Sabrina's nesting, Steve's mishaps, and lots of other stuff too

Monday started off with a bang. My dad and I went raspberry picking while Cecily hung out with my mom. We were the only ones there and there were TONS of berries. I got about seven or eight pounds in less than two hours.

Emilia and Mira got out at noon, so we had to be back to pick them up. I don't remember what I did during the afternoon, but that evening, I cooked up five pints of raspberry syrup and canned them. I'm so excited to try it out on pancakes and ice cream and such.

Tuesday morning, i woke up at 7 am and went to the hospital lab to have my glucose test done. I was there until 9:15 and my results came back normal. Phew. I don't have to do the 3-hour test! Woot!

I hurried home and made pancakes for breakfast to settle my stomach and then went to a meeting for the teacher appreciation committee at the school. I purposely didn't sign up to be on any committees this year and I signed up to help with fall class parties for each of the girls (2 Thanksgiving and 1 Christmas) because I knew I would be useless after the baby came. But a woman in my ward decided to sign up to do everything this year because her youngest is in kindergarten at the school. She is the room mom for 2 rooms, is on the PTA, is heading the teacher appreciation committee, and is a room helper for one of her kids. So she pretty much strong-armed everyone who goes to the park Wednesday mornings to be on her committee. I figure she at least knew the state I was in before she asked me to help, so it's her problem if I'm totally unhelpful after the new year.

I had my writing critique group in the afternoon. While my pages were being critiqued, I peeled 6 cups of peaches from the bags that Wilda gave me last Sunday. The group talked until school got out and then I had a friend come visit who moved out of the neighborhood two years ago. She stayed until 5pm and during the last part of her visit, I started making pie crust to use with all the peaches I'd peeled. Once I had the gluten-free pie dough in the fridge, I had to run to Walmart because I'd gotten an email earlier in the day saying the firefighters were in urgent need of certain items and if we wanted to contribute to drop the items off by 6:30. I texted a bunch of other ladies in my ward and my parents and five of us pitched in to get a bunch of stuff for the men and women fighting the wildfires. After I dropped that off, I cooked dinner and then I put the pie together and baked it. I haven't had a good peach pie since I stopped eating gluten, but I think i finally found a good recipe. This pie was heaven. I ate most of it myself (all but 3 pieces). Ha!

Steve and I also folded clothes after the kids were in bed that night. We watched another Jack Ryan and I repeal anything good I said about it. This episode had a fairly graphic sex scene which Steve tried to fast forward through, but it was very long and I wanted to burn it out of my mind for days afterward. It also had a woman nearly raped, and innocent children being ordered to death (though the people didn't follow through with the orders), and Jack Ryan was only in the show for maybe 15 minutes. We will not be watching that show again. It's frustrating that Steve and I can't find one television show that we both enjoy that is clean. How are we supposed to fold clothes TV-show makers? How?

I think I overdid it that day because Wednesday, I basically sat on the couch and hated everyone, especially myself. I could tell it was depression, so I tried to not be too hard on myself. It's just frustrating to go from such a productive day/person to someone who has a hard time caring whether they've showered recently or whether her kids rot their brains with non-stop electronics. On the up side, Steve and I finally found some names for this bebe that we both like. I didn't think it would happen, but I'm excited to narrow it down.

Thursday, Cecily slept in. She usually sleeps until at least 9am, but she didn't get up until almost 10 that morning. While she slept in, I cleaned my whole kitchen (everything but mopping the floors) and put ribs in the crockpot for dinner. After Cecily was up and fed, we went to my parents' house to do family history. My mom kindly made us a yummy lunch again and while Cecily was in school, I went shopping. I made knoephla and green beans to go with our ribs and man, was that a tasty dinner.  And I got to work on my writing after the kids were in bed, so it was a great day for me.

I decided Friday morning that Cecily and I needed some bonding time, so we built stuff with legos after she woke up until it was time to take her to school. I helped her put together this dragon, which was an altered version of a dragon they'd gotten a while ago.

I worked most of the afternoon on writing and we had tons of leftovers, so the girls and i ate those for dinner. We were supposed to meet Steve at a park in Orem at 6:30 where the kids could play and Steve and I could play frisbee golf as our "date." But right as I was about to reach the park, I got a call from Steve. He had somehow run the side of our car into a light pole in his work parking lot (the sun blinded him to it, he says) and I had to research tow trucks (Steve doesn't have wireless internet on his phone) and then go pick him up. We let the kids have ice cream that night and I ate the last of my pie in consolation for missing out on the fun evening we'd planned.

Saturday, I found this in Cecily's backpack. It's a bus she made in kindergarten and it's even cuter if you can see the people she drew on the window squares.

I got to help my parents reorganize their garage for most of the day on Saturday, but they took me and Ben out to lunch at Culver's so that made us even. :) Steve cleaned the church again, then mowed the lawn, and then brought the kids over after lunch and helped with some of the heavy lifting. When we got home, I needed to make a side to take to the brisket dinner the Elder's Quorum was putting on at the church. Steve wanted jalapeno cheese cornbread, so I made a 9x13 gluten free version. Then we showered and got ready. As we were leaving, Steve somehow broke the handle on the cake pan and dropped the entire pan down our steps. It splatted very nicely right behind our front door. *sigh* Today, he managed to cut his finger on regular sewing thread and drop a container of sour cream out of the fridge which opened and got all over the kitchen floor. It was not his weekend.

Today we got to hear from an apostle, Elder Bednar, in a special stake conference. I loved his wife's message: ways we can find Christ in our everyday lives; our stake president's message: don't get complacent in our discipleship; and Elder Bednar's message: listen to your stake president--he holds the priesthood keys to receive revelation for our part of the world. He reiterated what the stake president said with examples from his travels around the world. It was very uplifting and made me want to make an action plan to follow through on the council given. I will have to work on that during my scripture study tomorrow.

All-in-all a pretty good week, don't you think?

fun and productive

I told my friend Julia last week that I could no longer handle helping her every week. I didn't want to keep going after the baby was born because I didn't want to work around nap schedules or worry about entertaining her while I'm working for an hour. But I thought maybe I could keep going until the baby came.

My schedule lately has been so crazy that I found that I was resenting having to take the time to go help her. I felt like it was taking away from me keeping my house running or keeping other commitments or from being able to have a little bit of downtime to care for my own mental health. I was going to find someone in our ward who could take over for me, but when I talked to the lady who is both her ministering sister and in the Relief Society presidency, she told me that there are already a bunch of other people in the ward helping Julia on a regular basis and the lady thought I just needed to let her rely on herself and the others for now. She also knew of a program in the community where elderly people can apply to have a companion come help them with things a few hours a week, so she was going to help her sign up for that if she was interested. So I feel like I did my due duty in trying to get her help. I also am glad that I've been able to do it for the year+ that I did. It was beneficial to both of us, I think.

This last week felt so open without that on my schedule, but it filled up quickly, of course.

Monday is my laundry day, plus my critique group got moved to Monday this week because one of the members was flying to England on Tuesday. (I'm not jealous at all. Nope. No jealousy coming from over here. Why would I be jealous?) That took 2 hours of my day. Plus it was early out day for my kids, we needed to go to the library, Cecily had dance class and Mira had gymnastics.

Cecily has been in gymnastics for 2 1/2 years and I think she was getting a little bored, so she told me about a month ago that she wanted to try ballet and hip hop. I asked her multiple times she was sure she wanted to quit gymnastics and try dance. She emphatically told me yes every time. So I signed her up for a ballet/jazz class (nobody teaches hip hop to five year olds). The class didn't start for a month after I signed her up and Monday was her first class. She flipped out. Screamed at me for fifteen minutes that she didn't want to go. I finally convinced her to try 1 class and see if she liked it. So we went. She smiled the whole time and was really quite good for it being her first class. But then she screamed all the way home saying she hated it and never wanted to go back; she just wanted to keep doing gymnastics. *eye roll* I would make her stay in dance just to prove a point, but it's WAY easier for me to take both Cecily and Mira to the same place at the same time than to drive them both to separate places at different times and entertain them during the other kid's class. So no more dance class for Ces.

I found her and the cat like this Monday morning after her sisters went to school.

 I also sanded down this dresser on Monday. It's for the Childresses and I got it for $10 at DI. It's nice real wood. I forgot to take a before picture, but it was all black. This picture was after I sanded down the whole thing with 60 grit sandpaper, which took the paint off all the edges.

Throughout the week, I worked on finishing it. I painted it white one day, spraypainted the drawer faces another day, spraypainted and reattached the hardware a fourth. What I really wanted to do was make the drawer fronts mirrored, but that would have required getting a mirror and having it cut to the exact dimensions of the drawer fronts (or risk doing the cutting myself and getting the special tool for it) and then drilling holes in it for the drawer pulls. That would have been a lot of extra time or money which I really just couldn't justify spending. So I used black, copper, and gold spray paint I already owned + a plastic bag. This is the finished product:

Tuesday, I hosted another activity Days after school. It was one of the girls' birthdays, so I decided to do a fun day to celebrate. I made sugar cookies (from a mix) and decorated the table with a bright tablecloth and some streamers. When the girls arrived, we mixed up some homemade face masks and let them dry while listening to meditation/relaxation exercise. Then I got out all my nail polish and let them do their own manicures. It was interesting to see the different colors and patterns they all chose.

No pictures of that. But Mira was bored and didn't want to join us. :)

I also played Legos with Cecily that morning, did some writing, and folded laundry before making dinner.

Wednesday, I took Cecily to a play date at the park in the morning, worked on the dresser, made dinner (two nights in a row!), and watched a TV show with Steve after the kids were in bed. My kids are always disbelieving when I tell them that I probably watch 1 hour of TV a week. Some weeks it's 2 or 3 if I don't have a good book to listen to while I work on projects, but otherwise, it's about an hour a week. So watching a show with Steve was a nice break. We tried the new Jack Ryan series on Amazon. It's pretty good. The first episode had some unnecessary swearing and a bit of gore, but it was war-related and didn't bother me as much as other TV shows have.

Thursday, the fires south of us really picked up. There are two--Pole Creek and Bald Mountain fires. The news says that the went from 3400 acres to over 20,000 in about 8 hours on Thursday, and this was the view from my house all day.

They've had to evacuate about 5000 people so far and one of the highways through the canyons has been closed for 4 days now. I'm sure everyone would appreciate prayers for the firefighters and for rain for our desert state.

Cecily went to school that day with 12 bows in her hair--6 pairs that went all the way around her head. She felt very beautiful.

I also did family history with my mom that morning and she was nice enough to make us a pancake and sausage lunch.

Steve and I got to go on a date Friday night. We had a picnic and then played frisbee golf in the near-dark at Scera Park in Orem. Then we got Jamba Juices (smoothies) at the exact same place we had our very first date. It was nicely nostalgic. I convinced Steve to walk through Savers with me since he never went garage saling with me. He found some new shirts and I found some cheap cotton yarn. It was a perfect date. :)

I had to finish my sub for writing group before I went to bed, so I worked on that after we got home. I didn't quite get it finished, so I worked on it the next day as we drove to and from a family outing to Thanksgiving Point gardens. It was one of our Visit Salt Lake pass places. It was okay. Very hot. A lot of walking. There was a good amount of shade, but not in the flower gardens, so it made us just want to sit in the shade and look at the flowers from a distance.

Before we left on our outing, Steve went and helped clean the church again and I went to a garage sale that advertised baby girl clothes. They actually didn't have a ton of baby clothes. It was mostly toddler stuff, but I did pick up a few cute, name brand items.

The sunrise was really pretty that morning because of all the smoke. There is ash on everything, too.

Random picture Mira took of herself.

Pictures from the gardens.

After our outing, we came home and cleaned house and I finished up my sub and sent it off. Saturday night, Steve went to the temple and I took the girls out for ice cream at the new Farr Better Ice Cream in Payson. It was just as good as the one in Orem that we used to go to until it closed. This was the sunset on the way:

At Farr Better you get to serve your own soft-serve ice cream and add whatever toppings you like from a topping bar. There are about 10 different flavors of soft serve. I tried huckleberry and brownie batter with brownie pieces, butterfinger pieces, nuts, hot fudge and caramel. Mira got raspberry dole whip and brownie batter with fresh strawberries and chocolate chunks. Cecily got plain old vanilla with gummy bears, m&ms and sprinkles. Emilia got brownie batter with sprinkles, m&ms, oreo bits, hot fudge, and whipped cream. Yummy.

After the kids went to bed, I finished quilting my quilt (finally!) while listening to my current book and then Steve and I watched the second episode of Jack Ryan.

The girls drew some fun stuff at church today.

And tonight we'll head to Nick and Wilda's for dinner. I look forward to another week of growing a baby, hanging out with my kids and husband, and checking things off my to-do list. What's on your to-do list?

Outings and other adventures

So the puffballs that Mira wore on her first day of school were ones she bought herself. She doesn't want Cecily wearing them for good reason--Cecily pays no attention to what she's doing (hence her constantly falling or running into things), so it's very likely that Cecily would get annoyed with them in the middle of the day, take them out, and leave them wherever she was. I don't blame Mira in the least. But I got tired of Cecily trying to steal them. So I looked into getting her some of her own. But I couldn't find any locally that were colors Cecily would like (gray is way to boring for this girl), so I started to look on etsy. But on etsy, to get a good price, you had to buy 10 of them--which would be fine if I could get two puffballs of five different colors. But you could only pick two colors. Why in the world would I want five puffballs of the same color? One of the listings talked about them being homemade. So I googled it. And they are SUPER easy to make! The fur isn't cheap--the least I found it for was $20/yard at Joann's. But since you only need 1/8 of a yard to make like 10 puffballs, it ends up not being that expensive. You just end up with ten puffballs of the same color. Haha! The jokes on me. (I realize now that I told you this already. Sorry.)

So anyway. I made puffballs out of Cecily's choice of colors for her first day of kindergarten. I think they were the perfect accessory to her outfit. I I love what she picked. A funky sequined heart shirt, fuchsia pants with silver glittery spots on them, and fuchsia sandals with sequined pineapples on them. It's just so Cecily--vibrant and funky and fun.

She was all about the photo shoot, too.

She had a bunch of poses up her sleeve.

She made me take one with her leg up like this because "it's like I'm running into my classroom." Haha! She's so funny.

This pose was all her. Where does she come up with this stuff?

Gah. Those eyes. That mischief hiding behind them. *heart eyes*
We're in trouble in 3 - 8 years. There is too much gorgeousness tossed around in this house.

She started school last Tuesday. And I was so excited to have down time in the afternoons to write. Hah! It's only happened once in 2 weeks. I keep myself too busy to sit down for two hours straight. :)

I thought another belly picture was in order. I am 24 weeks in this picture. A little over half-way there.

I took Cecily to the mall play area before school one day so I could have time to work on my writing. I also got my hair color touched up and finished my Independent Study course.

Last Saturday, we were assigned to clean our church building. Mostly because Steve just got called as the new building cleaning coordinator. Since there are three wards in our building, we only have to clean it Sept thru Dec. So Steve has to assign each family in the ward to clean it one Saturday during that time. About 3/4 of them won't show up to do it, so Steve will probably end up doing a lot of building cleaning over the next four months, but he's been very dedicated about it so far and I'm proud of him

The kids and I didn't actually end up going down for our turn because Cecily slept until about 10 minutes before they were going to be done. So I got up and mowed the lawn so Steve wouldn't have to do that, too, when he got home. You use a surprising amount of muscles to use a lawnmower. And I scratched myself like three times and bruised my ankle really good. I guess Cecily doesn't get all of her clumsiness from her dad. ;)

Mira made a Duplo castle that day and had to take about 10 pictures of it. This isn't the best picture, but you get the idea.

This was Mira's hair for church.

Monday was Labor Day, so we decided to use our Visit Salt Lake passes. We were going to go to Red Butte Gardens, but we found out last minute that they were doing free admissions on Labor Day, so we wouldn't even need to use our passes and it was probably going to be ridiculously busy. So we went to the Zoo instead. Parking was a nightmare, but the Zoo itself actually didn't feel overly crowded.

The girls had been grouchy, rebellious, and contentious all weekend. I had hoped getting to do a fun outing would help them turn their attitudes around, but it ended up just making me and Steve want to throttle them.

The elephant show--where we got to sit in the shade--was probably my favorite part of the day.

The Sea Lions were pretty cool, too. There was one that was bigger than me.

Cecily and the grizzly bear had a moment . . .

. . . before he went back to making dents in a bone with his enormous canines.

The red panda was what Cecily was the most excited about.

That night, we went to a park and had a picnic dinner with my parents and Ben's family. It was the only part of the day where my kids seemed happy, so it was good.

I found this sucker in my garden on Wednesday. My zucchini plant has been super weird this summer. It's only produced five zucchini all summer, I think. So I stopped checking it regularly. And then I go out to find the godzilla of zucchinis growing out there. Who knows what would have happened if I'd waited any longer. Maybe it would have started eating the neighbor kids.

I also picked all of these on Wednesday.

And on Saturday, I turned them into these:

On Thursday when I was heading to my mom's for family history, Cecily asked me to take her to the art museum. There's no way I could turn that down, so I took her on Friday. They were doing a quilt exhibit, which was highly disappointing to Cecily. I found it fascinating. Especially since I just put together my second quilt of my life. I learned a bunch just from making this super simple quilt and was awed by the talent (and patience) displayed. But, since Cecily was so disappointed, I got her a donut when we stopped to get buns for dinner at the grocery store. We also had friends for dinner that night and I stayed up late finishing some revisions and new chapters to submit to my writing group.

Saturday, after cleaning the church and canning salsa and mowing the lawn again, Steve and I took a load of new stuff up to the Childresses. Then he scrubbed the kitchen floor, showered the girls, and put them to bed while I went to the temple. Isn't he a good guy?

The temple had so many beautiful blooms and I love the spirit of peace I feel when I'm inside. It was nice to go. And when I got home, Steve and I watched BYU get beat by Berkeley and stayed up too late reading (for me) and playing Stardew Valley (for Steve).

Today a returned missionary from our ward gave a talk in church that was amazing. He talked about how doing the small things, like reading our scriptures daily, praying daily, attending church, etc. is the way we receive God's power in our lives and how those small things make huge positive differences in any person's life. I loved his stories and his obvious closeness to the Spirit. It brightened my spirit and my day.