I brought the girls with me to the school, first of all, because I wasn't sure anybody would show up (and I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a babysitter and paying them if I wasn't going to get paid anyway). And second of all, the school doesn't mind if they're there, so why not, right?
When we went to leave, Cecily was convinced she could drive us home. If it wasn't so hot in the car, it would have been cute. It still was cute, I guess, but she would have pretended for a lot less time if I had my way. The picture of me and Emilia and Mira is us in the passenger seats.
Since I didn't have to teach, I took the girls to the library. Emilia goes through books like candy in the summer, so we have to replenish her stack regularly. Cecily loves the stairs at the library. I think because she's not supposed to go upstairs (there aren't any books up there).
Steve's grandma on his dad's side lives near us in an assisted living facility. She's getting dementia pretty bad, but Nick is so faithful in attending to her needs and visiting her. He was gone on vacation this week, though, and so when Beverly wouldn't eat on Wednesday, we went to visit her to try to cheer her up. It seemed to work pretty good, since she seemed much better when we visited again Friday night.
Thusrday was a little bit frustrating and a little bit cathartic. It was frustrating because I made plans with a friend on Tuesday to go to a splash pad and then she called Tuesday morning and cancelled. Then Thursday, I made plans to go to Utah Lake with a friend and she called Thursday morning and cancelled. That was on top of being cancelled on by two other families the previous week. So I was feeling unloved and like I had a bunch of unreliable friends. So Thursday afternoon, I took the girls to run errands. It was cathartic because my errands list is about a mile long and I was able to check off more than half of it. We went to Hobby Lobby that day and the girls found lots of interesting things to play with.
The friend who canceled on Thursday rescheduled for Friday, so she got herself back in my good graces. :) It ended up that Utah Lake was "closed" because there is a man-killing algae growing in it right now (Steve found out later that they think its because the government has been forcibly removing the carp from Utah Lake because sport fishers hate them, but they eat the man-killing algae, so I guess they're good for something). Instead, we went to Bartholemew Family Park, which is a reservoir from a dam on Hobble Creek that they dumped a bunch of sand next to. They add fish, too, so people can fish if they want. But mostly, we just played in the sand and splashed in the freezing cold water. It is mountain run-off after all.
After we visited great-grandma on Friday, we went to feed the ducks. It was a super cool outing. We got to feed the ducks, as planned, and all of them were pretty little still, so they were cute cute cute. Then, Steve spotted a beaver munching on something growing in the bottom of the irrigation ditch. We watched it for a good fifteen minutes, bobbing up and down to grab something off the bottom and then munch it above the water.
This picture is of the girls watching the beaver. He was literally fifteen feet from us.
The other cool thing was the sunset as we were leaving. God lit the sky on fire. It was unbelievably gorgeous.
I also found a tree that looked like a skeleton was trapped inside of it. Weird, but cool, right?
Today is Emilia's 8th birthday. I'm good at birthday parties, but I'm kind of terrible at making the actual day of their birthday's special. So Emilia got chocolate chip pancakes from a mix two hours after she woke up this morning. And tonight she's getting the regular ice cream and grandma and grandpa's. That's about all we're doing to celebrate the day.
In my defense, yesterday, we had cookies and ice cream for her neighborhood friends, this coming Friday, we're having a party with some of her cousins, and Saturday we're celebrating with my side of the family. Plus grandma and grandpa Watts will take her birthday shopping some time this week, and on August 6th, she'll be getting baptized and we'll have a party for that, too.
It's kind of cute why we had a neighborhood party and a cousins party. I told the girls last year that I'm not doing a themed big party for all of them every year. So they get one every other year (until Cecily is old enough and then I don't know what we'll do). This was Emilia's year to not have a themed party (because Mira got a Star Wars party for her birthday. Emilia wanted to have a Pokemon party at a pool and invite her friends, but I told her she should invite her cousins, since her cousins like Pokemon and her friends don't even know what they are. Apparently, she'd already told her friends that she was doing a party, so she felt really really bad about going back on her word and disappointing them. So yesterday's party wasn't really a party. I baked cookies and bought a thing of ice cream and we invited her friends to come and partake. Then we walked around the neighborhood for 45 minutes trying to catch Pokemon in the PokemonGo app on my phone. No prep, almost no money, and no presents. But she'll get that on Friday with her cousins.
No comments:
Post a Comment