Weekly Review August 22 '25

Last Friday I finished sewing the Cathedral Window quilt block. It took quite a bit of time to sew all those seams, but it turned out looking great:

 It was pretty late by the time I finished, so I didn't finish the pillow until the next day.

While I was in the middle of sewing, I got a call from our stake Seminary coordinator who wanted to go over our class list to find out how many on our list were actually likely to come. We are still trying to figure that out, but I gave her the best information I had. Then she told me that the reason she wanted to know is that the teachers for another class were going to be moving and since this class was small (only 4 kids who come regularly), they were going to move the kids in this class to our class. What?? I was waiting for her to ask me how I felt about it, but she never did. 😂Don't get me wrong...it might turn out to be a good thing. I'll probably love these kids! But our class is already large and has kids from 3 wards and 2 high schools. Now we will have kids from 4 wards and 3 high schools, and having kids from multiple wards and high schools creates unique challenges--like having a class that is unified and where everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts. It also makes the "ministering" piece more complicated. We try to attend events like soccer games and concerts and so forth for the kids in our class, so having more kids from another high school with more events is going to make that more challenging. It's also challenging to establish relationships with kids who don't attend our ward so we don't know their families or much about their backgrounds and we don't see them except in Seminary. We've already been dealing with all of these challenges--we'll just be multiplying those challenges with these new kids. But we are going to do the best we can and hopefully it will be a blessing. I am definitely prepared to take these kids into my heart! I just hope the increased work load doesn't kill me!

On Saturday morning, I went to a regional training for all the Seminary teachers which was located at a stake center right next to the temple. Tammy rode with me and we had the opportunity to talk a lot about our class and especially about the news we had just received the night before. (She feels about the same about it as I do.) At the training, we split up and went to different classes so that we could share notes afterwards. As always, the classes were excellent and I came away with some good thoughts and ideas. At the end they fed us lunch and it was fun to talk to some other teachers. One of my Primary boys from years ago was there with his wife and came and sat beside me. They live in northern Virginia and were just called as Seminary teachers. It makes me feel kind of old to have one of my little Primary boys grown up, married, and serving as a Seminary teacher! 

When I was at the training, I also saw our stake Seminary coordinator and talked to her a little more. She said they didn't know yet when the other teachers were moving, so the new kids may not join our class until later in the year.

After I got home from the training, I finished sewing the Cathedral Window pillow. First, I cut out the border strips and sewed them on:

Then I sewed the back pieces on and the pillow was complete:

I'm really happy I was able to get it done, and with August only being half over!

That evening we were just starting to make dinner when the missionaries showed up for dinner. We weren't expecting them! I had them on my calendar for this Saturday (the 23rd), not last Saturday. We still don't know exactly how the mix up occurred...if I put it on my calendar wrong or if the person who transfers the info from the calendar that's passed around at church to the online calendar made a mistake. Anyway, we told them to come on in and we'd feed them anyway. Luckily, I had planned to make pancakes (which is very easy to expand) instead of our usual healthy, proportioned meals (which is not expandable). And here is the other crazy thing...we were also having bacon, and when I purchased bacon earlier that week, I had the thought that I should buy more than I usually do, so I bought extra! Which meant we had enough for everyone. We also supplemented by making some scrambled eggs, and no one went hungry. It might seem silly, but I really feel like that thought I had to buy more bacon was a prompting. I didn't know that a mix up was going to happen with our dinner that night, but Heavenly Father did, and he knew those missionaries were going to need to be fed that night and that they wouldn't have time to go home and make something for themselves (they had an appointment an hour after they showed up at our house) so He made sure that everything worked out so that we were able to feed them even though we weren't expecting to. Heavenly Father takes care of His missionaries!!

Sunday was another really busy day (like the previous one). Tammy and I had more visits...before church, we visited with the boy who was just baptized last week to give him all the information about Seminary and he is planning to come! After church, we visited with three more of the incoming freshmen. We still have one more incoming freshman to visit. Then that evening there was another training meeting for just the Seminary teachers in our stake. At that meeting, I ended up sitting next to the counselor in our stake presidency who is responsible for Seminary and he leaned over and told me that they had just found out that the teachers of that other Seminary class are moving this week! So that put the addition to our class on fast forward. He also said that they were looking into calling a third teacher for our class to help us out. The training meeting itself was good; the theme was "Back to School" and our stake coordinator even gave us little sack lunches:

The rest of this week has been kind of a blur of Seminary preparations. Tammy and I felt like we had everything figured out, but with the new kids being added to our class, we had to re-think a lot of things and re-plan and make adjustments and we also had a whole lot of communicating to do with the new parents (plus letting everyone else know what is happening). It turns out that there are actually 7 kids in this class, although 2 don't attend regularly. Yesterday we made the decision to move our start date back to September 2nd (we originally planned to start this coming Wednesday, August 27th). We just felt like the families coming from the other class need more time and it will help us to have a little extra time too. We are currently trying to get appointments to visit all the new kids before Seminary starts. Hopefully we will be able to get that done. Originally, I was planning to prepare my lesson for the first week (we only had 3 days and I was only teaching 1 day) this week but I literally haven't had any time to do that. Now our first week will be 4 days and I will be teaching 2 of them, but now I have this coming week to get those prepared, thankfully. We currently have 34 kids on our roll, but it's likely that at least 7 of them won't be attending, and there are a few others that are tentative. It's kind of hard to plan when we don't know exactly how many kids we will have but hopefully by the time Seminary starts we will have a much better idea of who to expect. We asked them to hold off on calling another teacher because we just want to see how things go first. Another teacher could be helpful in keeping in contact with families and ministering to the kids (not to mention we might be teaching a little less) but having a third teacher will also complicate things and require adjustments and it might just take more time than it saves us. I guess we'll see how things go and then decide. 

All the Seminary stuff really did take up most of my week, but I did do a couple of other things. On Wednesday evening I went to book chat. I managed to finish the book-- Exodus-- just in time. Now we are reading a book called Falling Like Rain that was written by one of the members of our book club. I brought home a copy of it with me, but I haven't had time to start reading it yet. 

On Thursday morning I went to an appointment with the missionaries to visit a less active member in our ward. I've known her for a long time, and it was good to see her again. We read a chapter in the Book of Mormon and she told us that one of the verses that we read is her favorite verse! Then she said it's been her favorite ever since she was in Seminary 30 years ago. It made me happy to hear that something that she learned in Seminary had an impact on her!

Today I went to the temple. It was closed for two weeks and just reopened this week. It was really nice to be in the temple again! 

The flowers outside are really gorgeous right now and when I came back outside after the session, I discovered that they are attracting a lot of butterflies. I tried to get some pictures:

A friend from my ward came out of the temple while I was taking pictures of the flowers / butterflies and she offered to take my photo in front of the flowers. I'm squinting into the sunlight; oh well!:

After I got home from the temple I worked on the budget. I was looking at our remaining mortgage balance and how much we have already set aside to go towards the mortgage and realized that we could just pay it off a little early. (Our last payment is supposed to be in November.) Frank and I talked about it, and we decided to go ahead and pay it today. So we did...and it felt kind of amazing to do that!! Then I decided we'd better record this moment in history with photos, so here you go. Photo of the house 5 years after we moved in (March 2005). Apparently, we didn't take any photos of the outside of the house the first five years we lived here!:

Photo of the house today:

Photo of our family taken the summer after we moved into the house (August 2000):

Photo taken of our family today (without the 3 kids in the above photo, and with a 4th kid who wasn't born yet when we moved into the house):

And one of just Frank and I:

Yeah, we're a little bit older now! (But hopefully wiser, too.)

I'll finish up by mentioning that Frank did his temple shift on Tuesday and Seth worked on Monday and today. Seth will start his college classes on Monday. He also made an appointment this week to get his patriarchal blessing (at the end of September) and this Sunday he will be ordained an Elder. So lots of important things happening in his life right now. 😊

Weekly Review August 15 '25

 I'll start with one photo from YW camp that I somehow missed last week. This one was taken on the first day at dinner time (Michelle & me):

On to this past week. On Saturday Frank and I went to a funeral for a sister in our stake who used to be in our ward (before boundary changes in 2013). She was only in her 60s, but had cancer and passed away the previous Tuesday. I worked with her as a den leader 'way back and we got to be pretty good friends. She was really an amazing person. The funeral was very nice. I was impressed that two of her three children talked, as well as her husband. And her husband also played the piano for one of the musical numbers. One of her brothers also spoke briefly--he came all the way from Hong Kong (that's where she is from) to be with her. 

After the funeral, I went to the quilt store to see if I could find some fabric for the other August quilt block so I could start over. My friend Rebekah came with me which made it more fun! The quilt store is really cute and has a lot of nice fabric as well as patterns and other quilting tools. I think I will be visiting there more often! There wasn't a very large selection of neutral colored fabrics, but I did find something I thought would work. I washed the fabric after I got home but didn't have time to work on it other than that. I cleaned the kitchen floor, practiced ukulele, and worked on updating a Seminary information document to send to all the parents of Seminary kids. We usually have a meeting, but we decided to save everyone the time and just share the information via email instead. I also created a sign up for our weekly Seminary breakfast.

Sunday was super busy because after church Tammy and I had visits to some of the youth who are incoming freshmen, so new to our Seminary class this year. We visited two girls and one boy and I was so impressed with all of them! Just really spiritually mature and wise. 

From those visits, we went straight to a baptism. You may remember that earlier this year (in January) a boy who had been attending our Seminary class got baptized. On Sunday, his younger brother got baptized. It was really lovely. He shared a beautiful testimony and also sang a solo and it was so good!! Seth was asked to give the talk on baptism and another boy from our Seminary class gave the talk on the Holy Ghost. Both of the witnesses were youth from our ward (one in our class, one about to come into our class) and the pianist was a girl from our class too. They all did a great job. I just felt so proud of all my "kids"!! I love them so much!! So even though Sunday was busy and exhausting, I just felt full of joy when I went to bed. 

The rest of the week has mostly been regular chores, sewing, and Seminary preparations, with a few other events thrown in. I've also been working on getting to bed earlier and getting up earlier so that my body is accustomed to that routine before Seminary starts. I got up really early a few mornings (between 3:30 and 4:30) and not as early a few others (didn't get up until 6:00 today) but I'm working on it!

On Monday I woke up at 1:30 and didn't go back to sleep so I got a bunch of things done and then took a nap around 7:00 - 9:00 am. Also on Monday I went to lunch with three other friends in my ward (more were invited, but in the end only four of us were able to go). It was nice to visit with those three, though. Seth worked, but after he and Frank got home they got haircuts and then we all went to Rita's for family night treat and played a game for activity. I did a lot of quilting and I finished quilting the first August quilt block. 

On Tuesday I worked most of the day on Seminary stuff. Tammy and I made a list of things on Sunday that we needed to get done and then we divided up the list between us. I worked on an email to send to the parents (which included the information document and a link to the breakfast sign up that I created on Saturday, plus some other things like registration information). Besides that, I contacted a couple of parents to find out if their child is planning to attend Seminary this year (we have a few who registered last year but who never showed up or only came for a little while, so we try to reach out to those folks), contacted one of the youth to ask him if he will serve as Seminary class president this semester (he said yes 😊), and contacted the three bishops of kids in our class to see if they are still willing to provide breakfast once in a while. All the Seminary stuff, along with regular chores, took up most of the day but I did spend some time watching a mamma and baby deer in the back yard (the grass is getting so yellow because we haven't had any rain lately):

I also found time to sew the back onto the first August quilt block, so one of the August pillows is done:

The back looks like this:

On Wednesday Tammy and I met at the church for about 3 hours to do some planning. We got the first 3 weeks of lessons planned (not prepared; we just know what we're doing) and also made a list of potential guest teachers and contacted the bishops to get approval for those people to possibly teach sometime this year. I went to a lesson with the missionaries at 4:00. They were teaching a lady named Margaret. I picked her up from her house and took her to the church for the lesson. She seems like a very nice lady and I enjoyed getting to know her better. She was at church on Sunday and also came to the baptism and she said she loved church...that she felt very welcome; that it felt like a family. That was nice to hear. They taught her about the Book of Mormon and she asked "How can I get one of those?" So of course they gave her one...but it was cool because a few weeks ago they had asked us to write our testimonies in the front of a Book of Mormon so they could give it to someone and that is the one they gave her. 

One of the missionaries who has been serving in our ward since January is going home today so they came by later on Wednesday night so he could say good bye and get some pictures:

He was an excellent missionary and we will really miss him. He trained three missionaries while he was here (two of them visa waiters going to Jamaica) and they had 3 baptisms and really included the ward in everything they were doing. I learned a lot from them and it has been great to be more a part of missionary work than I have been in a long time. (Well, if I don't count teaching Seminary, because that has felt a LOT like serving a mission, and is missionary work in many ways!)

That night I also went through a bunch of blocks that I used last semester as a memorization aid for the doctrinal mastery scriptures and pulled out all the blocks that I could still use this semester. Each block has a word from the key phrase or reference written on it and I would put the blocks for two of the scriptures together in a bag and then give them to the kids to unscramble. So anyway, I pulled out all the blocks that had words on them that I can use again...mostly words like "the" and "is" and so on, although there were a few more specific ones like "Joseph", "Smith", "God", and "Jesus". Tammy thought it sounded like too much work to do that, but it actually went really fast once I had the thought to put all the words in alphabetical order so I could find what I was looking for quickly. And look, I found a whole bunch of blocks that I can re-use:

I will still need to go buy some more more blocks, though. I still have some blank ones, but not enough to create blocks for all 12 DM scriptures.

Yesterday was one of the days I got up really early so I enjoyed the sunrise and some more deer watching:

Frank had to go to a different location to do some stuff for work and it is about half way in between work and home, so after he was finished there, he came home to work for the rest of the day. We went to lunch together, which was nice. (Seth was at work.) 

That afternoon I started working on the second August pillow, using the new fabric I purchased. I re-cut two of the pieces and ironed them and then tried sewing them together and thankfully, it worked! I didn't have any problems. (I also didn't use any of the sizing / starch on the new fabric, so I know that must be what caused the problems before.) I was also able to get some nice sharp folds even without using the sizing / starch, so I wish I had just done that in the first place. Oh well! After I knew that the new fabric was going to work, I cut out the rest of the squares and ironed / folded all of them:

Then I sewed all of them together:

After that, the next step was to sew down all the flaps which was kind of a pain but I got that done too. Then I got out all the fabric squares I had previously cut and started laying them out on the background to figure out where I wanted to put each one. After some experimenting and a little input from Frank, Seth, and my friend Rebekah (I sent her photos), it looks like this:

I also ended up re-cutting a few of the squares because the prints are more directional than I realized so it looked better if I cut them differently (so that the beehives are right side up instead of sideways, for example). By the time I got all of that done, it was past time for bed so that's as far as I've made it with this pillow so far but I'm hoping to work on it some more today. The next step is to sew down the edges around all the "windows". Then I just have to add border strips and the back. 

Today Frank left really early to do some things at work and then he went to two clients to do some work for them, too. He is still on his way home from there (it's about lunch time) and he will work from home the rest of the day. Seth went to FCC to get his student ID and a parking pass, which turned out to be super easy so he was only gone for about 30 minutes, including travel time there and back. (Things were so much more complicated when I was in college! 😂) I have already got most of the budget done (just waiting for Frank to come home because he needs to look something up for me) so after lunch I should have some time to sew. Tonight Seth and I are going to go help set up tables and chairs for a family funeral luncheon that is happening tomorrow for another family in our ward. (An adult son who had a lot of health problems...I didn't really know him but his parents are friends that we have known for many years.) This is the third member or former member of our ward who has passed away this summer. Frank also has two clients whose fathers have passed away in the last couple of weeks and then Julia's mom too so we just know a lot of people who are grieving right now and have a lot of people in our prayers. 

I think the only other thing I could mention is that Frank applied for a new position at UMD this week. It's a management position that he knew earlier this summer may become available by fall. At first, he wasn't sure he wanted to apply for it, but after talking to the director that he would be working for (if he got the position) and finding out more about it, he decided to go ahead and apply. 

Today is Scott's birthday, so today marks 31 years ago that Frank and I became parents. It's been quite a journey and we are grateful for all the joy that Scott and all of our children bring us!! 

Weekly Review August 8 '25

I finished last week's post talking about issues with our phone line, so I'll start with an update on that. We do have our original phone number back now and the phone line is working. There have been some other issues that Frank has been trying to get resolved today but at least we have a working phone with the correct number!

I don't remember a lot about last Saturday except that I did a lot of packing for camp (which included a trip to the storage unit to get empty plastic bins and our insulated water dispenser). On Friday evening I ordered a couple of things that I realized it would be helpful to have (shower shoes, a toiletries bag) and they arrived on Saturday. (How did we survive without Amazon? 😅) I also tried working on the Cathedral Window pillow but ran into the same problems as last time so washing the fabric didn't work. I've decided that I am going to have to buy more fabric and start over, but I haven't had a chance to go look for some yet. There is a quilting store in Frederick that carries some fabric, so I'm going to try there first. I did get the other quilt block ready to quilt and started quilting it but since I was at YW camp most of this week I haven't had time to work on it much. 

I didn't put anything on the calendar for Sunday, so there were no extra meetings or choir practice or anything like that. I remember I took a short nap and that I talked to Jared for quite a while. 

Seth had to be at work on Monday morning at 8:00, so I took him to work and then went to the store to get some groceries. I needed to leave for camp by about 12:30 but before then I also got all the laundry done as well as vacuuming and I finished packing too of course. I got an early start that day because I woke up when Frank got up at 3:30 and didn't go back to sleep. Since I didn't fall asleep until nearly midnight the night before (I went to bed much earlier than that), I was operating on very little sleep. I did manage to squeeze in a short nap before I had to leave as well. 

The plan was to meet at the lead cook's house at 1:00 (her name is Lisa) so that we could all help transport food up to camp. I already had a lot of stuff in my car--besides my personal stuff, I was bringing several large plastic bins (for food storage...there are mice at camp), an insulated water cooler, my crock pot, my insta pot, a large bowl, my food chopper, and my food grater. But in spite of all of that, I did still have some room for food. Lisa decided to give me all the frozen & refrigerated items and then sent me on my way. I arrived at camp around 2:10, only to find out that we couldn't get into any of the buildings until 3:00. So I kept my car running with the air conditioning on for 45 minutes, hoping that none of the food would get too warm. It turned out okay, thankfully.

My experience at camp this year was much better than last year. Here's why:

1. We had beautiful weather, with high temperatures in the low 80s during the day and in the mid 60s overnight and low humidity. (Last year we had high humidity and temps in the high 90s every day.)
2. The kitchen had working air conditioning!!! (Last year there was no air conditioning. I brought 2 fans and a neck fan with me this year and I never used any of them.)
3. There were 4 people on the cooking crew (Last year there were 2 of us.)
4. We had 1 or 2 additional helpers each day, who stayed the entire day (Last year we had helpers for each meal but they weren't there in between meals to help with advance preparations. Also, some of last year's helpers didn't show up.)
5. The meals were a lot simpler this year. Most of them were a main dish that included toppings for variety. (Last year we had a lot more options at every meal...a salad bar for nearly every lunch and dinner, oatmeal with toppings and bacon for every breakfast, in addition to the main option, etc.)
6. We had a lot less food and a lot less equipment than last year, which made unloading, setting up, and loading / clean up a lot quicker and less overwhelming than last year. 
7. I put inserts in my shoes which helped my feet a lot. (Last year my feet would start hurting an hour or two into the day and would hurt for the rest of the day.)
8. I got to sit down several times every day. Some days I even got to sit down for an hour or two. This also helped with my foot problem. (Last year I never got to sit down.)

I won't give a play-by-play of what we did every day at camp. Most of the time we were cooking, of course. The other two people on the cooking crew (besides Lisa and me) were Michelle and Liz. Michelle is in my ward and we've served together in a couple of presidencies and are really good friends, so that made it extra fun. Lisa and Liz are both Seminary teachers (well, Lisa was a Seminary teacher last year but she is not going to be this year) so I already knew both of them although not as well as I know Michelle. They are all really great people, hard workers, and fun and inspiring to talk to. 

Camp was from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning. I slept at camp on Monday and Wednesday nights, but came home Tuesday night so that I could (theoretically) sleep better (I didn't) and take a nice shower in my own bathroom Wednesday morning (I did shower at camp on Monday evening but it's just a lot easier and nicer to shower at home.) On both Monday and Tuesday nights, I had trouble falling asleep and on Monday night I woke back up several times during the night. Once I fell asleep (finally!) on Tuesday night, I did sleep better but I had to get up a lot earlier since I had to shower and drive back to camp (30 minute drive) and get there by 6:30 am, so it was a really short night. On Wednesday night I fell asleep a lot quicker and only woke up once in the night so that was the best night's sleep I've had at camp, ever. In spite of a decent night's sleep on Wednesday night, I was falling asleep by 9:00 Thursday night.

My phone has no cell service at camp so I didn't have any contact with Frank and Seth except for briefly on Tuesday night. Seth was still up when I arrived home (around 10:00 pm) but Frank had already gone to bed. He did wake up when I came in and we had a very brief conversation. Then I woke up enough to give him a hug and kiss when he left for work (around 3:45 am) but that was it! I really missed being able to have contact with them. Because my phone didn't have service, I kept it back in my cabin most of the time and that means that I didn't take any pictures except for a few that I took on the way to camp. Right next to camp is a place called Red Caboose Farm and there was a beautiful meadow of wild flowers that I tried to photograph (as always, the photos don't do it justice). 

Although I didn't take pictures, some of the other cooks did take some photos and others took photos of us and shared them with us, so I do have a few photos.

Making pancakes on Wednesday morning. We had two helpers for the day, plus the teen age girl next to me came in and helped us a lot throughout the week. She was one of the Youth Committee Leaders, and she really enjoyed working in the kitchen so she came to help us as much as she could:

Lisa, Michelle and I  displaying lettuce we chopped up on Tuesday night for the Caesar salad wraps we were having for dinner on Wednesday:

We were listening to music while working and at one point on Tuesday started singing along and using our spoons for "microphones":

Our aprons say "Mess Sergeant" on them, btw. The theme of the this year's camp was "B.O.O.T. Camp" (BOOT stands for "Build Our Own Testimonies") so everything was military themed. All the leaders had T-shirts that said "General" on them and a lot of them wore camo pants or shorts. Really cute!

Michelle and I serving dinner on Tuesday (Hawaiian Haystacks):

Me, Kate (YCL who helped us a lot), and Michelle on Wednesday:

On Wednesday evening there was a music / dance competition. Each of the levels (1st years, 2nd years, etc.) prepared a song to perform. We thought it would be fun to do a song as the cooking crew so with some help from chat GPT, we wrote new words to the song "Eat It" (Weird Al Yankovitc parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It") with references to meals we actually made. At the end, we threw candy into the crowd. It was quite a hit! We won this award for our performance:

Liz, Lisa, Me, Michelle eating yogurt parfaits for breakfast on Thursday morning:

On Wednesday morning when we first starting making pancakes, the grill wasn't hot enough yet so the first pancakes burned (after the grill heated up) and it was a lot of work cleaning that up. Michelle took these photos of me showing that process:

Burned pancakes (Wednesday morning)

Cleaning (Wednesday evening)

Seasoned and totally cleaned (Thursday morning)

As I mentioned earlier, clean up / packing up was a lot easier this year and I was able to leave camp by about 10:30 am. I got home and unloaded everything and unpacked and ate lunch. Seth had gone to work shortly before I got home, but Frank was working from home (he doesn't usually work from home on Thursdays, but Seth needed a car to get to work so Frank got approval to work from home). After lunch I took a shower and helped finish laundry. When Seth got home from work, we went to Red Lobster for dinner. (I thought I deserved a break from cooking for one night!) 

Today I have been busy trying to get caught up on some of the things that need to be done after being gone for most of the week. I returned all the bins and the water dispenser to the storage unit and picked up some prescriptions for Frank and bought groceries. I also updated the budget and planned meals for next week before I started working on this post. I talked to Tanner for quite a while too. Tonight we went to the church for about an hour so that Frank could help a sister in our ward who is preparing for a 5th Sunday lesson...she needed help with some of the IT stuff. We stopped for ice cream cones on the way home and then sat in the car and talked until we were done with our ice cream. 

I asked Frank and Seth what they did while I was gone and they said "nothing", so I'm not purposely leaving them out...I just have no idea what they did all week!

I am glad to be back home but I really had a great time at camp. Now I will be diving into Seminary preparations, since there are only 2 1/2 weeks until Seminary starts.