The weeks of winter sicknesses have officially begun. I remember Jack being sick constantly during wintertime until he reached kindergarten and his immune system caught up. I have a feeling it will be the same song and dance with Alice. Little Miss had a fever all week. No throwing up, but a weak appetite and cold symptoms in addition to the fever. Her fever is gone now and she is making a good recovery, but we were a bit down-and-out all last week.
Speaking of Alice, we love that little lady so much. She has the funniest little personality. She's sweet with a side of spicy--mostly sweet but she has to have a little kick in her to survive growing up with Jack. She is so quirky and we just can't get enough of that about her. Her language is 80% slurps (my speech pathologist cousin says she holds her tongue too wide in her mouth and that's why; it will probably resolve itself, but if she's still slurp-talking by the time she's in kindergarten then I'm sure she'll be spending time with a speech pathologist. For now we adore the slurps.) She walks with a bit of a bounce, holding her elbows up to the sides, and she LOVES to dance and sing (squeezing her eyes shut when she's REALLY into a song). At home she wants to be within eyesight of mom at all times, but if we're out at a family gathering she'll kind of wander around and find toys and food to pick at and generally enjoy her independent explorations. If we're somewhere public, like the dinosaur museum, she would prefer to command me to "stay" (or "sssss" with a finger pointing at me and a slurp) while she runs around and up and down stairs/ramps for a while.
Alice's most recent obsession, which started cute but is becoming problematic, is her obsession with making recipes of her own creation. This started out as playing in her play kitchen while I would cook meals, but at some point this last week (I think after I had the kids help me make muffins one day) she realized that she could mix together REAL FOOD, and now nothing else will suffice. When she points at our fridge and says, "Tea," I know I'm in trouble. "Tea" is short for "tea party," which means she is going to set her toy cups and plates around our table for all her cousins and grandma and grandpa, and mix up some snacks for a "tea party." The only way to avoid a meltdown after Alice has uttered the word "tea" is to open the fridge and let her choose 2-4 ingredients. I try and steer her toward produce that is getting old, but that doesn't always work. Then she will ask me for what sounds like a "Boo" but is actually a Bowl.
While I'm getting her a mixing bowl she will find herself a spoon or fork to stir with. At this point I can generally get something done for 5 minutes while Alice adds her ingredients to a bowl and mixes them up, all the while making slurpy noises, and then she'll set the bowl on the table for us to have our tea party. She'll say the names of all the family members who are there in her imagination and then I'm required to take a few nibbles. For the most part, the recipes she comes up with have been decent combinations (strawberries and arugula one day, romaine and salami and a cheese stick the next day), but she's starting to venture into more adventurous territory and these tea parties are getting scarier (her latest creation was limp celery, raw eggs, and salami, which I am REQUIRED to sample. I feel like Craig in Malcolm in the Middle on the episode where his Helper Monkey turns on him and forces him to drink a Drain-o milkshake).
Whelp, there goes my brevity. Anyway, we love Alice and are glad she's feeling better. The rest of us have cold symptoms but no fevers. I wanted to make note of mine and Jared's micro-car dates so we can remember to keep doing them in the future! We are seriously suffering from lack of quality time together. When we lived in Washington, we used to have Jared's full day off every Tuesday to have the morning together and squeeze in a date while Jack was at school and Alice was napping. Then we'd have an hour or two together in the evenings after the kids were in bed. Now Jared has a half-day off on Wednesdays, but since he works a bit of a commute away it ends up being just an hour or two together before Jack gets home. And between Jack's 3 weeks off of school and the random appointments we have to squeeze in to get our life in Utah set up (this last week it was an appointment to the DMV to get our Utah licenses), it's been a long time since we've really had time for each other instead of using that time for time-sensitive tasks.
The lack of uninterrupted time together in the evenings has been a blow, too. I remember listening to a Q&A on a mom podcast last year. One of the questions asked about what was the hardest transition in parenting so far, or the most surprising. The podcaster answered that she and her husband were blindsided by their kids getting older and going to bed later, slowly encroaching on she and her husband's quiet evenings together until they were pretty much gone. I thought we'd have a few more years before that transition began, and I guess I assumed it would happen approaching the teenage years when Jack would want more separation from us, but it appears to already be upon us and he has no desire for more separation. It's probably time to adjust our expectations so we don't get annoyed at Jack every night for only sleeping 10 hours instead of 12 hours, when 10 hours is, unfortunately, within the acceptable range for his current age.
Jack has had trouble staying in his room after bedtime since we moved, which is something we're working on. Something that hasn't helped has been the loft and bedroom setup in this house. Jared's "dream house" floorplan included a two-story great room that you can look down on from an upstairs loft, which this rental house has. The problem is that the kids' bedrooms are just off the loft so we can hear every whine, cry, or giggle even while we're downstairs trying to forget we have kids for a minute. And Jack can easily sneak out of his room and be part of the downstairs action, staring down at us from the loft. It's difficult to maintain some separation in a floorplan this open. In our next house we're hoping for a bit more separation between the kids' rooms and the rest of the house. Glad we tried this floorplan on in a rental, because we're making note of some tweaks that would make everyday life flow better in our next home.
But, car dates! One day last week was particularly tough with the kids. I put them in front of a show while I started making dinner, but I was in such a need of a break that I went out to my car to call and vent to Jared, who was driving home from work. About halfway through our conversation the garage door opened and Jared pulled in. Instead of going inside together, I got in the passenger seat of his car and we stayed and talked and laughed and commiserated about the kids together for 5-10 minutes. It was really nice to have a moment to feel connected when he got home from work, instead of him coming into the crazy that is two kids during witching hour and a frazzled me, at which point we never really have a moment to feel connected all evening. More car dates before Jared comes inside from work in 2025, please and thank you.
Some other highlights from our week were my mom coming to help organize our kitchen and stay with the kids while Jared and I had a DMV date. Thanks for helping me get the ball rolling, mom! We also had freshly homemade fettuccine at Chris's house for dinner one night. The invite came just in the nick of time--we weren't sure we could sit through one more grumpy dinner at home, so it was a relief and so fun to have dinner with my brother while the kids ran around contentedly with their cousins.
And now, some pictures from our week:
We have officially made it to the first year of the rest of our lives! I know we could say that every year, but this year it rings especially true. It feels good to, for the first time ever, be living somewhere we know we'll be for the long haul. We've had some wonderful adventures and now we're ready to settle in.
This might be basic, but your girl LOVES a new year. New Years is a reflective type of holiday and I'm a reflective type of person. I had such a peaceful New Years Eve. We didn't really make plans because I knew we'd be hosting all my siblings a few days later when my brother was in town and doing New Years types of activities with them then. Halfway through New Years Eve we were like, "Shoot, we should have invited my parents over!" We have such fond memories of New Years Eves spent with my parents in the various places we've lived, when they'd come visit us after the Christmas hustle. I really regret not having them over and carrying that tradition on (sorry Mom and Dad! We missed you!), but I have officially made note to get back on track for future years whenever possible.
We did play several games with Jack after dinner on New Years Eve, make informal vision boards of our goals and hopes for 2025, drive to a lookout spot two blocks from where we live to watch fireworks go off across the valley, and put Jack to bed a little later than usual (9:30). At this point I wrote down some resolutions with Jared and my sleepy lil' husband couldn't hang on anymore past about 10:15. He is such an outlier in our family. The rest of us would always rather stay up just a little longer! There's so much more to do in a day! But he would always rather go to sleep. It's honestly cute and I really wish my children inherited that trait, but alas. I do love when I can greet the New Year at midnight with Jared, but this year I was giddy to go downstairs and have two hours alone by our glowy Christmas tree to reflect and dream and plan.
It was peaceful and magical. I lit several candles, made myself cheese toast, got a bubbly drink, and parked myself in our living room where I could see the lights and fireworks of the valley twinkling and popping outside our big picture windows. We are getting VERY spoiled with the view from our rental house. There is a chance we will have great views from our next home, but honestly it probably won't be as good as the views in this home. You can see most of the valley from the main level of our house, and we get an entire unobstructed panorama view of the entirety of Utah Valley from the window of our primary bedroom upstairs. Because we're on the north side of the valley we get a full view of the sunrise AND sunset every morning and evening. We are feeling very happy with where we've landed and so far feel confident in our decision to build a home right next to our current neighborhood, hopefully by the end of the year. Jared has a bit of a commute to work, but it's nothing crazy (about half an hour in traffic), and the commute feels worth living in this location to both of us. (Not to mention home prices are a little lower on the Utah Valley side than if we decided to look closer to his work on the Salt Lake side.)
And that was our simple New Years Eve! The days since then have been filled with fun and cousin time. I am so grateful that we were able to be living in Utah during this extra long winter break out of school. The days went by so much more quickly and so much more fun hosting cousins and my parents and visiting fun spots with them. Here are some pictures from our week:
Confession--I just tried to read through last week's blog post to remember where we left off, and I couldn't make it through because it was so long. I've been WORDY with my posts lately. I'm a written processor and don't keep a journal anymore, so I fear the blog has been getting allll my thoughts and feelings. One of my New Year's resolutions is to work on brevity in the blog posts. This week I'm going to try just pictures with captions:
We must have found our village, because Jared spent the weekend in Washington, and of the 6 meals the kids and I ate while he was out of town, over half of them were cooked by and/or enjoyed with loved ones. And I didn't even preplan that out. Once again, it is wild to me how much of a support system has just, like, casually been here in Utah the whole time while we were white-knuckling our way through raising our kids on our own during most of the past decade (grateful for being able to dip our toes into a support system with Jared's parents living an hour away when we were in Washington, but it is a whole different level having so many loved ones with young kids living within 20 minutes of us now).
"The Village" is an interesting concept to me. I know "the village" of today does not look the same as it did for people raising their children 100 years ago. I know people for whom the concept of a village does not exist in any way, shape, or form; I know that feeling because I spent a lot of time there. For me it was like, ok, I know people love us. I know people would help if we asked. But. We are so far away from those people that it would be an inconvenience for everyone involved, and that usually didn't feel worth it to me.
I think it is absolutely possible to build your own village even if you don't have or if you live far from family, and if we had never been able to move back near family I think we could have built a community around us that I would have felt pretty comfortable calling on frequently. But not like this. I am slow to make friendships that have that depth and closeness, and we've never lived anywhere long enough to get to that point. I knew to an extent that a support system is what I'd be coming back to when we moved to Utah, but the ease of it has surprised me.
Saturday morning, Jared left for his early flight and my brother Chris and his wife Caitlin invited the kids and I to an Ebelskiever breakfast they host at their home around Christmas every year. Their kids are near our kids' ages so we just, like, ate breakfast and chatted and the kids played?? The kids all had their moments but it's so much less hands-on to go to a gathering where there are other kids for my kids to play with. I wish we had invited families with kids to our home more often in past places we lived. It always felt like it had to be a production though to cook and clean all day, and here I am learning that it really doesn't. I am so grateful for our loved ones here who have come before me--my mother, my grandmother, siblings, friends--who are leading by example and showing me that it's supposed to be casual. It's supposed to be, "Come on over! Toys are everywhere because we live here. We have leftover chow mein, you have corn dogs, let's bring them together and call it dinner." That was basically our dinner Saturday evening, and our kids again just ran downstairs and played with cousins. Wild. I might need a refresher on how to be a conversationalist, because those skills have become rusty since I started having kids 6 years ago and I'm realizing I may have the opportunity for longer adult conversations again now that we're here.
Sunday my parents invited us to their Christmas church service. Jared was out of town and my dad was singing in his sacrament meeting (and our church is at 8:30 but theirs is at 10:30) so it was a no brainer. After church my parents invited us to stay for a waffle lunch. I love when my parents serve waffles on Sunday. They set the table fancy and invite family over, and then we have waffles. It's beautiful and special but not overcomplicated. I've definitely been overcomplicating hosting and I'm grateful to practice taking it easier. Last minute on Sunday, my friend Julie invited me and the kids over for a casual dinner. She made a meatloaf and I brought frozen corn and some biscuits from a box. Boom, dinner. My kids play so well with hers, too. The weekend without Jared was busy with casual gatherings, and it flew by so much faster and less lonely than time apart has gone in the past.
In a season that has lots of other stressors--Jack missing his old school and friends and routines, us getting unpacked and set up in an unfamiliar home and neighborhood--I am grateful that we have people in our life with whom we can gather. A village. People who aren't "helping us" by inviting us over anymore than we're "helping them" by coming over. We're just people who want to do life together and to have our kids do life together and it's a beautiful thing. And it is helpful! If you don't have this in your life but ever have the opportunity to try it out, whether near family or by creating it in your own community, let this be your nudge to give it a whirl. Signed, a big-time introvert who loves alone time but is finding such relief and comfort in having a nearby village of loved ones. And now for some pictures!
I can't believe we're so close to Christmas. Jared's new job is starting really slow with the patient load because it's a fairly new clinic, so he has actually had quite a bit of free time when he's at work. He asked me to send him a family picture from our last week together in Washington so he could turn it into a Christmas card. He was so excited to bring home a whole bundle of Christmas cards that evening, and then I noticed that the cards are from "The Johnson Family"😂 I was all for keeping them and sending them out to close family and friends anyway because (a) they'd think it was funny, (b) most of them will end up in people's trash cans anyway after the holidays, and (c) It feels like a good reflection of the chaos of our year to have the wrong name on our holiday card😂 He did end up ordering a new batch but I fully plan on sending the original version to my siblings.
