Now on to this week! I did spend all of Friday evening setting up Christmas decorations. Frank wasn't feeling very well and Seth was more interested in video games, so I did almost all of the decorations myself. It took a long time and I was up pretty late, but I got everything done (with a few exceptions) and our house looks all festive now. I added some writing onto the ornament I purchased for this year to personalize it, so now it looks like this:
Saturday: This day was really busy. Seth had an 11 year old scout activity in the morning (they made breakfast) and that evening our ward had their Christmas party. Frank helped cook all the meat for the Christmas party, so he was basically gone all day. I picked Seth up from his activity and took him to Walmart to spend his allowance (he got a Lego set, of course--a small one). I also finished a few Christmas decorating items that I hadn't finished the night before (a few outside decorations and getting out the Christmas salt & pepper shakers), finished preparing my Primary lesson, read through a bunch of orientation information I got from the Arc at my intake meeting, figured out what books I was going to recommend for book chat (it was my turn to do that this month), made our contribution for the ward Christmas party dinner (sour cream potatoes) and made dinner for one of my ministering sister's families because she just had a baby the previous Monday (the 26th). I actually misjudged the time it was going to take to make the food and ended up taking Seth and our meal contribution over to the church and then coming back home to finish and deliver the meal for my ministering sister's family. Then I went back to the church for the party and thankfully there was some food left when I got there! The theme this year was "Christmas Around the World" and it was really nice. All the tables and the trees had traditional Christmas decorations on them, but they also had little flags from lots of different countries. They had decor from lots of countries on the walls, too. It's hard to describe (I wish I'd taken photos!) but it looked fantastic!
Sunday: This day was also busy because I had choir before church and my self reliance group met after church; then we listened to the 1st Presidency Christmas Devotional after I got home. (It was wonderful!)
I was fasting for a number of things that day, and one thing I want to remember. I was starting my work for the Arc on Monday morning and for some reason I was feeling really anxious about it. Mostly just because I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to do and I wanted to do a good job. So in my fast, I included a plea that I would be able to be calm and at peace about my new job and that request was definitely answered. By the time church ended, I noticed that my anxious feelings had been completely replaced with a calm feeling, and that feeling continued into Monday when I actually went to work. It's kind of a little thing, I know, but it made a big difference to me!
Monday: So I as I mentioned, I worked on Monday. I work directly with an adult with a developmental disability, but other than that I can't say much because I need to protect her privacy. But I can say that she is lovely to work with and I really enjoyed my time with her. Really, I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this! So I feel really fortunate to have this job. We worked it out that I will be working with her for 4 hours each Monday and Thursday. It is nice to have a predictable schedule too. Other than working, Monday was a pretty average day and somehow all the regular things I do on Mondays got done even though I had 4 less hours to do them. How does that happen? I'm just grateful that it does. One of the things I did was to pick up some books I had put on hold at the library (suggestions for book chat) and I was shocked when they told me they were due December 26th. Wait a minute...is Christmas really that close??! It kind of put me in panic mode. For some reason I thought I had plenty of time until Christmas!! I haven't even started shopping yet!! That was a wake up call that I needed!
Tuesday: Mostly Tuesday was a normal day but I did take some time to prepare for my next self reliance meeting and that evening I had book chat. We had a great discussion about Okay for Now (everyone else loved it too--you should really read it!) and, happily, everyone liked my suggestions for next month too. I decided to go with Christmas books and we chose to read A Christmas Carol and 4 other Christmas stories by Charles Dickens.
Wednesday: Frank was gone most of the day because he volunteered to work a shift at the church storehouse. He had to be there at 8:30 but it's over an hour away and he was going to have to contend with rush hour traffic to get there, so he actually left at 6:00 am. The shift was supposed to go until 12:30 but they got done a little early so he was home by about 1:45. Meanwhile, I got Seth to school (where he had a field trip to the library) and did all the usual things I need to do on Wednesdays including going to the religion class. That evening our ward was singing a song at the town of Walkersville's Christmas tree lighting. As the music chair, I had been in charge of finding someone to lead us (I just asked our choir director) and helping choose what song we would sing. Seth decided he didn't want to go and Frank was exhausted from his day at the storehouse, so I represented our family. We had a large group of ward members show up to sing and actually it sounded really good! I really felt the spirit while we were singing. Several other churches performed musical numbers also. It was really sweet. Then at the end, Santa Claus arrived riding on a big fire truck with sirens blaring. It was pretty cool and I wished that Seth had come because he would have loved it! I tried getting a few photos of the fire trucks, but they didn't come out very well:
Thursday: Frank had his interview that morning and he feels like it went pretty well. We'll see what happens. I worked again that morning and then when I got home, Jessie's mom came over so we could discuss plans for the wedding and figure out who is going to do what. That was a good meeting and they will be great to work with, and now I have a few assignments to start working on. And again, all of the usual Thursday work somehow got done too!
Friday: So far today I have been working on the budget which is mostly done. My main goal for the rest of the day is to get some Christmas shopping done!
In between everything else, I've been working on getting Christmas cards ready to mail and I'm almost done with those. We've done well with exercising and brain balance this week. Seth and I haven't had much time to read together, though. I did pretty well with my goal to go to bed and get up at regular times. I did better with the getting up part than with the going to bed part (went to bed later than I wanted a couple of nights). I didn't sleep well on Sunday and Monday nights but since then I've been doing much better.
We caught another mouse this week. Ugh!! After we caught the mouse on Thanksgiving, we decided we'd better set another trap to see if there were any more. The trap sat there empty for nearly 2 weeks and I was thinking there must not be any more (I was happy about that!) and I was going to tell Frank he might as well remove the trap. But then on Wednesday when I was home by myself, I heard a noise and I thought it kind of sounded like the mouse trap snapping but I didn't really think that's what it was and I forgot about it until later, when I went down to the laundry room to get food out of the freezer. Then I remembered, so I checked the trap. The lighting wasn't very good but I could see that the trap was actually flipped over, and it looked like maybe something dark was attached to it, so I called Frank to come look at it and sure enough--it was a mouse. So he disposed of the mouse and set two more traps. We'll see what happens. We wish we could figure out how they are getting in so we could block it! It's got to be in the basement somewhere.
And on that "exciting" note, I will end our review for this week.
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