Celebrations Galore

Lots of celebrating this week.

We celebrated Cecily turning five on the 23rd, which was Wednesday, with a birthday party. So I spent most of Monday and Tuesday preparing for that. She wanted a rainbow party, because when you ask her what her favorite color is, she says, "Rainbow!" Or when we see a rainbow on a shirt or a sign or wherever, she yells, "Look! It's my favorite color!" I find it adorable. So I thought a rainbow party was highly appropriate. I decided that since we don't usually give the girls presents if we throw them a party, that I would make her a rainbow skirt to wear for the party. My little gift to her. For some reason, I never learn, and thought this would be a quick project. 15 hours later, I finally had something that looked very little like I'd imagined, but still quite cute on Cecily. I think she really liked it, since she's worn it again this week already.

I also made rainbow playdoh for the kids to take home as party favors. I wanted to give them 6 small balls, one of each color of the rainbow. I ended up making enough to make 6 rather large balls. But c'est la vie. Instead of using food coloring, I saw online that you could use koolaid to color the playdoh and then it would smell good, too. Sounded awesome to me, so I grabbed some koolaid on my next trip to walmart. But--after I made 6 batches of playdoh and started coloring them, it took me a number of tries to realize that koolaid has this thing about the powder changing colors after it gets wet and the playdoh itself was not wet enough to change the color of the powder. So when I colored the red using tropical punch, it looked purplish red, sort of maroon. And when I added grape to just turn it the rest of the way purple, it turned black. Which is why we have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and black, instead of the traditional purple at the end. After that I had to wet down the koolaid powder in the palm of my hand before squishing it into the playdoh. Some of them I had to add food coloring to as well--the powerful gel kind. (Like yellow--lemonade is still mostly white, even after you get it wet.) My hands were a lovely rainbow of colors that night.

Then came the cake. I made it Wednesday morning because I was up until 1am Tuesday night finishing Cecily's skirt so she could see it and wear it first thing when she woke up on her birthday. I thought I was in trouble because it would take me FOREVER to make, but it actually went pretty quick. The recipe I found online called for 2 white cake mixes and 2 lbs of butter for the frosting. Two pounds of butter? Are you kidding me? That means that cake would cost me like $15 to make myself. No way. But that recipe said to bake the cake in 8-inch cake pans. So I figured if I could find something smaller, I could use only 1 cake mix and 1/2 the butter. I ended up using my bread pans. So I made up the mix, divided it into 6 bowls, and colored each bowl with a crapload of food coloring. This actually took WAY less time than coloring that stupid playdoh. It is hard to knead playdoh enough to get color evenly spread throughout. My hands started cramping at the end. But for the cake, all I had to do was stir it with a spoon. And Cecily was happy to help. (She'd been happy to help with the playdoh, too, but gave up half-way through 1 color.) Then I baked three colors for about 12 minutes, cleaned the pans and baked the other three. I knew the frosting wouldn't need to look amazing, but I worried I'd have to make more than 1 batch anyway since I needed to put icing between each layer and all the way around. But I was able to just scrimp by with one batch. Total win on that. And it looked amazing if I do say so myself. Everyone loved it. And even though it was not gluten free, I had to do a taste test.

Monday, I had to go to the store and get ice cream for the party, but I also had to get some for an ice cream party Emilia was having at school on Tuesday. I'd volunteered to bring a gallon of chocolate. But unfortunately, I could only get the rainbow ice cream Cecily desperately wanted in gallon size, too. And my freezer is FULL of meat, so there was no way I was going to be able to fit 2 full gallons of ice cream in there. I barely fit one. Luckily, I finished grocery shopping just before the girls got out of school and I made Emilia give her chocolate gallon to her teacher a day early. Phew!

Cecily had invited all the kids in her church primary class plus three more, totally 7 kids she'd invited to our house that were five or under. Augh! Fortunately (or unfortunately), parents in our ward are totally up for birthday parties, so all but 1 of them came. That was still 7 four and five year olds all in our house at the same time. And I slightly underestimated their attention spans. So despite making straw rockets, drawing with chalk, going on a rainbow hunt, opening presents, and eating cake and ice cream, we still had 20 minutes where I knew they weren't going to sit still long enough to do another activity and I just let them play with magnets and put on some music. I guess it worked out though. And all the kids were pumped about getting yummy-smelling playdoh to take home.

Thursday, my mom and I worked on family history in the morning, then I had to run to Macey's really quick before Emilia had a play she was putting on with her class at school. I had bought 2 cases of diced green chili's at Macey's caselot sale, but after cooking a few meals with them, the family was like, "Did diced green chili's get a LOT hotter recently?" That's when I realized that the guy helping hand out cases had given me 1 diced green chili case and 1 jalapeno case. And of course I'd been cooking accidentally with the jalapenos. No wonder the kids were complaining my chili was too hot! So I took the leftover case back to Macey's hoping they would let me exchange them despite not being able to find my receipt. When I told them the story, they were happy to let me exchange. So yay! I don't know what I would have done with all those jalapenos.

Emilia's play was really cute. It was called "Double Tied at the Tracks." She was a cook called "Cookie" and the best friend of the two main female leads. It was the perfect roll to get her feet wet in theater. And I think she kinda loved it. She kept saying afterward that she was so so  nervous before it started, but then it was fun after the curtain went up. And she did a a great job. Once again, I could tell what she was saying (and I didn't know the lines this time!) and she projected well despite not having a microphone.

Friday was the last day of school and the kids got out at noon. We celebrated by getting sno cones. Emilia had a friend over because she just couldn't imagine not having her around all summer.

Steve and I were able to go to the temple for a date Friday night because Nick and Wilda babysat for us. They watched Emperor's New Grove and "scarfed" a very large bowl of popcorn while we were gone. It was a beautiful warm night but I forgot my phone at home so I wasn't able to get a picture of the temple.

I was supposed to go to a writing conference all day on Saturday. I wasn't looking forward to it because the classes didn't look like things I needed, but I thought I needed the hours to renew my teaching license next month. Well, I figured out on Friday that I was only counting 2 years worth of points and I could actually count 3. So I had plenty of points without going to the conference. I called the conference head and they happily gave me a refund, so I was able to stay home and scrub floors, clean up, take my kids to the splash pad, go to a wedding reception of the son of a good friend, have another good friend and her girls over for dinner, and make dessert for our family party on Monday. It ended up being a wonderful day.

And we have two more days of a long weekend to go, which I am looking forward to, too! I hope everyone has a safe and pleasant Memorial Day weekend. I wish I was home to visit the graves of so many loved ones that have passed on and are buried in Mandan. But I think we'll visit some of Steve's family graves, so that will have to do. Happy Memorial Day!

hair cut, school program, and a gutter problem

It wasn't a very busy week this week, but I wasn't feeling well for a lot of it, so that made it seem longer.

Cecily did get her hair cut on Tuesday as promised. I think it looks adorable.

As always, I helped Julia that day. This time she had me sew an army-quality duffel bag that she was planning on giving away to the thrift store. I had to cut the end off and reattach it to cut off the holes that were around the edges. Then I had to patch the two holes in the bottom (actually, I patched them before I reattached it). Then she had me zigzag stitch all the other edges so they wouldn't continue to fray. All this so someone else could have the benefit of having a nice duffel bag. Always an adventure with that lady. But she is an interesting friend and I love her.

Wednesday, Cecily and Mira had gymnastics again and that evening was Emilia's school program all about Utah. She had a speaking part that I think she did very well. She isn't nervous, so she speaks slowly and enunciates, so I could understand her part better than many of the other kids. Although, I had helped her practice, so I knew what it said. That could have made a difference, too. ;)

Emilia got to have her "school" birthday on Thursday. Since her birthday is in the summer, they pick a day to celebrate during the school year. She wanted me to bring donuts for a treat at the end of the day and I wasn't going to because donuts are like $.80 each and I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy $20 worth of treats to celebrate her fake birthday. But when I went to Walmart to buy her second choice, ice cream sandwiches, there were day-old chocolate iced donuts and I could buy enough for her class and her sisters for $5.50. That was a score!

I had a doctor appointment inconveniently at 6:15 on Friday night to check on my thyroid medication that I started a couple months ago. But because of that, Steve and I couldn't do our usual Friday night date. Plus, I've been gone the last two weekends, so we decided we absolutely had to go on a date Saturday.

But first, Steve mowed the lawn, the girls and I cleaned bathrooms, and Steve and I cleaned out the gutter on the rear of our house. The gutters on the front of our house are three stories above a slab of cement and we're going to pay somebody with the right equipment to do that safely. Those strapping, hearty weeds were growing in our back gutter. That's when you know you've waited too long to clean them out. We had a large pile of very nice compost at the end. :D

After we showered and had a lovely steak and knoephla dinner at home, we went to that restaurant in Provo, Good Moves, that I've told you about before. We didn't get food this time, we just played a game we hadn't played before called Five Tribes. It took us over two hours to set up, learn, and play the game. It was a lot of fun though, especially because I won. :) I don't know if we'll get it for home just because there are few people willing to play a two-hour-plus game (even we have a hard time playing a game that takes so long most nights, just because we are tired and don't have the brain power after the kids are in bed). After we finished the game, we grabbed a couple of Praline Creme Swamp Pops and headed home to enjoy them. It is probably the best tasting soda I have ever tried. If you ever get the chance to have one, do it!

One last random picture: I made Cecily carry all of the shoes upstairs that she'd left downstairs. She was so proud of how many shoes she was carrying, she made me take a picture (and that wasn't even all of them). Silly kid.

Gone again

A bunch of random pictures from my phone this week because the week was mostly filled with to-do lists. My to-do list for Thursday alone filled the entire back of the envelope.

Our air conditioner went out last week. So we got three bids this week and signed a contract to have it fixed a week from tomorrow. Guess that $2k we were going to put toward vacation will be put toward being comfortable this summer. :\ Thankfully, it hasn't gotten any hotter than 80 degrees outside (and since our AC was under-powered, it couldn't get our house any cooler than 78 degrees on hot days, so we really haven't been able to tell the difference yet). We're going to put in a bigger unit, so yay for having a cooler house in the summer! People might actually want to visit us between June and September. :)

I was feeling pretty healthy this week, so I took a picture to document it. You can also see the usual state of the girls' bathroom counter. So many beauty implements. And they're not even teenagers yet. (Actually, I get ready in there, too, so I don't have to have hair stuff in multiple bathrooms.)

Nick and Wilda were kind enough to give me a gift card to the local greenhouse as an early Mother's Day present last Sunday, so on Monday, since I didn't have time to go to the greenhouse, I cleaned out the neighbor's unused garden bed. It was covered in grass that wasn't too hard to pull out. My dad usually does this huge garden and if they have extra, they'll give it to their kids. That's how I got enough tomatoes to make salsa two years ago. Well, this year, my parents are in a condo and can't grow a garden, but we're getting low on salsa. So I wanted to plant extra tomatoes so I can make salsa this year. Plus, a TON of my basil grew from seed (like 12 plants worth), so I thought if I planted a bunch I could dry it.

Tuesday, I dragged Cecily to the greenhouse with me to pick out annuals and some veggies that didn't grow from seed for me. We also headed to Winco to get some gluten-free stuff I was low on. The chocolate section deserved a picture both for beauty and so I could price home-made chocolate bars that Emilia has asked for for her birthday party (two months from now).

Mira came home from school on Tuesday saying her tooth was bothering her. A boy in her class had accidentally bonked her in the face and bumped a tooth that was already a little bit loose. Unfortunately, he only bumped one side of it enough to loosen it, so the other side was still stuck in there pretty tightly. I tried pulling it with dental floss and yanking as hard as I could, it didn't budge, it just made her scream. (I felt bad about that.) It bothered her every time she ate (to the point of not wanting anything for dinner), so Wednesday morning, I called the dentist and set up an appointment to have it pulled around 9am. She was very brave and the dentist pulled it out easily. Though he did mention that it was still attached pretty well, so he wasn't surprised that I couldn't pull it.

That night she forgot to put the tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy and the next night, she couldn't find it. She was very worried that the tooth fairy would be disappointed with her, but Toothfairy Violet left her a reassuring note along with some money. :)

Wednesday and Thursday, I had to get all my plants in the ground so that they wouldn't die in the pots while I was gone for my cousin Paul's wedding all weekend. And of course, since I was out planting, the weeds in my front beds started bothering me, so I pulled weeds and sprayed the field bindweed. And since I was spraying the bindweed in the beds, I had to spray the rest of the yard.

Since we didn't have air conditioning all week, I tried to not use the oven for dinners, so one night we had foil packets and ate out on our back porch (that I just cleaned). We noticed ladybugs in all their stages on the cement retaining wall. There were SO many. Like thousands of ladybugs in one stage or another.

Cecily looks like such a wild child these days. We're trying to grow out her bangs, and she insisted she didn't want her hair cut at all for a while. But it's bugging both of us enough that I insisted she get it cut. So that will be happening on Tuesday.

Friday, Ben and I drove to Reno to attend Paul's wedding. We left our kids with our spouses and made a quick weekend of it, returning this morning. I didn't take a ton of pictures, but it was a nice ceremony and it was fun to spend time with all my Richau cousins and aunts and uncles again. We missed the Lee and Amy Richaus, and Alison, but pretty much everybody else was there.

My kids all made me cute and funny mother's day presents that I got to open when I got back, and Wilda was kind enough to make dinner for us even though it was Mother's Day for her, too. So it was a good day for me all around.

Stupid sickness, Yay, yardwork! and a writing conference

Last Sunday, we went to Steve's aunt's house (his mom's sister, Donna) because she and her husband got home from a mission and had an open house. They live in the same ward as my brother, so we went to Ben and Haylee's house after the open house and had dinner with them and my parents. Just before dinner started, I felt like I was going to pass out if I didn't sleep immediately. And I did fall asleep with 7 children running around the house. Even after a short nap and food I felt like konking out, and that's exactly what I did as soon as we got home around 9:30. I slept for about 11 hours and woke up feeling tired. It was craziness. I was like that until Wednesday evening, so pretty much nothing got done this week.

My Dad did come on Tuesday and helped me ready my garden for drip watering. On Wednesday, I had to take Emilia to get some new tennis shoes. We bought her a brand new pair right before school started and she grew out of them half-way through the school year. But she had a district-wide (mandatory for everybody) track meet on Thursday, so she needed some. The other girls all got new shoes, too. Sunday sandals, summer flip-flops, etc. There was excitement all around. Steve had Ben over to play LOTR card game that night, too.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I had my writing conference. I was very much looking forward to it. My neighbor, my parents, and Steve each took a day to watch the girls and I was so grateful for their support. There were tons of friends I got to see and a number of peeps from my writing groups took home top prizes in the first chapter contest, so that was exciting (after a bad experience last year, I didn't enter this year).

Me being sick last Sunday, and falling asleep as soon as we got home, I didn't do a blog post last week. One day, I cleaned out my back patio. It hadn't been done in probably 2 years and it looked terrible. I dumped a lot of gross water, cleaned out an old turtle sandbox, cleaned the grill, pulled weeds, swept up leaves, and pressure sprayed the cement clean. I also got our wasp killer and sprayed wasps out of mid-air (who'd gotten used to coming around for the water). It was a satisfying afternoon. My dad came one day that week and helped me prep my garden for planting. He rototilled and I planted/replanted and mapped. I registered my car that day and took a black widow that I'd caught to the Bean Museum to display if they wanted. They used to have two on display for a long time, but they haven't been there for a while, and since I found one while cleaning the back patio that was super easy to catch, I thought I'd take it to them. You can shudder now, Mom. ;) I made a bunch more shrinky dinks that i was planning on giving away at the writing conference. And Steve and I had a game night with a friend of his from work--at the friend's house, so we counted it as our date night, too.

I just thought of one more thing I wanted to add from this week. Today at church, since it's fast Sunday, we allow people to stand and bear their testimonies during sacrament meeting. Steve does it regularly, I do occasionally, but Emilia had never gone up since getting baptized. She asked if she could, and Steve reminded her of a few things and she said a prayer, then went and sat up on the stand waiting for her turn. When it was finally her turn (there were a lot of people up there today), she bore such a beautiful testimony. She said that recently at school, there were a lot of people using bad words and it was starting to make her feel uncomfortable. So she prayed to know what to do about it or if there was a way to make it better. Finally one night, she couldn't sleep, so she came to get me and we talked about what she could do and she felt that we figured it out. She then bore testimony that God answered her prayer by having her come talk to me, and that she had a testimony that he does answer our prayers. It was the sweetest thing and I was crying by the time she was done. It's my greatest wish that my children grow up to have a relationship with their Heavenly Father, and it made me feel like I'm on the right path.

Mira loved this outfit so much she wanted a picture.

Same with these stuck-together chocolate chips.

Cecily: "Mom! Take one like this."

"And like this!"

"And like this."

Then she took her own picture.

I did Toothless (from How To Train Your Dragon) for my conference.