Weekly Review April 24 '15

This week I will back track a bit to start out.  Frank took his GoPro camera with him on our trip to NC, but I didn't realize that he took a bunch of pictures with it while we were on the boat.  He got some pretty good pictures, so here they are:

(Lindsey obviously didn't want her picture taken!  But I love how the world looks curved in the background!

Ok, so on to this week.  If I can type with my stiff fingers, that is.  It is cold in here!  That's because it got down to the 30's last night and hasn't got above the 50's today.  Plus it's windy.  And since the weather has been bipolar, we switched the heat off and turned the A/C on last week.  I could switch it back, of course, but it involves a few steps and I'm not confident I remember them all.  So the house is pretty chilly!  At least I can be happy about all the money I'm not spending on natural gas or electricity!

We still didn't get an illness-free week.  Seth started throwing up Saturday morning!  He was quite sick all day Saturday.  The Elders came for dinner that evening and Seth slept on the couch through the whole thing.  Jared was at his play and Tanner and Scott were both at a YSA Luau, so it was just Frank and I with the Elders!  Shortly after the Elders left, Seth woke up and finally perked up.  He started keeping down liquids and in a few hours tried crackers and kept those down too.  However, since he'd been throwing up most of the day, we knew we should keep him away from people on Sunday.  This complicated our life quite a bit since Tanner was scheduled to be ordained an Elder on Sunday, so of course we both wanted to be there for that.  Plus Frank teaches Sunday school and I should really be in RS if at all possible.  Oh, and I was singing in the choir and Jared was directing the choir.  What is it with Sundays lately?!  This was the fourth Sunday in a row that someone was either sick, injured, or had an infection.  We finally ended up taking Seth to Sacrament Meeting (but keeping him away from people) and after I sang with the choir, I took him home.  Then we arranged to have Tanner's ordination done at the beginning of the 3rd hour, so I took Seth back for that, then Frank took him home.  I was able to stay for the rest of RS and for my meeting after church.  In the end, it all worked out and the ordination went well and we're very happy Tanner has taken this step.  It was just complicated getting it all figured out!  But that seems to be the norm rather than the exception in our lives these days.

Sunday evening Frank and the oldest 3 boys had a stake priesthood meeting so I stayed home with Seth.  Back to Saturday...Frank and I got a walk in that morning, before Seth got sick.  Jared took the ACT and then was at the play.  I ended up helping the family of the sister who passed away...I found someone who needed the two twin beds they wanted to donate, and helped them get them over to their house.  I also picked up some things they didn't know what to do with...temple clothes & garments, and a bunch of church books.  I helped make a huge pot of rice and got Scott over to the Luau...Tanner had to be there early because he was dancing in a dance for the Luau.  It's a dance called the Haka...apparently a dance the  Maori men would dance right before a battle so it is loud and intimidating!  He was the leader of the dance and he's been practicing for months.  I hear it went really well and was very impressive!  Here are some pictures:

Skipping ahead to Monday now (since I already talked about Sunday)--Scott flew to Utah on Monday afternoon.  I found that having him leave this time was harder for me than when he went on his mission.  I think that is for several reasons. First, even though I know I can communicate with him more often and we'll be able to visit him, this time he was leaving home for good.  He will be back for visits, but he'll never live with us again (or it's very unlikely that he will).  It just felt so final!  Second, we just got him back--didn't feel like we had enough time with him.  Third, I'm realizing that all of my boys are going to do the same thing, probably.  They want to be out west to get their educations and to have the chance to meet their future wives, not here.  There's a part of me that just feels rebellious sometimes at the fact that I seem to be destined to spend most of my life living far away from the people I really want to spend my life with!  Now my children are starting to join the ranks of all the family members that I miss all the time.  Finally, Seth had a much harder time with Scott leaving this time as well.  He cried & cried Monday morning when it was time to go to school!  So that ripped out my mother heart, too.

Now that I spent a whole paragraph talking about how hard it was to have Scott leave, I should mention that I tried not to dwell too much on what I was feeling and we all (except Seth) kept it pretty upbeat.  Frank couldn't get off work but he worked from home so he could see Scott a little more, and Tanner and I took him to the airport.  I think he's been enjoying his trip so far and he'll be back in Utah Sunday night so those of you who live in Utah should be seeing him soon.

On Monday I also did a food order and went to the library, besides the usual cleaning and grocery shopping.  Seth has been going to a little gardening club at the library after school on Mondays.  He goes with our carpool boys and their mom.  He seems to be enjoying it.  I went visiting teaching, took Tanner to work and back, and took Jared to the orthodontist on Tuesday, besides the usual chores.  Good news for Jared...now that his bottom wisdom teeth are out, his bottom teeth have straightened out and he can get his bottom braces off at his next appointment, which is in about 2 weeks.  Of course he is very happy about that!

On Tuesday evening I also found out that my schedule for the rest of the week was going to need some adjusting.  I can't remember if I mentioned this is another post, but I don't think I did.  As I think you do know, we have been looking for a bigger house off and on for years.  I think it's been about 6 years or so!  We haven't really looked at all the last couple of years, though.  Anyway, our very patient realtor (he's a friend of ours, too) called us about a week ago and asked if we had any interest in selling our house right now.  He's helping a young couple who are getting married later this year find a house.  They really like our neighborhood and have looked at a few houses in this area.  He remembered our house and knows we have some of the features they really like, such as a walk out basement and updated kitchen counters and floors.  So he wondered if there was any chance that we would be interested in selling if this couple looked at our house and liked it.  We talked it over and decided we are willing to sell now if a buyer is interested.  As a matter of fact, trying to get our house sold is one of the major reasons we haven't made the plunge and actually moved yet.  Anyway, on Tuesday he contacted us and asked if he could show our house to this couple on Thursday evening.  Yikes!  Even though they know it isn't on the market so it's not really ready to be shown, I still knew that our house needed to look a lot cleaner and less cluttered than it did at that time.  (No chance to paint or make repairs, but at least it could be clean and neat!)

So, Tuesday evening and every chance I got on Wednesday and Thursday I was cleaning things or organizing things or throwing things out!  The older boys were responsible for cleaning their rooms and Frank spent a lot of time cleaning his office.  He also helped with a lot of other things like vacuuming and taking out trash and so did Tanner.  After those couple of days I was utterly exhausted but it really did make a significant difference.  Our house is cleaner and less cluttered than it has been in YEARS!  I am so happy to have a neat house again and I am committed to maintaining it this way.  I've been wanting to get it much less cluttered for a long, long time but couldn't seem to motivate myself to do it.  It felt impossible.  So I'm really glad this happened because it finally provided the motivation I (and everyone else) needed to actually dig in and do it.  We certainly didn't get everything done.  As a matter of fact, the storage room / laundry area was pretty much untouched and we didn't have time to do a thorough cleaning out of drawers and cabinets.  But I was very encouraged by how much we were able to accomplish in just two days and what a big difference it made, and now I'm feeling motivated to keep going.  As a matter of fact, Frank spent most of today doing more work in his office.

So what did the potential buyers think of the house?  They liked it.  Our realtor feels that there is definitely a possibility that we could get an offer.  He gave us a list of things they mentioned they would like to see changed, and I was surprised at how short the list was...like four things!  (I can think of a lot more than four things that I'd like to change.)  I think the biggest negative for them is the layout of the basement, and I can't blame them...I've always thought it was somewhat awkward.  That's mainly because there's a fourth bedroom down there, which most people don't want (but we did, since we had three kids when we moved here and were planning to have more.)  So we'll just wait and see what happens.  If they don't want to buy it, then we are that much closer to getting the house ready to sell later.  If they do want to buy it, they don't need to move in until October, so we have some time to find another house.

By the way, if I hadn't been so busy cleaning and organizing, I would have taken some "before" photos.  I wish I could have done that because then you could appreciate how much better it looks now.  I breath a huge sigh of contentment whenever I look around.  That's mostly opposition in all things...I've spent the last several years living in a state of perpetual anxiety / discontent whenever I looked around my house.  I've been a neat freak most of my life and I've been really good at keeping my houses clean, organized, and uncluttered but the last several years I have just had to let it go.  I couldn't keep up with it.  But I've never been happy about it.  Jared hasn't been home much this week since he still had the play going on this weekend (tonight is the last performance) but he did take the time to clean up his side of the bedroom he and Tanner share.  However, I can't say that he did as thorough of a job as I would have.  While Jared was gone on Thursday,  Tanner cleaned up his stuff and went down and helped him with the closet and we found a lot of other things that belonged to Jared (and Scott) down there and cleaned all of that up.  When Jared came home from the play late Thursday night he said he didn't even recognize his room as being the same room!  (In the process of all the cleaning, Tanner also moved his stuff upstairs to Scott's room so that is his room now.)

Well, enough of all that.  I said that I was cleaning and organizing and such every chance I got those two days.  I did have other things I had to do, like shopping, taking Tanner to work and back, and a presidency meeting.  That was actually tricky since he worked the same day as my meeting.  I picked the meeting day and time before I knew Tanner's work schedule and the meeting was only an hour before I was supposed to pick him up, which I knew wouldn't be enough time (it takes about 20 minutes to get to his work).  So I asked him if there was any chance they'd have more work for him to do and he said he'd ask.  As it turned out, someone else had called in sick for their shift, so he was able to stay 3 hours longer than scheduled.  Which was, of course, even more time than I needed to get through my meeting!

Jared had YM Wednesday evening and they had a court of honor.  They asked Tanner to come too so that they could take a few minutes to recognize that he had received his Eagle scout award (he was adamant that he didn't want an Eagle court of honor, so we never had one.)  I'm glad that they did that for him.

Thursday was our 23rd anniversary, but in the hustle and bustle of all the cleaning and organizing, we didn't really get to celebrate.  We thought we were going to have to wait until next week sometime because the older boys had lots of activities going on this weekend but then we realized that Seth had a birthday party last night so he'd be gone too.  Jared had his play and Tanner went to see it too.  (Scott saw it last weekend.  I wish we could have seen it.)  We decided having all of them gone at once was a chance too good to pass up, so even though I had lots of other things I should have been doing, we took the time to go to dinner and then we went to see the new Disney Cinderella movie, because I've been wanting to see it.  That was fun.

Today has been busy too.  This morning I had an auxiliary training meeting at the church down by the temple.  One of my counselors and the secretary and I all went together.  Sister Reeves, 2nd counselor in the Gerneral RS presidency, came from Salt Lake City for the training.  It was really good and I have some things to think about.  Sometime this week Jared reminded me that he had promised a friend that he would take her to Prom which is next weekend.  So after I got home from the meeting, I took him to buy a lavender tie (to match her dress) and we tried to order a corsage too but no one at the place we went to knew what they were doing, so that will have to wait until Monday.  Jared had a picnic for the cast of the play this afternoon (not the best weather for a picnic...pretty chilly!)  I went to the memorial service for the sister in my ward who passed away two weeks ago.  Her family decided they didn't want to do a service at all, but as a ward we wanted to do one and we did invite them and a few of them came.  That was the right thing to do...the service turned out to be very sweet and I know her family really appreciated it.  I sang in a small group that sang "Each Life that Touches Ours for Good".  There were many wonderful memories shared of her, and I think the service was a perfect representation of who she was.  I'm sure she was pleased about it!

That wraps it up for this week.  I will add some of the pictures that Frank took last Friday when he was down in Washington DC.  Some of them turned out really nice, I think!

This last picture was not taken in Washington DC.  It was taken of the view out our back windows, and maybe you can understand why our backyard views is one of the things I love most about our house!:

       
Oh, and here's one last picture to tickle your funny bone.  When I was going through the schoolwork Seth brought home this week, I found this:

If you can't read it, the instructions say "How are a kangaroo and a butterfly alike?  How are they different?  Write your answers in the chart."  I got a big kick out of his large question mark in the "alike" column!  Tanner and I were both trying to think of ways that a butterfly and a kangaroo are alike, and all we could think of was that they both eat vegetation.  So it really was a challenging question, (I thought so, anyway).  Seth is never afraid to say what he is thinking!