More swimming and Father's Day

Swimming lessons were good again this week. Cecily, my girl who will not let even a drop of water touch her eyes when she's bathing, actually learned to dunk her entire head under the water at swimming lessons and enjoy it. Yay!

Cecily playing dead, taken by the lovely Mira.

Tuesday the pool heater was broken and the water had gotten so cold that they canceled lessons. I thought it was fortuitous because that day, the summer dollar movie was Lego Batman and we were going to have to be late because of swimming lessons. Lessons ended at 10 and the movie started at 10. We got all ready and arrived on time and they sold out! I didn't even know that was possible. Especially since I paid the money to buy a pass that covered all the movie showings. They were offering a showing of Captain Underpants as a consolation prize, but none of my kids were interested in that. We were all pretty disappointed and annoyed.

We ended up going clothes shopping. As summer came on, I realized I didn't have a lot of shirts I could wear without something layered over the top. And I didn't have a lot of skirts that were in fashion. Besides, since I'm in the Relief Society presidency in my ward, I have to sit in front of all the women every week and even knee-length skirts can show a lot more than I'd like from that angle. Since we were at the mall anyway because of the no-go movie, I decided to look in one of the stores. And then I saw that Sears was going out of business and had 40% off everything, so I wanted to check out their selection. And then I had to look at a third store in Spanish Fork because a friend had recommended it for dresses and I wanted to see if they had cuter/cheaper things than the 1st store because the first store had a TON of cute things, but they were pricier than I would have liked. So it ended up being an epic shopping trip (from 10am until 5pm!). My kids were with me the whole time and they were so good. I rented Lego Batman from Amazon for them to watch that night. They earned it. :)

Emilia had a church activity on Thursday. Her activity days leader has a pool, so she got a pool party with pizza, lucky kid.

I kept myself busy with serving a sister in the ward Monday, cleaning out the garage to get ready for a garage sale that the kids wanted to put on, putting old bookshelves and other furniture in the classifieds, picking up a new set of bookshelves, rearranging the playroom, plus all of the normal weekly stuff.

My parents came down Friday afternoon to bring us our new couch. The old one was one of Cecily's favorite places to jump, despite our continued admonitions to NOT do that. Since it was only a $200 couch to begin with, you can imagine how well it held up. Can you visualize the vinyl peeling off and the springs falling out the bottom? It served us well, and I actually loved that couch while it lasted. But it was time for something new.

The garage sale didn't go super well. Mostly because it was all toys and a few furniture items, so no one wanted to get out of their cars to look. We only had four shoppers, so the girls only made $7 each. They were only open for an hour and a half, so for a 6 yo and and 8yo, I think that's a decent hourly wage.

Saturday was productive but fairly relaxing. The girls had the garage sale until about 10:30, then Steve mowed the lawn, I played a new computer game for a couple of hours (which is weird for me--I almost never play computer games--who has time for that?), we cleaned bathrooms, and Steve chopped down the low-hanging branches on our Russian Olive tree while I made bbq chicken and salad for dinner. Then I took a couple of hours to cut all the newly-trimmed branches into manageable pieces while Steve played with the kids. I played the game a little bit more before bed. (It's addicting!)

Wilda asked me to make dessert for Father's Day dinner and when I asked Steve what he wanted he told me to pick something gluten-free and make it. (I'm trying to eat gluten free because it seems to mess with my skin and my moods pretty bad. I don't remember if I've mentioned that before.) So I got on Pinterest and found some things that looked tasty. Normally I go for chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate and Steve goes for lemon or berry stuff. But last night strawberry ice box cake, funnel cakes, or fruit pizza sounded really good. I thought I was set! So I asked Steve which one he wanted and he was like, "What about that crumb cake? Or that chocolate cake looks good." Ugh. So then I was like, "What about banana split icebox cake?" (because that has fruit and chocolate). And he was like, "Well if you're not going to listen to me, why did you even ask?" So I thought, "Fine. It's Father's Day, I'll make what he wants. So I decided to go with Better Than Sex Cake because at least that has whipped cream and is chilled. So I ran to the store to get whipping cream and gluten-free cookies or candy bars to put on top. Of course they were out of whipping cream. And of course, the gluten-free oreos are $5 for 1/2 the number of oreos than a normal container. So I got Cool Whip instead and shelled out the 5 bucks for oreos because, darn it, if I wasn't getting my berries, I was at least going to get the decadent chocolate cake. (It turns out it didn't matter, because they were completely out of strawberries too. Haha!)

Steve got spoiled for Father's Day today. Smith's had Ribeye on sale for 6.77 a pound, so we grilled that up, along with fresh corn on the cob, watermelon, a salad, baked potatoes (because Steve hates corn), and sauteed mushrooms. *sigh* That's a meal to go down in the record books. So good. Plus we had my decadent cake for dessert. Add a great game of Castles of Mad King Ludwig to round out the evening, and it was a practically perfect day. I hope all of you fathers out there had a wonderful day, too!