We enjoyed a nice, restful Sunday (for once!). General Conference was great! As many others have said, it’s always kind of sad to see it end. Of the talks that I heard, I would have to say Elder Holland’s was my favorite. (His talks are usually my favorites—for some reason, he just really speaks to me!) So many of the talks were good, though. I’m looking forward to listening to them again and / or reading them all.
Monday morning started early for all of us. This is what our street looked like at 6:00 am.:
This is later, when it was a little lighter outside:
Most of us were already up anyway—Scott had just gotten out of the shower, I was awake because Scott woke me up to tell me he wasn’t feeling very well (his mouth was hurting and he was feeling nauseated), and Seth had just woken up so Frank was in his room with him. Jared woke up about 15 minutes later, but Tanner slept through the whole thing. I think we counted 7-8 fire trucks (two of the ones with the huge ladders), 2 ambulances, about 3-4 police cars, and 6-7 other fire vehicles. They had our whole street pretty much blocked off within minutes! We didn’t see any smoke or flames, but later we found out there really was a fire in one of the nearby town homes. Frank gave up on getting Seth back to sleep—I found them at the window with Seth saying “Fire truck! Fire truck!” over and over. 
I decided to let Scott stay home from Seminary and school until I could get him in to the oral surgeon. (He couldn’t have gone to Seminary anyway—no cars could get up or down our street!) I took him in to get checked later that morning. He didn’t have an infection, so we’re not sure why he was experiencing so much pain. His mouth was actually feeling a little better by then, but he said he still felt nauseated, and he looked so exhausted that I let him stay home from school. He took a long nap that afternoon. I took about an hour nap also, while Seth was napping.
Scott was able to return to school on Tuesday, which was good since that was the last day of school before spring break. He was able to check in with all his teachers to find out what he missed while he was gone, and he brought home make up work to do over the break. I got brave and did some clothes shopping with Seth in tow, but I probably won’t do that again for a long time! He figured out how to crawl under the dressing room door, so you can imagine how much fun that was for me. I was hoping to find left over winter clothes on the clearance racks so that I could replace some of my old ratty long-sleeved shirts, but I didn’t find anything (I meant to go about 6 weeks ago—it’s probably too late now.) I did end up bringing home a couple of blouses and a short sleeve shirt, though.
The boys were in a party mood when they got home from school, of course! (The fact that there were actually snowflakes drifting down from the sky didn’t phase them a bit in their excitement for “spring” break!) Tanner was invited to spend the night with his friend Ryan; two other boys from the ward were also invited. Scott went to a party for his Seminary class.
Wednesday afternoon, the “party” transferred to our house—Ryan, Brian, Anton, and Bryson (Jared’s friend) all came over. They played outside for a while—it was a little chilly but sunny at least—and then came inside to play games and watch a movie. While they were outside, they all decided to go wading in the river, with their shoes on! I don’t know what possessed them. They know they aren’t supposed to go in the river, and why they didn’t at least take their shoes off is beyond me. Everyone came home with soaking wet muddy shoes (and socks, and pantlegs…) Scott managed to lose one of his socks, also. I had to document on film that I was the lone female in the house with 10 male living things!:
Even the dog is male!
After all the kids went home on Wednesday (Bryson stayed—he was going to spend the night, but he changed his mind later and went home. His mom says he does this a lot.), Frank and I took Seth with us and went to buy paint. Yes, we are painting again! The couch we are going to purchase is dark brown leather. Our living room walls are a sunny yellow. I don’t like the idea of dark brown and sunny yellow together! I warned Frank if we bought the couch, we’d have to paint, but he said that was ok. So we picked out a light tan color. Frank did some patching and furniture moving on Thursday evening, and started putting on primer late Friday. Our neighbor, who is a professional painter, came over to help him (Frank has done some computer work for our neighbor so he insists that he “owes” Frank. In any case, we are happy to have his help.) They got a coat of primer on the stairwell and upstairs hallway that night. They worked pretty much all day on Saturday, and got the primer done, except for a little bit on the downstairs stairwell because we ran out of primer. They did some of the trim also. Hopefully they will be able to finish the trim and get the paint on tomorrow. In the meantime, things are kind of chaotic around here. Hopefully it will be worth it when it’s done, though!
Seth "painting"Meanwhile, back to Wednesday—Scott and Tanner had a service project that evening. They went to help with yardwork for another family in our ward—the husband is about to have back surgery, so he can’t do a lot of things for himself.
Thursday I was going all day long. Scott had an early appointment with the oral surgeon—I forgot when I made the appointment that he would be out of school, so I made it for 7:45. He is healing well and doesn’t need to go back. We stopped at the grocery store on our way home. When we got back, I started the laundry, vacuumed, helped all the boys with homework and with scout stuff, took the 3 youngest boys to get haircuts, and got Seth down for a nap. Then I took Jared to play with his friend Bryson and to do some other errands. I went to the fabric store first to get some supplies to make a quiet book for Seth. (It remains to be seen if I will actually finish the quiet book before he gets too old for that sort of thing!) After that I went to pick up a honeybaked ham for our Easter dinner—Frank received a large gift card from a client at Christmas time, so we decided to use it for Easter. Then I was going to go to the library, but thankfully Frank called me then and said “you’re on your way to the doctor now, aren’t you?” Yikes—I’d completely forgotten that Tanner had a doctor appointment that afternoon! I rushed home, picked Tanner up, and made it to the doctor only about 5 minutes late.
Seth with shorter hair
The doctor visit was for two reasons—I needed to get a form filled out by his doctor for scout camp, and I also wanted to start the process of seeing if we can get him tested for ADD or whatever it is that is contributing to his difficulties in school. The doctor listened very sympathetically to my frustrations and sent us home with questionnaires for Frank and I to fill out, as well as questionnaires for each of his teachers to fill out. After we get all of those back to them, they will look them over and hopefully have a better idea of what the problem might be. She said he may have some ADD (she agreed with me that he is definitely not ADHD) or he may even have some anxiety issues. Obviously, it is not “cut and dry” and making a diagnosis is tricky. She asked him some questions about sleeping, and it occurred to me that perhaps his difficulties getting up in the morning could be caused by the same problem that makes it so hard for him to focus. I’d never really thought about that before; I just assumed he was a “night person”. Wouldn’t it be great if we could solve that problem, too? Well, I shouldn’t get my hopes up too much, I guess! It’s just that I’ve been dreading getting him up for Seminary in a couple of years….
After the doctor visit, we stopped at the library. I finished reading both the books I was reading last week, so I returned them and got the sequel to First Light. I loved First Light, by the way. I was just blubbering by the end…but in a good way. There are at least 8 books in this series…could they all be that good? I hope so! After we got home, I made dinner. Then I finally sat down!!! What a day. Frank’s day was similar—he was running from one client to another all day, and then, as I mentioned, he came home and patched walls. Our bishop also brought over his computer that evening—he’d asked Frank to do some work on it, which Frank did Friday morning, along with working on another computer for a client.
I spent Friday trying to keep Seth out of paint stuff. It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated, though. Snickers got neutered that day—we had to drop him off between 7:30 and 8:00 am. He wasn’t supposed to have anything to eat after midnight, but we forgot to tell the boys. Scott got up before we did, let Snickers out of the crate, and gave him a treat when he went “potty”, which is what we usually do. We were worried we’d have to reschedule his surgery, but the vet said one small treat was ok. They called us around noon to say that the surgery was done and went well. Even better—one complication that they had anticipated didn’t happen, which means the surgery was less intrusive than they thought it was going to be and that also meant it cost about $200 less than they had estimated. Good for Snickers (easier recovery) and good for us (easier on the pocketbook)! They wanted to observe Snickers and give him time to wake up, so they asked us to pick him up around 3:00. I took Jared with me to do that. They said he had been resting very well and hadn’t even cried at all. Well, he did whimper a bit when he saw us, but they laughed and said “He’s doing that because you’re here!” He whimpered softly quite a bit on the way home, so I was glad Jared was in the back seat with him to reassure him. Snickers was quite groggy the first hour or two after he got home. I felt so bad for him that I held him on my lap and petted him a lot of that time. After a few hours he woke up quite a bit more and by late evening even got pretty frisky. He is not supposed to run or jump for 10-14 days—it was hard to keep him from running around and jumping on and off the furniture! It’s going to be a long couple of weeks, but we’ll do our best to keep him calm and quiet.
Seth has been an early riser this week—he seems to be getting up around 6:00 or even a little earlier most mornings. Not so fun for us! He has also been waking up in the night once or twice almost every night. We’re feeling sleep deprived. He goes in cycles, though, so we are just waiting for him to get back into a good sleep cycle! He is saying phrases like “drink of milk”. Or “Mommy, sit” (he pats the seat next to him when he says that…very cute!) He has also learned to say “please”. If you have something he wants (like a cookie, for example), he will make “come here” motions with his hand and say “please, please.” How are we supposed to resist that?!
I got to church early for choir practice—we sang “Beautiful Savior” today. Now we are home from church and relaxing. We don’t have any meetings or anything, which is nice. I think the boys have eaten nothing but candy all day. I guess one day of it won’t kill them! I just hope they are remembering the true meaning of Easter with their mouths full of chocolate! Here's our eggs that we dyed yesterday in the middle of painting chaos: 
I had to move Seth's chair into the middle of the floor, away from the table to keep him from knocking over the dye or cracking the eggs:
He wasn't very happy about it!:
Here is Seth, playing with Snickers this afternoon (Snickers was under the couch.)
Snickers kept poking his head out, and Seth was laughing like crazy! It was very cute. Now Seth is napping and we are all thinking about dinner, so I will get this posted and go get dinner ready.
Happy Easter!
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