Dating

One of our family goals this year was to start doing more one on one 'dates' with our kids. Fortunately there have been a few built in events that facilitate this. The first was the school's Sweetheart dance. It is darling. Aren't they a cute couple?!


It is a fancy affair with a yummy dinner, cotton candy machine, chocolate fountain, picture booth. Eliza's friend Rachel was there too with her dad Murray. Apparently last year Eliza often ditched John to go run off with friends, but this year she really wanted to dance with him.

Meanwhile, here at home we were having a mommy, daughter, daughter date. These two munchkins were my dates. We had a hot dog dinner (real gourmet, I know), with dessert pizza cookies after. 

Cutest little date!

Yummy and so easy, I had frozen sugar cookie dough, and some delicious strawberry frosting that was frozen as well. Top that with chocolate chips and fresh raspberries, and we have winner.

Making the pizzas was a fun activity too! After dinner and dessert, Miriam wanted to take a special bath with Holland, which they both LOVED! After the bath was movie time. Miriam was so darling and wanted to dress up as Rapunzel and watch Tangled. (Little girls are the cutest!)

We only have one Rapunzel dress (can you believe it??), but she wanted Holland and me to dress as close as we could, which meant pink and purple dress ups. Holland was so enthusiastic about it. They were just so happy about the whole thing. It really was adorable.

I love you...let me squeeze your head!

Sweet sisters!

Okay, I want to crawl away from you now.

Pretty little princesses.

It was my turn to go on a date with Eliza a little more than a week ago for women's conference. Since she just turned 8 it was her first one. We went to the Stake Center and out to dinner afterwards with other moms and friends. So fun! Eliza was absolutely adorable about the whole thing. She wanted to dress alike in our denim dress/shirt and do our hair the same. She was very attentive the whole meeting and took notes. She sung her little heart out during the intermediate hymn, which of course garnished a few kind comments from surrounding women. It was so fun to have one on one time with this sweetheart!

John had a special date at home with Miriam and Holland during this. I think there were hot dogs again. :) And I think they made some cheesecake brownies, which is about the best thing ever. I know they did another movie night too. So fun!

The married couple goes on dates too. :) We went to the new Beauty and the Beast at the theater, which was extra cool because our realtor rented out the theater for all his old clients so we got to go for free. The sad part was that we could have taken our kids for free too (and we even have a Belle dress that one of them could have worn!!), but they thought it would be too scary (which is probably would have been). They gave out a red rose to the couples too. Paired with Chipotle, it was a fun afternoon out. Our friends were so nice to watch our girls for that long.

Another fun date we did recently was a create-your-own cookie recipe. We made up cookie base and did a truffle filling and topped it with delicious morsels. We are pretty much amazing. ;) I love our little family!!!

10 Years!

How does the time fly so quick? 10 years?! Seriously?!

We really didn't want to spend the day in Utah or traveling from Utah, so we put our foot down and left in time to spend our anniversary at home. I don't really remember the fancy, yummy food that we made, but I am sure that we made some. I do remember that we went to a movie Star Wars: Rogue One (because I love him). It was a good movie, although a sad ending. It was especially fun though because we had a gift card to go to the nice theater, and we decided to use some of it to buy concessions, which we really never, ever, ever do. Nachos, drinks, and something else maybe? It was fun!

My favorite part of the day though was when we dressed up in our wedding clothes and took some pictures. Actually, that is just John's suit because he rented a tux on the day of our wedding. This was the first time that I had put on my wedding dress since we got married. So fun! Our little girls were the perfect people to be there when I tried on my dress. "Mommy, you are so beautiful!" "Mommy, that is the most beautiful dress in the whole world!" "Mommy, you look like a princess." They are so validating. Although Kylee honestly looks spectacular in the dress still, 10 years later! (John here) How many girls fit in their wedding dress after 10 years and three pregnancies and look better if anything?! Our sweet little girls loved being in a few pictures. We also took some photos of them by the window, which turned out cute.

We exchanged gifts in the evening. I got Kylee a map of the world with push pins to mark where we have traveled. The black pins are where I have been without Kylee, the white pins are where she has been without me, and the green ones show notable places we have been together. Notice we mainly have white pins on the map. Hopefully the green ones start to overcome the other colors as we get older and richer. :) Kylee got me a photo book commemorating the past 5 years of our marriage. At our 5-year anniversary I got her something similar, and it will be my turn again for the 15-year anniversary. She spent hours and hours collecting photos, memories, and stories and putting them in the book, and the result was amazing! It is really fun to just sit and peruse the book and remember the highlights of the past 5 years together (dare I say it - the best 5 years of my life. It keeps getting better!).

The Big 10 Year Anniversary Plan was to go to Hawaii together, but that is currently on hold until next year. It was initially on hold because Honeywell was threatening lots of layoffs (my boss's boss actually told his group "Don't go out and buy a new car."). Things have stabilized at work (I even got a raise this year!) but now the plan is on hold because this year looks too busy. Next year we feel pretty good about making it happen.

Ten Years Ago!

Christmas 2016

Christmas was a little bit rough this year. At least it started out that way. Holland was sick the entire trip to Utah. So on the one hand she slept in the car way more than she usually would have on the drives, but on the other hand when she was awake she was 100% miserable. She just had a nasty cold that Miriam brought home from Kindergarten. (It was funny {not funny} that when school resumed all of the parents mentioned how their kiddos got sick over Christmas with the exact same symptoms. Thanks, whoever brought that to school.) Anyway, the drive up there on my 30th birthday was pretty painful. Miriam was still a little bit sick, and her ear wouldn't pop. Eliza was fine. That was what is so funny/painful about that little video above. The two younger girls are so upset, but Eliza is just watching her movie. She pops up and is delighted by the snow. Not fair at all.

We had the Deru celebration on Christmas Eve because Christmas Day this year was on a Sunday. Marc and Miriam always wrap their presents in a super unique way and this year it was a rock band theme. But to our surprise there wasn't a karaoke machine inside (they had given that to the other two siblings the two years previous, so we were kind of expecting that), they actually gave us a hammock. It works out well that my dad brings a big trailer down to Scottsdale right after Christmas so he can carry all of the loot we get. :)

That hammock has been the biggest hit! We put it in our front room where we don't have any couches, but we do have books and toys to play with. Well our girl have definitely turned it into another toy. They wrap themselves up in it and twist around. They swing in it. They read in it. 

Also, it is rated to 450 lbs so our entire family can be in it at the same time! It is pretty squishy though. What a great gift!

Also on Christmas Eve we gave Kayla and Cortney the citrus we brought them. That is going to be our go-to present from now on as long as we keep driving from AZ. Hopefully no one gets sick of it! Grandpa and Grandma Deru (with the help of me) reserved a beach house on Long Beach over July 4th as our big family present this year. It was quite the ordeal to pick the location and time to do this trip, but eventually we came to a conclusion. (This all happened while John was in Ireland earlier in the month, and my mom was down visiting to "help" me.) It took every spare minute I had because my mom had to look at every possibility in the western half of the United States. I am getting a little worked up just thinking about it. Okay, I am going to stop thinking about that awful week and focus on how fun this trip will be (hopefully). 

Aunt Carol and Uncle Pat always give the nicest presents to all of our kiddos, which this year included bath bombs. We did one of the these on Christmas Eve night, the water turned a delightful urine color. It smelled like lemonade though. :) 

We did the Christmas sing-a-long, and rice pudding. It was a really nice evening.  

Christmas morning ended up being nice and snowy. My girls got a few present from us and also my parents. They loved the secret journals and the other fun things that they received, including a lot of art supplies from my parents. (They had been asking for art sets, which we actually had purchased for them and everything. But they were too big to bring to UT, and since they got so much of that stuff from my parents, it worked out to take them back and save that money.)

They big present this year was a trampoline for our back yard. It was a journey to convince everyone that it was good idea. The problem is that we don't have grass in the backyard, and we don't really think we want to put in grass because it is kind of tricky in AZ to make it work. Also, fake grass is super expensive. But we wanted to get them something that they could play with back there. A trampoline was an obvious choice to me because with the net it wouldn't matter if it were on gravel.

John broke his best friend's leg on a trampoline when he was in Kindergarten, so he was concerned about getting something so potentially dangerous for our yard. In hopes of getting some support for the idea, I asked the pediatrician about what she thought about trampolines. She had a very strong opinion about trampolines, and it wasn't in favor of them. Unfortunately I asked this in front of my girls so later when Miriam saw me looking at trampolines online, Miriam said, "You can't buy us one of those, it'll die me!" Well, we decided that as long as we had some pretty strict rules about it, we were willing to risk it. Hopefully we don't come to regret that decision someday. 

Not surprising they weren't exactly thrilled when they opened it though. 

They really do love it now though.

That evening we did our Lucas Christmas gathering at Kayla's new house in Bountiful. There was a yummy dinner and an adult present exchange and then a children's present exchange. This was for the best because the kiddos stayed downstairs and watched a movie while the adults ate and did their exchange. In the last few years Grandma really has had a hard time with the chaos of so many noisy children all trying to stay happy during the long, long gift exchange. I do feel a little bad we were isolating them though. They were so happy about it though. Kayla had provided them a ton of kid friendly food, plus a fun movie to watch. It was heaven in their minds. William and Camille and John and I exchanged board games in which they got us one we already had (which is what we did to them a couple of years ago), but we ended up getting them one they didn't have. They switched out ours for one they had gotten for themselves, which worked out nicely. :)

We got home pretty late that night, and our poor baby suffered for it. She was so, so sick that Monday, so much so that I stayed home from the Pearson family Christmas party just so she could sleep. And sleep she did. She napped for more than five hours. Poor girl.  She woke and nursed back to sleep immediately. Thank goodness I still nursed her because that was the only intake she accepted for a few days.

We stayed there for a couple more days during which Holland stayed sick, we visited one on one with David and Patti and Kayla and Cortney. My girls made several little pouches with my mom out of fabric scraps she had. John and I played our new games and really we had a very nice low key time. We just wished our poor little one felt better. Lots and lots of sleep for her.

We left Utah and drove home on a cold, cold day. The girls were so bundled in the car. The thermometer in our car, which so frequently shows 111 was showing just 11. A 100 degree difference! It was a long drive home when once again Holland slept a lot but was miserable when she was awake.

We finally got home and did our stockings at home the next morning.  Sweet baby is starting to feel better!

We set up the trampoline a couple of Saturdays later (when did we get so busy?!) and although it started raining partway through we kept going. We didn't want to miss the window of time that we had allotted to doing this. 

Fortunately, our sweet baby is back to her normal happy, healthy self. Something I have heard that I try to remember is that you don't appreciate good health until you don't have it. I really try to appreciate our good health!