Valentine's Day Heart Attack

Valentine's Day is my second favorite holiday (behind Christmas). I don't buy that it's a Hallmark scam. Of course we should love every day, but I am in favor of a day especially devoted to celebrating love. One of our traditions is to do a family "heart attack". We did this as our Family Home Evening activity this past Monday. I cut tons of hearts from red paper and we each wrote things that we love about each other. My favorite part is when we go around and read them out loud. I get so choked up hearing the things that we love about each other.

Here are a few I want to remember:

Then, we tape them all over the walls so we can see all that love whenever we come into the house or come downstairs. It's amazing how good it feels!

On Valentine's Day morning, I had a little gift bag for each of the boys. (I'd mailed packages to Lyndsay and Dylan so they could share the fun as well.)

Usually I make a pink breakfast, but this was our Field Trip day, so the boys brought their new games to the car and off we went to the mountains!

Christmas Eve

I woke up early on Christmas Eve, the list of tasks for the day running through my mind. I love the holiday traditions we have established in our family, and I love that my children depend on them, but it is a lot of work to make holidays happen! I had to run to the grocery store to get last-minute additions to our day. We had waited for Lyndsay to be home to do our graham cracker houses, and with my work schedule, that tradition got pushed to Christmas Eve. Also, Lyns requested a turkey dinner, since she missed my food so much at Thanksgiving, and since I was scheduled to work Christmas Day, we plugged our holiday meal into this day as well.

While we worked on food in the kitchen, and carols played in the background, the kids and I got to work on our graham cracker village.

I did a cheater thing this year, and I'm blaming it on Pinterest. I saw someone had posted that they assemble their houses with hot glue since they never eat the crackers anyway, and then decorate with royal icing. This was a year I could definitely use a time saver, so I went with it. One less (at least!) batch of royal icing to make, plus the cost savings involved.

Several hours later, our finished houses!

Aiden's really took the cake this year. It was quite a masterpiece!

Lyns went for a log cabin this year.

Despite the confusion and turmoil in our marriage, I don't want anyone to be lonely for Christmas. I invited Adam to come and spend the holiday with us. His children, Caitilin (home from college) and Sean, came by for a little while to exchange gifts, and we got our traditional family photos in front of the tree. Man, we have so much fun together. Christmas has a way of blurring bad memories, and everything just felt so happy. We sure were missing Dylan though, who wasn't able to be with us.

Love a good laugh fest. And I love these two girls.

We reminisced about when they were little girls sharing a bedroom. Now they are college girls!

Three of our handsome boys.

Lyndsay made the rolls for me, and they were amazing!

Caitlin and Sean had dinner with their mom, so they didn't join us. The work involved in preparation was so worth it! The food was delicious! I'm not sure why Conor looks so glum here, except that he probably just wanted to get down to eating!

I really wanted to drive out to the temple to see the lights and hear the Christmas concert, but the traffic was horrendous, and truth be told, I really was exhausted. Instead, we read our nightly Christmas story together, sang several carols, and Lyndsay read the account of the Savior's birth in Luke 2. We had a family prayer together too, focusing on our gratitude and our wishes for members of our family who were not with us, and struggling.

My friend and visiting teacher, Angela, stopped by to drop off a gift.  We chatted for a bit. She's getting ready to move out of the ward, and a good distance away right after the holidays and I am so sad about that. She has been so good to me and I will really miss her.

Then it was time for yet another tradition: Christmas jammies! Each of the kids opened their gift.

Cozy!

Merry Christmas!

Apple Turkeys, Pajamas, Two Dinners, and Scrubs: The Best of Thanksgiving

Up until the week of Thanksgiving, I wasn't quite sure how I would pull the whole thing off. I was scheduled to work Tuesday night and Thursday night, and Aiden's birthday was Wednesday. This year it was only to be me and the boys for Turkey Day. Lyndsay decided to stay up in Utah to save the gas money and to stay focused on her classes, since she'd be home in a few weeks at the end of term anyway. I knew I'd have to do something, and the boys were looking to me to make it happen. I assured them there would be food.

After I woke up on Wednesday afternoon (having worked Tuesday night), I scrambled to get Aiden's birthday festivities accomplished. (More on that in a separate post.) Once cake was eaten and dinner was cleaned up, I did what Thanksgiving prep I could. That included baking the pies (I only did pumpkin this year), baking the rolls, and laying out the bread for the stuffing. This is a yearly tradition that my mom always did the night before Thanksgiving.

Before going to bed, we lay out the bread (one loaf per pan of stuffing desired). I only made one batch this year.

By morning, it's pretty stale and ready to be torn up by the children. Conor got the job this year.

Then I add the onions and celery that have been sautéed in butter, the herbs, salt and pepper, and enough chicken broth to make it moist. Into the oven it goes. (Or, into the bird, but I didn't do that this year.)

Simple and delicious.

I also only cooked a turkey breast this year. Since it was just the three of us, and we only like the white meat anyway, it made sense.

While the food was cooking, we watched Christmas movies and the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. Then we did our other Thanksgiving tradition dating back to my childhood, and made apple turkeys.

The kids never outgrow it. Poor Lyns missed out.

Dinner was ready around 2pm, which is when we like to eat our big meal. We talked about our blessings and Conor made several toasts, which is his favorite thing to do at meal time. We ate contentedly, even though we were only three. I love these boys and I was not going to miss a chance to celebrate Thanksgiving with them, even if I was missing my other children and feeling stretched thin.

Just the basics this year, but all the good stuff. During dinner, I realized I was still in my pajamas. Oh well. I suppose that was a compromise worth making.

We worked together to get the meal cleaned up, I took a nap for about an hour and a half, then got into the shower and got ready to leave for work.

Thankfully, it was a pretty quiet night on the unit. One of the nurses was kind enough to bring a full Thanksgiving meal for us from Trader Joe's (her husband works there). Around midnight, we carved another turkey and enjoyed another delicious meal.

I love the night shift! I got to eat one turkey dinner in my pajamas and the other in scrubs! That's how to do it!

Really, I count my job and my new friends as some of the biggest and best blessings of this year. I can't believe how lucky I am to love what I do and to truly love all the women I get to work with. Their friendships have been a balm to my soul and a steadying force in my life when other things are rocky. This year, they helped turn me into a real Labor and Delivery nurse, and I am so grateful.

I marvel at how God balances our lives. He cannot prevent the trials and the pain we must experience, but He always makes sure we have hefty doses of blessings. His loving kindness has been so apparent to me this year, once again.