A snapshot of the past two weeks:

The short version...

• Wednesday April 9 - Melissa breaks her collar bone playing fetch with the dog.
• Monday April 14th - My front left wheel breaks off my car while I'm driving on campus.
• Thursday April 17th - We get word that Melissa's grandmother is on her deathbed.
• Thursday April 17th - I hit two deer at once time while driving in Southern Utah 
• Friday April 18th - Melissa's grandmother dies. 
• Monday April 21st - Today - Nolan and Ian get the stomach flu and spend all day Tuesday and most of early morning Wednesday throwing up.

It has been a rough few weeks, but really it could have been so much worse.


The long version...

Wednesday April 9 - While playing fetch with the dog on a 50 ft leash at the park, Melissa gets pulled over by the overzealous puppy chasing her ball, and she twists on her heals and falls shoulder first onto the concrete, snapping her clavicle in half like a #2 pencil. We spend the afternoon and early evening first at the Urgent Care, and then at the hospital getting x-rays and waiting for the Orthopedist to give us a diagnosis. Melissa gets her first shot of morphine and tells me she'd rather give birth than break her clavicle. If you know anything about Melissa's pregnancies, THAT is saying something.

We are told to come back Monday for consultation. Melissa is sent home in a sling and torso wrap that is miserable to wear.

Plus side? Melissa could have hit her head and suffered a concussion. She could have been alone at the park (her sister was with her), I could have been out of town, She could have fallen, not onto the concrete, but into a boiling pool of great white sharks.

Monday April 14th - at approximately 10:45 am, fifteen minutes before the last day of my advanced creative writing class where we have planned to eat pie (a potluck for which I have baked from scratch a crumble-top apple pie) and share our work, I am driving my Honda up and out of the JFSB parking garage on BYU campus, when I turn a corner and the left front wheel falls off my car. I grind to a stop, get out, survey the damage, and call campus police, who tell me I need to call campus parking, who tell me I need to call campus autoshop, who tell me they can't help without, yes, permission from campus police. Guess who I call next?

When the police arrive, I ask them to watch out for the car while we wait for the tow truck and I rush my pie over to my class of waiting students. I ask them to carry on without me, as my car is currently broken and blocking traffic in the aforementioned parking garage, give them the pie as a consolation prize, and head back to the parking garage where a tow truck meets me courtesy of AAA, and hauls the car to my favorite little autoshop where they fix the problem for a scant $700.

Oh yeah, and while all this is happening, I'm supposed to be taking Melissa to the Dr. for our consultation with the Orthopedist, so instead of me picking her up, she gets dressed and drives herself one-handed to Provo and picks me up.

At the Doctor's office, we decide to give the sling and torso wrap three weeks, and if things haven't started fusing back together, we'll do surgery.

Plus side?  My wheel could have fallen off on the freeway, which could have caused the car to roll, and perhaps killed me.

Thursday April 17th - Faced with the question of how Melissa will survive on a long-planned trip to Capitol Reef National Park for the weekend, we decide that Melissa and her mom and sisters will stay here in Provo while our exchange student, the older boys, grandpa, and I go to Capitol Reef.

However, one hour before we are scheduled to leave, we get word that Melissa's grandmother is unresponsive in her room in an Oregon assisted living center, and Grandma and Grandpa Fitzgerald change plans, buy tickets, and fly out to Portland that afternoon.

Upside: Grandma and Grandpa Fitzgerald arrived in Portland in time to see Grandma one more time before she passed away.  And Naoto, Callan, Nolan, and I still made the drive to Capitol Reef. Melissa and her sister's spent the weekend together, which helped them handle the news of grandma's passing.

Thursday April 17th - That night, after three hours in the car, and with only a few more miles to go before we arrived at our lodging near Capitol Reef NP, I came around a corner on Highway 12 outside Torrey, Utah and hit two deer at once who were standing in the middle of the road. Nolan, who had been talking and talking as he is wont to do near the end of any road trip, said, I realize now, "Dad, don't hit those deer," but he said it so softly and as such a matter of course that it didn't register as a warning until after I'd already slammed on the brakes and watched the two started animals hit my grill and roll onto the pavement in front of me. Both animals jumped up and stumbled off into the darkness, and we rolled on to our cabin.

Both boys said several times, "That was really scary," but I didn't realize how effected they were by the event until almost a half an hour later we were sitting at the kitchen table in the cabin and right in the middle of a conversation about hot dogs or something, Nolan melted into tears.  I scooped him up and let him cry a bit and then he said, "Its okay though, because the deer got up and walked away."  I'm thinking its okay to let him believe the deer will be okay, and who knows, maybe they will be.

Upside: the car is only cosmetically damaged, and we still had a great time at the park.

Monday April 21st -  Both Nolan and Ian start complaining of stomach pains and then spend the whole evening and following day throwing up.  It is now Wednesday and Nolan is doing fine but Ian is running a fever and has only had Pedialite to drink since yesterday.

Upside: at least it isn't all three kids throwing up!

I've got to say, I'm grateful to have a flexible job that has allowed me to work from home so I can take care of Melissa and the kids, and I'm grateful to neighbors and family who have helped with meals and who have watched boys and given rides. We are pretty exhausted and alternate between laughing and crying because, really, what else is there to do?  Still, amid all this we were able to have a large group of exchange students over for dinner as a last hurrah for Naoto, our exchange student from Japan; and we had a potluck with graduate students one night; and we got to spend a wonderful Easter afternoon with my sister Krysti and her husband Ross and their kids this past Sunday. So it's been crazy and we are ready for a breather, but it has also been lovely, and in the end, it really all could have been so much worse.

Photo Dump-o-rama

My goal now for a long time has been to make a weekly post to the family blog, and for a long time now I’ve been failing miserably. But we HAVE been living these past few months, and we’ve taken some pictures to prove it.

 In early March, I took Callan and two other cub scouts to a belt loop camp. Callan earned the Volleyball, marbles, and astronomy belt loops. here he is bumping a volleyball. He did really well and had a lot of fun.  He'd never played marbles before but won just about every game he played. Then a week later, at home we were playing marbles and he wasn't doing as well and he said, "I don't know what happened, I gotta get my shot back," and he practiced out in the living room for hours.

 Last Fall we took a hike from the Squaw Peak parking lot along the ridge.  We had lunch and hiked about an hour and even helped Ian take his first #2 in the woods. That wasn't as fun as it sounds.

 In October we went with the Fitzgerald extended fam to a pumpkin patch for a hay ride and some cool pumpkin picking.

 Nolan is the blurry, curly kid at the top middle of the screen. He and Callan both played on basketball teams for the first time this year. They both played in the old Springville gym where two games go simultaneously and the noise reverberating in that room is enough to make you crazy. But the architecture is pretty cool, and the kids are cute.

 We all went as super heroes for Halloween.  It was our first big neighborhood activity and it was crazy. We gave out a ton of candy and covered about six square blocks in an hour of trick-or-treating.

 The funniest part about Halloween was how quickly the boys tired out.  I remember running from house to house with my brother Jason trying to get as much candy as we could, knocking on doors as late as 8:30pm, pushing the limits of people's patience--Jason even tried going out in two different costumes once in order to hit a house twice that was giving out full-sized candy bars.

Incidentally, Halloween was also the night that Nolan learned the truth about Santa Claus.  You see, Melissa had this idea about how to get the boys to give up some of their candy (to keep them from eating too much sugar, not so we could eat it).  She told the boys that if they left out their bag of candy at night the "great pumpkin" would exchange their bags of candy for a new cool toy.  Nolan thought this was a great idea, but when he asked if he could put his bag of candy out that night, I told him no, and when he asked why, I said, "Because the great pumpkin hasn't gone to the store yet to get the toys."  I didn't know it then, but later Nolan told me that it was this conversation that helped him figure out that Mom and Dad must be in on the whole Santa Claus thing.

 Nolan has also been playing the Violin a lot.. nd Callan's been playing the piano.  They practice most mornings before school and sometimes they even do it without complaining. Actually, Nolan almost never complains about practicing the violin. Callan, on the other hand,, likes to remind us on a regular basis that piano is not on his short list of favorite things to do.  Still, though, when he doesn't think we're paying attention, we do get to witness him actually having fun playing piano.

 Here's a shot of the boys reading together on the couch.  Ian likes to hold up books and flip the pages and "read" to himself the stories he has memorized.

 A few more shots of Nolan's basketball games.  Gotta get a better camera.  He is a diligent little ball of hustle though.  Lots of energy and lots of fun to watch.

 Ginny is all grown up now. This shot is a few months old.  We've got her fixed and groomed and she is starting to feel like a regular part of the family.  She lives to play fetch though and sometimes that gets a little old. She is very good at bringing a slobbery ball to me while I sit on the couch or at the table and placing the ball on my leg and holding it there until I take it from her and throw it.  We often toss it over the railing down the stairs to make her chase it downstairs and back up--the theory being, of course, that such exercise will tire her out, but I think we have yet to win that battle.

 We had a February birthday celebration for a variety of folks and the festivities included this carrot cake that ended up upside down in its stand in the back of the car. Next time we'll wait to frost it until we get to Salt lake.

The boys love Nana.

 Ian's favorite birthday present this year was his scooter. He's been asking for one for a really long time and now he can tear around the neighborhood with his brothers.

 On the first Monday of the Olympics we had a family olympics activity for Family Home Evening.  Here in this picture you can see our homemade ski ball game.  And that's Naoto, our Japanese exchange student.  he was very good.  He and his wife, Nozomi came just before Christmas. Nozomi went home in the end of January because she is pregnant and getting ready to have her baby, but Naoto will be here until the end of April.  We drive to school together every morning and he hangs out with the family a lot.  We've really enjoyed having him here. He is kind to the boys and very helpful around the house and a lot of fun to have around.  Its been good for the boys to get to know him, and his English has gotten much better in the past few months.  

We met Naoto years ago in Japan while we were teaching English. He was a teenager then and his family was in our church congregations there.  Flash forward seven years and he's a return missionary getting with a wife and baby on the way and he is getting ready to apply to BYU Hawaii. He was coming to Provo to study English for a semester, and his mother mentioned on facebook that they were looking for a place to stay, and so we offered to let them come here.  What a great decision!

 We all got "gold" medal chocolate coins for "winning" the family olympics. Way to go Melissa for planning such a great FHE.

 I went to Seattle in the beginning of March for a conference and to see my older sister Sherri. It was

And that brings us full circle to Callan's marble shooting at the cub scout activity.   It's been a busy few months and this only scratches the surface, but what do you do, right?

Batman taking a break for scripture study.

The first thing that Ian put on this morning was his Batman mask.

Springville Soccer 2013

When soccer started back in August, we were all shorts and bottled water and desperate for shade.  The boys sweat through their uniforms and stunk the car up in only the way a pair of sweaty soccer-playing kids can. And then fall came and week after week the weather got a bit cooler and the nights darker sooner and by this game in early October, we were all in long sleeves and blankets and knit caps and the sun went down so early we had to end a game early on account of the boys losing sight of the ball.

We didn't bring a camera to any of the early games, or any of the midseason games, or really any of the late season games, but we did, on the last day of the season, finally remember to take a few photographs.  A look at Nolan here will tell you how cold it was.

Nolan loves to play defense.  I helped coach a few games near the end of the season and while most kids begged to play offense, I had to convince Nolan to spend some time on that side of the ball.  Here are a few shots of him clearing the ball.

Some fun things about six-year-old soccer: They play in that liminal space between kick-and-chase and real soccer, which means they're learning positions like offense and defense, but if you tell them that defense plays down at the edge of the goalie box, they'll go stand on that line, but then they won't move from it to save their life, until the offense is practically upon them. It means that when they play goalie, they're likely to forget that they CAN use their hands, and when they're not playing goalie, they'll likely forget they CAN'T. And finally, it means they can't wait to go in when they're waiting their turn on the sidelines, but if they have to wait too long, they're likely to end up in a wrestling match behind the row of parents-in-chairs, or sitting on mom's lap under a blanket, or playing with one of the puppies tied to one of the parent-in-chairs. 

It was grand fun to watch Nolan.  Soccer is a no pressure sport in Springville (unlike Lubbock) and all the kids had a great time.  Nolan had  teammates from his school and from our ward and like every outdoor activity in Utah County, we had the big sky and the shrugging mountains as our backdrop.

Callan played third-forth grade soccer, which has transitioned completely into real soccer, and it was fun to watch him and his teammates pass and cross and attack like a real soccer team.  They play on a big field and get pretty tired by the end of the game, but they have a lot of fun.

Funny that there's not much to say in terms of cute little kid antics for a third-fourth grade soccer team. Except for the soccer-ball to the face that turns into an unintentional header or the over-excited coach/dad/mom who gets too into the game and starts hollering at their child/the coaches/the ref/ and has to go somewhere else to cool down, there really isn't much to chuckle at.  Plenty to smile at, and plenty of opportunity to feel proud of these kids who are playing their guts out and learning to cooperate and sweat through 50 minutes of soccer.  And also a little to feel sad, or at least introspective about--that the lack of antics means they're growing up, a bit, that they're starting to figuring the world out, and they're one season closer to not needing us on the sidelines all the time.

Not too close though.  He is only ten.

Some more photos from our summer trip

This is the prison where my grandfather ed franklin spent seven months for embezzlement.

We stopped at multomah falls on our way to oregon.

At the oregon coast. 
The boys first time at the ocean.

safeco field for a mariners game.

the chihuly museum with aunt sherri.

and back home with our new puppy. who buys a puppy on a road trip?

Camping in Hobble Creek

Photos from a quick summer overnighter to Hobble Creek Canyon. Camping, 15 minutes from our front door!

This beetle was hanging out by our picnic table.  He climbed up to the top of the branch and then just stayed there.

Roasting marshmallows for breakfast.

This was a good practice run for our two nights at Yellowstone.