Corbin’s primary talk

Corbin read this verse and this talk that he wrote in Primary on Sunday. Gotta love his reference to Star Wars 🤣🤦🏻‍♀️  

Garden/Yard Reconnaissance 2

I used to curse the hens for tearing up my garden, but after 1.5 years of no chickens, I missed my ladies and their all natural fertilizing, rototilling, bug eating, dinner providing, greatness.  

I have spent so many hours Saturday blowing leaves and pulling weeds. The kids helped out/played a lot this Saturday and it was glorious for them to just run around and be outdoors for hours on end. I was wearing jeans and tennis shoes but still pulled a fat tick off my leg at the end of the day. 

It was really therapeutic to work in the soil again. I wish I’d had the capacity to get seeds started and use the greenhouse in February. So far, March has been so warm I don’t know if I’m the effort of getting started will prove its worth. I also don’t know how much emotional bandwidth I’ve got in me for failure right now! 🤣 

This “after” pic here was after I removed the leaves that were waist high  and filled the space entirely. It looks so huge without all the leaves. I wish I’d taken a before pic. It was crazy and you’ve never seen so many leaves in your life. I ran out of gas before finishing the other side. Next weekend. 

This one shows progress on the play set side still a ways to go but it’s so nice to see they yard taking shape after such a long dormant season. Come back to life, Willy Backyard! 

Irish 10K

This year (left) vs last year (right)! I didn’t think it to be possible, but I shaved a couple minutes off my time! PR! 🎉🎉 55:43 chip time and a (barely) sub 9 minute mile.  This is exciting stuff right here.  Double that and add 10 minutes for the last mile and my dream time goal of 2:05 half marathon is looking pretty tight, but possible! 

Reese and Quincy at the KC temple

The Shaws graciously added Reese and Quincy to their brood for a day at the Kansas City Temple.  Julie took these pics of our funny bunch afterward. 

They went to Costa Vida after and enjoyed a pretty peaceful drive home 🤣 Thank you Shaws for giving our girls the opportunity to serve in the temple! 

Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies

My friend, Simone, introduced me to this bit of cookie perfection. I use only semi-sweet chips and I salt the tops as soon as they come out if the oven, because I believe that’s what should be done to every chocolate chip cookie.  Here’s the recipe, compliments of Simone and Stephen H. You’re welcome. 

Monday in March Madness

1) 3 cheers for early voting. I don’t look forward to the presidential race. It’s like watching a terrible dating show where they’ve brought out all the suitors and they are all terrible, and the contestant is still peering over at the curtain nervously asking, “uhhhh what else ya got back there? Wait what? This is it? Is there NO ONE ELSE?!” 


2) My contribution to helping Reese be on time to seminary is to help Aaron get out the door. The man wakes up early but he does. Not. Rush. Ever. I try to press a week of shirts once a week for Aaron. This is a labor of love.  This week, I taught Reese how to iron, and she also made a contribution to speed up the morning routine. If she had more time, I would regularly commission her to do this chore and win win win. 

3) Reese has been working HARD, lately. She’s taking every babysitting and bathroom cleaning gig she can get. She’s got a monthly financial savings goal and she’s killin’ it. She’s got a plan to buy her car with cash and this is a plan that makes her mother so proud.  Need a sitter? Your bathrooms cleaned? Your doggy walked? Give Reese a call to put her to work and pad her car savings fund. She is hard working and eager and is on the lookout for more opportunities to work. 

4) I spent a couple hours trimming all the liriope on Saturday and cleaned out the front rock beds—filled up a trash bag full of house debris: staples, nails, metal, roofing H clips, several old roof shingles, broken ceramic tile, glass, melted hunks of metal, insulation, loads of trash including cigarette butts and monster drink cans and Gatorade bottles galore, and an entire roll of framing nails. 


5) Lady/Grammy had a birthday! Reese, Julie and Finley S are her ministering sisters, so they planned a spring crafty day for her and invited Q and I, too. We made burlap bunnies and stuffed painted muslin carrots and covered eggs in book pages and moss.  And we ate Shaw magic cookie bars so it was just the best time ever! I love you mom! Happy Birthday! 

6) What do a twitching eye, 3 cold sores, restless legs, blown up neck glands, and Raynaud fingers have in common? 

No idea, but they’re all flaring up at once on me. None of  the blood tests I had done yielded any new or telling information. 






7) for today’s naptime project, Sloane helped me start re-assembling new 72 hour kits for our family. 

I spent $36 on food and everything will last until the end of the year, so we will swap it out October General conference weekend. I took a pic of the food so I will know exactly what to buy again!without having to think it over. Easy and done. I probably should add more protein. Maybe I will add some peanut butter crackers. That would be easier than some of the other meal ideas. It feels great to have SOMEthing again. My emergency “doomsday prepper bunker storage room was so well prepared for disaster. It destroyed me to watch it all get thrown in a dumpster.  


8) I’m slowly beefing up our first aid supplies as well. There’s already a box of N95 masks in there, but a couple of washable N99 masks and a multipack of disposable carbon filters will arrive soon. I don’t really care that I sound like a paranoid alarmist.  I have always felt called to prepared to help and lift another in the event of a disaster.  We could’ve survived a pandemic quarantine for weeks down there. Haha!  And then I had my own disaster and I learned a lot. So here we go again with new and improved knowledge. Water, First aid supplies, and food are the current focus.  Below are some of the recent inspired purchases I felt to add to our supplies. 

I miss the peace I once felt knowing I had all of this already taken care of, but I’m trying to be patient and listen and research so the efforts I can make are the best ones. We’ll get there again and we will do it right. 

9) Today, Reese had an after school study group from 4-6 at the Bentonville library, Soren had soccer in Bentonville at 6, Q needed to be at OPYO rehearsal in Downtown Rogers at 5:50, and Corbin had soccer at 7:15. I made an early dinner (pork tacos, I ate mine in the car), took the triplets with me to deliver Q in Rogers, Aaron too the boys to soccer, I came home and bathed the triplets, unclogged an overflowed basement toilet, bleached the    Bathroom, then cleaned the bottle of shampoo that Esme emptied and smeared all over my glass shower door during the 1 minute I left her unattended in the shower to go get a towel. I put the Littles to bed, went back to Rogers to get Q, Reese stayed home and continued on homework until 10:30 when we made her call it and go to bed. the boys came home wind chilled to the bones, showered and went to bed and I am sitting for the first time since the swings at Dave Peel Park, this morning, and the restoration crew will be here in the morning. Let the March Madness begin! 

Meg Reads

Continuing my 2020 focus to read books, I felt early on in the year that all the books I read should be for fun. I’m already bored with that. 

So February’s book was super “fun” but I don’t feel like reading it served enough purpose for me. I don’t feel more relaxed, more fulfilled, more educated, or more anything, really. I am satisfied that I finally read a Jane Austen book, though!  Feels like such a grown up thing to do. How adulty of me. 

What’s not adulty? Spending so much time reading a book.  I’ve got to switch over to audio books or back to paper. The kindle format on my phone just has me staring at my phone screen even more than I was when I decided to “put the phone down more often and read a book.”  Which wouldn’t matter except that my preschoolers cannot tell the difference, and at least if my nose was perched on paper instead of a device, I’d be physically and more intentionally setting a good example for my young children to read and read and read.  I wondered this about my teens and scriptures. If they didn’t see me with paper scriptures, would they know I read and study and ponder every day every day every day? Will they follow my lead and learn to love the word of God? Or do they think I idle away every spare minute on social media? Or do they care or notice a difference at all? I feel this way about kindle books. Fun to read on a different, very convenient format. But this book was a long read and kind of a time suck to devote to “just for fun”. I don’t know. The vocabulary/old English dialect was a nice interesting change, and fun to decipher, but I’ll be reading something with more brain power for March.  

I feel like I need to watch the old Masterpiece Theatre A&E movie mini series version again. Lydia, Mary, Kitty, Mr and Mrs Bennet are well cast. I enjoyed reading Mrs Bennet and Lydias obnoxiousness...what a train wreck. I liked Elizabeth much more in the movie than in the book. And I loved her sister Jane’s always well-assuming and forgiving character so much more in the book, I wanted a back story of her good natured selflessness and wish she were the main character. I also secretly wanted Miss Bingley to get some comeuppance for being so nasty to Jane. Or at least a legit change of heart and not just I just can’t stand mean girls who exclude and out down the introverted kind girl, even in books.