Paint Louis

I have to intro this post with a story. One time, when I was a teacher, I wanted to make my classroom look less boring. (White cinderblock walls are HARD to decorate . . . but I did it!) So I told all my students that I was looking for someone with graffiti skills to graffiti the word "Multimedia" above the door. A few hours later, a young hooligan with crazy long and affro-ie hair, lots of piercings, and pants that didn't cover his bum, entered my room. He was perfect.

I asked him to do a sketch and showed him the spray paint cans I had bought from Walmart. He took one look at my paint and rolled his eyes at me, "Those aren't going to work. I'll bring my own paint." Apparently to be a good tagger, you have to get special tips for the paint cans that can only be bought on the black market. Nice. I didn't ask any questions.

He showed up after school a couple of days later, I approved his sketch, and he got to work. I think it took a couple of hours. And it was super cool! He DID add a little "embellishment" that wasn't in his sketch - he signed his gangster name to the side of the painting. It didn't bother me and I didn't think much of it.

The next day, first period had JUST started when the vice principal and school cop showed up. Uh oh. I assumed they wanted a student. Nope. They wanted me. Word spreads fast when it has to do with gangsters and graffiti. Apparently the whole "let a student graffiti the school wall thing" was a bad idea. It took some convincing, but eventually they decided I could leave the work of art up there if I would just paint over his gangster name. Phew.

This thing worked like a charm, and having the cop show up just made it even better, because students like to tell each other cool stories about when their teacher gets in trouble by the cop. So for a couple of weeks I had all sorts of students coming into my room to check out the wall.

I remember when the student who actually painted it came by with a couple of girls to show them his piece of art. One of the girls said, "Oh my gosh! This is so cool. I am so going to make out with you for this." Classic high school.

I just spent an hour trying to find a picture of my Multimedia graffiti wall for you to see - tragically I couldn't find ANY pictures of my Skyline classroom! Le weep!

BUT I do have some awesome pictures of PAINT LOUIS. Apparently St Louis has a wall that is legal for taggers and they even have a festival every year where the really good taggers are invited to come and paint something cool. I've been wanting to go ever since I heard about it, and with Nathan and Rachel Ditto in town, we had an excuse.

Dan, the St Louis thug

 This wall is literally MILES long. Every inch covered in paint. And sometimes we had to avert our eye from the ahem, "inappropriate" things. Gangsters can be lame that way sometimes.

 Can you tell what it says?

Of course the missionaries had to get in on the action. Giant name tags. Well done.

Yay for friends who like us enough to come visit!

Friday Night Fish Fry

Despite the bad rap that St. Louis often gets for poverty and crime, its actually quite a religious city. Churches are all over (many of them have gorgeous architecture) - in fact there's a church a few blocks away that rings beautiful bells on the hour (they're quiet - not like the church bells in Gilmore Girls). Most of these churches are Catholic, which means many people observe Lent. (My first introduction to lent was my freshman year of college - my roommates decided to go without sugar the whole time, which meant any treats that were dropped off were enjoyed by me. My sweet tooth loved it.)

Anyway - part of observing lent includes giving up all meat (except fish) beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on Easter. So a lot of the churches and private high schools hold Friday Night Fish Fries during Lent as fundraisers. And they're always super fun.

This is us at LAST YEAR's fish fry. Thanks to Nathan for introducing us!

This year we went to the #1 rated Mexican Fish Fry. The line was 1.5 hours long, but since husband will chat it up with just about anyone, the long wait didn't seem very long as we were getting to know our line buddies. They were awesome. Especially the guy who was the spitting image of Cousin Eddy from Christmas Vacation (he even spoke the same way!) The only tragedy of the night was that we were having too much fun to stop and take a picture of our new friends.

We're Alive!

It's been a while. I promise we're alive. The past 2 months have been, well, long. But I finally seem to have the upper-hand on what could probably go down in the books as the longest miscarriage ever. So I am back, and ready to share our adventures.

We recently celebrated spring break - and since husband graduates soon it will probably be the last time we'll have this break in a lot of years. Which is quite tragic. (Yes, I miss all my teacher holidays. Someone needs to tell the corporate big wigs how much happiness would enter the world if we all had a spring break. And a winter break. And a summer break.)

The break started with a game of bowling. I'm awful.

But I DID get a strike.

Then, we drove to Denver. And on the way we stopped at this historic site. What an amazing and sacred place.

Denver. It's high on our list of places we would love to live after husband finishes school, so we decided it deserved a visit. And when I found out that Denver has a Cafe Rio, we put its address on the gps and it was literally our first stop. It did not disappoint. And we may have stopped there again before we left. (Trust me, when you've lived years without a Cafe Rio close by, you become obsessed.)

And of course we had to pull over when we saw Jamba Juice. (Can you tell I miss the west?)

Hooray for meeting up with good friends!

If you've never been to the Red Rock Amphitheater you're totally missing out. It's amazing. And beautiful. And the best part? Its in the MOUNTAINS. I don't care what you say - mountains are amazing and I need to be near them.

La la la!

This has nothing to do with Denver. Or Spring Break. It's an old pic, but I guess in the craziness of the past couple of months I forgot to post it. I've always told Dan he could grow facial hair if he didn't want to kiss his wife (meaning, I don't like facial hair). So he grew it out while he was in Hong Kong last January (told you this was an old picture). Guess what? I liked it. Hot husband!

Happy Love Day!!

Thanks to some friends who planned a fun date and invited us along, our love day was awesome! We started with dinner at Qdoba. Not the most romantical place for a love day dinner, but they were having a "kiss your special someone in front of the cashier and get a free burrito" day. Yes please! (Husband was especially excited about the kissing part.)

Then we went dancing. Yes, DANCING. . . for the first time in our married lives (because dancing around the apartment doesn't count). This place was AMAZING, and conveniently located just down the icy street. (Let me interject that I think it was 4 degrees that night. And I was in a skirt. Bless me.) It was big band style ballroom/swing dancing and the band was LIVE (and amazing. A big black lady sang "At Last" - we were in heaven.) There were lots of cute old people there all dressed up and dancing like they were 20 again. It was seriously so cool and definitely something we'll be doing again.

Everyone knows I'm no dancer . . . but I did spend many a night going country swing dancing with the roommates in college, and eventually I was half decent. Too bad that was eons ago and I lost any moves that I had. Lucky for us, Dan spent lots of time in ballroom dance classes at BYU. He made us look like we actually knew what we were doing.  Even the old people were impressed with us - who knew!?

Yay for love day!

My *Seemingly* Forever Battle

Having a family of my own has been something I've been battling for over 10 years. Recently a friend was complimenting me that I wasn't the "cookie-cutter" Mormon woman - I have a master's degree and a career instead of 5 kids, and she appreciated that we could talk about things besides potty training. She said it was refreshing. I had to correct her - I WANTED the cookie-cutter life style. My life plan was to get married, graduate from BYU, and start having babies before I ever had to start a career. Apparently I was way, way off. This life of mine - which is a great life - has been my "ok I don't have a family so now what do I do" plan. But all along I was always wanting and hoping and praying for the family that I knew I would one day have.

Meeting and marrying Dan was the best thing that could have happened to me. It made every awkward date and every heartbreak seem worth it. Finally my family had begun, now we just had to add a quiver of children and all those years of battling for a family would be forgotten. I've never fought harder for anything in my life than I fought for Lydia's life. Losing her only increased my desire to have more children (if that was even possible), so when we got clearance to start trying for more kids, I armed myself with everything I could to get pregnant again. OPK's and BBT's were part of my normal routine (and if you don't know what those are, consider yourself lucky). I wanted to make sure I was doing everything in my part to get these babies here!

After a year of (impatiently) trying, we had our Christmas miracle. On this last Christmas Eve I finally had a positive pregnancy test - we were finally having a baby!!! I've never wept more tears of gratitude, and I've never had a better Christmas. I've been floating around on cloud 9 ever since. Life couldn't get any better.

Until this week when we discovered this little miracle was not to be.

We are still in shock. We are heartbroken. But we are not defeated. Where there is sorrow, the comforter always leaves at least a little room for hope of a brighter day. My brighter day includes raising lots of children. I know one day it will be happen. This battle of mine is not over, and one day, I just know I will be victorious. So until then, I pray lots and have a heart full of gratitude for my wonderful husband, who is the best support anyone could ever ask for.

Favorite thought of the day, "There is something at work in suffering that is exalting." - Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

Baby, Its COLD Outside

Um, hello. Belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. We celebrated in Utah with family and it was the BEST (really).

We left about a week before Christmas. When I got home, I noticed that our Christmas countdown cubes were left on 21. I think we were just so excited for Christmas that we didn't have time to properly countdown (Max would be mortified at our slothfulness).  Now I am counting down the days until husband gets home from Hong Kong (5). (Totally should have covered up that nasty hole in my wall. Don't judge.)

So while husband is swimming in the ocean in Hong Kong, I am stuck at home. Literally. Its been in the negatives for who knows how long and we had a crazy blizzard all day on Sunday so church was cancelled. The roads are still crazy because its too cold for the salt to melt anything, so it was a work-from-home kind of day. Please bless the city can thaw out soon because my cabin fever is getting bad (and I've almost eaten an entire giant bag of peanut butter m&m's all by myself).

This is not me, but this is my city. Isn't that crazy! 

Mush

Let it be known that I have the best Mom in the world. Not only did the entire family eat a home-cooked dinner together every day, we also ate home-cooked breakfast together. Cold cereal was a rarity in our house. The breakfast menu was as follows: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday's were mush days (hot oatmeal). Tuesday's and Thursday's were pancake days. And both the mush and the pancakes were topped off with a tall glass of powdered milk (yes, its true). Sometimes on Friday's she would change it up and make eggs or waffles or something, but we rarely strayed from that schedule. As kids, we LOVED pancake days and only survived mush days. Sometimes she would throw raisins into the mush, which was an added bonus.

Occasionally, she would forget what day it was and we would get pancakes on a mush day. We lived for those days.Which meant when she confused a pancake day for a mush day there was much weeping and wailing. But she was a firm believer that oatmeal "sticks to your ribs" and that it would keep our bellies full til lunch time, so despite our incessant whining, the tradition continued for years.

After she was diagnosed with her terminal cancer, I moved back home with the hope that I would be able to help take care of her. Little did I know that she would be taking much better care of me, and the moving home part was more for my benefit than hers. I wasn't surprised when I moved back that the mush and pancake tradition still lived on. (After all, why change something that works, right Dad?) And I also wasn't surprised when she would wake up at 5:45 every morning to make breakfast for my Dad and me before we headed off to work. It didn't matter if she hadn't slept well or if she had just started another round of grueling chemo - she would still make breakfast every morning. Mush on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and pancakes on Tuesday and Thursday. Often she wasn't able to eat with us, and there were many times when she would take only a bite or 2 before she was sick and it came back up. But still she carried on with never a word of complaint.

Despite how sick she had become, she made breakfast for us up until school let out for Christmas break in 2009. She passed away 2 weeks later. I don't remember my dad and I ever discussing how breakfast would work without her, but that first morning back to real life, I knew we needed the stability my mom worked so hard to create. So I made us mush. (And it was awful - apparently the water-to-oats ratio really did matter - I just always watched my mom eyeball it and figured I could do the same. Bless my dad for still eating his entire bowl). The next morning - Tuesday - I came into the kitchen realizing I probably didn't have time to make pancakes before we had to leave, only to find that my dad had already turned on the pancake griddle and made a batch of pancake batter. I smiled, wiped away a tear, and poured the batter onto the hot griddle. And so began the continuation of Mom's tradition. I'm pretty sure Mom and Linz were chuckling from heaven as they watched us carry on our crazy family routine, but for me it was just what I needed to get through each day.

This morning, I made mush for the first time in years. It tasted like home and made me miss having my mom around. I miss her food, her smile, and our hours of endless talking.

Now I just look forward to the day when I'll have little kids of my own to complain about eating mush for breakfast 3 times a week. And when they do, I'll smile and let my heart remember one of the greatest women who ever lived.