Category Archives: thoughts on life

More Blessings

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(this post is picture heavy, and some of them are rather large pictures, some of them are from my phone and aren’t great quality, but I felt I needed to post them all, as this blog is somewhat of a journal)

June 2012 has been one of the driest Junes on record for the state of Utah, and I would assume for most of the west.  Combine that with the two previous exceptionally wet years and you have the perfect recipe for wild fires.  It has been hot, and windy, the kind of hot wind that just sucks all the energy out of you.
It seems like every corner of the west has been affected by wild fires, and Utah is no exception, as of yesterday (July 4) there were 10 wild fires burning across the state.

On the afternoon of June 21st a wildfire was sparked that hit very close to home.

The morning of June 22nd, I am in the car heading towards home, which is about 5 miles away. As I passed this neighborhood mandatory evacuations were starting.

Morning of June 22nd, this picture was taken about two hours after the previous one. The fire is now a few miles farther south, about two miles from my home.

This picture was taken at the same time as the one above, a few minutes later this neighborhood was evacuated as well.

Through out the afternoon my neighborhood was put on alert, we were to be ready to evacuate at anytime.  The kids and I packed the things we felt were important, and spent the afternoon watching and waiting.  All the roads into our city had beed closed (too keep the sight seers away) and about half the city was empty.  We watched helicopters fly to the lake, pump water and dump it on the fire, there were also big planes dumping fire retardant around the perimeter, a fire break was also built around the neighborhood.

The view of the fire from our back door. There was much praying that those horrible hot winds wouldn't change direction and blow the flames towards our homes.

Towards the evening, as the sun went down, the winds did change direction so instead of moving southeast, they were going southwest. West was good, that was away from the homes and we weren't evacuated.

The view of the fire that night from our back door. It was almost directly behind us, but much farther west than it had been earlier that day.

Since the fire behind our house there have been a dozen or so wildfires in Utah. Many homes have burned. The latest started the afternoon of July 3rd, east and north of us near a city named Alpine. This is how it looked a couple hours after it started from my city. It threw up a lot more smoke and such because it is burning in big pine forests.

Sunday July 1st, our family along with many other people fasted and prayed that there would be some relief, hopefully in the form of rain and cooler temperatures.  We need some moisture so badly to help with those fires, to keep new ones from burning and to give moisture to the tinder dry conditions around the state.  So we fasted and waited.

 On Sunday there was no rain in the forecast.

As the days went on it started looking like something might happen at the end of the week, but it wasn’t a sure thing.

This morning, I woke up to rain.
Not just scattered thunder storms, but good steady drizzly rain!  Not enough to cause mud slides on the damaged hills, or flash flooding, but enough to give everything a good soaking.

Nice low clouds, full of rain, much different from the smoke that has been hanging around.

 Today I am feeling so blessed

Because I know that Heavenly Father hears and answers our prayers.

 

Just Ask

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I had a conversation several weeks ago with a lady at one of my punk’s soccer games.  She had asked when my due date was and I told her, adding that I am due three days before the kids go back to school, and that Dadzoo was going to take about 2 weeks off work so he could play “mommy” at all the back to school activities.

She then said “Oh wow, my husband would never do that, unless I ASKED him to,” with a very dramatic eye roll.

I had to pause for a second or two.

I then said, very casually “Oh, well Dadzoo (except I used his real name) is really willing to help, but I have to ask as well, he doesn’t know what I need unless I tell him what that is.”

We then chatted for a little bit and parted ways.

That conversation made me think, a lot.  Why do we (women) think that they (men) should be able to just sense what we need?  I wouldn’t be expected to go into work for Dadzoo, sit at his desk and just know what needed to be done.  How can I expect Dadzoo to just walk into the house and just know what needs to be done?  One could argue that if he has to step over toys to get to the couch that he should just know they need to be picked up, but then again he could argue that I should just know that e-mail is checked before the ticket queue at the office (which I don’t really know, I am just guessing).

It leaves me to wonder how much happier we would all be in our relationships if we could just give up the idea that our spouse should just know, and instead we just asked for what we needed?  For me personally, Dadzoo is always happy to do and be what I need, I just have to ask first.

Friends

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I have never been one to have a large circle of friends, growing up I usually have one or two girls that I spent time with and that was it.  I am pretty shy, and social situations have at time paralyzed me, and at time the anxiety has been so great that I have avoided socializing altogether.   When we moved into this house almost 11 years ago I was welcomed into a wonderful group of ladies, we were all pretty much at the same place in life, new homes, newly married and having babies, we all had a lot in common and I felt welcomed.  It was really great for me, someone who has a hard time putting herself out, to have girls around me that were so willing to include me.  However, in the last few years I have noticed a change in the dynamic, and it became especially clear to me with the birth of my last baby.  Our lives have been changing.  Families have moved, friends have gone back to work, they have finished having their families and are moving on.  I feel as if I am being left behind.  I am still home, having babies, something I am so happy to do, but it is still different from my friends who are finding new hobbys and interests, while I am still raising small children.  I don’t fault them, I would be doing the same thing if my family were finished, I guess in part I feel a little jealous of their freedom and sad about my loneliness.  There are no lunches at the park with the kids anymore, my friends are off doing “big girl” stuff without little ones tagging along while I still have two littles (and another on the way) tagging along.  I use to be able to swap babysitting if I needed to go somewhere without the little kids, but I have no one to do that with anymore, my friends no longer have little ones at home.  I felt particularly alone after the birth of Lydia, everyone was so busy and so out of the baby thing that I felt as if I wasn’t noticed.  There was one evening in particular, where I was feeling really down about a few things, that all I could so was cry for a friend that had moved away who had always been particularly thoughtful and helpful after the births of my babies.

Now here is the thing that I am really struggling with right now.  I look around and I see plenty of ladies who are still having babies, who have little ones, who are out going and “doing” things.  I want to be involved, I want to make friends who have the same interests as me.  What holds me back?  I know they are all very nice people and I would be included without any problem, but…but… it scares the crap out of me to put myself out like that.  It is far easier to hide in my home and feel lonely.  I worry that I won’t fit in, I can’t really talk much about the latest fashion, movies or TV shows, because I am not really interested in all of that, and is anyone really  interested in chatting about homemade laundry soap and canning green beans?  Seriously, is there anyone out there that cares about the fact my tomatoes seeds sprouted when there is a new season of “Dancing With the Stars”on?

Anyway, just a little venting and self exploration I guess.

Our Hearths

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In my church the women’s organization is called the Relief Society.  There are three main purposes of the Relief Society: 1. Increasing faith and personal righteous, 2. Strengthening families and homes and 3. Serve the Lord and His children.  I want to talk about the third purpose and an experience I had lately.  We have a program called Visiting Teaching.  Every sister in the Relief Society, who wants to, is assigned  other sisters in the ward (name of our local congregations) to look out for.  Once a month we are asked to visit our sisters and take them a spiritual message, we also ask if there are any needs and make sure our sisters know they are loved and that if they need anything they can call us.  It is an organised way of looking out for each other.  Visiting Teachers are the ones who take meals for new babies or sickness, they are a listening ear, help with the lonely and pray for and with our sisters.  It is a powerful program and I have seen many wonderful things come to pass because of visiting teaching.

This month our lesson was “Guardians of the Hearth”.  I loved this lesson, I have a strong testimony of the power of a good woman in her own home, and I know the importance of a righteous woman in her own home.  It was easy to see how this lesson applied to me, I am a mother of young children, and I take the job of building a shelter from the world in my own home seriously.  However, the sister I was gong to visit is an older lady, widowed, with grown children and grandchildren.  I knew this applied to her, but was having a hard time expressing my feeling on how this subject applied to her.  As I pondered how this truth applied to her the thought came to me “we all have different hearths at different times in out lives”.  It occurred to me that  a woman doesn’t have to have children at home to exercise this part of her divine nature: to love and nurture.  In fact a little girl is born with this drive and desire to love and nurture, I have many times seen a small girl pick up a baby doll and love it, without any coaxing.  All woman, young and old have their hearths to guard, depending on the season of their life.  Everyone, our young girls, our youth, the young single adult, the married with and without children, our single sisters and our grandmothers, all have important hearths to guard.

It is part of our Divine Nature

Buzzing

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Some days, I have the perfect blog post, but I don’t have time to sit and write it out.

Some days, I have plenty of time to write a blog post, but my mind is blank.

Some days, I have so much buzzing around in my head that I can’t organise anything into a blog post.

Today is a buzzing kind of day.  Today I am thinking about: yogurt, vitamins, laundry, gardening, valentines, visiting,  money, new floors, my children, the new baby, Dadzoo, headlines in the news, religion, cleaning, spring cleaning, sleep, homework and other various things.

Mostly though I am thinking about glory.  The glory of God to be exact, and what that means in my life.  I am thinking about why I do certine things, is it to glory God or man?  Do I do my church duties with “an eye single to the glory of God“, or do I do them just so I can turn in my perfect numbers, or to receive the praise of men.  Something worth pondering.

Today my brain is buzzing….