There are no words

 So I don't really have a lot to say today. My silver tongue fails me. Blame it on some unruly children and long days. But hey, it's Wednesday, and let's face it, you're clamoring for some attention. If this is untrue, keep it to yourselves. So I hereby give to you an exceptionally rare treat: Photos sans commentary. For your visual viewing pleasure only. Silencio with the smart aleck remarks. Enjoy. And don't say I don't ever do anything for you.

Choose your own blog adventure.

So. Busy week. Busy busy busy. I could try to catch up on all the goings on over here, or I could not. Because let's face it, I would never have the stamina for catchup posts. That arena belongs to more dedicated folks than I. So let's play, Cami writes mini-blog-posts and blows your mind in three sentences or less. Go.

Blog #1- In which I run to Logan for the afternoon
My sister-in-law is having a baby, so baby shower, treats, cuteness! Driving to Logan with my mom and debating how one actually pronounces Mantua! Cranky sick babies who sleep through the whole thing!

Blog #2- In which Madeline pretends to be a pro athlete
Madeline started soccer, because our neighborhood organized a league. She is considerably more psyched about her pink soccer shoes and shorts than actually kicking the ball. She is pretty much terrified of the opposing team.

Blog #3- In which we attend a wedding
Jessie's brother got married, and we all rejoiced and ate food. Madeline wore her wedding shoes and Spencer pooped in his tuxedo. Successful night.

Blog #4- In which there is a lot of poop.
That pretty much covers it, you don't want to know more.

Blog #5- In which Jessie and Cami go to a movie theater
The third time this year, which is some kind of record for us. We saw Avengers and missed the final scene because they cheated and put in two bonus scenes. Spencer came with and loved it so much he pooped.

Blog #6- In which we camp in our backyard
We setup our tent and enjoyed nature, hot dogs, and watching Muppets on our laptop, because we're not into nature that much. We all even slept for part of the night. And now we are ready to camp for real, if someone makes us.

Blog #7- In which we shoplift at yard sales
We supported our neighborhood yard sale by giving the children nickels and setting them loose. We came home with a swing, a plastic car, a small chair, a few princesses, some cookies, a onesie, and some other junk we didn't need. Mission accomplished.

Blog #8- In which Jessie's father is venerable
Jessie's dad turned 80, which is apparently quite the accompishment- go Dad! They threw a party and we were all proud. Eighty is the new 63.

Blog #9- In which Kimberly is a human petry dish
Kimberly and I missed the amazing birthday party because she has a ruptured ear drum and hand, foot, and mouth. This is as awesome a combination as it sounds, and involves a lot of crying and very little sleep.

There you go. Like a whole month of posts condensed into the cliff's notes version for your convenience. We're just trying to recover from being awesome and sick and busy and awesome. Try not to be jealous.

Holidays and so forth.

Aren't you ridiculously sad that you only hear from me once a week? If only Jessie was gone every night instead of just Wednesday. Sad day. Things here are going swimmingly. We had a great Memorial Day and took the girls down to check out City Creek. They got McDonalds, ice cream, new shoes, and played in the fancy fountain, so they gave the place a pretty good review. That will comfort the builders, I know, who were waiting for the okay from my kids to consider their work done. We also visited some graves, which was nice, although I'd forgotten how tiny cemetery roads are. We ended up hiking in with the stroller, which made me grateful we have one that can contain three children. Best Mother's Day gift ever. Jessie was so thoughtful when he said okay and let me order it. (In a girlie color, even. He is a saint.) All together, everything a holiday should be. And today was everything the day after a holiday should be-that is, lazy. To recover from the holiday.

Also new since our last report: I have a new calling. Before you place your guess, let me give you these stimulating and obscure clues: 1) The relief society president is my next door neighbor. 2) The relief society president is my visiting teacher. 3) Jessie got to know my calling before I did. (That may or may not be relevant, but I felt like that was a little unfair.) Back to the facts: Yes, my calling is in the relief society! How did you know? I am the new Visiting Teaching Coordinator in my ward. This should be comforting to my mother, who worries that I don't "get" relief society. Think of it as special training for the relief society challenged, Mom! I'm actually really excited about it. A lot of it is on the computer recording stuff. Is it nerdy that I'm kind of excited to do some work that is more brain work than repetitive cleaning work? It'll be good for me. Let me know if you have any tips for me on how to coordinate. I'm still working on coordinating schedules. And outfits. And other coordinating things.

I am a young mother. Or so they tell me.

   So I have some kids. A few of them. Not a ton. I know a lot of women with a ton of children, all a year apart, whom they dress in homemade designer clothing and feed homegrown jam and read to five hours a day. I am not one of those women. But I feel like I can safely say that we're in the throes of what some might call "young motherhood", and thoughts on the subject have been percolating in my brain. (You see how I used the word percolating there? That was totally gratuitous. Just to remind myself I know some big words. One of those young motherhood things, probably.) Sometimes young motherhood is awesome. Take today. When it took my daughter four hours to pick up a dozen toys. Reminded me of the time my mother wouldn't let us come out of our closet until we cleaned it. We were in there all day. Mom brought us dinosaur macaroni and cheese to eat in the closet. Best day of my young life. I wonder now if my mother was relieved to have us so happily contained. Probably. Smart lady.

   Today I went to a relief society meeting. That was a smart move, because Jessie sits with the bishop Wednesday nights, so we got to bring all the kids, and they love field trips. Madeline terrorized the nursery. Spencer terrorized Daddy's lap. And Kimberly spent three minutes in nursery, thirty minutes in the hall climbing all over the stroller with dad, thirty minutes in the relief society meeting driving trucks on seats and flipping the lights, and five minutes stealing pudding from the treat table. I got her down the hall by confiscating her pudding and using it as bait to lure her. She cried the whole way and people looked at us funny. I gave them my "young motherhood is glamorous and I know you are jealous" look, which is a great look for me. It should not be confused with the "I feel like a circus freak show and probably should not be in charge of multiple small children" look, which is what it looks like on most other women, but not me, because I'm cool like that. Then I dragged several small children out the door crying loudly for their father. Home to their beds where they thanked me profusely for getting them to bed at a decent hour and feeding them vegetables and washing their laundry.

   Sometimes we are a circus when we walk out the door. Sometimes we're loud and unruly. Sometimes I feel like dishing out a round of spankings or hiding in the closet and eating macaroni and cheese. Sometimes when there's a lot of kicking and screaming and the kids are kicking and screaming even louder than me, I think to myself, "Wow! This is making me really passionate about having lots more babies! 500 of them!" Young motherhood rocks. But seriously. It does rock. Because sometimes a pudding faced kid is the last straw, and sometimes they are the perfect photo op.

In honor of Mother's Day...the kids.

Welcome back to the mad house. The kids alternate between running me ragged and making life amazing, so we're staying busy enough. In honor of Mother's Day, which was appropriately celebrated with extra sleep and treats, let us indulge the mother in me and check in on the little munchkins and their latest award winning escapades.

Spencer is three months today, although we didn't have any cake, so I'll probably convince him to stay two months for a while to compensate. At the risk of totally screwing myself, I will admit that he is a dream. He sleeps anywhere from 8-11 hours a night, usually more on the 10-11 hour end, and therefore is my favorite child. He's getting more vocal about not being alone and responds to attention by hyperventilating. Clearly he needs to be adored by the public, and you'll see him on some reality television very soon. He is also laughing a lot, which is quite the drug high for my mama brain, so I spend a lot of time acting like a loon to get my fix. Madeline enjoys it too, but Spencer tends to clam up when she grabs his face and demands he laugh. I don't know why.

Kimberly has taken another one of those inexplicable leaps forward where she wakes up ten years older and I don't know how it happened. She weathered her second ear infection last week and takes her medicine with enthusiasm. She enjoys waking up at six in the morning and climbing into bed with Mom and Dad in order to make sure we don't sleep through our alarm, because she is thoughtful. Mostly she talks to Jessie and kicks me, which shows you how much gratitude I get for giving her life. Kimberly also enjoys sneaking suckers and Warheads out of the pantry, although the joke was on her with the Warheads. Hee hee. She talks a lot, mostly to Daddy on her play phone, and pretty much just spends all day hanging on the outskirts of the chaos picking up whatever food, treats and toys she can scavenge. She loves the new stroller I got for Mother's Day and spends a lot of time begging to sit in it. Happy Mother's Day to Kimberly.

Madeline continues to be the most interactive, the funnest, and the most exasperating of our children. Hazards of the firstborn. She has memorized the first two Articles of Faith and likes to bear her testimony in church. She is convinced one of the men in our ward is President Monson, but amazingly, this does little to convince her to be reverent in sacrament meeting. She pretty much spends all day either playing with friends outside, or with nose pressed up against the windows begging to be outside with her friends. I think she has a more active social life than I did in high school. Although that may not be saying much. Madeline loves to throw tantrums and whine, and then tell Dad how good she was all day. She has about 389 best friends. You are probably one of them. Congratulations. She spends a lot of time pretending, which is adorable, unless she is pretending to listen. She also spends a lot of time loudly referring to people as "that old man" or "that old lady", whether they look 20 or 90. They are always uniformly flattered and amused. She also likes to ask loudly about the baby in people's tummies, which also makes us a lot of friends.

Jessie was good to me for Mother's Day, and as I mentioned, I got to sleep in several times, try out my new stroller, go out for dinner, and hear how impressed Jessie was that I don't turn into a homicidal maniac listening to all the whining and crying all day every day. So nice to be appreciated for my accomplishments. Good weekend with my little family, living motherhood in all its bittersweet and wonderful glory. Hope you all enjoyed it too.

Keeping it REAL.

So we were awesome this week. We attended our first ever Real Salt Lake game. Well, really our first soccer game ever. Transformative, I tell you. I am contemplating becoming a soccer fan. Contemplating. It's that or quidditch. Because I kind of felt like Harry Potter should be swooping in on a broomstick to take the ball with sll the red and gold. Not to mention the lion mascot. But soccer is awesome too. I am now a soccer expert. I know everything about everything. See, you kick the ball into the other teams net. And sometimes this pesky ref steps in and makes up rules about offsides and fouls and stuff. If these rules help our team, they are good rules. If they help the other team, they are dumb rules and the ref is a biased scumbag. If you're mean you get a yellow card. (They don't actually give it to you, they just hold it in the air. If they actually gave it to you I would collect them and show people how awesomely bad I was on the soccer field.) If you're really, really mean, you get a red card and you can't play with the other kids any more. See, I catch on quickly. Anyway, it was a great game. Because we won. At the last second. Which is intense and awesome and the other team sat down and cried because of our clear superiority. Not even kidding. Mostly Jessie and I enjoyed googling rules and heckling the diehard fans who kept standing up in excitement whenever the ball got near the other goal. You would suppose that since Jessie served a mission in South America, he would come home with a deep and abiding love and knowledge of the game, but you would suppose wrong. He doesn't know anything. Don't tell him I told you because he has a reputation to maintain with the menfolk. Point of the story: you should go see a soccer game. Feel the adrenaline. Sing the Cougar fight song. Or the Real fight song, whichever.

You'll always be two years older than me, sucker!

 Ha! Insert pathetic excuses for inability to blog here. Moving on, it's time, a week late, to honor our venerable patriarch on the anniversary of the commencement of his life journey. This year I thought I'd share with you, in honor of his 28th, the many roles of Jessie Warner. In no particular order:

 

A husband to a wife who gets a little crazy. The patience of that man...is not quite equal to Job. But close. Really close. He could be Job's second in a duel.

 A father to some rambunctious children. Who love him more than me. Stinkpot. But really, who can blame them? Look at that face. Also he bribes them with candy and entertainment.

An able businessman and marketing rockstar. Or so he tells me. Okay, other people tell him and then he tells me. But seriously folks, the finest working mind of our generation.

Our mode of transportation. So we got him his very own identification so the police don't impound him if we leave him parked illegally outside the library.

 Food and drink taster extraordinaire. A most discriminating palate. He makes sure we don't eat crummy food. Because that would be embarrassing.

 Class clown. His job is too make sure we never take ourselves to seriously, and to cheer us up when we run out of fruit snacks and ice cream. He is relentless in this duty.

 Horsey whenever the situation may require. Such as when our van breaks down and we need to get to the county store. Or when the girls need to practice roping and shoeing.

 Our victor and champion in all circumstances. Always fighting for the little people. Since we're all littler than him, that's handy for us.

 The scariest monster you'll ever meet, consuming and tickling small children in a single bound. Except when you catch the monster crying in a corner because no one likes him. But if you assure him he is your best friend ever and sit in his lap and feed him a cookie, he usually feels better and might go back to eating you or your sister.

 Shepard to our little flock, although he is more accomplished with chocolate and timeouts than crooks and fences. Also the sheep have him wrapped around their finger and more often lead him around. But he's the leader in spirit or something like that.

Strong man for all difficult situations, good for opening a can, chasing a spider, or carrying car seats and sleepy children. And he doesn't even have to work out.

I just added a picture of him in a tux because I can. And because he makes it look good.

So you see, we would be quite lost without our brave leader, and we're pretty glad he decided to be ringmaster of this little circus. Happy birthday Senor Warner, and may the odds be ever in your favor! :-)