Slow Down, Life.

Well, this has been a busy, crazy month. Every month is busy and crazy nowadays, it seems! 

To start things off, Spring Break was the first week of April. 3 of Nils' siblings and their families came to town to spend time together; specifically to spend time with Par and Jenny (Nils' parents). Par was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in January. Suffice it to say, this is terrible news. He has an amazing attitude about it, of course, and he, Jenny, and the rest of the family are doing everything possible to make the most of the time we have left with him. So, we partied hard for about a week together.

As luck would have it, Nils came down with the flu on Easter and was sick in bed for the entire week that his family was visiting. It was pretty lousy for him, but the rest of us had fun. He started feeling better the day before everyone left. :(

First there was Easter and an egg hunt:

Par n' Pip

Parker the crack up

Pip the dog

Aani and Rubi

Tiago

Ava and Saada

Thrilled Anders

A tour of Sweet's Candy Factory, and Parker cracking us up once again.

Eating popcorn with chopsticks....because you can!

 Cousins twinning (Xan and Anders)

Crazy pictures taken under the trampoline. The pit is so fun?

York decided to do our backsplash one morning. Randy showed up to help. We could use these guys around more often! :) We LOVE it.

Bottom: Nils, Grove, York. Top: Saren, Par, Jenny. Missing Shiloh and Harmony, but they both came to visit in March. It's been so fun seeing everyone. 

With spouses. Randy, Andrea, me and Luly.

We have a family reunion in June and will see everyone once again, so that will be spectacular.

I took Aani and Ava to the nickel arcade, because the older kids are too cool and busy to spend time with me now.

In other news: 

We got our trampoline back-filled and put up. What a friggin' ordeal! Aaaand, now we have to finish the yard, which makes me feel sad inside. Putting in the rock wall and trampoline did a fine job of tearing up much of our yard. Where are the magic forest animals that do this for you? 

In preparation for house guests for 8 days (while Nils' family was here), we realized that we needed to finish the bathroom in the basement, otherwise 13 people would be sharing one bathroom upstairs. Oh man, it was bananas getting that thing done. We bought 3 vanities before we found one that worked, took 8 million trips to Home Depot, spent 1.5 times what we thought we would, and finished it about 10 minutes before York and Luly & fam arrived, no exaggeration. Start to finish, it took less than 3 weeks, but the vast majority of the work was done in the 5 days before they came. In hindsight, we should have just had the handy brothers and brother-in-law help us while they were here. Haha.

 It's really nice having a bathroom downstairs! All the labor and stress was worth it after all.

Anders got his learner's permit. My mom has been letting him drive her car since he was like 13, so it's fine...kinda. Still scary. He has much to learn.

After way too long, the boy finally got his braces off. Good heavens, that took forever. Over 2.5 years for phase 2. He had them on for like a year and a half in phase 1. I'm so over the monthly visits to the orthodontist. I finally just told them to take them off, because I'm pretty sure the orthodontist would have left them on for eternity. Every month for the last 9 months he would say, "Well, your teeth are straight as heck, but your bite is a little off on one side." Then they would tell Anders to wear this crazy, convoluted rubber band arrangement in his mouth that made it impossible to eat or talk, so he never wore them. Ugh. It's over. It's fine.

Celebratory lunch at Costa Vida. Gluten free, baby! (Minus the flour tortillas)

We celebrated 18 years of wedded bliss this last weekend with a trip to Park City. Nils found this cute little studio room at Deer Valley. My mom was kind enough to watch the kiddos. We had a grand time.

In addition to dinner and some shopping, we found a blood pressure machine at the Walmart in Park City. If this is what we do on or anniversary get aways now, I can't wait to see what we do in 20 years!

We made a nice little breakfast. Gluten free, of course. 

Took a little hike so Nils could fly his drone. It was snowy and muddy, so we didn't get too far.

We decided to buy Nils a new car. Does everyone get this excited about used Honda Accords? You get to see the car and Nils' bare midriff! The old Accord is the perfect teenager car, so keep it we shall.

LRN2DIY swag in the mail today! Pretty fun to have the logo on there and everything. The YouTube channel groweth.

Hey look, Nils took a picture of me teaching Sharing Time. I feel like Oprah with that microphone, but we gotsta have it in there!

One more month until school is out, and then we have another busy summer to look forward to. This phase of life is not calm, no sir.

Dreaming of Food

It's fast Sunday, and I came home from church and took a 3 hour nap, which helped tremendously with the hunger pangs. However, I dreamed about food almost the entire time, so obviously I'm starving. Ha.

I'm getting worse and worse at taking pictures of life these days. I don't know why, I guess I'm just so focused on being PRESENT. Hahaha. Anyway, here's what I got:

Aani was riding her scooter to school and hit a rock. She face-planted and got a nice scrape and knot on her head. I picked her up from school and let her stay home for a couple hours to recover emotionally and physically. When she was ready to go back to school, she made sure to pick the biggest band-aid ever made to cover up her wounds. Subtle, Aani. ;) 

Ava- 'nuff said. This child is a never-ending source of amusement. #8 though.

This is what I do for Valentine's Day, and all they remember. The kids love getting the giant Hershey Kisses. They (the children, not the kisses) are getting bigger and much faster at eating them. It used to take them weeks. Not no mo'.

Costco went through this nightmare phase of many months of not carrying this product. WHAT was Nils supposed to eat for his late night snack? It was a dark time. One of the last times I was there, I made sure to stock up.

Addie called me one morning from school feeling sick. She was soooo sick for days and couldn't even sit up. She crawled to the bathroom and could barely even lift her head off her pillow. We made a trip to the ER, since it was Sunday, and it turned out she had influenza. Poor kid. She was sick in bed for a solid week.

Speaking of Addie...

Addie and Aani have been telling me for awhile that they can't see very well, but I didn't think much of it because they weren't running into things and are able to recognize people. I'm such a good mom. Anyhoo, the past few months we've noticed they have to get close to the TV when we cast scriptures at night, so maybe they weren't faking it like I thought. I took them to the eye doctor last week, and it turns out they actually CAN'T see. It's not too bad, but bad enough to not be able to read the board at school, etc. They, Aani especially, feel like they've won the jackpot. We tried on glasses at the optical shop and then came home and ordered them online. Just helping ruin the little guy. :) 4 pairs of glasses for $100, as opposed to $300/pair at the optical place. Sorry, little guy. Anyway, Addie and Aani are super excited for the glasses to arrive. #nerds

We replaced our upstairs flooring this month. The carpet the builder put in our house is just the worst, so we had the same laminate/hardwood flooring that's in the kitchen extended to the great room, entry, and down the hall. The house was a construction zone for about 5 days, but we actually didn't do it- we hired it out and it was amazing to see it done so quickly. ;) We're loving no traffic patterns and no crappy carpet bunching up.

Gluten update: I'm feeling so much better! I have had a few little breakouts, but nothing too bad. I haven't intentionally eaten anything with gluten in it since the beginning of February. I've learned how to make gluten free brownies, so I feel like life is still worth living. All the meals I prepare are gluten free, and the kids honestly don't mind. Gluten free products are about 8 times as expensive as their counterparts, which is completely nuts. I made regular homemade bread a couple weeks ago for the fam, and held it up to my nose and lips and smelled it- Nils was like, "Don't go sniffing too hard, woman!" I'm surprised that I don't really miss it- it's more just a pain in the neck to make sure I don't eat gluten, but I have no desire to eat it. Not worth it. Full body rashes aren't funny!

Nils has reached a point with YouTube that we're really having to evaluate what this is and what we want from it. We're attending a seminar next month on how to streamline everything- hiring people to help and making the most of our time and resources to make it worthwhile, and not kill us or hate life. It's so time consuming, but it seems the more time you put into it, the more profitable it is, so it's a vicious cycle it seems. It's now an official business. Anders has been editing the videos, and we pay him minimum wage. Not too shabby for a 15 year old kid. He's been able to buy AirPods, a nice blue tooth speaker, and plenty of crap from the vending machines at school.

Anyway, finding balance is a constant challenge. There's a house to run, kids to raise, memories to make, church callings, family, job, health to upkeep, sleep to get, rashes to scratch, YouTube job, etc. etc., so we're always experimenting, failing and succeeding, learning and trying. It's bananas. All is well in Zion. :)

I'm 40 and I can do whatever the heck I want, as long as it doesn't include gluten. :(

I spent my birthday money on these costly shoes. Nils asked me yesterday if I love my shoes. I've only had them for one day, so it's probably too soon to tell, but so far, they are just shoes and haven't transformed my outlook on life or anything. He asked what the appeal of them is, and I had to admit that I just wanted to buy expensive shoes. I'm 40, and I'm sick of wearing crappy flats, ok? And, he's always telling me to spend my birthday money on something fun, so I done did it. Maybe they will turn out to be the best shoes ever, and I'll continue purchasing unreasonably expensive ballet flats wif mah birfday money. Maybe not. My point is, now that I'm 40, I'mma do what I want. As long as it's not immoral and doesn't include eating gluten.

I mean, they're pretty cute.

Remember that pesky rash I wrote about a few months back? It's been plaguing my life for about 7 months. Now, rashes are generally minor annoyances that have a resolution and are responsive to treatments. This rash has been non-responsive. I itch from head to toe all the time, and have little pock marks all over my body that break open and bleed. I scratch to the point of bruising myself. I've been treated for scabies (twice), even though there is no evidence of scabies. I've manically cleaned and sanitized my home, steamed my bed, treated the dog, all to no avail. 

Sample of scars- this is what my back and arms look like, too.

On January 19, the dermatologist sent me up to the University of Utah Medical Center to be a patient for "Grand Rounds", where you sit in a room, about 25 different doctors look at your affliction, and they say things like, "hmmm", and "that looks itchy". Guess what they concluded? That I am being bitten by mites from my dog or reacting to medication. Face palm.

So, I don't take any medication, and if one more person tells me I'm being bitten by mites I'm going to lose mah mind. Anyway, when those were the results of all these medical geniuses, I lost all faith in them. 

There has been much prayer and fasting in order to figure this out, because this experience has been plain old miserable. 

Backstory: I went to see an ob/gyn in September, because my cycle had been greatly affected by all the steroids the dermatologist gave me. The dermatologist denied that the steroids had anything to do with it, because he is a moron. Anyway...the nurse practitioner at the ob/gyn office listened to my sad story, looked at my rashy foot, and said, "this looks like a gluten rash". She ran a blood panel for 1000 different things, including gluten sensitivity. The results came back that my anti-bodies were high for gluten, but the nurse who talked to me about it on the phone gave me the impression that it might be a good idea to limit/eliminate gluten. Therefore, I didn't connect the dots that gluten was causing this rash. I had never really heard of such a thing, anyway. I have since tried to be selective in my gluten intake, but I have definitely not abstained or gone to great lengths to avoid eating it. 

Ok, so fast forward to last week. I made chicken parmesan for dinner one night and had the thought that I should probably not eat it. I told Nils that I was just going to try not eating gluten for awhile and see if that helped at all. The next morning, I had the thought to google "gluten rash". Why had I never googled gluten rash before?? I have no idea, but clearly I did not connect this rash to gluten. 

Holy crap, THIS is what I have. For the first time in months, I had clarity that this is exactly what it is. The images are spot on. The symptoms are spot on. This is the itchiest rash known to man. It's itchier than poison ivy. I texted Nils and told him to google "dermatitis herpetiformis". He called me and said, "THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE." I cried out of relief, sadness, and frustration. 

I called the ob/gyn office to update them on my case and ask them for some guidance. They called me back and told me YES! You absolutely need to eliminate gluten! 

*LOOOOOOOONG SIGH* The dermatologist is fired. I totally get that doctors are people and don't have all the answers, but this seems so blatantly obvious now. One google search is all it took for me to find it. Seriously, though, SCABIES?? Come on, people.

So, here we go, on a gluten-free adventure for life. Now I just need to re-learn how to cook, so it's totally fine. I'm really considering just ridding the house of wheat flour all together, as well as the hidden sources of gluten, which are many. The kids can continue to eat packaged crackers and bread, etc., but whatever I cook will now be gluten free. Sorry, family. :) 

Any gluten-free pro tips are welcome, por favor!! I've got to get this situation under control! 

Birthdays, Cruise, Do we live in California now??

Whew, what a month!

We've been to California 4 times in the last 6 months. We went to LA in June to see Shiloh and Brian, and took the kids to San Francisco in August, which I never blogged about, but it happened. The marching band marched in the Rose Parade on New Year's Day, so we went back to LA to be in the same vicinity as that was happening, and then Nils and I went on a cruise from Long Beach to Ensenada last week. We're feeling like California residents. There were 3 birthdays smushed in there, as well.

Anyhoo... 

LA after Christmas thru New Years: 

We had to go to Chinatown again. The kids love it- they spent their Christmas money on all the fun things.

So, we never saw Anders, except from a distance. He did manage to text me, however, when he left his brand new hoodie at Medieval Times (40 minutes from where we were at the time), and requested that we go get it for him. I'm a sucker. But it was brand new! Anyway, I had to put it on and send him this non-embarrassing picture as proof that we did him a big favor.

Fun with Indy and Tenzin!

Brian has this Dyson dust buster and loves clearing off surfaces with it. :) Shiloh and Brian are the ultimate hosts. Shiloh made sure to feed us home-cooked meals non-stop. If they don't stop being so fantastic, we'll have to make our trips there much more frequent.

We went to the Getty Museum, which was probably not as fun with kids as it would be otherwise. They don't care about art and artifacts, but we killed an afternoon anyway, and it is an impressive place.

This is where we saw Anders for a minute. This was at Band Fest at Pasadena City College, where they performed their field show. We didn't go to the parade for lots of reasons- $80/each for grandstand tickets, or camping out on the street. Nah. We watched it on TV and Amazon Prime, and it was great!

Anyway, here are the cute band kids, all queued up. They had the ultimate SoCal trip. Universal Studios, Medieval Times, the beach, MARCHING IN THE ROSE PARADE, service opportunities, Disneyland...Anders came home exhausted from all the non-stop fun and activities.

The girls doing some George Washington pose at the local Ralph's. Ava got her Totoro backpack in Chinatown.

Birthdays:

Anders turned 15! We took him and a couple friends to see Jumanji, got some pizza and let them hang out for awhile afterward. I love non-party years.

Anders is living up to the teenage stereotypes quite exactly. I love him fiercely, and I want to strangle him in the same breath. Example: He loves playing the piano and can pound out almost anything, but I can't get him to play a hymn if his life depends on it. He's had a deal with us for the last 3 years (THREE YEARS!!) that in order to get a real phone plan (as opposed to a phone that has the same use as glorified iPod touch), he needs to learn to play 15 hymns. He won't do it. He's fine bumming hotspots off his friends or connecting to whatever wifi he possibly can. This is one small example of a frustrating scenario we encounter. It's a constant battle of wills with evvverrrything. Anyway, we love him, and pray we all make it through the next 4 years. Seriously, lots of prayers.

Addie turned 13! Addie loves reading, Greek mythology, Percy Jackson, talking about Percy Jackson, writing about Percy Jackson, thinking about Percy Jackson, etc. She and a friend stand on the corner at the bus stop every day and talk for 20-30 minutes. I asked her what they talk about, and she said Percy Jackson. She's a character.

Nils and I left for a cruise on Addie's birthday, which was pretty rude of us, but the timing couldn't be helped. In order to compensate, I checked her out of school the day before and took her to The Greatest Showman. She had a couple of friends over for dinner and hanging out, and presents that night, and Nils took her for birthday breakfast on her birthday morning- so hopefully she still felt loved.

 B-day breakfast with Dad, while wearing her Percy Jackson shirt and necklace.

She made high honor roll. That Addie.

Cruise and Mah 40th Birfday:

My birthday is 2 days after Addie's, and this all coincided with a cruise and a conference that Nils was attending the next week. We went on a weekend booze cruise, so we celebrated my 40th birthday with 3,000 drunk people. What did we learn from this experience? We learned that we don't want to go on anymore booze cruises, because drunk people are embarrassing and make bad choices. 

However, we still had a great time. 

This chocolate melting cake was a nightly event.

Ensenada

On fancy night we ordered 3 desserts each.

It's not a day in Ensenada if you don't hire a local person to drive you around in the back of their truck all day. Last time we came here, it was the same type of thing, and it was so memorable we had to do it again. :)

We went horseback riding, and my horse trotted the entire time. After 2 1/2 hours of trotting, my butt et all were screaming. Nils' horse, on the other hand, was not too bright and barely managed to walk without being distracted every 5 seconds. It was an adventure for sure.

Nils was about this far from me the whole time due to his dim-witted horse. 

La Bufadora 

Nils tried escargot. I did not.

A pig?

On our last night of the cruise, which was my birthday, we were up on the track walking off some of our meal(s). Let's be honest, we ordered everything we possibly could. Anyway, we witnessed an assault, and it was kind of traumatic. We walked around the bend in time to see some idiot throw his girlfriend to the ground, kick her, say some horrible things and storm off. We stopped to help her, and it turned into a whole thing. I ran to get help and try to find her purse, which she was asking for. Nils stayed with her, and by the time I got back, they were both gone. I was afraid that the stupid boyfriend had come back, and I couldn't get anyone to help me find them. I got my 10,000 steps that night running up and down the stairs, going from the medical place on deck 3, back up to deck 14, and running around in between. I couldn't get anyone to be helpful! Clearly the ship employees did not want to get involved in this "incident", but I couldn't find my husband, so I was a bit panicked. 

What happened was Nils ended up carrying the lady down to a bathroom so she could be sick, and got some of the spa employees to get her some medical attention. We found each other eventually, and decided that people who drink from breakfast to breakfast are the worst. I was glad Nils didn't get thrown overboard on my birthday by some jerk-face woman beater. Nils is a lover, not a fighter, but he probably could have taken on the jerk-face. 

So, we had fun other than that. It was not the best ending to our trip, but memories of the trotting horse, my sore hiney, all the ship food, and tacos in Ensenada will prevail. We'd love to take the kids on a nicer cruise one day. They'd love all of that.