Fun and Games

This afternoon we went to Trampoline Hell Heaven, a place called Jump On It located in Linden.  For those unfamiliar with this concept, it is a warehouse full of trampolines tied together.  Here are a few images for you to envision little Meg in the "Under 4 Feet" section

And here she is, we had to make a quick stop on the way home from Jump On It, which the nurse referred to as a Death Trap :

And here we are several hours after Jump On It:

When the doctor in the ER saw the x-ray with a broken tibula, he looked at the nurse and asked "Trampoline?" 

View from hotel

5 Years!

We lived in Santa Barbara for nearly 5 years.  That might not sound like a lot to some people, but we have never lived anywhere more than 3 years in a row up until now, so a large portion of our lives as a family was invested in our paradisaical experience.

I am not as poetic as my friend Katie who did a beautiful post on her departure from Santa Barbara, but I did run across the email that I sent out to people when we first moved there:

 

Hola a todos!

  

 

  

We are now living in Santa Barbara where Steve has embarked on his final journey towards his Ph.D (religious studies)!  I am working from home and travel once a month or so out to North Carolina to work with 5 schools there.  Casey and Bridget are happy in school and Gillian hangs around the neighborhood during the day.  We live in the family housing and we are renting out our home in Sacramento for the time being.

  

 

  

Life is wonderful and we have been blessed in a million small and big ways.

  

 

  

In trying to be more organized in this new lifestyle (small apartment living and all) I decided that I need to gather together our addresses in one location and realized that we sold our old computer and forgot to get our address book off of the hard drive!  So while some people might not care whether or not they ever see us again, we still would like to send

out Christmas cards, etc.  to the people that we love the mostest!  

 

  

Please send us your current information- names and ages of children, address, phone number, email that is better than this one.  No one is exempt from this request, even the people who I talked to like, last week, I don't have your addy.

  

 

  

Love to you all and word to your mothers,

 

Lee Ann, Steve, and Family

 

It is amazing how I still have all the same shortcomings--losing addresses, writing random words in Spanish, and overuse of parenthesis. 

And some things have changed:

Medieval Weapons

Completed approx.11 pm.

Daylight Savings and Other Offenses

For the record Daylight Savings is a travesty.

In other news:

1)  I love living in Utah.  I am shocked to see myself typing it, but I do.  There is nothing negative so far, all positives.  I repent of previous negativity towards the Beehive State.  More on this as I go.

2)  I am on my 6th week of Weight Watchers.  I have not really lost any weight as far as I know, but since I haven't seen my scale in 4 weeks, hard to tell by just looking. I think I have lost an inch off of my chin so far, and maybe one around my waist but much slower than expected.  I do feel excellent however.  My diet has switched from predominately whole grains to predominately vegetable and fruits.  I have no idea how it happened like that, but I will probably never go back.  My favorite recipe:

2 eggs
sauteed bell pepper
cayenne
nutmeg
laughing cow cheese wedge

So yummy. I cannot tell you enough how much I love that recipe.   My second favorite recipe:

blueberries
strawberries
pineapple
banana

I do feel guilty that half of this stuff is shipped from Costa Rica, but I decided to choose me over the planet.  So sorry Michael Polland, the situation was getting out of control.

3)  My in-laws invited me to Austria/Budapest.  I am short on time but feel like I should go for it.  I know the me of a few years ago would consider it idiotic to skip out, but for now the time commitment sounds like too much.

4)  My son created this in google sketch up for a castle project.  He was supposed to build it with cardboard or sugar cubes or something but I am done with that kind of business so I emailed and said "hey could he like, do this in google sketchup or something?"  So hours and hours later, after trying to free the monster I created by suggesting it, my son came up with this:

Here is the top view:

It may not look like much to you, but sketch-up is a bit tricky and requires some really good design-thinking stuff.  Did I say I was proud of him?  Anyway, he turns it in on Tuesday, I am excited to see how it went (although the bar was low, create some diorama and then label five parts).

5)  BYU ranked 3rd.  I know that I don't usually reference sports around here, but moving to Utah has brought a few things to the forefront (like my son suddenly hates the Utes for no apparent reason and my daughter claims to be a Jazz fan now.  Must be the bad influence of kids at school.) Anyway, I have to say that it has been more than interesting to hear everyone's take on the Honor Code.  I actually appreciate ESPN's support of the integrity of our program and our willingness to enforce the Honor Code even when it is a hard choice to make.  I am proud of BYU taking a stand (unlike the time when they had Dick Cheney as a keynote at graduation) and I appreciate being associated with a school that stands by a value system in a way that shocks the rest of the nation (a direct quote from an interview last week "Isn't this standard just unrealistic?  I mean, look at this first thing on the honor code, be honest--most coaches couldn't even live up to that one." )  Someone recently said to me "Wait, so you REMEMBER college?"  I had to tell him that it was not the first time I had heard the joke before and that I look forward to more innovative jokes in the future.

New situations

It has been nearly five years since moving and I have forgotten that making friends is kind of an effort.  So much effort sometimes because I just don't have the patience to wait it out and let the friendships naturally happen.

I blame Tiffany because it took me approximately 5 days to find her at *DT.  We were born to be friends you know--and I have been impatient ever since.  She did give me some sage advice this afternoon to "drop this obsession with trying to make friends everywhere you go" which I will always treasure as comforting words from my BFF.

I also remember Krissie whom I met before she was even in our ward and ten seconds later knew she was my kind of friend--so that doesn't help me wait it out.

Come to think of it, many whom I met when I first moved to Santa Barbara were people who I could relate to immediately because we were in a similar situation.

Yet at playgroup this last week in my new ward when a girl told me that she and her family were in "my same situation" because they lived with their in-laws, I wanted to say HEY I AM NOT IN A SITUATION.  But I need a friend so maybe I need to consider my situation the similar bonding material of graduate school lifestyle.

Fortunately I had lunch with the ever lovely Chellese who raised my spirits today and has committed to mandatory friendship time twice weekly.  Thank you again for saving me from my self-imposed constraints.

And right when I am sitting in front of my computer alone at night wondering if I will even make any friends at all, I recall my best freighbor of all time and how long it took us to find each other when she was right there all along.  I still sometimes cry over the lost time we could have had mocking reality tv show contestants.  And if I am patient, somewhere in this new life is a Katie hiding out.

I just need some good pick-up lines to sort her from the chaff so any advice on friend-making tips is welcome here.

*RIP

Togetherness

Since you asked, here is an explanation of why our family is apart until the end of March:

1)  We originally planned on leaving in December but had that opportunity for Steve to TA instead (blogged about it in December but too lazy to find the link)

2)  We were going to stay as a family but a number of things cropped up for us.  Most prominently, we lost our carpool family and it became a fairly big headache to try to operate business as usual on that schedule

3) Steve's parents were leaving on the 24th of February and I wanted to have the kids spend at least a couple of days with them before they left for their trip (I also wanted to have some time to discuss the house, agreements on use of space, etc.)

4)  What was once a very enjoyable experience at the kids' school was a pretty bad situation for my kids.  Bridget's group of friends almost entirely disappeared (7 of her friends left her class from the beginning of last year until the carpool friend, who was her best, closest friend), Casey was really unhappy with school (the kids were really mean to each other and the teacher and I don't have the same values) and I felt like I had to bribe them to get out of bed everyday.

5)  The school really lost the interesting and unique edge that it had and simply became a low performing school.  The last week of school they had posted their API goal (for those outside of California, that is the number that summarizes how you did on your state tests) on every door in the classroom and were trying to get the kids excited about test scores.  I don't care if that is an effective method of bumping up a few points, who wants to be at a school whose goal is to increase their test scores?  After sacrificing an entire year of our family time for the school, it was tough to see that the way they were implementing the plans I helped write in a way that was so contrary to their original purpose.  I am not angry or disappointed, I just can't watch it.  If my kids had been happy we would have stayed but since it was such drudgery to them (at least the oldest two) I couldn't really find it in myself to say "no, really kids, things are great!"

6)  Steve really needs some time to get a good start on his dissertation.  Between driving the kids to school on the days he wasn't teaching, and trying to manage the household while I am working, he was getting very little time.

7)  I have an increased number of conference calls these days and getting a place where there are no kid sounds in the background in a small apartment is almost impossible.

8)  Trying to move and also keep clean a two-bedroom apartment with 4 kids in it= muy malo.  


So... did we improve our lifestyle by making the move?

New Commute= 7 minutes WITH traffic.  Niiice. Not to mention that school starts at 8:15, 15 minutes later than school started there.  Double nice.  We have a garage to mitigate some of the effects of living in a cold climate= triple the happiness.

Grandparent Time= wonderful.  We got to spend a nice couple of days with grandma and grandpa and it was genuinely fantastic.  We were able to have a good conversation about expectations for the house and use of space and hang out with the family in general.

School Experience= In spite of a bumpy first day registration, the kids are glowingly happy with school.  They come home every day reporting how nice the kids are to each other.  There is no bullying at their school, the kids don't use bad language, they share stuff on the playground, they accepted my children as peers immediately, and the school is not low performing.  The school is not particularly innovative and the level of Spanish is decidedly low rigor (Bridget brought home some homework with pictures of farm animals asking if they were *ciudad or campo which is something that she would have done in Kinder in our previous school) but at least they are getting Spanish at all.  The teachers send me an email on Fridays with updates for the week, everyone there is really friendly.  Even the secretaries after day one have been decidedly NICE.  No one has a hard time getting out of bed and they are all happy to go to school because it is FUN.  Imagine.  Learning is fun.

Steve= This has been the one serious downside. I really underestimated the impact of missing my husband like this.  We have been apart off and on during our marriage but this is different.  With lifestyle changes like we are experiencing,  I want to discuss with him every little detail of the day.  I think he is spared some really boring conversations with me, but I am just lonely for his company.  This is his culture, the land of his birth, and I feel like a foreigner seeing things through eyes of an emigrant.  I know it sounds funny, but all of our visits here and living here when younger were not real.  I never opened a bank account here or needed to get a Utah driver's license.   In terms of his productivity, only he can say.  Is that working for you?  I hope that he is getting a lot done though he is doing all the moving (totally huge fringe benefit for me.)

Home Life= Oh.  My.  What a difference square footage makes.  Don't let anyone tell you differently.  With JUST the downstairs area, I feel like I live in a palace.  The space is unbelievable and my kids seem to have a ton more to do with just a little more space. Fighting still occurs, but over the rules of games and rough housing, not space or toys.  When I have a call, I can walk in the next room and barely hear my children as they beat each other!  I won't go on and on about the benefits of living in this place but know that I am happy on that end.

It was the right thing to move here.  In spite of the temporary pain of separation, this was definitely a good decision for my children and ultimately, for me.