Growing Pains

Hazel is 9 months old! I can scarcely believe it! She is much too gung ho about this whole growing up thing - she isn't very much my little baby any more. Not only has she developed four new teeth, she has also decided to start walking and talking!! And while it's super cute when she says "uh-oh" and "go," it's also quite distressing. This week she got her bangs cut to keep them out of her eyes, and has started wearing little piglet-tails (her hair is still too short for full scale pig-tails) - so sophisticated!

This is her new do before and after naptime.
Isn't she the queen of funny faces?!

Oh, my little cutie-patootie, I sure do love you! I guess I'll just have to be extra careful about cherishing what fleeting time I have left of my little Hazel-baby.

An Outing in the Park

Zion had a free day on Saturday and the Farnsworths were kind enough to invite us to join them on their trek to Emerald Pools. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to spend the day with Levi and other adults, but perhaps I should have checked the weather forecast before jumping so quickly as it was HOTTER THAN HOT! I think we narrowly avoided frying our brains!

These pictures were taken as we rested at the middle pool. Unfortunately, Tomy's smile didn't last much longer as we started the last leg to the upper pool. I think the .3 mile marker was put there as a cruel joke! If it weren't for the promise of the cool wading pool, I think we might have curled up in one of the few square feet of shade afforded on the sandy last leg and died!


=

Luckily the upper pool was as blessedly chilly as my sun-bleached brain imagined and we had so much fun splashing around, we didn't manage to take any pictures. Scenery was taken in, sand castles were built, logs were ridden, poliwogs were chased, and enough water was soaked up to take us back down the trail. Wisely, we returned via the shady route and managed to preserve the majority of our remaining gray matter. The ice cream also helped erase the negative effects of the blazing sun - that three dollar cone was worth EVERY CENT!


All in all, as this smile attests, we a had a very fun time. Tomy LOVED riding the "bus," Hazel appreciated all the "oh, she's so cute!" comments, Levi enjoyed the banter, and I welcomed all the sweet smiles Eli sent my way. Wrap it all up with a nice picnic at the park and we had a perfect summer day! Thanks Kevin, Paulette, and fam!

P.S. Isn't that little boy just cuter-than-cute?! I'm glad this picture is what will be remembered and not so much his incessant, three-year-old, whining. :o)

ramblings of a crazy woman

So... compared to many, I tend to blog a lot. It's my way to stay sane. No, really - I'd have to merit finally getting over a major hump in depression recovery to the blogosphere. I was still really struggling with not feeling like I had a supportive network of friends or a needed best friend. Of course, I had friends, but not like I needed - all the best candidates either lived far far away, had busy lives of their own, and/or couldn't quite give me what my crazy self craved. And frankly, I wasn't in the kind of space that made making friends very easy - desperate, unstable, closed-in, hypersensative, and incapable of taking the kinds of risk necessary to building healthy relationships and open lines of communication.

Then along came the blog - my own personal miracle - it was exactly what I needed. I could have a social life without necessarily having to be social. I could see family and find old friends. I could put whatever I wanted out there without any real risks or expectations (okay, so I really like comments and I wait for them like Christmas morning - but my world doesn't crumble around me if the comment box stays empty.) I could work at having a life again while living vicariously through the lives of others. I could slowly practice at being relatively normal in an atmosphere where people are almost always positive.

Meanwhile, it put me in a position to focus on the positives in my life as I framed my world for others to see. It provided me a chance to write and to feel the accompanying edge-of-your-seat, mind-tingling, confident sensation that was my almost constant companion through the school years. It gave me the chance to complete a small task well in a world where the thought of cleaning the kitchen well was too daunting a task to even start and hence even more defeating. Yes, it brought me a much needed measure of accomplishment and gratitude.

Yeah, I could go on and on about how blogging has saved my sanity... but I'll stop here because I CAN! and still feel happy about myself and life in general. What a lovely thing to be able to say honestly! Thanks again blogosphere and all you who venture therein for giving me the space I needed to recover a large measure of my happy, confident self!

"warn!"

This post has nothing to do with a notification of danger, potential harm, or risk. No, this is my son's way of telling me he wants something *warm* or microwaved. The real quandary is - why would he want me to microwave his mandarin oranges for breakfast this morning? Perhaps he knows something that I don't about the culinary wonder of warm oranges? I'll probably never know.