LDS Pilgrimage

So I'm not gonna lie, this post probably won't be very funny, and I know that's why everyone reads this blog. I admit it's funny to hear about how I mess up being a stay at home dad, and my successes, and Mollie..... well everything about Mollie, she's just funny, Lukas' obsession with sports, spiderman, and now Missionaries, and anger management with Nikki. But today it's pretty much all about me, well my photography, and my job. I have a great job that allows me to travel quite a bit and lets me see a lot of the country, and because of this I get to see some really cool church (LDS) history sites.

Now if you happen to not be familiar with the LDS faith and it's history, these images will probably be just a little bit confusing, and wondering specifically "Why?" In the LDS culture, there are several places where the Saints (That's what we call ourselves) have lived and then moved on afterwards, eventually settling in Salt Lake City.

To make things a little clearer, think of Salt Lake City as an LDS Mecca, and these other sites as pilgrimage trails. Well in the last two weeks I got to go to 2 of these,  and they're pretty big as far as LDS Pilgrimage locations go. I hit up Kirtland, AND Nauvoo within a week of each other. While I was at Kirtland the missionaries there said all I need now is to get to Palmyra within the year and I'll be good.

It was a real great experience, looking at the history of the church and seeing what used to be and what could have been. Just think what would have happened if the LDS church had not been kicked out of all these locations and just gathered all the Saints there? I mean seriously there was a lot of people in these cities at the time, and now they only have populations of less than a thousand.

When I was walking through Nauvoo specifically, I felt a palpable sadness. Not that the people were sad, but it was kind of like thinking back on playing football, remembering how happy you were playing it, and then in that same moment, knowing that you will NEVER play football again (sorry it's the best analogy I got, go ahead and substitute the word football for something else like running or monopoly).

Nauvoo, this is the site that greeted me as I came into the town. I had a great opportunity to do a temple session as well. 

Kirtland Ohio, The Newell K Whitney Store, Joseph and Emma Smith lived here for a while, school of the prophets was here, and we received the Word of Wisdom.

N. K. Whitney Store Baskets

I'd like to say this is an original book of commandments (what is now the Doctrine and Covenants) but it's just a prop.

The table is an original piece of furniture from the house.

Corn/Bowl

The Kirtland Temple, currently owned by the Community of Christ.

Kirtland Temple

Flowers outside the Nauvoo Temple.

Joseph and Hyrum Smith.

Nikki and the guitar

Nikki and Lukas were bored one day, well pretty much everyday. If they don't have anything to do for five minutes they decide it's time to bug dad until he yells. SO, the other day Nikki was flipping through Netflix and she wanted to watch the Katy Perry documentary. I thought about it for a minute while it was loading (I initially said yes) but then I told her it probably isn't a good show for her to watch (She is only 7 and I don't think we need to sexualize our kids any earlier). 

So for an alternative (she still wanted to watch a music show) we turned on Taylor Swift documentary. The other option was the Justin Bieber movie or Spice World, both of which will make anyone vomit (trust me, I sat through all of spice world as a teenager, and I refuse to let Nikki watch Justin Bieber, or Barney). Within five minutes Nikki starts asking questions, such as "Is she famous? Is she really playing that guitar, did she write all those songs? How much money does she make?"  You see Nikki has this fascination with being famous. She really, REALLY wants to be famous. I'm not sure if it's just famous but I think she wants to be rich as well.  Yeah I know, I have some work cut out for me as a father to teach her the truth about happiness, but this thing got her interested in music. She asked about guitars, because she saw Ms Taylor Swift playing the guitar, a sparkly one. I told her that I had one (not a sparkly one, just a regular guitar) and from then on there was no quiet in the house. Every five minutes she kept asking me to go to the storage unit and get the guitar. Lukas didn't know what she was talking about, but when I finally brought home the guitar, he understood, and wanted one too.

Then she wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Strike that. She didn't want to learn, she just wanted to play it. When I started to teach her about the basics of the guitar, like frets, strings, and how to hold the thing, she just said "No dad, I just want to learn how to play the guitar, I don't need all this."  Well sorry. 

I think that she had this idea that by just holding the guitar she would magically transform into a Taylor Swift-esque superstar without doing any work whatsoever. She was mistaken. I tried and I tried and she finally just took the guitar in her room to learn by herself to play. 

Today (Sunday, three days later) she came to me and wanted to learn. The novelty had worn off a little bit, and she realized that in order to make something sound good, she needed to learn something. It's like on Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure at the very end when the Wild Stallions are trying to decide how to get better. "Maybe it's time we get Eddie Van Halen?-Bill, Maybe It's time we learned how to play?-Ted." Both nod heads. Touching moment really. So today I taught her the strings, frets, and the first little bit of Mary had a little lamb. She's getting there, and she plays everything by ear (like her dad) but she is really getting interested in Music. If it keeps up Kara and I have talked about getting her lessons and a guitar that actually fits her (she has to play this one hawaiian style). 

I did look up how much a sparkly guitar was, and I think I'm just going to take the one that we have and get some glue and sparkles. Much easier.

So if any of you know any guitar teachers in the area, please let me know.

Working from home?

What a great idea. I'll bet the majority of you think "Working from home would be so great, no commute, I can see my family more, and I can get so much work done." I hate to break it to ya, but that's a big fat LIE.

So that's what I do most of the time. For so long I would commute to a job, work at the job, then commute home. I kept thinking that working from home would be so great.

I wish I had an office to go to.

Seriously some days I just want to go to the office, that magic place where I can actually get some work done in a timely manner.

Lets take an example. I work using the program Illustrator, it's basically a drawing program. I receive work orders through my e-mail that are very specific so I have to reference them back and forth between my mail program and Illustrator and to make things smoother I use keyboard shortcuts (you'll understand why I am giving all this background info in a minute).

So here it goes:

E-mail comes in

Check e-mail

"Dad Lukas hit me!"

Resolve issue.

Resume e-mail checking,

"Dad when can we go outside?" (Nikki)
"I wanna go outside too!" (Lukas)
"me toooo!" (that's Mollie)
"No It's quiet time" (That's me)

Make a quarter turn towards my computer screen

"But I don't want to be quiet" (Obviously)

Ignore.

"Dad I want a snack." (Lukas)
"We just ate Lunch" (Well we did, you just looked at it and said it was yucky)
"I'm still hungry"
"Eat your lunch it's still there on the table" (Note to self, do dishes before Kara is coherent enough to care, but not early enough that it has a chance to get messy again so I have to clean it twice.)

Click on Illustrator icon

"MOLLIE WHAT THE..(Insert Mollie shenanigan here)"  (Swear words in my head)

Stand up, clean up whatever it was that Mollie was ruining. Check clock, if it's anywhere close to afternoon, guess what, Mollie is getting a nap.

11:45, close enough.

Turn on netflix for the Kids.

Sit down in chair.

"Dad the Wii isn't working."
"Why do you want the Wii?"
"For Netflix"
"Use the Roku"
"We can't find the remote." (Nikki)
"Is it in your room? You usually take it in there to prevent Lukas from changing shows and having any decision making power ever." (Me)

"Will you help me find it?"
"No"

Begin re-reading e-mail

"I NEED TO GO POTTY!" (Lukas)
panic rush to the bathroom.
"I'm done!" (translation, come wipe my butt please!)
"Did you poop?"
"No"
"Then you know what to do"
"But I need help"
"No you don't"

Begin again to re-read e-mail.
Select file to open.

"I need a baked potato from Wendy's" (Kara)
"Now?"
"Oh yeah, now."
"Ok, I'll be right back."
"Can you take the kids?"
Swearing in my head that I now have to find shoes.
"Sure!" (me wondering if all the fun we had making the baby was worth this.......... Yep!)

Go to Wendy's.
Return from Wendy's.

Mollie is UP
Mollie is in my chair.
Mollie is typing something.... all over the file that I was working with. She has also e-mailed my boss a message of pure gibberish. Boss thinks I am having a stroke and felt like I needed to e-mail it Monty Python Style. "He must have died while carving it." -Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now have to start all over again.
Not a huge problem because I only got past three steps anyway.

It's now 5:00 and the workday is over. Whew.
Wow working from home is so.......relaxing!

School Shopping

The summer is winding down. The days are getting shorter, the afternoon's a little lazier, and sound of children's laughter will soon be replaced by the ringing of the school bell.

And we are approaching "The Most Wonderful Time.... of the Year!" No it's not Christmas, it's FOOTBALL SEASON! I like to commemorate this holiday by sending the children to learning activities for about 9 hours a day, and in order to do this they need some type of outfitting. Luckily the professional shopper is still available to help out in this department, before she heads into her harriest semester ever and I lose her to the clutches of that monster, Academia. 

Basically this next semester Kara is taking on a huge workload and will also be a TA (for which she gets paid, pretty excited for that) but that also means that even when she is home, she won't be home, because she will be studying and non-responsive to anything I do, unless I do something wrong, which will probably happen. It's probably going to be a ploy on my part to just get attention. I'm just warning you that weird stuff is going to happen this semester, because it will basically be me and Mollie, and Mollie has some crazy ideas when it comes to fun. 

Oh yeah, that reminds me, Lukas is starting pre-school too. So with the new school year, Kara is at Grad School, Nikki is in Elementary, Lukas is in Pre-school, and Mollie and I will have some uber-bonding experiences. I just hope she doesn't decide to give up on naps, or learns how to take off her diaper (Mollie, not Nikki or Kara). 

So my little dude is so excited to start pre-school. Today we went to the Disney store and bought him a backpack, because what better place to buy a backpack than the company that embraces capitalism at it's finest, DISNEY! Actually we weren't planning on getting him one there, but it was only twelve bucks, spiderman, and it would save us a trip later. So we got it, and as soon as we bought it for Lukas, Nikki immediately feels that she deserves something too. She begins picking out comparable items in price and keeps asking 

"Can I have this?"

 I respond with a question, "Did you bring your money?"

"But Dad Lukas got something!"

 She has conveniently forgotten that just two days ago we purchased a brand new backpack, lunch box and shoes for her, amidst the exact same cries emanating from Lukas, except Lukas said ,

"Dad go home and get some money so you can buy me something."

We should have never bought them anything.... ever.

How would that be, if you just bought your kids the bare essentials (which is probably what we can afford right now). What if they had to make their own toys, or actually keep their old toys nice? What would the world come to? This is what I usually think about every time we do Christmas or Birthday shopping. Since we live in such a small apartment right now I mostly think 

"Where are we going to put this crap?"

I can't really use the excuse "When I was a kid I had ONE TOY and it was missing an arm, and I fixed it so I could play with it for twelve years. And my room was immaculate, I always did my homework in class, I scored the winning touchdown, girls thought I was hot, and my feet don't smell" 

which I know is completely bogus because I had a ton of toys and my feet STINK!

So we continually buy our kids stuff, but with school stuff at least it's stuff that they have already worn out the previous year so it NEEDS to be replaced. I don't know if that makes me feel better or not. I wonder if I can use that excuse "This television is the one I had last year and so I need a new one." For College, I used the same three backpacks over and over. I actually used one and the other two were just messenger bags that I bought when I wanted to be hip, but they could only hold like two books. As an art major you need to bring whole trunk of supplies with you, so I bought a backpack at the gap for $10.

Man I am really off on a tangent tonight. Probably because this blog post was interrupted halfway (guess where it was). So we went shopping for backpacks for Nikki and Mollie wanted one too. I know it's always Mollie who is usually the instigator, but.....she is.  Here is the footage.

You may ask yourself why I am filming this instead of stopping her. The answer to that is this is the third time she has done this, and the first two parenting techniques did not work, so I decided to embrace my parenting fail.

So I decided to be a good parent and put Mollie back in her stroller, and little miss Hairy Houdini escaped, and this is my attempt to keep her in the stroller. As you can see she is not very happy with me.

And here we are at the Disney store where she pulls the same thing again. Obviously my parenting techniques really work.

Hey guess what?

I used a question mark at the end because I am not sure how to properly word this. You would think I would be better at this because I've done it three times already. I usually try and come up with something really cool to announce it and we succeeded pretty well for the first two, but have kind of run out of ideas since number three. Seriously, first one we wrote a letter that we read at thanksgiving basically making fun of everyone in the family, second we had Nikki announce it via our other blog that has since gone private so we can write about all of the craziness in our lives in private and not worry about offending people  (I'm not even invited to that one so don't feel bad if you can't read it anymore. My wife changed the password the other day and I forgot she did and I thought she was trying to hide a third family or something. She already has a second and I'm ok with that, because it helps to have another breadwinner with how much food Mollie likes to waste).

If you haven't figured it out by now, Kara and I have decided that we make way too much money and that we should give some of it to the hospital because hospitals are in need of money all the time. We're planning on donating it over the next nine/eight months and then continue these generous donations for several more years afterwards. But don't worry, we're not coming away empty handed. No sir/madam. In exchange we get a two night stay at the hospital (maybe three if we're lucky), unlimited ice in a cup, night gown laundering service (only if you use their nightgowns, which I'm gonna), cable television with a speaker that comes out of your remote, and a tax write off that expires in 18-24 years. 

We've also been thinking that we have Wayyyyy too much space in our spacious 750 sq apartment.

So here's the real story. A few months ago I felt like someone was missing from our family. I talked to Kara about it and she felt the same way.  We prayed about it (man did we ever pray about this one) and we knew that it was our choice as to what would happen ( Heavenly Father does that to us a lot, makes us make our own decisions and be grown ups, except for our career path for some strange reason). We decided that we needed this child in our family and that he was a part of it just like Lukas and Mollie and Nikki, and that it wouldn't be the same without him.

So we made the decision, and now we ( actually mainly Kara, my part was over four weeks ago, now I'm basically a food delivery guy) are four weeks into another huge medical bill. Welcome to the family little person.