wild and precious

 photo courtesy of Rebecca Mudrick of darling art photography.

I had three kids in a span of 18 months.  I wish, oh how I wish, that I could beautifully express what that is like.  But just living it was easier than writing down what I was feeling about it.  If I had to write a poem about it it would go like this: 

Wee Young Ones.  A poem by Nicole Empey

Me and three wees. 

Intensity.

That’s all I’ve got to say about it.  I’m about as eloquent as a duck.  Luckily for me, I have eloquent friends.   I would read about their exploits and their poignant thoughts on motherhood and vicariously my heart would swell and soar with words that gave my own heart a voice.

There is another friend I have (who doesn’t know I’m her friend), but who I turn to whenever I’m feeling like what I am doing is impossible to accomplish with any grace or dignity whatsoever.  She writes at the blog Wild and Precious and she had 5 kids in 4 years.  Right, who am I to complain with my 3 in 2 years?

I want to share with you her recent address at a BYU Women’s conference.  Here is the link to her blog entry about it, and her talk is about halfway down entitled “Come Sighing and Singing to the Lord.”  Oh and her name is Catherine K. Arveseth.  Please, go read it.  It is sunshine for a mother’s heart. 

I identify with her experiences in a real way.  Though, I have yet to find a handmade sign in my yard that reads “Mom for Sale.”  But, that said, my kids can’t write yet. 

That one time, when we went on a Safari.

…like, a year and a half ago?  Well I didn’t even quite make it past the second day, so I’m feeling motivation to do it right now and when I’m motivated – I’d better do it.  So, we last left off with us eating lamb for dinner at Dunia Camp in the middle of the Serengeti.  ‘Will we see a cheetah the next day?’ I asked, and in this post, you find out.  But first, here’s what the morning looked like: 
We woke up in our spacious tent to a tray of hot chocolate and cookies which we enjoyed looking out over the morning mists and then headed to the main tent for some delicious breakfast.
We then piled in the Safari cars once again.
The night before, I had asked around if everyone had brought some plaid.  It turns out that most had.  I had a theory that if we all wore plaid the big cats would show.  We drove for a while and soon came upon a pile-up of safari cars.  If there’s a pile-up of cars in the middle of the vast Serengeti, you know something big is going on. 

There’s mama Empey sporting her plaid.  And here’s Nick and I trying to see what everyone else with the binoculars is seeing, also sporting plaid.

Can you spot him?
How about with Papa Empey’s beast of a camera? 
A leopard!  All that plaid was working its magic.  But would we see a cheetah?
Another pile-up!  What would it be this time? 
Lions in the road!
Is this the first time we’ve seen lions?  I think so.  Don’t worry, you’ll see more later. 
We moved on and saw this good looking bird up close and personal.
This bird didn’t stay too long.
And then we met this harmless looking little monkey on the side of the road.

Maybe this little monkey looks familiar to you?  He’s my facebook photo companion:

Oh, but he decided I was so amiable that I was worth sitting next to.  When I didn’t offer him lunch,

he got to looking around on his own.

When he couldn’t find anything he said his goodbyes and headed on out.  Evidently our driver, Eddie, didn’t know that the monkey had come in the car.  When we told him and showed him the pictures he laughed and said he’d never seen that before. 

Later we met this old giraffe you see over my shoulder.  You can tell he’s older because his spots are really dark.  I learned that from Eddie.  Eddie knows things.
Alright, alright so we’re driving.  And all the sudden Eddie slams on the breaks and backs up.  This is why you pay him. Do you see that?
Yeah, none of us did either.  Look closely and you’ll see:

A cheetah!

And she had some wee babes hanging out with her.

Wahoo for plaid, eh?  I would now like to interject that I spent most of my youth crawling around the back yard and then jumping up and sprinting across the lawn pretending I was a cheetah.  I remember begging fairly often at the movie rental store to rent the movie Cheetah.  Seeing one in real life in Africa was, well, SEEING ONE IN REAL LIFE IN AFRICA. 
Next will talk about lunch with the hippos.

these berries don’t happen to look like straws at all

Wednesday was berry pickin’ day.  We left in the morning before it got too hot.

They gave us some cardboard palettes.  We filled them up with (mostly uneaten) strawberries.

We picked only the best.  The reddest.  The juiciest.

We apparently picked some other stuff, too.  We didn’t (I hope) eat these, though.

For Brookston it was a time of deep introspection.  “Why do they call them strawberries?”

For Nicole it was a time to see how long she could keep white pants clean during a red berry juice adventure.

For Roz it was a good core workout.

“But I can’t drink milk through them.  Weird ol’ name for a berry…”

That’s one happy strainer.

See what I mean, though?  These are obviously very juicy, red, unstrawlike berries.  Maybe the most unstraw like I’ve ever seen.  But we didn’t let that stand in the way of having a good time.  Well, maybe Brookston was a little perturbed.

The Slurping Mud Pit

I think I’ve mentioned before that when it rains our yard turns into a slurping mud pit? 

…Yeah, it does.

Accountability

I’ve noticed accountability helps when it comes to p90x.  That’s why the cool kids and I have a google chat club with high expectations.  We meet every night at the same time and sweat it out for an hour and a half.  My friend Al provides the motivation, Ames provides the encouragement and I provide the whining.  Last night we threw Hannah into the mix and she provided the happy baby.

Here we are, all happy, as we start our Yoga X:

This picture of Al above gives me tender feelings.  Look at that smile.  Al recently got her own beachbody coach, and I’m pretty jealous.  Her coach has a picture of himself with Tony – I mean, that’s legitimacy.  I’m currently trying to find out if her coach can be my coach.  Oh, and it turns out that Al’s coach went to the same university she did, and he’s Mormon.  Mormons are everywhere, man.

We each live in a different state of the U.S. but a similar state of awesomeness.  Here’s Ames, probably finishing up her three minute fiction while we all chat.  Look at that smile too: 

The following picture makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.  I asked Nick to take a picture of me to prove my stretchiness.  I distinctly remember saying “and we only want flattering pictures.”  Ha ha ha.  Oh, failed that one.

But here’s my stretchiness.  When I started p90x the first time round I was ‘grabbing at my socks’ as Tony says.  So I’m pretty happy with this instead. 

If you’ve ever thought about doing p90x but aren’t sure about it, I highly recommend it.  But, get a cool kids accountability group going, or you’ll never get it done.  It’s an hour and a half (more or less) each day 6 days a week, and that requires good friends to make you do it and to make it exciting.  See below for example.  Look at those smiles:

But I have noticed great results.  My first time round I couldn’t even attempt to do a pull up, by the time I finished I could do one.  This time through – the other night I did 5, count them 5, chin ups.  Yeah, it surprised even me.  I kept yelling “Look!  Nick LOOK!  I’m doing it!  I’m doing it again!  What's going ON?”  So, I’m not just putting that up here to brag, I’m putting that here to testify that you get results.  =)  Note: Blogs are for bragging, and that’s why I have one.  I brag.  I’m a bragger. 

If you’re wondering what it’s like, it’s pretty much like this. I actually found this skit on Tony Horton’s facebook page.  Believe it or not, I hadn’t heard about BYU’s divine comedy until I saw this from Tony.  Yeah, I have a lot to thank him for.

And now, I’ll end with my favorite Tony quotes: 

“Don’t stop breathing.  You stop, you die.”  (Thanks, Tony.  Although, I usually am holding my breath at this point and need the reminder)

“Kaw! Kaw! Like a pterodactyl backing out of trouble.”

“Get your little bucket nearby my friends.”

(pointing out  Joe Bovino’s triceps) “Diamonds of Gold.”

please, don’t eat the dolphin

don’t bite it either.  thank you.

What we did this morning

You’ll have to ask Nick what happened before 8:30 a.m. because  I was out solid and he was his usual responsible self and got up to make sure the kids didn’t climb on top of the refrigerator or something like that.  I woke up to Everett’s voice asking me if I wanted some water.  I say his voice because when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anyone and thought perhaps it was in my dream.  But no, he had climbed all the way around the backside of the bed to stand right behind me to ascertain whether or not I wanted to patron his ‘water stand.’  (He didn’t have any lemons…) At any rate, I was interested and drank a whole cup.  He never asked me for money, so I’ll have to introduce him to capitalism sometime I guess.

Since Nick was already headed out for his pharmacy I let the kids watch The Busy World of Richard Scarry while I got ready.  I did say this blog post is about what we did this morning and I meant it, details and all.  So, once I smelled better I went out and had some breakfast.  Rosalyn joined me for some mini-wheats doused in chocolate whey protein powder.  It’s my made-up diet for p90x.  They say eat eggs, I eat cereal with chocolate protein powder – It’s about the same. 

So then I thought I was really smart and I cut some holes in the top of some shoe boxes that were sitting around waiting to go out with the recycling so I could put the kid’s favorite stuffed animals inside like it was their car.  This plan failed miserably. After  I turned off the show and revealed the make shift cars, E,B, & R pushed them around once or twice and then started smacking the boxes against the floor.  Ah, well.  Evidently not as brilliant as I thought.  I was at least hoping for a good 20 minutes of interest – no such thing. 

So we moved on and I may or may not have needed to drag kids into this room, lock the door and insist that they play with trains as I sat there making it as interesting as possible while B cried and cried.  (I guess I need to interject here that lately my kids have just taken to harassing each other and terrorizing the nation and it takes some real effort to get them to do anything else) but after a bit of ridiculousness it turned out thus:

Kind of picture perfect. 

Brookston said this is ‘the church man getting a ride to the church building’:

And this picture of Roz makes me kind of giddy.  She was making the trains say hello to each other. 

This is the camping ground and Everett set that car up ‘roasting marshmellons at the firepit’.  (Marshmellons?  Eh, Dad?  Did you get the reference?  ..he hasn’t even seen that movie yet.)

I kept that up with them for an impressive amount of time.  Next we moved on to an old favorite:

I’ve added this scale to the mix, which the boys thoroughly enjoy. 

Everett’s explaining to Brookston that he has plans to get the scale all the way down to the 2 lb mark there at the bottom.

Success.  And I love B’s posture above.  He totally gets this from Nick.

If you looked back at the old blog post to which I linked above, you’ll notice that this time round Roz has a considerable increase in hair volume. 

They are still pretty quiet while they do this and I LOVE it.  Ah, a quiet moment.  Totally, totally golden.

Oh, I’m such a brave woman.

We cleaned this up and had some Macaroni and Cheese and then the kids went outside to play in the mud.  I took the opportunity to work on cleaning my ever-messy kitchen and kept an eye out the window and only needed to step out periodically to say things like, ‘boys, those are RED ants, they’ll bite you.” or “Brookston, that’s Roz’s worm – go find your own, dude.”  Or “Everett, if you keep slipping when you go that way, then maybe you can find a different way around.  I know it’s frustrating but crying won’t fix it, son.”  You know, stuff like that. 

Then eventually they all wanted to come in and by the time I had all the mud off everyone I was ready for my alone time and now they are locked in their rooms while I am documenting all of this.  However, it sounds like they’ve all fallen asleep!  They haven’t done that in a while, and I am relieved…. 

Well, never mind that last bit.  E just came out crying and itching like a maniac.  We’ve suspected poison ivy and we must be right.  So I calamined him up again and we’ll see how that goes.    Bye now.