Weekly Review September 13 '13

Sorry...no pictures this week.  No time for picture taking.

Last week I said I didn't think things were going to settle down around here anytime soon and I was certainly right.  I don't know how much of our crazy life you really want to read about, but I feel the need to record it...if for no other reason than to prove that I survived it.  If it bores you (the one or two people who read this), then just skip it!

Saturday I spent most of the day finishing up my talk and figuring out visiting teaching changes.  In the late afternoon we went to a birthday open house for a sister in our ward...they had ice cream for everyone and there were lots of other people there we knew so it was fun to visit for a while.  After that Frank dropped Tanner, Jared, and I off at the church.  The boys were helping with a big surprise birthday party for one of the YM leaders and I was finishing up visiting teaching changes and putting them into the computer.  I saw a little bit of the birthday party...his wife planned the whole thing and she had all the YM and YW do a couple of big musical numbers and several other friends did performances too.  It was quite the production!

Sunday I gave my talk and I think it went well.  I had a lot of people tell me they enjoyed it afterwards, anyway, so at least I didn't bore everybody, right?  My topic was temporal self reliance; I spent the first half of my talk sharing thoughts / quotes on why this is actually a spiritual topic, not just a temporal one.  I had a few personal experiences to share and it was good for me in preparing this talk to see how much the Lord has helped us to be self reliant.  Oh, and I got a new secretary.  I only had my second secretary for a few months and she was doing fine but she had a lot on her plate since she works full time, has four kids, and her husband is in the bishopric.  Originally I was planning to get an assistant secretary to help her and I even submitted a name for that, but the last few weeks was feeling nudged by the spirit to release her and ask to have the sister I submitted for assistant secretary be the new secretary instead.  Then when I talked to the bishop about it, he was feeling the same way.  So that's what ended up happening.  I am glad to have her; she will be great!

Also on Sunday, choir practices started up again. I always enjoy choir even though I admit the 4:00 Sunday afternoon practice time is a challenge for me.  Especially this Sunday since I woke up at 2:30 am and never went back to sleep.  Ugh! 

The rest of the week I've just felt like I'm in the middle of a rat race and I admit to being in tears (or close to it) more than once.  It probably won't sound incredibly busy on paper, but believe me, it was.  Everything seems to take so much longer than it should.  I've been really struggling to feel like I'm keeping all my different responsibilities balanced.  And it's just been crazy...unexpected things coming up all the time.  I don't like getting things done at the last minute but that seems to be all I can manage these days.  I try to plan ahead but unexpected things seem to come up constantly lately, so projects get pushed back until I'm running into a deadline and then I'm really stressed trying to get them done.  Ok, enough whining!  I don't want to sugar coat my life, though.  Sometimes it's hard.

Monday I had lots of phone calls to make and emails to send...RS stuff, mostly, and trying to get visiting teaching set up.  I exercised, did laundry, grocery shopped, and vacuumed.  I also got a soccer ball for Seth...his coach wants every kid to have their own ball at practices.  I talked to Mom who gave me some guidance on the sewing project I needed to start and started working on that.  We had family night.  Frank went to the dentist to get a crown put on which cost a lot and left him with a very sore mouth.  It's been sore all week (although better now than at first) and he's been eating soft things and has actually lost some weight because he couldn't eat very much.  He thinks the dentist got his mouth with the drill a few times.  He's gradually getting better, though.

Tanner was sick on Tuesday...he didn't go to seminary or to school.  Luckily just a mild 24 hour stomach bug, which so far none of us have caught...keep your fingers crossed!  It was a bummer he was sick that day because he missed another temple trip...this time just our ward youth.  And this trip was just after school, of course...not all day.  Meanwhile, I had lots of house work to do, I had a long talk with the stake RS president about several things, and in the afternoon I took my friend Katie to the doctor to get the cast on her foot.  The good news was...they decided that she didn't need a cast after all; they put her in a boot.  That means she could start trying to put weight on it and she would not have to be in a cast for 3 months.  Needless to say, she was ecstatic!  Another sister in the ward watched her kids while we were gone so after the doctor we picked them up and I took her back home.  I stayed to pick up a few things for her and by then her baby was having a meltdown because she needed a nap and really needed to be picked up and jounced a bit, so I did that for her because she can't put full weight on the foot yet.  Her baby gave up and went to sleep really quickly, thank goodness.  Before I left another family in the ward called me needing emergency childcare so as soon as I got home I had to call them back to give them a few ideas of people they could call.  By then Seth was home from school, Jared left for the temple trip, Frank had to leave to go help cook for an event, and I needed to make dinner and get Seth to soccer practice...which I managed to do and even got him there on time.  Seth seemed to enjoy practice and I read a little of the book chat book while I was waiting.  Haven't been able to touch it since! 

Wednesday I realized I'd forgotten to make a grocery list the day before, so I did that and then went shopping.  Frank came home to work from here for the afternoon because we had scheduled someone to come in and clean all our air ducts.  They were coming some time between 12:00 and 6:00 and I had appointments.  It turns out they came closer to noon.  I wasn't home most of the time they were here but Frank was and he wasn't very impressed.  He heard one of the guys telling the other one that the equipment needed to be generating a certain amount of pressure and the other one said it was only doing half that.  The first one said something like "well, we'll have to go with that."  Frank checked the equipment more than once and it never got above half the needed pressure, which made us feel like our ducts weren't cleaned nearly as well as they should have been.  They also broke a switch which we had to replace and later that day we had problems with the air conditioning coming on and didn't figure out until Thursday morning that they had bumped one of the thermostat controls and knocked it loose.  So the bottom line is, Frank called and complained and now they are going to send someone else to clean the ducts all over again at no charge.    

Meanwhile, I had a visiting teaching visit and an RS visit Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening was our monthly RS meeting.  Thank goodness I didn't have to do anything for that except show up!  It was a massage and relaxation night, which I certainly needed but I found it was hard for me to relax because we were lying on a hard floor and after a few minutes my back was killing me.  Plus, I stink at visualization I guess.  So I spent most of the relaxation exercise giggling at myself for my total failure at relaxing.  When I got home, the guy I'm doing the sewing project for was here so I could take another measurement that I had forgotten to do when he was here the first time.  I couldn't do anything else until I had that measurement.  Then I watched part of a September 11th documentary before going to bed.  I always cry on September 11th.

Thursday after dropping Seth off at school I went to the store to get elastic for the sewing project, then got groceries, then dropped some things off at my 2nd counselor's house.  After lunch I started working on the baseball pants and spent all afternoon working on that...and only got one casing done.  I was feeling pretty frazzled by the time the boys got home from school.  It turns out that the fabric I'm working with (100% polyester) is a total pain to work with.  It doesn't iron well, for one thing.  The side seams I had to sew over were so bulky that my machine wouldn't go through them so I had to do that part by hand.  Then I finally got the elastic in and discovered that in spite of all my precautions, it was twisted so I had to take it out and do it again.  And after all that, it didn't even look right to me...it looked like the elastic wasn't tight enough.  I was ready to cry at that point, and feeling really frustrated because I had not wanted to take this project on in the first place for this very reason...I knew it was going to take more time than I planned and totally stress me out! 

The other reason it took so much time is I decided to use my new sewing machine.  My old machine has tension issues so the stitching never looks very good.  My new machine sews beautifully but I've only used it once before so I'm not familiar with all the controls and have to look up how to do everything from threading the machine to changing the needle to selecting the stitch size, etc.  That added on a lot of time.

Anyway, I had to put everything away and get dinner made because the Elders were coming over for dinner and even then, dinner was late.  Frank was working at a client's and the missionaries got here a good 20 minutes before he did.  I had planned a taco bar with both chicken and beef, and when I realized I had put the chicken taco seasoning in the beef, I was ready to crawl in a corner somewhere and not come out!  But thankfully both the chicken and the beef tasted fine, even if their seasonings got mixed up.  And the Elders enjoyed dinner and didn't mind that it was late.  So it all turned out ok.  I was trying to remember all that stuff I'd heard the night before about breathing deeply to relieve tension, though!  Goodness!  Oh, and I forgot that right before we sat down to eat I got a phone call from a sister in tears who needed emergency childcare and I certainly didn't have time to delegate that out at the moment so I just told her to bring her child to our house.  Besides that, I also got a text somewhere in there that someone else was in the hospital!  It was then that I told Frank I was about ready to resign as RS president.  After dinner I had a RS visiting appointment.  Frank was doing maintenance for a client but luckily our visiting child and Seth had a blast playing together so he was fine.  By the time I got back from my appointment, the visiting child was leaving and I was feeling a little less stressed (but not much). 

So I decided that I couldn't do anything else with the pants until the owner tried them on to see if the elastic was ok or not.  He couldn't come over until this evening, so I decided to go to the temple today.  It's our stake temple day because we have stake conference this weekend.  Frank and I were hoping to go together this afternoon but he has been swamped with work for his business so he decided he couldn't go.  I missed the 10:00 session by only a few minutes so I had a long wait for the 11:00 session but I'm glad I went.  By the time I got home, the high school boys were out of school and it was time to pick up Seth.  Jared seems to have developed a nasty cold but he is plugging along.  After getting everyone home from school, Frank went to a client's while I got the budget caught up.  After Frank got back we went to a friend's house to look at a bunk bed they are selling to see if we wanted to buy it.  Seth really needs a bigger bed, but we haven't made up our mind whether to get this one yet.  It's a full size bed on bottom which would be nice for visitors, but his room is so small that we're not sure it will work.  We measured, and it will fit but that leaves almost no room for his dresser and toy / book shelves.  When we got back from that, the baseball pants owner was here to try on his pants and he actually liked them the way they are...thank goodness!  Although after some discussion we did decide to take an inch or so off of the elastic.  That shouldn't be too hard and hopefully the rest of the pants won't take so much time.  Hopefully!  But knowing how things go, I'll probably have more problems crop up.  I need to get them done by Tuesday night so I am not liking how soon the deadline is looming.  After he left, it was nearly 7:00 and we hadn't had dinner yet so we all pitched in and made scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon and OJ.  Tanner ate quickly because he was leaving for a priest / laurel activity shortly after 7:00.  Hopefully he will be home soon and we can all go to bed!  Tomorrow will be busy too.