Destination: Boise

Meridian, Idaho is a short five hour drive from Sunnyside, and it was the last weekend for the new temple open house. The opportunity was too good to pass up, so we made some reservations and drove to Idaho on Friday, taking advantage of the day off of school for Veteran's Day. It was a cold wet drive, and after a pit stop at Chick-Fil-A for my growling tummy, we went to see the temple through the steady drizzle. It was big, beautiful, shiny-new, and crawling with people. I'm glad that so many people took the opportunity to tour the temple, but I have never heard so much noise inside a temple before! It was cold, dark, and rainy on the outside and warm, light, and happy on the inside--thank you, weather, for accentuating the contrast of the world vs. the temple.

Before the temple tour, we were shuffled into the stake center next door for a 12 minute video, after which we were portioned out into bite-size groups led by tour guides. It was too loud in the temple for our tour guide to do much more than steer us from room to room, but the whole experience was still positive. The temple is about FAMILY. It was so special to be inside a temple with all of my kids and my husband. I know that the temple is the house of the Lord, and that families can be together forever through the priesthood ordinances in the temple! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: being inside the temple with my whole family is HAPPY.

I'm thankful for this experience. It was all over in less than an hour, and as we exited to a tent full of sister missionaries, I had three thoughts:

1. That was quick! We drove all that way, and it's over already! 
2. It was worth the trouble! 
3. I hope our kids remember this.

The threads of Life Experiences are woven one at a time into a blanket. The more meaningful experiences we have, the thicker, plusher, and warmer our life-blanket it! The quick temple tour was one of those extra soft threads added to our family blanket as a whole and to each of our kids' personal life-blankets. My goal as a parent is to provide my kids with plenty of enriching, fuzzy experiences to put some loft into their life-blankets so they grow up to be puffy quilts: soft, huggable, warm people with depth and perspective. Maybe that metaphor was stretched a tad thin at the end there, but the point is, our trip to Idaho felt valuable and cozy.

We made a night of it. After leaving the temple, we checked in to our favorite hotel chain: Holiday Inn Express. The staff are always kind and welcoming, the beds are comfy, the rooms are clean, the pool is indoors, and the breakfast buffet is large. It's the perfect family hotel! Step one: unplug the phone and alarm clock. Step two: swimsuits on! We went for a family swim before bedtime on Friday night, then lounged in bed watching Captain America until the kids were drowsy enough to drift off to sleep. We turned off the lights in our hotel room and Amber stopped running laps around the place at last. Jeff and I read on our phones and whispered quietly to each other in the dark while the kids settled in. Listening to my kids fall asleep has to be one of my favorite things to do as a mother. It is such an intimate, sweet thing to watch them snuggle up, let go of the day, trust the night, and surrender to sleep. Their breathing slowed and the room was under the spell of sleeping children. Trust me, sleeping children are the one source of muggle magic. That hotel stay was another snazzy strand in our family "life blanket." Once the kids were all asleep, I went down to the front desk and procured two sets of earplugs to drown out their snuffly noisy breathing.

Something wonderful happened on Saturday morning: my head stopped throbbing for the first time in over two weeks! I moved around, testing it gingerly, before joyfully donning my running apparel. When Jeff returned from his run, I jogged out into residential Boise, relishing every quirky house and every footstep on the sidewalk. I lost plenty of fitness during my illness, but it still felt so good to be back out running again at last! Even better, the sky was clearing visibly as I ran, and patches of blue sky were appearing. Four miles later, I met my family at the hotel breakfast buffet. Secret: we stay at Holiday Inn Express mostly for the cinnamon rolls. Good service, clean comfy rooms, reasonable prices--all good things, but the cinnamon rolls are the biggest reason we keep coming back!

The kids went for a post-breakfast swim (cue family dance party in the elevator!) and then we checked out, loaded up, and embarked on one last Boise-venture before heading home: Table Rock. When I was researching Boise, I came across Table Rock and knew that it would be just the thing. In the interest of time, we did not do the official 4 mile loop trail, opting instead to park half a mile from the top and walk up the rest of the way. It was just right for little legs and we enjoyed blue skies and sunshine on top of the Treasure Valley panorama at our feet. After sufficiently enjoying the view, we swung through Chick-Fil-A one more time and then drove the five hours home again, arriving just after 5pm, completing our family outing in 32 hours.

 Rainy temple visit: good thing families are forever, because we're going to need that long to get a good family picture! Hah!

 This photo station was in the exit tent, and a missionary took this picture and emailed it to me with a labeled blue border.

 It was still wet, cold, and rainy when we left, but darker.

 Let's get down to business! 

 Hotel life.

 Amber got the couch, little wiggle worm.

 Morning swim! This boring mother sat on the sidelines for the second swim. Someone had to take pictures!

Table Rock:

 Saturday morning, the sky cleared and the sun came out, providing us with a dynamic view of the Boise area.

 Such bright sun!

 We peeked at the underbelly of Table Rock, and were rewarded with copious graffiti accompanied by the smell of urine. This little cave was seriously so gross.

 The heart of graffiti! We enjoyed the Moana pun.

 Walking

 Jeff and I basically carried/dragged an overtired Amber down the road. She wanted to go back up top and jump in rocky puddles, rappel off the cliff, lick the graffiti, and roll around in the pee-cave.

Adios, Idaho! It's amazing how simultaneously refreshing and exhausting a quick overnight family trip can be!

Fruits

Last week I was slammed in the head with a sinus infection. Starting Halloween night, it felt like a mad ax-man was hacking at my skull with a dull blade--repeatedly. Stabbing pain, throbbing pain, and more stabbing pain, around the clock. It kept me up at night in spite of NyQuil. My eyes felt like they were bulging, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. My teeth throbbed the same anguishing rhythm. I could barely move it hurt so badly. Jeff stayed home from work last Wednesday to take care of me (aka, keep Amber away from my tender head). With minimal coaching from the couch-wife, he even made me a delicious large pot of homemade chicken soup with rice. One of the awesome things about Jeff is when he says "is there anything I can do for you?" He MEANS it: anything. He had never boiled chicken bones to make broth before, but he confidently waltzed off to the store, got a flat of drumsticks, and showed that broth who's boss.

On Friday, after three days without any improvement, I finally went to the doctor and procured a prescription. Halfway through, the round of gut-melting antibiotics are helping immensely and although I still have a persistent headache, the pain has diminished significantly. I was able to go to church on Sunday. My eyeballs only throb every now and then. My status quo right now is to get the kids to school, do the bare minimum around the house, and then SIT still all day. Sit and read. I have read six books in the past week. They are fluffy bubblegum books, but that's still well over a thousand pages total! Mine and Amber's birthday happened on Day Two of the antibiotics. I suffered through the extra throbbing caused by bending over, and took some pictures of Amber turning three, cutie patootie. On Saturday I also throbbed my way through the piano ribbon festival and played duets with Jay and Rose. It was good to get back home to my quiet stationary spot on the couch, though.

Due to this thrilling sinus ache, I haven't run in TEN DAYS--a feat that may well equate to madness in my world. It is doing wonders for healing my achilles injury though! Early this week I tried going on a short 2 mile walk with a friend, and came back with a head so throbby my right eyelid puffed up, my eyes ached, and I could barely see straight for three hours afterwards. This sinus infection is the boss of me, and as antsy as my legs may be, after that eye-closing experience I am prepared to wait it out and not run until it's been beaten into antibiotic submission by those massive fat pills.

I've been working really really hard at enduring this sinus infection patiently. I know I didn't bear the worst of it quite as gracefully as I could have, but it did remind me just how wonderful it is to be married to a superstar. With his seemingly simple acts of service, Jeff showed me true love and I adore his heart o gold even more.

Sunday rolled around and I hadn't practiced piano all week. Raging headaches are not conducive to noise, moving, or thinking, all of which must happen simultaneously for successful piano-playing. Sunday morning, I swallowed some extra strength Tylenol, said a few prayers, and cranked out a cram-jam practice sesh for half an hour before heading to church. Amazingly, I had my best Sunday Primary piano-ing yet. I thought my terror and stress of the previous two Sundays had stripped me to my core of quaking humility, but a week without practice humbled me even further. I knew that I was completely at the mercy of my anxious prayers combined with whatever muscle memory my hands had retained. Coasting off of previous practicing was scary! I had no idea how much I would remember.

Over the past few weeks, I have upped my piano practice to an hour every day in an attempt to gain the upper hand on that feisty Children's Songbook. I have been going all out to learn these tricky songs, and I felt progress slowly seeping through my fingers. But the improvement felt disproportionately slow to my hours of slaving over the fiddly notes. Fast forward, through that week without piano-ing, to this Sunday: I got a text message listing the songs we'd be singing the night before and when I went to play through them before church, there were four songs I already knew via previous practicing. I then managed to learn three new songs during the short pre-church warmup! At my level, that is unheard of.

Quite a number of little puzzle pieces came together to form a bigger piano picture on Sunday, and at the end of the day, I stepped back to look at the resulting view in awe. I just "happened" to have flipped to one of this week's new songs in a previous practice and played through it a few times. The second new song was a simpler version of a hymn I already knew. The third new song was only two lines long and in the blessed key of C, always my friend. So I was able to cobble together singable versions of all three new songs without too many nerves attached (besides the ones pulsing in my sinuses). Playing piano is a physical feat of coordination and concentration. It is absolutely fascinating and humbling and awe-inspiring to receive divine assistance in such a specific, visible, physical way. It's kind of like the gift of tongues for foreign missionaries, but instead it's the "gift of fingers" for under-skilled pianists. Saying yes to this calling in spite of my fears and taking on that massive scary musical workload has put me in a position to see real life, personalized miracles. I have been marveling at the experience all week.

Another tender mercy from Sunday really quick: junior primary's singing time ended too early, so the substitute chorister picked a song he knew the kids could sing well: hymn #239, Choose the Right. That is the first hymn I learned how to play way back as a twelve year old, and I own those notes! So I pounded it out, all three verses, while the kids sang as LOUDLY as they could. They were excellent. The bishop had to come and admire their singing, because he heard it all the way from his office on the opposite corner of the building! That was the first time I really had fun playing piano at church. It was a song I knew well, and the kids sang it with such gusto that I really had to put some energy into my playing. And all of it was a last minute time-filler inspiration from a substitute chorister. God is in the details. I have never felt so poised on that piano bench!

When I started writing this post, I did not intend for it to take a "religious" turn. I didn't even really plan on linking my sinus infection with my latest piano playing. Sometimes I wonder if these types of posts come on too strong. But I can't accurately or honestly write about my life if I leave out my reflections. My faith is part of my every day life! Not every single event is a spiritual experience, but I find that whenever I tackle a challenge or Scary Thing the right way, they usually end up becoming spiritual experiences in the end. I love stepping back and recognizing God's hand in the small and simple things. Because he is always there, whether we recognize him or not! He is simply there.

A lesson that is being drilled into me in a variety of ways, over and over is this: our mortal experience with a physical body provides experiences that teach us lessons we cannot learn in any other way. I am finding strength and power from unassuming sources. There is power along the journey of enduring to the end, not just in the end. There is power in the aftermath of taking a leap of faith, not just in the act of leaping. There is power in submitting to God's will and following through, not just in trudging along blindly. There is power in working really really hard.

In the words of Brinnley Ashton, (a beloved member of our previous ward, serving down south in the Macon Georgia LDS Mission who writes the best weekly emails to the ward which I still read even though I'm not in that ward anymore):

We have been working really, really hard. But you know what happens when you work hard? You see fruits. 

Amen, Sister A! The fruits--plural--are so sweet and worth every second of hard work.

Completely unrelated kid pictures, from the golden month of October before cold harsh November attacked:

Halloween highlights

Halloween is long gone. We've celebrated two birthdays since then! Halloween highlights:

• Jay dressed up as "Weapon Man." He originally wanted to be Odysseus or a Minotaur since mythology is his jam right now, but while we were costume shopping at Goodwill, I nonchalantly said "you should just get a bunch of weapons and dress up as Weapon Man. Jay took the bait and I was off the hook from figuring out how to concoct ancient Greek armor or a buffalo head for him to wear. 
• Rose dressed up as Aphrodite, inspired by the many mythological tales Jay has spun for her. On a school project, she filled in these blanks: For Halloween I will dress up as a: GODDESS. I will feel: HAPPY. And she was.
• Amber didn't understand about choosing her own costume, so I chose for her. I scored a fancy quality Rapunzel dress from Goodwill, and she wore Rose's old fleece Rapunzel braid. I got her one of those tiny one-egg frying pans to carry like Rapunzel's iron frying pan weapon, but she ended up forgetting to bring it trick or treating. She loves her "Rapunzel weapon" though...a little too much sometimes (hello, time-out for hitting everything).
• Using my red hair to its full potential, I dressed up as Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus cartoon. I stuck foam solar system stickers to my old navy blue dress, and wore purple planet foam stickers on my ears as earrings, and stuck foam rocket ship stickers to my shoes in the classic Ms. Frizzle fashion. 
• We drove to Grandview to trick or treat at Grama and Grampa's house and the cousins' house. 
• We finished up at our ward's sleek efficient trunk or treat: the cars lined up close together in one column, and the kids walked around and around the circuit until all of the candy had been handed out. 
• Jeff dressed up as Bill Nye the Science Guy. We were a dynamic duo. I love the idea of Ms. Frizzle marrying Bill Nye. They are soulmates for sure.
• We forgot to bring our candy to pass out at the trunk-or-treat, but we did have most of the 500-pack of foam space stickers that I used for my costume, so we handed those out instead of candy.
• We were in and out of the trunk or treat in less than 45 minutes.
• No trick or treaters came to our house in the dark countryside: an introvert's Halloween dreams come true--we were finally able to retreat from the crowds once we were done! 
• Rose and Amber wanted pretty makeup to go with their costumes, and I received my yearly reminder of how inexperienced I am with all varieties of makeup. 
• It was not a night for great photography.
• We carved our pumpkins three nights before Halloween, but never lit candles in them once! 

 "Weapon Man"

 The fair Aphrodite, goddess of love, in the yellow setting sunlight.

And Rapunzel, wearing red boots under her dress. 

Ms. Frizzle: I did not have the energy to create that solar system headdress. On Halloween I was falling fast to the symptoms of a serious sinus infection, so my enthusiasm was clouded.

Ms. Frizzle and Bill Nye, with their three kids: Aphrodite, Rapunzel, and "Weapon Man." 

 Trick or treating on good ole Westridge Drive in Grandview. We tried to go to our old house (confusing Amber greatly), but they were not accepting trick or treaters. 

Halloween comes but once a year.