Pbbbbbt

Just what you always need on a stressful day like today:

I just found the brand new tub of butter upside down in a sink full of dirty dishes. 

Groan.

Things will look brighter after lunch, right?

We Lived after the Manner of Happiness

This morning I finally sat down and unloaded my camera card onto the computer.  I've been putting it off - for good reason.  I couldn't help but cry as I looked through those pictures.  And here is a big reason why:

 

I made this banner soon before Jeremy got home.  It just struck me one day that this is what I want our children to say when they look back on their childhood.  I want this scripture to be true for our family.  And so I've thought over and over again how our different choices help us find happiness or unhappiness, and I want to teach my children how they can find happiness in their lives.  I truly believe that real, lasting happiness comes as we live the gospel and take care of our families and those around us.  Real, lasting happiness comes from obeying God and loving those who He puts in our way.  That lovely truth has been proven true in my own life.

 

As we drove away on the morning of our move, we left this banner where it was.  What I created as a reminder became an epitaph of sorts.  And looking at it now, I cry remembering that we did live happily in that house.  I loved all the times when I would lay on the floor and Timmy would climb on me, bursting with giggles.  I loved the cool evenings when the children and I would go outside and dip our toes in the little stream that often ran in front of the sidewalk.  I loved watching Jill run in circles on the grass exclaiming, "I love grass!  I love grass!"  I loved the winter time when the children and I played out front in the snow.  We were usually the only ones out there. ;) Our neighbors probably all thought, "You crazy Arizonans!" 

 

I loved watching Jeremy and the children play "smash the meat" (steamroller) for a Family Home Evening activity.  I loved watching Timmy's stair-climbing skills evolve.  He got to be quite a pro!  And I even loved scraping ice off our windshield.  I grumbled about it from time to time (or maybe every day), but I still felt all sorts of pleased that we lived in a place where there was ice to scrape.   I loved that the homecoming parade went right down our street.  I am sad to miss it this year.  It was wonderful!  And I loved how blessed we were there in Cedar City.  Jeremy finished two master's degrees.  Joshua got his testing done.  Wonderful people helped us out in countless ways in our times of need.  The children and I survived 2 months without Jeremy there.  They were a hard two months, bu they were good.  All of this combined together with a million other things just prove the point I was trying to make - we are blessed as we obey God.  It was His idea for us to go to Cedar City.  We obeyed, and we were blessed.  We were happy.

And so, as we drove away, leaving behind that beautiful house full of memories, I thought of that banner, hoping that the people who come there will see it and know and feel that it is a good, happy place and that we lived happily there.

Random Happiness

I didn't do my "weekly" update again.  I am so dang behind!  I now have only a small window of time on Sunday that is available for such things.  (That's somewhere between feeding everyone lunch right after we get home at 12:30 or so and going to family dinner somewhere between 3:00 and 5:00.  And if we're hosting, forget it.)  It doesn't seem like it should be so hard, but it is, especially when I'm behind.  Maybe I need to find a different day again.

Jeremy's clearance still hasn't gone through to start teaching at the high school.  We are waiting for something to come in the mail.  And when it does he will high-tail it to Tucson to finish things up as quickly as possible.  The poor guy has been feeling the lack of work.  In the meantime, though, he subbed for a few hours out at the college.  Aaron teaches out there, but he took time off for their new baby.  So Jeremy subbed for him. 

Then when he went to the Globe-Miami football game on Friday he got roped into coaching the JV team.  Oh, goodness.  And after we just had a Globe Burk family discussion about why I don't like football.  Maybe it's not that I don't like it.  I just have never really been interested in it, and I have a bad habit of zoning out that I picked up back in my marching band days.  I am not good at focusing on football.  And part of that was the fact that I was bitter because the school spent way more money on football than music.  So the football team got new everything every year.  I know that's typical and kind of needed, but while they were getting new everything every year, the band was marching around in uniforms from the 70s.  I am not even exaggerating.  They came complete with the biggest collars you have ever seen, plastic square-toed shoes, and a plastic cowboy hat with a feather.  Oh, goodness.  Awful!  I have pictures!  And you know how cowboy hats have that dip in the top?  Well, in a hard plastic hat it rubs and digs into your scalp.  Lovely!

Anyway, so you get the picture - I have resented football in the past and have learned a little too well to tune it out.  Well, don't tell Mom, but I think I may be beginning to like this idea.  Having Jeremy go to practice and a game yesterday and have ideas swirl in his head about how to fix things has got me starting to get excited.  The proof of this is evidenced by an offer I made.  I told Jeremy that if he could get them all to learn how to hit good I would make them cookies.  And I am serious.  And I'm not talking about cake mix cookies or something silly like that.  I am talking about my super yummy, made-from-scratch chocolate chip ones.  And I am talking about A LOT of them.  I'd even quadruple the batch.  And I probably will even go to at least some of the games and cheer.  Maybe I can break my bad habit of zoning out and actually learn something. (And maybe I'll get past the fact that every 3 seconds they stop and start over.  How is that fun?  I don't get it.  Yeah, it's pretty obvious that I'm clueless.  I'll be the first to admit that.)

So anyway, Jeremy will get paid a pittance for coaching, and he'll get something for teaching at the college, but I don't know what, and we definitely don't know when.  But it's money coming in, right?  I must admit I'm thankful.  I'm still tapping my foot, waiting for the state to hurry up and do that fingerprint clearance, but I'm thankful for what we have. 

Oh, and get this - we got new doors yesterday!  That means that the knobs on both front and back doors work.  And the front door doesn't have a big hole in it.  And the master bedroom has a door!  The guy is here right now installing weather stripping and whatnot.  AND yesterday we went by the shop where Jeremy's car is getting fixed, and we saw that it was actually being worked on.  The engine must have finally come in.  Hooray! :D I'm thankful.

And another happy thing lately has been listening to Jill and Timmy's ever-evolving jabber.  It is so fun.  Timmy is learning to copy more words lately, and he's also been learning what they mean and using them.  In nursery on Sunday he blew me away by picking up the star shape and plopping it right into the appropriate star-shaped hole.  On that toy there is a red star and a yellow star.  The yellow one has more points on it than the red one.  He got the right one.  And to top it all off, he said, "Star," as he did it. Who knew that he knew what a star is?  I didn't!  Yea, Timma!

And in other news, I was just handed a bunch of little nails.  I turned them all head-up and the heads all together like that look like sequins or desk magnets or something.  Beautiful!  It's funny that such a simple thing can strike me just so.

Goodies of the Day

Today I loaded an app on my phone for Blogger. I thought it would make blogging from my phone easier. To make a long story short, it did not. But in the process it did give me a good laugh. I was trying to change google accounts, and my phone was trying to auto-correct. I ended up with "burkfamily1@yahoo.compensate." I'm still laughing.

And just now as I was getting Jill dressed after her bath she was pointing out all the little things on her dress. She showed me hearts, a bird, a rainbow, a popsicle, a spin around... Say what? I didn't remember a popsicle being on there. And what is a spin around? I asked her to show me that popsicle and spin around. They both turned out to be peace signs.

And last of all today is something not so funny. Aaron and Kenzie gave us a couch with an ottoman. I am so thankful. We haven't had a couch since before Christmas. And we got to hold their sweet new baby today.  I love him. :)  And another blessing I did not expect came today. I have been praying that we could get a new bed for Jill. In Cedar City she and Timmy slept on mattresses on the floor. They just seemed to prefer it. Well, here I worry about that. Not only did our renters make the carpet nasty, but there are lots of bugs here. I just feel better having them off the floor. Jill has a little toddler bed, but Timmy's still been on the floor. So my hope was that we could get a bed for Jill and put Timmy on the toddler bed. Well, as soon as Jill got home and saw the ottoman that her Papa and Aaron had hauled in, she exclaimed, "Mine bed!" I knew I had my answer. And her crib mattress sheet fits it too. God hears our prayers. He may not answer how we expect, but he hears. :) I'm thankful.

Moved

Well, we moved.  We are back in our old house in Globe.  It is crazy.  It's also sad because the tenants caused a lot of damage.  And they also smoked in here, which we specifically asked them not to do.  There are scorch marks here and there to prove it.  The whole place smelled nasty.  Thanks to my friend Kathie and some all-purpose cleaner with bleach, the whole place smells... well... better.  I also have covered a lot of the carpet with baking soda.  Ima let it sit for a while so the kiddos can grind it into the carpet for me, and then I guess I'll vacuum it up.  That poor carpet really needs replaced.  It was starting to go when we left, but the family who lived here seem to have surpassed the destruction we caused just by living here for the somewhere around 7 years we lived here.

I am trying really hard not to focus on how mad I am about what they did (and about how they skipped town without paying the damage money the judge commanded them to pay).  After all, I've got to live here, and I can't live constantly being mad when I see the empty spaces there the cupboard doors were.  Breathe, Christine!  Breathe!  I've got to move on.

But there are some things to be thankful for, and I would like to list some of them:

1. The oven works.

2. The range works.

3. Both of the items listed above are plugged into a new outlet down under the counter instead of in my regular wall outlets.

4. The bathtub and shower work.

5. The toilets work.  Phew!

6. They did not ruin my beautiful laminate floor in the living room.

7. They broke doors but not walls.

8. The dishwasher works ok.  And by that I mean not great, but it may be passable.  I need to experiment with how I put the dishes in again.

9. There is a guy outside right now who is cleaning up our yard.  Hopefully this means that our allergies will be less monstrous.  Either way, it should mean that the piles of buried garbage and the broken glass should get hauled away today.  (Please!)

10.  One wall of the living room is red.  I don't like it.  I am not a bold-color person.  But it's not as bad as some colors they could have chosen.  It's not sticking around, but it could have been worse.

There you go.  That's enough for now.

In other news, Timmy is dang cute.  Often when I ask him a question he says, "No," in a sweet little voice.  He has said some words, but not many.  Mostly he walks around jabbering nonsense in the same sweet little voice that he uses to say, "No."  He is really cuddly.  He prefers to fall asleep while laying on my head and eating my hair.  Well, really he usually falls asleep next to me holding my hair, but he seems to have a nightly ritual of climbing on my head for a bit and trying to eat my hair.  He still doesn't like to take a nap, but the other day I knew he needed one, so I sat and rocked him while we watched Cinderella for a bit, and he fell asleep fast.  Nice. :) Before you say, "That's a girl movie!" I would like to point out that Cinderella has a lot of animals in it, and that's why he likes it.  His favorite parts are the ones with the animals.  He also has no fear of running in the road.  I'm happy that we have a yard for him to run in, but that doesn't seem to make him less likely to run in the road.  I hope to spend more time outside with him once the yard is cleaned up.  I think he will really like that.

Jill loves grass a lot.  When we lived in Cedar City she'd go run around in circles on the grass by the van exclaiming, "I love grass!" every time we went out to the van.  I'm sorry that we don't have grass here.  But she will enjoy spending time outside just like Timmy will.  Jill is talking more and more lately.  The other day she was going on and on about how it was scary outside and there are monsters out there when it's dark and scary, and, "I chop dem with mine pink sword!"  (It's all about pink, you know.  Pink is her favorite.)  Then she'd say, "A scratch me!" (And she would make scratching motions, of course.)  And I'd reply, "That monsters will scratch you?"  And she'd say, "No.  A chop dem a mine pink sword!"  We went through that several times before the conversation moved on, but she seemed pretty pleased with herself.  That's my girl!  Choppin' monsters with a pink sword. :)

Can I Please Have a Burro?

I went into Del Taco to get some dinner a few days ago, and I asked them, "How much is your most basic, cheapest burro?"  They lady said, "Huh?  I don't know what you mean?"  I tried to explain.  Another worker came over and tried to figure it out as well.  He said, "Do you mean a churro?"  We went back and forth like this until I suddenly realized that all the signs say "burrito," not "burro."  Aha!  I tried that, and they did know what I meant.  I guess I forgot I'm in Utah, not Arizona.  It's funny, though.  What in the world?  These crazy Utah people!

First Day of School



Well, it's all done. The four older boys are officially off to school. Hyrum is in 6th grade - middle school! Joshua is in 5th grade, Benji's in 3rd, and Michael's in 1st. They'll only be at these schools for a week, and I'm sad about that. But we still had the traditional first day of school pictures.

Now to get my buns in gear and get the house packed up...