Lately, I've been trying to get my family to eat more vegetables.  Probably most moms attempt this at some point in their mom career.  It can be discouraging but I refuse to give up.  Taking good care of our bodies has become more important to me since we have had health problems with my youngest. Here are some of the things I've tried:  When I get out the food for lunches every day, I get out a big plastic container which I keep stocked with baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, and sometimes green peppers and cucumbers.  My kids will take a very small amount in their lunch and I have no idea what actually gets eaten. Another tactic I've been trying lately is to buy big bags of spinach from Costco and try to use it up before the spinach goes bad.  Once a week I make smoothies at breakfast time and try to put in a good amount of spinach.  Frankly, it's really not that much, but I'm hoping to increase it.  I have to mask the spinach with lots of ber...

Lately I am feeling sad for the people of Ukraine.  The violence is reprehensible and tragic and I hope a peaceful solution can be found soon.  I feel a special connection and love for the people of this country because my son is there, serving a mission for the LDS church.  So you might wonder, am I worried about his safety?  Not really. There are a few reasons I'm not worried.  The first reason is that he is nowhere near Kiev, which is where the violence is.  The second reason is that I trust our church leaders.  They are very conscientious is making sure that the missionaries are in safe areas of the world.  I am confident that if they were at all concerned about their safety, the missionaries would be evacuated at a moment's notice. The third reason I don't worry is that the Lord watches over his missionaries.  There is a story in LDS Church history about the safe evacuation of all the missionaries out of Europe right before the be...

My husband loves to eat homemade bread.  He can eat an unbelievable amount of toast for breakfast and his favorite is homemade.  I make bread for him because I love him.  I can't say it's always been great bread but over the years I've finally found a fairly fool-proof recipe that my family really enjoys.  I got it from the local Bosch store.  Needless to say, I also use a Bosch mixer to make our bread. I used to have an old Kitchen Aid that I inherited from my grandma.  Kitchen Aids are a good all-around mixer and is probably fine for a small bread recipe that makes one or two loaves (it's been so long that I can't remember how it worked out).  But if you want to make more at one time, then you really need a Bosch.  Of course, people have been making bread for thousands of years without a Bosch.  Mixing and kneading by hand is very doable and I have done it myself.  Just be aware that it's easy to add too much flour when you knead by ...

Twenty-six years ago, my true love and I were dating.  For our first Valentine's Day together, I gave him a highly romantic gift of a...wait for it...Tupperware sandwich container!  Incredibly romantic.  Definitely a window into my very practical soul.  I gave him a wallet too because I didn't like his. I seem to remember he was happy to get my gifts.  He wasn't sure of my feelings about him at the time, so the gifts helped, although I think our first kiss may have happened around then too... This picture was taken a few months after our first Valentine's Day Now we've had years and years of Valentines' Days together.  He is still my true love.  We've had nine children and almost twenty-five years of marriage together.  He has been so loyal to me, through it all.  I feel so lucky to be married to such a caring and helpful husband. 25 years later. When you get married, you don't usually think about all the hard things that you ...

Our second son came home on Friday night.  It turned out to be kind of an ordeal.  He got up at 3am in Latvia (6pm Thursday night for us) and spent the next 30 hours getting to our house with just a few hours of sleep.  The layovers were the problem.  The layover in Denver was longer than planned because the flight was delayed almost two hours.  We could have almost driven to Denver and picked him up and driven back home in the time that it took for him to fly from there. We ended up waiting in the airport for most of that delay because our online info was inaccurate.  It's a good thing we had time to figure out we were in the wrong terminal. My oldest son got engaged, married, and had a baby while his brother was gone. Finally he arrived and we got home close to midnight.  My youngest was so tired and not feeling great thanks to an ear infection.  (Have I complained enough?)  Oh yeah, and his luggage didn't arrive with him!  So...

My husband is a scientist.  He's an experimental physicist who likes nothing better than to go down to his lab and align his lasers.  In fact, asking him about his experiment right before sleeping is a really bad idea because it will keep him up and he won't be able to sleep!  I think he picked the right field because he likes to think about his experiments all the time. So, knowing that, you would think that our family would be experts when it comes time for the school science fairs.  But no, we are lousy.  We are especially terrible at picking projects.  But I'm okay with that.  My husband never did a science fair project when he was growing up and he still liked science enough to get a Ph.d in it. I also think our projects are not big winners because the kids mostly do the projects on their own.  But it's really for them in the first place. Here's our latest project.  Talmage didn't win any awards but it got done on time.  And i...

The Power of Habit:  Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg is a very interesting book.  I know I say this about every book lately but they've all been good!  This book is full of stories that really draw you in while it's teaching you.  And it wasn't just me.  My husband and teenagers also really enjoyed reading it. The book starts with a story about a man named Eugene.  As an older man, he became very sick with viral encephalitis and wasn't expected to survive.  He did survive, but he completely lost his memory of the last 30 years.  He couldn't retain any new information for longer than a minute.  He could watch the same TV show over and over and never remember that he had seen it before.  If you asked him to draw a map of his house, he couldn't tell you where anything was.  However, the part of his brain that governs habits still functioned.  So even though he couldn't tell you where the kitchen was...

Today I got an amazing email from my son serving an LDS mission in eastern Europe.  It is his last email to us since he is coming home on Friday.  I'm pretty excited to see him after two years! This email was a summary of the miracles he has seen during his service and the things he has learned during the last two years.  He has really matured and grown spiritually and emotionally.  I wish every parent could get a letter like that from their child.  Any trouble I had raising him feels so worth it. He's 21 now so memories have dimmed a little, but I do remember missing a lot of sleep when he was a baby.  He wanted to eat every two hours around the clock and he did gain a lot of weight.  People would ask me at church what I was feeding him since he was such a roly-poly.  Potty-training him had some challenging moments too... But overall he was a good kid, relatively easy, and I'm so impressed and happy with the person he has become. I wish I c...