33% of my life

Today is our anniversary. 10 years. That seemed amazing in and of itself but then I realized I have been married for 33% of my life! 10 more years and I will have been married for half of my life. How did we get from there

to here?

10 years of marriage

9 countries that we have dragged our family through.

8 moves starting in a studio apartment to our first home we have always made it our own.

7 pregnancies always filled with excitement and sometimes ending in heartbreak.

6 cars from the Honda Accord that brought us together to the Honda Odyssey which now can barely hold us we have good memories of getting from here to there.

5 children, they are amazing little people... a piece of me, a piece of you and a piece of heaven.

4 jobs... the telemarketing job that didn't go past training and Deloitte that has given us so many growing experiences our family has always made it through.

3 states. Okay, so I was having a hard time coming up with three but we have lived in Utah, Washington and California :)

2 people

1 Forever Family

I don't update this much so here are some pages I have made of what we have been up to since Penny was born.

We drove down to the beach for the day with the youth in our ward. It was beautiful and relaxing.
I made rainbow tutu's for all the girls at Adelaide's birthday party and I couldn't resist making one for Penny too. I made super hero capes for the two boys who came, I think their parents appreciated that I didn't make them wear tutu's (although Isaac keeps stealing Addie's and wearing it, Joseph says I'm not allowed to take pictures of that).

Right before Joseph had to head back to work after his 3 weeks of paternity leave we drove down to Monterey and went to the aquarium for the day.

I took the kids to a fun family water park for the day, Isaac loved this water slide and my water sling came in very handy for Penny.

Jocelyn and Solomon both had their first soccer game and are loving playing soccer. Jocelyn scored her first goal today, go Joc!

Solomon and I made his catamaran together for the Raingutter Regata and he got 2nd place!

She is still my biggest smiler and getting so big!

Reading Time

I know having a big family, there's less of me and Joseph to go around, but I always hope that the benefits of having lots of brothers and sisters balances that out. It's when I catch a moment like this that I am so grateful for each of my children and what they give to each other and learn from each other.

Jocelyn's learning to digital scrapbook

Jocelyn has been wanting to learn how to digital scrapbook. We had our first lesson in photoshop this morning and she wanted to post it online just like I do so I told her we could put it up on my blog. Jocelyn's first scrapbook page made all by herself :)

Something for Sunday

There is a primary goal for each of the kids to memorize all 13
Articles of Faith and when they do the presidency bakes them a pizza size cookie as a reward. My oldest two had them finished and passed off in no time. What has surprised me is how quickly Adelaide has memorized them. All I do is sing her whichever article she is working on as her good night song and she has already memorized up to number 11. What really surprised me though was when I heard Isaac in the other room singing the 10th Article of Faith as loud as he could. I have a video of him doing the whole thing but I thought this one was so funny because of how he got frustrated at the end when he messed up at the end. I think I will have to make him his own giant cookie since the challenge isn't for nursery kids :)

Penny for your thoughts

Here's my sweet little Penelope Kim, a.k.a Penny. She has been a really easy baby so far and is definitely loved and adored by all her brothers and sisters. I've been especially surprised and touched by how much Solomon loves to take care of her. He is always offering to hold her while I shower or do other things. Isaac is so funny he loves to ask me a series of questions:

Ike: Can Penny run?
Mom: No
Ike: Can Penny talk?
Mom: nope
Ike: Can penny eat?
Mom: no
Ike: Yes she can, from Mommy.


This is always followed by uncontrollable laughter (on his part) I'm not sure why, but he thinks he is hilarious.


Jocelyn loves to interpret different noises Penny makes as words. She will get all excited and insist that Penny just said, yeah, or sure. Yes, my baby is apparently very precocious.


I really enjoyed Joseph's 3 weeks of paternity leave. The first day I jokingly asked him what was for dinner and he followed through by cooking almost every single meal for the entire time. He also did all the laundry, by the end he was informing me that we really need to buy one of those whirlpool duet washer and dryer. I should have hit him while he was weak, now that I'm back on laundry duty I think our *need* for a super washer and dryer was converted to a *need* for a ping pong table. (which we bought last Saturday).


I should have had him do more of the cleaning around the house while he was home, because my *need* to hire my housecleaner back isn't impressing him thus far...


Here's a few more pictures/pages of my sweet Penny girl.


One week

Two Weeks

Three Weeks

Four weeks and really starting to smile :)

faith is like a little seed

I love having a garden. Sometimes I like the idea of a garden more than the daily watering/weeding/harvesting that it entails but I spend a lot of time planning and dreaming up what I want to plant in my little plot of earth. This year I have planned my biggest garden. Our house here has a huge garden shaped like an E and last year I only planted one section of it. This year I really wanted to fill it up. I got this great California organic seed catalogue and decided to try starting my garden from seeds for the first time. I have to say sticking these little seeds in the dirt I started panicking that I had just wasted a lot of money on seeds. I was really nervous that my little seeds would be duds and not sprout at all...

But they did! I just love to look at them. And hopefully thanks to the fact that my garden has automatic sprinklers installed they will continue to grow.

In my veggie garden I've got 5 different kinds of tomatoes, 4 different kinds of cherry tomatoes, crookneck squash, zucchini, watermelon, cantaloupe, edamame, rhubarb, scallions, 5 kinds of peppers, 3 kinds of cucumbers, pumpkins, celery, breadseed poppies, strawberry spinach and sunflowers.

I also planted a cutting flower garden with sweet pea, zinnia, cosmo, giant poppies, calendula, amaranth and a hummingbird mix.

No such thing as a free lunch?

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Baby Peanut

Joseph had told me he really wanted to wait and find out if we were having a boy or girl until the baby was born. I was opposed at first but as I started thinking about it, I liked the idea. It's the perfect time to try something new and who knows, it might be our last chance to be 'surprised' later rather than earlier.

Today I had my ultrasound appointment at 1:00 and last night Joseph changed his mind and said he couldn't stand to wait and so we should just find out. After some discussion I decided that we could and would wait until the birthday to see. My sister had told me it was a really neat experience to wait (she has waited for 2 out of her 6) and so now here I am post-ultrasound and nothing really to announce except my baby definitely has arms, legs, a heart, brain and supposedly kidneys although I couldn't really tell what the technician was showing there.

Joseph was sighting phantom 'boy parts' the entire time (umm, no Joseph that was the umbilical cord) so evidently he thinks it's a boy. It will be fun to argue, er I mean discuss boy names and girl names for the next 4 months or so. Until then I will call my baby... peanut.

When life gives you lemons...

I made lemon bars, lemon tarts, lemonade, lemon curd, lemon cookies, lemon poppyseed cake, lemon rolls, lemon parmesan fish and that's just the start!

We picked 400 lemons off of our tree and I've managed to give 150 away. This picture is how many we have left on the tree. I've gone from choosing recipes that look yummy to trying to find recipes that use up the most lemons (I'm sorry but 1 T. lemon juice only uses one lemon!) The other problem is that most lemon things are desserts. I tell you this is not a good situation for somebody trying NOT to gain 70 pounds.

I did discover that it is possible to can lemon curd so as soon as I borrow a canner (thanks for living so far away Amy!) I can really make a dent in my lemon supply. Now I only have one more problem...

What can I do with 400 oranges???

5 peas in my pod

I just wanted to share how excited I am that we will be adding one more to our family in July! We will find out in 3 weeks whether it is a boy or a girl (although Joseph is lobbying to wait and see). It took us a lot longer than we had originally planned but I am finally believing that it's real. Now I just have to convice Isaac that he is a big boy and not a baby anymore.