My first iris bloomed on May day:
Now there are 4 or 5 of them blooming out front. We've continued to have typical spring weather, which means some days are nice, some are kind of chilly, and some are pretty hot. Here is the summary for this week:
Friday: Frank and I got to go out for dinner as a belated anniversary celebration. We went to a Mediterranean place and it was really good.
Saturday: I had to kind of laugh at myself on Saturday because I realized I was "nesting". Frank left to go pick up Jared and Jessie from the airport and I was running all over the house, "tidying up". I realized that I always do that when one of the kids is coming home after a longer absence...just like I did the weeks before each of them were born. (As a matter of fact, this house cleaning / organizing / decluttering project I have embarked on...isn't that really just a huge case of nesting, because I know ALL of the boys are coming home in June?) The thing that is funny about it is that my kids don't care a fig if the house is tidy or not. And certainly babies don't care, either!! But it got me wondering...does nesting cause some kind of feeling in the air of the home? A "welcome, we love you, and went to a lot of effort for you" kind of feeling that the child (baby) can sense, even if they don't consciously notice that the house has been cleaned up in their honor? I guess I'll never know the answer to that, but I do know I always feel compelled to welcome my kids with a house that is as clean and uncluttered as I can manage. Anyway...after all that philosophizing, now back to the other things we did on Saturday. I was actually really proud of Seth. He started the day kind of crabby and difficult but we got him out the door by 8:00 to go help with the annual scout lawn aeration fundraiser. I really thought he would only make it an hour or so, but he worked until we needed to pick him up at around noon (because I needed his help with other things) and he worked that whole time and came home in a good mood without any complaints! Then he spent all afternoon until dinner time working in his room to help me finish cleaning and organizing it, and once again...he was really cooperative and didn't complain or anything. Super nice!! His room looks like this now:
And of course Jared came home!! So that was nice, and we are enjoying having him here.
Sunday: Jared came with me to choir practice. I assumed that he and Jessie would be going to the YSA ward until they get married, but they actually decided that since this is the last time either of them will be living at home, they wanted to spend more time with their families so they are each going to go to the ward with their families. Frank and I took naps after church and I did some indexing and we had family night.
Monday: I worked with my Arc friend for a few hours in the morning...she wanted to do some shopping at an outlet mall. I spent the rest of the day getting the regular chores done and I also contacted BYU catering and got the date for Tanner's luncheon cleared up and contacted the webmaster for the office furniture website because he was helping me solve the sideways photo problem. (Hopefully it's solved now, but we'll see.) Jared helped with the laundry, thankfully, because there was a TON of it. That was his fault, though, because he brought home so much dirty laundry. He mentioned on Saturday when he got home that he needed to do laundry, but when I told him that I usually do laundry on Monday, he decided it could wait. If I had known that he needed to wash EVERY STITCH OF CLOTHING HE OWNED BESIDES WHAT HE HAD ON, I would have told him to do laundry on Saturday! But as I said, he helped a lot. He kept the wash moving while I was gone and he also folded almost all of it. That evening we all (including Jessie) went to a Frederick Keys baseball game. (The Frederick Keys are the local minor league baseball team. They are named the Keys after Francis Scott Key, who lived most of his life in Frederick and is buried here.) The reason we went to this particular baseball game is because Roy Rogers was making a donation to the Cal Ripken Foundation and so we all got free tickets through Frank's work. Plus, they had rented a box for our group and had all this free food too, so that was nice. The only thing that wasn't nice is that it happened to be one of our chilly days. It was cloudy and only in the low 60s and windy. And of course as the sun went down it got chillier. We could watch the game from inside the box, of course, but it was pretty crowded so we all stayed outside most of the time except for Frank--he went in and out because he was talking with various people that he works with. (A few blankets that Jared retrieved from the car helped us out a lot.) We met Frank's boss and a lot of his coworkers, and we also met the owner of Plamondon, which is the company that owns all the local Roy Rogers restaurants (and the local Marriott hotels also). Everyone was really nice. The game went pretty late, since baseball games are always kind of long, and no one made it to the end of the game but our family outlasted everybody in the group, staying until the end of the 7th inning. Seth had a blast and he was really excited because he got on the big screen three times. We also had a few close calls with foul balls, although Seth was disappointed that we never got a chance to catch a ball.
Roy Rogers advertisement, with the Plamondon Hospitality Partners advertisement right next to it.
Oh, and the Keys won the game! It was 5-0 when we went home, and the final score was 5-2. One of the owners of the company told us that they have blocks of tickets for all the games so if we ever want to go to a game, we can probably get free tickets again. We will probably do it again sometime...on a warmer day!
Tuesday: I didn't exercise on either Tuesday or Thursday because I didn't get up in time. But I did get all the regular chores done on Tuesday, plus I went to lunch with my friend Rebekah, took Seth to the orthodontist, and went to book chat in the evening. Jared mowed the lawn for me, which I really appreciated! My friend Rebekah and I had planned to go to Boston Market but discovered that it has closed! That's kind of a bummer because I really like Boston Market and now the closest one to us is 30 minutes away. The orthodontist persuaded Seth to let him try pulling 3 of his teeth and he did pull 2 of them out. He has so many loose teeth that are just barely holding on! He also decided that we can give it a few more months and see if he can keep wiggling them and get more of them out. Which is fine with me, because I'd rather not have to pay the dentist to pull a bunch of them. The orthodontist didn't even charge us for the 2 he pulled, which was nice. Book chat was fun as always, with lively discussion. Now we are going to read a book called When You Reach Me, which is actually an older child / young adult Newbery winner book, and I have already read it twice--once a few years ago, and then I read it again in the last couple of days! I decided I needed to read it again since I couldn't remember it very well, but I didn't intend to read it that fast. But it is pretty short and easy to read and I just got through it really fast. It's one of those books where you are trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together, so it's pretty motivating to keep going. The first time I read it, I had a really hard time putting it down because I just wanted to know what was really going on!! This time I remembered enough that I was okay putting it down but as I said--I still read it pretty quickly.
Wednesday: I got Seth to school, came home for a little while and then took Jared to work. He actually wasn't scheduled to work this week but he picked up a few shifts. (He's working at Chick-fil-a again this summer.) His work is right next to Walmart, so I did the Walmart shopping right after I dropped him off and then went to my religion class. We are going to study the Pearl of Great Price this summer and this week we learned all about the history of the Pearl of Great Price--where it came from and so forth. I actually learned a lot of things I didn't know and it was interesting. After class I worked on the quilt for a bit--started marking it--and then I had to pick up Jared from work and then Seth from school. Then it was time to do brain balance with Seth and to make dinner and after dinner I took Seth to YM. I had agreed to take a couple of other kids home when I picked Seth up at the end. (Meanwhile, Jared went to Jessie's and they worked on addressing wedding invitations.) I really needed to get some work done for the office furniture website, but didn't get the chance to start working on that until about 9:00 pm. I stopped long enough to say prayers with everybody and then I kept working on it while everyone else went to bed and I ended up staying up until 1:30 am finishing everything! I didn't intend to stay up that late, but once I got going I really wanted to finish it.
Thursday: I actually woke up about 6:00 and never took a nap either--not sure how I functioned on so little sleep but I wasn't even that tired. I got the regular chores done (Jared helped with vacuuming) and kept working on marking the quilt. It's probably my least favorite part of the project, but it has to be done. I'm hoping to finish that part tonight. Jared had an appointment with the eye doctor in the afternoon, and even though I called and added him as a driver on our car insurance, I still had to take him because I was worried he wouldn't be done before I needed to pick up Seth from school. And I was right--he wasn't quite done when I needed to leave but thankfully I didn't have to go back and get him because Jessie stopped by (her mom works at this eye doctor's office) and she said she could bring Jared home. They did some shopping or something before coming home too. While I was waiting for Jared at the eye doctor, there were a couple of little kids running around and they came over and started talking to me and pretty soon they were handing me toys and books and climbing up into my lap and everything! When their mom finally appeared, she just looked at me but didn't say anything, which I thought was kind of strange. I mean, I didn't really mind that they were climbing all over me, but if my kids had been doing that with a complete stranger, I would have told them to stop and I would have apologized to the stranger. For that matter, I wouldn't have left them roaming through the waiting room alone for that long, but to each his own, I guess. Frank decided that he really wanted to go see End Game after work so he got tickets for him and the boys. There wasn't time for him to come home from work and then go back, so we drove over to meet him at a restaurant and I traded cars with him. I was supposed to be going to a stake RS activity--a dinner and speaker--but after dropping the boys off I decided not to go. I had a bad headache and the thought of being able to lie down in a quiet house was just too appealing!! So I just made myself a sandwich for dinner and relaxed and that's when I read most of the book chat book. I also folded clothes and did some other chores that I hadn't had time to finish earlier (my head felt better by then). I did have the house to myself for a couple of hours but they got back home a lot earlier than expected because something went wrong with the movie about half way through and the picture went out!! They couldn't fix it, either. What rotten luck! So now poor Frank and Seth are waiting to see what happens. (Jared has already seen the movie.) They did give each of them 2 free movie tickets at least. Hopefully they will be able to go see the movie soon, and hopefully it will work this time. (I fell behind on the Avengers movies several years ago, so I need to watch a whole bunch of other movies before I can see this one. Maybe in a few years...or maybe a decade!...)
Friday: Today I got the budget done and took Seth to the library. Jared and I took a few things to the storage unit too. My cleaning / organizing / de-cluttering project for this week is supposed to be my bedroom and closet, but I have barely got anything done except I went through a couple of bags of salt & pepper shakers that Frank's mom has given me in the last few years. I'm hoping to get some more work done in my room tomorrow. I actually need to get a couple of bookcases before I can really get things moved around in there the way I want to. But I also went through my closet about a month ago and purged a lot of clothes and also about a month ago I got some new underbed storage containers and put a lot of stuff in them, so my bedroom and closet are already a lot better than they were a few months ago. We actually had 2 large underbed storage containers sitting in the corner of our bedroom on the floor for YEARS because when we got our king size mattress several years ago we got a metal bed frame rather than getting a new king size bed (headboard, etc). As it turns out, the frame is a lot lower than our previous queen size bed was, so the underbed storage containers wouldn't fit under it anymore. And there they have sat, with a lot of stuff accumulating on top of them, until I finally found some underbed containers that do fit. I was pretty happy when I found them, believe me!! So our room isn't too bad, but there's still plenty we could do to get it more organized and less cluttered, and I hope to make some progress on that tomorrow. I was supposed to take my friend Wanda to the store today but she changed her mind and I was glad because I barely got the budget done before I had to go pick up Seth as it was. Plus that gave Jared a chance to take the car this morning so he and Jessie got more wedding invitations addressed.
Speaking of weddings, Tanner sent me a link a few days ago for he & Darlee's engagement portraits and they are beautiful!! We also ordered ties for everybody for Jared's wedding and Jared's came a few days ago and the rest of them came today. These weddings are starting to seem more and more real. I gave Jared & Jessie their quilt on Monday because I wanted to surprise them with it and I knew that Jared was going to see me working on Tanner & Darlee's quilt and he would probably figure out that I had made him one too. So I gave it to them early. And they were surprised, and they did like it a lot.
That's all I can think of to report except to say that we are praying for Erick and his family and we will fast for you all on Sunday, too. We love you and hope you can feel the strength of all of us praying for you!!
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