Mother's Day surprises are hard to pull off if you're married to Melissa.

For Mother's Day this year I watched the boys (including cousin Kimble) so that Melissa and her sister Amy could go out for the day--do some shopping, get lunch, see a movie, etc.

Of course, my real motivation for getting Melissa out of the house was so I could paint our bathroom, which while it is really lovely for lots of reasons, had a serious case of beige-itis.

 (If you've never heard of beige-itis, that's a disease in which a room in your home is so overwhelmingly washed out and boring that you find yourself inexplicably wanting to sit on the couch all day watching reruns of the home shopping network while painting hotel art and subsisting on a diet of wonderbread and mayonnaise sandwiches...Our house currently suffers from beige-itis in most every room).

So I asked Amy to keep Melissa out of the house for at least three and a half hours and as soon as they walked out the door I got to work.  The paint color is "Atmosphere" from Behr, and in addition to the paint, I got some white towels at Wal-Mart on clearance, and I cut a faux frame out of 1x3 stain-grade pine and glued it onto the mirror.  As pictured below, the frame has one coat of  gel stain on it, but that is all I had time for (I'll get the few coats on soon).  Eventually we'll swap out the light fixture, and maybe find some art to put up, but for now, this was change enough.  It's my favorite room in the house now.

 

The best part is, I got it all finished about thirty minutes before Melissa and Amy came home, and even after they arrived, it took Melissa nearly two hours to make her way back into our bedroom to see what I'd done (Amy kept trying to come up with ways to get her to go back into her room -- "Don't you want to change?" She'd say...).  

Of course Melissa knew I was up to something (she told Amy in the car, "I think Joey is building me something"), but she didn't catch on that I was painting the bathroom (which is a feat, considering three days earlier I'd had a subtle conversation with her about paint color as we sat at the computer looking at bathrooms on Pinterest. I almost painted it green, which I would have loved, but she would have hated).

Easter Ties and Easter Eggs

 Melissa bought us all Easter ties again this year, and the boys (I think for the first time ever, they were all really happy to get them, though Nolan and Ian have already broken their clip ons).

 On Easter Sunday we had dinner with my sister Krysti and her husband Ross and a bunch of their kids (they have 13 + some in-laws). The events included a brief devotional in which a few cousins  took turns giving part of the message about the meaning of Easter and then we watched brief video (#becauseofhim) and then an Easter Egg hunt for all the kids from Ian (4) to my twin nieces who are both 16.  There were 180 eggs, if I remember correctly--enough for twenty each.

Nolan was the first one finished!  It wasn't a race, but, of course, it was (you know how it is).

Capitol Reef

“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.” 

                                    --Edward Abbey

 

 So your wife has a broken collar bone, you students are all about to turn in their finals, and you just got word that Grandma might not make it through the weekend? What do you do? Well, if you are me and the boys and our exchange student, Naoto, you head to Capitol Reef for the weekend.  I don't think we would have gone if Naoto wasn't scheduled to go back to Japan the following week, but he was and we had a friend's cabin scheduled and the boys had been looking forward to the trip for weeks, so Melissa's sisters came to our house in Springville and stayed with her and the little cousins while we spent Thursday night - Saturday afternoon in red rock country.

 

  

Climbing on rocks.  This is what we did the whole weekend. Even when we were on a trail the boys stopped at every big rock or outcropping to climb up.  Only occasionally did they strike a pose.

 

We packed lunches each day and brought water and snacks and the boys carried their own gear and didn't complain a bit. (okay, maybe a tiny bit on the last hike when i wouldn't let the stop every two minutes to throw rocks, or climb higher up the hill off the trail after we'd already gone way off it and had to get back to the car, but really 959 of the trip was fuss free and we had a really great time).

“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break” --Edward Abbey

 

 We had pancakes and sausage for breakfast on Friday morning and we let the boys stay up crazy late both nights watching movies and eating junk (isn't that what vacation is for?). 

 On Friday we did a two two-mile hikes and on Saturday we did another two-mile hike. We hiked slot canyons and red rock ridges and saw petraglyphs and pioneer registers (and some rock graffiti, including one lady who carved her first and last name into the stone, along with the date--isn't that kind of like tagging your name on the side of a building?  Sure makes it easy for the authorities to track you down).

 You can't see Nolan very well in this picture, but those are his legs up in the pocket of the rock.

 

There is a certain something about red rock country that is hard to get anywhere else--a certain awareness of the age of things...of the way time builds upon itself one thin layer at a time...of the way water and wind heat and cold can whip through a valley and crumble an entire mountain.

In red rock country, as in the rest of the world, all things are working themselves to dust, but the difference is, in red rock country there's no putting on airs. The world is crumbling around itself, and that is okay. The sage brush withers, an arch falls under its own weight, the canyon walls slip slowly into rubble, and a pair of brothers step down a trail together, taking the lead from their dad, kicking rocks as they go, wearing down their own channel, slowly, in the earth. 

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.