Weekly Review December 5 '14

Sometimes I wonder what there is to write about.  I mean, so much of my time each week is spent doing the same things--grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking, driving kids to places they need to go, laundry, etc.  Probably takes up 75 -80% of my time.  Or maybe more.  

Then there is all the Relief Society stuff.  That's a constant, too.  Are you all tired of hearing about that?  This week is the week before the first Sunday of the month, which means I was working on VT changes...again.  I texted Frank last night and said "I think I have all the VT changes figured out, thank goodness."  and his answer was "Until next month...bwahahaha!"  He's right, of course!  Besides that, I had a presidency meeting (nothing new there) and met with the bishop (because it's the first week of the month, and I always have a meeting with him the first week of the month).  Plus, I had lots of phone calls to make and emails to send out...as always.

This sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not.  I'm just pointing out that if all I ever wrote about was the unusual things I do, it would sound like I sit around doing nothing most of the time!  I guess I've been reflecting a bit on my "job" this week.  That's because Frank had been out of town all week on a business trip--at a conference in Las Vegas.  He wanted me to come with him, and of course I would have loved to do that.  But then how would the kids get to school?  Who would buy the groceries or do the laundry?  Who would take the dog out?  Or mail Tanner that prescription he really needs?  So it occurred to me that when Frank wants a day off, he just asks for it, and the work at Marriott goes on without him for a day or two (or even a week or two).  Overall, I'd say he has the more rigid working conditions.  He is not as free to choose what he does or to set his own hours (although he can do both of those things, up to a point).  But when it comes to days off?  It's a lot simpler for him than it is for me.  My job never goes away!  And even though I don't get paid for it, I would have to pay someone else quite a bit to do it in my place.  

Again, I am not complaining!  I have the job that I always wanted the most and I am exceedingly grateful for it!  I'm so thankful I can focus on my home and on my children all the time and I don't have another job competing for my time and attention (unless you count RS...haha!)  I'm so thankful I am here for my kids all the time even in spite of the fact that every last one of them at some time or another has said (as Seth just said today) "Mom, I wish you had a job."  (Seth's reason was so we would have more money (!!!), another kid wanted to go to daycare like his friends.)  Bless them all, I DO have a job.  A 24 / 7 unpaid job with no days off, but a job nevertheless.  And the most important job there is, even though my kids don't realize it.  Or at least my youngest kid doesn't realize it.  My older kids are definitely seeing that now.  For example, Jared had a super busy week because this was opening week for the play at his school.  He was leaving the house at 6:15 for Seminary and not getting home until 10:00 or 11:00 at night.  So I was dropping dinner off at the high school for him every night.  I was getting text messages from him like this "You are a goddess."  Yeah, it's nice to be appreciated sometimes! :)

Well, now that I've said all that, we did have a number of events going on this week.so I do have something to write about besides laundry and cooking.  

Frank's parents left Saturday morning.  I teased Frank last week that we had no proof that his parents were here for Thanksgiving since he didn't take any pictures of them.  So here is our proof:

  

On Saturday we had a fun excursion down to Washington DC.  If it weren't for Erin & Dan, we would probably never go down there anymore, but they are always finding out about cool things to do there and telling us about them, plus we want to spend time with them so off we go.  It's going to be a real bummer when they move to Idaho in a few weeks.  (For a lot of reasons.)

Anyway, this time we planned to meet them at the National Geographic Museum and the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum.  They were going to a place called Eastern Market first, along with Dan's visiting sister, and they ended up running a lot later than they'd planned so we ended up doing the National Geographic Museum without them and meeting them later at the DAR Museum.  At the National Geographic Museum we watched a 3D movie about ancient sea creatures (it was fun, and Seth really loved it) and looked at their exhibits.  There really were only 3 large exhibits...one about food, one about Spinosaurus, and one about Mars rovers.  They were interesting...I liked the food exhibit the most (we even got to sample some turkey pumpkin chili, which was quite good) and Seth loved the Spinosaurus exhibit, of course!:

But overall, we thought it was a bit on the expensive side for only having 3 exhibits.  (The movie cost extra.)  We did enjoy it, though.

Frank got some nice pictures of Seth in the courtyard, too:

Oh, and one more from the Spinosaurus exhibit:

Then it was on to the DAR Museum, which was awesome because admission is free and it is located in this really cool historical old building with tons of gorgeous architectural details.  Plus they had a big quilt exhibit.  And several dollhouses on every level.  And a cute gift shop.  And all these beautiful period rooms.  And right in the middle of the building was a big genealogical research library.  Totally my kind of place!!

The whole building was beautifully decorated for Christmas:

Frank was taking pictures the whole time and it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that he was mostly taking pictures of all the architectural details, and he didn't get many of the period rooms.  But that's ok because the architectural details are certainly worth photographing and if you really want to see all the period rooms, you can actually do a virtual tour of them on the DAR website.

Each of the rooms represents a different time period sometime between the 1700's (or maybe it was the 1600's) and the mid 1900's.  There were parlors, sitting rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, libraries / studies, at least one kitchen, and an attic playroom.  Each room is named after a state, because they were created (and undoubtably paid for) by a different state's DAR charter organization.  There are not 50 of them, but there were probably close to 25 of them, at least.  Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures so you can get an idea of what the place was like:

(Attic playroom.  Erin noticed that in front of the fireplace there was a mark along the wood floor and there were hinges on one side of the mantle, so there must be a secret passageway behind the fireplace!)

And here's the library, which was also beautiful (the pictures don't do it justice)

At the top left of the picture, you can see the bottom of a bunch of flags.  I think they had a flag for every state hanging around the top of the wall.

And check out these cool little alcoves!

It would have been really fun to poke around in that library and do a little research, but we didn't have time.

Actually, no time was the theme of this museum, since we got there only one hour before it closed.  We ran around so we could see all the period rooms and I barely got to glance through the quilt exhibit (which was Virginia and Maryland quilts...a lot of Baltimore Album quilts in there, but others too) and we couldn't browse in the gift shop at all (which was probably a good thing...would have been too tempted to buy something).  I really wish we could have had more time there, because I could have spent an hour or two more.  I will just have to go back!

After we got home, Jared went to a Seminary party (he was late).  They had each researched a different person from church history so they could share information with each other, and they were supposed to dress up like their person, too.  Jared was George Albert Smith...the apostle, not the one who became the prophet.  They had a gift exchange and lots of food too, of course.

On Sunday I did not have any meetings for once but I still had to get up just as early because Jared was getting his patriarchal blessing.  Worth getting up for, of course!  The patriarch was quite emotional when we got there, and told us that he had never prayed harder over giving a blessing than this one.  And he did give Jared a beautiful blessing!  He already has the written copy, too...we got it in the mail on Tuesday.  We were totally surprised (and impressed) when it came that fast!  I read all three of my boys' blessings this week and it was really sweet.  Reaffirmed my testimony that these blessings come not from the patriarch, but from a loving Father who knows us so completely.  Even though their blessings say many similar things, each one is unique and I get a sense of each boy's personality in their blessing, and can see that it is tailored to that particular boy's strengths and weaknesses.  Kind of hard to explain, but hopefully you get the idea.

Frank left for Las Vegas very early Monday morning.  He will be back late tonight.  I think he enjoyed his week, but he will be glad to be home too.  He never did get on Las Vegas time, which is 3 hours behind us...he was waking up at 2:30 or so every morning, which is 5:30 here and he's usually up by that time.  He was able to go to bed fairly early most nights (8:00 or 9:00).  I guess that means he doesn't have to adjust back to our time now!  One kind of cool thing that happened is that he won a door prize from a vendor...a really nice drone.  He had to ship it home because he couldn't take it on the plane, which was not cheap but much less expensive than buying the drone would have been.  So early Merry Christmas to him!

I had the Sister missionaries over for dinner on Monday.  One of them...Sister Shumway (not Jeanette's daughter; there are two Sister Shumways in the mission) went home on Wednesday so I asked her to pick what she wanted for her last dinner with us and she chose chicken chili.  The sad thing was, when they came they told me that they just found out that not only was Sister Shumway going home, but Sister Madsen was getting transferred and in their place we were getting a second set of Elders instead of Sisters.  What a bummer!  I can't even begin to tell you how much help the Sister missionaries have been to me with all the RS work there is to do in our ward.  But I guess I will have to muddle through without them.  Hopefully it won't be permanent.  Nothing against the new Elders, of course.  I'm sure I'll love them too!

Today was our stake's annual Temple Jubilee, so I went to the temple this morning.  I actually debated going...the sore throat I had last week turned into a sort of cold with some congestion and the kind of cough where you occasionally, without warning, having nasty coughing fits.  Overall, I haven't felt my best all week although I pretended I felt fine.  Anyway, I didn't think a nasty coughing fit would be so great in the temple, but I finally decided to go anyway.  And it was wonderful and I didn't have any coughing fits so I'm really glad I went.  The trip home was rather rough, though...as soon as I got on the beltway, the traffic was just creeping along.  And then I saw the sign which said there was an accident at exit 35 and two lanes were blocked, and so was the ramp.  Well, exit 35 is where the beltway connects with 270 North...which is the only way to get to Frederick.  I didn't really want to go to Northern Virginia today so I decided I'd better get off at exit 34 and try to make my way home some other way.  Of course, I was in the car without the GPS and I don't have a smart phone.  But by following some signs and making one phone call to Frank, I managed to find my way back to 270 North, past the accident.  In the meantime, I got some lunch (I happened to pull into a Popeye's parking lot to call Frank, and it was after lunchtime and I was very hungry) so by the time I got home it was practically time for Seth to be home from school, I was really tired, and I still had a ton of things to do today.  But that's ok--it was worth it.

In between everything else, I have done quite a bit of Christmas shopping this week and I made quite a dent in what I need to do, so I'm happy about that.  Still haven't even started on Christmas cards or decorations, but I'm making progress at least.  I didn't have much free time, but I did finish reading my book for book chat (All Together in One Place...really enjoyed it; thanks Mom!) and I've also been reading a book called Here Is Where--Discovering America's Great Forgotten History, which is pretty interesting.  It even has a chapter on the Haun's Mill Massacre.  (Although it had an account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in the same chapter, of course.)  Wednesday was probably the day I felt the worst, so I did take the afternoon off and watched the first few episodes of Downton Abbey season 4.

It's mostly been just Seth and I hanging out together this week with Frank gone and Jared at the school all day every day.  Thank goodness he's been able to get rides home at night since Seth had to be in bed long before he got home.  As a matter of fact, he was home so late Wednesday night that I had gone to bed.  I didn't even hear him come in!  (Nice to know someone could break in and murder us in our beds, and I would not wake up until it was too late.)  I woke up suddenly around midnight and panicked for a minute, thinking Jared hadn't gotten home.  But then I checked downstairs and all the lights were out (I'd left one on) and his shoes and backpack were on the floor so I went back to bed.

We had a really nice warm day on Monday, but overall the week has been cold, grey, and rainy.  We were actually supposed to get a wintry mix Monday night / Tuesday morning and 1-3 inches of snow on Tuesday afternoon.  We did get some of the wintry mix...I was awakened by the sound of ice pellets hitting the window during the night, but the temperature must have warmed up more than expected because by the time I woke up Tuesday morning it was raining, all the ice was melted, and the snow never materialized...just more rain.  

Overall, I don't like having Frank gone but it doesn't seem to be as hard as it used to be.  Maybe because I'm busier, so the time goes by faster.  When he used to travel when the kids were little, it was a lot harder.  I really wasn't as busy then, which seems strange.  You'd think now that my kids can feed and dress themselves, I'd be less busy.  But now that they're older, they have a lot more going on, too, so they keep me running.  Besides that, I don't get as nervous about him being gone as I used to.  For one thing, I feel really safe in my current neighborhood.  And I suppose having a teenage son who is bigger than I am adds an element of security as well, not that I would expect Jared to defend me.  I'm still his Mom, and I'm sure I would still stand between him and danger.  But it's nice to think that in a crisis there would be another sort of adult around to help me cope.  I think the idea of facing a dangerous situation alone is what has always scared me the most.  I always try to compensate in little ways when Frank's gone too...I do things like plan super easy meals.  It's just me and Seth (and sometimes Jared) anyway and they are really happy with things like mac and cheese.  Plus I really like those Totino's Party pizzas, for some reason.  I have no idea why, but I do.

Well, I started out saying I don't have a lot to write about, but I managed to write a lot somehow.  Feeling philosophical tonight for some reason.  I guess that's what being left alone with my thoughts for a week, without a husband to talk to, does to me!  I'm very glad he'll be back in a few hours.  Now on to the all the other things I need to get done tonight....