Molly's Birthday!

It was Molly's 30th Birthday last Monday. So I knew this party had to be HUGE! Well we normally we have pizza and soda and a cake for a party so I thought I had better up the ante a bit. I bought streamers and balloons and a silvery shiny happy birthday banner to go with the pizza and soda and cake. I put up the banner before I left for work in the morning so she could see that much when she woke up. She loved it! Then she had to be in Salt Lake that afternoon for an ultrasound to verify that our baby didn't have brain problems (and luckily it didn't - which is good because it would have been a bad birthday present for her to find out otherwise). So after the ultrasound we went to her favorite restaurant, The Olive Garden, and ate lunch. It was delicious. Then we found out her parents where in town and coming to visit us in the evening so that was fun news. When I got home from work I sent her to her room so I could wrap the presents with the kids. And we got to work decorating the place. In addition to the streamers and balloons, I also bought a shiny red plastic tablecloth and pink plates and little celebration blower things. She came out when we were done and thought it was great. I know it seems dumb, but it is a lot more than we usually do for a birthday so I think it made her feel nice. Here is Luke pointing out the obvious:
We had a great time. We ate pizza and drank soda and Molly wanted cheesecake for her cake so she found a recipe online for a white-chocolate raspberry cheesecake that looked delicious so she decided she wanted to make that. It turned out great. I am not a cheesecake lover, but I loved it. Maybe she will post the recipe. And I bought candles that said "sparklers" on them so I thought that would be fun too. After I lit them they looked like sparklers. And an added bonus was that they were the kind that came back after she blew them out so Luke loved that. And he got to help blow them out. I don't think anyone minded having his spit all over the cake either. Here is a picture of the birthday girl and her cake.

Here is a picture of the Larsen grandparents and Zoe and Lila.
It was a great time. Even though there was no piñata I think it was a birthday to remember.

He can Dance if he wants to

This is video that Zoe took during dinner one night when Luke just felt like dancing. We have always taught them that when you get the urge to dance it is unhealthy to suppress it. So even though there was no music or beat going on, he felt the inner music and just stood up and danced. That's my boy.

Accepted

Well it is official. I have been accepted to the graduate program in Civil Engineering at the University of Utah. I feel like I should learn some more about structural engineering and thought school would be a good place to do that. So I start classes in January (the 12th) and I will try to take two classes a semester for the next five semesters and get my Masters degree. Seems simple enough. Hopefully I can last. When I was in school before it was pretty hectic and Molly hated it and I never saw the kids and I was always tired. But I like school and I like learning. Hopefully it won't be as bad this time. When I was in school before I was taking 4 or 5 classes a semester and trying to fit 40 hours of work in after school. So that made for late nights. Now I am going to try to only have two nights a week where I get home only about 45 minutes later than usual. And I can do my homework after the kids go to bed. So I think it will be much better. If not, I may have to scale it back to one class a semester. But I am excited to get started on it. I am signed up for Concrete Design II and Foundation Design this semester. I am hoping that now that I have done real work in these subjects that it will be easier than going into the classes cold, but I could be way off. A lot of classes in college have nothing to do with standard design practices unfortunately and only deal with the theoretical. But I will soon find out. If you see Molly alone and with a desperate look in her eye, you will know that things aren't going as well as I had hoped.

High School Musical

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

This one is for my sister Shelli, who went to see High School Musical 3 on opening night and loved it.

(the real) Halloween 2008

Well Halloween was a success this year. If you call about 13 lbs of candy a success. I do. Since we only bought four pounds of candy and had at least half of that left at the end of the night, plus the 13lbs or so that the kids brought home. Maybe Lila will finally put on a little weight this year. The kids wore the same costumes that they wore for the trunk-or-treat. Zoe was a veterinarian, Lila was a witch, Leisel was a ballerina, and Luke was a turtle. Here is a couple pictures. I couldn't get them all together for one shot so I had to do two. The first is Luke, Leisel, and Lila. The second is Leisel, Zoe, and Lila.
And here are some pumpkins that the kids carved. They each got to design and carve their own which they loved. The top left is Zoe's, top right is Lila's, bottom left is Leisel's, bottom right is Luke's. I helped Luke with his but the girls mostly did their own. I even made them clean out the pumpkin innards themselves (mostly). I forgot to take a picture of them right after they were carved so this is after a few warm days and they have started to kind of slump a bit. And Luke liked to roll his around the yard so his is pretty beat up looking. Good times, good times.


Here is me. Well this is the me I always wanted to be anyway: long flowing hair and no pesky glasses. It is the non-balding, non-glasses wearing me. If I had hair I would grow it long and dye it black and wear it rocker style. Maybe. A guy can dream you know.

Trunk-or-Treat

Does anyone else hate trunk-or-treating? For those that might not know what that is, trunk-or-treating is when a neighborhood or church group gets together and everyone parks their cars in a parking lot or central location and people are dishing out candy to the kids from their trunks. I assume it was originally intended to be a safe alternative to trick-or-treating with the assumption that you knew and trusted everyone involved in the trunk-or-treating. Of course like a lot of other holiday traditions it has been corrupted. Halloween is a fun holiday I think. I mean you get to go out all dressed up as whatever you want to be and people give you free candy. It's a great idea. I do get sick of finding half sucked suckers stuck to the sofa and the carpet and the back of Lila's hair. And I get sick of the kids asking me if they can have some more candy (because I take their bags and only let them have some when I feel like it). But overall, it is fun. But then, someone has the crazy idea that they should organize a trunk-or-treat. Well fine, its quicker, you get just as much candy, and it could possibly be safer. Oh, but wait. There's a catch. It turns out that this person with the idea to do some trunk-or-treating isn't the only one to have the idea. So they want to meet at the church parking lot, but someone else has already reserved the church parking lot for halloween night. So this person thinks, well that's ok, (and here is were they lose my support) we'll just do it on a different night. What? Halloween on October 25th? That is what happened to me. They wanted me to get my kids in costume and buy halloween candy a week before halloween. Now I know some people have their kids costumes all ready weeks in advance and have the candy bought in plenty of time. But not us. We usually go out and buy the candy halloween day and put the finishing touches on the costumes a few minutes before we go out the door on halloween. So to ask me to have all of that done a week early is asking a lot. And to ask me to repeat it all again the next week is really pushing it. I like candy. And my kids like candy. But we really don't need to have two halloweens a year. And you know that just because we did trunk-or-treating early they will still want to go trick or treating on halloween. So when we heard about the trunk-or-treating taking place a week before halloween Molly and I decided to boycott it.

BUT the day of the trunk-or-treating came and Molly was out of town and all the kids in the neighborhood were getting their costumes on and taunting my kids because I told them they weren't going and I just caved in and said, "Fine we can go." Plus they were having free dinner at the church before the trunk-or-treating and I didn't feel like cooking. But then of course I had to scramble for some costumes.

Zoe wanted to be a veterinarian and Molly had bought some fabric with some animals on it and was going to make her a scrub shirt. But of course she had not yet because we still had like a week left until halloween. Lila was going to be a ghost because Zoe was a ghost a few years ago and we already had the sheet with the hole cut out for the head. But when Lila brought it to me it was ripped. Leisel was going to be a princess or a ballerina which is easy because they have a huge dress-up bucket with a couple dozen princess or ballerina costumes. And we had bought Luke a sword and shield and helmet to be a roman warrior when we went to Vegas last March, but we didn't know what we were going to have him wear with it yet. So I had to find something for Zoe, Lila, and Luke. Well, I decided that I could handle making some scrubs for Zoe. They seemed pretty simple and I had an example of some (in Molly's size anyway). So I got one of Zoe's shirt to get the size in the right range and got Molly's scrubs to see what they looked like and started cutting out some fabric. It turns out that I was right. They weren't so complicated. Well actually I only made a shirt. It did take about three hours from start to finish though. But it looked ok to me. Good enough for a halloween costume anyway. Zoe took a picture of me sewing.
Then I found a box with more old halloween costumes in it and found a witch costume that would fit Lila and a turtle costume that would fit Luke. So we were all ready to go. Oh except Leisel, who had been wearing the ballerina outfit that she wanted to wear, peed in her costume. So I had to hand wash that and put it in for a speed dry. But then we were all ready. Oh, except I didn't have any candy. So we all went to the store and I bought three bags of candy hoping that would be enough. It wasn't. But I didn't feel too bad. I know the little buggers who missed out at the trunk-or-treat would be at my house in another few days anyway on the real halloween. Well the kids had a good time and got loads of candy. I didn't get a picture of them before we left so all I have is this picture of them looking all tired and scraggly looking afterwords. Oh well.

First Snow In Tooele 2008

Well it snowed for the first time a couple weeks ago. I think it was the weekend of the 11th, but I could be wrong. The snow didn't last long (it was all melted by noon) but it was a mad rush in the morning when the kids woke up and saw snow outside. They were all rushing around trying to find their coats and gloves and boots. So me and the kids went out and had some fun. At first Zoe didn't want to go out, but once she saw all of us having a good time she came out. The kids love jumping on the trampoline with snow on it. They started throwing snow at me so pretty soon it was a big snowball fight, me against the four of them. I think I won.Luke kept falling over and his boots kept coming off. He would then take his gloves off to try to put his boots back on and after failing at that he wouldn't be able to get his gloves back on either. So pretty soon he had cold hands and feet. But he didn't want to come in. Lila and Luke and I made a snow man and put it up on the porch so that it would be out of the sun and last a little longer. I think it lasted all day Saturday and most of Sunday before it was just a lump of snow. We used baby carrots for the face.


The first snow is usually the funnest snow. But really any time the kids can convince me to go and play with them in the snow it turns out pretty fun. And of course anytime we go out in the snow, we have to have hot chocolate when we come back in. Sometimes that's the best part

Perfect Use for a Polly Pocket House

Luke is a boy. A boy with three older sisters. A boy who is forced to live with the the hand-me-down toys of three older sisters. Sure he gets some of his own toys but the math kind of makes it impossible for the number of "boy" toys to be balanced by the number of "girl" toys based on his new arrival to the scene and the shear number of previous girl birthdays etc. Not that we much worry about what is a boy thing or a girl thing in our house. I put him in pink hand-me-down pajamas more often than not and he has gotten his own dolls for Christmas before because he likes them. But there is just something inside his little boy body that doesn't quite find the same satisfaction with the girl toys that it does with the boy toys. He likes cars and balls and legos. You would think that with about a million barbies laying around he could get used to playing with them. And he does sometimes. But he prefers the cars. And we really don't have the best accessories to go with the cars yet. So sometimes he has to make due with what he's got. And sometimes a Polly Pocket house is much more entertaining as a parking garage than a Polly Pocket house.

New shelves will do the trick

So the kids have toys everywhere. We have way too many toys. And no matter how many we put away, they seem to keep coming back. We have a lot toys that we haven't even unpacked from when we moved here 20 months ago. But the kids sometimes sneak them out of the boxes. And they keep having birthdays and Christmas keeps coming around and grandma keeps coming to visit and though I like all of those things it seems to increase the number of toys. Now really I have nothing against toys (except for the extreme excess I see in my own house), I do have a problem with how they toys are generally arranged in the house. Here is a picture to give you a good idea of the typical arrangement (and yes that is Luke in a ladybug costume - who says that a lady bug has to be a lady?):


Since finishing the basement family room it has been used pretty much exclusively for a toy palace. Toys are everywhere. Well Molly kept saying that she was going to get them all organized when I got the shelves put into the closets that I built down there. So I finally got most of the shelves put in (after a minor setback of getting 5'7" confused with 57" and cutting all the boards 10" too short - don't fret, I fixed them). Then one morning me and the kids went down to the basement and didn't come out until the room was clean. Here is what it looked like when we were done:

Well it looked so good and the kids knew where everything was and they all swore on their mother's life that when they got through playing with something they would put it back. And we had a nice discussion on the importance of keeping it cleaned up and looking nice. I was sure that this time things really sunk in. Well that was a week ago. Here is what the room looked like this morning:
Should I be worried about Molly's life?

Wish granted and the following dose of reality

Well Lila and Zoe have been begging me for a bunk bed for I don't know how long. Probably four years. Molly never really wanted them to have one because of the danger issue and they already had beds so there was never a good reason to get them one. But when I finished their bedroom in the basement I decided to get them one so that there would be more room in their room. So I found a cheap one at a garage sale and scrubbed it and painted it and put it up. Wow, they were so excited and happy to finally have a bunk bed. All their little dreams had come true. But it turns out that once they had what they wanted, they realized it wasn't really as good as they always thought it would be. Every night I go down to check on them before I go to bed and almost every night this is what I find:

They are almost always asleep together on the bottom bunk. Sweet right? Except for the fact that the time and money I spent on the bed was wasted! I should have just sold one of their beds one EBay and I would have been ahead a little money and they would still have the same sleeping arrangement that they have now. Oh well. I guess that is the way it goes with a lot of stuff we want. We think there is something that would make us so happy that just the thought of having it makes us giggle. And then we get it and our so excited to have it and show everybody how awesome it is. And then, it just turns out that after we have it for a bit that we figure out that our life probably isn't that much better because of it. Sure, we still probably like it, but it doesn't really gratify us the way we hoped it would. I have really tried to start thinking about what things are really worth my fawning over (is fawning a word) and what things are probably not worth it. I read a book not long ago called "collapse" about how much we consume as a society and it really made me conscious of how much we waste the limited resources our planet can provide us with. Well actually it was about the collapse of different societies throughout the history of the planet and how one of the recurring themes in their collapses was excessive use of their available resources. So that got me paying closer attention to what kind of things I buy and trying to not just buy stuff to have something.

And lately I have had some similar thoughts running around in my head about what is really important for me to be doing with myself and my resources. These thoughts have been less about consumerism and more about trying to become a better person and being more prepared for anything that might come. These days with all the crazy financial market swings and the banks failing and the economy going down the toilet have been really interesting to me. I think I worry a lot about what is to come and how hard it will be getting there and getting back. But something that is surprising to me is that even though I seem to be worried, I kind of look at what is going on and am excited. People think I am crazy, but more often than not, I am just like, "bring it on!" I don't know if it is the adventurer in me or what, but I secretly hope that the whole financial system fails and we go back to the wild west days of living off the sweat of our brows. Now of course the people that lived through the last great depression would probably think I am crazy for wanting some giant slump. And I probably am I guess. I just think that people don't realize what damage they are doing to our society by our whole living on credit mindset and that something drastic will have to happen before people will change. If the economy has to tank and everyone has to have a wake up call for us to change our ways, then I think that will probably be what is best.

And I guess I am ranting so I might as well continue on with current politics. Man those guys (and gal) drive me crazy. It is just so hard to have faith in the future of America with the current choice of our future leaders. On the one hand you have Barack who has never taken much of a stand for anything before in the political arena and who has spent time with crazy radicals but who says he is tired of typical politics and is for "change". But based on his past voting record in the senate and his lack of previous credentials I don't really feel like we can judge his prior experience with any certitude. And then there is McCain the "Maverick" who has been in Washington so long that he seems out of touch with reality. And though I do have some respect for Bush and think at the end of the day, no one can say he didnt' try, we are hurting in a lot of ways that we weren't before he came to office and McCain does seem to have a similar mindset to Bush (even though he seems to be realizing that if he doesn't change his mind he won't get many votes). And at first Palin seemed like she would be a nice change to have someone new come in and shake things up a bit. Kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But the more I listen to her, the more she scares me. She seems so aggressive. Like if anyone were going to push that nuke button, she would be the one to do it without much hesitation. And regardless of who actually wins the election, it seems that with all of the other career politicians and corruption in Washington that it doesn't really matter. I have been reading the biography of John Adams by David McCullough and I just think, please God, send us someone more like him. We need more people with the kind of vision and integrity that he had. So I tend to despair on the future of our country. But really I should have more hope. The audacity of hope as one might say. I should focus more on serving others where I can and hope that others will do the same. Really we just need to stop being self-centered and start caring for others as they did in the past. I can only hope that as myself and others try to do that, things will slowly start to turn around. Hope. It's all we can do in these crazy times.

Cats!

Me and Molly went to the play "Cats" the other day (by Andrew Lloyd Weber). It was very different than I thought it would be. I didn't know anything about it before we went so I guess my expectations were along the lines of a great story like Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera. But I was mistaken. For the first half of the show I just kept trying to figure out what the story was about and was feeling rather dense for not being able to follow the story very well. Then during the intermission I at last realized that there was no storyline. Well at least not much of one. It was just kind of a collection of different little songs and dances about different cats and their individual personalities. I will have to say that I didn't enjoy the first half. But after I realized that there wasn't a story to the play I tried to enjoy it for what it was and the second half was better. The dancing was nice and the singing was good. I would have to say that I would still have to rate it third of the three Broadway shows I have seen. But the Memories song was really nice. Almost made Molly cry. I would probably not recommend the play to anyone but those infatuated with cats and their crazy antics. Personally I have never been a cat lover. Don't get me wrong, I like cats. I just have never had one and so have never gotten attached to any to the point were I think they are great. But it was fun to go out with Molly and watch a show.

It's official - Baby #5 is on its way

Well here she is. At least it seems she is a she, but we won't know for another couple months. Molly is pregnant with baby #5. She is about 13 weeks along with a due date of March 25, 2009. Molly has been sick (throwing up several times daily) for a long time. I don't know how long. It seems like forever. I don't think she has been this sick since Zoe was in there. The other kids don't know about the baby yet. I guess Molly gets tired of telling them everyday that it will still be another 6 months before the baby is born so she holds off on telling them as long as she can.

I was a bit undecided on the idea of having another baby. Four seemed like about as many as I could sanely handle. And Molly said she felt the same...except for this nagging urge to have another one. So in the end I came around and decided one more might be fun. I am excited for a new one. And worried. I can't say I am exactly the best dad in the world and who knows what kind of damage I have done to my current out-of-womb children so to have another one to take care of just adds to my current worries of inadequacy. And I am worried about Molly's life. She has had four C-sections already and her uterus isn't exactly in pristine condition anymore. But during the last C-section the doctor said it looked like she could have one more if she waited at least two years before getting pregnant again. So she did. So everything should be fine right? And how many times do you hear people say that they were expecting their wife to die during childbirth? Never. It is always a tragic unexpected occurrence. So the fact the I am thinking it will happen makes it less likely right? But if Molly did die, would the baby be worth it? I don't think so. I guess I just need to hope that I never have to face that question for real.

So we are thinking of naming her Mawtha because Leisel and Luke sound so cute saying it. Of course once they are grown that name may sound a little funny. Other names we have thought of in the past are Ethnie (girl), Jones Larsen (boy), Oscar (boy), Zeb (boy). I don't think we have fund the right name yet though. But Molly has really liked the name Ethnie for quite a long time. It's a little weird for most people's taste though. We still have quite a long time to consider names though.

Luke and Molly

Here is a picture of Luke (about a year old) and Molly.