Weekly Review February 13 '15

Greetings from the frozen land!  Ok, we aren't buried under snow like our counterparts to the north, but it's only about 18 degrees out there.  Last night it was that cold, plus the wind was blowing like crazy.  I listened to that wind howling out there and felt very, very grateful to have a house--with heat!!  We're supposed to have more of the same the next couple of days.  We got some sleet Monday night and had a 2 hour delay on Tuesday morning.  We did have a few days in between that weren't quite so bad, though.

I am keeping very busy getting the boys to all their various activities.  It definitely makes a difference having Tanner home and Jared seems to be a lot busier than usual lately too.  Tanner has his driver's test a week from today so hopefully we will have another driver in the family soon but since he won't have his own car that is not going to help me out a whole lot.  Some, though.

Jared survived his cold camp out in usual Jared fashion...that means we didn't really hear any complaints about it.  He is pretty good about rolling with the punches when it comes to things like that.  He got home with barely time to get to his next activity, which was a basketball game (church ball).  His team lost, but only by 3 points.  They had another game later but Jared missed that because he was working a concert at the high school.  He got paid for that concert plus the one he did last week, so he is feeling somewhat rich right now.  This week he helped with a few rehearsals and he also helped with a school event last night, so he's been gone a lot.  He did get his Eagle scout project approved, so now he just needs to find time to do it.

Tanner is busy with YSA activities--he goes to FHE and Institute each week.  Tonight he is going to a dance also.  He is going to be part of a dance performance of some kind soon so he is going to rehearsals for that.  He worked two four hour shifts at work, but he isn't scheduled to work any hours next week.  Our dentist had a cancellation, so I was able to get him into see the dentist this week too.  We had our monthly RS meeting this week and he helped with the babysitting again, which was very much needed!

Seth started a piano class this week.  It's a beginning group keyboarding class which is held once a week after school at his school.  He liked the first session so hopefully he'll keep liking it.  I'm sure it's not as good as private lessons, but it's a start.  I went in to Seth's school on Tuesday morning to help him get some things done.  It's too bad I can't do that every day because it does help him to have someone there helping him focus.  Tanner was just given a book to read about ADD and I am planning to read it too in the hopes that it will help me understand both Tanner and Seth better, and gt some ideas that might help them.

Frank has not been as swamped this week as last week, but he keeps pretty busy.  Besides taking the kids all the places they need to be, I kept busy with lots of other things this week.  I went to lunch with a friend on Monday, which I really enjoyed.  We had our monthly RS evening meeting on Wednesday, as I already mentioned.  We talked about ideas for increasing love at home and for others outside the home as well.  We also made Valentines and we made 50 hour candles to add to our emergency supplies.  We had a lot of people come, including a few women who don't usually come, so I was really happy about it.  Yesterday morning my presidency got together so we could clean out our closets in the RS room.  They had gotten really packed with stuff.  We were pretty successful...there's a lot less stuff in there and the closets look pretty good!  I ran a few errands for a sister in our ward who lives in a nursing home and made some phone calls for RS too.  In between everything else, I was reading the book for book chat, which got really interesting so it was hard to put it down.  I finished it Wednesday morning, after staying up much later than I should have on Tuesday night.  The book was dealing with a troubling situation which left me feeling somewhat conflicted a lot of the time but still...I enjoyed it.  It's definitely worth reading...The Light Between Oceans.

We've seen a lot of the missionaries lately,  They were here for dinner on Saturday, Monday, and last night.  On Monday they came over last minute because we found out they didn't have a place to go for dinner.  We always like having them over.

Tonight we had a fun evening with some families in our ward.  One family invited us over for "Darwin Day".  Charles Darwin's birthday was February 12, apparently, and to celebrate the diversity of species, they choose a food item every year and try to experience as many varieties of that food as possible.  For example, some of the things they've done in the past are apples, yogurt, and M&Ms.  This year they decided to do tomato based pasta sauces.  If you can believe it, we sampled 22 different flavors of pasta sauce!  We put all of them in little cups and then dipped small pasta shells in each one to taste them.  We took notes, and chose our favorites.  Then we found out which ones we liked the best (they were all numbered, so we didn't know exactly which was which).  It was really fun and interesting.  The funny thing was, the one that Frank and I (actually all of us) thought had the strangest taste turned out to be the kind that I always buy!  Can't figure out why it tasted so different to us, when we eat it all the time and we have always liked it.  For Frank and I, a lot of our tastes didn't match, but we both really liked a butternut squash pasta sauce, so we'll have to try that again at home.  We got to choose two bottles to bring home with us and that's one of the ones we chose.  We had green salad and fresh fruit along with all the pasta sauce sampling, so it was filling and made a good dinner.  We had a good time visiting as well.

That sums it up for this week!