I can do hard things.

Here I am, last day of my 8-week challenge.  Dying to eat a bowl of cereal for lunch.  Seriously.  That's all I want. Just a big, sugary, did I say big? bowl of cereal.  I find myself craving white flour more than sweets these days, which I guess is a step in the right direction at least.  I need to journal everyday, so here is my last *required* journaling for this challenge.

I really can do hard things.

I can exercise every day.  I don't like to.  I hate it actually.  But a little bit can do more than you think.  If I am watching a show on TV or a movie, how hard is it to workout for 30 minutes of it? Not.

I can do nice things.  Being nice goes a long way, and I like that I have met new friends through being nice in this challenge.  I have discovered that I already do nice things everyday, but that the days I stay home, I should look for ways to reach out.

I can drink lots of water.  But a) I don't like going to the bathroom 50 times in a day.  b) I prefer to drink lots of milk and small amounts of water rather than 8 glasses of water every day.  c) My Brita pitcher needs to be refilled about 563 times a day when drinking 8 glasses per day.  (okay, thats an exaggeration, but I swear it seems that way!)

I can eat fruits and vegetables every day.  But they taste a lot better when you aren't required to consume a specific amount daily.

I can eat less sugar.  I can NOT eat no sugar.  I think eating no sugar is ridiculous and only encourages things like eating sugar substitutes, which I think are worse.  But it is possible for me to eat sugar in small amounts, and less times in a day.

When I am required to get more sleep, I actually get less.  Don't know how that happens.  Whatever.

I can refrain from eating after 8 pm.  But I don't like it.  I know it's not very good for you, but nothing beats sipping a nice cup of hot chocolate while snuggling with the hubby on the couch.  (Or a bowl of ice cream after a yummy dinner).

I can find time to read my scriptures everyday.  And I like it.  I can put it into my schedule so it is habit, and is much more enjoyable when I am awake and engaged as opposed to falling asleep and clueless as to what is going on.

I can write in my journal everyday.  I don't enjoy it like I used to.  I used to document everything that happened, but now that I have Jax, there is no humanly possible way to document every funny thing he does, every situation he gets himself into, and all the emotions I feel throughout a day.  But I can scrapbook and make a small dent in recording my life.

I am done with this challenge as of 12:00 tonight, and you better believe I will be staying up to eat myself a big sugary bowl of cereal!!!

Dishwasher Moments

I sit here at my computer, basking in the silence of an evening of everyone in the house sleeping except me.  I am totally enjoying all these sounds I never get to hear.  Dishwasher running. Heater blowing.  Keys clicking.  Clock ticking.  Silence.  Ahh.. its wonderful.  I never thought I'd enjoy hearing the dishwasher and the heater, but after days of crying, yelling, whining, television, movies, strangers talking to me, and just overall craziness, I find myself enjoying the simple pleasures of life.  And there is something about sitting here by myself knowing that both the boys in this house are out cold for another good 7 hours.  And not worrying about waking up to make one of them breakfast (or both).  Not worrying about how long it will be til I accidentally drop a toy and wake Jax up. Not worrying about if JD has forgotten anything or if he is going to make it out the door on-time.  I can sit here and do absolutely whatever I want.  I can clean my house, and NO ONE is awake to mess it up! The best part is that I am sitting here looking at my clean house enjoying it for once, instead of following toddlers (or husbands) around as they destroy it. No dinner to make, no high-chair to clean, no husband to cater to.  Don't get me wrong, I actually really love my life and love doing each and every one of those things.  But its all those "things" that make moments like this so wonderful.  These dishwasher-going, clock-ticking, heater-blowing moments.  Ahhh. Bliss.

Slacker.

That's me. I thought I haven't been blogging because nothing exciting has happened, but now that I am looking through the pictures on my camera, there are plenty of things to post.  I'll do a whirl-wind post of some of the things we've been up to (or mostly Jax I guess).

Jax discovered that popcorn and Toy Story are a great combination

I found JD like this one day.  I think all the mid-term studying is getting to him.

If you excuse the fact that Jax looks like he came from the orphanage, there is a funny story that goes with this.  I had a friend over scrapbooking, and had a few treats out for us.  We were back in the other room for a few minutes (we thought Jax was watching his movie), and he comes wandering in to find us looking like this.  He had found the hershey kisses and snarfed one up. I found itty bitty wrapper shreds all over the floor.  Oh well.  Hope you enjoyed it, Jax.

Hand Sanitizer anyone?

(Censored!) One day Jax escaped after bath time and tried sneaking outside.  Brrr!

Jax' new favorite activity is pulling out the long umbrella, straddling it, and putting Woody in the saddle right in front of him.  They ride around the house together.  Apparently I need to get him a stick-horse.

The little artist got sneaky and found the crayons.

Daddy's box car.

Another "after-bath" escape.  He thinks he is absolutely invisible in this tent and that we can't get him.  Funny.

What can I say?  The kid loves YouTube.

We make Jax take out the trash.

We make him put it down the chute, too.

We made gingerbread trains (in February!).  Jax put on all the yellow candies on top.  All by himself!  I pointed where to put it, and he stuck it on standing up and everything.  Pretty good, I think!  His favorite part was destroying, though!

Just to remind you, we are still waiting for visitors!  Here is a link to Orbitz so you can book your flight now! :) Do it!

Have you caught it?

I mean the genealogy bug. I've been infected by it.. in a good way.

Being at home everyday I thought I should be making myself useful. You know, making a difference, doing something for good, turning my time into something productive... Well, a few family members have really gotten into indexing in the past year or so, and I thought that might just be my niche. Nope. It wasn't. I did a few records, but it isn't my thing. Whenever I can't figure out a name or word, I panic, and a feel really stressed that I am messing something really huge up. And it is really time consuming for me (in the "it just took me an hour to do this one tiny document" way, not the "wow, where did the time go? I just indexed 5000 names" way). So I kept looking. The bishop of our ward has asked us to set a goal to take a family name to the temple this year, so I started there. Then I remembered that back in high school I really got into family history. I put all the information from my parents' genealogy books into PAF (a file who's location is now lost to me). It was really interesting for me to find out about all of these people who preceded me, and read their stories and experiences. So I started again.

The church has come out with this "new" family search site, and I knew absolutely nothing about it. I started poking around on it, just to see what it is like. Have you seen it? Incredible. Really. The amount of information available through that site is really quite an achievement. There are quite a few things that I do NOT like about the site, but that is another story for another day. Back to my story...I got to the end of my family's line, and wondered how to find more. So I googled the last names of the line. That's right. I googled their names. In all varieties of combinations and spellings and orders. I found a LOT. My guess is that the internet holds more information on dead people than on living people. I of course verified sources, compared, and and checked before adding any information, but I have been able to find 27 people who need their temple work done. This has all happened in just the last few days. 27 people!

So JD and I planned a trip to the Washington DC Temple tomorrow to take a few of these names. We were excited to go since we haven't been in so long, and we have some great friends who offered to watch Jax ALL DAY while we took the long trip down to DC. And then...Enter horrible weather. Darn! JD and Charise:0, Satan:1. Seems like he always strikes when we make plans to accomplish good things. We had to cancel our trip due to adverse weather conditions. But we'll get there soon enough.

Anyway, on to the whole purpose of this post. I needed a place to keep all these cool stories and documents and pictures I was finding about my ancestors. So I started a blog. It is my personal journey through genealogy, and has no rhyme or reason, just a collection of interesting facts and stories that I will someday tell to my children. But I wanted to introduce you all to it, just in case any of you are my family and want to know the stories, or strangers who are just plain curious.

It is called Blogging Through Time: My Journey through family history and the stories along the way. If you'd like to take a look, it can be found at bloggingthroughtime.blogspot.com.

I hope you'll enjoy some of the stories as I have, and I hope someday you'll catch the genealogy bug, too. It's good for you!