Last Friday feels like a long time ago to me...I guess that's because this week has been pretty busy.
On Saturday (the 3rd) we went to dinner with the Hatch family to celebrate Jessie's birthday (which was on Thursday the 1st). Jessie chose Red Lobster. I haven't been there for a long time and decided to try their cocount shrimp, and it was really good! The server took a couple of photos of us but she cut Frank out of one of them and Jessie's grandma's face isn't visible in either one; oh well!
On Friday evening and on Saturday I spent a lot of time cutting out quilt block pieces and I was able to get all the pieces cut out (from the fabric I've purchased so far). I set up a little work station on one end of the kitchen table and cranked them out:
When I finished cutting out the pieces for each quilt block, I laid them out and took a photo. They're all a little off because of the seam allowances, but I can get a pretty good idea of how the finished block will look. Here are the blocks for September:
I actually finished sewing one of these blocks together yesterday but I haven't taken a photo of the finished block yet. The block design came from a full size quilt called Maple Mayhem. (The quilt has 35 blocks like this; I only had to make 2 since I'm making covers for 2 pillows.) Here are the blocks for October:
For March, I made these blocks (Monkey Wrench and Le Moyne Star):
I haven't purchased fabric for April or May, but these are the June blocks:
These patterns are called Double Nine Patch (above) and Jacob's ladder (below).
I haven't purchased fabric to make blocks for July or August yet either. All of the quilt blocks will need borders around them to make them the correct size to cover the pillows so I still have some cutting to do but I decided to sew the blocks first and then I can make the border strips to fit the blocks. I am having fun with this project and hope I will have time to keep working on them after Seminary begins.
On Sunday Seth had meetings both before and after church. That evening, Jared & Jessie came over for their last evening with us of laundry, dinner, and game playing. We played Monopoly and Jessie cleaned all of us out.
Monday through today I have been busy with all the usual chores, plus exercising, plus scripture study, plus taking Seth driving, plus a lot of other things!
One of the "other things" was an online Seminary Training Symposium. There were 2 classes every day except today...only 1 class today. I was able to attend all but the first one and they were all phenomenal! I learned so much from all of these veteran master teachers. I'm sure I won't be able to implement even half of what they taught us but if I can even do a few things it will be an improvement. It was interesting to me, too, that many of the topics and / or the things they said are really in line with the list I made a few weeks ago of ideas I had for Seminary this year. That helps me to feel like I am on the right track. One of the things I found so helpful about this symposium is not just the content of the lessons being taught (even though the topics were great), but observing how the teachers taught us. They did so many good things such as calling on people by name, complimenting people for their comments, asking great follow up questions, and asking the class members to respond to a question or comment from another class member. Every one of them also testified at the end of the lesson and every one of them praised us and told us how amazing we are and how much they appreciate our service as Seminary teachers and really seemed to enjoy the experience of teaching and being with us. These are all things that I want to do better in my own class. It's interesting when I look back to the beginning of the summer and what I wanted to accomplish to prepare for Seminary and to realize that my entire focus has shifted in the last few weeks. I feel like the training I just received is the best possible preparation I could have had. I'm really grateful for all the promptings of the spirit that I receive to help me understand what I need to do and to move in the right direction.
While I'm on the topic of Seminary, I'll go ahead and mention the other Seminary related things that I did this week. On Monday my team teacher and I went to visit one of the new students coming into our class. Her family are not currently very active members so we thought we'd be visiting her to help encourage her to come to Seminary but when we got there and asked how she felt about coming to Seminary, she said that she was excited about it, just not looking forward to getting up really early. She and her mom both talked about it as if they are planning on her attending, so that was a nice surprise. Her mom does not speak a lot of English (although she obviously understands a lot) so throughout our conversation she would often stop in a sentence and turn to her daughter and ask "como se dice..." and say a word and then her daughter would tell her what the English word is. It was kind of fun!
On Wednesday morning my team teacher and I met together again to do some more planning. We chose a class president and did some other things related to that. We also starting planning what we're going to be doing the first week of Seminary. We'll be meeting again next week to plan some more!
I finally found a few minutes last night to sort through my pile of stuff from the past Seminary year. It's still not as organized as I would like but it's better than it was. I have a lot of files on my computer that I need to organize as well.
I think that is all of the Seminary related stuff for this week. In the house cleaning and organizing department, I finished going through things in my bedroom and I also cleaned out Seth's bathroom. I am mostly done with the top two floors of the house now...just need to go through my bathroom and there are a few other things like washing windows and wiping down some of the walls and baseboards. The basement is the most cluttered part of the house and I'm sure I'm not going to get it all done before Seminary starts but I will probably be able to get a few things done down there. Frank already did a lot in the hallway and he is working on his office but I'd like to get the storage room in better shape (it's not terrible since we did a really thorough and good cleaning out a few years ago) and the really big project will be going through all the files. Hopefully I'll be able to get them in better shape than they are now, at least. I have also had Seth working on his room and that is very slow going but he's made a little progress.
Seth had his last on the road driving session with an instructor yesterday (Thursday the 8th). It went well, apparently. When I walked in to pick him up his instructor said "he is a great young man!" To help prepare him for this session, I took him driving every day and we tried to focus on the freeway for most of those drives (we knew they would take him on the freeway for his final driving session). On Monday we got on I-70 West and drove to Hagerstown and back, which took over an hour. We encountered road construction and then we missed our exit and had to get off at a different spot and wind our way around some back roads and Seth handled all of that quite well. I actually have seen quite a bit of improvement in his driving this week...he is starting to get a lot better at recognizing what he needs to do without me telling him to do it (things like slowing down or adjusting his speed for hills, curves etc.) There are still moments when I need to remind him to slow down more or when he starts to veer a little into another lane while checking his speed, but they are happening less often. I've tried to combine his driving practice with things we need to do whenever possible so on Tuesday he drove out to Middletown and back so we could say goodbye to Jared & Jessie, on Wednesday his friend Wesley invited him over so he drove to his house and back, and today he drove me to the library and back so I could pick up a book I had on hold. On Thursday morning before his driving session we spent some time practicing different kinds of parking in a parking lot and we also went over all the windshield wiper controls because it was supposed to be raining during his driving session (and it was, although not as hard as I feared). He has accumulated nearly 30 hours driving time now; he has to have 60 hours before he can take the driving test. Which is fine, because he definitely needs more practice before he's ready to drive on his own. I think after another 30 hours of driving, though, he will be ready. It's going to be a lot more challenging to get driving time in after school starts but we'll keep plugging away at it. Hopefully we will be able to get in at least a few minutes most days.
As I mentioned, we went out to see Jared & Jessie off on Tuesday morning. On Monday, we made cookies and put together two treat bags for them (they were each driving a car so weren't able to be together for the trip). They were very happy to get those cookies!
Driving away (they were backing out of the driveway) Jared is driving the red car and Jessie is driving the blue one.:
We're really going to miss them, but we're so glad they have been able to live nearby the last 18 months! Jared sent me updates when they arrived at Knoxville, TN the first night, Little Rock, AK the second night, and Tyler, TX on Thursday afternoon. He sent me a little video walk through of their new apartment last night and it looks pretty nice. We're glad they got there safely!
Our ward's activity night for the youth switched from Wednesdays to Tuesdays this week. That's actually going to be somewhat convenient when school starts because Frank works from home on Wednesdays so he doesn't have to get up as early. That means he can pick Seth up from his activity and I can go to sleep before they get home.
The last few days we have had a lot of rain...the remnants of tropical storm Debby. I don't think we got as much rain as they originally thought we would, but we did get quite a bit. It's good because we need it. We're lucky that we didn't get the severe weather that a lot of places did. We had flash flood and tornado watches but nothing really extreme materialized. They had a tornado warning at Frank's work this morning and they had to go to the basement for about 30 minutes but no thankfully no tornado showed up. Frank has had a busy week at work with a lot of meetings...he actually had to go in every day including Wednesday. He did get to come home a little earlier yesterday and today.
Seth never heard back from the job interview he had about 3 weeks ago so a few days ago he called them back and found out that the store manager who interviewed him wasn't at that store anymore. They asked for his contact information and told him they'd call him back. They called back today and asked him to resubmit his application and come in for another interview so he will be doing that tomorrow morning.
I believe that is all of the news from around here.
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