April 2020

One thing that’s been encouraging in the few weeks since I started doing these is that even though every week FEELS like it’s the same as all the other weeks lately, I can at least see through these little updates that we are, in fact, making progress and learning new things and making good memories together.

And one thing I know for sure about myself is that for my own well-being, it’s important for me to experience, notice, and celebrate progress.

Note: There are affiliate links to the products I mention below, which means I may get a small commission on any purchases made through those links, at no extra cost to you.

In the Kitchen

Well, I had my first real success with gluten-free baking; namely, that I was able to produce a baked good (in this case, banana bread) that was at least as good as the “normal” version, and better than many. The recipe came from my latest cookbook splurge–America’s Test Kitchen’s How Can It Be Gluten-Free? Cookbook–and although it took more effort than typical banana bread recipes (not to mention more bananas–it calls for a whopping FIVE!), it really was quite incredible.

We’re still talking about it days later.

We were so encouraged by the success of the banana bread that we tried the chocolate chip cookie recipe from the same cookbook as well. Another clear winner! While the texture/aftertaste is just *slightly* different than a “normal” chocolate chip cookie, the recipe is a for-sure keeper. This makes me all sorts of hopeful about what gems we’ll find in the rest of the cookbook. One part about going gluten-free that’s so hard is that you start to wonder, “Will I ever be able to eat a delicious ____ again?” And now, with at least a couple of these baked good successes under our belts, there is hope for the future.

I’m still on my Instant Pot kick—now that it’s getting hotter outside and sometimes I feel like we’re *thisclose* to turning on the A/C (already?!), I am starting into my “don’t turn on the oven unless necessary” phase. Enter…more Instant Pot meals! We’re still eating tons of rice (as it’s the cheapest GF option), but I’m now starting to rotate in other “bases” for GF meals, like corn tortillas and potatoes. We do eat GF pasta sometimes, but as it’s expensive, we’ll probably be relying more on these other bases for meals.

When doing meal plans for the week, I’ll often have certain nights be tied to certain “themes” or “bases,” which helps give me some direction when trying to narrow down what to make for the week. My system used to be pretty set (soup + breadsticks on Mondays, breakfast for dinner on Thursdays or Fridays, Mexican one night, pasta one night, etc.), but since Matt’s celiac diagnosis, I feel like the whole system has been thrown for a loop (even though it really shouldn’t be, as there are GF options for all of those), and I haven’t been meal planning very much at all. Now that we’re moving away from soup season, I just need to come up with a new weekly “blueprint” so that I’m not doing the 4:00 dinner scramble every day.

I’ll let you know when I figure that out. Maybe I should add that to my official to-do list for the week.

Note: I will start linking to the recipes mentioned below, if they exist online. Often I’ll just use a recipe as a “blueprint” and then customize it as my own, but I’ll link to those blueprint recipes where I can as well.

On the Menu This Last Week: Chicken Enchilada Casserole, Instant Pot Parmesan Ranch Chicken + Potatoes, Baked Breakfast Casserole, IP Indian Curry Rice w/ Mixed Vegetables + Chicken, Takeout Pizza From Firehouse Pizzeria

In the Yard

The weather finally moved back into warm spring temps again, and since we had a lot of clean-up to do before our realtor friend came over to give us some pointers on selling the house (more on that below), we got a decent amount done. The biggest visible change is that Matt weeded and raked out all the raised garden beds (I’ll have to take a pic of that soon). Even though we’d done some direct sowing in there, it was getting too hard to tell which plants were weeds and which weren’t, so we decided to start over with a clean slate. (Yes, this means that pretty much none of our transplanted seedlings from the first batch made it, and we don’t know about the direct-sowed seeds due to the aforementioned weed problem above.)

I need to do a post on our garden failures soon, because we’re racking up quite an impressive list. Basically I’ve decided that growing plants from seeds is not as easy as I thought it would be, and while I’m super tempted to just never try it again and just go with our tried-and-true method of buying established plants from the local garden nursery, I am determined to figure this seed thing out. We already know many of the reasons behind our recent failures, so we’ve been trying to correct for those with our second batch of seeds, which are sitting on the counter under grow lights as I type this.

Matt made a small shopping trip to the local nursery to pick up some herbs (purple basil, oregano, parsley) and a couple tomato plants while they were such a good price, as well as two geraniums for the front to fill in some bare patches. We normally would never plant tomatoes this early (or most of the herbs either, for that matter), but since it’s looking more likely than not that we’ll be moving in the next 3-5 months, we figured the only way we might get produce this year is by starting earlier and praying that we don’t get a hard (or even soft) frost over the next few weeks.

Blooming this week: Tulips! Lots of them! (The new pink ones we planted last fall, plus several of the red, the red/yellow mix, and a few purple.) Plus the beginning of the blossoms on the peach tree and whatever the perennial above is called (I really should know, as we were the ones who planted it!), and the grape hyacinths and forsythia still.

In the Playroom

At the beginning of the official quarantine period, I was all sorts of motivated to do fun things with the kids and make the time as special as possible. After so many weeks of the same thing, I’d been slipping into “survival” mode many days rather than actively looking for ways to make the most of it. While I understand that sometimes I’m going to have “off” days and that’s okay, I also recognize that letting myself have a ton in a row is terrible for my mental health (kind of a “bad habits beget more bad habits” type thing).

I was confiding my feelings about it all to Matt one night, and he came up with a really good suggestion—since I’m so drawn to make lists, he suggested that each week, I put something on my to-do list to do with each kid at some point throughout the week. That way, I’m not pressured to make every last day super special, but at the same time, I still have things to look forward to and for our kids to look forward to and ways that I can feel like I’m being the best mom I can be under the circumstances.

For this first week, here were my items:

1- Read a book to Hyrum every day, just the two of us. The baby will often be in our laps while we read to the other kids, but it’s rare that I read a book just to him. And man, he might be just barely over four months old, but he was RIVETED. Love for books is in our kids’ blood, man.

2 – Throw and catch a ball with Mathias outside for at least 15-20 minutes. It’s pretty hard to do things with just Thias because his older sister doesn’t take naps and always wants to be part of the fun, but on this day, she was actively engaged in listening to her new audiobook downstairs, so I took advantage and went outside with Mathias, just the two of us. I had high hopes of really working on his throwing and catching techniques, but we only got so far with that before he just wanted to run around and do his thing, which was fine. I could tell he relished having all the attention on just him, though–he proudly pointed and labeled everything he saw, and he gave me lots of hugs and snuggles. (For my own record, he can *kind of* throw things a very short distance, and he can catch a medium-sized beach ball as long as I throw it from a fairly close distance.)

3 – Type and print out a “book” with Raven that she can then illustrate. We did this one together yesterday afternoon while the boys napped, and she loved coming up with the story all by herself (with some subtle directional hints from me to make sure we got person, place, and some plot in there), seeing me type it up, and then printing it out and pasting it into a “book” we’d stapled together from computer paper. Not gonna lie, it melted my heart a bit when she specifically thanked Heavenly Father in our family prayer Sunday night for the opportunity she had to “make my special book with Mommy.”

Honestly, Matt suggesting this was an answer to prayer—it’s made me more intentional about my mothering again, and it’s also given all of us some concrete things to look forward to as well as the “little victories” I need on a semi-regular basis to stay sane.

Other fun things for the week — We went on a mini “hike” in the canyon by our house after doing at-home church on Sunday, and we had a little snack picnic by the stream and let the kids throw rocks into the water for about half an hour. Other than forgetting to bring a burpcloth for the baby (who spit up EVERYWHERE, necessitating that we had to use grass–yes!–to clean him up a bit), it was a resounding success for us all. We also squeezed in a family walk earlier in the week, and I’m hoping we can start doing that on a more regular basis again since it’s so good for all of us to get out of the house together as a family. Most days, the older two kids got outside for decent stretches to play in the sandbox in the backyard, climb on the little plastic slide we have back there, and observe the chickens.

In the Home

On Saturday afternoon, our friend Rob (who’s a realtor) came over to give us pointers on some things we could do to up the curb appeal of our house and tell us what was worth doing (or not) inside the house to help it sell. We got a lot of good ideas, and I was relieved to hear that there isn’t too much painting in our future. At some point, I will likely do a post on things will be doing to prep the house to list (although I’ll probably be doing that on the other blog rather than here, and only when we know for sure that we’re moving).

To prep the house for Rob’s visit, we did a LOT of cleaning and organizing on Saturday morning. Since Rob’s a good friend and we go way back, we knew he wouldn’t judge us for our cluttery ways, but we wanted to make it easier for him to see what really needed to be done to the bones/background of the house, rather than the obvious “clearing up and staging” kind of thing. In addition to just having a clean house to relax in this weekend, the cleaning party was nice too because it allowed me to check some things off my spring cleaning list, which I’d largely started to ignore because of my lack of motivation most days. A few of the things I checked off? Wiping down all the cupboards in the bathroom (surprising and maybe a little disturbing what a difference it made), vacuuming the vents, swapping out the kids’ books in the bookshelf in the front room and getting it back down to a manageable number, and clearing off our mud bench of all the winter gear that’s now unnecessary. Getting some more wins under my belt has hopefully now motivated me again to tackle more of the list, since it was just plain satisfying to see the immediate effects of our hard work.

In the Soul

This week marked some important shifts for me. I think often of the studies I’ve read about, which say that the best way to feel happy in your life is not to chase happiness itself, but rather a sense of purpose and meaning. Since my conversation with Matt about his idea to literally put the kids on the to-do list, I’ve felt a renewed sense of being more intentional in my mothering, which I desperately needed. As any mom knows, this motherhood gig is rarely the kind of thing you get “gold stars” for—many efforts go unacknowledged, you’re repeating yourself endlessly and wondering if anything is getting through, and many days feel very much the same, which can make progress seem elusive. I know that for me, I like “gold stars”–I like being able to cross things off of lists and see measurable progress and hear concrete evidence from others that something–anything–I’m doing is making a difference.

So while I’ll still be endlessly repeating myself with the kids and many of our days will still feel like an eternal repeat of Groundhog Day during these strange times, I’ll at least be able to point to these one-on-one weekly goals with each kid and say, “See? Look! We DID do something intentional and worthwhile and noteworthy this week!”

Another major shift that happened was that mentally, I finally accepted the fact that we’ll likely be moving, and that there’s a decent chance it will be to a small county in Utah that’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. My body and mind have been raging against the notion of moving–especially to somewhere so rural–since I first found out it was a possibility. I liked the life we’ve established here, I liked our proximity to a bigger city with all the amenities (not to mention a big hospital and our favorite doctors), and I liked that things seemed stable here, both financially and support-wise.

My friend Rachel put it this way, in a Facebook comment to me: “Change can be so fun and exciting when you planned for it. When it’s thrust upon you,….not so much.” A thousand times, YES! I often actually inject our life with regular doses of change, just to keep things interesting, but big changes that we didn’t ask for? Not a fan. So, because this is a change we didn’t ask for, I’ve been railing against it–every time I thought about moving, my body tensed with stress, and my mind jumped to frustration and even anger.

Finally, this week I came to acceptance of whatever will be. Any way you look at it, our lives will be changing this year, whether that comes in the form of a new job, a big move, or both. (Unless, of course, the company Matt works for miraculously changes their mind, that is.) And because I came to an acceptance, I also was able to see the benefits—if we end up finding another job, we might be living closer to family, having a better benefits package and/or making more than we are currently, and it would prove a new challenge for Matt with an opportunity to learn new skills and meet new people. If we end up moving, we might have a chance to own more land, save money on our monthly mortgage payment (if we downsize), do some fun house projects as we make a new space our own, and make new friends.

There still will be lots of stress in the meantime as we figure out our new direction, yes. But at least now I’m (mostly) okay with whatever direction that will end up being.

Oh man, what an up and down week! For a long time, I felt like we had this quarantine-at-home thing DOWN, but this week, the whole never-leaving-the-house started to wear on us all. Couple that with the stress about our unknown future with Matt’s job situation and where we’ll be living in the next few months, and it turned out to be somewhat of a doozy of a week, until I finally just let it all out on Wednesday night.

Note: There are some affiliate links in this post to the products I’ve mentioned. This means that if you click through those links and make a purchase, I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you.

In other news, Matt finally succumbed to the dark side (#kidding) and joined the smartphone club. (Yes, both of us have indeed just had flip phones from the Stone Ages this entire time.) The basic flip phone we’d gotten him awhile ago when we joined Tello (where we pay just $22 a month for both of us, baby!) just wasn’t working well, and since he uses his phone so much for work calls, the company he works for said that they would be fine buying him a new one. I thought I’d have more mixed feelings about it than I do, but thus far, the fact that we lived so long without caring much about our phones has translated over to the new phone, and he hasn’t been on it nearly as much as I thought he would be. (In fact, he was NOT on it so much at work that he was totally late meeting me at the hospital to watch our other kids while I took the baby in for his appointment because he’d left his phone charging in his office at work and had gone off to do other tasks. Apparently old habits die hard.)

Turns out, it seems he’s pretty disciplined with his technology use, and now we have a way to access a GPS when we get lost in the middle of nowhere.

Weird.

In the Kitchen

The bananas on the counter were starting to turn scary-brown, and I couldn’t bear the thought of wasting so many, so I finally put on my big-girl pants and started looking up gluten-free recipes. I already had been making the gluten-free banana oat muffins (which we’ve made for years just because they’re delicious, gluten-free or not), but I found this recipe for banana bread on the website for the Namaste flour blend we like so much, and I made that this week. It was…decent. With some tweaks, it could be even better, so that’s now my mission—tweak it, make it my own, and regain some of my enthusiasm for baking again.

It might be a slow process.

I’ve also started looking into gluten-free sandwich bread recipes, just because I cannot stomach the $7 price tag on the store-bought GF stuff. I found one from the America’s Test Kitchen gluten-free cookbook that might be promising, but it required that I order psyllium husk powder, so I’m waiting on that to ship before I can experiment. (No, I have zero experience with the stuff. I’m not even quite sure I know what it is, other than the fact that it is like a huge dose of fiber and promotes digestive regularity. Guess we’ll see!)

I seem to be addicted to my Instant Pot lately, as you’ll see on my menu notes below. I finally got comfortable enough with it that I made up a recipe of my own for it for cheesy Mexican beans + rice casserole, which I’ll post a recipe for soon, either here or on the other blog.

On the menu this week: Instant Pot creamy chicken and rice with mixed veggies, IP Mexican casserole, IP Cheesy Potato Soup, and broccoli, bacon, and cheese omelets.

In the Yard

It was another cold week, with a few snowstorms thrown in for good measure (all of which melted down the same afternoon). However, Saturday dawned sunny enough to go out and do some weeding, and everyone got in on the action except the baby, who was napping in his crib. Mathias pulled up handfuls of dandelions and ran to feed them to the chickens. Raven wanted to simultaneously do everything we were doing and do nothing that we were doing (all while begging us to “play instead”). I picked up several of the branches Matt had pruned off the fruit trees all the way last fall. Matt fiddled with our watering system to see if the city had turned on our water yet (it appears they haven’t). We all weeded. We all exclaimed over the green popping up everywhere.

Now that there’s a definite possibility we’re moving in the next several months (though nothing is certain—we honestly don’t know which way we’re leaning at this point), our to-do list has markedly changed. Rather than moving forward with the building of more garden beds and the sowing of tons of flower seeds and the planning out of a large kitchen garden, we’re instead talking about curb appeal and weed control and getting truckloads of wood chips and fixing that plumbing problem in the back.

If we end up not moving, this might very well feel a bit like a lost year, as we won’t be planting nearly as much as we had planned, just in case we do end up moving.

Blooming this week: the grape hyacinths (still), more of the forsythia (though we might have overpruned it, as many of the bushes have only a few sorry strands of blooms at the very bottom and nothing else), and *almost* several of the tulips

In the Playroom

Hyrum had his 4-month check-up this week. The hospital called me the day before to check if we had fevers, coughs, shortness of breath (no to all), and to inform me that only one healthy adult was allowed in with him, and no other children. Luckily that had been our plan all along. So Matt came over in the middle of the workday and took the other kids to get frosties and french fries while I took in the baby, my face covered with the mask my mom had made for me. My temperature was taken as soon as I entered the building, and no one seemed suspicious that it was only 95.8 degrees.

Hyrum measured so small that he doesn’t show up on the charts, even after we adjusted for his premature age (in other words, comparing him against 3-month-olds rather than 4-month-olds). Our pediatrician isn’t concerned though, at least not at this point. The baby is still growing and following a definite growth curve, and Mathias was (and is) also very small for his age, so maybe our boys will just hit their growth spurts much later in life. Or they’ll just be 5’2″.

Raven has taken to listening to audiobooks for looooong stretches of time (often 2- or 3-hour stretches) while she draws intently. She’s finally getting to the point where her artwork is becoming recognizable. This week she said, “This is a chair, Mommy,” and I saw the chair. “Show me how to draw a flamingo, Mommy,” and I could see a definite flamingo after the fashion of my own. My dad is an artist and my mother-in-law is an artist, but Matt and I don’t seem to have much of the drawing gene in us…maybe it skipped a generation and went to her. She definitely has the focus and ability to sit still and practice for long stretches at any rate, so if she wants to be an artist, she’ll have the discipline to be one.

Mathias has somehow learned to recognize the letter “A.” I did not teach him this. Matt did not teach him this (I don’t think). Maybe Raven? It shocked me a bit the first time he pointed it out. Made me feel like I should be doing more to help his early literacy skills, but my strategy of just reading, reading, reading to the kids each and every day multiple times seems to be doing the trick just fine, so I’m not going to stress myself (or the kids) out by trying to do some regimented program. That and I learned with Raven a long time ago that I’m definitely not cut out to be a reading teacher—teaching 7th graders was about the youngest I was meant to go.

In the Home

Pre-meltdown (see section below), I had zero motivation to do anything productive in the home. I barely skimmed the top layer of dishes every day and ran a load of laundry in the morning (without folding it in the afternoon), and that was about it. Post-meltdown, I felt completely renewed, so I folded the bundles of laundry strewn all over our bed and room, and I started the daunting task of going through all the hand-me-downs we’ve been given over the past 4 months, as well as putting away all the too-small stuff of the kids’. Other than the laundry, I don’t think it made enough of a difference to anyone else in the house to notice, but it at least made me feel better for having moved forward.

We also washed *almost* all the dishes in the house today (Sunday), including the chef’s knives, which seem to get put off the longest because we insist on hand-washing them all. I’ve also kept the kitchen table clean the past few days (#progress) and have been wiping down the countertops and sweeping regularly again. It just goes to show what a funk I was in that those things weren’t being done for awhile, but I think I’m back on the motivation train for the time being.

In the Soul

Confession: I had a meltdown this week. I joked to Matt that I need to have one about once a quarter to maintain homeostasis–where every few months, I just need a good solid cry. The rest of the time, I’m pretty darn stable. It’s just how I am–not super high, not super low, just somewhere right in the middle (maybe with a trend towards general optimism). So that day (Wednesday) was hard. Everything seemed overwhelming: the idea of moving, the idea of not moving (and having to find a job), the feeling that I was failing at everything (especially housework) lately, you know…the general pity party stuff.

After a good solid tear-fest and about a two-hour talk-fest with Matt, I felt significantly lighter. Buoyant, even. And that sense of lightness carried over the rest of the week, so that I finally had motivation to do All the Things again–to, once again, make the most of this odd time known as the COVID-19 quarantine, rather than feel beaten down by it. To start planning out fun activities to do with the kids, especially one-on-one. To read All The Books.

We still don’t know what the next few months will bring for our family, on many levels. But at least now I’m feeling at peace about wherever we end up.

In the Kitchen

I feel like I’m going through a mourning period in the kitchen. Before, I was baking batches of chocolate chip cookies every other day, trying recipe after recipe to see if I could narrow it down to a few favorites (I never really could); I was pinning quick bread recipes to dream up new uses for browned bananas and wrinkled carrots; I was dreaming of the cakes I would make out of The Baking Bible (aff link), which was a Christmas gift to myself I bought with some gift money I’d received. Now, ever since Matt’s celiac diagnosis, I’ve almost not baked at all, save for two batches of these gluten-free oatmeal banana muffins (with chocolate chips, of course, which is a small consolation…well, the fact that they’re genuinely delicious helps, too).

I don’t know why I feel so bummed out about the diagnosis–I mean, I’m not the one who has to stop eating gluten! But the inescapable fact is that baking for others is one of my love languages, and I feel as if my ability to express myself in that way has been severely limited. Yes, I know there are many, many delicious gluten-free recipes out there. Yes, I know that we are beyond lucky to live in a time when there is such an array of gluten-free options to choose from, both premade options and myriad types of flours, non-gluten thickeners, and more.

I’m hoping that someday soon, I will see this as a fun challenge to rise to—as a way to make myself stretch even more as a baker.

Now I just look at the huge 25-lb. bag of all-purpose flour in our pantry and sigh every time I see it.

We’ve been eating a lot of rice this week, as that’s a naturally gluten-free option that’s also cheap, which is more than I can say for many of the other things we’ve picked up in the past couple weeks (like gluten-free oats, flour blends, and bread, which is $5.99/loaf). My mom ordered us six–SIX!–huge bags of the Namaste GF flour (aff link), which is one of the favorite flour blends we discovered when I went gluten-free for a half year to get my autoimmune disease under control. For awhile, I toyed with the idea of making gluten-free meals half the time and making Matt something separate the other nights, but I don’t think I can do it–I don’t think I have the energy, and I still feel bad whenever I make something delicious that he cannot eat.

We will get used to this, and in a year, I probably will laugh at the melodramatic reaction I had to the whole thing. But for now, consider my baking and cooking motivation to be almost nil.

On the menu this week: Chicken Fajita Pasta (using GF penne noodles), our go-to quick dinner of corn tortillas topped with melted cheese, avocados, and hot sauce, and Instant Pot Indian Butter Chicken with Potatoes (over rice).

In the Yard

I was getting sick of looking at last year’s dead annuals in the two flower pots that flank our front door, so I finally broke down and picked up a couple six-packs of pansies on my final (for real) trip to the grocery store this month. I’ll pick up a couple more annuals to fill them out more in May, but for the time being, it makes everything look much fresher and a little more well-kept than before.

Raven especially got into it the business of planting and was all about loosening up the roots, placing them–alternating the colors–in each of the holes, and patting down the dirt. Mathias did his part to “help” too, though we largely encouraged him to run around the yard rather than get *too* involved, since a couple of the pansies almost got beheaded by accident.

I direct-sowed a few more sweet pea flower seeds and normal pea seeds (since we finally found the missing seed packets, and we discovered to our chagrin that it might not have been the children’s fault after all that they were misplaced, though no one remembers for sure), but they haven’t sprouted yet–hopefully in the next few days. The tricky thing is that we have a bunch of seedlings pushing through in the raised beds, but it’s hard to know at this point what’s stuff that we’ve sown and what’s simply weeds. We’ll have to wait until everything is a bit bigger, but by then, we might discover that we simply have a weed patch that’s thriving on all the direct sunlight and frequent watering we’re giving them. Only time will tell.

Blooming this week: grape hyacinths, the beginnings of one of the forsythia bushes, all the daffodils.

In the Playroom

It was Raven’s birthday on Sunday–she loved being able to share it with Easter this year. We did our egg hunt and Easter baskets on Saturday morning, then reserved Sunday for birthday celebrations and our at-home church service. Two sets of Raven’s grandparents braved coming up, face masks and all. We enjoyed a lunch of pot roast, orange salad, potatoes, and rolls, and Raven had a blast with the present scavenger hunt I’d created for her (and even read several of the words on the “clues” all on her own, without hesitation!). She has impressed me time and again with her positive attitude toward everything going on right now—she’s just taken it all in stride, in a very matter-of-fact way. No complaining, very few tears (and 99% of those were shed over our Hawaii trip being canceled). She’s probably the wisest and most kind-hearted 5-year-old I know, and she helps me out SO much at home with her brothers. I love that all last week, when we were doing little things throughout to make her birthday week extra special, she would frequently say, “Mommy, thank you for doing all these special things for my birthday. I just love you!”

Matt’s parents, who recently came home (early, due to COVID-19) from their mission in Hawaii, came to the house yesterday for the celebration. Mathias, who was only 10 months old when they left last April, was extremely wary of them for the majority of the visit. He just kept staring and staring at Grandma Meidell, and when we tried to explain that she was also Grandma, he kept looking over at my mom (who was also there) like there couldn’t possibly be TWO grandmas. (His head will probably explode when he sees his third grandma next, since he hasn’t seen her in even longer!) Eventually Sherry won him over with little tricks like putting his car on her shoe and sticking her foot closer to him and playing silly hiding games, so hopefully it won’t take him too long to warm up to her when we’re able to see them again after all this is over.

We were worried Hyrum’s fussiness over the past couple weeks might have been due to an ear infection, but now we’re just pretty sure it’s due to constipation and gas issues. Yesterday, after a particularly loud and long crying spell (when even Grandma Allred couldn’t calm him down!), we gave him an ounce of pear juice, and he finally let it all fly over the course of the next few hours and was MUCH happier and less tense as a result. He’s also napped a whole lot better today too, so I’m crossing my fingers it’s a little easier from hereon out. Pear juice for the win!

In the Home

I often have to kind of “trick” myself into doing housework, since it’s just something I will probably always loathe. One of my tricks is the old, “Just pick up 10 things” or “Do 10 short tasks that will make the biggest difference visually in this room.” We had quite a bit of picking up to do before the birthday party yesterday, so to motivate myself, I decided to photograph the three main spaces I was cleaning every 15 minutes to show the difference over time. I’m planning on doing a little post just on that, because it was kind of fun to see the changes!

The roller/wheel thing on our garage door broke the other week, so Matt went early to our local hardware store on Saturday, got a replacement part, and fixed it in about 10 minutes. Matt was really not a very handy guy in the first several years of our marriage, but ever since buying our house three-ish years ago and with him taking his cabinet-making class and doing woodworking projects for fun, he’s really getting to the point where I’m thinking there will be very few things he can’t do himself! It’s so nice that he has such a natural inclination to learn things like that—I’ve felt very lucky.

In the Soul

We’ve got a big life decision weighing on our minds lately (which I’ll do its own post on soon), so my stress levels have been a bit on the elevated side. I’m the kind of person who feels much better AFTER a decision has been made (not before), so living in a state of limbo over the past few weeks has done a number on me when I actually take the time to think about it.

On Good Friday, Matt and I participated in the worldwide fast that our church leader, President Russell M. Nelson, challenged all church members (and all people of all faiths) to do. I didn’t do a full fast from food because I’m nursing, but I did do about a 17-hour one and then fasted from my beloved chocolate and Diet Dr. Pepper for the remaining 7 hours. I don’t think it’s coincidental that here in Utah, where so many people were participating in the fast, there has been a definite drop in the growth percentage of new cases over the past few days.

Easter Sunday yesterday was such a beautiful day—it felt wonderful to be with family again (we were still within the county guidelines of avoiding gatherings larger than 10 people), even if we didn’t have nearly as many hugs as usual. The whole day, I just felt so GRATEFUL—so grateful for our parents, so grateful for our beautiful children, so grateful for my husband and all he does for us and the man that he is, and so grateful, most of all, for my Savior Jesus Christ, who is the true source of ALL hope. I just had the sense all day that not only will life get back to normal, but that when it does, we will all be better because of what we’ve been through together.

In the Kitchen

I braved the world outside on Wednesday and went shopping at two different grocery stores, with the plan in mind of not having to go again for the rest of the month (or *maybe* going once for milk and produce and Diet Dr. Pepper…you know, the essentials). Neither store had toilet paper, and when I had Matt go to a third store on Thursday and he also couldn’t find any, it looks like we’ll have to do that other stop for sure since we’ll run out in about a week and a half. The stores were also out of eggs, so we are now officially living only off of the eggs that our own hens produce, which is kind of amazing to think about. One year ago, we hadn’t gotten any chickens yet, and now here we are with our 4 mama hens providing us with just enough eggs to get by. Once our six chicks start laying in a few months, we’ll have more than we know what to do with.

Since Matt got his positive celiac diagnosis just last week, we were seriously tempted to just not try and change his diet until I went grocery shopping on the first of this month, but when he started foregoing his daily toast, the leftover breadsticks he was supposed to take for his lunch, and the like, I figured I’d better step up, too. So we made do last week without having anything that was “gluten-free” other than those foods that naturally were—rice, beans, fruits and vegetables, meat. I felt bad eating stuff in front of him that he couldn’t have, so I stopped baking cookies and started only feeding the bread to the kids, or just waiting until he wasn’t around to eat it. We both lost a few pounds this last week as a result (ha!). I know it won’t always be like this, but I’m trying to ease the adjustment. (Plus I’ve been trying to shed the last of the pregnancy pounds anyway, so this is definitely speeding things up.)

On the menu this week: a sweet potato, pinto bean, and chicken skillet meal, an Instant Pot coconut chicken curry wonder over rice, some more baked oatmeal (for dinner AND breakfast), rice + beans, and finally, some takeout from our favorite local diner to try and support them during this difficult time.

In the Yard

It was another cold, somewhat gloomy week outside, with the bitter wind driving the kids inside after only about 10 minutes of play every time they tried to venture out to the backyard. We did squeeze in a family walk yesterday when the sun finally felt warm again, and another one today. It’s looking like it should warm up quite a bit from hereon out, which will be a welcome change.

Monday night, Matt put up the other two trellises, and we transplanted out all the early spring vegetable seedlings and all the sweet pea plants. Matt thinks that the majority of them are already dead, but I’m holding out hope that they’re tougher than they look and that their tendency to bend over or flatten out is just because they haven’t gotten used to the fierce canyon winds yet. At any rate, I feel confident that at least a few of our pea and sweet pea plants should make it, even if nothing else does.

We also tried direct sowing a few of the same varieties we’d transplanted out, though two of the varieties we were the most excited to direct sow–more sweet peas and then some poppies that do better to be direct sown rather than transplanted–had been misplaced by Raven, who immediately tried to pin the blame on her brother. After a quick search of obvious locations, we still have no idea where the seed packets have disappeared to, which I’ll admit irritates me to no end.

Blooming this week: more crocuses, many of the daffodils.

In The Playroom

Hyrum (the baby, who’s almost 4 months old) seems to be hitting the dreaded 4-month sleep regression, or at least he seems to be going on a nap strike during the day. Luckily our nights are not bad (he usually just wakes up once around 3:30 to eat), but he wails with reckless abandon and waves his tiny fists every time I try to wrap him up for a nap in his bouncer, which meant that much of my days this week were spent planted in a seat by the laptop in the kitchen with my foot rocking the bouncer and the other two kids getting away with a bit more than usual as they ran wild wherever they pleased. I had Big Plans for all I was going to accomplish this week, but very few things got checked off. And by the time I DID actually have a moment to breathe? I usually collapsed right onto the couch to get in a nap myself. Already he was much easier by the weekend (I think constipation might have had something to do with the wailing), so fingers crossed this was just a blip of a week.

Mathias (21 months old) is taking great pleasure in naming everything for us. His face cracks into a wide grin every time he points at an object and proudly shouts out its appropriate title, and he is a miniature parrot of everything he hears. This week I tried to teach him how to jump, which was hilarious–he would bend his knees like we showed him, then sloooowly stand back up again, put his hands belatedly in the air, and shout “JUMP!” Truly, this stage is one of my favorites—the only problem is trying not to laugh when he’s naughty just because everything he does is still so cute.

Raven’s birthday is this next Sunday, a fact she continually reminds us of. Every day: “Mom, how many days until my birthday? Mom, how many days until Easter? Mom, can I check outside to see if the Easter bunny came early?” Our original birthday plans for her have all been changed thanks to the pandemic, but man, she’s impressed me with her resilience. After a solid 10-minute sob session when she found out all our big plans were cancelled (the Hawaii trip we’ve been saving for for so long, the big family party with cousins, possibly a friend party if I felt brave enough, or at least a small play date), she has rebounded with full enthusiasm for the day when she turns “The Big 5” (as she puts it). And luckily, all her eager questions/suggestions/queries are mostly requests we can fulfill—a scavenger hunt where we hide her presents around the house and yard and she has to find them, a big cake with pink frosting, a dinner with grandparents (we’re still hoping this can happen, as we’d still be a group fewer than 10 people and as there hasn’t been a state order forbidding such yet).

No matter what happens, it should be memorable at any rate.

In the Home

I started spring cleaning this weekend, mostly to try and keep myself from going mentally crazy during this time of so much uncertainty and endless news feeds that beg to be refreshed constantly. (Oh, and the fact that our house is a bit of a disaster because as said above, the baby has not been a happy camper this week, which meant a very limited amount of housework got done on any given day.)

I started with the easiest task on the list–swapping out our Christmas wreath (yes) for our spring wreath–then proceeded to the one that called to me the most right now: The Pantry.

As mentioned above, I did a huge shopping trip this week that I’m hoping will be the only one (or almost only one) I will have to make all month. However, since my children, ahem, “reorganized” the pantry a couple months back, I didn’t actually have a clear idea of just where we stood on everything. I also haven’t taken everything out of the cupboards and wiped them down since we moved in nearly 3 years ago, so it was time.

The first thing I noticed was how we have all these “cream of” soups that feel basically useless to me now with Matt’s celiac diagnosis. I mean, I can still use them to make lunches for the kids and me, but I was bummed to think of all the money we just spent on those, as they were one of the things I purchased from a case lot sale just a couple months ago. Of course, if we end up discovering that we’re really not using them over the next year or so, I’ll make sure to donate them to the local food pantry before they expire so that at least they won’t go to waste.

The second thing I noticed was how dirty it was near where you open the cupboards. I didn’t notice until I started wiping them down, but there were a lot of dirty little fingerprint smudges all around the hardware. Apparently my brain has trained itself not to notice grime build-up on things I use every day. I’ll blame that on living with small children, where, if it doesn’t smell like poop or other bodily fluids, I’m not as concerned about it. #truth

The third thing I noticed was the enormous satisfaction I felt in the project—the sense of security I felt from seeing the cans all lined up in a row, the bags of flour and oatmeal, the large tupperware container bursting with rice. I felt gratitude that we’ve always had food security, and that we will continue to have food security for the foreseeable future. I lived in El Salvador for about a year and a half while serving a mission for my church, and I think often of the poverty I saw there. I check the COVID-19 numbers for El Salvador often, and I worry about the people I love there who lack the access to basic health and food resources in the best of times. Thinking about all the problems and injustices in the world can drive us crazy if we think about them too long, but I try and let them mold me into someone who is more actively grateful for the abundance in which we live, and I try and remember that rather than feel guilty for the inequality all around me, I should let that inequality be a constant reminder to me of the need to be generous and to look outward, and to share what I have.

In the Heart

I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and twice a year we get the chance to hear from our church leaders (who preside over the worldwide church). While the format for the conference looked very different this year because of the current conditions, my weary heart took courage and felt filled to the brim today and yesterday as I listened to their messages of hope and faith, and their reminders of the goodness of God and of His watchful care over us. Although I’ve been studying my scriptures nightly throughout this pandemic (as I’ve studied them nightly without having missed a day in over a year and a half), I sorely needed the extra boost that the combined faith and testimonies of so many others has on my own.

Although I’ve largely felt at peace throughout all the craziness that’s been the past month, I feel an even greater sense of it now. My faith has always been a great source of strength and comfort for me, and I’m so grateful for it. We believe that God has again called a prophet in our day, as He did in times of old, and our prophet challenged us as a church (and all other faiths who want to join us) to fast and pray worldwide on Good Friday for relief from the current pandemic, for the caregivers to be protected, for the economy to be strengthened, and for life to be normalized. He talked about the Savior’s teaching in the New Testament how “some things goeth not out but by prayer and fasting” (Matthew 17:21). My heart is filled with hope, and I am eager to join my own faith with the faith of millions of others in petitioning our loving Heavenly Father for this relief.

Many of the talks over the past two days were about how we can allow adversity and trials to refine us and help us become more like Jesus Christ. I already feel like this current global pandemic has both taught me a lot AND also showed me that I have MUCH to improve upon.

I loved these thoughts given a few days before the conference from one of my favorite modern-day apostles, Jeffrey R. Holland:

“This is a rare time of enforced solitude when we don’t have a lot of trivia or superficial busyness distracting us from considering the truly important things in life. Such times invite us to look into our soul and see if we like what we see there. [This is a] “kind of mandatory Sabbath—a time when we step away from our normal routine, from life as usual, and consider our dependence on God and the blessings from Him we so often take for granted.”

I know that life WILL normalize, and that this pandemic WILL end. And when it does, I hope that I don’t forget the things that I’ve learned over and over again over the past month of sheltering in place—to cleave to God, to cherish my family, and to be grateful for the goodness of life, every minute.