Merry Christmas Everyone!!!

For those of you who didn't get a letter and Christmas card because of my negligence, I sincerely apologize. I am posting the letter so you don't miss too much.

Dearest friends and family,
What an amazing year this has been for us. We hope the Lord has blessed you as we feel He has blessed and watched over our family.

Our year began with the closing of the sale of our first home. We thought we had a great home in the works to buy, but as short sales go, it didn’t work out in our favor. So, during the six week period of living in my parent’s basement, we began our home search anew. We happened upon a foreclosed home in West Jordan, about 15 minutes from Clifton’s work. It is a great neighborhood, a great ward, and a great house. We love it here.

Caleb (7) has done so well with our transition this year. He had to change schools twice, but came out shining. He is an excellent reader and loves to be in school. He had quite the adventure around his birthday when we had to take him to Primary Children’s Hospital to have his appendix removed. His maturing sense of humor is starting to show as he tells jokes and plays pranks. This next year he will be baptized. We are very proud of him.

Lauren (3) is growing and learning by leaps and bounds. She has quite a charged personality and on one hand is very independent. She achieved potty-trained status this summer. On the other hand, she is still very much dependent on Mom and Dad for reassurance and encouragement. This fall she began a “preschool” with some of the children in the neighborhood. She loves playing with these preschool friends and is learning quite a bit from school.

Eva just turned 18 months and it amazes us that she has grown so much just in this year. She went from just learning to sit up around last Christmas, to crawling, scooting, walking, to running all in a few short months. Her vocabulary seems to increase every day. For a while her favorite thing to talk about was “puppy.” Now she can identify quite a few animals. She just had her first official day in Nursery at church (we were going for a couple of months—either Mom or Dad stayed to ease the Nursery leader’s load). We love watching her grow and learn.

Susan has had fun trying to make our new home feel like our home. Trying to make all our stuff fit in a differently shaped house has been a good challenge, especially on a limited budget. She was recruited this summer by the PTA president, who attends our ward, to be on the local school’s PTA board. She worked many hours this fall helping out with the Reflections contest. Susan is currently serving the ward in the Cub Scouts as Wolf Den leader.

Clifton has been really busy at work this year. He still is in charge of the twice-yearly Garden Fairs and endless classes and seminars for teaching waterwise landscaping. The garden is expanding once again by adding an amazing education center that will contain his and other offices, classrooms and meeting spaces. He is really starting to get his name recognized—big establishments like Red Butte Garden make sure he is on their lecture schedule. Once again, he put his talents to work when he helped finish the basement in our new house. He says never again will we live in a house without a finished basement! He currently teaches Sunday School to the 12 and 13 year olds.

We hope you have a wonderful Christmas season and may the Lord be with you throughout the coming year.

Love, The Smith’s – Clifton, Susan, Caleb, Lauren, and Eva

My new Thai Favorite

I am probably brealing all kinds of copyright rules, but I must acknowledge the August/September 2010 issue of Taste of Home cooking magazine for my current enthusiasm for trying new dishes lately. So, some of you expressed a desire for the Thai Portobello Chicken Stir-fry recipe that I tried out the other day. MMMMMMmmmmmmmm. . . . . . . . . . . the yumminess lingers in my memory.

I will copy this as exactly as I can so I don't get in to as much copyright trouble.

Thai Portobello Chicken Stir-fry (pg. 72, Aug/Sept 2010 Taste of Home)

submitted by Susan Bazan, Sequim, Washington

Prep: 25 min. Cook: 20 min. Yield: 6 servings

1/2 C Thai peanut sauce
1/2 C teriyaki sauce
1/4 C chunky peanut butter
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
3/4 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into thin strips
3 Tbsp. olive oil, divided
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
3 C chopped sweet onions
4 celery ribs, sliced diagonally
2 medium carrots, sliced diagonally
1/2 lb. sliced baby portobello mushrooms
4 -1/2 tsp. minced fresh gingerroot
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/3 C thinly sliced green onions
Hot cooked rice

In a small bowl, combine the peanut sauce, teriyaki sauce, peanut butter, and Worcestershire sauce; set aside.

In a large skillet or wok, stir-fry chicken in 1 Tbsp. olive oil and sesame oil until no longer pink. Remove and keep warm.

Stir-fry the sweet onions, celery and carrots in remaining oil for 4 minutes. Add the mushrooms, ginger and garlic; stir-fry 4-6 minutes longer or until vegetables are crisp-tender.

Stir sauce mixture and add to the pan. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened. Add chicken; heat through. Sprinkle with green onions. Serve with rice.


My comments on this: If your family is afraid of vegetables, chop them up smaller, or don't add as many. But the flavor of the sauce masks the taste of many of the scarier veggies, like onions and mushrooms. Caleb kept telling me he couldn't taste the mushrooms, so he was okay to eat them. He had no idea there was a bunch of onions in it, too. My mom and I finished off the leftovers a day or two later and she told me to add this recipe to the regular repitoire for my family. Give it a try and let me know what you and yours thinks.

Fun with InstaCare

The Alpine Slide in Park City and the children enjoying the Heber Creeper.

We've had quite a year and there is still so much of it left. We've sold a house, moved twice, and now, today, for the third time this year, we've gone to an InstaCare Clinic for some pediatric malady. Back in February we took Lauren to have her chin stitched up when she fell off a toilet in my parents house. Then, of course, a few weeks ago Caleb had his appendix removed. Now, Lauren has hurt her foot. She proclaimed on Sunday she had "sprained her leg" after breaking all kinds of rules and ignoring all kinds of warnings while jumping on cousin Eden's bed. We didn't think too much of it thinking in the morning she would forget all about it. She woke up in the morning still complaining of pain and limping when she walked. Later in the afternoon, she and Caleb were again breaking rules by jumping off furniture into a beanbag. The laughing turned to horrible crying. She had again hurt her foot and the limping got worse. She cried in pain with any weight she put on it. So Clifton took her to the InstaCare, got an x-ray, and found that she had only sprained her foot. But, ya know, it would have been broken if we had decided not to take her, and some would have said we should have taken her. So we took her anyway. Let's hope Eva doesn't need any emergency medical attention. I worry, though. She has a new activity she enjoys tremendously: climbing up chairs to get to the top of the kitchen table and dancing atop the table. Yes, there is an accident waiting to happen.

I figure if I get one post in each month I'm doing better than I am in my personal journal. We've had a busy summer, with lots of family reunions, birthday celebrations, day outings, hikes, and school. Yup, I said school. Caleb has started school already, July 26, to be exact, and he is already off track and will go back the day after Labor Day.

We were able to get a swing set for the kids. Wow! What a necessity!! They love the thing. I really hope it gets a lot of use for years to come, because we paid a mint for it. (Thank you, Barak and the tax credit.) Actually, the real thanks goes to my parents for contributing to the swing set fund; they gifted some money to the children for their birthdays this year to go toward the purchase of a play set for our new yard.

Caleb recently had some exciting events in his young life. On Wednesday, August 4, when I picked him up from school, he complained of his stomach hurting. I checked all the normal things (Go to the bathroom, get a snack, a drink, take a Tums, go to the bathroom again) but nothing allieviated his pain. Finally when the pain, which had been in the middle of his chest and abdomen migrated to his right lower side AND he started to throw up, I knew it was going to be bad. I called the neighbors to help Clifton give Caleb a blessing, then we took him to the InstaCare. There they took some samples of urine and blood and found him to be slightly dehydrated and had a higher than normal white blood cell count. They told us to take him directly to Primary Children's Hospital. When we finally got there (I got lost up around the UofU) the ER nurses looked at his admitting papers and said, "It's an appy." So, he spent a few hours in the ER waiting for surgery. He went in around 10 pm and was out an hour later. Meanwhile, I had to go back home to get the girls to bed and help my mom, who came to help me. Then it was back to the hospital to be there when Caleb woke up from surgery. He had no problems and woke up groggy, but feeling better. The surgeon said his appendix was a grade 2 out of 5 grades of severity, so we caught it early. Clifton stayed with Caleb at the hospital and I brought the girls to visit Thursday. He came home that night around dinner time. He cried because he didn't want to leave the hospital and all the special treatment from the nurses and the presents and good food. A few days later, you would never know he just had major surgery. He was up and running around and riding his bike. He has three little scars on his stomach from the laproscopes.

Well, summer is fun. Hope you've had a fun summer!

Basements and Birthdays

Here's a more recent photo of the basement all furnished and put together. It's so nice and cool down there. Almost cold. It's perfect right now. It'll be frigid in January.

Grandma and Grandpa Nicolaysen, Uncle Adam and Aunt Shantae, Eden and Hannah, "Aunt" Thressa were all here to celebrate Eva's birthday.

Doesn't this look like yummy fun? Eva's the only one of my kids who really gave it her all and enjoyed her first birthday cake.

Summer's here

And we still don't have anything fun to do, according to Caleb. There are still no boys his age in this neighborhood. One of the reasons we moved was to get in to an area with more children. Well, we accomplished that, but they are either much older or younger or all girls. Poor kid, he never gets a break from the girls, until dad gets home from work.

We are done with the basement. It is so wonderful. Essentially, our house size is now doubled. We can now park in the garage because we were able to move all our junk downstairs. We sifted through it all, and all we have to take to the DI is a small pile. I was hoping I could relinquish a lot more of my C-R-A-P but I just can't throw most of it away. I guess I can do what most people do--hand on to it until I die and let my kids throw it away.

Eva's walking, Lauren's potty training, and Caleb is getting ready for second grade. I am so proud of my smart kids. They are wonderful. Even when they fight and cry and complain.

Update

We've been here about one month now. It's starting to feel like home. We accepted a bid for our basement to be finished. They are working on it today. The insulation is going in. I am so excited to have twice the house we have right now. It's going to have a wall of shelves and bookcases and a wet bar. Under the stairs will be a small play space. It has a small door and window, the light switch is down low for small people. But it is a small space. I first thought it would be the place to keep all the toys, but now I think it will be the place they will take their toys to play.

I can't decide where to hang all my pictures. It is a daunting task. I am kind of persnicketty about where and how pictures are hung, so they may not be going up in the super-near future.

Eva is growing like a weed. She crawls and pulls herself up to standing and moves around the furniture. She has just two teeth and loves candy. Of course I don't give her much of it, but she like to suck on licorice and bits of jelly beans. She is the smiliest baby! She is really happy, but only when I am holding her. Any other time, she wails and complains like she's been abandoned. Even with Daddy, sometimes.

We're IN!!

So, this is the story:

We had been malcontented with our house for a long time. Around Christmas in 2008 we investigated the possibility of moving and found that it would not be possible to make a step up on our present finances, so instead, we refinanced in March of 09. That was okay. By Thanksgiving 09, Clifton had the moving bug again and started looking on the realty website and found a home 5 minutes from his office. We called Kristen Price, our realtor, to set up a showing appointment and we loved it and made an offer. Long story short--it was a short sale and there was corruption all through the bank and the seller's realtor. After 3 months of not hearing anything we gave up and found the one we got after seeing dozens of awful houses. Meanwhile, right around Thanksgiving last year when we looked at the short sale, we thought we'd test the market and put our house up. It sold in two weeks. We were expecting to be in a new house while trying to sell our old one, paying 2 mortgages. Not so. We had to pack everything up and put it in storage and move to my parent's basement. We were there for almost two months.

Our house now is in West Jordan, 5124 West Pebblestone Circle (8700 S). It's not 5 minutes from work, more like 10-15, depending on traffic. But it's not 35 minutes like we used to be. It's 5 minutes from Jordan Landing, which means it's close to the municipal airport and the Nat'l Guard Armory. I hear helicoptors all the time, even as I write. It has an unfinished basement, so we are planning to get that done ASAP with some of our equity. We had enough to make 20% down and some left over which we are using to finish downstairs. It's around 2800 square ft. and it has a garage!!! We can't park in there yet, not until we can move the basement stuff out. It's a rambler, 3 bedrms up and 2 more down. Master bath and a common bath and one more down, walk in closet in my room (love it!!). The kitchen is not as storage friendly as I would like, but that just means I have too much junk.

We moved Caleb out of Orchard Elem. and into Majestic Elem. It's about 5 minutes from the first house we offered on. Whoops! That was jumping the gun a bit. We decided it was worth the sacrifice to drive him there for the rest of the school year just so he could have a little stability. When he starts 2nd grade we'll move him to Jordan Hills Elem. It's just through the neighborhood.

I think Lauren is handling the move the hardest. She is starting to have tantrums and act out a bit violently. I hope I can get things calm for her to start feeling equilibrium. Eva (nine mos. old today) has been sick a lot in the past month. Just colds, but it must be her way of dealing with it all. Clifton and I are overwhelmed. Moving sucks. This week is the Home and Garden Show at the South Towne Expo Center. That's where Clifton is now sitting at a booth for work. He is going out of his mind thinking of all the things he could be doing here to unpack. Oh well, the stuff's not going anywhere. Our 6 1/2 year old phone number didn't transfer as we'd hoped. So we have a new one: 801-280-8585.

Come out and visit!! We're not too far out of the way.

Live Here, Not There

So, we have given up on the house on Country Mill Ct. We think the bank that is working on the short sale wants to make the property go into foreclosure so they can collect mortgage insurance. Why they wouldn't approve someone to buy the house and get it off their books is a complete mystery to us. So, we went out looking again and found a rambler way out in West Jordan. The day before we found it the price had been reduced. It is a bank owned property, but is in really nice condition. The only (big) downside is the basement is unfinished. On the upside, we know how to do basements! I am so anxious to get in to a home of our own again.

This is a view of the kitchen from a lookout at the top of the stairs in the house we are trying to buy in West Jordan.

Colorful, isn't it?

These are the occasionally happy children dressed in their new Christmas clothes from Grandma.

This is one excited fairy princess on Christmas morning. This might have been the only time she wore those wings. We will unpack them later and see if she likes them better.

This is the daddy and baby experimenting with the new Christmas loot. Ain't they cute?