Weekly Review January 9 '15

Greetings all!  This will probably be a somewhat short post also.  Not a lot going on.  I'm not really complaining about that, though.

Last Friday Frank and I went to the temple.  We wanted to squeeze in a visit before the temple closed for winter maintenance.  Because Frank was still coughing a lot (aftermath of the flu), we decided to do some initiatories instead of an endowment session.  It was really nice!  Plus, even though the festival of lights was supposed to be over, I was really happy to discover that they still had all the Christmas lights on.  We weren't able to make it down to see the lights this Christmas before then!  I took some pictures but they are on my tablet and I have no idea how to get them from there to my computer, so you'll have to trust me on that.

On Saturday we had the missionaries over for dinner and right before they showed up, Seth started complaining that his head hurt.  Then he said he wasn't really hungry, so he stayed on the couch in the living room while we had dinner.  Before we finished, he was asleep!  That set off some alarm bells in our minds.  He hadn't been complaining that his stomach hurt, but I just had a funny feeling about it and decided to get out a bucket for him...just in case.  Good thing.  He woke up an hour or so later and started throwing up.  

Meanwhile, during dinner a family in the ward had called...the wife had fallen and broken her wrist and the husband was looking for someone to stay with his two little boys so he could meet her at the hospital.  So I left dinner to make phone calls but couldn't find anybody at home.  Tanner & Jared offered to stay with the kids so after dinner Frank took the missionaries home and dropped the boys off at this family's home.  He was going back to get them when Seth woke up and started throwing up.  

Having Seth sick complicated Sunday a bit.  We were having a combined RS / Priesthood, though, so I felt like it wasn't as important for me to be there.  So I went to Ward Council in the morning (we are still meeting at 8:30 even though church doesn't start until 1:00 now) and then stayed for another ward's Sacrament meeting so I could take the sacrament before coming home.  Then I stayed with Seth while Frank and the other 2 boys attended our regular meetings.  I got pretty much the easy end of caring for Seth because he was throwing up in the morning but by the time I got home around 11:30 he stopped.  By afternoon he was asking for crackers and when I let him try some he kept them down with no problem.  Meanwhile, I got some things done for RS, including preparing for two meetings, and watched a DVD that Amy's family sent us for Christmas...it was a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert from a year or two ago.  It's the one with the candy bomber, if you've seen that one.  Wow, it was so good I just sobbed through most of it!

I had to keep Seth home from school on Monday since he was throwing up less than 24 hours before.  You may remember he missed 5 of the last 7 days of school before winter break, including the last 2 days before break.  The school nurse actually called on Monday to see what was going on with him.  No, we really didn't take an extended vacation or anything...I wish!!  

Seth was all set to go back to school on Tuesday and then this happened:

We got about 3 inches of snow, so of course they cancelled school.  It all came down in the morning around the time everyone would have been driving to school.  And even though there wasn't much snow, the roads were pretty slick.  Frank tried to go to work and after an hour he had only made it to the mall (about 10 minutes away normally) so he just gave up and decided to turn around and come back home.  He worked from home instead.

By afternoon the roads were pretty cleared up (still slippery in some places) so he and I went to lunch.  We also remembered that we needed to buy a new coat for Seth...he had broken the zipper on his coat shortly before Christmas.  So we took Seth out and got him a coat (found a great one half price at Land's End store!) plus some boots and (because Frank really wanted to) some snow pants.  Frank and I always argue about snow pants.  I admit that they are really great to have for sledding /playing in the snow.  There is no doubt that the kids have come in soaked to the bone when they don't have them.  But you never know if they are going to get used very much or not.  This winter it has only snowed twice so far.  I just have a feeling they aren't going to get used much, if at all.  But we did buy them a little big so they should fit him next winter too.  I hope I am wrong and that we get our money's worth out of them!

Seth finally got to go back to school on Wednesday!

I've kept busy this week with RS stuff (Presidency Meeting Monday, meeting with the bishop Tuesday, and the usual list of random tasks) and taking boys places (Tanner to apply for jobs, Jared to get his haircut, Tanner to the doctor for a med check).  I also read another book called Prisoner of Tehran, which is a memoir by a lady who was a political prisoner in Iran during the early 1980s (the time of the shah getting exiled, Ayatollah Khomeini taking over, and the hostage crisis).  She was arrested when she was only 16 years old.  It was a very interesting book, and well worth reading.  I was a little wary of it because I don't enjoy reading about things like torture, but it wasn't too bad...there was very little of that in the book even though she definitely was tortured.  There were lots of flashbacks to her experiences before being arrested also which gave me some insights on what it was like to live in Iran before everything went crazy, and it was really very well written in my opinion.  The other thing I did was to start doing some cleaning / organizing in the kitchen.  The kitchen is going to be my project for this month.  I'm working on a different room every month.  I think I tried to do this last year and didn't get very far, but I am trying again!

Most of this week it has been miserably cold.  As in single digits and "highs" of 21, for example.  Today it's in the high 30's and that feels warm by comparison.  Yesterday morning, when it was 9 degrees, the heater in the Expedition wouldn't work.  Fun!  Jared added water to the engine and it finally started working later in the afternoon.  Didn't help much on the couple of drives I had to make that morning, though.  Frank says the radiator needs to be flushed and antifreeze needs to be added so it won't happen again.

It has been nice to have Tanner around, especially because I don't have to get Seth up early to make the Seminary run with me.  He has done a little cleaning in his room, has worked on a few job applications (slow progress there, though), and went on splits with the missionaries.  He went Tuesday night and he is going again right now.  He's planning to spend a lot of time with the missionaries over the next few months.  He also went to Institute and to YSA FHE.  He may go to a YSA movie night tonight.  Today he visited his high school for a while, and went to lunch with some friends from high school.  I am noticing that he has a lot more opinions about what is going on in the world than he did before he left.  Apparently, he paid a lot more attention to the news while he was out in Utah.  They also discussed a lot of things in his Sociology class.  It is kind of fun to see him starting to pay attention to the adult world.

Jared and Tanner have been driving anytime I go anywhere with them so they are both getting a lot of practice.  It will be nice when both of them have their licenses.

This morning I had kind of a crazy morning because when I went to get my keys out of my purse to get the car warmed up, they weren't there!  And I looked everywhere and couldn't find them.  I finally remembered that Tanner had checked the mail the night before (the key to the mailbox is on my key ring) so I texted him and asked what he did with them and he said check his coat pockets and there they were.  (Thankfully, he hadn't worn his coat this morning although I can't imagine why he didn't.)  So I had to go out with wet hair since I spent the time I should have been drying my hair looking for the keys, but it all worked out in the end and I barely got the kids to school on time.

That sums it up for this week!