Cooking with Emma

Click here: Adventures in Cooking - to view this in High Definition.

Adventures in Cooking from Amy Leavitt on Vimeo.

Emma's Birthday Portraits

Apparently, I can't keep up with two blogs... head on over to my photo blog to see Emma's birthday portraits:

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The Desert is my Playground

We went for a walk this afternoon. It seems every city in these United States is covered in snow. Except mine. The lovely Silver State has it's advantages. Sunny, high 50's, perfect day for a walk.

We had nowhere in mind to go, but ended up at our neighborhood park. Let me tell you about it; wide field outlined by a walking path, a full size basketball court and sand volleyball, a remote control car race course, and two ultra-safe modern playgrounds – a grand example of the over-thinking of child psychologists. These bubble-wrapped playgrounds are aimed to stroke over protective mothers – you know, the ones with Children's Motrin in one hand and Neo-Spray in the other.

My kids dropped their scooters in the grass and waited for us to catch up.

“Can we go up in the desert?”

I looked at the playground. A few kids dabbling on the equipment, a mom in between the two structures checking her phone.

I looked up the steep landscaped hill, over which the desert lay.

“Ok,” I said.

We climbed up and let Pepper off her leash. (One thing about pound dogs. You're the best they've ever had – they want to be with you, so go ahead and let them off the leash, they won't go far.) The oldest two were off, ignoring the youngest's cries, “Wait! Wait-a-me!”

They found a large cement drainage pipe, it's mouth shooting out of the ground a good 6 feet at an angle. Groundwork for the acres of new homes to be built before the over-inflated economy popped. Here it sat, abandoned, a ghost town before it was even built. They stayed there as I traced the pipe to it's “end” - a square hole in the ground, lined with cement.

“Say something!” I yelled across the desert.

“Hello!” They say into the cement mouth, and I am still amazed at the physics of sound at the age of 35. They sound so close I check to make sure they haven't crawled in.

We find another drainage ditch filled with scattered debris and I feel like we're in a Bones episode and if we look too closely we would find skeletal remains.

It's like this; we all laugh about our toddlers on their birthday. They play with the box and ignore the shiny new toy. And we marvel at their ignorance. No, no here is the fun thing, the worthwhile thing. The box is not fun – look - let me show you how fun the shiny thing is. But the child has figured it out. The child is under the control of the toy. It dictates to the child, and is limited in it's abilities - it can do only one or two cool things. But the child has total control of the box – and there are no limits.

Hannah told me of a time she came out to this desert and found a large piece of cardboard covering another hole – this one contained two lawn chairs and a small pile of stones.

There's a great story in that hole. Out there somewhere are two people who will always remember that one time when they put their lawn chairs in a hole in the desert and built a fire. You can't do that on a playground.

2009

I'm no scrapbooker. However, I love to work with photos, so this is my way of documenting our life last year:

2009-Our Year in Photos

Sacrament Meeting Protocol

Dear Jim:

You've been in the bishopric for a long time, and thus have not been present for much of our children's sacrament-meeting-behavior-training. Now that you are sitting with us, I thought it would be a good time to go through a sacrament meeting refresher.

Customs and regulations regarding diplomatic formality and precedence in sacrament meeting:

"Keeping the kids quiet" does not include handing a child your iPhone to play "Tap Tap Revenge".

Writhing on the floor is not allowed for children eight years of age or older.

Making paper airplanes out of the sacrament program = bad.

Our children are not allowed to keep the sacrament cups. Seriously.

Two of our children cannot sit by each other. This will bring about consequences previously unknown to you. If this law is broken, it will bring about castastrophic results. Think 2012.

Yours truly,

Your loving wife.

My Scooter Man

Scooter was our first baby. We went to the pound (the best dogs are pound dogs) just to look around. We took a walk down the hallway of cages. Dogs of all shapes and sizes were going nuts. Barking, howling, jumping, and throwing themselves at the cage. We walked past a cage which held a small black dog. He wasn't barking. He was sitting still. He saw us and laid his ears back. I bent down and coaxed him over. He timidly approached us and licked my fingers through the cage. We asked to play with him for a little while and found out that he was on day 2 of his 3 day stay. (they only keep dogs for 3 days, then euthanized them if they're not adopted). We adopted him right then.

He was skittish - so we called him Scooter. He was afraid of Jim, and all men. We soon theorized that he had been either the recipient or observer of abuse. Jim came home one day and went in the room to change out of his work clothes. Scooter walked in just as Jim was taking off his belt. The poor little guy ran out and hid behind a chair for hours.

When Hannah came along, he loved her too. He tolerated all her poking and pulling, and I would often find them like this:

He was so protective of the kids. When Hannah was born and we had lots of visitors. He would discreetly position himself between the visitor and the baby. If the visitor got up and moved around, Scooter would get up and reposition as well. He slept under her crib. Up until a few weeks ago, when he could no longer go up the stairs, every night he slept underneath Emma's crib.

He loved to join the kids in the street riding bikes and playing. Near the end, he couldn't join them, but he loved to lay outside and watch them go up and down the street.

I keep looking at the spots in the house where he would always be. By the stairs, under the desk. And he's not there. He's not here anymore.

People say "he's just a dog". He was much more than that to us. He was a comforter and protector, a friend and loyal companion. He is part of our family and we love him. We'll miss you so much, Scooter. There'll never be another dog like you.

only mormons do this...

We just built a room where our tandem garage space used to be. I guess we got tired of all the food storage in the office, under the beds, in kids closets, in the linen closet, and in every nook and cranny of our house. When it was done, it looked so pretty, I could think of a hundred other cool uses for it (a rockin' movie room with big screen tv? A sweet photo studio?), but food storage room it must be (mud room too). These are the "before" pics.