And breathe...

I had a marvelous holiday and a great birthday! Yes, I am one of the cursed few with a birthday the day after Christmas. But it was awesome. I love to go shopping on my birthday and also had lunch with great friends Stefanie and Stacey. Thanks you guys!

My family was out with the husbands and kids of Stefanie and Stacey snow machining. Or snowmobiling to all of you Lower 48ers. As JaDee was leaving at he kissed me one more time, "Are you sure its OK that we go."

Do I look like a mean wife/mom if I push them out the door? Are you kidding! I practically jumped for joy when Todd asked if he could take them!

After they left I went back to bed with a bowl of s'more mix and a book for breakfast.

I did not mind at all that they were off having a great time!

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730 to go...or exactly one year ago today...

It has been exactly one year. One year since we touched down in a land frozen and dark, not knowing a soul. One year ago with 10 suitcases, 2 cats (one of them howling) and a dog (he was peeing in the men's room of the airport) where I almost lost it. [Click here here or here for details of that journey.]

So how is life in Alaska? Are you going to stay?

Those are the 2 questions I am asked the most. By new friends here, by my mother every other phone call, by relatives to my mother/father/sister/in-laws and out-laws.

A year ago I was counting down the days (1095) for our 3 years to be up in this forsaken, brutal land. I was desperately homesick, lonely and in the chaos of re-establishing ourselves and our possessions it was all I could do to hang on to that one ray of hope: I could go home.

Then I got to go home in April by myself. On the return of that trip when I touched down in a slightly warmer, brighter land, I had the soft whispering in my heart as the landing gear pounded the tarmac, that I was home. My dearest ones were here and I belong with them.

I can do this, I thought. I can love it here.

And love it we have. That is the answer to how we are.

As for the answer to are we staying here...

The jury is still out.

We are enjoying the now.

The most wonderful time of the year

To answer a few questions about our family pictures: We were outside, it was not a back drop. It had snowed the day before and the trees were perfect. It was about 35 degrees out so of course us Alaskans didn't need coats. The snow was about up to my knees and Olivia needed to be carried. We took a red bench from my room and packed it around to the different places we shot pictures. It took us about 45 minutes to get our shots. For those of you familiar with the area, we were at the Eagle River North Fork state recreation area on the way to the Nature Center.

We saw lots of animal tracks and heard a moose bellowing in the not too far off distance, but no wildlife encounters.

But this weekend we had the most holiday-rific time of all! It started Saturday morning with the boys Christmas piano recital and Olivia's primary Christmas party, both at 10 AM. Luckily we just had to drop Olivia off to her teachers at church and we both made the recital. It was Ethan's first performance. He was thrilled to play on his teacher's cherry red baby grand piano because "It sounds cooler than the smaller black one downstairs."

Olivia had a visit from Santa at her party. "But," she told me. "It wasn't the real Santa. He only comes out on Christmas and its not Christmas yet." Olivia asked for, "The doll withe the llama." Luckily, as one of Santa's helpers, I know that this means the American Girl Doll "Chrissa" and her pet llama.

After the party/recital we went up to Palmer for their annual Colony Christmas celebration. Just like Perry, UT celebrates the 4th of July in a grand way, Palmer uses Christmas as the back drop for their towns celebration. We decided to check out the Nativity display set up at the LDS church house. The building was also hosting performers and our friends little girls were participating in a couple of numbers that their little dance group put on so we decided to go and support them and see what kind of Nativities were set up.

The Church gym in Palmer at the Nativity Display. This is just a taste of the set up that was all over the building for us to enjoy.

I was blown away. There were over 1000 Nativities set up in over 10 rooms of the Church. The decorating was over the top. Complete with rough wood arches, hundreds of yards of butcher paper stone wall murals (that were incredibly well done), yards of fabric swathed the walls and ceilings of each room transforming the scene to a rich and warm backdrop for the literally hundreds of Nativities lovingly set up on display.

We spent over 2 hours taking in all of the Nativities, playing the "I spy" game set up for the kids to look for objects all over the building, and then moved on to see more of Palmer. We saw the ice sculpture garden, and many lights and carolers, but missed the gingerbread house displays, the night time parade, and only glimpsed in on the Orchestra Concert playing holiday music.

Ice sculpture Gardenn at Palmer's Colony Christmas Festival

We had to get back to the much discussed Adult Ward Christmas Party. No kids and many of the 12-18 crowd was asked to serve. So who to babysit? Carter and Ethan forget that Olivia exists so we still need to hire someone to come. And we can't exactly leave a 12 year old girl alone with my 12 year old boy, so we got them a 16 year old boy who has lots of experience with his little nieces.

And the party was fantastic!! A HUGE amount of work was put into a very nice evening.

The end of weekend was wrapped up with a Messiah Sing A Long at the church last night. The amount of "amateur" was incredible and the quality was top notch. A small orchestra and an army of pianists accompanied the soloists and the congregational choir. It was a lot of fun and a awesome way to worship our Savior this time of year.

Yes, the Moncurs are feeling the Christmas spirit!

Did you see this on FB?

We had our pictures taken by the wonderful Catherine, who is also my partner in backpacking adventures. I posted the one on Facebook but here are some others.

OK you will have to come back and see some more because I am having upload problems...

photo log: Christmas Tree 2009

Last year we did not get to break out the Christmas decorations that were of huge concern to me as we house hunted last December. A concern as in "Where are we going to put them since none of these homes come with basements?" The answer has been our huge heated garage that only holds one car (mine) 6 months of the year when it is too cold to ride bikes and they can be hung from the ceiling. Never mind that it is a 3 car garage. But that is another post.

So when our house ended up boasting a 2 story living room with a bay window perfect for a Christmas Tree, I was most excited. The Christmas Tree is my thing. Our ornaments are from every place we have ever vacationed starting with our honeymoon in Jackson Hole. I love to scour the shops of every place we have been in search for the perfect ornament.

We have a space needle, a statue of liberty, a San Diego fishing boat, a Confederate Soldier from Franklin, TN, moose on white water rafts, and even one from Germany when JaDee was there for work a million years ago.

And then there are the kids ornaments. Of course the baby ornaments but also ballerina slippers this year for Olivia, a cowboy boot for Ethan several years ago when that was all he would wear, and the salt dough ornaments made by Carter in Kindergarten.

I spend hours wrapping each branch with lights and hang my strings of red beads just so before the ornaments touch a branch.

This year we chopped one down and it was FREE! Wahoo! And the wild trees here are exactly the kind I like and which I have been known to spend way too much on in UT.

And so enjoy these pictures of our trees journey, where 5 days ago it was growing in a field on the Fort Richardson Army base, until we came a long with our axe and strapped it to our car. I like to think that it is glad it got to be our tree this year. That it is honored to hold our stories on its branches for a few weeks.

what I was going to blog about...

...Was the Christmas tree we chopped down the other day. And how it was not much different from picking one out at a tree lot. Meaning I loved the first one we saw, went all over creation to double check there wasn't one better only to trudge back to the first one and tie it to the roof of the car. I had pictures and everything.

But my camera is locked in my car.

In my garage.

With my keys.

Which leads me to blog about cortisol levels and how mine are off the chart high in the morning.

See I know this because I have been getting a bunch of hormone tests done as a result of feeling like crap for the better part of the 4 years Olivia has been alive. After several doctors in Utah told me I was just getting older and "it is because you are a Mom," I found a women's center here that does everything but babies. So no offense to all the preggers out there, but it is nice not to have to be scheduled around you. And it being not preggers, and therefore not the cash crop that babies are to a women's center, I am not waiting 3 months in between appointments.

So long story short, I have hypothyroidism and to be thorough I got a work up on all sorts of other hormones. This was done with an attractive saliva test. Ever done one of those?

Me either.

You get to fill (yes, I said FILL. I will wait a minute while you gag at that image. I gagged when I saw it for real) a test tube with your own spit 4 times on day 19, 20 or 21 of your cycle (so this was done about 3 weeks ago), mail it at the UPS store and they get all sorts of info from that. Who knew there was that much to spit?

Turns out one of the things they read is your cortisol levels. And mine are through the roof at 6:30 in the morning.

I reviewed these results yesterday with my nice doctor lady, and she monologued about saying no, not doing too much for the PTA, getting enough sleep, and exercise and eating right. Blah blah blah. The irony of this is that since we moved, I have said no to the PTA, I do eat right and exercise, and since I cut off the Diet Pepsi at 3 in the afternoon and get up before 6 most mornings, I sleep great so what the heck could be stressing me to the point of needing a whole new bar graph to track my cortisol levels from 7 AM to noon every day?

I came up with 2 answers.

First: I am LDS. We are a busy people. We have many obligations to our faith and the organization of the congregations we belong to. Not only do we attend a block of 3 hours worth of meetings every Sunday, we have Tuesday night youth activities that JaDee has always been a leader in and now Carter is old enough tot attend. There is also choir, and cub scouts and Relief Society activities and cleaning the building, feeding the missionaries, and other miscellaneous activities like chili cook-offs that come around once every so often but there is usually at least 1 or 2 "miscellaneous" things a month if not once a week on top of the usual.

But aside from that, the second set of stresses I came up with was this:

Dealing with ages 12, 8 and 4 provide a wide variety of needs.

All day I am inundated with all the things like just now, for example as I sit here typing the last line: "Mom, how come you always get silverware for wedding presents." "Mom, I want you to play ponies." "Mom, can I play Wii before my homework just this once? Please, I promise I will do it tomorrow!"

How can one person's brain cope with questions like that all day long! Blooms Taxonomy would put things like this at a level 5 or 6. In other words, high level thinking and like being under fire in the intellectual/emotional kind of way.

Not to mention the sheer effort it takes to coordinate all of this/them.

Here is a typical Thursday:

6-6:30wake up get the boys out of bed say prayers with JaDee before he leaves for work
make lunches, get the boys through the shower.
7:25 leave to take Carter to jazz band leaving 8 year old Ethan "in charge" for 15 minutes.
7:40 come home get changed out of pajamas. Get Olivia up and dressed, get Ethan finished up.
8:30 take Ethan to school
9-10:30 go to the gym, run to the store/bank/post office
11:00- 12:45 eat, shower, quick chores, phone calls, whatever
12:45 take Olivia and friend to pre school
1-3:15 I take this opportunity to run to Costco, fold laundry, get dinner started, make a doctor appointment, work on cub scout stuff, blog, Overall it is amazing how much you can NOT do in 2 hours without any children.
3:30-5:30 pick up Ethan, get both boys through homework (A note about homework: kids cannot do it alone. I could, I guess because I was smart. My kids are apparently not. I spend a hellish 2 hours a day helping kids with homework). then dinner, lament the breakfast dishes that are still out from this morning, tell Olivia I will play later, etc.

Then the usual after dinner rat race. But only on Tuesdays are we really busy after dinner with scouts, youth activities and piano.

So as I wake up every morning and run through my day in half hour blocks and try to fit in "take your vitamins" and "switch the laundry" I realized that I am constantly working out a schedule in my head. I think in terms of "First I have to..." and "Before I do this..."

It starts the minute my feet hit the floor, apparently as my double bar graph of spit results so aptly shows.

And then today I get to the car to run Carter to school and the keys are locked in it.

Of course it takes an extra graph to chart my cortisol levels.

Of course it does.