Longest Week

 Wooh, this week was long! I'm one day away from getting the nose splints removed, and can't even wait I'm so excited. As I expected, this surgery recovery has been rough. SO rough. I have taken a two-hour nap nearly daily this week just because I'm completely exhausted and can't function at all. The splints chafe like crazy and they're literally stitched to the inside of my nose right at the tip, so that's quite aggravating if ever I move my face around enough to make that part move. Yuck all around! All that being said, I don't regret even slightly getting the surgery. The improvement is going to be amazing, I can already tell. 

Before the surgery

On the way home

Day one at home

Puffy nose

My poor, chafed nose

Solution to the constant dripping when I'm not allowed to blow my nose, lol. 

My sister was on spring break this week and she was so kind to help out. She took Chloe with her a couple different times. This time they went to IKEA among other adventures. 

Another day my mom and sister and kids came up and we went together to the park. Notice I can't actually smile for really really because it doesn't feel good to lift my upper lip. So I gave this lovely number, lol.

Chloe was really hamming it up one day and I took a couple cute pictures. She turns five in a couple months! That blows my mind. The time has gone so fast. 

Here she is at her soccer game. They won this week! She got a sweet breakaway run. She missed the goal by like two inches, but man, she looked good. Half the time she doesn't really have a clue what is happening on the field, but then suddenly she's all there and it's fun. I love watching my kids play soccer. 

This and that from the week

Grandpa gave Aaron his old military flashlight. Aaron is thrilled. 

Genevieve got here hair trimmed a bit. I love her hair. It's just such a beautiful color and so silky and beautiful. It's actually somewhat wavy, but it's fine enough that it brushes out pretty easily. But I forecast when she gets older it's going to get a lot curlier. 

I had a delightful day to myself on Saturday when Bill and Grandpa took the kids on a rather ill fated adventure. Their day didn't go as planned because of some unexpected intense weather, but I had a wonderful day to myself at home. I ended up making these two table runners. I'm kind of on a kick. I'll probably make a couple holiday-themed ones so that I'll have them for decorations in our new house. 

Spencer also got a haircut and cut his mop off. He looks good with it short again. I did like it long too, but he decided to cut it short for summer. 

Chloe also decided to cut her hair. Namely her bangs. They're quite brief now. Haha! She didn't do the worst job. She said she didn't like them, they were in her face. She's taken years to get even the bangs she had to grow, so hopefully they'll grow back soon and keep growing. She's taken the longest to grow hair of any of my kids. It's still pretty thin and short. Mine was much the same as a child and it's as thick as can be now, so I also bet hers will eventually come in much more, but for now it's light and barely there and now a little less there after her efforts. 

Spring Break is coming next week and we're super excited about that. We're going to go down to southern Utah and go to Moab and Canyonlands and Goblin Valley and wherever else we feel like for the week. As long as we can find a campsite in the first come first serve sites that are all that is available, it's going to be awesome. So fingers crossed for that. 

Zoo Trip

We dropped a chunk of change last week on a Salt Lake Connect Pass, which is tickets to like 16 different attractions around the valley at discounted prices to be used over the next year. First stop was the Hogle Zoo this weekend. It wasn't actually warm at all, but we promised the kids we would take them, so we did!  And we had a great time despite it sleeting and snowing a bit while we were there. Our outings are set for the summer now. Huzzah! 

Hogle Zoo is a cute little zoo, but I keep telling my kids I'll take them back to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs someday, because that one is big and awesome. Or the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which makes every other zoo look tiny. But I'm always good for one trip to any zoo, so it was a fun day. I've actually never been to Hogle Zoo even though I've lived in Utah for 13 years now. Always a first for everything! I've also never been to Lagoon, and that needs to be remedied. I think we'll start taking our kids up there for their birthdays, or half birthday in Spencer's case, sometime in the next few years. That would be really fun. 

Look at this cute picture of Grandma reading to the kids. She climbed up on the top bunk to do it. Yay for awesome grandmas!

 

Progress

We have our breaking ground meeting for our house this week. Huzzah! Building finally starting! We signed back in January, so this process is long and I'm so incredibly excited to get it started. 

Genevieve had a Dr. Seuss week and day one was crazy character hair day or some such. Grandma did magic on Genevieve's hair for the day. 😀

 

Chill Week

It was a pretty chill week. I made a few table runners. They're a quick, fun design and sew with a fast result. My mother in law gave me a stack of fat quarters for my birthday, so I used most of them plus some of my other fabric to make them.  

Chloe made like a Chicago stuffed pizza style thickness of a pretend pizza. 

And she made a card for her grandma with a Valentine's card kid I had but never used. It's fun to see her get creative. Her drawing and crafting is a very recent development and I love seeing her new interest in creating things. They create a lot of art projects at one of her preschools and I think that has gotten her interested. 

Low key week

 I finished a couple quilts earlier this week and said I was done with all the projects, but I actually decided to make some runners to go on my table and maybe some console tables in my new house once we move. This is the first one. I just found some pictures on Pinterest that I liked and am making my own in whatever colors I choose from the pictures. 

Chloe wearing Grandma's vest. 

Pumpkin chocolate chip streusel cake? Don't mind if I do!

Snow!

 It's been a super dry winter and we haven't had nearly enough snow to enjoy, ha! Actually, it's been a nice transition for me from Washington and South Carolina and how much warmer they are than here. But I love snow and it was fun to get a good storm this weekend. After we got home from church on Sunday the kids wanted to build a snowman and that quickly escalated into going sledding. That wasn't the original plan but hey, wholesome family recreation and all that. We actually missed the virtual Sunday school meeting on accident because we forgot. Whoops! Sledding was fantastic though.

A few pictures from the week

It was Red Ribbon Week this week and the kids had a crazy day.  We had a good time with it.  

And this is Spencer's real live crazy hair day after wearing a hat all day during the same week's hat day. Haha! He has the best hair. So thick. And he loves it long these days, so we get some pretty good crazy hair on the regular. 

It snowed brown snow this week. Dust kicked up out by the Great Salt Lake and mixed with the snow and covered literally everything with junky, dirty grime. This is looking out the window of my previously clean car. Everything outside is coated with a this stuff. It's going to be quite a job cleaning it all up. 

My latest quilt top. One of a pair for me and Bill. This one is mine in my favorite color. His will be purple, which is his current favorite color. These will be for our bed in the summer when our duvet gets too hot and we just use a single quilt each and don't want the weight of a huge king-sized one. 

Genevieve is quite the collector. She loves to keep everything. And she's not organized, but lately she's starting to see the good in being a bit less messy. She was so proud of how she organized the top of the dresser and she wanted a picture. 

And apparently this is the correct way to sit in a chair, according to Chloe the other night. Haha! 

The perfect Saturday

Probably everyone that reads my blog knows that Bill and I spent a LONG time in school. We didn't meet until after I had finished my undergrad degree at BYU. When we did meet, Bill was only a year into his undergrad, so we did that together. In the middle of that I did my Master's degree as well. Then we headed down to Clemson and spent six and a half years there working on Bill's graduate degree as well as two years afterwards plugging away at trying to finish his dissertation with no help or support from his second advisor, who had never helped much, but disappeared entirely once we had to leave after our funding ran out. 

You may not know though that the entire reason we started a PhD was so Bill could get hired at a firm that required one, but partway through our time at Clemson, that firm stopped requiring it. A PhD in Civil Engineering is actually not that useful outside of academia, at least not for us, and while we started the grad school process thinking Bill was interested in pursuing that route, we quickly realized that was not the path we wanted to take. We didn't end up being able to go work for that firm after all either since when we were available, they weren't hiring. 

So very recently we made a heart wrenching, but very good decision, to abandon whatever it would require to finish the dissertation, and move on away from that very long educational journey, as it a horrendous drain on life dissatisfied, and also wouldn't do much of anything career wise for Bill because of the things that had changed in the eight years since we started the journey. To say it was disappointing is an understatement. I do not regret our time in South Carolina even a bit. We loved it there, love our friends, love how our family grew there. We had two kids there and all four of my kids spent years there. But it is so hard to walk away from something you've put so much of your time and your whole self into. Bill did get his Master's degree and is considered ABD(all but dissertation) for his PhD. Stopping doesn't take away the expertise he has and knowledge he has gained. There is some measure of sadness though, a good bit of disillusionment, and a whole lot of relief. Ha! 

All that being said, we had several goals when we started our educational journey. One was the educational part, but the second was the PE part, or professional engineer, which is a career step that requires Bill to have worked for five years under another professional engineer, then take a two-day long test to become one himself. He's a year or two away from the time requirement, and will take the test in October. 

So while the grad school journey didn't go as expected, at the end of this year we will have reached the second goal we've had since we got married 12 years ago. And let me tell you, that is one amazing feeling. We are so close. And our life has normalized. No more extra hours working on dissertation. No more me working day and night to earn my paychecks so that we could survive on the student income. And more recently, no more living in a high COLA place that sucks every last cent we are earning out of us so we still felt poor. 

I never would have asked for the path that we have taken. It's felt like an incredible grind for years and years. I thought we were going to settle in the Pacific Northwest forever. We planned to. But life has taken a different path than that, and seven months post being laid off in the middle of Covid, we are in a much better place than then and so many of our huge goals are coming to fruition this year. They wouldn't have without this huge upheaval in our life. 

This weekend was the perfect Saturday. We had not a single thing we had to do. But I got to go to my FiA workout group. I got to go to my South Jordan run club. And then after I came home and we ate lunch, we were able to drop the kids off at their cousins' house and come back to go snowshoeing in the canyon behind our house. We spent a few beautiful, glorious hours out on the mountain enjoying the world. 

We got sun. We got clouds. It snowed for a bit. We had 18 inches of fresh powder to snowshoe in. We hiked a ridge line for a couple of miles and then dropped down into the valley to snowshoe back. Glorious is the only word that I can come up with that describes the feeling. We have been working so hard for seemingly endless years. We've had so many disappointments. So many trials to overcome. But this weekend we had the perfect day. We came off the mountain, picked up our kids, grabbed them some pizza and us some Chinese food, and watched Newsies while we ate it all.  

I keep just marveling at the place we've come to in life. We're building a house. We have jobs that take care of our needs and have room to grow. Our kids are in a good place. I didn't particularly want to move to Utah. I liked Kirkland. But so much good has come here, and I remember back eight years ago when we left Utah I felt sad about leaving the beauty and majesty of the outdoors. I had never planned to live here again, and I mourned some of the things that weren't available elsewhere, like the slot canyons, and the hikes so close to home, and the national parks. Coming back feels like this precious gift to do so many of those things again and share them with our kids. So while I didn't think I wanted to live here, it's a GREAT place to live and we're settling in and I feel so good about it. After 2020, that is a precious feeling and I'm grateful for it. I'm sure there will still be hard times and unforeseen trials. But for now we're in a good place and it makes me very happy.