A new calling

I just got back from  an interview with the bishop where a new calling was extended to me, Nursery Leader. Of course I accepted, but I almost cried right there in the bishop's office, and it wasn't tears of joy. See, I have plenty of experience in the nursery since there was never a reliable nursery teacher in our previous Spanish Branch ever since my first born turned 18 months and it was time for her to be in the nursery, until the time we left ( a couple months ago) when my second born was already more than 2 years old. So I have been both my kids unofficial nursery teacher. At least now I will have the official title to be my own kid's nursery teacher. This was one of the reason's we made the move into the English ward. I needed some adult time and a class where I would acually be the one learning and being taught to. I think there's a scripture that says, "El  Señor no sera burlado" or "The Lord will not be mocked" and I am finding that this pretty much applies here. I tried to run from it, only to come back to same exact thing. Heavenly Father must be trying to teach me something.

I shared the news with Jocie when I got home and she was super excited "You are my teacher!" she yelled. She gave me a big hug and then said "You are going to give me snacks!" I couldn't help but smile and cry a little more, but this time they were tears of joy.

Early Valentine's surprises

Today I got a very pleasant surprise delivered to my door, roses and chocolates! As previously divulged by my 4 year old. Really, what was daddy thinking trusting his Valentines secret plan to her? So with that, I knew what to expect, but it still caught me by surprise when they came to my door, in a box. The girls could see and hear my excitement that they too jumped and giggled as I opened the box to reveal my surprise. Naomi asked "Mom, who sent you this!?" I said "Daddy, isn't he nice?" to which she answered "Yep. He must love you!"  Yes, he does. He loves me. I know sometimes it's not easy to love me, but he still does. I love him too.

Later in the day, there came another surprise package in the mail. This time for the girls from their grandpa. I wish I'd had a camera to record their reaction. They were so excited about it, they could not believe it. Jocie had just had a melt down at the store over a little box of candy hearts that I did not buy her, and now she was getting her wish.

Let the sugar overload begin! Happy Valentines!

"Mom, where is Jesus?"

I wish I had a pen and paper on hand every single minute of the day, or a memory that could remember all the cute, funny, smart things my kids say. I'm always trying to keep a mental note of them for the purpose of writting them down later at the end of the day, but it never happens and then I forget. This is to precious I could not forget.

Today as we were driving around driving errands, we passed a pretty ugly car accident site. The girls, specially Naomi could not help but notice and naturally asking questions. First she asked: Mom, what happened? Why are the firefighters here? I explained the best I could for a 4 year old to understand and some of it sounded like "There's been an accident and sometimes people get hurt and the firefighters are here to help those people" kind of thing, and then she asked,  "Mom, where is Jesus?" and I answered "Jesus is in Heaven" and she said "Jesus can help those people. He can heal them! Why is he not coming down?" ...and my eyes got all watery as I tried to think of the right words to say. What do you say? This was the best I could come up with: "If you say a prayer for those people Jesus can help heal them. Do you want to say a prayer?" and then she said "No". I think she was a little dissapointed with my answer. What kind of answer is that for someone who believes Jesus is real as to come down from Heaven to heal someone on the spot. I wish I could have that kind of faith. I hope I didn't just destroy it.

A silly old witch.

Just a while ago the girls and I were sitting at the table eating lunch, and this is what happend:

Naomi: Jocie do you want to hear a story?
Jocie: uh-hu!
Naomi: Once upon a time, there was a silly old witch that didn't eat healthy snacks so she died, but then she ate Jocie and she lived happily ever after and  she went to heaven and sat in Jesus chair. The end! That was a silly old witch!

Life with this two little ones is never boring.

My new running blog

I just started a new running blog for myself. I will be able to keep track of my running progress and other health and fitness related stuff separate from our family's blog. Here's the link if you are interested in hearing about running stuff.

"Group Hug!"

The missionaries came over for dinner yesterday and at the end, as usual, they shared a scripture and a prayer with us. At the end of the prayer Naomi yelled out "Group Hug!" Which left the missionaries a bit confused. Aaron and I broke down laughing and then had to explain to them that is actually what we do after our family prayers. The girls yell out "Group Hug!" and Aaron scoops them up and squeezes them hard. They girls love this and they look forward to family prayer and "Group Hugs." The missionaries, in the other hand, were happy to pass on the group hug.

Naomi's dance recital

Naomi loves to dance. In fact, I think she is very in touch with her art/creative instincts. I signed her up for a morning parent -child dance class when she was two, it gave us something to do. When she turned three she was advanced to the creative dance class group. Then we took a break from dancing this past summer until she asked me to take her back to dance class in the fall. We signed her up , this time during the evening since she started preschool this year. A few months ago I took the girls to see Ballet West during a ring around the roses performance of the Sleeping Beauty. Naomi was able to go on stage to learn some tricks from the experts themselves. She was very excited then. She asked for ballerina shoes this for Christmas. Yesterday she performed in her first dance recital. She counted down the days and of course was very excited. The choreography was everywhere and nowhere at the same time, but I believe everyone in the audience was able to see past and I'm sure everyone had as big a smile as the one on my face the whole time. Naomi was the cutest thing out there. I love my little dancing girl and I am so very proud of her and her courage to be up in that stage dancing her little heart out.

She saw my family seating up on the front row and ran to them in the middle of the performance.

She was very excited to see grandma.

During class the teacher told them to swing the bear around. This is her adding her little touch to "swinging" the bear around.

They loved the bubbles. She actually tried to catch some with her tongue.

Good toe pointing!

Naomi feels the music.

During the finale she jumped in and improvised a solo of her own.

during her solo

and more solo...

Done.

Feliz Navidad!

The cross training isn't going good. I have practically not made any of them. I have been running and will be taking Christmas week off and then resume running the week after Christmas kicking off our Marathon training schedule!

I am hoping Santa will register me for the race (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), then I will be a happy girl Christmas morning.

Anyway, enough of that!

We are enjoying this season I think more this year than the previous years since we started our little family. We are at a place where things seem to be a little bit less chaotic in a sense, well at least it feels that way for me being an off pregnancy-baby-caring year, no potty training or caring a diaper bag and a stroller around with me every where I go, yes Jocie gets to walk a lot and if she gets tired I can carry her for a few minutes, I rather this than carrying a stroller. I like to keep things simple, so simple that when my make up bag went missing I decided not to buy anymore make up, one less thing for me to worry about! Maybe when Naomi is dressing herself I will take back make up....by then I might be pregnant again.... so never mind. Same thing with my cell phone, after it magically disappeared and didn't show up for weeks I opted not to buy a new one and connected our land line instead, no calls while driving and no frantic searches for the cell phone because baby miss placed it for the hundred time.

Mmmm...how did I go off about that when I inteded for this to be a recap of our holiday season? I think I need to blog more often.

Anyway here's what we have been up to:



The girls get so excited to see snow fall and they can hardly wait to go outside and play. It takes for ever to dress them up , but it's worth it at the end they love it and have so much fun in it, makes me wish I was a kid again.



We set up our Christmas tree the morning after thansgiving. I wish I had taken more picture, but I was busy helping the girls, this was the part when Aaron stepped in.

We spent Thanksgiving with both our families. In the morning we went over to my parents and helped with the cooking and then headed over to Aaron's family's to help with the eating :)

This is Aaron's twin brother Joel. Jocie loved going around the room taking picture with everyone. She is such a poser. CHEESE!

This is Aaron's older brother. Jocie insited to take a picture with him too.

Here we are, the night after Thanksgiving at Temple Square for the lighting on of the Christmas lights. We rode trax and got there late and did not see them all go on at the same time, but it was nice anyway. The girls loved all the lights. Jocie kept pointing and saying "I see more, I see more!" that is lights.

And last but not least I took the girls for a visit with Santa. Naomi is so excited about the whole Santa deal this year. Aaron has taken advantage of that and has been bribing her with the whole naughty and nice list. He tells her he has his number and is going to call him when she is acting up, she cries uncontrollably. Aaron thinks it's funny, I think it's cruel. Anyway, we got there and Naomi went off about her Christmas list, Jocie did not know what to do, she wasn't so sure about sitting on his lap. I think she would have cried have I not jumped in to tell her he was going to bring her a new tea party set for Christmas. Still she wasn't sure. You can tell in this picture.

The girls are excited about Christmas morning. Naomi wants to bake cookies to leave for Santa. Aaron and I are excited about the tamales we get to make and eat! Haha! and of course ecxited to get to see our little ones on Christmas morning. I think Christmas gains it's magic back from when you were a kid after having your own children.

Hope you are all having a wonderful Season. Feliz Navidad!

Still working on it

Today for cross-training I walked, pushed the stroller with two very chunky babies in it. We walked for about 15 to our friend's house and then back for another 15 mins. There! Walking is a form of exercise and valid as cross-training. YAY!

Ran 4 miles on Thursday and tomorrow we'll be running 6 miles. Three more weeks and we start our Marathon training!

Motivation tactic

So I'm trying something new to stay commited and motivated to cross train on my days off from running. When I trained for my first 5K last year it helped me blogging about it here. It was kind of having virtual running buddies to be accountable to. This helped me get over the hump of making running into a habit, now I think I am passed that point and can say that waking up early on certain days out of the week to go running has turned into a routine. However, this is not the case when it comes to crosstraining. I've had a hard time stablishing a routine to do any type of exercise that is not running. Why? I don't know. Why would running in the dark and cold weather be more appealing to me than working out in the warmth and convinience of my own living room? I don't know. Well to make a long story short. I going to start blogging about it, this time on my own blog, and hopefully it will help me now like it did then.

Today is Monday, a crosstraining day and I did nothing. It would be nice to write off grocery shoping, cleaning and vaccuming, making dinner and a total of about 1 hr and 45 mins worth of driving as crosstraining. That's not to mention the melt down Jocie had today because she did not want to go down for a nap. I wonder how many calories I burned just there. Well all of those went down the drain when I ate that piece of brownie Aaron made for after FHE. Good news are I get to burn some of those tomorrow morning!

Anyway, Beth and I are getting closer to kicking off our Marathon trainning in just a few weeks! I'm excited!

What do you do to stay motivated on reaching your health/fitness goals?