A conversation with little girls

This past week I have been babysitting a friends little girl. She and my girls girls get along fairly well, but she is the exact opposite of my girls, and so I find their little conversations very humorous. First thing she does when she gets into my car is demand the radio be turned on...now I know Jenna can be demanding and sometimes forgets to say please or will you, but this little one has down exactly what she wants and is not used to be told no to anything. So I make her say please will you turn on the radio and she does so I put on one of Kayla's kids songs, I then hear her yell from the back HELLO LIKE JUSTIN BIEBER! And this is the part that just made me smile Jenna turns to her and says "We listen to kid songs because we are kids" so I then ask Jenna who Justin Bieber is and she tells me no she has never heard of him....I have to say I was proud of that, I want to keep my girls little for as long as possible I don't want them growing up too fast and I don't want them idolizing anyone like Justin Bieber, Hanna Montana or any other teen idol our society says our children need to worship.

I sat with Jenna and watched a ICarly show the other day and I hate to admit it but I thought it was kinda funny. Then as I thought about it and as I watched a few other of those type of shows I began to realize that 1. they make parents/teachers or any adult for that matter look stupid and 2. I strongly believe the writers of these shows degrade all men in general but they especially degrade the role of the Father and they make him out to be an idiot. This is something that bothers me greatly and something that I have been thinking about lately. For example I got a add in the mail the other day and on the title it said "So easy even a man could do it" now I know their are somethings I am better at than Justin and there are equally as many things he is better at than I am, but if something came in the mail with the saying "So easy even a women could do it" I would be highly offend and would never think of buying that product! I never want my girls to view adults in the way these shows portray them and while I don't like the idea of banning my kids from watching TV I do think waiting till they are older, more mature and limiting viewing time is the better way to go.

I want my girls to stay innocent and little, I don't want them growing up too fast! They are going to be grown ups in a few short years and they will never get their childhood back! I want that childhood to be filled with, fairies, princesses, playing outside and using their imagination! So yes I do smile when asked about DS systems, tween idol stuff and the latest songs on the radio that my girls don't know a thing about them. For me seeing them singing nursery rhymes and playing for hours with little people, ponies and putting together elaborate puppet shows is exactly where I want them to be right now!

Kayla

Little Ms. Kayla has just been making me laugh a lot lately, she is developing this funny little personality that just cracks me up! I love this picture because it sums up who Kayla is right at this moment in time! Today she was playing in Jenna's room with her new jewelry box she got for Christmas from Jenna. She also took Jenna's jewelry box out and has evenly divided Jenna's jewelry up between the boxes. I ask her what she is doing and she tells me "I took Jenna's jewelry because mine only had one, then she pauses and with a matter of fact tone declares....I think Jenna is going to be mad at me!" She says this in her sweet little Kayla voice that makes everyone around her just say "oh how cute!" Well my cute little sweet voiced child has a hidden dark side that is learning to manipulate her cuteness into getting what she wants or using it to negotiate her way out of trouble! She really didn't care if Jenna was going to get mad, and I think she may have been enjoying the idea of making her sister a little mad! But the little charmer worked her magic because I left the room not doing a thing about it, but just smiling because it really was cute....even though I'm sure when Jenna realizes what her little sister has done I won't be smiling anymore!

New Years!!!!!

Well happy New Years!! So apart of me really loves New Years as a time of renewal and starting over....but that last about 3 days then I'm back to my usual bad habits, I then get in a funk of a mood because I have totally failed at the 10 or 15 things I set out to change about myself and end up eating the rest of the Christmas candy and feeling really crappy for the rest of the month!

Historically January has always been the most depressing month for me so I think I have always been doomed to failure from the start! I always have felt this huge let down after Christmas, it always makes me really sad to pack up the Christmas decor, then when we lived in Utah January weather always made me feel all gloomy and doomy, at least now I have sunny weather to help me stay out of my January funk!

But some things just dont ever really go away, and every year comes January 13. That is day I lost our first baby at 13 weeks, yes it happened the first year we were married (13 years ago) but the pain is still there and it still really hurts. I rarely think about it until this time of year, but I loved that baby and I think trying for 7 years to have another made the pain that much worse. After having my girls I think a year or two actually went by when I didn't think about it till that day, but now that my girls are older and knowing my body can't have more babies I find I'm thinking about that loss baby again and the longing for another is emerging, and once again I find myself getting really sad that I can't get pregnant again, but for now I will save the baby talk for another post:)

So for those main reasons and a few more little ones I dislike January!

That is why I have decided to start this January with a totally different out look than in years past! While I have resolutions I want to make I'm not going to. Instead I have chosen two things to focus on, I feel that by changing these two things they will have a snow ball effect on the rest of my life!

The first is getting back to dinner. I was great at that up until a year ago and I don't know what happened but I have become so disorganized in this area that we end up eating out, eating really late or resorting to our staple of PB&J! To fix this bad habit I have created a menu that we will rotate through every month. I'm hoping that it wont get boring or repetitive! I did make room for a new recipe to made every month, but I figure having 21 dinners to rotate through wont end up getting old (I don't cook Tuesday or Saturday nights). This way my grocery list is always planned, I don't have to sit down every Sunday night and plan a weekly menu (I think this has been my downfall) and I hope that by planning more budget friendly dinners I can stick with my budget of 125 dollars a week on groceries! I also planned really well balanced healthy meals that are easy to make so hopefully that trickle down theory will come into play with maybe a little weight loss;)

My second goal is just to keep on top of my 5 daily choirs, a rule I had after Jenna was born to help make me keep to a schedule every day as a new stay at home mom.

The rules are as follows:

1. Make beds every day....a bed made for whatever reason keeps the bedrooms clean

2. Do a load of laundry...my all day laundry marathon once a week if even that is getting old!

3. Organize the mail...I happily can say I have always stayed on top of this one:)

4. spend 10 minutes every night just picking up clutter

5. sweep the kitchen floor after dinner

This is not to say I don't do these things all together they just have not always been getting done every day, and I find that when they don't get done life becomes a disorganized mess! I'm hoping that just by getting back to simple basics and forgetting the rest I can once again lead a more focused and organized life and that by small steps everything else will just fall into place!

I will end with wishing everyone a happy new year and happy wishes that we can all stick to new goals, that this year will be better than the last and that when the end does come we are better people than we are now!!!!

Christmas!!!!!!

I LOVE Christmas!!! I think I am more excited for Santa to come than my kids are!!!! I never could sleep on Christmas Eve when I was a kid and I always thought that when I "grew up" I would get over it, well I'm grown up now and I STILL cannot fall asleep on the 24!! I love the baking, the shopping...oh the shopping! the parties! decorating! I love putting bows of presents! The Christmas cards! taking my kids to see Santa! Everyone seems just a little bit nicer and more friendly! Most of all what I love about the Christmas season is seeing it through my kids eyes! It's amazing how young they make me feel and to see their eye's light up and the excitement in their faces makes all the work so worth it!!! I just feel like screaming to the world CHRISTMAS IS ALMOST HERE!!! Ok I will calm down now...but seriously I don't know if I can stand waiting one more week!

Listen to melissasue13s Playlist

listening to that still small voice

Every year around August I start planning the Christmas budget and this year I decided to cut the budget in half, which for me was hard, but lately I have had the feeling that we need to save every dime we could spare. Now I know why we were to save, normally my kids are really healthy we average maybe one or two trips to the doctors office each year, but this year for the first time since my kids were born we have meet our out of pocket deducable and we have meet it in the space of 8 weeks! First having kaylas heart tested ended up costing about 600 dollars, then we got a medical bill from last year for her that was a couple hundred and now jenna has had bronchitis and was diagnosed with asthma yesterday she is now on a nebulizer treatment every 6 hours, the medicine alone was over 100 dollars!! Plus all the other meds she was given and having to take her to the doctor every week it has become expensive! Im only sharing this because i have to express how thankful i am for all the blessings our family has been given, first justins job in this econemy its truly a blessing, second that my girls are healthy and that all we are dealing with is treatable, third that we have health insurance, and fourth and most important that i listened to that still small voice and i saved the money, still was able to buy a nice christmas for our kids and can pay all our medical bills off with some still left over in savings. This year christmas has been feeling thankful for all that we have and focusing on having a meaningful christmas and giving to others rather than having a big expensive christmas that we really dont need.

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Christmas Time

It's been two months since my last post, life just seems to be so busy and time passing so fast! It is Christmas time here in sunny California and other than decking the halls, for me it does not feel like Christmas. I am really missing the snow!!! Now that California is looking to be our home for a very long time, I have decided that I need to build new traditions with my own little family so that every year when it's December 1st and 80 degree's out it I will feel like it's Christmas time!

The first thing I decided I wanted to do is buy a real Christmas tree, and I have to say it worked better than I ever thought it would! Taking my kids to a real tree lot (not walmart) was SO much fun! They had flocked trees sitting out and as we pulled in my girls screamed with excitement that it had snowed...they were only mildly disappointed when I told them it was fake, and soon got over it when we got out of the car and started walking through the forest of trees. It smelled like Christmas and felt like Christmas!!!! It was fun watching the girls run from tree to tree trying to decide which was their favorite. Jenna of course chose the biggest widest tree the lot had to offer....at well over a hundred dollars and being much too tall for our house we had to tell her no, but we ended up finding the perfect tree for our home and I have to say it's probably the prettiest Christmas tree we have ever had! Once the tree was delivered and set up (best 15 dollars ever spent!) It was time to start decorating! Every year I buy the girls a new ornament, this is their first gift of Christmas. I choose one that represents the past year and their favorite things or just something that remind's me of them at the age they are now. This year Jenna got a Barbie ornament and Kayla Minnie Mouse. I write a letter to go along with the ornament and I keep the letter with the ornament. In the letter I tell them why they received the ornament they did and what it represented to me at the time I gave it to them!

The second decision I made was to dig out our Christmas village...although it was put up before the Christmas tree. Our Christmas village is something Justin and I started collecting when we were first starting out and we bought each piece with the thought of how much our "future" kids were going to love it! So it's a little ironic that after having those kids I decided that it was way too much work to put up! Although in my defense we did move 5 times from the time Jenna was 19 months old till she was 3 1/2 and managed to have Kayla during that time so really when I say it was too much work it truly was! Our village just makes me happy, it reminds me of my childhood and to see how excited my kids got when they saw it for the first time literally made me cry!

The third thing I decided to do was to set a goal of having all my Christmas shopping, baking and to do list done by December 17th, why the 17th? It's Jenna's last day of school and I want to be totally relaxed and have nothing left on a to do list the week before Christmas, and so far I am on schedule! I have 3 gifts left to buy and while next week is going to be crazy busy for me the following week will be all free time to have fun!

Fourth, Christmas is supposed to be fun so I have planned many activities to help us stay in the Christmas spirit! So far we have made paper chains, did the ginger bread house, went to Disneyland to see Santa, wrote and mailed our letters to Santa! and have the following planned:

1. For our next FHE we will be having a Polar Express night reading the book and this year I bought silver bells for the girls that we will give them to see if they can still "hear" the bells ring, then will watch the movie curled up with our mugs of hot chocolate!

2.We have lot's of baking planned and one night will go give our baking treats to our neighbors and friends.

3.We are going to visit the Shops to experience fake snow (It actually is kinda fun, and for a minute feels like winter!)

4.Taking a trip to Venture once Jenna is on break (Justin has to work their once a month) on our way home we plan to check out Universal Studios Grinchmas, we have passes this year (thanks Grandma and Grandpa!) But will not be renewing them so we want to check it out!

5.Going to the Chino Christmas parade, Jenna will be marching in the parade with her girls scout troop.

6.We have our ward Christmas party yes I'm excited because it's really the only one we will be attending! One of many things I miss about "home" Christmas parties!!!!

7. Go to Griffith park for the Christmas light festival.

8. While this list is super fun and busy one of my top goals has been to keep Christ in the spirit of all we do, everything we have done or plan to do I have had a lesson about why we do it in the spirit of CHRISTmas.

9. Christmas eve we will be spending with our good friends Joe and Kristien, we give our kids their Christmas Pajama's, read from the book of Luke and express why we are thankful for each other. We are very thankful to spend this time with our dear friends!

10. Finally the big day Christmas!!! Christmas is a free day for us I love staying home lounging in our jammies, letting the girls slowly open their gifts enjoying each one as long as they want, having a little brunch, playing with the new toys and then having what I like to call "Utah Dinner" Ham, funeral potatoes and rolls!

Our fun will not end on Christmas we are going to be heading back to Utah on the 26th and will be staying through new years!! I have two goals for Utah 1st snow sledding!!! 2nd take the girls to Temple Square my girls have not been since they were too young to remember! I love spending the week after Christmas in Utah and look forward to seeing our family and some old friends!!!!

So this is my Holiday schedule and while it took me a while to get into the spirit of it once I started focusing on the meaning behind the celebrating it now feels like Christmas! I am thankful for this magical time of year, to be celebrating the birth of our savior, and to show our love for him by giving to others. This really is my favorite time of year and maybe next year all I will need is to see the palm tree's strung with Christmas lights to get me in the spirit of things!!!!!