So long 2017

Each year, as we close the year (and our blog book), Shantel and I like to look back at our year and give any final thoughts. In our Hello 2017! blog post to start the year we talked about some of our goals, exciting things and worries that we had for 2017. I thought it might be nice to talk about some of those things.

Our biggest goal was to bring our new baby into the world (and as we said to start the year, hopefully with a name). I'm happy to report that we were beyond successful. Caleb Samuel arrived healthy and happy and has been such a good baby and an amazing addition to our family. Plus, we found the perfect name for him. Lydia started kindergarten and is doing awesome! It has been a huge joy to see her grow. She is full of goodness and happiness and shares that with so many people. We did not have anything big we expected for Austin, but he has done so much this year and is a bight and happy spirit who is learning new things every day. Those three children our the most incredible people and I am lucky to be their Dad.

Shantel was feeling quite dejected with the state of the world in the beginning of 2017, and honestly, while this can't always be our approach, we mostly ignored the world this year. We focused on our family, our faith, our obedience, our kindness, our love for each other and our efforts to be better each day. And it worked- it worked for us right now to focus on our family and build our spiritual fortifications, knowing that they will be in place to protect us in the future. I think this quote that I shared to start the year is fitting, from President Hinckley, "Look to the positive. Know that he is watching over you, that he Hears your prayers and will answer them, that he loves you and will make that love manifest."

I set a few goals to start the year. I wish I could say that I did great with all of them, but I think it is important to look back at your successes and your failure and use both to make an even better path for the future.

1. First goal, was to be a better husband and father. I certainly had moments where I was not great, but...I think I truly accomplished this goal. Over the past year, I learned to be more patient. I listen better. I took time to build and play and chase my kids. I have so far to go- but I think the progress that I made this year, is now I understand where I want to go and how I can be the kind of father who my kids will know they can believe in and trust and we can have a bond through both joyous and troubled times. As far as being a better husband...I'm not sure if I was, but I do know that I love Shantel. She is my heart and my joy and I look forward to each moment I get to spend with her. I love the way she makes me laugh and she is my best friend and companion.
2. Blog more on Sunday. I think I started out the year strong on this and faded...probably something to work on. However, I am proud of this blog and the record we are keeping for ourselves and our posterity. Obviously Shantel does the most to keep things updated and I am grateful for that, however, I am proud of the help I give and the journal that this is of our family. We used to have a lot of people follow and read our blog. It was nice for family and friends to stay caught up in our lives. However, over the years fewer and fewer people have read our blog. We are not sure anyone actually reads the blog anymore. We are excited for this as we are trying to share more personal and important things about our family and our faith. Sometimes it is hard to share these challenges to the blog world. But now that it is just for us, it is nice to share our challenges as they happen and also the many joyous things we have. I hope that as we share these things we can build our own testimonies and inspire ourselves and hopefully for some future posterity, they can read our stories and be inspired in their own lives.
3. Focus on the keystone habits (powerful scripture study, prayer, and family home evening.) As far as scripture study- I had some great moments this year of truly powerful study- but these are too infrequent and my study is too inconsistent. I want to do better. I also want to increase the power of my prayers- and I don't think I accomplished that this year. I do think that we had a great year of family home evening. Frequently (most of the time) the lesson was put together the last minute, but more often than before we had powerful family home evening lessons that I truly believe will make a difference in the future. We are still working on this, but I think we really improved our family home evenings and had some great experiences.

Overall, I feel like I made progress and I will continue to move forward and do better each day.

David and I have been working to fill in and finish all of our posts for 2017 over the last couple of weeks. We wrote out a big list of posts that we still needed to finish - everything from little posts to our big Christmas posts. When he told me that he had just finished our "Goodbye 2017" post, I was surprised and more than a little grateful. As I just read through this post - I am overcome with gratitude for the good man that David is. He has always been a wonderful husband and father in our family, but through his efforts this year, our family has been even more blessed by him. I'm grateful to have him as my partner, in everything from making potato supreme in the kitchen, to raising our children together, to having him as my permanent Friday-night-date. I think that his summarization of our year is accurate - we focused on the things that matter the most to us and tried not to get upset or worried about the things that don't. This family matters to me, our faith in the Lord matters. And this year we felt the Lord's love and we continued to grow as a family. It's been a wonderful year. I'm grateful to be able to say that, especially because of the feelings I had at the beginning of the year. A huge portion of why this year was so great is because of our sweet Caleb. He's truly brought so much joy to us. Lydia and Austin, too. As I was feeding Caleb before bed the other night, and I could hear Austin and Lydia doing their bedtime-winding down in their rooms I felt such gratitude for this life that we have. This little corner, this little pocket of space and love and peace and family and goodness. I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for our home, and our neighborhood, and the gospel, and our families, and our marriage, and our children. I'm so happy to be here, right now, where we are. 2017 has been good to us, and I'm looking forward to sharing 2018 with the people that I love most, doing the things that are the very most important.

Last year- we did kind of a quick run through of the highlights for the year- I am pretty sure we are going to be at our picture limit for our book- so instead I'll just share one last picture.

New Year's Eve!

For New Year's this year we had church, which was great. Actually- kind of funny side story. We have been getting Austin ready to start sunbeams. So when we got ready to take him to his last week of nursery, he would not go. He wanted to sit in the primary room for singing and sharing time. It was so cute, and honestly, Shantel and I did not fight it at all, because we figured, no point in fighting to get him to do something we want him to start doing next week. He was super reverent for the first hour. After that, he started having a harder time and I did run him to nursery.

(Hopefully not irreverent) Pictures at church. These boys are just so darn cute. 

After church we went straight my parents (the Peaden house) for birthday parties. In fact- we are strict believers in staying all through church, but decided to sneak out 15 minutes early because we wanted to leave the party early, and it is hard to leave early if you get there late. Anyway, we did parties for Amy, Kevin and Melissa. Then we headed home because we needed kids in bed on time and a more normal night with everything going on.

Plus- we set it up with our friends, Cade and Leah Ward to have a game night at their house for New Year's. Cade and Leah moved into the house across the street about 5 or 6 months ago and it has been awesome! We love our neighbors, but none of them have really been, go over to their house and just hang out. The Ward's went to Utah State (Go Aggies!) and Cade actually knew my brother and worked in the USU Controller's Office in the same place I did during school. We hung out a few times and we really enjoy it. They invited us to bring over our baby monitor after we put kids in bed and have a game night for New Year's. It was a ton of fun. We played a game that they had called Bohnanza that was really fun. Then we got a new game called Code Names for Christmas that is super awesome and played that as well. We finished just in time to watch the ball drop at midnight. It was super fun. We are glad to have such good friends, and especially glad to have friends that live within baby monitor range. I expect we will do that even more in the future.

Also, our kids were so good. Shantel only had to run over and help Caleb one time, other than that, our kids just slept away.

Happy New Year!

insta-December

Just a few pictures from this month, insta-style. 

{12.4.17}

After Lydia left for kindergarten, Austin and I went outside to spend a few minutes in the snow. He was thrilled and saying things like "I'm going to ride my sleigh!" And "now we can make a snowman, but we need to find a hat so that he can walk around." It only lasted a few minutes, because I was cold, but long enough for him to ride a sled down our hill a couple of times, and for us to make this tiny snowman. In contrast, right now he is screaming at the top of his lungs because... we were going to go to the store but he threw a fit when I tried to strap him in his carseat and so we came back inside. Literally been screaming for 15 minutes now. Being three has lots of big emotions, some magical and wonderful. Some just really really frustrating. I'm praying for patience to help him learn how to navigate those emotions, without joining in the emotional chaos myself.

{12.27.17} 

Planned to stay home all day (going through a holiday-detox with the kids is no joke) but last minute we hopped in the car to go to the Hogle Zoo free day today. We were there for less than an hour, but it was exactly what we needed.

{12.31.17}

Last Sunday of the year: Austin decided he didn't want to go to Nursery but wanted to start "Big Primary" a week early. He sat on a chair the whole time and might have been the most reverent child in the room, until I wouldn't let him go to Lydia's primary class and he threw a huge fit while I was trying to do opening exercises in Senior Primary. When we came home we found that I'd been heart attacked by the Sunbeams! ♥️♥️♥️☀️☀️☀️

(This note is so special to me. The 10-reasons they included were: 

1- You teach us. 2- You make sure we have a teacher. 3-You help us learn about Jesus. 4-You help us be reverent. 5-We like you. 6-You help us sing songs. 7- You give us warm fuzzies. 8-You call our names with the sticks. 9-You love us. 10-You love Jesus.)

December Happenings

This Christmas Season has been full of lots of activities, big and small. Here's a recap:

--This month has been incredibly busy for me. David and I talked at the beginning of the season and talked about how we wanted to cut out things that we were doing just for the sake of doing them, and really try to slow down and enjoy the season and focus on the things that were the most important to us. I feel like we did a good job with that as far as family things go - but I spent a good number of mornings waking up at 4 a.m. so I could get work done before the kids woke up and it was exhausting. Preparing for a new year in Primary is no joke. There's so much to do. Plus I had a couple of RLD design projects that jumped out at my last minute and it was just... a lot. However, due in large part to my many early mornings, I was able to get everything done and still enjoy this season with my family. I'm so excited for the Primary Theme next year, "I am a Child of God." The start of the year is going to be a little cra-zy, but I'm hopeful that it will go smoothly and be successful! 

-We celebrated my parent's 32nd wedding anniversary. I'm so proud of them and grateful for their example. And grateful for the love that they share and the hard work that they've put into raising their family. 

-A lunch date with Dad is the perfect kind of activity for these kids. (And their mama.) 

-I can't remember if we wrote about this or not, but this year David's Eide Bailly Christmas party was at the Living Planet Aquarium in Draper. We got to walk around all of the exhibits after-hours, eat a delicious dinner, and hang out with David's co-workers. I wish I'd gotten a better picture - but we dressed up nice and had a great time. 

--Lydia's at the sweetest age right now. She is SUCH a good big sister to her brothers and has recently started picking Caleb up and carrying him around. (I don't really like it when she does it, but he's finally big enough, and she's big enough that I let it slide sometimes.) She's always so proud and takes good care of him. She made a Christmas present for David and I at school and was soooo excited to give it to us. We sure love this girl. 

--We hit the Festival of Trees with Sue and Amy for Sue's birthday. I was SOOO glad to have David be able to come with us! 

-Some Christmas shenanigans included a chocolate advent calendar every day - and many Target runs (one of which they were handing out free cookies and juice boxes - so that was a win!) 

-Last year after Christmas I found a whole bunch of wrapping paper on super-clearance and I snagged 80+ rolls for between 20 & 30 cents a piece. We held on to them all year long and handed them out to our friends and neighbors to express our love and gratitude for them. (I truly love neighbor gifts.)

--The Peaden Family Christmas party was a hit. We played bingo, decorated cookies, and had a white elephant gift exchange. Usually the goal of the white elephant gift exchange is to buy gifts that everyone wants and then trade strategically so you end up with the best thing. This year, at the very end, after all the gifts were locked in - there were a few still unopened. Austin had an unopened bag, and when he opened it - it was a live beta fish. :o I wasn't so sure at first - but "Little Blue" has become a happy little part of our family. (Side-note: I was trying to make a dark red frosting color and it ended up totally black. I took the opportunity to make a "lump of coal" for my cookie submission this year. It didn't win. Ha.) David's cookie is the one under mine in the picture below. Austin made a sprinkle covered snowman, and Lydia made the most darling white-frosting covered reindeer with a red sprinkle for its nose. 

-One of the last things we did this month, and also one of the most adventurous, was an escape room with a few of David's siblings. Bruce had to go back to New York (boo), so we decided to get a babysitter and have a fun evening out. We went to an escape room, and actually did really well. The room we were in was decorated beautifully and the puzzles were interesting and varied. Some of the puzzles were too easy, in that we guessed the order of the letters (because we thought we were supposed to arrange them to make a word) instead of learning from a different puzzle what order they were supposed to go in. So we did some things were out of order, and ended up getting out of the room without solving all of the puzzles. The look on the guys face when we burst through the door (on accident) was priceless, because we were really struggling with one puzzle and all the sudden we were out without ever figuring it out. But we came back inside and figured the rest of the puzzles out, still within the hour time limit. This is the second escape room we've done - and we really like them. It's fun to work together as a group to solve puzzles. Both times we've gone, we've used a groupon so even though it's one of our more expensive dates - it hasn't been too expensive. 

A quick trip to the Zoo

One of the first things that I saw this morning was a post that the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake was having their free-admission day. I haven't been feeling great, and we've been going through some serious post-Christmas(candy) detoxing, so I thought "That would be fun! But probably not the best thing to do today, today should probably be a stay-home day." (We've gone to this free-admission day a couple of times before and it's always been super busy, and I didn't think that fighting a bunch of crowds would really lend itself to helping my kids get back on a schedule.)

But, with just enough time to drive there and look at a few exhibits before they closed - I decided that they would love it and that it would be good for us - so we jumped into the car and were off! I'm so glad we went. We had about 45 minutes of walking around looking at the Zebras, the Elephants, the Snakes, etc... We hopped around from here to there fairly quickly, but I was careful not to push them to go fast to see more things. The trip wasn't about seeing all of the animals - it was about being out and being together.

I sure love these kids, and I'm so grateful for the flexibility I have to be able to go on adventures with them and spend this precious part of their childhood right by their side.

Christmas at the Peaden Home

 After Christmas at home we headed to my parents house to do Peaden Christmas. First thing on the agenda, was of course, our picture in front of the tree.

Then we did the annual present sorting. This year my mom did numbers as the code word names on presents. Both Lydia and Austin were super excited to help with present sorting this year. Caleb was happy to just go along for the ride.

Lydia and Austin next to their beautiful presents. All three kids were very well loved with presents from Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Bruce and Aunt Amy.

Lydia and Austin helping Caleb open a present.

Sibling love! At one point Austin gave Lydia a huge hug that knocked her over.

Lydia and the giant stuffed unicorn that Amy gave to her. Lydia named her wings.

 Lydia opening a present.

Lydia with her Me reader and paw patrol books from Grandma and Grandpa.

We had a great time opening presents and spending time with the family.

The next day we just hung out and enjoyed playing some games. Bruce brought Lydia and Austin Ostrich eggs they could paint so they worked on those.

Also, super funny, but my dad fell asleep next to Caleb on the floor and Caleb had a great time playing with the buttons on his shirt.

Merry Peaden Family Christmas!