Weekly Review December 19 '09

The Christmas tree is finally up & decorated!

Snow on the back deck, about 8:30 this morning



Snow on the deck, around noon.

The wintery Monocacy River (from our back door)

Presents piled under the tree!

Snickers looking fine with a new haircut!

Another haircut photo

A very cute Santa! (The scratch is from falling into the Christmas tree!)

We didn’t have church on Sunday because of the weather. It really wasn’t so bad—mostly rainy and cold, but apparently the roads were a little icy and quite slippery that morning. By mid morning, the roads were just wet. Most of us think we should have had church, but I guess it’s always hard to predict these things! You would think with church cancelled that we would have a quiet day with lots of extra time to just relax, but it didn’t work out that way. Mainly that was because of all the things I was supposed to do at church, such as pass out all the plates with cookies to the teachers. All of us in the Primary presidency ended up driving around to the teachers’ houses to deliver the plates instead, since we didn’t want to give the teachers plates of stale cookies and we also didn’t want to make all those cookies all over again! Other things that got messed up: choir practice (my last chance to practice since Ward Council is held at the same time as choir), a special presentation that I had prepared to give to each of the older classes (one of my counselors is going to be gone the next two Sundays so I wanted to get it done before she left, knowing I would be a lot busier the weeks she’s gone), and a visiting teaching appointment that I had right after church. There were lots of phone calls going back and forth that morning, but I think we got it all worked out!

One of my counselors and I had an appointment that afternoon to visit a family with Primary kids—we were able to go ahead and do that as planned. In addition, my other counselor and my secretary came to visit Jared & Seth. We also had family night and decorated the Christmas tree. It turned out to be a pretty full day! We did get a chance to play a few games, which we don’t usually have time to do on Sunday, so that was nice. After we got the tree decorated, we were all admiring it. Tanner said “I like it, but I’d like it better if there were presents under it!” Well, there are presents under it now—thanks to the package we got from Mom & Dad on Wednesday and a little “wrapping party” I had on Thursday evening. It’s hard for me to believe that Christmas is so soon!

I didn’t have quite as long “to do” lists as last week, but it was still a full week with book club on Monday (we had a huge amount of food!), my visiting teachers stopping by on Tuesday, a Primary presidency meeting on Wednesday night, a doctor appointment for Tanner after school on Thursday (check up on his medicine; he is 5’ 7 ½ “and weighs 110 ½ pounds now), and Snickers going to the groomer (also on Thursday; he looks great!). The laundry didn’t do itself, the house didn’t clean itself, and food did not appear in the cabinets either, so I took care of all that, too!

By Thursday evening / Friday morning, they were predicting significant snow for this week end. Frank always jokes that whenever snow is predicted around here, everyone runs to the store and stocks up on milk, bread, and toilet paper. I ended up going to Wal-Mart yesterday morning to get a few things I realized I’d forgotten on an earlier trip this week, and there were indeed a ton of people there, and I saw a lot of milk, bread, and toilet paper in shopping carts, which made me giggle. There were a lot of other things in carts, also, though.

Yesterday was enlivened a bit by the power going out a couple of times—there was work on the power lines being done nearby. Thankfully, the power was off for only a few minutes each time it went out. Frank and I went to the temple last night. We left as soon as the boys got home from school so that we would be sure to get back home before the storm hit. (It wasn’t supposed to hit until around midnight, but we wanted to be on the safe side!) We got stuck in pretty bad traffic, so we missed the 4:00 session we were shooting for. Instead of waiting for the 5:00 session, we did initiatories instead, which I always enjoy. We left the temple by about 5:45, but didn’t get home until about 8:30 because Frank had to stop on the way home to buy a computer for a client, we stopped for dinner, and we ran into some more traffic (but not too bad this time). We found everything was well at home—the older boys do a good job babysitting (although they could work on cleaning up the kitchen after meals).

We woke up this morning to about 6 inches of snow, and it is still coming down. Now, at noon, we have a full foot of snow. The weather reports say that the snow is going to get heavy this afternoon, with an additional 8-12 inches expected and another 2-4 inches expected this evening! The ward Christmas party, which was scheduled for this evening, has already been cancelled. Frank and I were not going to be able to go to that anyway because the Griffin party was also supposed to be tonight, at a restaurant here in Frederick. (We had already committed to go to his work party when they decided to move the ward party to the same night. Originally, the ward party was scheduled for December 5^th.) Now the ward party is going to take place in January, so I guess we’ll get to go! The Griffin party has also been cancelled (I’m not sure when it’s gong to be rescheduled). I planned dinner for just the boys tonight, so dinner is going to be interesting! We’re thinking church is probably going to be cancelled tomorrow, also.

Frank was supposed to be helping cook the ward dinner all day today, but now he doesn’t have to go so he has some unexpected free time. He is still trying to think of excuses to go outside, because he loves driving in the snow! (Yes, he’s crazy.) Maybe all of us will venture out later to sled or build a snowman! The boys and I did some scouts and wrapped some more presents (wrapping paper roll fights were popular.) Now they are all playing video games.

It looks like we’re going to have a white Christmas this year!