Kathryn July 12th, 2011

We have this photo of Dallin when he was a little boy. Apparently one day his Mum found him sitting there under the carport, he had found the chair, dragged it there and was watching the digger and truck for ages. I’ve always thought it was a pretty cute little story and photo!

Well yesterday we came home today and there was a digger digging up the footpath just down the street. We were heading inside but of course Joshy had already seen it, and when I tried to bring him inside he insisted ‘digga digga digga’… when I said no and brought him inside (because it was cold and I was tired!) he grabbed my hand and insisted ‘look look look’… So he took me outside, led me through the gate and down the footpath. We stood there for a minute, when it became painfully clear Joshy was in for the long haul!

We only stayed out there for a couple of minutes but I’m sure if I had let him he would have stayed there the rest of the day! So needless to say I think Joshy is most certainly entering the ‘little boy’ stage of life…and maybe, just maybe, becoming more and more like his Dad everyday….. and I love it! I love that Josh can be so determined and know exactly what he wants to do. (even if it’s not what I was planning on!)
I love that he can be so full of life and getting into everything and yet at the end of the day he will lay next to me while we’re reading scriptures and stories, gently giving me kisses on my cheek.
The 2 most important men in my life are my husband and my little boy, and one of my greatest joys is seeing them play together, and watching their relationship grow. Life is wonderful with my family!

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Kathryn March 12th, 2011

I don’t miss high school… Not one bit! If there was anything I would say that I miss it would be that when I was in school, I saw and talked with one of my best friends everyday… But even then, I still have that friendship and although I don’t see and talk to her every day like I did then we are still good friends, we’ve just grown up a little and have our own lives to live!

Now if I could tell you what I DON’T miss about high school… the list is LONG! But at the top of the list would have to be the drama….

I remember a girl at school being SO upset that her best friend had a boyfriend and that, as she put it, ‘he has changed her.’ Because of this issue that she had (or that she created, depending on which way you look at it) she lost her best friend – and in the long run it probably cost her a lot of friends… Thinking about it now I remember that she had the same issue with at least one of her other friends. At the time I had never been in a relationship, and yet I could still see that this was an over reaction. Now, probably 9 or 10 years on I think about that situation and have learnt an important lesson.

The view of teenagers, and perhaps the view of the world, is that you should never allow another person to change who you are. There is some merit to that. You should never allow another person to lower your standards, or tell you that you are less than what you are. When that start to happen and you start to believe it, that’s when trouble starts and you can end up in a very dark place. You can’t see the way out and looking at it to the extreme it can destroy your life…. BUT… You SHOULD allow other people to help you raise your standards and help you feel important, loved, and like the child of God that you are. When that happens then you reach new heights, achieve goals greater than what you thought you would ever be able to achieve and what is most beautiful about that is that you can then lift those around you.

I’ve never been, and probably never will be, a big fan of change…. my husband and my mum will testify to that…. But I have come to know how necessary and beautiful it is. It’s change that allows us to become and be better than we were yesterday, I’m sure that any one who has suffered from an addiction will testify to that. It’s change that allows us to make new friends, ask anyone who’s had to move interstate or overseas and met a friend who they will be forever grateful for! It’s change that allows us to gain knowledge and experience, ask someone who has lost their job and taken the opportunity to go back to uni and start a new career! But the biggest thing I’ve learned is this – It is change that allows a couple to create a happy and successful marriage. I love my husband and my son, and because I love them I am continually wanting to be a better wife and mother. I can’t do that if I don’t change…. it’s impossible. If I chose to not let my husband change me and he chose not to let me change him then we would be heading in different directions, but as partners we are continually making the changes necessary to reach our goals.

By asking someone not to change we are ultimately asking them to stop growing and learning…. and why would we want that for a friend? I am not in touch with my friend from high school anymore but I’m sure that she has changed, and I hope that somewhere she has learnt that allowing someone to change isn’t such a bad thing!

I hope that I never have and never will try to stop anyone making positive changes in their life. If someone ceases to change then they also cease to grow, and to me that is one of the saddest things of all.

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Kathryn March 3rd, 2011

Today I am grateful for the small, seemingly coincidental things in life that brighten our day. After I put Josh to bed this evening I had to go out and pick up something I had left at Grammy and Papi’s. On the way home I made a spur of the moment decision to stop at the chapel and print something off that I needed for my calling… I thought about just doing it the next day or on Sunday but in an effort to stop procrastinating I decided to stop on my way home. As a result I was able to see a dear friend who I haven’t seen for a couple of months. It was totally unexpected for both of us… we both had things to be doing and literally only stopped for about 2 minutes… about long enough to say ‘It’s so good to see you’ ‘What are you doing here!?’ and ‘Anyway, I have to go’ – but it made my day, and I’m glad I made the decision to stop when I did. On the way home I was thinking about how glad I was to see her and how I could have just as easily not seen her.

I have been one who through the years may not have followed an impression that could have blessed someone else’s life…. Do you know the kind I’m talking about? The kind where you have the impression to call someone and you ignore it, for any number of reasons, only to find out later they really needed to talk…. Or maybe you felt impressed to offer someone a lift to a meeting, you explain the prompting away because they have a car or someone else usually picks them up, then you find out they didn’t come because they didn’t have a lift…. We all regret those situations and regret not being able to be a blessing to someone else.

I had never considered before, the possibility that our Heavenly Father may give us an impression, for seemingly no other reason, than to bring a smile to our face…. I had never thought about his love in that way …. He loves us enough to suffer for us, to comfort us in our distress, to give us counsel and guidance, create a wonderful plan for us…. AND to create a situation, allowing for a chance encounter between two friends just because he wants to see you enjoy life and be happy.

To some it may have been pure coincidence…. and perhaps it was, but if nothing else it has given me a new perspective on our Father’s love.

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dallin July 27th, 2009

I’m going to tell you the story of our last week. We didn’t tell many people about it as it was going on, because we didn’t want people to worry (there was never anything to worry about). So don’t feel like we don’t like you just because you didn’t know that all of this stuff was going on – not many people knew at all! To tell the story properly though, I’m going to have to go back nearly three weeks, when it really started.

On Saturday July 4th Kathryn’s heart woke her up at about 6:00am. It was beating very strongly, very quickly and had a very erratic beating pattern. It was pretty odd. But she felt fine (just a bit freaked out) and we’d both heard that funny heart beats and other heart oddities are quite common in pregnancy. So we weren’t overly worried about it. And I was tired, so I went back to sleep. Kathryn stayed up for a bit, and looked up some information on the internet.

By the time I had to leave at about 8:00, her heart was still going about the same. I gave her a blessing before I left, and she tried to go back to sleep. By the time she got up for work (it was her last day!) at about 9:00, she felt fine, and as far as she could tell, her heart was beating normally. We planned to page Amy, our midwife, sometime during the week to let her know and check that everything was ok, but we both forgot about it.

Fast forward to this last Monday morning. At about 4:00, Kathryn woke up hungry. I think she got some food, and came back to bed just before 5:00, and went back to sleep. Then at 6:00 her heart woke her up again. At first it was beating very hard and fast, and then after a few minutes it switched to the irregular beat, similar to the last time. Again, we weren’t especially worried, but we decided to call the hospital, just in case. They were also not worried, but recommended we come in and get it checked out, just in case. Both of us fully expecting to be home within 2 or 3 hours, we didn’t shower or have breakfast, we just went straight in to the Women’s and Children’s. It was 6:30 when we parked the car.

They did an ECG and kept her heart rate and the baby’s heart rate and movements monitored. The baby was very happy, and Kathryn felt fine, she just had a very odd heart beat. She was beating faster than the baby, which is very odd indeed (Baby’s heart rate is about 150bpm. Kathryn was about 180 when we first got there). The doctor came and took some blood, and we just sat in the room, with the instruments beeping. Every so often we had to reset the alarm that would go off, because her heart-rate was too fast. They wanted to keep her monitored until the heart rate returned to normal.

This is going to be a bit long, so click the continue link to get the rest!

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dallin December 7th, 2008

We went to Hungry Jack’s for dinner last night, which isn’t very common for us, but we were hoping to meet some friends there. Unfortunately we had to leave before they got there.

From where we were sitting, we had a good view of the playground and the entrance to it. It has quite a high fence around it, with a gate at the entrance, which has a magnetic latch which you have to lift, in order to open the gate. This is not unlike the sort of gate you might find around a pool or at the entrance to a Kindergarten, to stop children from being able to get through. We sat there considering a few reasons why the would have such a system to keep children in or out of the playground.

As we sat there, we saw a boy who was determined to get into the playground. We watched as he slowly pulled a chair from a near-by table towards the gate. We watched as he crawled up onto the chair and stood up. We watched as he lifted the magnetic latch. And we watched as he tried to open the gate. In vain. The problem was the the chair, the very tool he was using to aid his entrance (or perhaps escape) into the playground was blocking his progress.

We considered this scene for a moment, and thought how sometimes the very actions that we perform while trying to get ahead, can often impede our progress. Hastily organised and poorly thought out plans can put us in a worse position than where we began. But a little more fore-thought, and perhaps some input from someone a little older, wiser or more experienced than ourselves, can simplify the process and help us achieve our goal. And our Father in Heaven is of course the ultimate source of that guidance and assistance.

Fortunately the boy did end up reaching his goal. Two other children came to his aid – one pushed his chair back slightly, and the other held the gate open while he climbed down so that they could move the chair away and open the gate.

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Kathryn October 2nd, 2008

Where do I start! New calling, new house, work experience! And the list goes on…

Last Sunday Morialta ward got a new Elders Quorum president, yep, Dallin!!! Dallin’s excited about it, and will hopefully have his counsellors sustained this week. He claims he has no idea what he’s doing but I’m sure he’ll do a wonderful job. I mean one of the first things he did after being sustained was orgainse for a few of the Elders Quorum to come and help us move on Tuesday, which was great!

The move wasn’t too bad…..I was pretty busy through the last week of term and so didn’t get any of the packing done until Monday afternoon, when mum came and helped which was wonderful, as we weren’t getting anywhere by ourselves! So we moved on Tuesday and pretty much just put everything in the lounge room, which was full by the time everything was in there. After everything was moved we stayed back at the unit to clean through it ready for the new occupants!

Dallin had an interview today at one of the government departments (Dept of land, water and biodiversity conservation) for some work experience. As part of the course he’s doing at uni he has to have 6 weeks full time (or equivalent) work experience in the field. He contacted some of the guys in our ward who did the same or similar degree and he has managed to get some work experience with them, which is great. He starts next week and will just work Wednesday mornings and Thursdays until uni finishes then he’ll probably do 3 full days each week, and work at State Supply the other couple of days… but we will see how it goes.

That’s about all for updates, so here’s a story for you all……

A few months back Dallin noticed that when you turned the fan on in the bathroom it made a funny noise and then seemed to stop, so we decided we should stop using the fan because it was broken. A few weeks later we took the cover off the fan and realised that it was working. It made a funny noise when starting up but other than that it was working perfectly. So we started using the fan again. A week or so after that one day Dallin turned the fan on and it made a cracking, thwacking sound and then silence. So again we stopped using the fan. The day before we moved we decided to take the cover off again and have another look. So Dallin took the cover off, I came in to have a look and we both looked up and went ‘IT’S GONE!’ So the cracking, thwacking sound (thanks Dallin for the accurate sound effects) we assume was the fan flying off into space… Or atleast the roof anyway. The issue is yet to be resolved….

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dallin July 22nd, 2008

We helped Chantelle and Daniel (Kathryn’s sister and brother-in-law) move on Saturday. It was a pretty good move, as moves go. Pretty well everything was packed up already, and most things were labelled with post-it notes to tell us where it was going. Some was going to storage, the rest was going to Jeanette’s, where Chantelle and Daniel are living at the moment. So we had two trailers and two teams of people, one for each target location. It went really smoothly, and was all over in a few hours.

I’m not a big fan of moving, though. I think it’s the packing that gets me. It especially annoys me if I go to help someone else move, but nothing is packed up when we get there. I had a few horror stories like that when I was a missionary for the church, in Switzerland and Germany. Had some really good ones too.

We’ll be moving soon, though. For those who don’t know, my parents have been asked to run our church’s Temple here in Adelaide for the next 3 years. It’s the big granite/marble building on Lower Portrush road. Like all positions in the church, it’s a volunteer thing. But it’ll be full on, full time, so dad is retiring from dentistry and selling his practice. But, they do get to live in a house just behind the temple for the next three years. Which means we get to move into their house.

Fortunately, we don’t have too much stuff, so it should be a pretty easy move. Except that we’re upstairs here. And it’ll certainly be lovely to have some more space. Kathryn had just started teaching from there too, so that will be really convenient for her. We kind of feel bad at the moment, since that is dominating their front lounge room for now. But soon it will be our front lounge room, and renamed the music room!

Soon everything will be ours.

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