2017 Summary

Christmas snow is melting,

Ornaments all boxed up,

Our poinsettia wilting:

A new year is coming.

I'm not much of a poet, but I composed these lines yesterday while forlornly putting away the Christmas decorations. For some reason pumping my melancholy into a shaky meter was therapeutic and eased the sadness. I'm ready to look UP and move onward: do a little more good, listen a little more carefully, create a little more beauty--live a little more fully. 

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I don't really do summaries. It's all or nothing with my storytelling (usually all). But my sister puts together an annual family yearbook and requires a summary of the year from each family member. The problem with summaries is that they don't convey any emotion, just stiff facts. Maybe that's why I don't enjoy writing summaries--there's no scope for the imagination. Since I already wrote it, though, here's the 2017 summary (although I couldn't resist tweaking it and rounding out the edges for the blog):

White Family

• After seven years in Grandview, WA, we sold our house and moved ten miles west to the countryside of Sunnyside, WA.
• We traded our old Honda Odyssey van in and got a newer Kia Sedona van.
• Continue to enjoy weekly pizza and family movie night on Friday nights.
• Celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary! We are eleven.
• Favorite family trips: spring break road trip to Missouri (without Jeff, sadly), summer trip to Hobuck Beach and Cape Flattery, camping at Mt. St. Helens, seeing the Meridian Idaho temple open house, and driving to Utah for my cousin's wedding in November. Jeff and I went on two trips alone together: a week in Paris in January, and a weekend in Salt Lake City for my sister's wedding in October.

Jeff

• Flew to Paris with Shaina for a weeklong 10th anniversary getaway!!
• Completed his first season as assistant high school track coach over distance runners.
• Completed his first season as high school head cross country coach with two runners qualifying for state.
• Began his seventh year of teaching French at Sunnyside High School.
• Ran a lot over the summer.
• Called as 16-17 year old Sunday school teacher in the Sunnyside Ward.

Shaina

• PARIS WITH HUSBAND! Laaaa!
• Completed my 1,000th blog post and the blog turned 10 years old.
• For the third time, drove three kids solo 2,000 miles to visit our Missouri family.
• Did a lot of distance running over the summer and enjoyed beautiful views. Favorite run of the summer was a 15 miler on the Olympic Peninsula to Shi Shi Beach. 
• Called as Cub Scout wolf den leader in the Sunnyside Ward.
• Also called as the primary pianist in our ward, which requires MUCH practicing.

Jay

• Enjoyed the most snow days ever in his school career!
• Began third grade in a new school: Outlook Elementary.
• Began his second year of piano lessons with Sister Cook.
• Turned eight and was baptized!
• Highlight of the summer was having best buddy cousins Steve and Dan visit and sleep over one night at our house.
• Favorite activity over the summer: swimming.
• Fell in love with mythology of all cultures via Rick Riordan books.
• Started writing his own series of short books: “The best part about writing stories is I can make ANYTHING happen!”
• Quote: “I’m working on my sarcasm.” He also is developing his sense of humor and loves trying out new jokes and puns on his family.

Rose

• Finished up kindergarten and LOVED every second of it.
• Lost her two front teeth and turned six years old.
• Over the summer, she enjoyed going on half mile runs, and even ran a 15:45 minute 2 mile race in July!
• Started first grade at a new school: Outlook Elementary. Quote: “I love learning!”
• Still loves art and drawing with markers.
• Learned how to do her own ponytail sometimes, with great effort.
• Started her first full year of piano lessons with Sister Cook.

Amber

• After over a year, she finally started staying in nursery at church by herself!
• Dabbled in potty training twice, but never cared enough to make it official and still wears pull-ups.
• Loves digging in the dirt.
• Adores trampolines (“jumpolines”) 
• When Jay and Rose started carrying backpacks to school, Amber followed suit and for months rarely left home without her zebra face backpack, loaded with princesses.
• The master of mischief, she has racked up quite the rap sheet of household misdemeanors, from coloring all over the walls to dumping out the spices, oil, and honey, repeatedly.
• LOVES all screen activities: movies, Netflix episodes, but especially having free reign on the iPad.

And one last photo fave from our summer archives,

Happy New Year!

Christmas Day

Christmas Day dawned long after the stockings were explored and the presents opened. There was a beautiful half inch of snow outside, transforming our countryside into a white winter wonderland for Christmas. The first snowfall of winter was the night before Christmas--it doesn't get more magical than that! When I walked into the family room, I was surprised to find a Flexible Flyer sled waiting for me underneath my stocking: a real wood-with-red-metal-runners Flexible Flyer! It's the first time in 11 years that Jeff has surprised me with a gift so perfectly and delightfully. Happy happy Christmas morning.

This year for the kids' gifts we did 2 toys and 3 books each, and they each gave each other a small gift. It felt like just the right balance between minimalism for me and excitement for them.

FAVES: The gift that the girls both seemed to like the best was the plastic jewelry I put in their stockings: rings and bracelets and crowns galore! The jewelry and the colored pencils were the most used gifts for the girls, and Jay easily loved his lego-style knight set the best. My favorite gift was of course my Flexible Flyer sled, and Jeff's favorite gift was a virtual reality headset (picked out by him, wrapped by me). The kids gave each other funny little trinkets. Rose gave Jay a tube of toothpaste so he could squeeze the whole thing out at once, just like Ramona Quimby. He loved it. Jay gave Jeff a 5x5 Rubix cube--Jeff mastered the 3x3 cube years ago, but the 5x5 is proving much more difficult. Rose gave Amber a box of sparkly bandaids so Amber could use as many bandaids as she always wants to (they are already long gone). Jeff helped the kids pick out painting supplies for me: oil and acrylic paints, canvases, and even a tabletop easel! I have never painted on a canvas before and I have never used oil paint before! Their esteem of my artistic abilities is flattering and a tad overwhelming.

After a pleasant hour of gift-opening and another hour of gift-admiring, we went sledding in the thin powder for about half an hour. My Flexible Flyer performed admirably with the minimal snow depth. Then Jeff and I whipped up a pan full of omelets, tossed the kids and some gifts into the van, and headed over to Grandview for the White family gathering at 10am. We had brunch and opened presents with cousins and I tried to persuade everyone to let me take a family picture. They refused and I am still kind of bummed about it. It has been three years since the White side of the family took a picture all together! Sigh. We were home a little after 1pm, and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and playing with the new toys. I LOVE long slow Christmas afternoons. Christmas dinner was the usual ham and cheesy potatoes, casual and relaxed at our kitchen table.

Jeff built a barricade of cardboard bricks in the hallway to block the kids from running out too soon. Amber busted through it when it was time to come out.

 Stocking exploration. Jeff always gets a new video game for the family at Christmas time, so that was on the TV.

Typical Amby: wearing her crown like a superhero mask. 

 We all got socks in our stockings.

Pattern blocks 

Rose arranged her gifts in a neat semicircle inside her tent. 

Jay organizes his things in his mind, not in real life--just like his father. 

Amber's tent was also a tad jumbled. 

Rose drifted around the house watching everyone else's activities all afternoon. It took me half the day to get her to use her own gifts. She was so pleased with the little arrangement that she made of all her presents in her castle tent that she didn't want to disturb them by actually using them! 

 Rings, bracelets, and sparkly bandaids.

 Lego time!

 That's a tall plastic sandwich.

Trying out her 3D pen. 

 This book was MADE for Jay! It's Greek myths told with scenes made of Legos for illustrations.

The 5x5 Rubix cube conundrum.

I'd better start painting!

Jeff's VR headset is pretty cool. He always says "I love living in the future!"

 Catching a butterfly between his fingertips in a far off world.

Sledding:

 Queen Amber would not remove her crown for our sledding expedition.

[excuse my frown of concentration--getting five walking people into one picture is not easy!]

 Jay went rocketing over the side of a ditch on the sled and needed a fatherly rescue. He wasn't hurt at all; that snow/dust combo was exceptionally slick! Amber wanted to help rescue him too.

 The thin snow quickly mixed with the thick dust on this hill out back, so the kids' knees were all covered in dirt and snow, which melted into mud when we came inside. We hung the snowsuits on the front porch.

 Sled selfie! It was so FUN and magical to get a surprise sled on a white Christmas!

On to Grandview for the White family gathering:

 Rose picked out a stuffed cat for Layne and it was purrrfect.

Sweetest biggest hug.

"Helping" Grampa put together Grayce's toy 

Brothers.

 Amber is part hobbit with that hair. Hobbit royalty, of course.

Uncle Sam! 

Hugging Grama goodbye

Somehow Amber lost her crown. Maybe it fell off when she was upside down?

Christmas dinner 

 Reading his new Rick Riordan (Magnus Chase and the gods of Asgard) book in his tent.

All three kids love sleeping in their castle tents. Jay has the best deal if you ask me, though, because he can fit his tent onto his bed.

 Cosy Rosie. Jay and Rose both got mini clip-on book reading lights in their stockings, and they quickly discovered that the lights clip onto their castle tents too.

Ready for "bed" in her castle.

 We moved the girls' desks to the basement to make room for their tents in their bedroom. These girls' beds seem superfluous. They sleep in their own beds maybe 50% of the time.

Playing a Nintendo game. Jay thought it was hilarious when I told him that my least favorite part about Christmas is when Jeff makes me try out the new video games. It's true!

I feel so grateful for my family and for Christmastime. Giving with love on Christmas and serving with love throughout December are wonderful reminders of how I want to live my life year round. Here's to giving more love and service. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve

We had one hour of church on Christmas Eve, but the Sunnyside Ward made that hour COUNT! We sang and listened to many lovely Christmas hymns performed by the choir and various soloists and small groups. There were two Christmas-y talks. The highlight of the program was the closing song, Joy to the World. Here's my journal summary of the meeting:

• Church highlight #1: The first talk was about keeping the spirit of Christmas with us year round. She mentioned setting personal and family service goals. Serving is the way to keep the spirit of Christmas with us year round! And setting service goals helps us accomplish that and be more Christlike. I love the idea of setting service goals.
• Church highlight #2: the closing song was Joy to the World, always my favorite Christmas hymn we sing at church. The Sunnyside Ward's tradition is to sing that hymn at the end of the Christmas sacrament meeting, but it's not just any old hymn arrangement. About 30 years ago, Sister L. WROTE this amazing complex piano/organ duet for Joy to the World, and she has played it with Sister R. every Christmas ever since. After they did a nice long beautiful loud duet, they kept on playing their complex notes at full volume and everyone joined in singing all of the verses with gusto. It was the best kind of loud, the only kind of loud that I ever really like: beautiful music-loud. It felt so joyful and the spirit was so strong! Praising through song is the purest form of worship. It was breathtaking.

We called family members and watched the old claymation Santa Claus is coming to town movie during the afternoon, and then the real magic happened: it started snowing!

Christmas Eve night, we had our newly traditional tamales (purchased from Garcia's earlier in the week), cranberry muffins, and a Costco salad. It was supposed to be a low-maintenance meal, but I had issues making the muffins and let's just say it was a messy long ordeal, like so many of my baking ventures before. I pulled through, though, and we had our tasty cranberry orange muffins at last. After dinner we watched A Charlie Brown Christmas (Jeff's favorite), then had the kids act out the nativity while Jeff read excerpts from Luke 2. Then I coerced the crew into singing Away in a Manger (since the kids learned that one really well for primary). I played the piano and it was a nice "closing song" to our Christmas Eve evening. We herded the bouncy children off to bed in Jay's room for their yearly Christmas Eve sleepover, which Amber did her best to disrupt and disturb. They all eventually fell asleep at some point. 

Jeff and I quickly wrapped the last few presents and then brought everything upstairs to fill the stockings. Filling stockings is my absolute favorite part about Christmas with kids! Jeff let me fill their stockings while he built their castle tents. Then we covertly stuffed each other's stockings while averting our eyes, and Jeff banished me downstairs so he could set out his gift to me. But first, we snuggled up on the couch in front of a crackling Netflix fire and soaked in the quiet magical Christmas Eve ambiance. 

Before church I tried taking a cute picture of the kids...

 Amber was playing with an old cell phone and looking very teenager-ish.

Amber brought an extra toy cell phone for Jay. I decided to move the crew outside in hopes of better light and attention. 

 Jumping Amber

More jumping. 

Amber folded her little hands all on her own. Everyone looked and smiled all at once: a true Christmas miracle! 

I took away the toy cell phone to try and get Amber to look at the camera, but she just started crying so we ended the 5 minute photo shoot. 

After church Christmas Eve family photo. 

Christmas Eve dinner: they just love it when I take pictures. 

The nativity play: Rose was Mary, Amber was the angel, and Jay was Joseph and a shepherd. 

The sleepover in Jay's room. 

(Amber was banished to the floor) 

 Each kid got a castle tent. Rose had one a few years ago that was loved to death, and the kids still talked about it so it was a fun surprise for them each to have their own castle tent. Our little family room was pretty crowded!

Ambience: stuffed stockings, wrapped gifts, lit tree, picture cards on a ribbon, and a larger than life Netflix fire.