October 22, 2017

Life has been busy! We just finished the first quarter of school.  I can't believe that much time has gone by!  Rachel made the HS volleyball team! It's been so great for her.  We've been so happy about it.  Her games are fun to watch, she has a great coach and she loves to belong to a team and be friends with girls she probably wouldn't have otherwise.  I encouraged her to try out because I wished I would have done that in high school, so I was pretty nervous for her.  I'm so glad it worked out!  School was a big adjustment for her because long volleyball practices and seminary started at the same time, but she's done awesome!

Danny got straight A's the first quarter! It's a miracle! Ha!  He has struggled since he started middle school with his grades.  Mostly because of lack of trying.  But we told him he won't drive if he doesn't have at least a 3.5 and he'll get a better car if he gets a 4.0.  That was the ticket! He switched his whole perspective and work ethic with school and has been doing great!

Aaron has been adjusting great to middle school.  He works hard and has lots of great friends.  He is playing the Trumpet in band and doing great at it.

Seth and Ruby have great teachers and have made good friends and are doing well.

Bob and I are taking the Personal Finance class with the new self reliance program.  We absolutely love it!  We were starting to feel a little under water and out of control with our finances.  And this has completely flipped us around.  I've always had a good budget, I just don't follow it.  I go over budget almost every month and I trade money around to different categories all the time to make it work. I learned both of these are definitely not in line with the principle of budgeting.  They talked about figuring out the financial blessings we want and then making sure we follow the principles that are associated with those blessings.  That was such a great way to look at it.  Some of the blessings we would like help with are being able to buy a car for the kids when Danny is 16 and being able to take our family to Japan. Last week we learned about getting out of debt.  I've never really worried about that much because the only debt we have is our house.  But while we were doing the lesson I really felt impressed that we should work on paying off that debt faster.  I knew that in my finite mind it didn't make that much sense, but I do have a testimony of the power of obedience. So when we came home that night and were talking and thinking about it, the phrase "prove me now herewith" came strongly to my mind.  It was so exciting.  I know He was telling me to be obedient to this principle and he would prove to me that he would open up blessings to our family in ways that didn't seem possible with my limited view of the future.  Bob and I created a plan to work on paying the mortgage off faster.  I know we will be blessed as we do.

I have been having such amazing strengthening and tutoring lessons from the Spirit in the last few month.  Mostly because of my health issues.  I need to write about it more, but we have home teachers coming soon.  So I'm putting this in here to remind me to write about it next time.

August 13, 2017

School starts tomorrow.  I'm excited for a routine again and for my house to stay clean during the day. They all seem excited to be starting school.  I think I have a good carpool. I'm excited to get some good things done during the day.  I just need to work on being more disciplined with my time.

I've felt a little anxious about this school year and what kind of work I need to do.  I just don't really know what I want to do for work.  I have a few ideas like websites, photography, maybe some thing with health.  I also want to help at the school and go to the temple and be available to help people and be a deliberate mom.  I was feeling worried about what I would choose or what the Lord wanted me to choose.  But then I felt like it's ok not to know.  So my plan is to have a big list of things I want to accomplish and some of those will be looking for website clients and practicing with my camera or home projects and I'll pray about it and listen and then plan my day or my week.  Hopefully I'll have a least some success in making some money to help pay for teenage drivers and trips, etc.

I don't know if the gluten thing is helping Seth.  Bob took him to Adam Adair's homecoming yesterday and he ate a bunch of donuts. We were 12 days in.  But I also wasn't being super strict with it, like I forgot to ask the deacons to bring him the gluten free bread for sacrament.  And I didn't buy gluten free oats and he ate plenty of those.  We're pretty good at small changes over time, but cold turkey changes are hard for us.

August 6, 2017

EFY went well.  Rachel had a wonderful time and talked about the Spirit she felt and got to go to her first dance.  She called me every night.  Danny had a chip on his shoulder all week and before he left. I never found out exactly what his problem was.  He just seems like he doesn't want to do anything that I think is a good idea sometimes.  He barely responded to my texts for 2 days and then he stopped all together.  When he got home he was in just as grumpy as ever and acted like I was judging him.  I just tried to love him and ignore his bad attitude and ask him about the week.  And by the end of that day he was nice again and he's been nice since then.  While the bigs were gone, we went to see a movie and we went to the water slides.

Danny was home for a couple days and then he left to drive to Texas with Blake's family.  They're having a good time there and he will fly home in a few days.  Rachel has started intramural volleyball at the school to get ready for tryouts when school starts.  We only have one week now until the first day of school.  I think we're about ready.  We have the carpool figured out and uniforms purchased.  We just need to get a few more school supplies.

Seth and I started doing gluten-free on Aug. 1.  I want to see if going off gluten will help his allergies and eczema and attention.  I am probably more like "low gluten" because I'm not as good at following it.  And I know there are lots of hidden places they put gluten so hopefully we are getting most of it out.  We've still been doing regular oats, but now I'm thinking I should buy gluten free oats to make sure we're getting it out.  We'll see.  Recently several sources I really like for learning about nutrition and that make a lot of sense with the word of wisdom say that gluten isn't really good for anyone.  I'm torn with that one because that's what got me going on studying the word of wisdom in the first place.  There is a lot of research that says gluten does a lot of harm.  And they probably have changed wheat some since the word of wisdom was given and we probably eat more of it than was intended.  But I still feel a confused about it.  So I keep praying and thinking about it.

My breathing and sleep continue to improve.  My sleep recently made a huge jump.  I got a sleep mask to try to help with my dry eyes and that combined with whatever else I'd been doing have helped me to sleep though the night so much better! It used to feel like the night was a little bit of an ordeal.  Where I would try so hard to fall asleep and then I'd wake up wide awake who knows how many times in the night and have to start the process over.  But now it's finally back to how it should be where I go to sleep and I might wake up in the night, but it's just for a minute and I easily fall back asleep.  It feels so wonderful.

July 23, 2017

Girls Camp was great.  I loved being a stake leader.  It was great to hang out with those amazing ladies in the stake and get to hang out with our ward, and to not have quite as much responsibility as being a ward leader.  I was in charge of the survival march and it turned out great.  The girls loved it more than I thought they would.  They learned lots of survival skills like prayer, first aid, water purification, orienteering, knots, signaling. And then they got a slip of paper with a scenario where they needed to use the compass to get a cache of supplies where they had to set up food, water and shelter with the skills they learned.  There were also edible crickets for them to try there.  And they got to throw knives while they waited.

We came home from Girls Camp and had 2 days and then we left for Tahoe.  We took Danny's friend, Blake with us this time.  We had a great time as usual.  We floated the Truckee River, went fishing and swimming at Donner Lake (which Seth absolutely adored), kayaked and jet skied at Sand Harbor, played games, Danny and Blake were human pinatas for the little kids where they had candy glued to their shirts and they had to run away from littles trying to pull the candy off.  Seth and Ruby loved the new zipline in the Smith's backyard.  Danny and Blake played a lot of basketball in the driveway.

Danny and Rachel leave for EFY tomorrow.  I have been praying my heart out that Danny will let the Spirit in and have a good experience.  I sure hope he does.  I'm sure Rachel will do fine.  I'm looking forward to the week with just littles.  It'll be fun to focus on them.

July 9, 2017

Summer vacation is going fast.  We've been so busy.  We went to Utah right after school got out for Grandma Donna's 85th birthday.  We stayed at Trina's house since we weren't going to be there the whole week to share in the rental house with everyone else.  The first day I went to see Nancy Litchfield in Ogden.  She was the nutrition supplement lady.  She knows so much.  I was there for 4 hours.  I left with several supplements that I've been taking for the last month and I think they've been helping (multivitamin, D3, lots of fish oil, and Magnesium).  She also said that she thinks most people have a gluten sensitivity that causes lots of problems for us.  At first I was totally against that idea because it says in the Word of Wisdom that wheat is for man.  But I'm coming around to the idea of at least limiting flours a little.  I wonder if Seth's allergies, exzema and focus problems might be related to gluten.  We're going to try going gluten free for a few weeks when school starts and see how it goes.

Wednesday night we went to the Strawberry Days rodeo.  That was fun with everyone.  Thursday we went to the Provo Temple to do baptisms, to the BYU bookstore and then went to Utah Lake with everyone and bbq'd and went on motor boats with tubes and knee boards. Friday we went up Hobble Creek Canyon most of the day to celebrate Grandma's birthday.

Then we came home from Utah and Danny went to scout camp the next week and Aaron went to spend the week in Visalia.  The girls had their dance recital that weekend and then the kids and I drove to Visalia the next Monday.  We had a good time there seeing movies and swimming at the neighbor's.

Then Bob flew in on Thursday and I picked him up and we drove to Pismo for our anniversary.  Bob got us a cute airbnb to stay at.  We went to Morro Bay and then Pismo.  We spent a lazy day at the beach on friday.  Then Saturday my parents brought all the kids to play at the beach with us.  It was fun to kind of have a climax to the vacation and get to share it with them.  The sad part was that the ocean was so cold, kids didn't get in as much as usual.

This last week has been our only regular week at home this summer.  We had a fun 4th of July with lots of friends coming over to swim and bbq and then stay for fireworks.  I've been getting ready for girls camp and it's been kind of nice to be a little lazy.  This week Rachel and I go to girls camp and Danny will babysit the kids.  Then when we get back, we will turn around and go up to Tahoe for the week.  I'm so excited for that trip.  I love Amanda and her family and she always plans such a great week for us. Then we will hurry home for Danny and Rachel to go to EFY in Cedar City.  After that Danny will go to Texas with his friend Blake for a week and then fly home just in time to get ready for school to start.  It sure makes the summer go fast when we have so much stuff.  But it's all fun.

June 4, 2017

My breathing and sleep has been going back and forth a little still.  I feel like there's forward movement in healing, but at least half of the time is still how it's always been.  I had another blessing from Bob.  The line that stood out the most was "find strength in weakness". So I think this is how things will be for a while.  But it keeps me searching and reaching and I've come to really like that.  I went back to Valerie to see if she had any more suggestions or knowledge.  She gave me the name of a nutrition healer lady in Ogden.  So I'm going to see her when we go to Utah for Grandma Donna's birthday.  At the very least I'm sure I'll learn a bunch from her.  She also gave me the name of a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno.  It sounds like its a lot of healing through mental exertion kind of like Valerie teaches so that will be interesting to read.  And we talked about how the Lord has already given me the blessing I need for this and all of the tools I need to get through any roadblocks to get there, I just need to work through those so I will be ready to receive the blessing.  I think there are just still things I need to learn.  I think the major things I've learned so far is the massive amount of power and love available as we partner with the Lord.  My relationship with and understanding of who the Savior is has deepened and expanded so much in the last year.  Also I feel like lots of my answers and things I've learned have been the Lord's truths for how to take care of my body, not the ways of the world.  So I don't know what direction this path is going in the end, but I've learned a lot of healing methods, but I've also learned that the Lord can teach us true ways of doing anything if we work with Him.

May 21, 2017

I'm having more breakthroughs with my breathing and sleeping lately.  It was staying about the same since the last time I wrote.  I thought I was doing everything I could.  I was still going to Dr. Kruger every other week.  I went to Valerie again and she didn't really know why.  She suggested essential oils. So I tried that.  But nothing has really had any effect that I could see.  I have felt more acutely how the Lord has been with me in this trial.  There have been so many nights where I used to get up and just focus on how bad I felt that I didn't notice the Spirit there.  But now I've been able to feel the Lord sitting with me and comforting me. It obviously isn't best for Him to take this trial away, but I can really feel him with me even when I feel bad or sad and that's ok.  I felt like I should try a cleanse so I found Dr. Christopher's juice cleanse and Bob and I did that.  I felt like the biggest improvement was my mental clarity. So I pondered that and felt like maybe I was led to that to strengthen my testimony of fasting.  I mostly try to get through fasting.  But I think that kind of mental clarity is probably available to me in my monthly fasting if I will do it correctly and with the intent that I should.  So I fasted and went to the temple this week. Also a few days before that I started my reading and felt directed to Elder Nelson's talk about Accessing the power of Christ.  It felt like it was just for me. I felt like I'd been working on a lot of the steps already but the last one was asking like a drowning person and I definitely was feeling like a drowning person.  I went to the temple and didn't feel like a I had a ton of direction.  I think I'm going to go see Valerie and see if she has any more information for me.  And maybe I'll look for more information about the diaphragm.  But the thing I didn't expect was how things would just start being better on their own.  Just by bringing more of the Power of Christ into my life.  I've slept much better the last 3 nights.  My breathing is still tight, but I can get many more good breaths here and there than I used to. Also the joy I feel at being closer to the Savior is wonderful.

We went to Visalia for half of Spring break.  We had a great time with my Mom.  We went bowling and to the park.  Kristal and Ryan came for Easter weekend.  We all went to the zoo.

My mom and Kristal came to Las Vegas to do a girls weekend.  We ended up doing a lot of maternity shopping for Kristal.  And we ate at some good places.  We just stayed here to save money. We watched movies at night.  It was nice.

School is almost done.  I'm so excited not to have a schedule.  The kids sports just finished.