December Date

Back in December Clint went to Norfolk for two weeks. He was pretty bummed about being away from home during December. For his birthday present I flew out to meet him the first weekend. We visited downtown Norfolk and took in this flick. Looking forward to the next one.

And we ate here:

We had a nice Southern meal including fried gator! I asked the waitress how it was and she said, "Like really good moist chicken. Unless you get a bad piece--then it's like the worst old fish you've ever tasted." She assured us they had the good kind. It looked like chicken nuggets and and it was delicious--until the very last bite. Eww! I got a bad one! I had to wipe my tongue off with a napkin--that bad. We intended to watch the Army/Navy game here during lunch, but we have the time zones messed up, so we just went ambling about the mall, for like the first time since we had kids 12 years ago. How nice is that? Very. On our amble we saw this at Barnes and Noble:

It's my cousin Nate Hale's Robot Christmas book. I am very proud. It was a nice get away, which we like to do about once a year.

25 Facts about me

Because I love my sis-in-law Katie

1. Today is my 41st Birthday

2. I share this birthday with my aunt Karen, Brick Ellis and Anna Martineau and probably a few others in the world.

3. I like carrots so much I go through 1-2 bags a week. I was commenting to Clint about how I was surprised that my palms weren't orange. We held up our palms together and YIKES they are really orange. I'm trying to cut back. Is there a beta-carotene patch?

4. I sprained my ankle 3-weeks ago at the gym. I am now almost pain and hobble-free.

5. My good friend Karly invited me over for a birthday breakfast this morning.

6. My Mom and Jenny picked me up for a birthday lunch. I think that's the first time I've celebrated my birthday with my Utah family since I was 19 in the dorms at BYU and Wendy brought me fruit pizza! Definite benefits to being back in the home state.

7. Clint gave me an Ironman running watch, a large clothing budget and a journal for notes from him. He really knows me well by now, I think.

7. I have itchy feet--not literally. I LOVE to move--not the process, just the prospect. This is why I've never been close to home since I turned 18, even though my family are my favorite people. I've loved the many places I've lived.

8. My neighbor is Darryl Hoole. Google it. She's a sweetheart. She threw us a welcome to the neighborhood party and has brought me treats and sent me kind notes.

9. Jackie and Governor Mike Leavitt are also my neighbors and Jackie has brought me treats several times. She is so down to earth and I love her.

10. I grew up in an acting family but I haven't been on stage since the month before I got married 16 1/2 years ago. Getting on the stage would terrify me at this point.

11. My metabolism has slowed down and I weigh 8 pounds more than I did when I got married. I feel fine about how I look, but on principal, I've been trying to lose that weight for 3 years and it's getting really annoying.

12. I'm legally blind without contacts.

13. My husband bought a 4x4 F150 monster truck today that could probably run over our minivan. I want to call it Appa the cloud bison, because it's white.

14. I'm the co-den mother for 15 wolf cubs. They are really good boys, with really good parents.

15. My son in fourth grade has 12 more field trips till the end of school and he's probably already had a dozen. Wow.

16. I just started texting this year.

17. I've just started putting contacts into my phone this year.

18. I don't really love new technology.

19. While living in Memphis I tried very hard not to adopt the drawl.

20. Now that I'm in Utah I'm trying really hard not to say Mou'an for mountain, mill for meal, Hell for Hale, ect.!!! My brother Mike told me I had the worst Utah accent in the family and I'm trying to defy that!

21. I've been skiing 13 times this year. I'd like to go at least that many more times before the season is over.

22. Top on my list for reasons I wanted to come back to Utah was so that I could go to Hale Center Theater plays. I've been here 8 months and I've only seen two!

23. I'm pretty sure I'm done having kids. My body's done, and the ones I have require a lot of maintenance.

24. I have a really big mouth and whenever I'm in a R.S. or Sunday School class I can not resist commenting. I really need to stop this. I keep getting asked to speak and teach.

25. I have a widow's peak.

Godhood

The boys were playing on the front porch yesterday and I heard Trace, my two-year-old say, "I a God. I a God." I tapped him on the shoulder and asked, "Trace, what did you say?" He turned around and looked up at me with innocent confusion, shrugged his shoulders and said, palms to the sky, "I thought I was a God."

The Polar Express Comes to Jack's Kindergarten

Halloween 2010

Trace didn't get a costume, Mom was too busy helping plan the neighborhood party for 200 people.

Trace has amazing charming abilities.

Cole, as scary knight/ninja guy.

Here are some cupcake samples I made for the cupcake walk. I provided all the goodies to do these, but everyone just threw the candy on and ate it. I could have spent a lot less money on plain old sprinkles!

Jack as Ron Weasley, our neighbors are Harry and Hermione.

You can't tell but I'm wearing a side pony and two polo shirts. I'm Deb from Napolean Dynamite.

Random Pics

After school is such a nice time. I love walking from school to home, seeing all the kids interact, and chatting with the Moms. I Have to grab the adult conversations whenever I can!

Book Fair at the U

This was way back in the fall. The boys didn't want to go, but it ended up being a blast. Lots of free games and free children's books.

Story time with Ronald.

Climbing trees and the main event, which I didn't get a picture of, was playing on the playground equipment, including wiggle/plasma cars that the boys loved. That took up about an hour and a half.

Random storybook character.

Anakin, young and old and his accompanying Imperial troopers. This was a major highlight.

What are these things called Vandegraf Static Generators?

The coolest thing of all was not part of the fair, but a permanent water feature on campus. It was hot and all the kids were climbing all over this and standing in the waterfall.

Hallelujah!

Talmage has gained 6 pounds since New Years Day! He's over 50 pounds now and we're so thrilled! On Jan. 1st I weighed him and my heart sank because he was 44 pounds again. He'd lost four pounds over the holidays, when the rest of the family was packing it on! I'm pretty sure he weighed the same in 1st grade when he was 6 inches shorter. That makes for a very thin Tal. He looked so thin my family all started praying for him, unbeknownst to us. I felt like Clint and I had been trying and trying for years: ice cream at night, shakes he'd maybe eat once, protein bars he wouldn't even try, not to mention the arguing. He wouldn't eat any thing with nuts, few sweets, nothing touching, few meats, etc.
But it finally dawned on me that maybe I wasn't trying as hard as I thought I was. We'd have a battle with him over a meal, then forget about it for a few days. And during those days he was likely eating 500 calories or less, because food is just not a priority to him. I decided I needed to make sure that I was regularly putting food in front of him: three meals and two snacks. I googled his caloric needs which was only 1274. Then I made some worksheets with calorie charts for a week and printed out 52 for all of 2011, dated them, put them in a binder and started counting every calorie. The first improvement was that it improved my and Clint's attitude. It was all objective now much less emotional. Instead of panicking "Ah! You have eaten almost nothing for breakfast," I could see on the chart that he usually ate a small breakfast and more the rest of the day. The $20 bribe may have helped too, although that's been out there for a long time. We're just so glad that Tal is on the way up.

A Promise Kept

When we passed on our opportunity to take a chairlift up the mountain in Steamboat Springs, Co, we promised the boys we would do so in Utah. It was only a couple weeks after we arrived that we made good on that deal. Here are the boys at Solitude resort before we headed up.

These little varmints were hiding under a bridge between the lodge and the lift. We met many more.

Hanging on tight--I've worked hard to keep these guys alive thus far.

A reluctant hiker.

It was about a 10-minute hike from the chairlift to Secret Lake. At the lake edge were a dozen, very tame and hungry ground squirrels and chipmunks. A group of nice college kids lent the boys some trail mix to feed the critters. It wasn't long before Jack had them eating right out of his hand. He really has a way with animals. He says he loves all animals with fur.

On the other hand the critters quickly grew wary of Trace who tried to swat them a couple of times before attempting to feed them.

With some patience and perseverance, Tal was able to feed them too.

Before we left Jack had the squirrels trusting him so much that they let him pet them, even without a treat as a reward. Jack was so jazzed about this that as we hiked down he had to tell the mountain bikers all about it. "The squirrels let me pet them with 100 ascent NO BAIT!" This while standing in the middle of their trail, stopping them on their ascent up the mountain.

These three men are the top Frisbee golfers in the world. For reals. There was an international competition on the mountain that day. And you saw it here on Snollygoster Roster.

First Day of School

There could not be a more eager Kindergartner than Jack. He just turned 5 in June, but he was raring to go! He made a lot of friends right off, and has to be separated from them a lot because he has so much to say to them.

New grade, new school, new town, new state! That's a lot to adjust to, but the kids did great! They actually adjusted faster here than anywhere. It helps that they are Romans living in Rome, if you know what I mean. They've never had Mormons in their school--now they are part of a similar crowd.

Cole was quick to make friends. He's a cool kid.

I love this school. Parents can walk right in and are welcomed and Wow! do they do amazing things for the school. It really feels like the school belongs to the community.

Talmage also had a best friend on the first day and some really great teachers on his side.

This is the Place

For Family Home Evening we went to This is The Place Monument. It was closed, but there were still lots of statues to see and acres for the boys to run around on.

I really loved reading the plaques on the main monument all about the explorers like Father Escalante, Peter Ogden and Jim Bridger. Hey, we got history! And the monument above was about a pioneer that took many colonization assignments from Brigham Young. I think Brigham Young was amazing. Hundreds of towns in all the western states, Canada and Mexico were settled under his direction. As a girl I used to like to imagine what places looked like the first time people saw them. Having been gone from Utah for a decade and a half, and having just moved from the region that many of the pioneers came from, I really feel like I have a similar impression to what they had--minus billions of dollars of infastructure and irrigation :). The Hymn "Oh, Zion" has run through my mind a hundred times these past few months. "Oh ye mountains high, where the clear desert sky arches over the vales of the free..."

Clint Takes Command

This post has had me stymied for a long time, thus the two-month pause in blogging. This was such an important event for our family that it has been daunting to write about it. It's very hard to explain how important the command tour is for a Naval officer. It's what they aspire to their entire career. In fact their semi-annual performance reviews, called Fitness Reports or Fitreps, rate officers on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0 based on how fit they are for command, or how on track they are towards earning a command billet. It's a small percentage who ever actually make it to that point. Truth be told, Clint had aspired to be a commander of a squadron (a helicopter unit) and not a reserve center. But as a good friend told us long ago, "You never know when God is saving your life." Had Clint got the command he wanted he would be deploying to Iraq for seventh or eighth time right now. Clint's record was good enough that he got first choice when they selected CO's (commanding officers) for NOSCs (Navy Operational Support Centers, formerly known as Naval Reserve Centers--someone high up wanted to leave their mark and made the million dollar name change) and he picked Utah for me. He calls this the "Wife Payback Tour." I'm so glad he did. It certainly has been an adjustment for us--this is so different from anywhere we've been, but it is a dream to have so much family around. Good thing we really like our family!

The Change of Command ceremony is rich in Navy tradition that dates back to the Royal Navy's sailing days. At the beginning of the ceremony, the incoming and outgoing commanding officers are "rung aboard," complete with side boys, a bosun's whistle and a ship's bell. Here is Clint: Here is Erik Ostrom, the outgoing commanding officer. We really enjoyed getting to know him and his fantastic wife, Kris, and their three kids. This is the reason our boys did not make a peep during the entire hour-long ceremony. They were in complete awe. Maybe if there were sailors at church with guns they could sit quietly through sacrament meeting.

Erik has a great sense of humor. I've never heard such a laid-back and entertaining Change of Command speech. This is Clint reading his orders to assume command of the reserve center.

This is Clint relieving Erik of command.

This is the Captain who flew in from Washington to receive the ceremonial salute from both of them.

Clint's speech was more on the serious side and very inspiring. He even got choked up at one point and I can count the number of times I've seen that happen in public on two fingers.

This is Erik departing with the ringing of the bell and whistle as a farewell.This is Clint departing, with the same ceremony.

The remainder of the reception afterwards: Here is Jenny Pulsipher's knees, Phil Hale, Mike Pulsipher, Barbara Hale and Tal, Cole and Jack in the background. Other friends and family who came included: Dick and Megan Legas; Tad and Tanya Legas and son; Kenon King; Pam and Cap Cresap; Cara and Scott Lafferty; Amanda Kost; Julie and Bill Wareham; Seth Merrill; Wendy and Chad McKay; Edith and Casey Songer; Leo and Karen Frazier; Buzz and Patty Sandberg. I hope I didn't forget anyone, it has been four months!