This is the Life

So, you may wonder what we've been doing with all our newly added spare time.

Well, we go to the library A LOT! We go to the pool A LOT! We are working on my shared garden A LOT! We are enjoying each other happily a LOT! We are selling A LOT!

Two things:

1. Teagan LOVES batman and I feel it deserves documentation. We found this book at the library that has 4 batman stories. It is a chapter book that has about 1 small picture per page. He will sit and listen to that book, while clinging to his batman action figure as long as we'll read to him. Then when we're done reading he wants to play batman. He says: "me-Batman, Dad/mom Robin, ok? yeah!" Then we have adventures and fight bad guys. He is pretty darn cute. This was just tonight.
2. We are selling everything. It's SO liberating and we're both into it! Sunday we had some great friends over to eat and we realized that our living room was too crowded so we decided to rearrange. Zac decided that the reason we were having problems was the TV and stand so he suggested selling them. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, I HATE having a TV and I've always wanted to be one of those crazy people without one, but never dreamed in a million years that Zac would agree. Anywho, we chucked terrible stand that was ugly and broken and sold the TV, VCR, Playstation, and speakers in the last couple of days and LOVE the extra space! Zac keeps reminding me that this is not permanent, our next big purchase will either be a computer with a large enough screen for movie/TV watching or a new TV. I'll just enjoy the peace and serenity while it lasts. :)

Other things we've sold on craigslist: My whiteboard (don't be mad mom! We'll take you out to eat with the money!), kitchen bowls and baskets, about half of Teagan's toys, and as of tonight we sold Zac's Scooter! I've probably given half of my clothes and shoes to good will along with about half of my crafting stuff that I NEVER use. I think I've returned everything I've borrowed (mostly from my mom) except her bread pan... Only the everyday necessities or things that are really useful or high quality can stay.

We're saving the money and I think we're going to try to eventually save up enough for a nice computer or TV or baby depending on which route we decide to go...hehe (no this isn't an announcement).

I have never been happier, Teagan has never been happier, Zac is starting to have second thoughts about the TV ( I SWEAR it was his idea!) but he'll have another one soon enough and then he too will be very very happy. :) So things are going good. We have lots more time for each other and it's a very good thing.

Back to the Basics

Stress reduces the length of your life and decreases the quality of your life. As the seventh and final pillar of health, I believe it is just as important as the rest. I'm currently de-stressing my life and it is working wonders in my relationships with Zac and Teagan and my entire mood and outlook on life.

I started reading an excellent blog right about the time I started reading this chapter and the combination has really changed me. It's called The Lazy Organizer and I HIGHLY recommend it. I LOVE the way she thinks. She is so simple and so okay with being simple. I am trying to be more like her. In fact, she did a post similar to this one on her blog a bit ago and I decided to put my version here.

To me stress comes with pressure, pressure to be the best and pressure to be perfect and have a perfect looking life. I've decided that that I don't have to be the best at everything or anything, it is so liberating.

1. I am NOT a gourmet chef. I am a girl that cooks healthy, simple meals for my family.

2. My scrapbooks are NOT the cutest. I take pictures and pick the most important events to tape into a book where I write a little note about what happened. It's not breathtaking and that is okay.

3. The blankets, clothes, and bags I sew are not the prettiest. But they are functional.

4. My clothes are not the most fashionable, my outfits don't coordinate perfectly, my hair isn't the best, my make up isn't Hollywood worthy, but I do shower and look presentable for the most part and I do clean up real nice. :)

5. I'm not an Olympic athlete. But I exercise and move my body, and I love it.

6. My house is not spotless, and it probably never will be. But I clean regularly and make sure that our home is cozy and a breeding place for happy memories.

7. I'm not running a competitive, thriving company. I just tutor on the side to make some cash.

8. I don't own everything I'll ever need; things aren't stored for a rainy day or what ifs any more. It's okay to not have everything you want. I keep what we need and use regularly and I don't purchase things that don't fit those two categories. We are getting rid of toys, books, clothes, shoes, kitchen appliances and craft supplies by the box load. Sure makes clean up and dusting easier!

9. My child isn't in competition with every other child in the world. He doesn't have to have the coolest toys, clothes or hair and he doesn't have to know his ABCs first, read first, walk first, pray first, swim first, or hit a home run first. I just smother him with love, teach him as he shows interest, and give him lots of opportunities to be a kid. He is AMAZING and I wouldn't trade him for anything.

10. I'm not a "blogger" or "Internet tycoon." Starting tonight I do monthly family blog posts, my food blog is done, and my facebook is gone. I've been saving this post for a while because this one is really hard for me. I've felt really strongly for a few months now that facebook, in particular, is taking me away from my family too much. As much as I absolutely love keeping up with old friends and family, I just can't spread myself thin anymore. I tried hiding basically everyone besides family, but I'm realizing that I have an addiction. I sign in too many times every day, just to see if there is something new, pathetic, I know. They don't tell alcoholics to cut back to one beer a day, they say get rid of the drinks all together. If I was really die hard I'd throw my computer away, but I'm not there yet. For now it's farewell to my facebook and food blog and multi-weekly blog posts and bloglines.

I still strive to do my best, but I've released myself from the pressure of being everyone else's version of perfect. I get to be my own stress and worry-free version of perfect.

Thanks for reading my blog. It will be going back to private here in the next week or two. I'll probably stop blogging all together here in a month or two. Wish me luck on my journey to simplify our lives.

Happy Birthday and THANK YOU!

So my mom was a superstar last week and took care of Teagan while we partied in Denmark. I've only had a few weeks EVER where it was just me and Teagan and those were HARD weeks, so I understand how hard she worked. He, of course LOVED his time with Grandma and came home slightly spoiled, I figure that we will be back to normal in a couple days. :) I guess that's what grandma's are for! Thank you Thank you Thank you mom for taking a week of your life and donating it to Zac and I. We had an incredible time and we owe you!

Her birthday was yesterday, here is a little video that we made for her. :)

My mom taught him the "Who loves you" ---> "Grandma Cracker" thing while we were gone, so funny!

I hope you all have a mom as awesome as mine because she really makes life fantastic!

coming soon: The last pillar of health: STRESS

Denmark!

Finally I'm sharing all of our Denmark pictures. This is only half of them, but I felt like it was a little bit overkill so I narrowed it down a little. I hope you enjoy, we sure did!

We were extremely impressed with the airline we flew with. We almost spent a full 24 hours on their airplanes so I feel it deserves a picture!
Every person got their own TV that had movies, sitcoms, radio, video games, and an itunes type library. All of that studying and reading we had planned for the plane went out the window REALLY fast!

They served pretty good food too! Constantly coming around with snacks and drinks, it was awesome!

We arrived in the evening so we spent the first day just walking around town. All of the sidewalks are cobblestone so my heels kept getting stuck and making me trip, we totally did not look like tourists!

This place called Nyhavn (New Haven) was cool. There was restraunt after restraunt and ice cream stores. There were tons of young people just hanging out. We later learned that it is the place for the rebels "You wouldn't tell your parents if you went there" haha! No wonder we felt a little out of place.

We kept looking for Danish food and finally decided that it doesn't exist so we settled for a fancy looking Italian restraunt.

It turns out that ordering water with your dinner costs $10! We enjoyed every drop of that bottle!

I wanted to be fancy and cool so I ordered salmon, the silly chefs forgot to cook it. I tried to eat it and so did Zac, but we just couldn't stomach it.

Zac's meal was about Olive Garden quality. When we got our bill and figured out how many American Dollars it equated to we about died! It's one thing to pay a TON and get incredible food, but for mediocre food??? After this first meal we decided that we weren't going to be fancy with the food anymore. We ate at a lot of smaller more local shops and never passed up bakeries and ice cream stores. Those things were MUCH more impressive. :)

Taken just outside our hotel.

Down the streat was Amalionberg Palace, where the queen stays sometimes. The gaurds wore these wild fluffy hats, they were fun to watch.

The first morning we went on a tour of the city thanks to CBS studios. It was so cool to visit all the big cites and hear some of the history of Denmark. Christian IV was a crazy guy!

After a few hours in the city we discovered that EVERYONE rides bike in Denmark. There are literally hundreds of bikes everywhere. So we made our best purchase of the trip and rented 2 bikes for the remainder of our trip. They were so nice and easy to ride, way better than my Wal-mart mountain bike. I think that just riding around on our bikes is in my top 2 things that we did while in Copenhagen.

The downfall to the bikes: they are really fast and you loose your way quick! The first day with the bikes we were constantly pulling over and pulling out the maps. Zac got to know the streets really well by the end though and he lead us right through.

These were some fun electric cars that we saw.

Our church has a temple in Copenhagen so we went to visit it our first day. We rode our bikes all the way over there and did a session and it was really cool. There were about 10 or 15 missionaries in the session with us because one young man that had gotten baptized was going through the temple for the first time. He is from Greenland and was called to serve a mission in St. George, Utah. He is the first person from Greenland to ever serve a mission. It was really neat to be there, everyone was so excited. We met a couple great missionaries from Utah that were just finishing up their missions and are probably home by now. They recommended some GREAT things for us do to while in Copenhagen.

This was one of Zac's favorite meals in Denmark. It was a tiny shop that had pork and chicken on these HUGE skewers. They put a bunch of meat in the pita along with as many veggies as you want (kind of like Subway). I forget what they call it though.

We ate a LOT of icecream cones while in Denmark. the waffle cones were to die for and they put tons of toppings on top. Behind me you can see Stroget street which is a walking street lined by store after store. Many of them are designer stores like Gucci and Boss, but they had H&M and Nike too. We didn't do tons of shopping, the window shopping was just as fun.

For some reason Denmark is famous for "The Little Mermaid Statue." We didn't get to see it becasue she is visiting China right now, but someone put a model on one of the rocks where she is supposed to be.

Zac made a much more beautiful version, though I begged, he wouldn't take off his shirt for the picture. just kidding :) Zac had a lot of elderly tourists laughing and snapping pictures of him, hahaha I was dying. I married to a funny guy, let me tell you.

By way of recommendation we decided to take the train about 30 miles north to the Fredricksborg Castle. It was well worth the trip. It is by far, the coolest architecture I've ever seen. We were both amazed at how well protected the castles are.

Yes, Zac is touching the statue. I thought it was interesting how all the male statues are naked and very proud of themselves and all the female statues we saw the girls were naked and shy. This particular fountain had some very proud men.

This is the other side of Fredricksborg castle. It is literally built in the middle of a lake.

There is a Baroque garden behind the castle that is perfect!

There are acres of land behind the castle for the park with tons of trails and benches and trees. It would have been amazing to take a run through that park! Too bad we didn't have our shoes with us.

Zac exploring in the park.

This theater is apparently "The largest cinima in Scandanavia." It sounded impressive and came highly recommended so we decided to try it out. They happened to be showing "Eclipse" so we went to a late showing one night. It was really fun, but too expensive, it was probably about the equivilent of an IMAX theater, without the stadium seating. Oh well, it was still fun. PS: I can't understand why I keep watching the Twilight movies. I guess I just keep thinking they'll get better and be as good as the books. Instead I leave feeling like a total dork. I promise, the books are way better!

We found a life size Woody made out of LEGOS, it was so cool.

Eating strawberry cheesecake at a cafe on Stroget Street. Half the fun was people watching everyone walking by.

My fabulous, smart, funny, brother Brian and his beautiful, sweet, charming wife, Elise gave us a large chunk of change to spend in Denmark (they have our name for Christmas). They gave specific instructions that we needed to do something cool with the money and take a picture so that they could know what their gift to us would be. All week we kept our eyes open for what to do. Our decision: Tivoli.

Tivoli is an amusement park/restraunt area/garden that is located right in the middle of the city. It is really old and is actually where Walt Disney got the idea for DisneyLand (or so we were told). We absolutely LOVED it there!

All the rides were the kind that try to turn you around in as many directions as possible all at the same time and at high speeds. After this particular ride I layed on the bench for about 30 minutes feeling like an old woman.

This one might have been Zac's favorite. It is like the magic carpet ride at lagoon. It was so fun, and a little scary since you could hear everything creaking.

The whole trip I talked about going on a boat ride, Tivoli happened to have one. You got to drive the boat so that was cool.

There were tons of really fun rides. It was cool because they had concert too. This orchestra was really good and we loved it! (Probably me a little more than Zac, but he did say that he thought some of their songs were catchy).

Zac looks fierce in this picture, don't you think? This is where soldiers stand sometimes.

This is the ride of the day. You can see it from all over outside of Tivoli because it is so tall. Both of us were pretty afraid to go on it, and we weren't going to, but we felt it'd be wrong to call this our Christmas present if we weren't willing to go on the ultimate ride. Those little black objects hanging are people in swings hanging from small chains that don't feel as strong as the ones at most American parks.

We did it though. And screamed in horror the whole time. Especially when our swing started turning from side to side. We may have screamed "we're going to die" a few times. When we got off everyone kept looking back at us and snickering. We didn't care though, we just gave a high five and crossed it off the to-do list.

Here's the video:

We had such a blast at Tivoli! On the walk home (we had to return our bikes) we saw a bunch of street performers; magician, comedian, violinists, and crazy people. It was so fun and was the perfect ending to our trip.

Thank you CBS for an awesome trip to Denmark! And thanks for the Millenium Falcon Lego Set that will be used to pay for all our fun while we were there! It was fun to pretend that we were rich and to buy ice cream when we wanted it and to rent nice bikes, and see amazing sights.

My favorite part was just spending time with Zac. One morning we rode our bikes into this random place outside of the city center and just walked around. We visited a hospital and visited with the physiotherpist (Physical Therapist) about their socialized healthcare and her thoughts on that. We went to an appliance store and saw the WEIRD things they use in their kitchens. Just going into the local stores and visiting with locals was really fun. Zac and I got to be spontaneous and adventerous. We acted weird and laughed a lot. It was an excellent trip, I can't wait to take another. :)