Weekly Review October 2 '15

It definitely feels like fall around here. The temperature has dropped close to 20 degrees over the last few days and it is raining. Actually, it's rained a lot this week. We had a heavy rain storm on Tuesday evening and it has been raining off and on in varying intensities for the last two days straight. We will be getting more rain and some gusty winds, courtesy of Hurricane Joaquin out in the Atlantic, over the next 24 hours. But at least we are not going to get up to a foot of rain (some places south of us might) and the Hurricane actually isn't going to hit the United States at all. It's just that a front is pulling a lot of the moisture from that storm into the atmosphere over us and the rest of the east coast. For a while there, everyone was worried we were going to get a repeat of Hurricane Sandy, so it's good that we're not.

I have a nasty headache again today (yesterday too); that seems to be happening to me a lot lately. I wish I could figure out the cause. I was a bit more productive this week though. I went to lunch with my friend Rebekah on Monday and visited my friend Wanda too.

I met with Seth's teacher on Tuesday and everything she had to say reinforced my feeling that it is time to see if medication will help him. I gave her the questionnaires for her and the other teachers to fill out and I just got them back today when Seth came home from school so I have to get them back to the doctor and we will go from there. The good news is, he tested above average in both math and reading on recent assessment tests. His teacher says he is actually very intelligent, which is why he is able to perform well in spite of the fact that he doesn't get much done. But  his writing is behind and he has lots of "gaps" in his knowledge because he can't focus and she thinks those gaps will get wider as time goes on. His intelligence can compensate for only so much. I expect it will take a while for us to work out the details and to find the medication that is right for him. In the meantime, I am going to go in to school to help him occasionally and we are also doing some work at home. I helped him do some math yesterday afternoon and we did get it done but it took all the patience I could muster not to scream in frustration, mostly because he was so distracted. (But he is also good at arguing with me when he is confused about something.) I also went in to his school on Wednesday afternoon to help him and that went well...in one hour, we got 4 things done. Up until then, he had completed 5 things for the whole week. He was amazed at how much we got done in one hour. He just needs someone to help him focus.

Besides all that, I took the dog to the vet for a vaccine update and started on some projects. I am having a hard time settling on just one project so I have a number of different things going on at once, which is probably not a good idea. I need some more cold weather clothes so I did some shopping and found a few sweaters. But I also need some skirts and I have a hard time finding exactly what I'm looking for. So I decided to make some skirts instead. I bought patterns and fabric to make three different skirts. Let's see how long it takes me to get those done! (I still have a lot of doll clothes I want to sew too...that project went on hold over a year ago because I found that I was having so much fun that I was spending too much time on that and not doing other things that needed to be done.) I began some much needed cleaning / purging this week. I pulled several boxes out of the basement and brought them upstairs to sort through. I'm not finding very many things to throw away, but I did get rid of one box. In the meantime, the living room is a mess with all the boxes but I guess sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better!  I'm starting to put together a box for Tanner and starting on some Christmas preparations. Tomorrow I'm planning to start a photo scanning project because that sounds like a good thing to do while listening to General Conference. So, do you think that is enough projects?

We've barely seen Jared this week. He had a play performance for a play last night and another one tonight. This is not Legally Blonde, it's a play they are doing at school as part of his Advanced Theater Studies class. It's called a black box play because it's done in a small classroom instead of an auditorium. The play they are doing is called Triangle, and it's about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (an actual historical event). I would have liked to see it, but both performances sold out before I thought to buy tickets. Our book club read a historical fiction book about this fire once, so I'm familiar with it. Besides the play (and getting all the lighting ready for it), he had two in car driving lessons this week (he's done with that now). He had the same instructor for both lessons...the one who wanted a Book of Mormon after Jared talked to him during the first lesson. They were able to talk a little more and he does have a Book of Mormon now and he's reading it. Jared went to an Eagle Court of Honor for a friend and had an interview with our bishop for his Hill Cumorah Pageant work crew application. He had a Legally Blonde rehearsal on Monday and worked a long shift on Saturday so add school and Seminary to that and yes...we barely saw him!

Seth went to a birthday party for one friend last night and he's going to another one tonight, so he's had a pretty busy week too. Frank, as usual, has been swamped with projects. He spent most of Saturday working on one and he's had a lot to do in the evenings this week. He missed the BYU football game on Saturday, but of course he didn't miss much. I was so happy they finally had a game that wasn't in the middle of the night for us and then as you all know, it was a big disappointment. Not just the lack of scoring, but the lack of even one really good play! There was literally nothing to get excited about in that game, unless it was the fact that the defense managed to keep Michigan from scoring the entire second half.

Sunday was my first "real" Sunday not being the RS president (the week I got released and stake conference don't really count). I ended up holding the new RS president's 8 month old baby during RS, and I admit I was pretty distracted by him and didn't get much out of the lesson. It's kind of strange to be in RS and to be sitting in the back I've really spent very little time in RS in this ward...and usually when I am in RS, I'm there because I'm in the presidency so I'm sitting in the front! That doesn't mean I don't like sitting in the back, though. :) I could get used to it!

The theme for our Sacrament Meeting on Sunday was The Family: A Proclamation to the World, and we had some really good talks. One guy went through it and broke it down into sections...he pointed out that the whole first part is really restating doctrine that we already know, from the scriptures and from former prophets. Then it shifts focus a little and tells us how to go about applying the truths that we know about the family that were just restated. Then it shifts focus a little again and issues a warning and prophecy about what will happen if we don't follow the doctrines of the family. I had never thought about it quite that way before, and for some reading thinking about it that way really added to the power of that document for me. Especially the warning part, because I can see how the world is going the wrong way with families and unfortunately I think most of those warnings are going to become a reality. It's hard to put into words, but I was really struck by it all. After his talk,, we sang "I Am a Child of God" for the closing hymn and it was really cool because I could hear all the children in the congregation singing too (I don't think many of them sing usually, but this is a song they know, of course). It was just really sweet!

That's it for this week!