Weekly Review January 29 '11

Greetings from our crazy house! I am wondering if we are ever going to get back to a normal schedule around here.


Sunday started out early for me--I had a meeting at 7:00. Well, at least, I thought I had a meeting at 7:00--it was actually at 7:45. That was ok, though, because it gave me time to set up the chairs in the Primary room. They are always set up, but never the way I want them, so I have to adjust them a bit every week. We had Ward Conference, so the stake presidency came to our ward council meeting before church. It was really good. I didn't get much out of the rest of the meetings because Seth was a handful during Sacrament Meeting and then of course I went to Primary after that so I missed the rest of the meetings. I thought Frank would be able to fill me in later, but as it turned out, he missed the meetings also because he was taking Scott to immediate care. That's because right after Sacrament Meeting, Scott injured his hand. It's hard to explain how it happened, because it was one of those "freak" accidents. Apparently he was reaching out his hand to shake hands with his friend David when another friend (Ricardo) slammed into David, which knocked David's hand hard into Scott's hand, pushing back his thumb. Scott says he heard something "pop"! As it turns out, he didn't break his thumb, but he did pull or tear a bunch of ligaments in his hand. They put a temporary cast on it which he had to keep on until Thursday, and he was not supposed to use his hand at all until then. Here's what it looks like (Scott was resting on the floor Sunday afternoon):

Although it's stiff like a cast, it's removable, so he was able to take it off himself. He did remove it on Thursday, and although it was a little stiff and sore at first, it feels much better now. He still needs to be careful with it, but at least he can write again!

Scott's little adventure complicated my Sunday schedule a bit. I was supposed to go to choir practice right after church and then from there to a Primary visit. I skipped choir and had my secretary go with one of my counselors on the visit instead so that I could drive the rest of the boys home and make sure dinner got started. I was able to take a nap, though--nice!!

Apparently the visit I missed went fantastic. We have been taking Book of Mormon readers to a few of the kids in our Primary who live in semi-active families, hoping that will give them an opportunity to hear some scripture stories or even read them to themselves (for the ones who can read). They visited a family with two young girls. The dad is a member of the church, the mom is not. They come to church sporadically, but haven't come lately. Anyway, they gave the girls the Book of Mormon reader, and the mom suggested that they read a story together right then. So they read the first story--which happens to be the Joseph Smith story ("How we got the Book of Mormon"), with the mom helping them to read and stopping once in a while to explain what some of the words meant. My counselor said the spirit was so sweet and strong while they watched that mom read the scriptures with her daughters! Awesome! Hopefully they will continue to read, and want to come to church more often.

On Monday I put my Valentine's wreath up on the door:

It makes me hungry whenever I look at it--those hearts look too much like chocolate and sugar candy hearts!

Monday and Tuesday were two normal, busy days, with everyone in school. Snickers went to the groomer and came home looking great. I spent a couple of hours deep cleaning the bathrooms on Tuesday. Not much fun, but they look a lot better! I even tried washing the shower curtains in the washing machine, which I have done successfully before, but this time they both ripped. So Tuesday evening I needed to run to the store to buy new ones, and I decided to do the regular weekly shopping trip at the same time, which turned out to be a very good idea. Snow was predicted for the next morning so I wanted to avoid going out in that if I could, and besides that Seth had a fever that evening. He was more "cuddly" than normal Tuesday afternoon, and then when he fell asleep around 3:30, I knew something was up! By the time he woke up a couple of hours later, he felt hot to me, and sure enough--his temperature was 101.4! The funny thing was, the next day his temperature was back to normal. I fully expected it to spike back up again that evening, but it didn't. His nose was running a bit, though, and now he has a pretty nasty cough.

I was spared having to make a decision about whether or not to send him to school, though, because there wasn't any school Wednesday or Thursday. When we got up Wednesday morning, it looked like this outside:

That's not much to brag about, but because the weather was predicted to get worse instead of better, they still cancelled school. We had some kind of precipitation coming down most of the day. First snow, then freezing rain, then rain, then more snow. Around 4:00 it started to snow hard and the wind started to blow, and it was really quite a blizzard out there for several hours! I tried to get some photos, but of course that kind of thing is hard to capture on film. But here are my attempts:

Really, it was much worse than the pictures can show! Frank was at work and had to drive home in it, which wasn't fun, but he was a lot more fortunate than a lot of people were. He left around 3:30 and it turns out that people who left just a half hour behind him got stuck when all the interstates basically turned into parking lots. Some people did not get home until between 1:30 and 4:30 am!!! Apparently the combination of the snow on top of the freezing rain / rain that later froze really created havoc. A couple of transformers blew, also, so many people were without power. We feel very fortunate that didn't happen to us!

We ended up getting a good 7 or 8 inches of additional snow. Here is Seth, checking it out the next morning:

We didn't even bother to set the alarm for Seminary Thursday morning--we knew there would be at least a 2 hour delay! It was nice to sleep in for once. Seth climbed in bed with us when he woke up that morning. I told him I needed to get up to make some pancakes. He said "No, I want you to stay here with me." Then he turned to Frank and said "Daddy, go make Mom and me some pancakes!" We got a kick out of that.

The boys were thrilled, of course, that school was cancelled two days in a row. I didn't let them just lie around, though. They helped with vacuuming, dusting, and laundry and I also had them all work on scouts and Duty to God requirements. There was still plenty of time to play. Tanner and Jared went to Ryan & Bryson's house Thursday afternoon.

Frank was in and out during those couple of days. Power was out at Griffin headquarters as well as at several of his clients' buildings, so that limited the amount of work he could do from here. He ended up making trips down south on both Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday when he was cleaning off my car for me, the broom he uses broke--the wood handle broke in two. Later when he was using the remains of the broom to clean off his car, the handle slipped and jabbed him right in the hand between the thumb and his pointer finger, leaving a pretty deep gash. We thought we might be making our second trip to immediate care in one week, for a while! But after putting pressure on it he got the bleeding to stop and I bandaged him up.

The roads really weren't too bad by mid morning on Thursday. Frank and I ventured out to the grocery store to get a couple of things. We decided that now would be a good time to try out our one month free trial to Netflix. I've been resisting the idea of getting Netflix for a long time because we don't usually rent a lot of movies each month--many months we don't rent any at all. But all the movie rental stores in this area have gone out of business and Redbox has a very limited selection of movies, so we decided to give it a try. I'm already excited about the huge selection of movies available, including many older movies that are almost impossible to find anywhere else!

I kept busy with Primary stuff this week--lots of emails going back and forth as we finalized our plans for this week's activity. I also came across a blog all about names and naming trends, which is a topic I've always found fascinating, so I've been enjoying reading that. That site also referred me to another site where there are lots of quizzes you can take about names, as well as other topics. It's easy to get caught up in "web surfing"--I always have to be careful that I don't waste too much time that way! But in moderation, it's fun and keeps my mind active. I finished Blackberry Wine for book club, and really enjoyed it. I also read a book called Young Fu of the Upper Yaghtzee (a Newberry winner) and started a book called Rifles for Watie (another Newberry winner). So I haven't been sitting around doing nothing! I exercised a few times, too.

Here's pictures of the snow on Thursday:

We have a nice neighbor with a snow blower, and he always does all the walks as well as the parking lot around our cars. You can see we got a pretty decent snowfall, for Maryland! Nothing like last year, of course, but still--it was a pretty good storm.

On Friday there was a two hour delay--I guess they still hadn't been able to get all the parking lots plowed and sidewalkes shoveled, because the roads were pretty good by then. It started snowing again around 9:00 and kept coming down for several hours, but not hard like it did on Wednesday night. I'm sure we accumulated a bit more, but it didn't stick to the roads at all since they had all been plowed and treated. Seth didn't have school at all again, since he doesn't have school when there is a 2 hour delay. He was a little sad about that, but since he was coughing anyway, it's just as well. Plus, he didn't even wake up until nearly 9:00! My car pool boy, Javy, was also sick so I only had Jared to shuttle back and forth. Frank and I wanted to go to the temple Friday night, but he had some work he had to do right at 5:00 and by the time he finished it was too late to make a trip down to the temple. So we made plans to go tonight instead. Once his work was done, we went out for a little while to get a bite to eat--we had a gift card for a local restaurant which we used. Then we came home, put Seth to bed, and the rest of us watched the movie Eclipse, which we just received from Netflix in the mail that day. I enjoyed it--I thought it was better than the previous two movies in that series.

This morning we had a Primary activity--the last one we'll have. Quarterly activities have been discontinued as part of the Primary program, but since we had promised the kids last year that we would have a special activity as a reward for reaching a goal, we got permission to have one more activity. One of the members in our ward who grew up on a sheep ranch talked to the kids about some of his experiences with the sheep and related them to the Savior as the Good Shepherd. Then we played some "sheep and wolf" games, and had ice cream sundaes. We had a good group of kids attend and I think they had a good time. After I got home, Frank had to go do some work on some of the computers at the stake center. The boys helped me get the kitchen floor cleaned up and then we went over to the stake center to watch Scott's team play basketball. Scott couldn't play because of his hand, but he wanted to cheer them on. Jared and Tanner also came because we had arranged to have them talk to one of the other moms, who is also a merit badge counselor, to pass off their Family Life merit badges. Seth enjoyed playing in the nursery during the game, which Scott's team won. We were pretty excited about that, since it is their first win of the season. As a matter of fact, I think it's the first win they've had in more than one season!

After we got home from the game, Frank and I changed and went to the temple. We were just pulling into the parking lot at the temple when I realized that I had left my purse at home, with my recommend in it. Luckily, they were able to get in touch with my bishop so I was able to go in (although I had to wait a while). We decided to do initiatories since we were running late by then. I'm really glad we were able to go! Sometimes it seems like everything works against us when we are trying to go to the temple. Our stake president challenged us on Sunday to go to the temple three times before stake conference, which is the first week end in March, so we don't have many week ends to get that done.

They are predicting another storm for us on Tuesday-Wednesday of this week. Supposedly, it is a "large and powerful" storm. I am hoping it misses us somehow! Snow days are nice once in a while, but we've had too many lately. I am ready for some spring weather!