Summer Vacation 2026 - Week 11 - Seussical Week 6 - The airplane starts landing

Its August and the kids start school in a few weeks. I can definitely feel the summer starting to wind down and the school year start to get primed. I'm looking forward to school so that I don't feel like I am the sole source of providing enrichment for the kids. But I'm not looking forward to school because I'm not ready to be in charge of making sure 4 people leave the house by 8:30. 

This week was pretty chill. It's kind of nice that we have Seussical taking up so much of our energy because I don't feel a ton of pressure to make the end of summer AMAZING. I'm just focusing on making sure we can start school and do this play without going crazy. 

So here's the recap for the week. It will cover from Monday August 3 to Sunday August 9.

Monday was my 6 month check up for my vitiligo. Part of me was like, "Why bother? I've been dealing with freaking hives for 4 months. Who cares about the vitiligo?" Also I hadn't seen much progress with my medicine. (Partly because I was so focused on the hives I didn't use the medicine regularly.) I went anyway.  

And thank goodness for before and after pictures because guess what?  The medicine is working!!!! It's not doing anything for my face which is where I keep focusing, but my chest has actually improved from this time last year. That was so encouraging to see. My dermatologist told me to start using the cream on my arms. And I've been super diligent about that. I *think* I'm already seeing improvement and it's barely been a week. 

I went to work after my appointment. It was a good morning. I was in a really good mood. Which was kind of bad timing because most everyone else was still in a somber mood about the shooting. And yes, I know the shooting was a big deal and all that, but I had NEW PIGMENT and so I was in a great mood. 

When I got home Derrick and I went to the store so we could buy pringles and ice cream and chocolate shell. Derrick had watched a Youtube video about putting ice cream in a pringles can and he wanted to try it. I was like, "sure!"  I like doing things that he sees on youtube because it's fun for him and really doesn't take much trouble.

After we bought the things we took the chips out of the can and washed it out. Then Derrick scooped ice cream into the tube and tamped it down. (Hello fine motor skills work.) 

Then he carefully cut holes in the can and put popsicle sticks into the ice cream. (More fine motor skill training)

Here's the finished thing. He put this into the freezer for an hour and I took a nap. 

When I woke up we cut the tub/icecream into circles. This was kind of tricky and very messy so there aren't any pictures. Everyone got a circle and could dip it into the chocolate shell. 

And that was Derrick's latest food adventure inspired by Youtube. 

Veronica had been working on a lego recreation of the Jurassic World Ride at Universal Studios. 

It was so cute!

That night Charlotte and Lydia went to rehearsal. They were blocking Jungle Scenes. We joke that Thing 1 and Thing 2 are pan-dimensional beings because they hop between the Jungle and Whoville with no problem. 

Veronica and I read Harry Potter 5. My goal is to be done with that book before school starts on the 20th. 

On Tuesday I was supposed to have my scripture study group for Zephaniah (Not to be confused with Zechariah which is scheduled for October.) But when I'd read through it a few weeks earlier I hadn't really seen anything that I was excited to study with the group. So I cancelled the study group in favor of doing a project with the kids. 

The project was going through all their school papers and saving what they wanted to keep. I had piles of papers from this year, last year, and possibly the year before that. So I had each kid sit down with me and we went through their papers. Veronica hadn't even cleaned out her backpack from 6th grade yet. She went through her backpack and threw a lot away. She said, "There's a lot of trauma in all those notebooks."  Mostly we saved fun art things for each of the kids. 

I didn't have work at all that day so we worked on the project most of the day. 

Here are the kids showing off the finished books at the end of the day. 

At one point we'd paused work so Veronica and I could run over to the middle school for registration. We picked up her schedule. She was a little disappointed in it. She was hoping to be in drama this semester, but it's not until next semester. And she was hoping for Art, but she was put into Family and Consumer Sciences instead. She's still in orchestra so that is good. 

I had only skimmed the welcome email so I'd totally missed that in paragraph 6 they announced that all the kids get lockers this year because they won't be allowed to have backpacks this year. Kerri told me about that later. So we'll need to go back next week and teach Veronica how to open her locker. 

That night me and the twins were at the theatre for rehearsal. Veronica had something of a migraine all day so she stayed home. We were blocking the scene where the play switches from Horton Hears a Who to Horton Hatches an Egg. He get's distracted from the clover field by a bird named Mazie who convinces him to sit on her nest so she can have a vacation. The who's aren't in that scene. But we were in the next one when we come on stage for the big number at the end of Act 1. 

It was really fun to see the two scenes come together. I liked watching Nate direct everyone. And Charlotte and Lydia had a lot going on. They were in charge of bringing out the tree for Mazie. They held a piano for the cat. They moved the cloverfield. They brought out a leaf and a snowflake to signify the seasons changing, they were hunters that found Horton. They have quite a lot to do.

When it was time for the Who blocking I held up my hand to represent where Veronica would stand. That was funny. 

On Wednesday I ran a bunch of different errands in the morning. 

Errand 1. I took Derrick and Charlotte to the Berry Farm. Lydia wasn't in the mood to get up in the morning and I figured that this was one of those decisions that wasn't right or wrong and she could just make her own decision. Later she felt a little silly about not going. 

Errand 2. I took Veronica to my friend Megan's house to feed her son Ty's bearded dragon while they were out of town. 

Errand 3. I went to Castle Therapy and picked up my July paycheck and filed all my July things. This took like 10 minutes because Ivan only has like 5 insurance clients anymore.

Errand 4. I took Veronica and Lydia to Hobby Lobby so Lydia could get more yellow paint for the set and Veronica could get a note book.  

Errand 5. I picked up the kids from the berry farm and took them to the bank to cash their July pay checks. Lydia came along too and Derrick was nice and got her check so that she didn't have to go get it and say why she hadn't been at work. 

Charlotte had quite a bit of money. She'd picked up something like 5 extra shifts trimming garlic. Plus she'd been paid for watching Candice's animals. Plus she hadn't spent all her other money yet. So when she counted it all up she had $520. 

Derrick had been eagerly anticipating his pay check. We immediately ordered two lego sets from Walmart. One would be mailed to us, but the other was ready for pickup that afternoon. I picked it up after work and he went right to work on it. 

While he was working on that Veronica and I were going through our rehearsal music. I had the rehearsal tracks on my phone. We had the music book with us and we were singing along. It was really fun. Derrick was loving working on his legos and listening to us. 

Here's his finished mosasaur lego and a little boat. 

Derrick loved hearing about the play. We told him that at one point the Cat in the Hat sneezes on the clover. He laughed and said, "I want to see that."  This was big news. He's been refusing to see anything at the Orpheum for a while. I'm still not confident enough to buy him a ticket, but we are going to let him sit in on a rehearsal during tech week. 

That night at rehearsal we were all there. We ran through all of Act 1. All the dialogue, all the songs, all the dances. Things were sloppy and we still had our scripts open, but the show was there!  We had Act 1. That was a really good feeling. 

Thursday was kind of a lazy day for me. I got all the watering done, but I didn't go grocery shopping. 

I took pictures while watering. You can see we still have hazy skies from fires. 

It makes the mornings look kind of eerie. 

I mentioned this fountain in my last post, but I didn't take a picture of it. I used to have this fountain buried in a flowerpot, but the flowers around it got too big and the solar panels didn't get enough sun. So I moved it into a very sunny spot and I love it there. 

I met up with Andrea for billing stuff at 11:00. Neither of us had motivation to do any billing, but we actually got some things done - miraculously. 

Then I went to Aspen Grove. Our newest clinician was scheduled to do some billing training with me. The main point of this training is really to show new clinicians that I'm not scary. I'm there to help them and they can ask me questions without worrying that I'll be mad at them. But this time the training was a little different because the new clinician is Veronica's therapist Rachel. We've known each other for like 3 and a half years. In some ways I felt like the point of this training was to show her that I'm actually a professional person. Veronica's appointments were always on Wednesdays which was my day off and I always showed up at her appointments in really casual outfits and then fell asleep on the lobby couch. So I wasn't exactly the picture of professionalism. 

I think Rachel enjoyed the training and probably left with her head spinning. That's the other point of these trainings - to show the therapists that the billing world is awful and they better appreciate my skills. 

After work I took Veronica grocery shopping. It was a relatively quick trip because we'd basically given up on dinner for the past week and didn't eat any of the "dinner" foods I'd brought the week before. So we just stalked up on my snacks and individual meals like gogurt, fruit, corn dogs, burritos, and things like that. 

Brandon was at CSI. This week and the week before had been weeks where he was there on both Tuesday and Thursdays. I hate these kinds of weeks because it feels like we don't see him at all. 

None of us had rehearsal. The twins worked on finishing the clover field set piece. This one wasn't as fun because it didn't have fun details or colors. Just lots of pink. I told the girls, "I vividly remember when my dad read me Horton Hears a Who and we turned the page and saw how big the clover field was. It was so daunting looking. This reminds me of that first time reading the book. 

Derrick had been poking around in the freezer and found the chicken patties I'd brought the week before. He was like, "Mom, let's have these for dinner."  So he took care of cooking them in the oven. And then I helped with making sure we had sliced pickles to go on them. It was like our first real meal since Sunday. 

Since we didn't have rehearsal and Brandon was at CSI I declared that I was going to watch a movie. I'd checked out The Post from the library weeks ago. It's about when the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers. And since I'd FINALLY made it past that part in Katharine Graham's book "Personal History" I could FINALLY watch the movie. It was so good. Highly recommend it. 

Friday was Freshmen and Sophomore registration at the high school. I could have taken Charlotte, Lydia, AND Derrick all at once, but I really didn't want to do that. Last year the cafeteria had felt super crowded and noisy and I didn't want to deal with that with Derrick. So I'd already emailed his special ed teacher and she assured me that they would make sure Derrick had his picture taken on the make up picture day. 

So I went to work and then came home and picked up the twins. They had curled each other's hair the way that Hillary had taught them. They both wanted to look great since the picture they took that day would be their ID picture and their year book picture. 

We went to the school and went to the cafeteria which was not as crazy as I remember it from the year before. We picked up their schedules. Then we got into a line to pay for fees. 

I paid for them to have activity cards (It's required for Orchestra so Charlotte needed one, and it was easier to just also get one for Lydia rather than try to figure out if she really needed one.)

From the fee area we went into a line for pictures. And then from there we went into a line where they printed the ID cards. The whole thing was really quick and efficient. I was thinking, "Maybe I could have brought Derrick."

Next we went to the library picked up the girls' chrome books. We could have walked all around the school and found their classrooms, but the girls said they had it figured out. We just had to find a random hall where their history classes will be. 

Charlotte's electives are Orchestra all year and then Welding I this semester and Pottery next semester. 

Lydia's electives are Welding II all year and Art all year. 

They don't have any classes together and it doesn't look like they share many teachers either. 

When we got home I looked Derrick's schedule up on Powerschool. He has welding with Charlotte. Charlotte says that's going to be just fine for her. 

We joked that when Veronica gets to the high school it will be like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. Someone will say, "Oh another Illguth. I know just where to put you ---- Welding!"

I'm just fine with that. One of my mantras is, "AI can't weld."  These kids need some hands on trades. 

We needed to turn our head shots in for our program bios for Seussical. I'd been thinking that the ones we took a few weeks ago would work. But when I finally got those I was like, "Oh these are terrible." The lighting angles were just awful. So I was taking out own that weekend. I planned to do them on Sunday when we looked good for church. Charlotte said, "This is the best I've looked all summer, take my picture now." So I did. 

I went outside and discovered that my Dessert Willow had two little blooms. I was so proud of it. It's only two years old so I didn't expect anything until next year. 

I spent a lot of the evening weeding my garden. The chickens loved the weeds. I think all 8 birds are in this picture. 

That night was the last midnight swim at the pool for the summer. I made all the kids AND Brandon go. And wen it was over I made them take this picture. We didn't really say it, but this was probably our last time together at the pool. The kids all prefer Dierkies lake now. Derrick will still go to the pool during the week. But no one else is really interested. I'm sad about it because I feel like me and the pool were partners in raising these kids the last 6 years. It's sad to see this era end. But I know we will still have lots of fun together as a family other places. 

Saturday was kind of a weird day for me. I started out strong and got so much weeding done in the front yard. And then I just ran out of gas and didn't do much the rest of the day. 

We did end the day at Dierkies lake again. Brandon stayed home and worked on things in the garage. He'd been building a set Helicopter all day. I took the kid and read while they swam. 

On Sunday I tried to curl my hair with velcro rollers the way Hillary showed me. I succeeded in volume, but not in curl. But I'm getting there. 

Here's one of the pictures I took for my headshots. 

Veronica build more on the Jurassic park ride. Here's the line. There's a skeleton in there. He was in line so long he died. 

There's also the place where the boats came back. 

And a gift shop. 

She'd already put Derrick's Mosasaur to work in a tank. 

See. 

She really did a great job on this. 

Then the boats went into preditor cove. 

Here's the raptor cage. 

The escaped Indomonus rex

the raptor that comes down from the ceiling. 

And finally the big T-Rex at the end. 

Charlotte and Lydia curled each other's hair again. Here's Lydia's headshot.

And Veronica's.

Church was good. In Relief Society our teacher had us read from Luke about the two disciples that traveled to Emmaus with Jesus. She had the text of the scriptures up on the TV screen and then called on people to read from their scriptures. When she called on me I told everyone, "I have a different translation, don't panic."

So I read my part and then she asked, "can anyone look up how long three furlongs is?" Because that was the distance given in the KJV translation on the board. But then someone said, "Valerie's translation said it was 7 miles." I hadn't even realized that my NRSV gave the distance as miles instead of furlongs. I said, "That's why I switched to this translation, I couldn't understand the old English."

We had a nice afternoon at home after church. Brandon has been reading his story to the twins so they did that for a long time. And I wrote. 

And that gets us caught up for another week. 

Thanks for reading.