Five Things

This week highlights five things from our week. We woke up as little sickies this morning, and my head is still a bit fuzzy so there probably won't be a whole lot of elaboration.

1-When David and I got married, we received a stir crazy as a gift. We loved it, and after going through several small bags of popcorn kernels  we spied this 50 lb beaut at Sams club. It was much more cost effective than buying the  small bags and so we decided it was worth it and brought it home with us. The next four years were filled with popcorn, popcorn, (some Hidden Valley Ranch dressing) and more popcorn. We finally finished off the bag and decided that we had to document our "achievement". Don't judge us. There are way worse things we could have been eating than popcorn (and believe us, our bank account thanked us for the inexpensive snacking).

2- We've been able to hang out with friends a couple of times this week. The Griffins came over for dinner and games. Both Kyle and Chelsea were good sports and played "7 Wonders" with us. This is David's new favorite game that he got for Christmas.

And the Coopers were so nice to invite us over for dinner so that I could concentrate on packing instead of cooking and then cleaning up the kitchen. It was seriously such a blessing. I honestly was going to have David pick up a pizza on the way home from work. (We don't do that very often - but it was one of those days.) Thank goodness for good friends who take care of us. Ashley made some delicious White Chicken Chili with cornbread. It was delicious! David raved about the cornbread even after we left. (I am notoriously bad at making cornbread. He was so happy to finally have some sweet and non-crunchy cornbread to go with his chili. The cornbread really was delicious.) 

(And yes, both Scott and David were there. No, we did not get a picture of either of them.) 

2-  One of my best friends from Utah State is getting married! Cassie came over for dinner the other day so we could meet her then-boyfriend Colin. Just a few days later they were engaged! I'm so lucky to be able to be helping her with her wedding announcements, and she even let Lydia and I tag along as she went wedding dress shopping. I'm so excited for her, and so happy that we were able to make it to watch her try on dresses. I love, love, love wedding dresses and it was such a good time to chat about them with Cassie. SO happy for her and Colin. (And the dresses she was trying on were gorgeous. She is going to be stunning come this May!)

4- If I could sum up our week in one word - it would be "packing". Don't be confused at this nice, neatly stacked pile of boxes. It doesn't account for the boxes packed and stuck in the hall closet, outdoor shed, or in the bedrooms. It also doesn't show the disaster that the rest of the house is. Rooms are in shambles as we pick and choose what to pack and sift through the things that we "need" and the things that we can live without for the next month.

5- Today, January 18, 2013, is the 7 year mark of David returning home from his mission. I am so grateful for him, for his testimony, and for his missionary service. I surprised him by hanging this sign up so he could see it when he woke up this morning. I was also planning a big bacon breakfast - but we both woke up with sore throats so we bagged that idea. It seems like a silly thing - but I think it's important to recognize such a significant milestone. I can picture future years where we celebrate with our children and David can tell them stories of his mission and we can bear our testimonies of missionary work. (One year I made a cake and one year I made pupusas. I just love recognizing and celebrating this day.)

Happy Friday!

The Leonardo: Da Vinci the Genius

Last weekend we got together with the Walker clan and went to the new museum in downtown Salt Lake called The Leonardo. I've been dying to go there ever since it opened and so when my dad mentioned that he wanted to check out their special exhibit "Da Vinci the Genius" I jumped right on board. We decided to make a day of it, and the plan was to meet at the museum on Saturday at one. Melissa drove to Lehi and about noon we jumped in the car and headed up. We then got a phone call from my parents saying that Jacob had taken longer at his honor choir practice than they had thought he would and they would probably be about an hour late. No big deal - we just decided that we would go walk around City Creek for a little bit before heading over to the museum.

I have to admit that I was the one who devised the plan to park at David's office, then take Trax to City Creek, then take Trax again to the museum. I thought that it would be really fun, and then we wouldn't have to pay for parking. In retrospect, it would have been much better to just pay the couple of dollars for parking because we ended up taking a full 45 minutes just to ride the Trax directly to the museum. It was ridiculous. Both Melissa and David were such good sports. I wish I had gotten pictures of Lydia and us on the train, because she was so cute just bundled up in all sorts of blankets. You could just barely see her little eyes poking out. (However, somewhere along the way we lost one of her socks - which was SO so sad. I feel like such a bad parent. I usually keep a couple of extra pairs in the diaper bag but I had just cleaned it out and didn't put a pair back in. So as you look through these pictures, please try to refrain from judging me. I promise we kept her snuggled up in the blanket most of the time. She really wasn't too cold.)

Whew. And after that introduction, now we can get to the good stuff. The museum was awesome. Our timing was perfect as we were walking up to the doors right at the same time that my parents were. (Trax or no Trax.) They didn't let you take pictures inside the Da Vinci exhibit but it was really amazing. They had build life-size models of many of his inventions and drawings. He was an incredible thinker. I can't believe how much time he spent thinking about the world around him and trying to figure out how things worked. He made flying machines, pulley systems, war machines, mirrored rooms, bicycle cars, and even a mobile piano.

Picture of a flying machine from The Leonardo's Website about the Da Vinci exhibit.

One of my favorite parts was a little movie about the painting "The Last Supper". It talked about how Da Vinci spent months and months studying people in the street looking for just the right faces and expressions to use in his painting. All of the lines in the room point to Christ, as he is the focal point of the scene. Da Vinci didn't draw a halo (as was very popular at the time) but opted to use the light from the window to give him a natural halo. The video went through each reaction of the disciples and it was so so interesting. I really enjoyed it. 

Picture from this website that talks more about the positions of the disciples. 

There was also a whole section of the exhibit dedicated to the Mona Lisa. I think that it is so crazy that a single painting of a woman can be so famous and beloved. There was so much information and neat insight about the painting and we spent a lot of time learning about the painting there. Some people think that they know who the painting is of (some noble woman named Lisa) but after learning about how much he loved that painting and how he took it with him everywhere he went until he died - still working on it and trying to get it perfect - I think that it would be so wonderful if she was his true love. He never married - but he probably loved this woman, and that is why he kept her painting close to him for his whole life. So romantic. 

After we were done walking through the Da Vinci exhibit we went through the rest of the museum. There were so many fun things that even though we tried to stay together as a group, we inevitably got separated as we walked through on our own. 

These computers were really cool. You could paint with a paintbrush on them and it really mimicked the color and texture of a real paintbrush. (Like "Paint" on steroids.) 

Lydia was a champ the whole time. She had fun walking around and looking at everything. David was such a trooper and he wheeled her around and talked about things with her pretty much the whole time. 

This was one of the first times we've put her in the stroller sitting up (without the carseat snapped in). She did really great. I loved watching her stick her little feet up on the tray. She does the same thing in her highchair - I think it is so funny!  

Me, Melissa, and Jacob standing by a huge timeline pointing at our birthdays. It was amazing to see how many things have been invented or have happened in the last hundred years. It's really incredible. Such HUGE advances in technology and in the quality of human life. 

2009 - Our wedding year. Yay for us!  

Tinkering around with batteries, radios, and wire-things.

This was one of my favorite parts. It was a light defractor thing. Whatever it was, it made for really fun colored shadows on the wall. Lydia and I had a great time playing with it. She is such a little crawler now, and it was so fun to watch her try to figure things out.  

After we were all museum-ed out we headed over to Zupas for some warm and yummy food.  

We had such a great time, and are so grateful that we were able to get together. We really, really missed Jenna and Kevin and wish that they had been able to come down as well. Matthew was also noticeably absent, but we are grateful and proud of him as he serves the Lord in New Jersey. It was such a fun day. I'm so glad that my dad made it happen. (I probably would have spent another year talking about how I "really want to go there... someday".) 

Love you guys! 

Journaling

Last night David and I were eating dinner and talking about anything and everything. Somehow we got on the subject of Chicago (maybe talking about potential vacation spots if we decide we can't make London happen?). That lead to me telling David about how I almost went on a "study abroad" to Chicago during Spring Break with the Interior Design program my sophomore year of college. The conversation then bounced to our relationship and whether we would have been dating and what we we did instead of me going to Chicago. We were laughing as we tried to remember - and we kept getting that year confused with the following year when we worked 60 hours that week because we both felt that we would be getting engaged soon and wanted to have some extra money put aside. (Which was a good thing because we got engaged at the end of the week and were able to put that money towards our awesome honeymoon.) One of us would say something and we would both start laughing at our poor memories. Then David said "Lets pull out our old journals and see what we really did do that Spring Break." The rest of the night was spent looking through and laughing at all the crazy things we wrote about.

It was so interesting to go back and read about our dating time. In retrospect it was easy to see how perfect we were for each other and laugh at things like "I really think that I like him." Because, hello, of course you like him silly girl - he is going to be your everything, your whole world. He is perfect for you and you won't know what you ever did without him. But at the time, the emotions were so real and so uncertain.

We also read through much of our married lives. We laughed and laughed at the silly things we did, and the crazy things we wrote. There was definitely a pattern in my journal entries - I think I said "I'm so tired" at least twice per entry. And some entries like this one.. that is all that I had the energy to write.

Tuesday, 9-6-2011: "So tired..."

We laughed and laughed at the way we worded things or the experiences we had forgotten about. By the end, we were both saying how we wished that we were still as good about writing in our Journals. At one point we were religious about it, writing in it every night. I have years and years of my life recorded away in these books. There have been events like birthdays, holidays, getting engaged and married. There have been trials and opposition like stress during school, broken down cars, morning sickness, and miscarriage. There are entries about my testimony and faith and there are entries about nothing important at all.

There are too many "favorite" journal entries to post them all. One that had me giggling was this one: Thursday, 9-8-2011, "The problem with going to bed is that all the sudden it's morning again so quickly." You can definitely tell that I like to be with David and that the reason I was always so tired while writing in my journal is because we stayed up because if we went to bed then we had to be away from each other (during the night and then for the next day).  Another entry that made me just about cry was this one:  Thursday, 8-25-2011, "Shantel is very tired. She had a good day teaching today, but it was very busy. She also brought so much joy to her husband. - Her loving husband David, for Shantel Elise." I must have been too tired to write. I was in my first trimester with Lydia and was basically exhausted all the time. David is so wonderful to have written my in my journal for me. I'm so lucky to have him.  

We aren't as good at writing in our journals anymore, but I like to think that blogging has taken the place of our handwritten journals. In some ways, it is much better because we are better at recording fun events, silly things, and lots and lots of pictures. It's awesome because we have printed out each year into a blog book that we set on our side table in our family room. People can pick it up and flip through it or we can reference back through it. It is much more reader friendly (you know, for future generations and such). However, in some ways it's not as good. I was reading through our blog book of 2011 and thought to myself "I was pregnant then, I was pregnant while writing that post." And then a couple pages later, "I was having a miscarriage while I wrote that post. I'm writing about all of these other things, but I didn't write about what was really going on." At the time, it was much too painful to put out infront of the world by blogging about it. But now, other than a few references there isn't really a record of having gone through such a hard time in our lives. Thats not to say that there isn't a record of it, because I wrote in my personal journal about it - but it just isn't all in the same place.

Regardless, I love this new form of journaling that we have chosen to pursue.  I love that we can post about random things, or post about the way we feel, or post about things we've done. Most of all, I love all of the pictures of this sweet girl: 

She is getting into everything. The whole time I was laying out my journals to take pictures she was picking them up, crawling all over them, pulling them into a pile, pushing them away. It was quite the adventure. I would be so sad to read back through my journals and read things about her but not be able to have any pictures of her sweet face. I definitely think that blogging is the best form of journaling for us. There are just things that we blog about that would never make it into our journals, and those are the things that I love. However, I truly believe that journaling is so important. So I'm going to be better at blogging about anything and everything. I will blog about whatever I want, because that is what I want to read about in 2 years, or 5 years, or 20 years. I will blog about the things that I want my children to read about. I will stop worrying so much about what other people think about the things that I post, and focus on blogging as a way to record our families history. Because I love this: 

And I would love nothing more than to see this stack of two books turn into three books, then five books, then 50 books. Wouldn't that be an amazing legacy? 

I counted up my journals, and there are 20. One of them isn't pictured because I tried out a larger size (and realized that there was a reason that I liked the smaller size). I keep these journals together in a couple of shoeboxes and couldn't find that larger one. When we get moved in to our house and aren't in  the middle of such crazy packing i'm going to find it and make sure that it never gets lost again.  Here is my first journal and my last journal together. 

#1: September 1996 - January 2004       #20: October 2011 - Present

My Grandma and Grandpa Walker gave me my first journal for my 9th birthday (1996). 

 

At the close of that journal I wrote: "It took me seven years, but I am done with my first journal. Hopefully I will do better. -Shantel Walker"

 Little did that young girl know, once she reached high school she would start writing every day. Her journals would average 3-5 months each. Journal #1 took seven years. The following seven years she would fill up 19 more books. 

I loved going back and reading through my old journals. I am reminded about how good my life has been. I am strengthened by the testimony that I have shared and am grateful for the insight I recorded and can now go back and read. I'm sure that I will continue do a combination of blogging and writing - but in both areas I want to be better at recording our lives. Because... we have a good life. A great life. We are blessed at every turn and enjoy every moment together. 

I can't wait to print our 2012 book, and to continue to write this year and the year after that, and the year after that. I have a testimony of the blessings that come from keeping a journal. I'm so grateful for a husband who has the same desire to record his life and blessings - and who will sit with me for hours reading and laughing at what we wrote and just enjoying our life together.