Belay On!

 Saturday we spent a few hours at the local climbing wall...The kids love bouldering around.  Oscar and Poppy got some new climbing shoes with our REI dividend (gotta love free gear).  It was impressive to see what a difference it made in their abilities!

 I spent a good portion of the time in this position...neck looking up.   Yes, my neck was getting tired.

 Poppy wanted to master a more technical route and she got it.  It was so fun to watch her finger around the cracks for hand holds.  It is always fun to try to climb after the kids and try to grab for the holds I kept telling them to get.  Much easier said than done.

 I decided to try my hand on the route only to find that because I had been belaying for the past two hours, my forearm on my right side kept cramping as I would grip the holds.  Kinda funny, but not at the time.

 No worries though, I made it to the top.

 Oscar spent most of his time mastering complicated areas.  He had some decent blisters to boot.  Here is is bouldering after already being super tired.

 It's nice that we both can belay.  It makes it so both Oscar and Poppy can climb at the same time.

 Hazel on the other hand, spent a lot of time wanting this.  She will try a little bit of climbing, but she isn't won over by it yet.

 Poppy was snapping photos.

Oscar giving a tough route one last go...
Ahhhh spending time with my family.  It's what it is all about!

Sharing with a Capital "H"

(Hazel with her "binki-blanket," the one item besides the letter "H," I will not require her to share)

Have I mentioned I have added two  huge owl appliques over holes, and a new boarder as a means to making it last?

From the first time Hazel discovered the letter "H" on the story time library carpet, it has been "her's".  It isn't just the library carpet, she pens it on any surface that can conceivably be labeled.  She loves it.  She owns it, and beware the person who tries to say otherwise.  You will no doubt get her evil eye, accompanied by hands on the hips, with a wrinkled nose that will not tolerate anything else.  You could try, but don't say that I didn't warn you.  You may be snubbed for life.
It was "Carter day", the day Hazel (my 4 yr old) anxiously awaits every Wednesday.  It is a day of meeting at the library with her cousin Carter for story time, and then a play time at alternating houses each week.  It is the best day of the week! The two of them play for hours without too much friction, and an ongoing sense of kid-freedom from  their mothers.  It is the relationship that all mom hope to find, wherein the children cancel each other out.
I happened to have the little ones prior to story time, while their mom was accumulating a wooden crate that the two of us have been converting into chicken coops (that is a story for an upcoming post).  I was getting to story time just as it was beginning   The children ran in while I was returning some books. Hazel found her letter "H" along with a sweet little girl (who no-doubt also thought that it belonged to her).  She immediately made the mistake known and quickly evicted the girl.
I reentered the room only to see my child not being kind, considerate, or sensitive to the other girls feelings.  As any good mother, I immediately grabbed her by her arms and headed for the door.  Immediately it was tears, followed by her trademark "Hag Fish slime".  She was inconsolable.  The tears were flowing, sobbing, probably a combination of guilt and extreme sadness due to her not getting her letter, or story time. 
We sat on the bench just outside of story time, by the front door and check-out desk as she continued to melt down.  I was (as any good parent should do) trying to convince her of her wrong, encourage her to pick a different letter and to feel sorry for hurting the other little girl.  It wasn't working.  So we sat. She sad, me trying to figure out what to do.
My nephews and their mom were in story time, I had the car seats and she had boxes in her car, it was cold outside (Hazel wasn't wearing a coat)...we were stuck for the moment.  After about 10 minutes a older lady confronted me and in a not-so-pleasant way, told me I needed to make my child stop crying (as if I wasn't already trying to) she also said that if I couldn't, then I should leave.  She said her crying was bothering her and others who had come here to the library, and I shouldn't allow my child to be upset in the library...(that is the gist of it, but it was worse).  I responded as cool and collected as I could, and asked her if she wanted to try calming her down?  Ugh...the point is I felt horrible.
I felt horrible that Hazel didn't get to do story time, sad that she had hurt another little girl without a shade of remorse, felt hurt that someone would show such a lack of compassion to my predicament, and frustrated that I had unknowingly offended someone else.  It was such a complex level of emotion that would bother me all day.
My hubby has been out of town all week, and I could possibly be a little more sensitive in the lack of his presence, but the emotions were still so real and bothersome. Why couldn't I just brush it off?  Why was I feeling so vulnerable to the lady at the library?  Why can't I teach my child to share, to be kind or why couldn't I control the situation more effectively???
Being the wise sister-in law that she is, later in the day when she was picking up her son and I was discussing how I was having a hard time letting it go, she mentioned to me something she had read once (here is the link, I found it and read up on it a bit) about little children not being capable of sinning but rather, making mistakes.  The difference being, with sin it is an active choice and follows a process of remorse,  restitution etc.  Mistakes on the other hand, are actions lacking either knowledge or understanding.  It isn't premeditated, or possibly even recognized as a wrongful doing.  It is just a result of a choice, albeit a wrong one.
This brought me some peace in acknowledging that Hazel was somewhat justified in her actions.  She wasn't purposefully trying to hurt someone else,. she merely wanted what she wrongfully assumed was hers.  I too, wasn't seeking the opportunity to make this woman's library experience a bad one, I was just simply trying to console a disappointed child. The lady, much like Hazel, felt that the library was her space and we were infringing on her "H" of sorts...it was suddenly a giant circle.
Since Wednesday I have been trying to process it all.  I'm certainly not perfect, nor do I profess to be, but one of my spiritual gifts has thus far been my ability to let things go.  I forgive pretty freely, and I don't typically hold grudges.  It seemed funny to me to be so bothered by something so trivial (there are after-all matters of consequence in the world!!!).  It has served as a great teaching opportunity for myself.  My parenting paradigm has shifted a little. I don't have a conclusion just yet, but I am curious, what do you think of the idea of children not necessarily needing to be "responsible" for their actions?  Before you fill me with odes of wisdom on teaching my children to share, check out this article and let me know what you think?

After unloading all of this on my oh-so-wise husband, he responded that indeed when I am forcing my child to say sorry (no matter how many times I make her) will most likely not result in remorse.  It really is just making me feel like I'm being a good parent.  Food for thought...
Here is one more insightful article on kids sharing practices.  A recent study shows that kids between 3-6 know they should share evenly, but don't.  Interesting!!!

Four Years in the Making

As I was flipping through the facebook messages in my account, my friend Jess at Blonde Ponytail happened to post that the submissions for Hood to Coast relay with NUUN were being accepted for bloggers.  I thought, "that would be awesome to run."  Having seen and heard so many great things from both Jess and Harmony @   Keep On Keeping On about their experiences doing it that past couple of years, it really got the wheels turning in my head.  I thought "I used to be a blogger"...I used to keep a pretty regular blog".  In fact, I used to have four blogs... What happened???
I started thinking about all of the things that have transpired since I last posted here, or on my family blog.  It had been so long I started making a list:
In the case of this blog, it began with the morning sickness of this little piece of heaven...

Who happens to look a bit more like this these days...

Four years later...
Next I thought about Post-Partum and how it kicked my trash after her birth.
For two years it was truly a struggle to keep my family functional and to try to regain my sanity.  Luckily with the help of a very understanding husband, some meds and a great doctor, I finally got my feet on the ground.
Things were coming around and although I kept teaching and running through those years, they were difficult and I had to eliminate some unnecessary items... therefore the blog got put on the back burner.
Interestingly enough, it was during this time of depression that I thought I would fix it with extra exercise and more stringent eating plans...I was convinced that if I could attain a certain level of fitness and physique, I would be able to cure myself.
I probably don't need to say that it failed...BIG TIME!!! It was exactly those thoughts of perfection that were driving me deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of self-inflicted misery.
Ironically enough, it was shortly after I had read Intuative Eating, went off of medication in the fall of 2011, and felt I was getting a grip on my self,  that I was in a very serious car accident that left me incapable of exercise for a time.
All of the fears I had about me suddenly gaining a hundred pounds if I stopped exercising for even one day, that my body wasn't strong enough, defined enough, fast enough, healthy enough, were all brought back into perspective via a head-on collision.  It was the gift of life that made me truly begin to really appreciate the physical gift God had given me on this earth.   

I had/have a terrific body that was very capable.  I had ran 5 marathons, who knows how many half marathons, I could bike, hike, ski, swim, climb...I was strong!!! And suddenly I wasn't strong, for real.  I was hurt.  My left leg had kissed the dashboard with enough impact that even now,  1 year, 1 month and 24 days later(but who is counting), I'm still trying to fix.
It was humbling and empowering.  Many of my depression fears subsided as a result of my near-death experience.  I discovered that I want to be healthy.  That is it.  I want to be strong enough to live my life actively, with the ability to jump at any chance to wander the great outdoors.
I like food, good food, and I enjoy feeling good when I eat good food.  Tracking calories, carbs, protein, sodium obsessively is not the way I want/need to think about food.
I have stopped weighing myself (I know, big step).  You know what?  I am happier about my body today than when I was at the peak of my obsessiveness, and I still wear the same pair of jeans.    In fact, I'm pretty sure I've lost a bit.  The scale has lost it's control over me.  I am happy to be me.
Which leads me to where we are now...
We recently moved from Pullman, WA where all of my running/biking buddies are...for seven years we lived in the happy little town, with many happy people and yet we decided it was time to move closer to family.

Utah!  The land of recreation and beauty.  I love the mountains... as for the mass of people in the Salt Lake Valley? I'm working on embracing suburbia.  I miss my buddies, I miss my gym, I miss my spin class regulars...but I'm hoping to embrace our new reality.  Hoping to find my niche.
Last summer I was given the go-ahead to start running again.  I spent the Fall gradually increasing my mileage.  In November I was feeling a bit stronger and the runs were getting better.  I built up to 10 miles.  I was still having discomfort in my leg, but it was manageable.  I knew I was going to try to seek an ortho-doc to check it out, but with the move I was putting it off.

Early December while doing a speed workout I felt a sharp pain n my foot.  I stopped running and was just taking it easy.  January rolled around and it was not getting better.  I finally made an appointment.  The consensus was a stress fracture in my talus as a result of "my pulley-system in my leg not being back to normal".   My leg was booted for 5 weeks.  Just last week it was taken off!!!
The good news is that we are back to building up my running: 1 min. run, 4 min. walk for 20 minutes at a 6% incline.  Every other day I can run, and each day I get to add 30 seconds to my run time.  It's not much but it is a start.
The interesting part of Physical therapy this past week was him analyzing my running.  It was very revealing and slightly embarrassing.  Lets just say I have some work to do.  He could tell I was a cyclist by the way I sort of sit when I run.  Interesting...he gave me pointers, more exercises and stretches and wants to see me in three weeks after I've had some time to build.
Not having many friends or outlets and being encourage by the local gym I'm going to to get my AFAA certification, I am using this time to really study and hopefully certify on April 20th.  I'm excited, I have always wanted to do it but have never needed to to teach before.  You would think after teaching spin for 6 years that I wouldn't be nervous, but I am.
Well, that is the past four years in a very little nutshell.  Hopefully I will once again have this blogging outlet. Who knows, maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring of the Nuun Hood to Coast...or maybe I'll just have a reason to pick up my old blog and trudge forward on my Letty Legs.

Happy Easter!!!

Redemtion...Holiday style

Happy New Year From the Edge's
Look...a Family photo!!! We are off to a good start!
(OK, so this was Christmas eve, but since we didn't send out Christmas cards, this will have to do.)

We were lucky enough to get a nice little blizzard this week that has helped to keep our kids occupied.
This girl loves the snow but refuses to wear gloves...burr.
The boy showing off his skills on his new pogo stick. He was pretty disappointed on Christmas morning when his mom could pogo better than him. He is now working on showing me up.
Also not pictured, the boy decided to try out his new super awesome sleeping bag by sleeping in our freezing cold sun-room on a night when the temps dipped into the single digits...thanks grandma. He said he stayed warm!
Poppy wearing her new Rapunzel hair and dress...oh, the indulgent grandma, what would she do without you??? You certainly have the knack for knowing exactly what she would love. I do however win points for getting her a bead/creative box that has been getting pretty good play time too. Pretty sure that Rapunzel didn't have that in her tower!
Hazel didn't even have to ask to know that the barn and animals were hers. From the minuet she walked int o the room she had them in her hands.
The girls were pretty content with their pre-opened gifts prior to breakfast. We generally don't let them open gifts until after breakfast. This way they get to play with whatever is out on the floor and the other gifts come after.
Poppy was happy being Mary for our Christmas Eve nativity.Our good friends Helen and Justin came over for Christmas eve. We made our annual gingerbread trains. I was delighted by the fact that Oscar and Poppy are now old enough to handle the frosting themselves. They are really getting independent!
Christmas Eve I told Rick that I wanted him to take the kids out while I cleaned up the house and got it ready for Christmas. He then told me they were going hiking and I decided to forgo my plan...no way are they going without me! The bonus was that I got a awesome Family photo out of it. BTW I consider any photo that has my entire family in it-with them all facing forward a success. This may just go on our mantle.

(Oscar wore his cycling hat as a winter hat. Funny thing is, it doesn't cover your ears. I lent him mine half way through.)

Oscar did the extra two mile section with me. I always love it when I can hang with the o-man. He always has such great ideas and thoughts that come about when we are one-on-one.

Well, there you go, my first post of 2011. I am hoping to redeem my blogging self with the new year. I would love to catch up on the ups and downs for 2010, but then I get overwhelmed and don't know where to begin. So, lets just say I'll re-commit to do better this year than last. It shouldn't be too hard to do. Happy New year Blog world!

Have I mentioned before that I hate shopping?

Oscar left me this note last week. Ricky bailed me out and went for me. You will proud to know that I went shopping today. He will be so excited.

Poppy's invite

Someone is turning five this week...I love her invite.

Missing the Mountains...and my boys

Back in the day...Oscar on daddy's back

Oscar's First Hike, a few weeks old

Another one of his first hike, see how protective I was...can certainly tell that he was my first baby. The others would have been placed in the bjorn, and we would be on our way.

This is a picture of Ricky backpacking when he was about Oscar's age(from the side profile it looks like it could just be Oscar), wearing the same pack that Oscar is wearing on this trip...thanks grandma and grandpa! (Bet you didn't know back then that your grand kid would wear it.)

This picture may be about what he looks like today...well at least earlier today when they were actually hiking, and not right now when they are probrably snuggled into their tent sleeping (which is most likely what they are doing, that is unless, they are telling silly jokes and making farting noises)...

Here's another "oldie but goody" of Ricky and Big Rick. What good look'in guys!

Yesterday my boys left on an expedition to the wild wilderness of the Willowas.
As I sit here at 9:30pm at night, with my two girls in bed asleep (one of which is sleeping in MY bed, as a special treat), I can't help but really miss the mountains. I want to smell the crisp fall air, feel some rocks beneath my feet, a pack on my back loaded with all sorts of trail friendly foods, sit on a summit and stare off into the world beyond...I want to be hanging with my boys doing one of the things I love most, spending time outside.
I'm not saying that I haven't had a fun weekend with just us girls, on the contrary, we have been having lots of fun. We went to the fair last night and I successfully wore them out and they both crashed in their beds by 7:45pm. We have played at the farmer's market, cleaned the church, went swimming, had ice cream (including a gummy worm topping), I even rented Poppy a "Barbie musketeers" movie, and even painfully watched 75% of it with her (now that is love). We really have had some great time just being together, sans the boys.
All that said...I still am missing those mountains.
I therefore have a job for all of you out in blog world who are near some of those pretty, monstrous piles of rock and rubble. Do me a favor and take a hike. Be in nature and let me glean a bit of that exposure off of you.
In a couple of moths I'll get my fix. In the meantime, I'll settle for some freshly harvested wheat fields and some pictures that Mark Feltis is going to have to take, becasue our "Olympus Tough" camera wasn't' as tough as it was supposed to be, and suddenly quit working without any real abuse...more on that topic later... but I'll hopefully get a re-cap and my boys back tomorrow.
Oh, and I'm missing my boys too. Things seem weird and not so balanced without them. Too much Estrogen in the house right now. But then again, Grandpa Edge is used to that.

I Remember...

I remember Meeting Lisa at the Salt lake Airport to "see her off" for her transition from the MTC (missionary training center) to her mission in California. They never made that transition that morning. In fact they wouldn't make that transition for a while. As we drove back into Salt lake city from the airport, I left Rick at a bus stop so that he could ride the bus up to school. I turned on the radio and the reports were coming in of an airplane that had struck one of the twin towers. The reports were benign and seemed like a fluke tragedy.
I arrived at my office phone job where I worked customer service for the "Marriott Rewards" program. The phones were silent. Not a single one would ring. We sat their gathered around wheeled in TV's, watching the news unfold as the second tower was hit, as the towers collapsed, as the pentagon was hit and as they had the crash landing in PA.
I felt sick. Everyone felt sick, and helpless. We were sent home from work that day mid-way through. It seemed that no one wanted to see how their rewards were doing, nor did they want to plan a trip. It was very strange.
This would continue for a very long time. Our office had to "let people go" because there just wasn't enough customers wanting to redeem their rewards.
I was in my first trimester of pregnancy with Oscar and I was physically sick anyway. I recall a few days after the tragedy of us being paid to stand in the back parking lot of the building tearing out a page from all of the brochures because it was a page on the twin-tower Marriott.
I wanted to puke...and not just because I was pregnant.
I remember watching with my "cup half full" outlook, praying that they would find more survivors a week+ as they began to try to pull NY back together. I was sadly disappointed. Although there were success stories, there just didn't seem to be enough.
Rick's interviews that he had had lined up for jobs post graduation went cold. He decided to take the LSAT and see about Law school. Never had we considered this option before. In fact because of 9/11 he is an attorney today.
During law school we spent many hours flying across this nation. New security measures, and an ever presence of insecurity in the general populace, I always thought about those flights and those people who never made it home that day. It was haunting.
I wanted to write this down because everyone who was old enough to remember, has a similar story. Just like when JFK died, or many other historically marked tragedies, I will always remember. If I'm not here to tell you...you can pull up the archives of this blog and know that I lived that day and that my life has drastically been altered by this experience. Not necessarily for the worse, but certainly was a path that changed following the aftermath of this national tragedy.
To those who lost the most, I hope you have chosen to live and to share with the world the resilience and strength of the American spirit. We can do hard things and can make this world a better place.

Canned Food Inventory

Picture from last year

Tomatoes: 58 quarts
Salsa: 73 pints & 4 qt
Peaches: 54 qt
Pears (we haven't canned any this year) : 12 qt
Apricot Halves: 24 qt
Grape juice(none this year, which may include several bottles of vintage 2005): 27 qt & 1/2 gal.
Honey 120 lbs
Apples(none this year): 5 qt
Apple Pie Filling (none this year): 5 qt
Apricot jam: 32 pt
Cherry jam(none this year): 3 1/2 pt
Plum syrup(none this year): 2 pt
Black berry jam(none this year): 3pt
Strawberry jam: 2pt
Peach jam: 5pt
(Not included is the beans and wheat.)
Just in case I loose my handy dandy notebook, I want to be able to compare next years inventory.
Nothing quite like some home canned foods.

Budding Politician

Spiking your kids food for fun...

Hazel did her own tampering here...dip your bagel in the nice clean river water so that it softens up to the perfect consistency. (I should note I worried about giardia for the next week.)

If I'm not tampering with their food, sometimes I skip the whole make a "bagel and cream cheese" step, and just give them cream cheese on a knife.

(Poppy feeding herself)
Crapes are another food I find opportunity to stash all sorts of goodness into.

I'm not sure if I actually spiked his cereal, but that is the face I see when they actually figure out I have tampered with their food.

Oscar's spiked sucker that grandma sent 4 years ago...there's a cricket inside.

Tonight as I was preparing my two older children's bedtime snack of oatmeal, I decided I must make a post about how frequently I spike my children's food with all sorts of interesting things. Sometimes I do it entirely to see if they notice.
Take tonight for example: Oscar has repeated multiple times that he does not like whole milk or what her refers to as "Hazel milk". Even when we were entirely out of skim milk he said he would eat his breakfast without milk, so that he wouldn't have to use her milk. Therefore tonight I did what any other good mother would do, I used whole milk in his oats just to see if he would notice, even though we had skim in the refrigerator too. Did he notice? No.
Case in point# 2: Poppy has been getting up in the night for the past week. I decided that she must be mineral deficient or something...therefore I cut open one of my calcium pills and added it to her breakfast oats (I seem to see a pattern with oats, do you? You may want to consider skipping oats if you ever come to my house) did she notice? No.
Sometimes I do it is for nutritional value, or maybe to see if they will actually eat a different food that I know they say they hate, but maybe this time they will like it. The part that is the funniest is when I do it completely to humor myself, and they kids never even know it. Man I crack myself up. Maybe this is what parenting is all about...manipulating my littles.
Maybe it is my way of mixing things up a little. Either way I'm probably going to keep it up. Just to see.