With Valentine’s approaching, love is in the air – and cutesy decorations are on your walls.  Or aren’t they?  Up until about 5 minutes ago, there weren’t any here to hang in Smithtopia.  

Oh, sadness.

With a little creativity and just about 5 minutes (which means 15 if you have little kids underfoot), I came up with something for that blank wall.  It was crying out for a little red-and-silvery-heart loving.  Now it’s crying, but perhaps for a different reason. LOL.

I just know you’ll all be wanting to make one, so here’s the tutorial!

Supplies:

One wire hanger

One hearty-wire-garland thing.  Possibly sold at a $1 store near you if you’re lucky.  Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for a Valentine package from Zannie like I did.

Instructions:

Bend the hanger into a beautimous heart shape.

Wrap the garland around and around it.

Get impatient after one …

Remember this post?

It gets better.

Late Sunday night… a week and a half ago now…
John and I went to double-check on the boys before we went to sleep.
Gotta shoo away any bad dreams hiding in corners, you know.
Turn fans to “low” instead of “hurricane” (man, it’s warm here).
Tuck blankets up to cute little chinny chin chins since little boys sometimes forget how warm it is here.
That sort of thing.

We don’t often do that together; usually just one of us will suffice. That night, for whatever reason, we both went in – I was on the “lucky” side as it turned out. My shoulder was practically brushing up against the wall going down the right side of that hallway.

As we turned through the doorway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

“What was that?”

(Cue violins …

I like gratitude.
I like ham.

If I had to pick one, I’d go with the former.

You see, I had that one little day -so what if it happened to be Thanksgiving?- where I put all my happiness eggs in the “ham” basket, and it didn’t work out very well. It was a pretty miserable day, actually.

smile!

Oh, I put on a happy face at first. Laughed about it. Skyped with the family. Showed the neighbors. Ha. Ha. Ha.

And then my sweet husband put his arms around me and said,

“You’re being a good sport, but I know how much you were looking forward to this.  Come here and let me hug you.”

Well, he caught me red-handed there. I stood there and cried on his shoulder. …

In light of how fabulous this ham was going to be, I went and splurged.  As if the cost of one ham in Hawaii wasn’t splurging enough, I bought two big porkers.  One, you see, might not be enough for as many people as we’d have with our families combined.

I almost felt bad – This ham would be so yummy, their poor turkey would probably sit almost untouched.  Who wants turkey when there’s ham?

No matter.  With two huge hammies, we’d still have leftovers.

So!

Two nights before Thanksgiving I reverently cracked the seal on that big jar of apple-goo & sliced into our hammies.  I drizzled it everywhere and made sure the sticky sweet apple glaze would be infusing its magic over, around, under, and through.  I even prayed little prayers of gratitude for the little piggy lives spent on this meal.  Your lives …

My friend of Thanksgiving planning fame had another great idea a couple weeks before Thanksgiving.

“Let’s can applesauce!”

“Okay!”

And we tried.  We got a great big box of apples, grabbed our apple peelers (not knowing the applesauce-maker works way better with them -cough cough- unpeeled) and, feeling all self-reliant and domesticated, we went at it.

<INSERT – funny picture of me eating an apple peel covered in, um, dishsoap.  Of all the many peels on that mountainous pile of peelings, I happened to grab the one from the apple that didn’t get rinsed… >

<That picture does exist, truly, I just can’t find it.  Gr.>

All desires for eating apple peels taken care of, our plans for applesauce-making commenced… and quickly changed into plans of canning delicious apple pie filling.

(Peeled apples cooked quickly, yes, but didn’t squish well through her applesauce maker.)

I can …

“Only repentance leads to the sunlit uplands of a better life.

And, of course, only through repentance do we gain access to the atoning grace of Jesus Christ and salvation. Repentance is a divine gift, and there should be a smile on our faces when we speak of it.  It points us to freedom, confidence, and peace. Rather than interrupting the celebration, the gift of repentance is the cause for true celebration.”…

Fully a month before the big day (maybe more!), a dear friend and I planned to do Thanksgiving dinner together. It went something like this:

“Wanna do Thanksgiving together?”

“YES!”

With our five kids and their eight kids, it was going to be a nice, big group, and well worth planning ahead of time.  

We were going to set up tables outside & eat picnic style in our shorts and t-shirts. We were going to follow pie with snow cones… because it’s Hawaii and we can. (Over those 6 weeks of anticipation, I made who-knows-how-many blocks of ice using the empty yogurt containers she saved for me.)

It was fun to divvy up who’d bring what, even if I did lose my list…  several times… One thing was easy to remember:

They were doing the turkey, we were doing the ham.

John and I love ham.  We …

It’s not my fault other people also happened to think of it too.  If they had told me before I thought of it all by myself, then it could be their idea.

(Boy, do I hang out with little kids all day or what?  That’s some awesome little-kids logic there.)

One advantage to produce here being so expensive that Costco produce it is an actually economically viable option is…

Apple Containers!

Turns out this cloud *does* have a silver lining after all.

They made fantastic ornament-storage cases. I’m hoping the white netting stuffed in their keeps things from jostling around too much.  Hooray for another holiday season OVER!  Decorations finally up in the attic/loft/dealy — check!…

This year, for the first time, they transformed the whole place into a holiday paradise of lights and music, and in the evenings (MWFSa) you could go and take a ride through their Christmas lagoon.
[Disclaimer: the pictures that follow don't do it justice in the least, but I thought I'd share anyway.]

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I mean, “Christmas” doesn’t strike me as something historically celebrated by Polynesia. At …

(Marvin J. Ashton, in Conference Report, Oct. 1979, p. 87; or Ensign, Nov. 1979, p. 61)

It was quite an interesting experience to have  strangers come into your home, box everything up and load it into a crate.  I felt nothing but gratitude that they were there to do all that work for us, as I’m sure if we had to, we wouldn’t be able to actually get out of here until September.  2012.

Bittersweet, to see the home empty like it was when we found it four years ago.

Exciting, to know these changes are REALLY …