Abundant Recompense Copy

I found this on a friend's blog the other day, and it is so good. Being a mom is so SO hard. It's nice to hear an occasional word of encouragement. Elder Holland is one of the apostles in our church, and I love hearing him speak. It's always so powerful and heartfelt. This video has made me get a little misty every time - especially right around the 2:54 mark. So watch it - and all you moms out there feel good about yourselves for a second. And all you non-moms out there, thank a mom.

that my son finds the need to remind me multiple times a day that my job is hard?

A couple weekends ago we celebrated Nate's birthday. It was quite a to-do. We happened to have my sister Megan visiting with us on her way up to BYU-Idaho. My sister Beck and her hubby Ben also joined in the festivities. Poor Nate spent the majority of the day at school working on homework in the lab, but we made up for lost time when we got home. I spent the majority of the afternoon making food for a killer bbq including ribs (which we make roughly once a year) and dutch oven potatoes (thanks to my pa-in-law, the dutch oven king himself). Nate came home and I put him right to work on the grill and dutch oven, and man was it good, if I do say so myself. After stuffing ourselves silly, we sat around and watched Nate open presents, which is always fun. The best one was definitely from his parents: The Papers of Joseph Smith, which are basically the original Joseph Smith Papers project. Nate happens to work with Dean Jesse, the guy who put 'em together, so they are now both autog...

For family home evening this past Monday we went to the Dinosaur Park for the first time. It is really cool! They've done a great job of making a museum interesting and fun for kids. Addison is something of a dinosaur expert these days, thanks to the show Dinosaur Train, so he recognized several of them. Inside there are robotic dinosaurs and some dino skeletons and rocks. Outside there's this huge trail system with tons of big dinosaur statues. There were dinosaur sounds that were a little scary for Addison sometimes, but he was very brave. The kids both had a ball, and therefore so did Nate and I. I spy 3 dinosaurs! Also, amazing playground. This was taken about 2 seconds before he fell off. Addison and I played house in this big skull. He made several dinners and scooped out chairs for us in the sand.

We've been wanting Addison to have a trike forever, but the new ones are outrageously expensive. So we've been biding our time and digging frantically every time we go to DI, and our efforts have finally paid off. We found this beauty for $5.00 last Saturday. Missing some paint, a bit rusty and squeaky, but just perfect. After agonizing over whether to save it for his birthday or Christmas (both of which are in December when we're in hibernation) we just decided that his childhood was passing us by and gave it to him. Best idea ever. He LOVES it! He calls it his "bike" and rides it all the time. The pedals are a little tricky, but he's starting to get the hang of it. He likes to get on, do like two pedals (usually backwards) and then get off, run over to me and say something like, "I gotta tell you something Mommy. I love you but it's late. I gotta go." Then we hug and he rides off into the distance. This morning he "rode it to the store...