Boring and Old: Late Night/Early Morning Thoughts By Me

I was looking through my photos on Facebook tonight. I'm at work and I had 8 hours to kill. I caught up on Instagram, emails, Facebook, my scripture reading, and the ward bulletin (which I am responsible for updating). I didn't have a new book to read, so I looked at one photo and then another, and then all of a sudden I had spent 2 hours looking at pictures. I found some fun ones.

Okay, first of all, we were SO small! It is crazy how old someone can start to look in just 2 years! 

Second of all, we look so happy and like we had so much fun! 

Part of me sees these pictures and I think, "What happened? How come we don't have fun anymore?" Which isn't actually a very fair question, because nobody ever takes pictures of the boring parts of life, so we probably didn't have that much more fun back then than we do now. But it is easy to get caught up in that mindset of "If only..." 

However, another part of me knows that we have gotten older, in two years we have added a lot more responsibilities to our lives. When we were dating and getting married we just needed to find a place to live. And we were blessed to find an awesome first home that was extremely affordable. We had more time to have fun, even when we didn't have much time at all. Back then I know that I was stressed and worried just like I do now, but from here looking back, I can see that I didn't have very much to worry about at all. 

Now I feel stressed and overwhelmed, but I know that in 5 years I will look back and think the same thing. That I don't have very much to worry about at all. 

Now, what am I going to do to remember that? I don't know... but when I figure out the magical formula for living in the moment, making time to have fun, and not worrying or stressing all day every day, I will let you know. 

Third of all, I just finished a book called "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin, it's pretty popular so I'm sure many of you have heard of it. But it was really good! And got me thinking about what small changes I can make in my life to be happier. She spent a lot of time working on being happier at home, around her children and around her husband. While reading this book I realized that I am a grumpy housewife. Sigh. And I really don't like that about myself. So I finished the book and I gave myself ONE goal. To not nag my husband. And I've written down this goal and thought about this goal, but then what do I do? I go home and I can't even stop myself! I sigh, and roll my eyes, and think about "ALLLL" that I do around the house and demand that he does something, and then demand that he does something else. I probably drive him crazy, but I drive myself crazy too! 

I haven't found a solution to this weakness that I have, but it helps me to write it down and to share my thoughts and struggles. If you have found ways to help with this, please share! And I will update on my journey to be a happier wife and happier mom and happier, more grateful woman in general! 

It's hard once you have children and the more bills and items you add onto your to do list, but I know that I was not created to be a grumpy housewife! I know I can be better and I will work on it! 

That's all. Have a great day! :) 

Goblin Valley Again

A few weeks ago we went camping at Goblin Valley with Ryan's family. We went last year in March sometime and I was pretty pregnant. This time around Rose is now 1 and a bit and I am not pregnant so I was able to actually play hide and seek and climb all over the rock formations.

I was so sure it would be miserable and horribly hot to be in Southern Utah in the middle of June, so I was kind of dreading the trip, but the weather ended up being surprisingly very nice. (It may have something to do with me praying beforehand that I would be able to have fun and not complain the whole time... prayer works!)

We were down there for 3 1/2 days, camping in the wilderness and we all survived and had a lot of fun. And I am SO glad that I got to do it this time without being pregnant. I would not recommend camping while in the third trimester. Not fun!

Some highlights:

- seeing a giant lizard,
- playing hide and seek in Goblin Valley State Park
- accidentally stumbling upon a geocache in the Park
- eating s'mores of course
- freezing to death at night because we weren't expecting the temperatures to drop SO much. And Rose sleeping with us so we could keep her warm, even though she never wants to sleep with us anymore.
- going to sacrament meeting in Green River where everyone was SO SO SO nice to us even though we smelt AWFUL.

This is a late blog post and my brain is feeling a little foggy right now, so I'm just going to go ahead and post pictures now. Enjoy!

When Things Don't Go as Planned...or, In Other Words, Life.

So far, July has been a month of things not going as planned. I'm obviously quite spoiled, and these are first world problems like nothing else. But it is still disappointing when things go wrong.

I'm always a little bit of a clingy, control freak wife during the summer because I have so little time with Ryan during the school year that I try to find every free (or cheap) fun thing Utah has to offer and convince Ryan to do them all with me. Every ward activity, every party, every farmer's market, all the yard sales, movies at the park, hikes, camping, etc. I want him to go on walks with me at night, and we go to the gym during the day. You get the picture.

He's normally not interested in much that involves other people, but he agrees to do some activities to appease me. His idea of a good time is to lay in bed and read or to watch TV and relax when he gets home, but I always want to do something outside of the house, something fun.

Unfortunately, I'm starting to feel like the world doesn't want us to do fun things. For instance, I convinced Ryan to go to the ward Fourth of July party if I agreed to let us get Two Jacks cheese bread for dinner. So we put Rose in the stroller and walked to Center Street to get our cheese bread and on the way the tire fell off the stroller. By the time we got the stroller somewhat fixed and walked all the way back to the block party, there wasn't much left of the party, so we just went home. (That was probably Ryan's hope all along.)

Keepin' it real: We only did sparklers for about 10 minutes because Rose was determined to grab on to the sparkly part. She did not like that we kept holding them too far away from her. 

I told myself it was fine, because the next day we could watch fireworks and go to the Freedom Day's carnival. Unfortunately, our house is surrounded by VERY tall trees (which isn't unfortunate normally) and we couldn't see much of the fireworks shows that night, we sat in our yard and tried, but there just wasn't much of a show.

We also decided to wait and go to the carnival on Saturday... because we thought it went through Saturday, but when we walked to the carnival on Saturday evening they were finishing up packing the carnival up. I was so sure the carnival would be there until late Saturday night, but sadly, everything was gone except for a few canopies that were in the process of going down. No cotton candy for me... :(

No worries though because we had planned a camping trip up in Provo Canyon for this past week. Ryan had the time off of work, everything was working out perfectly. We got the car packed, drove into the mountains, spent 45 minutes finding the perfect spot. We lugged all of our stuff from the car to our spot. Set up our tent, set up a pack n play in the tent (for Rose), Ryan chopped up firewood, and then we went to make dinner and realized we had forgotten the matches. It was nearly 8 by then and we were all starving, so the only option was to just pack up camp and head back home because it would have taken nearly 2 hours to get matches and come back to get the fire going.

It was really a bummer to have to come home and sleep in our 89 degree apartment at 9:30 pm when we were expecting to sleep in the cooler temperatures the canyon has to offer.

I do have pictures of our tent in a beautiful place, but it wasn't as magical as it looks, because we were only there for about an hour and a half.

Ryan set this whole tent up, and then had to take it right back down.. Poor guy. 

Social Media tends to make it seem like things should never go wrong. Vacations go smoothly, pictures turn out perfect, house decor just flawlessly comes together, children wear cute clothes without spilling any food on them, and bows stay in a baby's hair. Well, unless my life is totally unique, I can testify that vacations almost never go as planned, it takes 30 bad pictures to get one with everyone smiling, house decor only comes together perfectly if you have lots of money to spend on it, babies spill EVERYTHING, they can make a mess out of nothing, and the bows I put on Rose's head only ever last about 5 minutes.

This is the sunset picture I captured as we drove back down the mountain after packing everything up again. 

Here is a friendly reminder that pictures do not tell the whole story, and it is easy to share pictures that make life look like it should be flawless, but things are going to go wrong. Accept it. Make the most of it. Enjoy it.

Here's to unexpected twists and turns in our daily lives, fun stories to tell and laugh about one day, and hoping for some solid, fun plans that go through in what's left of summer break for us.

C'est la vie.