anniversary, school, soccer

I just read a news article that says screen time for children is like digital heroin. It's just as addicting to them as cocaine and heroin and stimulates the same part of the brain. This is bothering me. I already feel guilty over so many things as a mom. And I'm pretty sure Cecily is on her way to being a screen addict. *hangs head and cries*

In more regular news, Steve and I had our 10-year anniversary this week. We went out to dinner and played at Nickle Mania to celebrate.

Emilia enjoyed her first week of school. Her teacher seems really willing to help challenge her and in my one interaction with her seemed very nice. Mira will start on Tuesday of this week. I'm excited for that. She and Cecily are NOT friends lately. They're kinda driving me crazy.

Emilia also started soccer recently. This week? Last week? Things are kind of blending together. She doesn't like running, so I'm not sure why she wanted to play soccer. But other than that whole running thing, she seems to have fun. :)

This super-flattering picture was captured by Cecily at Emilia's last game.

Other pictures from this week:

Us at my podiatrist appointment. My arches have fallen. Getting older is kind of poopy. But I have cute girls to hobble after, so that's something, right?

Mira built this castle and wanted a picture to commemorate.

Last week before school starts

We had a good, full week. And it didn't feel overly busy, so that's pretty impressive. I haven't been writing lately and I'm surprised at how relaxed I've felt just taking that one thing off my plate. I'll have to decide if that needs to be a permanent thing so I can be sane or if school starting will open up my schedule enough to make writing feasible again.

We fed the ducks for family home evening this week. We found a new place in Provo that has lots of ducks. I would feel guilty feeding ten pieces of bread to five ducks, but if there's fifty of them, I feel no guilt whatsoever. They're friendly and there's a nice playground right next to the pond, so that will probably become our new duck-feeding place.

Tuesday the kids had doctor appointments and we fed the missionaries for dinner. Wednesday, Emilia started soccer practice, which is kind of a relief and kind of not. A relief because we promised Emilia at the beginning of summer that she could play soccer in the fall . . . a-a-and then I forgot to sign her up. So she had to go on a waiting list. Thankfully she got on a team before games even started--so relief. But ugh. Games two days a week for two months is ridiculous and totally not a relief. :) Cecily had an Olympic games at tumbling that day and Grandma Watts was able to come down on her lunch break and watch. Cecily felt super important, so that's the important thing. :)

Thursday, I went school shopping while the girls were at the babysitters, and then that night I had writing group. Luckily I have two books completely written that need revising, so even though I'm not writing, I'll have plenty to submit to writing group for a long time to come.

Friday and Saturday were reserved for more family "staycation" time, this time with Steve. The girls and I went up to see my parents Friday morning so we could all go before school started. Steve got off work at 3:30 and then we went to see The Secret Life of Pets as a matinee. Then we went out to dinner at this totally disgusting restaurant. It was Steve's pick and he said I could blame him for wasting money and calories on that dive. :)

Saturday was really fun. I got up with Emilia and Mira and went to some garage sales. They got a new necklace each and some new stuffed animals and My Little Ponies and Barbie clothes. I also bought a rolling pin so each girl can have one when they play with Playdoh. I just realized, I didn't buy a single thing for me!

Then we ate lunch and went to the Provo Rec Center to swim and go down water slides. Cecily loved the water slides and everybody was worn out after a couple of hours there, so we went home and got dinner ready while the kids watched some television to relax. We all went out for ice cream at Farr's for dessert and then after the kids were in bed, Steve and I played Marco Polo and I actually won! I never win against Steve, so that was an exciting cap to the weekend of fun.

Baptism and a focus on the kids

I didn't post last week. I was worn out!

Emilia got baptized on Saturday the 6th at 11:30am and we invited everyone who attended to come have lunch at our house after. We also had Steve's sister, Cindy, and her family come stay at our house. It's not often we get visitors here since both of our parents live nearby. Most people that come from far away stay with them. But Joe and Cindy wanted to make the weekend special for Emilia (and Joe and Steve wanted to play games after the kids were in bed), so they decided to stay with us and we were so happy to host them.

Emilia and Steve before the baptism.

Cecily wanted to take a picture of me.

The only picture I took of everybody who came.

Emilia, Mira, Jane, and Meg sang a song.

It did make for a bit of a crazy week preparing everything. I had to get paper products and food, clean bathrooms and finish projects that were cluttering up useful space.

I also entered two contests that week and had to prepare my entries. One was a writing contest and one was an illustrating contest. For the writing contest, I had to submit a first chapter and a query letter and then the contest people could request more of my manuscript. I had someone request my full manuscript on that Saturday, which should have been awesome, but unfortunately, I still had a couple areas I needed to touch up at the end of the manuscript, so I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning Saturday night working on those so I could send it off the next day. I realized later that I probably shouldn't have entered since it was the same weekend as Emilia's baptism, but hindsight is 20/20 or something like that.

This is my illustration entry. The theme was "A brilliant flash of light lit up the night sky."

This week was much more laid back. I gave myself a break from writing for a while and tried to focus on the kids.

Thursday, we decided to use the all-venue pass to Thanksgiving Point that Mira won at the art contest last year. We could go to the dinosaur museum, the discovery museum, the gardens, and Farm Country for free, but we had to do it all in one day. They should call those things Parental Torture Passes.

I went in with a good attitude and A LOT of food, so it actually turned out pretty good. We hit Farm Country first and the girls fed the birds and rode ponies and took a wagon ride. Then we had a snack and headed to the dinosaur museum. We made it about half-way through before needing lunch, so we went outside and ate our lunch with Steve. He only works a few miles from the dinosaur museum, so he drove over and hung out with us on his lunch break. After lunch, the girls played in the sand/water table for a good 35 minutes before finishing the rest of the exhibits. Another snack, and we headed to the discovery museum. We were all tired by that point, but we soldiered on. The Kidopolis area was a lot of fun for them (though it stresses me out every time--so much chaos!). The Waterworks area was wet and a little underwhelming, though probably fun during the winter when splash pads aren't a regular play time thing. Then we headed to the Discovery Gardens area where we all pretty much broke down. It was 7pm and we'd arrived at Thanksgiving Point at 10:30am and we'd only had one meal. So after giving them a fifteen minute warning, we checked out a little bit of the Rainforest area and headed home. They had a cool game in the Rainforest that I wish we could get at home. They projected it from the ceiling and then the kids had to run around stomping on things to win the games. It would be great for getting energy out in the winter. Cecily especially loved it.

Friday we had to bathe everybody, and the girls had a playdate, and then we ate junk food and watched TV in the evening. I put together some of our Lego sets to see which pieces were missing. The pieces on Lego.com are cheap (like 10-20 cents a piece), but they charge you $6 in shipping no matter what, so I wanted to make sure I ordered everything we needed at the same time.

Saturday, the girls were so good and helped me clean the house before we went to a North Dakota reunion party for all of us church types who've moved to Utah from North Dakota. (There's a lot of us!)

Steve and I did go on a date Tuesday night because we knew we wouldn't have time to do it any other day this week. We played a round of frisbee golf and got eaten by mosquitoes, then got a treat and walked around downtown Provo. The Provo City Center Temple was gorgeous in the twilight and I got a bunch of Pokestops so Cecily could catch Pokemon during the week without exhausting our supply of Pokeballs. (She ADORES Pokemon Go, but is kind of terrible at it. She'll use like 18 pokeballs to catch 1 pokemon and you only get 1-3 of them per pokestop. I refuse to pay actual money for them.)

Also, I promised to show you before and after pictures when I finished the bathroom. And I did! Hooray for finishing things and getting them off my to-do list.

Here is the bathroom prepped to paint it the first time. This was the beautiful yellow both our bathrooms were when we bought our house. (I'm being sarcastic on the beautiful part.)

And here it is without the blue tape. and a fresh coat of gray paint. I thought I wanted it gray, and it looks nice gray, but then I changed my mind on the theme and repainted it for the final project. Don't you love it when you have to do things twice because you didn't get it right the first time?

And finally, here is my lovely new bathroom that only took me 8 months to complete. I painted the cabinet, found a new countertop on the classified adds, made a new frame for the mirror, and added shelves and decor. Oh and changed the light fixture. What do you think?

Side by side comparison: