Utah Mom Blog & Mommy Blogger | Life Elevated Mom

When your daughter conspires with the enemy

September 15, 2014 by Amber

I went through two horrendously awkward years. The unfortunate thing about it was I had no idea just how goofy I looked. In fact, I thought I was Queen Bee and gosh darn it if I wasn’t at the top of my class in academics and sports in fifth and sixth grade.

It’s just my appearance that was severely lacking.

Frizzy hair? Check.

Geek glasses? Check.

Tacky ’80s clothes? Check.

I have justifiably burned most pictures from those years but my brothers have held onto a few gems for blackmail purposes (my brother Jade posted the above picture on Facebook a couple of years ago).

During my courtship with Jamie, I lived in Salt Lake City while he was in Denver. When we got engaged, Jade dug into his secret stash and sent one of said Horrendous Pictures to Jamie. And being the horrid person that he is, he enlarged one of them, attached a “Welcome Home” sign and taped it to the front door the first time I ever came to his condo.

Jamie claims he could hear my blood-gurgling scream from the hallway.

When I was in Calgary over the summer, I went through some old boxes containing church manuals and magazines. I was thrilled when I discovered this treasure that was given to my mom by her beloved mother.

I love the inscription; Grandma always had such beautiful handwriting.

“Dear Chris, I hope you enjoy the book for your family home evening lessons. Love, Mother.”

My family loves snuggling up and reading the scriptures every night so I asked my mom if I can could carry on this tradition. What I love about this book is it is beautifully illustrated but also contains real scriptural passages (versus being summarized/paraphrased). I think it’s so important for kids to learn to understand scriptural language vs. just the stories because there is power and a strong spirit behind it.

So, what does this have to do with Hadley? As we were settling down to read the scriptures, I discovered something inserted into the book lo-and-behold, it was my seventh grade class picture. I was at the tail end of the geek years–I’d chopped my hair and the following year I got contact lenses so I was almost quasi-cool.

I won’t mention the trauma of how my mom liked my asymmetrical cut so much she got the identical style.

Hadley squealed, grabbed the picture and said, “I MUST DO SOMETHING WITH THIS!”

Even my sweet Bode turned against me. “Did you really look like that?”

I only wish I was dressed up for Halloween, Dude.

All was forgotten until I returned to my bedroom and discovered Hadley’s creation.

Now I’m just waiting for Fat Kitty to turn against me.

Filed Under: Bode, Hadley, Humor, Jamie

The Death of a Giant Pumpkin

September 12, 2014 by Amber

My life has been such a whirlwind. Returning from a month in Canada. Family in town. Starting school the next week. Getting sick. Crazy schedules. Seriously, last night we had the kids’ piano lessons, Hadley had Activity Days, Bode had Scouts, she had a volleyball game and a school disco dance that night while I had an event at the church.

How do families of more than two kids juggle it all?

I realized the other day that I neglected to give an update on Jamie’s pumpkin season. Sadly stated: it’s over.

On the day Bode got baptized in August, Jamie’s grower group did their annual patch tour where they caravan around the city looking at each other’s pumpkins. It’s a highly-anticipated event but this year brought some bad news Jamie had long suspected: his pumpkins “Bo” and “Lucille” had developed yellow vine disease. Though they both had a great start, they never really took off and then stopped growing altogether.

“Bo” in happier days. A gorgeous pumpkin!

Tissue tests came back stating that the plants had low nitrogen but then yellow leaves started popping up, which means doomsday for giant pumpkin growers.

So he pulled the plants and started soil prep for 2015. There will be no pumpkin parties, though he is buoyed up by the fact that the kids’ pumpkins (which are grown in another area of the yard) remain unscathed. We’ll call that Jamie’s silver lining.

Just don’t mention the color yellow.

Filed Under: Jamie, pumpkins

When you’re begging to be sent to timeout

September 10, 2014 by Amber

We’ve had a roller-coaster history with timeout.

During Hadley’s obstinate stage (ages 18 months-4 years) it was her second home. What a lovely dwelling that corner by the laundry room has become since we added Fat Kitty’s kitty littler box to the mix four years ago.

Talk about the ultimate punishment.

Since Bode is Mr. “Do What Is Right,” he didn’t have any marathon sessions in timeout but on the rare occasion he landed in the Corner of Shame, he was so broken about disobeying us that he would just sob. Have you ever tried to discipline a sensitive kid? Trust me, you come out feeling like you’re the bad guy.

We really haven’t used timeout as punishment in a really long while because, for the most part, both kids are pretty well-behaved and there are certainly more effective ways of disciplining them as they grow older.

The other day, Hadley did something mean to Bode and instinctively, I ordered her to timeout. You know, for old time’s sake.

Timeout?” she scoffed. “Aren’t I a little bit old for timeout?”

“You’re right, you just lost technology time.”

“I take it back. Timeout sounds just fine.”

Filed Under: Bode, Hadley, Humor

The bright side of being a slob

September 9, 2014 by Amber

Blurry Bode trying to keep me from taking a picture of his messy room.

For the most part, we keep our house tidy.

However, encouraging the kids to keep their rooms clean is a losing battle with the exception of making their beds, which they’re pretty good at doing most of the time.

Their actual rooms are another matter. Bode is the messiest and isn’t allowed to have any technology time until his homework is done and room is clean. This works great in the summer when I’m more lax on our schedule but during the school year, I only let him play video games twice a week.

Which means his room is only clean for a very small window twice a week.

The other night as I was putting him to bed, I commented on his messy room.

He carefully looked around, shrugged his shoulders and said, “At least you have a pathway to my bed.”

Filed Under: Bode, Humor

Our New Tradition: Labor Day Pancake Contest Eating Party!

September 7, 2014 by Amber

I love throwing parties. It really started years ago with our annual pumpkin party and has grown to dinner groups, 4th of July bashes and then a few weeks ago, Hadley and Bode convinced me to invite a bunch of their church friends over for a night of movies, pizza and ghosts in the graveyard.

For Labor Day, the kids and I thought it would be fun to get some people together to do a pancake-eating-contest-breakfast so sent an email to some families to see if they were in town. Most of them were and so our house was flooded with eight Mormon families. If you’ve seen ’em you know they have a lot of kids, which translates into a lot of fun.

Pancake Par-tay

Some of the men-folk

The women-folk

Last fall, the kids participated in their first pie-eating contest. Though the experience was hilarious, eating an entire pie was over-the-top so we thought doing the same challenge with a few pancakes would be a lot more feasible.

Here’s my sordid history with pancake-eating. When I was a wee Canadian lassie, my two brothers and I were very competitive. Oh wait, nothing has changed. So, one Saturday we challenged each other to a contest to see who could the most pancakes. For once in my life, I dominated, even beating out my brother who was four years my senior. I don’t remember how many I ate.

But I do remember how many I threw up afterward and it was All. Of. Them.

No lie: I couldn’t eat pancakes for 10 years after that.

For our First Annual Labor Day Pancake Contest Eating Party, the ladies went first. Yes, you will note my daughter is the only one who chose not to cover up her clothes.

Apparently, her strategy worked because she won.

Though I’m not sure if she looked like a winner.#She’sGonnaBlow

I had high hopes for the boys. Bode has an awesome group of friends so imagine my shock/dismay when I learned several of them had already started eating and didn’t want to participate.

“I prefer to eat with a fork,” said his friend Noah. What 8-year-old boy even says that?

I practically had to drag the few remaining boys down there but they sure loved it once they dove in.

Though Bode put in a good effort, his friend Carson barely beat him and even had a smile on his face doing it.

We had an all-you can-eat category and my friend Eva’s teen Rory dominated by eating something like 17 pancakes. Sadly, I did not photograph the evidence, probably because he was passed out in a corner somewhere.

We have invited a new family in our ward to several of our recent fetes and the father Craig commented to me how cool it was that we regularly open up our home as a place for all these people to come together for fun and chaos. “The party people” he called us, which kind of took me aback because it’s what we’ve always done. Growing up, my parents made our home into the place where our friends would congregate and it’s funny because Jamie once received a similar blessing that our home would be a “happy place, where our children love to bring their friends.”

I responded to Craig that it was important for me to have my kids build relationships with their church friends and I wanted to provide many extracurricular opportunities for them to have good, clean fun. I had fabulous neighborhood friends growing up and I’m still close with all of them. But during the teenager years, like many teens, they experimented with a lot of wild things and being the designated driver grew tiresome. Of course, I want my kids to have friends in all walks of life but there’s nothing like having friends who share your same morals and values.

Like stuffing your face with pancakes.

Filed Under: holidays, LDS

When the boy becomes a Cub

September 4, 2014 by Amber

Scouting is in my blood. For years, my dad was our ward’s Cub Scout leader and I saw him camp with those boys, teach them to start fires, tie knots and everything under the sun. I desperately wanted to be a Boy Scout but there was a problem: I was a girl. And so I signed up to be a Brownie, fully expecting to have have the some rough ‘n tumble adventures as those boys.

Oh, how wrong I was. I don’t think we went on any backcountry activities–in fact, we never even left the school stage where it was held. All I can remember was being required to wear ridiculously short brown dresses as our uniform, singing cheesy songs and skipping around in a circle.

Suffice it to say, I was a Brownie dropout after one year.

Upon turning 8, Bode reached a rite of passage in the church: he became a Wolf. We have a great Scouting tradition in our ward–in fact, most of my friends’ sons have achieved their rank of Eagle and are some of the most stalwart young men I know. I made Bode pose on his first day, telling him we’d share that picture in his slide show when he became an Eagle Scout.

“But Mom, we don’t know if I’ll become an Eagle.”

If you know anything about Mr. Responsible/goal-setting Bode, you know that once he delves into Scouting that boy will fly.

Their first gathering was a fun pack meeting at the lake on July 31 but his first Den meeting with Sisters Mauger and Phillips (his den leaders) was the following Thursdays when they learned about personal hygiene and household safety. He came home with a checklist of precautions we should be taking, which he took very seriously and proceeded to lecture us in the areas where we were lacking.

Welcome to the next 8+ years of my life.

Most of his besties are in his den, which makes it extra fun but that’s not what it’s all about. As we were thumbing through his Wolf Handbook, we reviewed the 12 achievements he must pass to learn his Wolf badge and I became convinced that every young man should become involved in Scouting as they learn everything from Feats of Skill (physical) to Your Flag to Tools for Fixing and Building to Your Living World to Family Fun to Making Good Choices.

The Boy Scouts of America has gotten so much flack in the media that people have forgotten what it’s all about. As I was waiting in the car one day, I watched a normally rambunctious and wild group of Webelos Scouts (age 10) respectfully learn to raise, lower and fold The Flag.

I was teary-eyed over their reverence…something that is NOT being taught in today’s society.

And coming from a Canuck, that’s really something.

Now, if I can just rope someone into sewing on all his scouting badges….

Filed Under: Bode

Happy Back-to-School!

September 2, 2014 by Amber

We had such a fabulous summer that I was dreading school’s schedules and homework. Then I hit the kids-constantly-being-home wall a few days before they went back so the timing was perfect.

Hadley’s school started a few days before Bode. It’s tough to believe that she is in fifth grade.

And that she had a growth spurt and is now a few inches taller than her friends who are all fashionistas. Her friend Fiona even had hashtag-shaped earrings.

Welcome to the tween years.

As for Bode, he is now in third grade. The nice thing about starting on different days is they each get their own special breakfast and celebration. Hadley asked me to make gingerbread pancakes and Bode wanted doughnuts. Lots of doughnuts.

The best news? He was in school when the sugar crash inevitably came.

Good luck to both of their teachers this year.

Filed Under: Bode, Hadley

Dreaming the Dream of Living Abroad

August 31, 2014 by Amber

Jamie thinks I’m a lunatic. What else is new, right?

One of my lifelong dreams is to live abroad with my family. It stems from the fact that I lived in the same house my entire life and always dreamed of experiencing new cultures. And by experiencing, I don’t mean visiting, I mean living there.

Many years ago, I shared this dream with my Utah-born-and-raised missionary companion when we served together in Switzerland. She thought I was nuts, too.

And then she married a diplomat and has lived abroad with her family most of her married life.

I love almost everything about where we live in Colorado: Our home, family, schools, friends, church community and fabulous mountains. I don’t want to permanently leave and we have a truly blessed life so why rock the boat?

I guess I just want more for my kids. I want them to see beyond the confines of their social circles to live in a different culture and be exposed to a different way of life–the good and the bad.

There are many in the family-travel-blogging space who are permanent nomads, homeschooling their kids as they travel the world. That is way too extreme for my blood but a semester- or year-long sabbatical would be food for my soul.

My fire was stoked when two fellow LDS bloggers uprooted their families: Design Mom spent a couple of years in France with her six kids and recently, Shawni from 71 Toes announced she was moving her family of five to China for a semester.

I am greeeeeen with envy.

Design Mom was able to swing it because she and her husband both work from home and like Jamie and me, all they needed was a Wi-Fi connection and could work anywhere in the world. In Shawni’s case, her husband has dealings with China and he will be working from their Shanghai office. In today’s world where so many are working remotely, it’s a wonder that more people aren’t uprooting themselves.

Another reason why I’m newly obsessed with investigating living-abroad options: my kids are perfect ages. Hadley is in fifth grade and Bode is in third. Next year would be the perfect time to go before she starts middle school and we become inundated with sports, camps, YW/YM, hormones and summer jobs.

On my wish list? Europe (especially England, France, Switzerland or Scandinavian countries with access to international/English-speaking schools) or Hawaii (not exactly foreign but the culture is so gloriously rich). Asia is an intimidating pipe dream. New Zealand/Australia would be amazing but their schools and holidays are on a completely different track.

So like the lunatic I am, I’ve been trolling all the house swap/house sabbatical/house sitting sites while also dreaming of house sitting for a senior LDS couple who lives abroad that have been called on a mission.

It will likely never happen, mostly because I have a husband who thinks this is just another one of my hairbrained ideas.

But a girl can dream, right?

Filed Under: Family travel, Favorite Posts, travel

St. Mary’s Glacier: On top of the world!

August 29, 2014 by Amber

Hiking St. Mary’s Glacier has been a tradition in our family since I moved to Colorado almost 12 years ago. But this year was my favorite yet because we pushed the boundaries and went higher than ever before.

And because we didn’t run over Hadley’s foot with the car. Or have our friend’s daughter get sick and then their car wouldn’t start.

In June, we went on weekly hikes with our hiking group but July was a lot of boating and hanging out with grandparents, which means both my kids are out of shape. Though St. Mary’s Glacier is only about 1 mile to the base of the glacier, it is a steepish, rocky mile through a high subalpine forest and the 10,000+-feet elevation can sometimes be problematic. Bode got an altitude headache early on but recovered fairly quickly. His whining about his tired legs was another matter.

Hadley started out slower than usual, “wow, I really am out of shape!” but quickly regained her strength and was blazing up the trail as usual. She has been begging to climb to the top of the glacier for years (a slippery, steep, arduous climb) and we’ve been putting her off because we knew Bode wouldn’t make it. I figured this year would be no different so we took our usual pictures at the base of the glacier.

But then something amazing happened. Hadley and I started climbing on the glacier, followed by Jamie and a reluctant Bode. And they didn’t stop!

The base of the glacier is bottle-necked with crowds but as we hiked the masses cleared and we had that entire river of ice to ourselves.

Looking down.

It was awe-inspiring as we snaked our way up one of the largest moving objects on earth. Bode and I had a blast holding each other as we slid down, shouting “1, 2, SLIIIIDE!”

Hadley reached the top of the glacier first and upon finding a trail announced she was going to keep going. Climbing the glacier was one thing; continuing higher to the Continental Divide Trail was another. I instructed her to only go as far as the next ridge because there was no way we would convince Bode to go higher.