This week has been super busy and my brain feels like mush, but I will do my best to remember the important stuff and to keep it simple.
Last Saturday (October 26th) started out with a haircut for me. Seth worked from 11:00 to 3:00. I got my second Seminary lesson for this week planned and got a lot of the prep work done but didn't finish all of it before the BYU football game started. We watched the game until it was time to leave for our ward's Trunk or Treat.
For the Trunk or Treat, we originally planned to dress up in dinosaur costumes and to decorate our trunk with a dinosaur scene using the many plastic toy dinosaurs that we have leftover from our boys' growing up years. That plan fell apart when 2 of the 3 dinosaur costumes we ordered failed to arrive. There was some kind of issue with the box being damaged or something like that so they were returned to the sender before they ever got to our house, and there was not time to order anything else so we gave up on that idea and thought we'd just go without costumes or trunk decorations, but the day before the Trunk or Treat I got the idea for us to dress up like BYU fans. We have quite a few BYU blankets, too, so we decided to drape those all over in the trunk. I thought it would be cool to have the game streaming on Frank's iPad and asked him if there was a way to do that, and he said there was, so that's what we did. It was great because we got to attend the Trunk or Treat AND watch the game! Guess what? Our trunk was a pretty popular place with a lot of other people at the Trunk or Treat...many kept stopping by to check the score and one friend from our ward parked himself in one of our chairs the entire evening to watch the game. (After we invited him to join us.) There were a LOT of people at this event because 3 wards were participating. Besides the Trunk or Treat for the kids, there was a chili cook off, hot dogs and cornbread to eat besides the chili, games for the kids, and awards for costumes, trunk decorations, and chili. They announced three winners for the trunk decorating contest and then surprised us by saying "And honorable mention goes to the Clevelands for having the BYU game streaming at their trunk". We even got a large Hershey's chocolate bar for a prize! Haha, we definitely weren't expecting to win anything!
Dark photo where you can see the iPad screen pretty well but not us very well:
On Saturday I also told Seth if he wasnted to dress up for Halloween, he'd better figure out what he needed and order it. At his high school, it's a tradition that the Seniors are allowed to dress up for Halloween (no one else is allowed to dress up) and they have a costume contest. He'd been talking for over a month about wanting to dress up and what he wanted to be, but he hadn't done anything about getting his costume yet. He wanted to dress up like scarecrow from Batman...a version that is similar to one in one of the Batman video games series. He got on Amazon and found a couple of things he needed (a brown robe and part of his mask), but the hat he wanted wouldn't arrive in time and he also wanted a burlap sack type of mask. I (foolishly) agreed to make those two things for him. Moms do crazy things for their kids sometimes!
Sunday was a bit more restful than usual because there was no mission prep class that night. I did have choir practice before church because we sang in Sacrament meeting that day. I talked to Jared in the afternoon and also read scriptures and did some more Seminary lesson prep. There was no school on Monday (end of term...teacher work day) so I didn't feel as pressured to get to bed early but I still went to bed fairly early. I didn't sleep super great, so I "slept in" until about 6:00 am on Monday.
Monday was not a relaxing day, though. I had all the usual chores to do...grocery shopping, vacuuming, laundry...plus I bouth donuts for family night treat, took Seth to the fabric store with me to get the materials we needed for his hat and mask, and we also spent quite a few hours finishing his last two essays and both of his short responses for his BYU application. I'd like to say that we got his application submitted that day, but he was still waiting on his teacher recommendation so he couldn't submit it yet. (More on that later!) That evening we played golf on the Wii for family night activity and even though I don't particularly like playing Wii golf, I am apparently pretty good at it (or just really lucky...the more likely reason) because I always win and this time I even got a new high score (only 1 over par). It all evens out, because whenever we play Mario Kart on the Wii, I dismally lose.
Tuesday's sunrise:
On Tuesday we were back to the usual Seminary and school routine. Tuesday's Seminary lesson was about the prophet Mormon (Mormon chapters 1 & 2) and it went a lot better than I thought it would. I still had some prep to do for Wednesday's lesson that afternoon, along with all the regular chores (meal planning, cleaning bathrooms, etc.) AND I needed to do some research about some of the candidates / issues on the ballot so that I could vote at least somewhat responsibly. But before all of that, I needed to take a nap because I had only had about 4 hours of sleep. Frank had something going on at work that morning that meant he had to be there about 2 am, so he got up and got ready and left for work around 1:00. Unfortunately, I woke up when he left and didn't go back to sleep. I really hate it when that happens! I slept for about an hour and a half and then I was able to function, at least. Frank came home around 11:30 and he took a nap as well (longer than mine). I did manage to get everything on my list done before the day ended. I took Seth to YM and did some shopping while he was there, which finished up my lesson prep for the next day.
Wednesday's Seminary lesson was a review of the doctrinal mastery scriptures. I gave each of the youth 3 mini cans of play dough, a paper plate, and one of the doctrinal mastery scriptures. They had to read the scripture and then create a "sculpture" that represented the meaning of their scripture. When they were done, they filled out a paper that had fill-in-the-blank versions of all 12 doctrinal mastery scriptures and then they looked at all the sculptures and tried to guess which scripture went with each sculpture. I think they enjoyed this activity and it was a fun change for me too. They were quite creative and did a great job on the sculptures.
Sculpting (as you can see, even when we do something fun, some of them choose to sleep instead):
"If men come unto me...then will I make weak things become strong unto them." (Ether 12:27)
After Seminary on Wednesday, I voted. (Both Frank and I decided to take advantage of the option to vote early.) It was nice because there was not a line...I was able to walk right in and vote and finish quickly. (Frank wasn't so lucky...he went last week in the afternoon and there was a really long line.) After voting, I spent most of the rest of the day sewing Seth's hat and mask. I didn't have a pattern, but with the help of a couple of YouTube tutorials and a whole lot of math, I managed to make a pretty decent hat. (I don't think I've used the pythagorean theorem or a protractor since I was in high school!)
In process (I took photos because I thought it was kind of ridiculous how much stuff I needed just to make one hat!):
Seth was happy with the result, and he also thanked me several times (he's growing up!)
Wednesday was a beautiful day, by the way. I took these photos that morning:
And this one when the sun was going down:
That evening we went to tithing declaration, so we are done with that for another year.
Thursday was Halloween, of course. My Seminary team teacher did a fun Halloween-themed doctrinal mastery review game at the end of class:
I also took some photos of our street because it was looking very appropriate for Halloween with decorations and tons of fallen leaves:
Seth had to work that night so Frank and I passed out candy to the trick or treaters. It was another beautiful day with very unseasonably warm temperatures...it was 77 degrees! We sat outside all evening and it didn't get cold even after the sun went down and a breeze started blowing. Most of the neighbors sat outside too and we enjoyed visiting with them. We didn't get many trick or treaters...maybe about 50 or so...and by 7:00 hardly anyone was coming by and it dwindled down to nothing shortly after that so by 7:30 we closed up shop and Frank went to pick up Seth from work while I got ready for bed.
I did an endowment session today and struggled to stay awake for some of it, but it was still nice and I had a few sweet moments when I had certain things stand out to me in a way that I hadn't noticed before.
I mentioned Seth's college application teacher recommendation earlier. Without going into all the details, I'll just say that we've been working all week to try to work out some kinks with that. When he checked with his teacher on Tuesday to see if he had written the recommendation yet, his teacher had written it but ran into some snags with submitting it. After some back and forth with his teacher and his counselor, which took a couple of days, we finally figured out that they just hadn't understood BYU's unique way of submitting recommendations. Seth took some screen shots of the directions for submitting a recommendation on BYU's website and sent those to his teacher and his counselor. His teacher was able to get the recommendation completed today. However, when Seth tried to submit his application, it still said something wasn't complete and the only thing that wasn't checked was the recommedation tab. When we looked at it again the only thing he hadn't done was a third recommendation, which both he and I thought was optional, but apparently it isn't. I still don't know how it happened that both of us were completely under the impression that it was optional! We solved that problem by (very apologetically!!) asking our bishop to submit a recommendation which he very graciously did at the last minute so Seth got his application submitted this afternoon...in the nick of time, because tonight at midnight is the deadline. So frustrating that in spite of all our efforts not to put it off until the last day we still ended up submitting it the last day, but I'm just glad that process is finally over!! We are 99% sure he won't get accepted to BYU, but I think going through the process has been a valuable experience for Seth so for that reason, it was worth the effort.
In between all of that craziness, I haven't been able to do much preparation for next week's Seminary lessons. I've read the scripture blocks twice and read each lesson at least once, but that's about it. I will definitely be working on lessons tomorrow. Hopefully it won't take all day.
I have also managed to read a little bit of the book for book chat here and there this past week and I have been pleased that I am actually liking it. I'm definitely getting more out of it and understanding it a lot better than I did the first time I read it! Kind of nice to realize that I've learned a few things in the last 40 years. 😄
On that happy note, I will sign off until next week.
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