Weekly Review January 22 '11

I'll start this week with some "January sky" photos. This year, I have been trying to appreciate January for what it is, and guess what? It does help. I am feeling happier this January. I'm actually finding things I like about January--such as the bright "morning star" (Venus) that I see every morning when I go out to pick up the boys from Seminary and the sunrises and sunsets that I get to see most days. Here's the view out my back windows:

I usually find this view rather barren, but this year it looks "restful" to me. I love how I can see the river this time of year. And all those bare trees? Well, I know they are going to be blooming before I know it! Quite the promise of new life in all those trees.

These next two are at sunset one evening. Nothing spectacular, obviously, but still pretty, I think:

And here's sunrise the next morning. It was spectacular a little earlier, when I was in the car, but by the time I got home, it had faded to this:

Try to appeciate January while it lasts...only 9 more days! :) (I couldn't resist!)

Sunday was busy with church, choir practice, home teachers visiting, and a teacher training meeting for me that evening. We didn't have any time to squish in family home evening in between all of that, so we did that Monday evening.

The boys were out of school Monday through Wednesday, so I let them have some friends over. Tanner had his friends Ryan, Brian, and Seth over to spend the night Monday after family night. Scott's friend David and Jared's friend Bryson spent the night Tuesday night. One advantage to having a small house--they all have to sleep in the living room and because of the noise, we make them go to sleep no later than midnight. No "all nighters" at our house!

We got a couple of inches of snow Monday evening and then during the night we had a lot of freezing rain. It woke me up more than once, hitting the windows. I was glad the boys were out of school anyway on Tuesday because I'm sure they would have had a snow day otherwise. We slept in a bit Tuesday morning (except for Frank--work as usual for him) and I was just starting to make waffles and bacon for all the boys when I got a call from the guy in charge of the church building wanting to know if my boys were home and could help with shoveling sidewalks at the church. I laughed and told him he had called the right place--not only were my boys home, but I had 3 extra able-bodied males at my house! So we had a hurried breakfast and then I took them all over to the church to shovel. It didn't take too long with all of them helping; then I took them all home. We barely had time to get back home and get showers before I had to be back at the church for a Primary presidency meeting. The boys came with me; they played basketball in the gym. (Except for Tanner--when I took Ryan home, Tanner stayed there and he ended up spending the night.) I didn't have a formal meeting, actually--we had decided we needed to clean out the Primary closets, so we did that and discussed several items while we worked. The closets look GREAT now!

Wednesday morning I took all the boys to get haircuts. They look great--here is Seth, showing off his new haircut:

Ok, it's a little messy in that photo, actually!

Wednesday was actually quite mild, which we enjoyed while it lasted. (It's back to being frigid now.) Even though the kids were out of school on Wednesday, they still had basketball practice and YM that evening, to make up for the one that got cancelled last week. I also had a RS meeting that evening. It was fun to get out and mingle with other women. I went to a class on "frugal living", even though I think I'm pretty good at that already. Always room for improvement! I felt like I needed that class more than the one on "debt reduction".

At first, snow was predicted for Wednesday night causing groans from most adults who didn't want the kids to be out of school AGAIN. It didn't snow Wednesday night, but the predicted storm moved to Thursday night, and there was an 80% chance of snow, according to the reports. Much to the chagrin of the kids and delight of the adults, the storm went farther north than expected and missed us completely. So there was school for everyone on both Thursday and Friday. I felt like I got a lot done those two days, including exercising a couple of times.

Scott had a check up at the orthodontist Thursday after school. While I was there, I made an appointment for Jared to get his braces on--that will be happening on February 10th. I think he gets just the bottom ones on first. He's not too thrilled about it, but his teeth are a mess, so it has to be done. He inherited large teeth and a small mouth, unfortunately!

Friday was the start of a new semester at school, which meant Scott and Tanner both brought home lots of papers for me to sign. So annoying! They were supposed to start the new term Thursday, but the snow day last week pushed everything back a day.

One thing I accomplished this week that really cheered me up is I cleaned my room. When I started my huge house organization project at the beginning of last year, I ended up stacking a bunch of things against one wall of my bedroom until I could create new places for them to go in other rooms. Well, that stack of things ended up staying against the wall in my room all year! Although I did a lot of work through out the house last year, I wasn't able to finish everything and in particular I haven't been able to buy all the storage items that I want to buy yet. So I never created the new places for all those items that I intended to create. I decided at the beginning of this year that the stack had to go! So I spent an hour or so on Thursday afternoon dispersing the pile. Some things got thrown away, some were given away, and some found temporary homes in storage boxes or other parts of the house. I now have a beauitful blank wall with no "stuff" stacked against it. I feel happy every time I look at it! Clutter makes me crazy; order makes me happy!

While cleaning out that pile, I unearthed a couple of photo albums from when the older boys were little. I sat down to look through them that evening, and before I was done I had both Scott and Jared hanging over my shoulders, laughing their heads off! Jared told me I need to take up scrapbooking again and do our more recent photos. Well, I would like to do a little more of that--haven't done any scrapbooking in years--but I doubt I'll ever scrapbook all our photos. My current ambition is to get all of our prints scanned and then put all our photos (scanned and digital) onto CDs. That's a big enough project in and of itself, without trying to scrapbook them! It would be good to get them all in albums, though--even if they are just put in photo holders with short descriptions.

I have also been reading my book for book club whenever I get the chance, and enjoying it a lot. It's called Blackberry Wine. I haven't finished it yet, so I'll have to reserve judgement on the book as a whole until I'm done.

Seth has been driving me crazy this week by having 2-5 "accidents" per day! I don't know what's gotten into him. It appears that most of the time he is just waiting too long to head for the bathroom, so he makes it there but doesn't get his pants down in time. It's been very frustrating! I'm pretty certain that he is just being distracted too much by his playing to take the time to go to the bathroom, but the frequency of the accidents for several days in a row makes me wonder if something physical might be going on. I guess I will take him to the doctor if the problem doesn't clear up soon.

Now it's Monday--obviously, I didn't get this done on Saturday. That's because Saturday was extremely busy. Jared had a basketball game at 8:00, I had a baby shower to attend from 9:30-11:30, I had a Primary visit at 1:00, and Scott had a game at 2:00. Then Saturday evening I gave the missionaries a ride home from Balitmore. One of them had just been transferred here last week from another area and she had a baptism in her former area that she really wanted to attend. The former area was about 90 miles away, so she arranged to have someone on that end drive them to a halfway point, and I met them there to bring them the rest of the way home. I enjoyed the ride back home much more than the drive over, since I had someone to talk to on the drive home!

Jared's and Scott's teams both lost their basketball games, unfortunately. Scott's game was particularly frustrating to watch because they started out well--his team had a 12 point lead before the first half was over--but they ended up losing by over 30 points. We're still not sure what happened--the other team definitely started playing better the second half and had a couple of guys that made several 3 point shots each, which really helped them out. But I kept looking at the score board periodically and being surprised at how many points they'd made and how our team's score had not gone up at all. The score didn't seem to match what I was seeing happening on the court. We suspect the scorekeeper may have made some mistakes--there were a couple of mistakes that were caught and corrected (ie--giving points to the wrong team). Besides that, we could see a lot of pretty blatant pushing and elbowing going on, but the referees didn't seem to notice. So that was aggravating, but that's how it goes sometimes. It's good for the boys to learn to be good sports, even when things don't seem fair.

The baby shower was fun. It was a brunch, with lots of yummy food. I won the first game--we had one minute to come up with a girl's name for each letter of the alphabet. (Yes, the mom is expecting a girl. And apparently they are having a hard time coming up with a name, so this game was intended to help her out.) I laughed when they described the game because my most recent "game" I play when I am having a hard time going back to sleep is to try to come up with a girl's and a boy's name for each letter of the alphabet. So I've had lots of practice, and sure enough--I came up with a name for each letter while most people ran out of time about halfway through the alphabet. I came home and told Frank that he can't laugh at me anymore for my little "try to go back to sleep games"!

Yesterday was busy and Scott had a little "adventure"--but I'll save the details of all of that for this week's post!