Fourteen Years Ago Today

I was this girl, preparing to step inside this building.  Anxious, excited and very warm.  (It was really hot that day!)

Inside that building, at the end of a short aisle, this waited for me.

This man, who I know loves me fiercely, gave me away.  

And this man, who I knew and respected nearly all my life, joined me to my best friend in marriage.

And I was blissfully happy.  Still am.

I gained a brother and a sister.

And a wonderful father-in-law, from whom I have since learned much.

I gave Andy all this awesomeness... plus a brother who is not pictured because he was serving a mission in Brazil at the time.

We ate cake.

And I exited that building no longer an individual alone, but a part of a pair.  We ran off to start the journey of our lives.  Marrying this man was simply the best decision I ever made.

To Andrew with all my love - 
may the next fourteen plus years be as amazing as the first.

Photo credit goes to my sister Daja Harris for all pictures excluding the one she is in.  

That family picture was captured by my Grandpa, Marvin Hayman, who I loved and miss very much.

Christmas in July 2012

The last week of July is always Christmas in our family.  I love Christmas.  I have these great memories of all of the things that we did to prepare for the holiday when I was little.  I have not really come close to recreating what my mom did for us, so maybe I can make up for that by celebrating Christmas twice a year.

During Christmas in July we do a Christmas craft/cooking activity every day, listen to Christmas music obsessively and watch a Christmas movie or special every day.

We also have special Christmas-decorated breakfasts each day.  Which usually means that I let the kids pour Christmas colored sprinkles on their oatmeal in the morning.

This year we made paper Christmas trees, which provided a great opportunity to work on shapes and cutting with Ephram.  For Charlie it was so nice to see his autonomy.  He required zero help from me and was so proud to show me what he had done and why once he was finished.

Our other craft this year was snowflakes.  Charlie had never cut snowflakes before.  The folding part was a little tough for him, so I sat and folded up 20 pieces of paper while he was cutting.  I even got to do a few myself.  There's something about making snowflakes that is undeniably fun.  A few of Charlie's got hacked up so much that they were no longer snowflakes, but overall his turned out great!  Ephram couldn't muscle through all of the folds to cut the paper.  Instead he took all of our scraps and did his favorite activity... poured Elmer's glue on various pieces of construction paper to make collages. Everyone had a lot of fun with this - we were at it for more than 2 hours!

Then we hung everything up on the back doors so that it would look a little bit like Christmas in the house.

We also made sugar cookies.  The kids were great helpers making the dough.  Yes, I have a KitchenAid stand mixer.  But I think it is more fun for the kids to make dough the old fashioned way, so that's how we do it when the kids are around.

The next day we rolled out the dough and cut out the cookies.  Ephram had never done this before... he had so much fun playing with the roller and placing the cookie cutters.  I was really impressed with his skill, I think it comes from all of the play dough time.  Charlie had fun putting sprinkles on the cookies before they went into the oven.  I think the most funny part about this day was that Ephram thought the flour on the board we used to roll out the dough was so very delicious.  He was getting his fingers wet, covering them in flour, and then licking it off.  (Once he started doing this I stopped rolling dough on that part of the board!)  At the very end I gave both him and Charlie a small bit of cookie dough to eat.  Ephram took one taste and spit it out.  I guess flour is better than dough!

Over the course of the week I let the kids choose out our Christmas movies from our DVD shelves.  We watched: The Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol (twice), Elf, The Santa Clause, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Polar Express and The Santa Clause 2.  (I was personally wishing we could just keep on watching every last one of them!)

On the very last day of the week we gave the kids each a present to open.  They were very excited to each find a new book.  Ephram got his first "big boy" book - Harold and the Purple Crayon.  Charlie got his first chapter books - The Magic Treehouse (1-4).  Macie got a super cute book called On the Night You Were Born.

When I told the boys that there was a surprise waiting where they each sleep, they were super excited.  We had wrapped another set of books for each of them by their beds... and we had one very big surprise waiting for our two year old...

Coasting on the Strider

We Kovars bike.  Andy really enjoys it, I think its relaxing, Charlie was off training wheels at 4, and Ephram has always enjoyed the thrill of riding on the front of either Andy's or my bike.

We've intended to get Ephram his own bike, a Strider, for about a year.  But his legs are quite short, he still can't reach the pedals of a tricycle at the shortest setting, so we figured he needed to wait a little longer.  Well, Ephram has had two huge growth spurts in the past three months.  (Hence why I keep talking about my guy growing up too quickly!)  He now is 4 pounds heavier than he was when Macie was born, and I'm not sure how many inches taller.  So, finally, it was time for the Strider bike.

We didn't tell him it was coming because we wanted it to be a surprise.  His face lit up when he saw what the UPS guy dropped off on our porch.  He hauled it inside, pulled it up to the coffee table, and started going crazy.

Andy called us about 5 minutes later to tell us he was on his way home from work.  I told him to safely hurry home, he had a little boy just a bit excited for what was inside the box.

Andy got home and we ate a very fast dinner.  Then they set to assembling the bike.  Ephram was so cute.  He picked the seat out of the parts and tried to balance it and sit on it alone.  Then he found the handlebars and put them in both hands, pretending to steer as he ran all over the house.  He was beyond excited.

Finally it was all built.  We let him try it out in the house, even though it was well past his bedtime he rode it for over an hour.

He was a natural.  That was a Thursday and we let him continue to ride it inside the next day.  On Friday morning he ran down, so excited for a chance to ride, that he tried to put his helmet on by himself.  It was a bit backward.

Then on Saturday, it was a beautiful day, so the boys all went out back to ride their bikes.  I am hard pressed to think of a more blissful time in Ephram's life.  The boy truly loves his bike.  He is definitely Andy's son.

Now, just a couple of weeks later he is already coasting along with both feet up.  It won't be too long before he's ready for a traditional bike... and maybe we'll be able to skip the training wheels all together.

The best measure of how much fun he has on his bike is what he always does after he comes inside.

I know I say it often.  But it's true and there's no better way to say it.  I love this boy.

Hello Molli

I have had the opportunity to see more old friends this summer then in years past.  Perhaps the best of all was my old friend Molli (formerly Sparks, now Black.)

Molli and I did not go to any of the same schools growing up, nor did we really live anywhere close to each other.  However, we belonged to the same stake of our church.  When we met during an overnight church trip - Snow Conference, I believe it was called - to me, it felt like we'd known each other forever.  Molli was just one of those people that you meet and instantly know that you were supposed to meet them at that point of your life.

For the next two years, I spent week nights and weekends having fun with Molli and a larger group of friends.  I remember spending countless hours talking on the phone.  And I'm sure the phone had a cord.  And I'm also sure that our conversation was full of overly-dramatic-teenage-girl talk.  Regardless, what I remember most about my time with Molli was laughter.  And a lot of it.

Then her family made the decision to move to Northern California, and they were gone.

A few years later I saw Molli a couple of times at BYU.  But from then, until this past July, we hadn't had the opportunity to meet again.  I have been keeping up with Molli and her family, she has 5 kids, over Facebook for a couple of years now.  I love how Facebook gives opportunity to rediscover lost friends.  The chances of Molli and I reconnecting without Facebook were very slim.

Molli posted a status update to Facebook mid-July about how she had made it to Washington in the car, with her five kids, by herself.  I was excited to hear that she was staying less than an hour away from us, and she made the offer to drive up to our house for a visit.

All three of my kids loved her kids.  And I was really super impressed at how well behaved they were. There was no mess to pick up when they were gone.  It was just a fun time for the kids.  Charlie mostly hung out with her girls, and he and Ephram spent the last half hour running around the backyard with them.

It was so nice to see Molli.  I love seeing old friends!

Ephram Was Here

Ephram was here...

 And here...

 And here...

 Sense a theme?

 He also branches out into collections of baby toys.  Just in case Macie wants to play.  

(See the burp cloth?  He's so prepared.)

 He has also claimed the bottom shelf in our pantry.

Love this boy.

Grab a Book

One day, as I was preparing dinner while entertaining a sleepy Macie, watching Ephram zip around the kitchen and listening to Charlie's its-too-loud-in-here-so-I'll-make-it-louder-by-yelling-a-bunch voice, I had an idea.

"Ephram, it looks like Macie wants to listen to a book!  Can you please go choose a book for me to read for her?"

He nodded his head with excitement and zipped off to the bookshelf on his trusty truck.  I turned around and kept working on the tacos I was trying to make.  A minute later, or maybe two, I turned around to find...

That Ephram is a big helper.  This also shows just how fast he can zip around, to assemble such a pile so quickly!

"I know!  Charlie, why don't you read a book to Macie?"

A pause in the yelling, finally.  Charlie looked at me and processed it for a moment, got a big smile on his face and said, "Okay!"

He sat down and took the book off of the top and proceeded to read it to Macie.  Unfortunately, Ephram didn't appreciate his brother crowding his hero effort.

Fortunately, he listened when I said that there were plenty of books for both of them to read to Macie.

Suddenly all I could hear were the much more quiet words of Charlie reading the Velveteen Rabbit, Ephram's funny pretend-story-telling pitchy talk, and Macie's adorable babbling.

There is no better accompaniment when making tacos.