Wedding Bells!

A couple of weeks ago we headed down to Southern California for my sister's wedding. Eva was beautiful and we were glad to welcome Aaron into the family. I didn't take my camera out of the car one time we were there and so our pictures are a compilation of being in the car, and what other people in my family took pictures of.

Happy Wedding Eva and Aaron! We love you.

Michael needed his "two ones whales" while watching shows in the car. My kids are great travelers and the TV helps quite a bit with that.

  

This sleepy face was too cute. I love his long eyelashes and he was still sucking his tongue which could be seen because his mouth was a little opened. Can you see evidence of his whales? 

At the family dinner Friday night. Penny loves to rub my belly and talk to the baby. She's at just the right height to always bump into it and give the baby a hug

 

Cousins glaring at the camera:

My whole family at the Newport Beach temple. Can you spot which 10 of these people are the Hirt kids? 5 girls and 5 boys, go!

Okay, well if you couldn't find them, here's your cheat sheet. That's Spencer, Sam, Nephi, Jon and Joe for the boys at the top of the collage and Julia, Rose, Eva, Katie and Annie for the girls at the bottom. Eva was a beautiful bride. I really REALLY loved her dress.

I didn't even recognize me in this picture when I first saw it. Perhaps because half of my face is covered by my sister's sunglasses. This is my sister Rose and I.

Eva gave Penny her flower bouquet. It was about 65 degrees out and a little windy. Needless to say Penny is NOT my Alaska girl. She wore her down jacket (hot pink I might add) the whole afternoon at the reception. 

There was a mustache booth with mustache tattoo's and a photographer taking pictures. These, my sister took. Aren't they funny? I can't wait to see the ones that the photographer actually took. Sean didn't understand why it was so funny, he hasn't followed the silly mustache trend. Thanks for being a good sport anyways!

One mustache we put directly on Michael's face. He kept it on long enough to take a few pictures and then wanted it off. It was hard to do a finger one with him, but he did it and then wiped it off. Guess he didn't understand the silly trend either.

My brothers are silly.

My kids had so much fun playing with Rosie.

Penny left her mustache on for days. 

 

A few things I remember about the wedding ceremony. The sealer talked about marriage being like a nice ornate box. Beautiful on the outside and when you open the box you would expect to see if full of love, kindness, service, happiness, christ, kind words etc. You'd expect it to be full of all the great things about marriage right from the beginning. But, what is actually the case is that the box, at the beginning of the marriage is completely empty and you have to fill the box with those things. And, not only fill the box with those things, but put in more than you take so that the box can always be full of what you want. I really liked this analogy. And gave me a visual to think about and asess in my own life. What is my marriage box full of?

He also talked about being sealed and creating eternal bonds. We can only see eternity in the mirrors when we look at our spouse, but when we look at ourselves in the mirrors all we can see is one person, our self. In order for a marriage to work  the focus must be on the other person with which you made that covenant. And lastly what I remember was looking forward in the mirrors he said as representing our posterity while looking back in the mirrors represented our ancestors. Sealed together in the temple to be eternally together when we choose to keep our covenants. Brought together at that time by Eva and Aaron who had decided to make that covenant.

He said a lot more, this is all that I remember.

I love weddings but especially temple weddings as I get to reflect on our temple sealing and what it did and continues to do for my growing, family.

What an amazing day Eva Jane.
I'm so happy for you and Aaron. Now, bring on the babies!

Chin Mis-hap

About 2 weeks ago, Penny was playing in the garage as I was fixing dinner. We have a pullup bar that Dad built in the garage for exercising that he has hung some rings from. He does exercises from the rings and the kids like to play on the rings. They are very careful playing on them and don't usually get too crazy.  We have a rug underneath the rings, but its really not THAT much padding.

Well, I'm sure you can see where this is going. Penny was playing on the rings only a foot off the ground. One leg through each ring and just slowly twirling and swinging just a little bit. She lost her balance and fell forward, I'm sure causing herself to also swing backwards at the same time. So her face hit the floor while it was swinging a little and drug on the ground a bit. She started crying like she was hurt, but not like she was hurt super super bad (you know the death scream you'll sometimes get when your kids think they might possibly be dying from pain). Dad picked her up and immediately had fear in his eyes. The first thing I noticed was she had carpet stuck between 3 of her top teeth meaning she scraped the carpet as she was drug backwards a bit. There was not a drop of blood but her bottom teeth looked like they had been pushed back.

Sean and I were seriously scared that she had broken her jaw. All I could imagine was her jaw being wired shut, feeding her through a straw and my sweet little girl having to have surgery to fix it.
Sean and I were both almost in tears.



She stopped crying after a few minutes but then said her chin felt really funny. I didn't know how to interpret this. Did that mean she broke it? It was swelling really fast underneath her chin. These first two pictures were taken 10 minutes after it happened (and after I flossed the carpet out of her teeth).

I immediately called our dentist (also a friend of ours) to ask him what we should do. I didn't want to rush to an Urgent Care because I've worked at an Urgent Care before and our doctors would have had limited experience with facial trauma (I know because depending on the provider at the time, I would be asked what x-rays  I would suggest to be taken). I just wasn't sure that we wouldn't get the runaround of ruling out this and that and spending hours in the UC or ER.

But, our dentist made a house call. He was on his way out to dinner with his wife for her birthday and he said he'd swing in. We started a movie for Penny so they could just chill while we waited. Michael was so relaxed too.

He came and determined that it didn't seem that there was any structural damage, that her teeth didn't even look like they were pushed back or moved at all. He said it was just really swollen and to have her take some IBU or Tylenol for pain and swelling if she needed it.

She perked up after the movie and ate dinner and seemed to be fine, just swollen and she said it felt weird.

This was what she looked like the next day. Her face just looked elongated and chubby but only chubby by the chin and around the bottom of her face.

It started to bruise a little under the chin a few days later but the inside of her mouth was totally black and purple between her bottom teeth and her lip. Only a little bruise the next day.

 

This picture was taken three days later. See how swollen her chin area is? It wasn't very purple yet at this point.

 This was 5 days later blowing bubbles. It had really started to bruise underneath her chin but the swelling seemed to be going down a little. It was really hard to the touch too and I thought about trying to get her some therapeutic ultrasounds but it seemed like the bruising was changing everyday so it seemed to be working its way out. She didn't want to do any heat or anything on it and that would have helped. It just looked awful!

 

 This was 1 week and 1 day later and it was really looking soooo much better when I took this picture.

It has completely healed now and there was no structural damage. Her teeth and chin are completely fine.

So, we felt so protected and blessed that it was only a swollen chin. Sean and I were extremely grateful that evening and though our hearts skipped a beat, we knelt in prayer that evening and thanked our Heavenly Father for only a bruised chin.

We're getting a 1 inch foam floor put in to a large area of our garage now as the kids play in the garage a lot (its our business area and we are out there a lot. We use our garage as an extra room to our house basically because that's how we roll).

On to 6th Grade Math

 

Dominic finished 5th grade math today and is on to 6th grade math (he's in 4th grade)! We love ALEKS math. Slowly, as he learns concepts in each area of his pie (set to the California State Standards), his pie fills in with the dark colors you see here until all of his pie is shaded in. It is a lot of fun for him to see this visually and he will often push himself a little bit harder than if I would have just given him some worksheets to do. He loves math and we're very happy with his academic progress this year. Its nice that he can take things at whatever pace he desires.

After he has "mastered" a concept, they reintroduce that concept again in an assessment after a period of time has gone by. If he still "masters" it then it stays shaded in, if he gets the problem wrong, then it adds it back into his pie and he has to "master" it again. I really like it. 

He started 4th grade math in early January and upon being assessed discovered that his pie was 3/4 full. He worked hard and finished 4th grade math by early February and started 5th grade math. So its been since mid-February that he's been working on 5th grade. He's beyond excited to move forward.