Drum Roll, Please. . .

Well the ultrasound was today and the results are in. . .it's a BOY!!  That's right, the May family will include three little boys and one lonely little girl.  But more seriously, the little guy appears to have all fingers, toes, and other vitals intact.

Amazed

Every once in a while, I have to stop and look at the things that really get me excited at this phase in my life: food storage, sales on meat, all things PBS or BYU TV, seeing an almost three-year-old decide to use the toilet, tax return documents, clean floors, tidily made beds, a day on the calendar when the kids don't have school or piano or dance or. . ..  As I review this list, I realize that my life certainly is different from how it was a few years ago.  At what point did I cross over into the category of woman who gets an adrenaline rush when she comes home from Costco and adds to her stockpile in her pantry?  At what point did dog hair become my nemesis?  When did I decide it was an accomplishment to make it 6 days without washing my hair?  And since when was being able to write a paragraph uninterrupted a feat?  Oh well, I just got interrupted by someone whose head AND arm are coming out of his neck hole.  Here are some pictures of this life lately.

Snow Canyon

Pin the Nose on the Grover

Atticus Turns 3

Cousins in a Wash

Jenny's Canyon

Rock Boy

Moved and Back to School

Okay, so I'm a bad enough blogger that I haven't even mentioned that we sold our old house and moved around the corner into a larger, more comfortable home at the end of a cul de sac.  And we moved in June! It's a huge blessing and we are so thankful; we honestly didn't know if it would work out for a while.

We had a super fun but very short summer.  The kids played in their rooms or our backyard and basically didn't watch television at all.  They played soccer in late spring, and Emerson scored his first goal.  We had cousins come in town in July and August and did our own swim lessons by going to the pool for a couple of hours each day for a week.  Emerson is doing real strokes and Stella is almost there, too.  Atticus is still convinced he can swim when he really can't.  Stella mastered her bike without training wheels just as school started up.

Tad did his usual bike races -- Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood Canyons.  And he has his City Creek Canyon race coming up in October.  I did three half marathons and a couple of 5ks.  I did better than expected, especially considering that I was sick for two of the three half marathons.  It's so sad that the early morning light is waning so we can't go for early rides or runs as easily.

Of course Stella turned five and as school started up she started kindergarten while Emerson started second grade.  Both kids are loving it and doing a really fantastic job.  I can't believe how quickly they're learning!  Atticus, however, is just impatient for them to get home each day.  He asks, "Mom, where's Emerson?  Where's Stel?" about every ten minutes.

Spring Has Sprung -- I Think

     Spring in Utah is an elusive thing.  This year in particular illustrates how difficult it really is put your finger on a calendar date and say, "Yes, spring is here as of April 7th."  It seems like each day as I pile the kids in the car for our ride to school,  there's a weather dialogue and it usually goes like this:

"Mom, when is it finally going to be warm warm -- like summer?"
"Well, sweeties, it's spring right now and --"
"How can you tell it's spring, Mom, there's snow on the car!"
"Well, that's just the way spring goes.  It might be warm for a day and then rainy and cold for a day or even snowy."
 "That's what you say every day, Mom."
    
     Now of course we are having some splendid spring days, but these serve only to create a false sense of spring security and a couple of days later my tulips are flattened by soggy snow.
     The kids, however, seem to grow as if their bodies are in perpetual spring.  Stella has grown more than five inches since her last birthday, and her intellectual growth is even more stunning; if I need something in our house, she knows where almost everything is and she's really improving her reading.  Emerson is a full-fledged super reader who had to convince the school librarian to let him check books out of the second and third-grade sections.  He writes these amazing, fully illustrated stories about our pet lizard, Bluee.  Atticus is speaking in complete sentences -- all the time, even when I beg him to quiet down for a few seconds -- and is obsessed with strawberries ("strawbreeze").  I can't believe he's already two.  He got a couple of guitars for his birthday and he loves to dance as he plays them.  He's such an assertive little sucker who fully comprehends the noisy lengths a third-born must go to in order to get the attention he so richly deserves.
     For the last couple of months, we've been trying to sell our house in order to buy a larger house around the corner.  And although we've had a couple of close calls and 30 showings, we've had no offers yet.  This means that my full-time job is cleaning.  And I'm not talking putting toys away -- I mean floor-to-celing scrubbing and putting EVERYTHING away.  I've officially been driven to obsessive-compulsive cleaning habits; I stare at the smallest speck of dirt like it's my life-long sworn enemy and I extinguish it's existence with ruthless efficiency.  But with the deadline for the sale of our home approaching, I'm taking solace in the fact that no other houses are selling either and that at least our house looks the best it ever has.

Pacific Northwest Adventure

Okay, so we in the May clan are definitely optimists.  The proof -- we decided to fly, that's right, fly on a plane during the busiest travel season of the year, the week after Christmas.  Our destination was the May estate in Vancouver, Washington.  But it proved a little tough to get there.  After arriving at the airport in the morning, boarding and deplaning twice (with hour-long stretches sitting in the plane between), and waiting around for nearly seven hours, we received the news that our flight was cancelled.  Optimism tested.

Luckily Caroline, Afton and Cheryll were able to make it to Vancouver VERY late that night.  And luckily we were able to repeat our performance the next day, sans delays or cancellation and with a brief and not entirely unpleasant stop in Seattle.  We convinced the kids (all of whom behaved admirably) that Monday had just be a rehearsal for the actual trip and boy were they overjoyed to finally arrive at the cousins' house!

We had a great trip -- lots of cousin play time, eating, visiting, freezing excursions to gorgeous sites, and more eating.  I'll post more about that later, but I had to share this link to this New Year's song that Uncle Tim composed with a lot of help from all of the cousins and adults.  Get ready Bilboard Charts, here comes your latest hit:
http://schmaldviche.com/2011/