adventures in space and bounciness

I wrote a post last week and forgot to publish it. Whoops! So you get two this week.

I exercised five days again this week! That feels like such an accomplishment to me. It's nice having kids old enough that I can have a routine. 

I took Cecily the the Bounce House this week, so I could work on writing while she played. She loves it. It's such a great little place. This first picture, you can't really see her because she is across the room on that farthest bouncy slide. She was yelling at me from there to take her picture. The next picture is a zoom of the same thing. She cracks me up.

She was afraid to try the climbing wall, so I had to walk over there with her, but once she got over her fear, she was great at it. It's so good for her to get her energy out that way.

This is a picture of Steve and my girls as we read scriptures one more before school. It made my heart swell.

This is a story I posted on Instagram that I'll just copy and paste here:

The Lord works in mysterious ways, as they say. We took the kids to the planetarium today and planned to leave at 9:30, so we could arrive as they opened at 10:30. But things went as they often do and we didn't leave until much later. We had vouchers for the IMAX theater and had to pick which movie we wanted to see after we arrived. The one both Steve and I would have chosen was called Beautiful Planet, but the last showing for the day started one minute after we arrived. They wouldn't let us in after it started. So we reluctantly got tickets for Think Big (instead of Aircraft Carriers--sorry Dad). Though i was disappointed, I had the thought that God doesn't work in coincidences and he is in the small details of our lives. It was possible that one of us needed to see the Think Big movie. It was about encouraging girls to go into engineering. Maybe one of my girls needed to see that she could be an engineer. But as we watched an hour later, I found that it was me who needed to watch. One line, delivered in Jeff Bridges' swoon-worthy tones, was an answer to earnest prayers that I've been sending up over a subject that's been hard on my heart lately. As I teared up with Cecily on my lap, I was grateful for a Father who helped me be calm over leaving late, or who made it important to my girls to fully dress 2 Barbies each to the nines before we left, or who made finding parking taking 7 minutes instead of 4, so I could get my answer today.

I also put up Valentine's Day decorations this week. Sometimes, I love going all out decorating. And sometimes, I can't muster the energy to even try. It's an all or nothing thing. But my kids love it, and I really love the pops of red and pink with the teals in my living room. So I went for it.

The kids have been playing really well together this weekend. It's amazing how fun the house can be when they get along. And how awful it can be when they don't. I wonder if them yelling less at each other has a direct correlation to me yelling less at them. I bet it probably does. Even more motivation to improve my parenting skills.