"Awhile" is a gross understatement....

Yes, it has been a long, long while since I have posted. I made the mistake of taking last summer off from blogging, and now I think it will take me a full year to get back into the habit and all caught up! Honestly, the two main reasons (note: these are reasons NOT excuses!) my blogging has been scarce are (1) Anytime I try to use the computer, my two kids freak out. Levi wants to play his computer games and Brinley just wants at the keyboard. And (2) Our pictures are all now on a external hard drive (since I fried my computer with hot chocolate) which we access over our wireless network... our very slow wireless network. Needless to say, this makes posting pictures a very time consuming process--a thing which is already in short supply.

Anyway, enough of my reasons. I suppose I will just have to learn to blog with those difficulties. Playing catch-up is not working very well, so I'm just going to do a little update on The Clements Clan, and as time, energy, and computer-usage allows, I will do some flashbacks of the things I have neglected to post this past winter.

Sam, Levi, Brinley and I are doing rather great! The Tri-Cities has been full of sunshine and warmth since (with few exceptions) the end of January. I LOVE when spring comes early! The end of February we got our garden ready and we started planting outdoors on March 1st. We started doing square foot gardening (click here to see what SFG is.) We are very excited and hope that our garden turns out 100 times better than our garden last year (which was actually quite laughable, but a good learning experience).

This past weekend, we took a trip to Idaho Falls/Rexburg to visit Sam's grandma for her birthday. While there we were able to see several aunts and uncles, as well as some of Sam's siblings and their families. I was also able to visit a roommate from my Freshman year, Alli, and meet her little boy Grant. He is a cutie! It was a short, but very enjoyable trip. The kids also did very well in the car. Thanks Grandma Thurgood for loaning us a portable DVD player! Seriously, how did we survive before?

Here is a brief update on each of us individually:

Sam is still the Ward Mission Leader and has been working (for what seems like an eternity) with the Ward Council to get a ward mission plan in place. Work keeps him very busy, but if you want to know with what you should probably ask him. I could try to tell you, but I wouldn't explain it very well, I think. Although Sam is traveling less often, his business trips have been of a longer duration. He leaves tomorrow and will be back on March 30th. So please, pray for my sanity for the next few weeks. Sam has also been reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen as well as a couple of other books about that region (Middle East), and is very interested in learning about that part of the world right now. The things he tells me about are very interesting and thought-provoking.

I am still serving in Young Women's as Laurel's adviser. I enjoy it, but find that I'm starting to have a hard time with the lessons because I have already taught them all before. It is difficult to be original. I have also been reading a lot, which has really become my favorite pastime. I just read an incredible book Left to Tell that you all should read.

Other than that, I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to develop a system that works for my home. We've rearranged rooms, moved furniture, de-cluttered, and purged. I've really been analyzing what my problems are (i.e. specific messes, like the kids books always being scattered everywhere instead of on the shelf) and how to address that specific issue so that it is less work for me. I am trying to limit the amount of time I spent cleaning up each day. (In case you were wondering, I solved the book problem by keeping the books in tubs instead of on a book shelf. There was just something so fun about pulling books off a shelf that isn't nearly as fun as pulling them out of a tub. Also, I put all of the soft cover books that Levi mainly reads before naps and bed in one tub up high and all of Brinley's board books in another on the floor. So there are half as many books within reach to mess up.)

Levi just had his 3rd birthday. He is just growing up so fast. His vocabulary has skyrocketed and he talks all the time! He says some of the funniest things and also has Sam and I looking at each other and chuckling. He is still our little sportsman and is also loving cars and Legos/blocks. Levi is learning is letters and his sounds, and he knows his numbers 1-10 (although not necessarily in the correct order...) He is also really into Go! Diego! Go!, Dora the Explorer, Handy Manny, and Thomas.

Brinley is almost 15 months old, but is still a little runt. She's a good eater though, unlike Levi who won't eat anything. She loves watching "Purple Monster" (actually called The Letter Factory, but Levi has always called it Purple Monster because one has an appearance at the beginning of the movie, so we've all taken to calling it that). Brinley is also talking quite a bit which is very different for us. She says purple (referring to the movie), cracker, poo-poo (which just means diaper more often than the other), Ma, Da, "vi" (Levi), milk, amen, bye-bye, yum, thank you, ball, duck, peek-a-boo (my favorite!), cheese and jacket. Oh, and, "What's That?" That was probably her first word. She also said "Love you" to me once yesterday. That made me feel like a million bucks!

Well, there's a little update on The Clements Clan. Maybe now that I've done this, I can stop feeling guilty about neglecting the blog and perhaps I'll stop avoiding it so much. :)