It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May.... Actually, I don't really like that song, but May has been beautiful so far. Crisp mornings and warm, sunny days with gorgeous blue skies and the earth looks bright green! Sorry Utah folks...I don't mean to rub it in. I hear you had snow. It's just that I complain so much about bad weather that I feel like I should be just as verbal about good weather!
This week went by fast. Sunday was the usual...church, choir practice, and family night lesson. The boys were tired after being up late for the last night of the play. They weren't as emotional as I expected, though...although Tanner tends to keep his feelings bottled up. He seems to be doing ok this week though.
Monday was super busy for me. I did volunteer accounting stuff at Seth's school that morning. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and then spent the afternoon making dinner for us and for one of my friends who just had a baby...including making a batch of cookies for dessert. I wanted to take the food over to her in the early afternoon (it could be warmed up easily later) so that I could visit with her a little bit before all the kids came home from school. I didn't get there as early as I would have liked, but we did still have a nice visit. All my kids were home by the time I got home. I helped Seth work on his science fair project a little and then we had dinner and family night activity. We were going to mulch the flower beds, but it was raining most of the day so we decided to wait.
I spent Tuesday morning / early afternoon doing RS stuff. I had lots of emails to answer and I had to write a presidency message for the newsletter. It wasn't my turn to do it, but I forgot to remind my counselor that it was her turn and she's been out of town the last few weeks, helping her daughter get ready for her mission. I'm also teaching this week so I started working on my lesson. The bishop asked us to use the Worldwide Leadership Training clips for our 1st Sunday lessons for the next few months, so I started out by watching all of those. (I'd seen some of them in Ward Council, but we haven't watched all of them yet.) All I can say about them is...Wow! They are so good. I was very moved by them and felt like I was getting all kinds of different thoughts and personal revelation while I watched. It was hard to pick just one of them to focus on for my lesson this week, but I did choose one. The kids had a 2 hour early dismissal from school that day so they were home before I knew it. We cleaned bathrooms and did more science fair project, and I made a grocery list and ran a few errands. That evening I needed to get a food order filled out...Frank went with me since it was for a single man. Then Frank & Tanner went home teaching. Another busy day.
Wednesday I did shopping in the morning and had book chat in the afternoon. That evening I had a presidency meeting and then a meeting with the bishop. The boys had to be at the church earlier than normal for their activity, so I went over with them. That left very little time between the time Seth came home and we had to leave to finish up Seth's science fair project display. We barely got it all done, and even then Frank had to make dinner or we wouldn't have eaten! Here is Seth with the finished project:
He is making a face because he was having a stubborn moment and didn't want me to take his picture. The meetings went pretty well. The bishop told me that we are going to get a set of sister missionaries in our ward (in addition to the Elders we already have) in June. He said "the ward is responsible to find them an apartment so...looking at me...that means YOU are responsible to find them an apartment." But then he told me to delegate it to one of my counselors! We have to find a place by May 14th so there's not much time. The Elders think they may be able to stay at the same apartment complex as them. I hope so...that would be easy. Anyway, I'm pretty excited that we are going to have sisters too. I can think of a lot of things that they can do to help with the women in our ward.
Yesterday I worked on my lesson again. I spent a lot of time because I got side tracked. I remembered an experience I had with the boys when they were little that could relate to the lesson but I wanted to find where I wrote about it to refresh my mind about the details. So I got out my book where I have printed copies of all the weekly emails I sent to Mom & Dad over the years to try to find it. The trouble is, I don't remember when it happened. So I'm scanning through hundreds of emails, and they are quite distracting. I am so glad I took the time to write all those emails...especially all the cute things the boys said and did when they were little because I had forgotten so many of them. It's been interesting reading through a lot of them too because I've forgotten what it's like to be a mom of a bunch of young kids! Wow, it wasn't easy. It seemed at the time that it would never end, but now I'm wondering how my little boys grew up so fast. I didn't realize how much life has changed until I started reading those letters. We really do get lazy with our parenting as we get older, too...I was surprised at how disciplined I was as a parent back then! Or maybe I was just too up tight...but I'm afraid I've gotten a little too relaxed these days. There must be a happy medium somewhere. :)
Anyway, I did get a few other things done like grocery shopping, vacuuming, and laundry. I also went outside with Seth for a while in the evening and drew pictures with sidewalk chalk. Seth presented his science fair project to his class at school yesterday and he said it went well. Today the parents were allowed to come in at the end of the day to see the projects. The kids were certainly enthusiastic...I was greeted at the door by about 3 or 4 eager kids all saying "Do you want to see my project? Come see my project next!" It was really cute. The kids all did a good job. Seth was kind of bothered that his frozen water samples had melted and he said no one would want to see his project but after I reminded him that he still had photographs of them frozen, he felt better. There were some good ideas for projects and I should write them down so I won't forget them...I think coming up with a good (and easy) idea is the hardest part!
Besides visiting the school, I also got the budget done this morning. Frank and I were going to go to the temple this afternoon / evening but Jared and Tanner both needed to help run lights and sound for a show tonight at the high school so Frank went to the temple after work and I am going to go tomorrow afternoon.
We are still waiting to find out what will happen with Frank's job. He knows he didn't get the Marriott job he applied for but we are still waiting to find out if Xerox (the new company) will keep him. We probably won't know until close to the end of May. If they don't keep him, he will still have a job there until the end of June and he will get some severance too, which helps. But I'm hoping they will keep him. There are also more Marriott jobs he can apply for, so he'll be doing that. Who know where he'll end up.
In the meantime, it's difficult to make plans for the summer but we are probably going to buy plane tickets soon and hope for the best! Xerox will honor any time off Frank asks for before the transition happens so we should be ok. We haven't figured out what we are doing yet, but it looks like we probably won't be able to come until August. The boys have youth conference June 27th-29th and Camp Helaman July 23rd-26th. It would be nice to come in between, and be there for the 4th of July and my birthday, but Frank's family has a family reunion on July 6th in Florida and we'd like to go to that. We haven't been to one for about 6 years. We may go to Disney World for a few days, since we are going to be in Florida anyway. We haven't decided for sure yet, though. We may possibly come to Utah straight from Florida, but I'd like to stay a few weeks when we come and that puts us on a pretty tight schedule. So...it will probably be August. I'll keep you posted as we make decisions.
We got one good piece of news this week about the summer. The last day of school was originally scheduled to be Wednesday, June 19th. With the snow days we didn't use, it was moved to Monday, June 17th. I was wishing we had used one less snow day so that the last day could be the Friday before that instead...how dumb to have the last day of school on a Monday! This week we got an email saying that the state had waived one of the days we had off for Hurricane Sandy, since we were in a declared state of emergency. So now the last day of school is Friday the 14th. That made me so happy! It feels like we got an extra 3 days of summer instead of just one since we won't have to be worrying about school over that weekend. (Someone got smart and realized a lot of people would not bother to send their kids to school that last day!) We need extra days anyway...we have a particularly short summer this year because school starts again on August 19th. Kind of a bummer, but the reason for that is that they decided they don't want the school year to extend all the way into the 3rd week of June, as we've been doing all these years. So we are starting earlier so that we can get out the end of May / beginning of June. It makes this summer short, but I'm not complaining because I've always hated having the school year go all the way to nearly the end of June...it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
Here's a picture I took to send to Scott:
It's Seth's dresser. His dresser is very messy...covered with his favorite toys...but I smile every time I turn his lamp on or off because the first thing I see is that. I thought Scott would like it too.
That wraps things up for this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment