entire-family-traveling, but I don't like driving the Tahoe. Too boatlike and unwieldy; kids always winging the doors into other people's littler, more unassuming vehicles; nowhere to put the groceries; bad gas mileage. Don't get me wrong--I love being a passenger in the Tahoe. But driving it? Not so much. And I do love my van, as dorky as it is to love a van. Love the sliding doors, love the seating arrangement for the kids, love the room. But we didn't really need to buy another 7 passenger vehicle, and getting a NEW van was more expensive than we would have liked. Then I found the Mazda 5. A mini minivan! Great gas mileage, relatively inexpensive, sporty. Seriously, it's really fun to drive. And we did splurge a tiny bit and get the nice package w/ the leather and seat warmers and moon roof (I'm a sucker for a moon roof on a nice summer night). It even has a jack for my iPod so I can listen to This American Life podcasts and NEVER HAVE TO BURN ANOTHER CD AGAIN. Yippee! (I couldn't care less about engine size--just give me an iPod jack and I'm thrilled.)

So . . . we bought a car! And yes, we're not really putting a dent in the whole debt thing in the way we'd hoped just a month ago, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. And getting a sporty new car with a moon roof and an iPod jack does take the edge off.

So thank you, Mr. Obama and the American Taxpayer, for HARP and CARS and my new Mazda 5.

Catching Up Part Two: The Segullah Retreat coming soooon.

(And p.s.--Are you watching Big Bang Theory? And are you watching Better Off Ted? No? Then start! Best new comedies since Thirty Rock. And I don't say this lightly.)

Independence! (And Yes, I Realize I Used an Exclamation Point in My Last Title Too!)

Example of Independence #1:

Elise portrayed "The Son of Liberty" in the 5th Grade Play. And yes, many girls played boys--we're depicting early American history after all, and our recollection of notable women is in short supply. Although--aside--I just finished reading Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates AND Forrest and I have been watching the John Adams miniseries and I think both Ann Hutchinson and Abigail Adams are pretty fascinating members of the fairer sex, and neither of them made an appearance in Monte Vista Elementary's production of The American Dream. Sojourner Truth did, though. Love that "Aint I a Woman?" speech.

Here's Elise in all her Pilgrimy glory:

(We decided that even though her shoes from Justice had sparkles on the toes, most audience members wouldn't notice. The buckles seemed kinda pilgrimy to me--pilgrimy with pizzaz!)

And here she is singing away. And being tall.



After the 5th grade play and a hot hot HOT field day (where photos were not taken because I was too covered in Otter Pop juice and focused on wrangling 10 rotations of 25 6 to 8 year olds into even groups on either side of the tug of war rope to take pictures) . . . school ended!

So Example of Independence #2? No more classrooms, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks! (Such a mean rhyme.)

Jonas holding his excellent report card aloft. I also took a picture of Elise with her report card . . . but her friend Hailey signed Elise's FOREHEAD as a passionate gesture of goodbye and it just looks too silly to post on the internet. Sorry. I'm controlling that way. Needless to say, Elise had a great report card too. Onward and upward to 3rd and 6th grades!

And now the obvious example of Independence, July 4th:

Andrew and Andrea and their family arrived from North Carolina just in time to join in the festivities. Okay, quick rewind: They got here on July 3rd and we went to the temple open house and Boondocks to celebrate Brandon's 8th birthday. Forrest couldn't come to the temple open house because he was helping a family in the ward move (and lest you think he's too noble, he also golfed in the morning, so half the time he was golfing, half moving--so the noblesse evens out). Wyatt was in even rarer form than the first time we went to the open house. The major differences this time was the absence of dad and the vast throngs of people who had the day off on Friday the 3rd and decided to visit the open house just like we did and stand packed together on the stairs in a manner which the Fire Marshall would most certainly disapprove. Wyatt was--shall we say--feeling a little "hemmed in"? He desperately wanted to get in the baptismal font, yelling "I go swimming!" at the top of his lungs. But my favorite stunt was when he wiggled out of my arms and darted underneath the velvet rope in the celestial room and went and sat in one of the chairs. Ahhh, parenting toddlers. Especially parenting toddlers while hundreds of people look on. Keeps a girl humble.

And Boondocks was really fun. Go carts, video games, all that good stuff. But I didn't bring the camera to either. You'll have to check out Andi's blog for that!

So. Anyway. The 4th of July.

Brandon's baptism was a great way to start the morning. So nice of his parents to travel thousands of miles so we could all be a part of it! Then afterward we descended on Grandma and Grandpa's house, had some good food, then turned the kids loose in the backyard. Just because they're cute, here's a picture of each of the cousins enjoying the slip n slide:

Eli making a run for it

Wyatt, who had a hard time understanding he was supposed to wait in line--but the kids were patient with him. That's the advantage of being one of the younger cousins.

Elise, rock star slip n slider with dangly silver earrings, purple cast, and wind machine hair.

How cute is this picture of Whitney?

Ethan: Attacking the slide.

Brandon, master of Slip n Slide form.

Jane, with a classic Slip n Slide expression.

Cute Lauren.

Jonas, riding the slide to the very end.

Reagan, expert knee slider!

And darling Emma, who chose to abstain from slip and sliding (at least while I was outside with the camera!).

This picture is just pure cute. Almost makes up for the temple open house(s).

Mmmm . . . ice cream and a porch swing

More cute ice cream pictures

And a gaggle of gangly cousins.

That night everybody came over to our place and we did fireworks. Some cool pics:
Cool nighttime setting on the camera, isn't it?

You can see the taillights of a car passing by. Sorry, traffic!

The ghost of Forrest, fireworks-lighter-extraordinaire

Vivi and Caroline, enjoying the action from their box seat.

And Wyatt with Grandpa. NOT too happy about the explosions, the loud noises, the "fire." ("I no like that fire Mom!" he kept telling me. It's got to be so confusing to be two, wondering why in the world we've all decided to congregate on the front lawn after his bed time and watch things explode.)

It was a great night, no Follow My Leader style accidents (did anybody else read that book in elementary school?) and so fun to have family in town. And now it's hot, hot, hot, and summer is officially here: otter pops, swimming suits left (wet) on the floor, sleeping in, boat trips. Looking forward to it.