White Week

It was a very white week in Sunnyside. Winter came early! The ground was covered in snow all week long, with another layer falling partway through the week to freshen it up. Monday was a snow day. Tuesday and Wednesday were school days. Thursday and Friday there was no school due to elementary parent teacher conferences. Suffice it to say, it was a weird wintry white week! 

Jeff was mostly recovered from Covid by Monday, but he still had Monday and Tuesday at home to finish his five day quarantine. So we had some rare one-on-one time during the middle of the day together. We started talking and ended up planning our whole summer, seven months early. 

Other things that happened this week:

A Snowy Sunday

We had a snowy Sunday. It snowed pretty much all day on Sunday. We stayed home from church due to Jeff's Covid making me paranoid at every scratchy throat and sniffle. When the snow started right around when we normally leave for church, I felt even better about our decision to all stay home. I strongly dislike driving in winter weather conditions, especially since our city does not plow the roads. So we had a cozy snowy Sunday at home together. Every time I looked out the window, I felt like I was living in a snow globe!

Skating and Parading

Saturday (December 3rd) was full of wintry Christmasy magic. After a face-freezing five mile run, I climbed down into the canal to check the firmness of the ice. It was thick and and slick. Time to get out the ice skates! A little while later, Rose, Amber, and I lugged our gear down into the canal for some ice skating.

The girls' feet grew so much that we had to do some ice skate shuffling with our three pairs of skates: I wore Jeff's size 12 skates, Rose wore mine, and Amber wore Rose's size 8s. Only Rose had skates that weren't too big, but Amber and I made do with our extra roomy ice skates just fine. Amber picked up on skating almost instantly this year! She flew all around the canal, and we had so much fun skating together. She even tried skating backwards with me. She fell down a good amount, but she was so happy and enjoying herself. I love doing mutually enjoyable activities with my kids!

Weekly Album

A photo album from our week: 

School pick-up. Ideally, Jay and Rose would ride home from school with Jeff, but he started coaching high school swim team a week after cross country season ended, and schedules have been all irregular ever since. For the past few weeks, Jay and Rose have gone running on the track after school before calling me to come pick them up afterwards. My fit diligent children!

Christmas Tree Quest 2022

The day after Thanksgiving is our traditional get-a-Christmas-tree day, and it is an all day event! From leaving to get the tree to hanging the last ornament took almost 8 hours. We left at 8:30am and drove an hour and a half to the mountains on Friday, November 25th. Jeff tried driving up our favorite forest service road a ways, and I had to clench my jaw to keep from verbally freaking out. The road was was too steep and icy, and our van started sliding! I am still so amazed and proud of myself for NOT saying anything or even making any noise at all as our van slid sideways and Jeff worked to get us turned back around on the narrow tree-lined icy gravel mountain road. Thankfully we were moving slowly and we kind of just slid through a 4-ish point turn till we could drive back down the road and park in the first clearing. This year our friends the Kannelys couldn't come on the same day as us and until we were on our own I didn't realize how much reassurance it gave me to have another vehicle, more people, and especially a second strong, winter-savvy man in our group. A year or two ago, we had six or more of us pushing the van from behind while Jeff drove it out of the snow. Shudder.

September & October Books

Whew, I'm squeezing this post in at the last minute right before November ends! My two month total for books read in September and October was 11 books. While I only really loved one of the new-to-me fiction books I read on this list, I very much enjoyed both of the nonfiction books I read in September and October. I'm not fast at reading nonfiction, but I enjoy finding a book about an interesting topic, and diving in. I usually read a little nonfiction each day while I eat lunch. This is a no-frills, no-quotes post, since I was not in quote-saving mode during cross country season. 

Turkey Time Part 2

Turkey Time Part 2 covers a two day span: Wednesday and Thursday, November 23-24. Late on Tuesday night, I got a phone call from my sister Mel. They were planning on driving the 3 hours from Seattle to our house on Wednesday evening, but their car broke down on Tuesday night! They had to get it towed to a shop and were awaiting a diagnosis. Late Wednesday afternoon, the mechanic's verdict finally came back, declaring the problem to be a dead alternator. Mel and Braxton would not be coming for Thanksgiving after all. Suddenly we had a lot more food than expected! The girls helped me make two more pumpkin cheesecakes on Wednesday, and we were planning on prepping Thanksgiving feast number two on Thursday! We did it anyways, but just had way more leftovers than we really wanted. Eating the same turkey and gravy dinner every night for a full week got pretty old, at least for me.

Turkey Time Part 1

We celebrated Thanksgiving for an entire week. We ran two turkey trots and cooked two turkeys. This post is about the first turkey trot and the first turkey, from Saturday, November 19th to Tuesday, November 22nd. My friend Tina is a high school teacher (we've served together in several church callings for the past five years, and she's currently our Relief Society president, with me as a counselor). Tina's high school leadership class organized a fundraiser turkey trot for the Saturday before Thanksgiving, so naturally we ran. I mean, a local running event that the White family is NOT in charge of? You'd better believe we'll be there! 

The Ambaptism

Happy sigh. Sunday was a good day. We had Amber's baptism at 1pm, and she was such a joyful ball of energy. We had just enough time to go home for a quick lunch after regular Sunday church before we went back to the church building to get ready for Amber's baptism. I helped Amber change into her white jumpsuit in the mother's lounge, which has the door to the baptismal font in it. Amber had never been in the mother's lounge before (in her memory), and she enjoyed trying out all three rocking chairs after she changed her clothes. Then we went out to the primary room to take a few pictures and say hi to the friends and family who came. Amber zipped around the room like a ping pong ball. She was so cute and excited! 

Amber got baptized!

Amber was baptized today! It was a sweet beautiful special joyful moment. I will write more about it soon. For now, here are a few preview pictures of our sweet spunky 8 year old being her natural free-spirited self. We are currently working on reading a kids version of the Book of Mormon together, and before her baptism I wanted some pictures of her holding the Book of Mormon. We had a five-minute front-yard cell-phone photo shoot on Friday, November 11th. After a brief standing pose, Amber was done with boring stand-still-and-smile tradition. She marched over to our rope swing and gave me some of my favorite ever Amber pictures as I chased her back and forth with my phone, taking pictures while she swung. I sure love my Amby girl. She has filled my life to the brim since before she was born.

36

November fourth: I turned 36 the same day Amber turned 8. Every year I journey a little farther on my quest to find the balance between motherly sacrifice and the necessity of carving out space for myself. This birthday was no exception. I tried my best to find a different day for Amber's birthday party, but there was no other time that worked. Hosting a birthday party for Amber on my birthday was something I did not want to do. It seemed like the recipe for a bad birthday for me. But I dug deeper (again) and hosted a birthday party for my daughter on my birthday anyways--not in a martyr give-till-I-shrivel-up-and-die way, but with the attitude that "I can share, give, and make my birthday good too all at once." In the process, I learned another useful lesson: a day is rarely all good or all bad. I realized that compressing any day into a good day/bad day binary is recipe for dissatisfaction, so I decided to pay attention to making parts of my birthday good, even if the entire day couldn't be all "good" or Shaina-centered. This was my approach to my shared birthday this year. Carve out time for good moments amidst the chaos! There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

Ambirthday: 8 years old

Amber turned 8 this week! We did all of the celebrating on her actual birthday--Friday, November 4th. In the morning before school, she opened gifts from her family. She brought a treat to share with her class at school. After school, we had 8 kids over for her birthday party with birthday dinner and donut cake. It was a very full intense day of celebrating our Amber!