The line of trees (behind the larger tree in front) is on an island, which is currently buried under water.Here's the view from our back deck (without zooming in; I zoomed in on the photo above):
Well, I think the only thing that broke this week was Jared’s glasses frames. He didn’t do anything unusual to them, either—he just folded them up Tuesday evening and one of the arms broke off. When we called to find out how old they were, we discovered that they are almost 2 years old, so I decided it’s about time to take Jared in to have his eyes checked anyway. He had them checked today and his new glasses will hopefully be in some time this week.
The furnace and the dishwasher are both fixed now although someone is still going to come out to look at the furnace again this week—it works, but it’s a lot louder than it used to be. They say the noise is caused by something vibrating, so they are going to replace something else to fix that problem. When the guy came to look at it on Tuesday he replaced the part we’d ordered and then he discovered that the furnace still didn’t work! So he had to replace another part and then it worked. It ended up costing more than we had anticipated because of that, of course, but it was still a lot less than it would have cost with the other company. The dishwasher was fixed late Wednesday afternoon and it runs great now. It is so nice to have a functioning dishwasher again!! I kept thinking, as I spent a half hour or more doing dishes every day how much time that would add up to over a lifetime. I have so much more time to do things I enjoy than my grandmothers or even my mother had, when I look at it that way. I’m grateful for that!
Frank has been insanely busy this week with work. Don’t I say that every week? They really need to hire another person to help keep up with all the work they have. But that’s a good problem to have, at least—beats not having enough work. I do hope they can get some help soon, though, because poor Frank is pretty worn out. We’d like to see him a little bit more, also! Fortunately, his feet are feeling much better this week.
Sunday evening the two older boys had a fireside at the church. There was a teacher development meeting going on at the same time that I was interested in attending, so I took them to the fireside and stayed for the meeting. I’m glad I did—it was a good meeting and I think I learned some things that will help me teach more effectively.
Tanner and Jared had MSA testing this week. Jared seemed to come down with a mild version of the stomach flu that Tanner and Seth had—he was up in the night on Tuesday evening because he didn’t feel well, and then he threw up early Wednesday morning. He was tired that day, and didn’t eat much, but he never threw up again and felt fine by Thursday. That was really lucky because Wednesday was the one day this week that he didn’t have testing! So now he doesn’t have to make anything up.
Monday morning Snickers had his annual check up. He wasn’t too thrilled about it (I don’t think I’ve ever seen his tail tucked between his legs that far!) but he behaved pretty well. He had to get blood drawn and 2 vaccines, poor animal! He’s good for a while now, though. He has to get one more booster next month, and then he’s good for a year. Overall, he’s healthy—he just has some issues with his knee joints popping out which means as he gets older he’ll probably develop arthritis in his knees.
Tuesday my visiting teachers came to see me—for once, none of the kids were home sick! Frank was here, though, although he was downstairs working the whole time. One of my visiting teachers is going to have twins any day now, so they wanted to get their visits done early this month!
Wednesday evening we had a Relief Society Activity to celebrate the RS birthday. (Scott and Tanner came with me because they had volunteered to help in the nursery; I brought Seth also so that Frank could get some work done.) We learned some cool and really easy ways to decorate cupcakes, did a “service exchange”, and talked about giving gifts to ourselves by choosing something we really want to do and then getting it done by doing it in 10 minute increments, if necessary. I liked that idea—I really needed to hear that at my point in life! I never have large blocks of time to do things which is probably why I have a list of projects a mile long that I am not getting done. But if I do 10 minutes at a time I’ll get done eventually, right? I am not the type of person who works very efficiently in small increments of time, but I’m going to try it anyway. Overall, it was a fun evening; I’m glad I got to go.
I was supposed to have lunch with my friend Christine on Thursday, but she forgot about it and scheduled an appointment to get two wisdom teeth pulled. That was ok with me, though, because I woke up with a slightly sore throat. I used the freed up time to work on Seth’s quiet book; it felt good to make a little progress on that project! I worked on it a little more Friday and today.
Thursday evening I went to interview another Primary child who is turning 12. That’s the third interview I’ve done and I feel like maybe I’m starting to get the hang of it. There really isn’t a lot of guidelines on what I’m supposed to do in those interviews, so I feel like I mostly stare at the child wondering what to say. This is especially true if they have not done their Faith in God—if they had been working on that, I could ask them about that!
The weather has warmed up a lot this week. We had a couple of really nice spring-like days—I love it!! (And it’s been nice that we haven’t needed our noisy furnace much.) All the snow has melted from yards and all that is left is the remains of snow banks made by snow plows along the edges of streets and in parking lots. Some of those are still pretty big, and they are unsightly, but I don’t notice them so much now that other things are starting to turn green and come back to life. There are tons of green shoots coming up in my flower beds, and more crocus have appeared on my lawn. (I’m excited to see all the bulbs coming up that Scott & I planted last fall.) I’ve been seeing rabbits and squirrels also, and there is a noticeable increase in the volume of birdsong in the mornings. The last couple of days it’s been raining a lot. I am so glad it’s rain and not snow!!!
Speaking of snow, the state waived one of the snow make up days so it looks like the last day of school is going to be Friday, June 11th. I’m starting to shop for plane tickets.
I haven’t done much house searching lately, but I did look at one house Thursday afternoon that just came up for sale. It is right across the street from my friend Marci’s house and it’s the same floor plan as hers except it has a bump out for a “morning room” behind the kitchen, so it’s a little bit bigger. The house was in pretty good shape, had all the space we would ever need (they had finished the basement with 3 bedrooms and there are 4 upstairs!), and the yard is huge. The price they’re asking is amazing for the size of house and the area we’re in. The big catch, though—the property taxes are enormous! We keep running into that problem. The principal and interest payment on the house would actually only be about $100 more per month than what we are paying for our total mortgage (including escrow) now. But the property taxes add on another $650 per month, which puts it out of our price range. It’s frustrating! Because of this issue, we’ve decided that we’re going to start focusing more on houses outside of the
Frank was at work pretty late last night and then he did some work from here today—they are setting up a new server for a client, which always takes a lot of time and has to be done after hours. Tanner and Scott had a YM activity at the YM president’s house from 7:00-10:00. Frank got home before they had to come home, but they got a ride home with one of the leaders which was nice. I think they had a good time. They were both invited to spend the night with friends, but we said “no”. They weren’t very happy about it, but sometimes we just need to be a family! I don’t think it’s good for them to be up late every week end.
Today has been busy, but I didn’t have a huge list of things that had to be done, for once, and that was a nice change. I worked on Seth’s quiet book (as I mentioned earlier) and finished reading a book called Sweetwater Creek. It was mostly a good book, but I don’t feel like I can recommend it because of a few scenes that happened near the end. There were a lot of strong emotions going on in that book! We had the sister missionaries over for dinner this evening and they gave us a really good mes
Seth fell down earlier this week on one of our walks with Snickers. He scraped up the back of his right hand, near the wrist, pretty good so I put a band aid on it. That turned out to be kind of a pain because the band aid wouldn’t stay on very well and Seth developed the habit, early on, of screaming whenever it came off. We’ve gone through several band aids and my nerves are a bit frayed, but I finally convinced him tonight that he doesn’t need a band aid on it anymore—it’s healing nicely. I can tell he’s trying to figure out what’s going on. At first he kept asking me why he had a hole in his hand! I had to explain that it’s a scab, not a hole. Now that the scab is starting to come off, he’s confused about that, too. Oh, the joys of being two (and being the mother of a two)!
Well, we have to set our clocks forward an hour (I hate that!) so we’re losing time and I’d better get to bed.
1 comment:
I never knew what a pain band aids were until I had kids!:) Bummer about that house it sounds like a dream! Glad to hear that Frank's feet are getting better, with all his extra work!
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