Gratitude #2

Dan is the best. Dan is the fun parent. The good cop. The one who wrestles with the children. The one who tells stories about dragons. I wouldn't even know how to tell a story about a dragon. 

There once was a dragon and he went to bed because he was tired. The end.

Dan is chill. He's willing to join in on any boring activity that other "too cool for school" dads would smirk about. I once had a friend tell me she wished she could take Dan with her on family outings because her husband won't participate. He takes crying kids out of Sacrament Meeting. He turns chores into games. 

He teaches amazing Come Follow Me lessons. Every. Single. Sunday. This week's lesson involved a game of memory. Most of the cards were lines of scripture matching each other, but there were also cards that said Reese's or Kit Kat and if you matched those, you could take one of the candy bars from the top. Brilliant and way more fun that the normal memory game.

Dan cleans the kitchen. Every. Single. Night.

I had to be super sneaky to take that picture without his noticing.

He is a peacemaker. I also once had a friend tell me that if things didn't work out between Dan and me, everyone would know that the problem is me. So there's that.

I'm grateful for you, Dan. Thanks for being consistently wonderful.

The End.

Gratitude #1

 I loved President Nelson's gratitude challenge yesterday. I don't have social media, but felt I could write gratitude posts on my blog. I wanted to post something here yesterday . I was even thinking--why don't I do this every November? All month?

Anyway, I went to start my computer, and I found out that my boys had been messing with it and had broken it. And I was so upset. I lost my temper in a major way, not just with the boys but with the girls and even with Dan.

Dan took my computer to the repair shop today, and the guy simply had to press a button, and it was fixed. One button. Fixed.

After I lost my temper last night, I knew I had been in the wrong. It would have been easier to say "You guys can't mess with my stuff!" or "You guys never listen!" But instead, I felt like I needed to just say, "Nothing you guys could do should merit a response like that from me. I was wrong, totally wrong."

I don't think everyone is healed from it. But things always feel a little better the next morning. 

I'm grateful for the chances that the Lord gives us. He gives us SO MANY CHANCES. We are used to hearing people talk about a "second chance". What a joke! My second chance with the Lord was 5 minutes after I was baptized at age 8 and I ran down the hallways in my church screaming and playing. I then knew I needed to ask for forgiveness because my parents had told me not to do that.

24 years later, I'm on my 2984732987423897th chance. And the Lord keeps letting me have them. 

The End.

I'm 36. But I feel like I'm 89.

It's been awhile. And I went private again. I read yet another lament by a mom who had posted public things about her kids over the years and then when her kids had grown up, they were mad at her for it. I want to respect my kids' privacy (sometimes). But I also think going private is a bummer. 

Let's do a quick catch-up. Most importantly, last week was my birthday! 3!6! Dan took care of the kids all day yesterday so that I could: get a pedicure, massage, highlight and cut and do some shopping. Yes, it was awesome. 

Except that my stylist asked me about getting some face frame to which I replied in the affirmative, and then she chopped my face off. The line "She's completely bald in front" from the movie Little Women comes to mind. Yes, the Winona Ryder one. Not that new one I didn't like.

My broken nose looks pretty good from that angle! Not so broken-y!

Also, we had Halloween!

You might be thinking . . . have we seen these costumes before? Yes. I feel like we've blown so much money on costumes in past years that this year I told everyone to pick their favorite one and to wear it again. So June was Wendy again, Gwen was a black cat again, Harris was Peter Pan again (but didn't cry while wearing it this year), and Beck was a mouse, but for the first time. It was Harris' costume first. And just to make sure you see Beck's face up close.

Smiling for the camera! A first! So cute.

How was trick or treating during a pandemic? Well, first off I found out about a month ago that each county in PA picks its own date to trick or treat. It's rarely on Halloween. Instead, it's usually the Thursday before. Well it rained all day that Thursday, so our county postponed trick or treating until the Monday after Halloween. November 2nd! My kids cried and cried that they couldn't trick or treat in the actual month of October. I kept reminding them that it was much better to trick or treat in November with no rain. And then of course, that Monday ended up being freezing and everyone had to pile on the coats, which really reinforced the idea for me of how great it is to recycle costumes since no one sees them anyway.

We did a couple of streets in our super un-busy neighborhood. Most people just left buckets of candy at the end of the driveway and said hi to us from their porches as we walked by. It was nice to see people.

Today, Dan gave yet another amazing Come Follow Me lesson which involved the kids scaling a mattress on the stairs while holding on to a rope. The rope was the Book of Mormon. Gwen said today, "I love Come Follow Me!" And that is thanks to Dan for making it fun. So what if she got all of the answers of the lesson wrong, she scaled the dang mattress, and she won't forget it anytime soon.

Lastly, I gave a talk in church today. I also played the organ. Also, no one is allowed to sing because of the added germs, so everyone just listened to me play while they thought about the words to the hymns. So, let's recap. Heather played, and everyone watched her play. Then Heather spoke and everyone watched her speak. Then Heather played again, and everyone watched her play. It was like the Heather talent show, but somewhat lacking in talent.

Here is a copy of my talk:

In March 2006, my younger brother Mark and I entered the Missionary Training Center on the same day. Before embarking on that now-retired farewell scene that used to take place inside the MTC, my dad sat both of us down at my grandma’s house in Orem, Utah, in order to give a small thought he had prepared. My dad was never one for casual words. He was a lawyer, and he spoke with precision and careful calculation at all times. He was also not an emotional person. But at this crucial moment, he looked up at both of us, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and asked, “Why are we doing this? Why would we send away our kids to far off places with limited correspondence? Why would we do something terrible like that?”

For a brief second, I thought my dad had broken character. I thought he was really truly wondering and questioning. I should have known better. After a dramatic pause, my father looked in my eyes and said, “Because Joseph Smith really did see God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, in the Sacred Grove. It’s true. It’s really true.”

I start with that story to remind all of us why we are here. We are here because Jesus Christ lives. We are here because Heavenly Father truly has a plan for us. And we are here because the Gospel was restored through the prophet Joseph Smith. We worship God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. We do not worship Joseph Smith, but we do revere him, and we are grateful to him.

If I may, I would like to touch on one more story about my father. You see, my father passed away shortly after Dan and I were married, and it seems like in the ten years since his passing, I have only begun to learn about the significant impact he had on me.

During the last few years of his life, my dad served in the church in two different capacities simultaneously. One, he was a temple worker at the St. Louis Temple. And two, he was a counselor in the mission presidency of the Missouri Independence mission. I once asked him which of the two callings he preferred. He immediately began to speak about his favorite missionary stories, relating with excitement about how this lesson was taught or how strong the Spirit was at a recent baptism he attended.

“So,” I concluded, “you prefer your calling in the mission presidency.”

“Oh no,” my father replied. “Working with the dead is much easier than working with the living.”

I have been asked to speak about magnifying our callings. The most obvious approach would focus on magnifying our actual, official, sustained and set-apart church callings, but I have felt impressed to focus my words on our opportunity to magnify our ministering assignments and also to magnify our callings as disciples of Christ both inside and outside of our church community.

As my father pointed out, we all can be pretty difficult to work with. Each person has his own set of strengths, weaknesses, talents, vices, pride issues, spiritual gifts, addictions, ways of showing love and deficiencies. It is easy to be overwhelmed at the prospect of showing every single person Christlike love. Add to that the modern-day public discourse, which encourages tribalism over unity, mistrust of anyone who thinks differently than you, and which is quick to judge but slow to seek understanding, and you have the perfect recipe to feel completely justified in watching out only for yourself and padding the walls of your brain with convenience and comfort instead of stretching yourself in selfless service.

In summary, it is easy to be filled with fear and selfishness.

Stephen R. Covey often talked about our circle of concern vs. our circle of influence. The circle of concern is everything you worry about, and it’s often very large. The truth is—we don’t have much control over many things in our circle of concern.

By contrast, the circle of influence is everything you have the power to change, and it’s often quite small, though it can be grown. How do you grow your circle of influence? You work on the things over which you have control. You work on yourself. You serve the people you have been assigned to minister. We don’t have power over them, but we can influence their lives for the better. When we help people, our circle of influence expands because the positive changes we have made will affect more and more people. I believe this will help us meet Bishop Johnson’s challenge he issued two weeks ago, asking us to become more united as a ward family. Ministering properly and effectively will expand our circles of influence and actually change the very nature of our ward.

I read a lot of news. And when I read it, I often allow myself to be full of fear. But if I can force myself to go outside or to run errands, I am always greeted by smiling faces from neighbors, a helpful clerk at the grocery store, or the librarian who chuckles at our chaotic family as we burst through the doors of the library carrying an empty laundry basket to fill with books each week.  I readily acknowledge that there is much evil in the world, but brothers and sisters, there is so much good. And good will prevail.

We do our part to contribute to the good—the building up of the Kingdom of God—when we magnify our callings as ministers and as disciples of Jesus Christ. What does magnifying a calling really mean?

Joseph Smith said, “To magnify a calling is to hold it up in dignity and importance, that the light of heaven may shine through one's performance.”

President Thomas S. Monson said, “And how does one magnify a calling? Simply by performing the service that pertains to it.”

In the Book of Mormon, Jacob said, “We did magnify our office unto the Lord, taking upon us the responsibility, answering the sins of the people upon our own heads if we did not teach them the word of God with all diligence.”

Do we hold up our ministering assignments in dignity and importance, that the light of heaven may shine through one’s performance? Do we perform the service that pertains to it. Do we take upon us the responsibility?

We hear a lot about ministering, but it’s easy to let it get swept under the rug. I, myself, constantly struggle to know how much to contact people. I don’t want to annoy them. I also don’t want to neglect them. It’s hard to find a quiet minute to even really think about what they need from us. What if I gave you ten seconds right now? Ten seconds in which to think on the names of the people you minister to. Have you reached out to them lately? And what do they really need? Do they need a text? A note? A food order? Help with a job application? A ride to church? Here are your ten seconds.

 

Now I don’t really think ten seconds will do the trick. But maybe you could set an alarm on your phone every single Sunday to think about the one of the people you minister to for five minutes and to write down what you know about them and their needs. And then the next week you could think about another person you minister to for five minutes.

In addition to our assigned ministering, I truly believe we also all have ministering we need to do in our neighborhoods and communities. This will look different for everyone. May I offer a few examples?

 

In 1939 Sir Nicholas Winton, a British man in then-Czechoslovakia, secretly raised funds for 670 Jewish and other children to be transported to England in order to save their lives from the Nazis. It wasn’t until 1988, when his wife stumbled across some old ledgers in their attic, that she and the public became aware of Winton’s good deeds. Later that year, Winton was surprised on the British television show “That’s Life” when he found out that sitting all around him in the audience were the now-grown children he had saved.

Sir Nicholas Winton magnified his calling as a disciple of Jesus Christ. But I’m betting yours and my callings as disciples of Jesus Christ will not include something so grandiose and dramatic, though they may. Our calling may look much more like the sweet 8-year-old girl who walked up to my mother before Sacrament Meeting in my hometown of Blue Springs, Missouri, and handed her a note. The note said, “My mom told me that your husband is very sick. I fasted for him today.”

Or maybe it will look like a friend of mine, who one day in the middle of taking care of four rambunctious boys, with their messes and stinky diapers, was fed up and ready to give up, when she heard the Spirit whisper to her, “Thank you for taking care of my boys. I knew I could ask you to be the one to clean up their messes and change their diapers and give them love.”

Or maybe you will be asked to serve someone who hurts you. I recently saw in the news a story about a father who found out his son was being bullied at school. He decided to ask around and find out about the young man who was tormenting his son. He discovered that this young man had a hard family life and that his family lived in poverty. The father invested time in him, got to know him. He took him out to eat and listened to him. He bought some shoes that the young man desperately needed. The young man became friends with his son.

Or maybe it will look like a dear woman in our ward in Jacksonville, who learned about a new convert named James, who was in his mid-40s and had never learned how to read. James desperately wanted to bless the Sacrament each week. And so she called him every night for weeks, and while he held the words of the Sacrament prayers in his hands, she would read them over and over to him until he recognized the words enough that he could say them without assistance. Every Sunday that James blessed the Sacrament was a blessing to me. He had to say the words so slowly and thoughtfully. Each word held so much meaning. Still, he would often mess up. And at the end of a prayer where the bishop had to correct James, James would often stand up and call out, “That’s okay! I gotta get it right for Jesus!” When he would say that, it would make me realize that I, too, gotta get it right for Jesus.

You could argue that each of these examples vary in their depth or influence, but all I see is people responding to the call to minister, whether that be ministering to family, ward family, strangers, or new acquaintances. Each of these people worked within their circle of influence and greatly changed a situation through small and simple means.

President Hinckley once said, “We are all in this great endeavor together. We are here to assist our Father in His work and His glory. . . . Your obligation is as serious in your sphere of responsibility as is my obligation in my sphere. No calling in this church is small or of little consequence.”

I want all of you to know that I know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and that I love it. I know that the Savior, Jesus Christ, stands at the head of this church. I know that President Russell M. Nelson is the prophet of the church. I know that ministering is the Lord’s program. And I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

 

 THE END.

 

I Think We're Boring.

I haven't had as much to say lately, even though there seems to be a lot going on. The big reason is that I have been trying to turn off my phone as much as possible so that I can concentrate on the things I'm doing without distraction. I have developed a bad habit of distracting myself with my phone through most activities. It seems to dull the pain of hard tasks, spice up the mundane tasks, entertain during the mindless tasks, and help me feel connected with the outside world while I'm at home with four young kids.

But.

Recently, I've become honest with myself that while my phone is extremely helpful, it's also detracts from what I'm trying to accomplish. So I'm decided to have certain hours when my phone is completely shut off. School is one of those times, and we do a lot of school. Which means I never take pictures of what we are doing. 

The lack of photographic evidence of our activities is a bummer, but my mind is calmer and I enjoy the learning process more. Instead of checking my phone, I try to look at my kids and figure out who they are. It's amazing how easy it is to live with people and not really understand them.

This seems to be a serious post. Barf. I do not enjoy being serious. 

Things I did manage to document with pictures:

1. Decorating the house for Halloween.

You may think the scary decorations are the spiders and webs but you would be wrong. Do you see that our second set of shutters is still not up? The imbalance of it all is frightening.

2.  The garage continues to become more beautiful. I have always wanted one of these storage things mounted to the ceiling, and Dan makes all of my garage dreams come true.

We moved a bunch of things that had been in our basement into the storage container, and seeing the basement be emptied of boxes was a wild rush like my mama heart has never known.

3. We have been putting pictures up. Deciding where to hang a picture is a paralyzing decision-making process for me, and Dan has been patient. Until he wasn't anymore. So we are getting it done. We have been trying to use Command strips instead of nails because I tend to change my mind, but when a frame crashed to the ground in the middle of the night last night, we realized I might actually just have to make up my mind and stick with it. Quelle horreur. 

4. Church!

We watched General Conference last week and attended Sacrament Meeting this week.

General Conference was great, but I'm excited to listen to it again while I run in the mornings because hopefully my adorable posterity will not be running alongside me and yelling that they need water in the middle of it. Because that tended to make it harder to hear everything the first go around.

I had a similar issue at church today. Church is right at Beck's morning nap time, and he just screams through everything. I heard we had a great speaker today but I missed his whole talk because I was trying to soothe Beck. And that great speaker was Dan, and apparently he shared some funny stories about me and he'll never tell me what he really said so it must have been juicy.

5. June requests a picture of her acting like a horse every single week.

There are also lots of requests for me to take pictures of the girls as they shake their booty. I have not included those because I'm a classy gal, no matter what Dan said during his talk today.

The End.

Practicing Church on the Couch.

We arrived back home from church a couple of hours ago, and do you know what my kids won the privilege of doing as soon as we were home? Sitting on the couch to practice being back at church. This ingenious activity is something my mother used to have us five terrible Beck siblings do while we were growing up, and now my lucky kids have earned the right to the same tradition. 

I'm thrilled to be going back to church. I really enjoyed home church a lot, but it's time to be back. Getting my kids back into the routine is going to take a few weeks though. Today, Gwen wondered why she couldn't crawl underneath all of the pews to go see her friends. Gwen--the SIX year old. When was that ever allowed, you ask? Never. I don't know where she got that idea from. The three big kids fought over two toy cars. And then Harris jerked on the hymn book holder in front of us and it came out of the nails on the pew. And church is right when Beck's morning nap usually is. So they were all out of sorts. 

We brought an elderly church member with us, and I'm sure she was impressed with our great behavior.

But the girls did have nice hair for it.

Dan taught a terrific Come Follow Me lesson. The guy has the best object lessons. I will sit and talk at our children until they pass out, but Dan gets them involved, and we all learned a ton. This week he focused on the Law of Moses being fulfilled in Christ.

Going up the first set of stairs in our house were the pieces of paper with the Ten Commandments on them. The girls read each one, and we discussed how they point people to the Savior and how they still apply today.

On the landing, Dan told the girls that the next set of stairs would contain Christ's law as given in the Book of Mormon (also in the Bible). The lower stairs and Law of Moses pointed the people to the Lord, but the Law of Christ is an even higher law (hence the higher stairs) which takes you even closer to Jesus Christ. 

And then they went up the higher stairs and read elements of the higher law. There's just something about that verse where the Savior talks about never even being angry that gets to me. Being angry is probably the easiest emotion for me to be. I love life; I'm a happy person. But it's so easy to get mad when things don't go well, the house is out of order, etc. It truly takes discipline and understanding of the Savior to not immediately go to that place of anger.

The big big news of our week was--June is riding her bike without training wheels! We have been working on this for yearsssssssssssss.

We had to get pretty inventive for this to happen. We have a balance bike she used when she was younger, but she didn't grasp the concept. Then we bought a bike with training wheels, and she could ride it but still struggled with leg strength to peddle AND keep balance. A couple of weeks ago, Dan realized she was ready for the balance bike again but it was way too small. So he removed the pedals and training wheels from her bike and made a bigger balance bike for her. For the first time in years, she didn't dread when I said it was "bike time". She would kick off the ground to get momentum and then could keep her legs in the air for a really long time while she coasted down the hill. So Dan put the pedals back on, and she could totally balance herself while peddling.

We still have our work to do. Her leg strength is still such that she cannot go up hills. But we're that much closer.

Other updates:

Ever since our excursion to the apple orchard, Beck requests an apple or two A DAY. Not cut up either. That would be for true babies. He gnaws on them and sometimes even eats the core before I can grab it from him. Yes, that is bad parenting at play.

Lots of neighborhood walks with friends as soon as they arrive home from school.

No idea.

And we are putting shutters on the big windows of our house. We did the bottom window yesterday and were attempting to do the top when we realized we had the wrong size for the top. So now it's just uneven and driving me crazy.

The End.

Johnny Appleseed.

We are home schooling this year. I'm not super nervous about the kids getting covid at school, but rather I didn't want to deal with the hassle of the back and forth of regular school vs. online school should the schools open and close throughout the year. Plus, June faced some challenges with the autism program here, and I've been interested to see if changing the method of her education would be helpful or not.

So we are doing our own thing--not virtual learning or anything to do with the school district. I admit this was a tough decision, one that Dan and I went back and forth on all summer. I say Dan, but really it was me. Every day my answer changed, and he would always reply with "Sounds great; let's just make a decision and STICK TO IT." 

So I would promise to stick to it and then would change my mind. I have researched about home school so much I could write a dissertation, but was nervous about my own ability to carry it out. I would picture myself meeting strangers and having them ask where my kids go to school, and my having to say, "We home school" and I would feel sick saying those words out loud. Because it seemed too weird. The idea of actually filling out paperwork to withdraw my kids from public school made me ill. Then I would do more research and get excited about the idea again. And then I had really-really-no-going-back-now-do-or-die decided to home school and had ordered books and started paperwork and then had a bad day with the kids where I lost my temper and backed out. And then while we were in Florida, I felt so much peace about home schooling that I flipped back AGAIN, and had to fill out all of the paperwork while we were on vacation. It was a little crazy, and Dan was more than supportive of my indecisive antics.

I've learned a lot about myself in the process. My inability to make decisions plagues me and hurts my progression. It's definitely given me a lot to think about and change.

So we started to home school a couple of weeks ago. And the first two days were terrible. I know June's principal fairly well, and I thought about calling him up and saying "Never mind--I'm bringing her in fifteen minutes!" but I didn't.

I had to remind myself that the first day of anything is usually terrible. And also sometimes the second.

And it's been pretty great ever since. Not perfect, not without hitches and not necessarily something I'm committing to for more than this year. But we can do a year.

We studied Johnny Appleseed this past week and went to an apple orchard as a field trip.

And afterward, we bought a fresh apple pie and a shoofly pie from the bakery and came home and enjoyed.

The truth is, only Dan enjoyed the apple pie. No one else likes it. We love lots of apple things, but not pie. So he was the winner of everyone's leftover apple pie. But the shoofly pie was a winner. If you don't know what that is, you need to visit Amish Country and get some Pennsylvania Dutch cooking in you! It's like a pecan pie without the pecans.

Today's Come Follow Me lesson was brought to us by Dan. Yes, this is a spiritual lesson even though it resembles the scary Scarecrow scene from Batman Begins.

You know the game--mask the person, spin the chair and then have them follow your directions to avoid upcoming obstacles.

The end goal was to successfully sit in a chair without falling on the floor.

The moral was--Follow the prophet! He knows the way! Or as my kids used to sing the song when they were too little to know better--Follow the prophet, and he'll go away! Sigh. Parenting is hard.

I don't know why June was wearing one of my snow gloves for the game, but I also don't know why any of my kids do any of the things they do. I'm going to put that in my parenting book I'm writing and I'm sure it will fly off the shelves for being the only honest parenting book ever published.

The End.

The Tower Hike.

 We've been back from Florida for awhile now, and I'm going to try to get back to regular blogging.

We came back to a different neighborhood. We live in a new development, and many houses were started while we were gone, and a whole new road was completed.

Harris has decided to join the world of scootering, and much to my happiness, does not mind a hand-me-down princess scooter. 

We have not lived in Florida for five years, but I'm still surprised by the seasons up here in the Northeast. And then spending some time down there again threw me off even more. I always expect that it will be warm in March (it's soooo not) and that it will stay hot through October (it so will not). But it's been a very pleasant mid 70s, and I'm loving it. And trying not to dread the upcoming winter. I promised Dan I would "try to get into it" this year, which will be a hard goal to achieve because there are no specific parameters. Does this involve smiling every time I freeze my buns off as I scrape my windshield? Does it mean leaping in the air with glee every time I go for a run and can't feel my face? Do I have to make snow angels sans clothing in order to prove my "getting into it-ness"? I know not. 

But I'm totally great with autumn, and so we've been late-summer/autumn baking this week, which involves lots of zucchini.

Zucchini bread, muffins and cake have all been on the menu this week.

And we went for a hike. There's a famous local hike that involves a site-seeing tower at the end that has been recommended to us many times. The tower has been closed due to Covid until just recently, so we took advantage and went. We had a neighbor with us, and I was quickly reminded that I'm much more protective of other people's kids than my own when they are under my supervision. My kids fell on the hike (there was a steep hill), and I was my usual nurturing self ("you're fine you're fine you're fine"), but when our friend fell, I picked him up and carried him and worried that I wasn't being a good enough caretaker. 

We arrived at the tower, and I was excited to climb the stairs to the top. I actually love stairs. But then we saw this:

The down arrow is probably confusing. There was an "up" side and "down" side, and I took a picture of the down.

Yeah, a ladder! No stairs. It was apparent that one of us would have to stay down with the baby ("I volunteer as tribute!"), and the other would get to lug a bunch of kids up the ladder. I tried my best to convince the boys to stay down with me and nearly succeeded. They went up a rung or two, got scared and came back down with tears in their eyes. I was relieved because Dan plus the two girls would be a much easier scenario. But at the last second, the boys joined back in the group and begged to go. So Dan plus an 8 year old, 6 year old, 4 year old, and 3 year old made the trek up the very tall tower.

As the baby and I waited down below, other families arrived to climb the tower. Each and every single time, they would approach the inside and exclaim, "A ladder!?!?! Where are the stairs?" And then they would debate whether they were going to climb it or not. 

Usually the dad would say, "Well we all need to do it. We didn't drive and hike all the way up here for nothing!" And then someone else would say, "I hate enclosed spaces!" or "My equilibrium can't handle that!"

And I always felt obligated to inform them that my husband was in there with 92384727 kids, and they were taking a really long time and would be holding everyone up. I hated to add to the family conflict already taking place, but also wanted them to know what they were in for.

Every time one of our kids arrived at one of the "windows" (slits in the wall), they would stick their head in and tell me how awesome it was. Dan never stuck his head out. I don't think he thought the whole thing was super awesome.

At the top:

When they all came back down, they said that they loved it, and even Dan said it was worth it. He's a champ.

And here is our lovely Sunday photo from this morning. Harris was in timeout because he wouldn't stop screaming, Beck was down for a nap, and Gwen didn't want to take a picture.

The End.