Alive and Well

We are actually still alive and well. I've been thinking about putting pictures on lately, but Clark was overhauling our hard drive for a couple of days and is still saying he's going to replace it so I've been putting off uploading my pictures. Lets see, we are doing well. Leila is starting to say lots of words, which is so fun. She wants to show me everything she thinks is cool and slaps my leg and yells, "Mama!!" in a very determined voice. Then she'll show me her toy or whatever it is that time and jibber jabbers as if she's explaining it to me. It's so funny. The kids love making her repeat words--that gets pretty silly as you can imagine. Evie has made a "best friend" named Molly. They want to play together every day. Evie went to a church activity with her (she goes to some kind of non-denominational church) and now Evie is inviting her to church next Sunday. Julianna is doing well in her school work, but now that she is settled in at school and feeling more comfortable she's starting to show her stubborn streak there as well. She got in trouble the other day for calling another little girl diarrhea poopy head. Oh dear. Russell is really at a fun age right now--he loves loves loves his little bike with training wheels. I think he could ride it all day. He gets grounded from it occasionally when he gets too far ahead of me when we are going to get Evie and Anna from school (we're in the walk zone). He and Leila are finally able to play with each other a bit and sometime he goes looking for her so he can have her tag along on his adventures playing with toys or in the backyard.

We are loving being a family again. It's soooo nice! Clark is doing well, though he's a bit frustrated at how slow work has been for him lately. There have been days that he's only worked on a couple of patients and he despises sitting around. Hopefully it will pick up soon. Oh, and we are training for a 10K on Oct. 25th. I'm excited and nervous about it! Okay, that wasn't very detailed. But that's what we've been doing. Clark's parents are in town so that's been really fun too. We've had tons of game nights and family dinners. I think they are heading back down to Nevada sometime this week.

One last comment, I was able to go to the Relief Society Broadcast on Saturday night and all I can say is, "Wow!" I came out of it kind of emotionally exhausted from getting so much out of it. I think I really needed it this year--maybe I was just listening better than I sometimes do. President Uchtdorf's talk was especially amazing. What an incredible apostle of God. I feel so blessed that there was this special time for all of us women to go and be spiritually fed. It made me feel so special as a daughter of God and encouraged me to work harder without becoming discouraged that I am so far from perfect. I loved what President Uchdorf said about being happy through "creation and compassion." We all can create something good in our lives, big or small. I hope I can create a home full of love and laughter and faith. That's my main goal in this life--it seems so overwhelming and sometimes I let little bumps in the road feel like failure. It's like President's Uchtdorf's story about how his wife will make a perfectly exquisite meal, but will always apologize for some shortcoming she sees in it. We are doing a lot of things right as women--lets not let that inner critic cripple us and keep us from reaching our potential as daughters of God.

So I'm off my soapbox now, but, man! What a great talk. If you missed it, you can listen to the whole broadcast at this link http://www.lds.org/broadcast/grsm/0,6220,285,00.html