Thanksgiving and other at home happenings

I realized the other day that we'd blown right past several important milestones that happen in November. I feel like mentioning a few of them. 

• It's been 10 years since Charlotte and Lydia were released from the NICU.
• It's been 4 years since we moved from Alabama to Utah.
• It's been 3 years since I started working in the Bannock County Treasurers office. 
• It's been 1 year since I started working at my current job. 
• It's been 1 year since I spoke at Bites of Brilliance.

As I thought about all these milestones I realized something crazy about one of them. We left Alabama somewhere around the 14th of the month. (The exact date is a little hard to remember because we were living in a cabin for a few days and then we left the area at midnight so I really can't keep track of the exact date we moved away.)

Anyway, we left Alabama sometime in the middle of the month. We took our sweet time traveling across the county to get to Brandon's parents house in Utah. We knew very little about what our future looked like. We were hoping Brandon would get a job with the FAA within the next few months. But I was also realistic enough to know that we needed to plan to stay in Utah for a little bit. I'd already talked to the Elementary school to know what I needed to do to register the kids. I was hoping to get some sort of job to tide us over until Brandon got a job. 

I ended up finding a job with the Accounting Department at Snowbasin Ski Resort. I applied for the job on Monday Nov 28, had an over the phone interview on Tuesday November 29th, and had an in person interview on Wednesday November 30. Wednesday night I got the phone call with a job offer. I started work Thursday December 1st. 

I've always been so impressed by that timeline. But this year I reflected again on how fast everything changed. Sure it's cool that I applied for a job on Monday and started work on Thursday. It's even more impressive if you back it up a bit. I was in Alabama at the beginning of the November. We didn't even get the go ahead for the move until October 28th. In a little over a month my whole world changed. 

As I thought about that change I was laying on the couch feeling pretty miserable. I've struggled with my health this month. I haven't felt great physically and the sun going down before 6:00 pm is not doing my mental health any favors. I felt tired and sad and like nothing would ever get better. But I realized that things can get better. Things can change and improve and it can happen very quickly. I've seen it happen. And somehow just remembering that made me feel better. 

And with that thought let's recap over the last two weeks. 

First off, if you are curious, we did get Marcia back from the Animal Shelter. We had to pay $10 per night so $20 and $10 to update her license. She acted really scared and ashamed the first few days home. But soon she was back to normal. She hasn't tried to run out of the yard since, nor have we really given her a chance. 

Here are the kids and Brandon having a lovely morning science lesson. All the kids were playing with their dalmation stuffed animals. Later, when I came home from work they played with theses dogs for HOURS. We actually pushed back the start time for school that day because they were playing so well. 

We did eventually get around to school, but we kept it short because we had some errands to run. Derrick was out of pull ups so I called Norco to get the prescription refilled and then we went to pick them up. Norco is sort of near the First Federal Park with the zipline so we went over there after picking up the pullups. The kid played with their stuffed dogs on the playground for a long time. I talked with my sister Lindsey on the phone. 

Veronica LOVES stuffed animals. She calls them her "Stuffies" because that's what one of her daycare teachers called them. She has so many stuffed animals that we realized we needed to get a pet net for them all. I ordered it online and it arrived on Monday. She was so excited to put all the animals in it. I'm excited that she a cleaner floor now. 

Charlotte and Lydia have turned into little hand sewers. They have made a lot of clothes for their dolls. I came home from work on Tuesday and found them busy working on a lot of projects at the kitchen table. Lydia had made a top with actual buttons for her OMG doll. I was so impressed. 

Charlotte made a Santa hat for her doll. She dressed her in a dress we'd made for a Barbie a while ago.

Here's the final outfit for Lydia's doll. 

Tuesday was one of my rough days. Looking back I can see that I was getting run down from the daily grind of work and homeschool, but on that day I couldn't see that. I felt like I was running in sand. It was all I could do to make dinner that night. 

I pulled myself together enough to take Derrick to Speech Therapy. And that night Brandon and I took Derrick to his baptism interview. 

The bishop was so sweet with Derrick. He had a bunch of pictures for Derrick to look at and Derrick told him about each picture. That was so smart. Derrick sometimes struggles with appropriately answering simple questions like "How old are you?" So I'd been worried the Bishop would ask him abstract questions like "What did Jesus do for us?"

Instead he just showed him a picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked Derrick, "What is this a picture of?" Derrick easily told him it was a picture of Jesus Praying. They looked at about 10 pictures and Derrick knew what each of them were. I could have cried. 

The funniest part of the interview actually happened while we were waiting. Derrick has been asking for a "Radio I can put CD's in and listen to music" for a few weeks. While we were waiting for the interview one of the bishopbric members pointed to an old CD player that has been sitting on a shelf. He said, "we've had this up here forever." Then he looked at Derrick and half jokingly said, "Do you want this Derrick?" I couldn't believe it. This was exactly what Derrick has been talking to be about.

I said something like, "If you are seriously offering that, we'd love to take it. He's been asking for something just like that." The bishopbric member said, "Sure you can have it, it's been up here for years."

And that's how we found Derrick's baptism present. 

I can't remember anything specific about the morning or afternoon of Wednesday. I know Lydia needed a free day from school because she was just DONE with doing work every day. I was feeling there myself. 

Veronica normally has Physical Therapy on Monday's but it was on Wednesday this week. They started her out on the exercise bike to get her muscles warmed up. Then the doctor stretched her out. Then they do a whole bunch of games to give her practice using her heels. The whole thing takes an hour and he is always very worn out by the end. It's one of the only times I see her tired.   

I can't remember if I wrote about this last time, but the kids and Brandon put together a robot for science. It's pretty smart and can explore a room on its own. It can sense obstacles and move around them. Derrick LOVES watching the robot. I find him in this position a lot. 

On Wednesday night I had an Autism Support Group meeting. It was the easiest one I've done all year. I'd contacted Idaho Parents Unlimited and asked them to do a presentation via Zoom for our group. IPUL is a great resource for Parents of kids with Special Needs. I always bring them up at our meetings so I figured we should hear from them directly.  The lady I worked with was named Sarah. She took care of making fliers and setting up the Zoom call. All I had to do was tell the group members about it.  When the meeting started she ran the show. She had so much good info. There were only about 6 of us on the call so we were able to ask specific questions. We are definitely going to do this again. 

When the call was over I finished up part of a project I was doing for my dad. He's been working on a book about some family history on my Grandma Mary Ann's side of the family. He'd asked me to proofread the book. He'd sent me 25 chapters and I started working my way through them. I know you may read this blog and wonder why anyone would trust me with proof reading. But I actually am a decent editor when I focus. Plus my dad patiently sat with me and proofread everything I wrote in Jr High so I figured I should return the favor. 

Thursday was a fun day. Several months ago I saw an advertisement for the "Home to the Dome" program for the planetarium on the college campus. They normally do planetarium showings for homeschool groups, but require a minimum number of people.  Well this year they have waved that minimum number. Any size group can sign up for the afternoon shows and get the discount. We decided that it would be fun to go to a show as Brandon's birthday activity. 

On Monday I'd called and reserved the "Faster than Light" show for Thursday the 18th. Brandon picked this because he's writing a novel with faster than light space travel as a major plot point. (Have I mentioned Brandon is writing a novel? It's what he does late at night when he can't sleep.) Anyway, when I reserved the show the 10 person limit on social gatherings had just gone into effect. I asked the lady at the planetarium if that would effect our reservation. She wasn't sure, but said she would contact me if it had to be cancelled. No one ever called me.

So on Thursday we hurried through school and then headed over to the planetarium for the 2:30 show. Brandon got off work and met us there. He was so excited for his break from work. I paid for our tickets. It was $3 per person so only $18. We discovered that we were the only ones seeing the show. We really got the VIP treatment. 

When we entered the theater the guy in charge told us we were seeing "Dinosaurs at Dusk." The kids were so excited to see a movie with Dinosaurs. I was like, "oh we thought we were seeing Faster than Light." But since the kids were already hyped we decided to stick with the dinosaur movie. It had a terrible plot, but the music and the visuals were great. 

Maybe the visuals were a little too good. Veronica was crying by the end of the movie. 

When the show was over the planetarium guy said that he'd checked the schedule and I was right, we were supposed to see "Faster than Light." He offered to show it to us free of charge. That sounded great to Brandon and three of the kids, but Veronica was not excited about another show. I took her out and everyone else watched the second show. 

Veronica and I wandered around the museum for a little bit. A lot of the interactive stuff has been moved, but most of the displays are still there. 

I'd made an appt for dropping off a big box of clothes at DI on 3:30. I'd assumed we'd be done with the show by then, but I hadn't expected to have a double feature show. I decided that Veronica and I would run over there while everyone else was watching the show. So we dropped that box off at DI. 

DI is right by Winco and Target so Veronica and I went to those stores and picked up some early Christmas presents. We were back at the museum by the time Brandon and the other kids were done. 

I'd promised the kids we'd go to the mall to see the Christmas decorations and to get gumballs so we said goodbye to Brandon and went to the mall. Veronica had about 2 dollars in quarters and had so much fun picking out gumballs.

Then we went down to the playground which was surprisingly open. The kids played on that for a while. 

We went back home and got home about 5:30. I was out of stream and couldn't even think about dinner. So I told the kids that sadly we were just having cereal for dinner. They were not sad about this in the least. 

On Friday I didn't go to work. After my crazy week at work the week before I was happy to have a lighter load this week. I was able to put all my energy into documenting the kids school work. I spend SO MUCH time on documentation. A big part of it is taking pictures of the kids work and uploading it to google classroom. I have a lot of pictures like this on my phone.

I was working at the kitchen table and Charlotte, Lydia, and Veronica were playing on the other side of the table. 

They were playing with Antler, Nose, and Coco. It was so cute. I had the documentation part of homeschool, but I love how much time the kids have to play together. 

I got all the assignments turned in but was beginning to realize that we were still pretty behind in some of our work. Some of it is my fault, but some of it is the fact that we haven't had great communication from some of the staff. I had to send a tough email detailing my concerns. That took a lot of my time too. 

I was feeling pretty distressed by the time I got done with everything school related. I was so burned out from basically non stop school since August 19th. And it was discouraging to realize that we weren't even on track in some of the assignments. Plus I was feeling overwhelmed by the proofreading assignment. And it just felt like everything was weighing on me. 

I realized we needed to get out of the house so I took the kids to the park. I called my sister Hillary and was able to vent some of my frustrations. She was a good listening ear. 

At some point I started to notice people posting what they were grateful for on Facebook. It seemed like more people than usual were doing that. I remembered that President Nelson was supposed to have given some sort of message of hope that morning. I'd been sort of planning to watch it, but had been deep in documenting school work when it went live. I realized that the grateful posts were in response to President Nelson's message. From what I gathered it sounded like he had asked everyone to post what they were grateful for. 

This ticked me off. 

I was like, "Here I am feeling like I'm sinking and President Nelson is acting like an Instagram influencer. That's not going to help me. It's not going to help anyone."

I rolled my eyes at every #givethanks post I came across the rest of the day. 

The kids had spent every free moment that week watching Octonaut episodes. They watched that when we got back from the park. I took a nap. Somehow I found the energy to make pizza for dinner. 

When Brndon came home we ate and then watched one of the Mission Impossible movies for movie night. (We've been introducing the kids to Mission I'mpossible and it's been really fun.)

After the kids were in bed Brandon and I put away the chromebooks. We were done with school for the next week and so we didn't need the chromebooks out. Also he kids had been using the chromebooks to watch Youtube nonsense and I wanted to make sure that wasn't an option during the break.

I had one goal for Saturday - clean the craft room. Brandon and the kids took care of the rest of the house while I disappeared into the basement.  Here is the before picture. 

I was able to get a lot of it straightened up, but I realized one of the biggest problems were the unfinished t-shirt quilts that were wadded up on one of the work tables. These are some of my "quits" that I've worked occasionally on since I was pregnant with Veronica. The tops are all done and I just needed to add backs. I even had the backs, but I hadn't put them together yet. 

So I decided to get both quilts done that day. And I did it!  By the end of the day I had two beautiful quilts done. One has T-shirts that Brandon wore in Highschool and College and the other has my highschool and college t-shirts. The backs were made from sheets I got for free through the clothing swap people. The "batting" was just two old wool blankets that were getting a little too worn out for our beds. 

I was super sick of the project by the time I was done so I didn't take many pictures. This is the best one. 

Meanwhile Charlotte and Lydia were hard at work on their own project. They were planning a Thanksgiving Feast for their Barbies. They worked on setting up the table. 

They made plates from fuse beads and flatware from balsa wood. Adorable. 

Working on the quilts had somehow been physically exhausting for me. I was completely DONE by the time I finished them. My head hurt, my body hurt, and I felt out of breath. I fell asleep on the living room couch for a long time.  

Later that night Brandon was getting worried about me. We had a LONG talk about how I was feeling and why. It boiled down to everything felt overwelming and hard, even if it was something that I knew was simple. It all felt hard. 

I asked Brandon to give me a blessing. He did and I felt a little better.  I didn't feel as tired anymore - which was a problem because it was like 10:00 at night. So we stayed up and finished watching Season 2 of Cobra Kai. That was super fun to do. 

On Sunday I was feeling a bit better. One of my biggest stresses was the proofreading project. In theory I had a lot of time to work on it during the next week, but it didn't feel like that. I decided to spend a lot of Sunday working on the project. I ended up proofreading 10 chapters. That helped me feel a lot more on top of things. 

While I worked on that the kids played really well together. They made a science museum out of boxes in Veronica's room. 

We let the kids stay up on Sunday night to watch another Mission Impossible Movie. That meant they slept in on Monday. And the best part was that we didn't have to get up early!  I didn't have work and Brandon doesn't go in until later in the day. We were able to stay in bed until about 8:30. That was great. 

Sleeping in had helped give me a new outlook on life. As I lay in bed scrolling through Facebook I realized how much I liked all the posts about things people were grateful for. Facebook had turned into  much more cheerful place lately. I begrudgingly admitted that maybe this gratitude challenge wasn't a terrible idea. I even wrote a post about how I was grateful for the kids. 

When we did get up Brandon started working on a pie. Charlotte and Lydia were so excited to help him. 

Way back in May I'd scheduled a dentist appointment for the kids for that Monday. I'd assumed they'd be back in real school and that this week off of school would be the perfect time to visit the dentist. I was so full of hope back then. It still worked out to be a good day for the dentist. The kids did great and no one had any cavities. Whew!

Back at home I was trying to get on top of my somewhat overwhelming to do list. My project for this day was a vest for Derrick's baptism. I'd bought the fabric in March when I'd expected Derrick to be baptized in April. I'd managed to trace the pattern onto tissue paper, but had never got further than that. The project had been weighing on the back of my mind ever since.  

I was able to get the vest cut out and sewn all in one day. Derrick was so excited about it!

I took Veronica to her PT appointment and she wanted another picture on the bike. She had another fun visit. Though I haven't seen much change in her toe walking. I joke that it might be easier to teach her to be a ballerina rather than try to get her to walk with her heels. 

Lydia spent a lot of time working on a ice skating rink built out of legos. There's a rink and a little lodge building. 

Here's the inside. 

And the outside. 

This is an igloo.

After dinner I worked on more proofreading. The kid were playing really well so we let them stay up. They'd taken the little museum and had all the Calico Critters visit it. Veronica has a kangaroo that she named, "Professor Kangarina" She took everyone on a tour of the museum. Even Derrick was playing. 

This was one of the most clever things ever. The kids used an egg carton as a theatre. The little egg holders worked perfect as seat and the top was the screen.

It was so cute to hear the kids playing next to me while I worked on the computer. 

Here are all the calico critters in line for a new exhibit.

I wasn't paying super close to the kids so I didn't notice when Derrick wandered off. He came out of my bedroom and said, "Look at my HAIR." and then laughted. I looked at him and noticed that he had tufts of hair on his shoulders. Then I noticed that he'd cut the hair off the top of his head. He'd been asking for a haircut for a few days and had finally taken it into his own hands. 

I stopped what I was doing and took Derrick downstairs to get the rest of his hair cut. Normally we do haircuts in the kitchen, but Brandon was making pies in there and I didn't want to get hair in the pies. 

Derrick had cut his hair really short, but I figured if I cut it at the #3 length it would be hard to see where the extra close spots were. So I shaved his whole head to the #3 length. Then I started to go round the sides with a #1 length so the haircut would look slightly intentional. Derrick could tell that the extra short spots were still visible on the top of his head. He said, "Mom, do it all short." So I took the #1 length all over his head. This certainly took care of smoothing out his hair, but it was so short and his hair was so blond that it made him look like he didn't have ANY hair. 

Derrick and I laughed so hard at his new haircut. So did everyone else. I said he looked like a baby and he pretended to cry and suck on a bottle. 

After that it was bedtime for all the kids. 

I had work on Tuesday. It was the only morning I planned to go in all week. I got a lot done, but the whole time I was there I was wishing I was at home. I still wasn't feeling well, and by this time I knew why. I'd started my period. And at the risk of TMI it wasn't going well. My periods have been screwed up this whole year and this was the worst one yet. 

When I did get home I told the kids, "I just want to lay on this couch and be comfortable for a while." I have no idea what they did (probably binged Octonauts) but they left me alone. 

When I got up again I was feeling a bit better so Lydia and I started working on Christmas Pajamas. I wanted the kids to have new matching pajamas this year because they've outgrown their last Christmas pajamas. I didn't like any of the options online so I'd asked on Facebook if any of my friends were making pajamas as a side hussel. I figured it would be good to support a friend. No one was doing that though. Lydia heard I was willing to pay someone to sew and so she volunteered. I decided that sounded like a fun project for us to do so I agreed. I told her she could pick out the fabric and that Id pay her $1 for every completed pair. (I'd pay her more, but since I was going to have to teach her I figured this was a fair price.)

We'd bought the fabric sometime the week before and Lydia had been after me ever since to start the project. I'd promised we'd do it after I finished Derrick's vest. So here we were. 

Pajama patterns were completely sold out in the area so I ended up cutting up a small, old pair of pajama bottoms to use as a pattern. We traced it onto tissue paper and added several inches to the pant legs. I laid the pattern out and pinned it on the fabric. Lydia cut it out.  We repeated that 4 times. I told Lydia we were lucky that all her siblings are the same size because we could just use the same pattern for each one.  

We took a break so I could take Derrick to Speech Therapy.  

When I got back we took the fabric directly downstairs and sewed all four pairs of pajamas. I showed Lydia how to do the seams in the crotch and the bums. We did those one right after another. Then I showed her how to press the seams. 

Then I pinned the long inseam and Lydia sewed it. I realized that this was a super efficient way to work. I could be pinning while she sewed. We were done sewing before Brandon came home from work. I was completely astounded. We still needed to finish the bottoms of the legs and put in an elastic waistband, but we'd made 4 pairs of pants in an afternoon. It was amazing. 

I was also completely wiped out. I had a huge headache and hurt every time I moved. I spent the rest of the night on the couch. I think Brandon made dinner when he got home, but I'm honestly not sure we even had dinner.

After Brandon put the kids to bed I was feeling well enough to sit at the table while he made a pie. I entertained us by pulling up funny youtube videos. 

I didn't have work at all on Wednesday and I declared the whole day a sick day and spent most of it on the couch. I felt a little guilty about that. But I just told myself that if I was bleeding this much for something other than my period I would be in the emergency room. 

Brandon was hoping to get off work early on Wednesday. But his last job of the day ended up taking hours. He ended up coming home only about 30 minutes early. He was so excited to be home. This was the start of a 4 day weekend that included his favorite holiday. 

I was feeling a bit better so that night I helped him dry brine the turkey. Last year Brandon had discovered that I didn't like the flavor of turkey. He admitted he was never a fan either. So this year, when we realized we'd be doing Thanksgiving on our own, we decided it was the perfect year to experiment with the turkey to see if we could give it better flavor. I took a Google crash course in turkey flavoring and decided dry brine was what would work best for us. (We didn't have a large enough pot to try a wet brine.)

And now we've made it to Thanksgiving. Let's pause and talk a minute about our plans. 

We never had big plans for this year. Brandon family get's together every other year and this was the "off" year. My family is spread out all over the country and we haven't been all together for Thanksgiving for over a decade. Brandon and I usually spend the "off" years with at least one part of my family and Brandon usually ends up being the main chef. I guess if COVID hadn't happened we would have got together with my sister Hillary. But COVID did happen. 

As cases started rising this fall I knew it wouldn't be prudent to plan to travel for Thanksgiving. Honestly, if left to my own devises I probably would have just skipped Thanksgiving all together. But Brandon LOVES Thanksgiving and so he was going to make sure we celebrated it no matter what. 

One thing I was afraid of was repeating the Thanksgivings I remembered from when I was a teenager. My family did the every other year thing with my Dad's family. The years with the extended family were fun, but I never liked our "off" years. We'd spend the whole day making food and then just sit at our regular spots at our regular table. It seemed like a whole lot of fuss for nothing. 

I didn't want to repeat that so I told Brandon we'd have to make the meal feel different. I planned to move the dining room table into the living room so we could dine comfortably. Brandon bought "fancy" disposable dishes. 

Brandon and his coworker Hannah started talking about Thanksgiving and decided it would be fun to get together. The figured they already shared germs at work so it wouldn't be irresponsible to celebrate together. When I heard that Hannah and her husband were coming I got excited for Thanksgiving. It would be so fun to have guests. 

Well Hannah ended up having to cancel, but I stayed excited for Thanksgiving.  All that rest on Wednesday meant I was finally feeling well on Thursday. 

Brandon woke up around 7:00 to get the turkey ready. He also turned on the live stream of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Watching this Parade is a family tradition. It was different this year, but at least it wasn't cancelled. The kids woke up and watched the parade on the laptop while eating breakfast. We don't have TV service so we couldn't watch the real broadcast of the parade, but this livestream was much better than it was two years ago. They actually had a host this year. 

Here's Brandon getting our turkey ready. This turkey was actually from last year. Brandon had picked it up at Winco after buying $100 of groceries around Thanksgiving last year. He knew it was just going into the freezer so he'd picked out a small bird. That came in handy this year. It was so small we could cook it in an 8X13 baking dish. 

The kids entertained themselves by playing with hotwheels cars. They had races and made jumps. 

Later they moved downstairs and played with Lincoln Logs. 

At some point Marcia was dressed up for the holiday. 

Charlotte and Lydia had been adding things to the Barbie feast. They'd made crescent rolls out of modeling clay they'd bought at the dollar store. 

They also made a turkey from clay. 

Brandon was hard at work doing Thanksgiving day magic. I'd be completely baffled by what order to make rolls, stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, and everything else. But Brandon has it down to a science. I did help peal potatoes and I made green bean casserole. Brandon did the rest. 

I took care of setting up the table. Brandon helped me move it into the living room and we set up the extra leaf. The kids helped me set it.

Charlotte made name cards. She had big ones, 

And little ones.

Here's Brandon making rolls. These were the best rolls ever. (He used butter instead of margarine and it made ALL the difference.)

Whenever we have Thanksgiving at Brandon's moms house she makes rainbow jello. We've never done the jello on the years we were with my family. But this year we decided to try it because Derrick kept talking about Jello every time we brought up Thanksgiving. It turned out great.

Our table was so cheerful. I loved the yellow plates. 

The barbie table looked great too! I put this picture on Facebook later in the day and so many people commented on it and liked it. 

Soon we were putting food on our table. The nice thing about doing this completely on our own was that we didn't have to wait for anyone to arrive. We just ate when the food was ready. (Which was about 1:00 PM.)

Here are the kids eagerly waiting for us to start. 

Brandon and the kids. 

Me with everyone. 

Brandon said a beautiful blessing while we all held hands. We've seen that in movies and decided to try it out. It was really special to hold Lydia and Derrick's hands. I want to do that every year. Then we started eating. 

Everything was super good. And the turkey was excellent. I liked turkey for the first time ever. Dry Brine for the win!

We all talked about what we were thankful for and had a fun time eating. Derrick poked at his jello and mostly ate rolls. Charlotte and Lydia tried a little bit of everything. Veronica had a few things.  I had the green bean casserole right next to me and took full advantage of the situation.  

Then we cleaned up dinner. My main contribution to Thanksgiving is to do the dishes. So I happily did that. 

Brandon got out some games. He played checkers with the kids. When I was done with the dishes we taught Charlotte and Lydia how to play Kings Corner. Then we played Go Fish. I had to be reminded of the rules because I've been playing "Veronica Rules" for so long. Derrick and Veronica played in the basement for hours. Later Brandon taught Veronica how to play war. 

Around dinner time we pulled out the pie. Brandon had made 2 pumpkin, one berry, and one pecan. They all were delicious!

Here we are eating pie. We were all in the best moods. 

The kids were a little squirrely so we decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. It was really nice to walk around with everyone. 

When we got back home we got in pajamas and got ready to watch a movie.  

A few weeks ago we decided to lean into the fact that most Christmas activities had been cancelled. There would be no parades or parties. We decided to just make plans to watch Christmas Movies every night in December. We came up with a list of movies we wanted to watch. I typed it up and added some notes about where the movies could be found. Four of the movies were at the library so I ordered them right away. Three came in right away too. I picked them up on Wednesday. I wanted to watch those first so we could return them so that other people could watch them in December. So we decided to watch It's a Wonderful Life on Thanksgiving.  

We snuggled under the quilts I'd finished and watched the movie. The kids were a little board, but overall they liked it.  It's been a few years since I watched that movie. I forgot how many endearing little things happen in that movie. It was such a good way to kick off Christmas. 

I'd wondered if Thanksgiving on our own would compare at all to Thanksgiving with extended family. It actually surpassed my expectations by a lot. I'm so glad that my little family can make things special. 

We all slept in super late on Friday. I think it was close to 9:00 when we finally got up and going. We had one main goal for the day - putting up the Christmas tree. Usually we wait until December 1st to put up the tree, but this year I felt we needed some extra cheer. Honestly we probably would have put the tree up earlier in the month, but I'd made a list of things that needed to be cleaned before we could put up the tree. It took us a few weeks to get through that list. 

The first thing we did was take down all the Thanksgiving decorations and some of the regular livingroom decorations. It was great to start with a blank slate for decorating. 

Then the kids came downstairs with me and helped me pull the Christmas totes out from the storage place under the stairs. Brandon carried the heavy box with our new tree in it up stairs. He started setting it up with help from the kids. I bought this tree on sale after Christmas last year. I'm so glad I did. I think I would have talked myself out of buying one this year.  

After the tree was set up we started putting on the ornaments. Brandon's mom paints handmade ornaments for each of us every year so we have a lot of beautiful ornaments. I carefully hand each ornament to the kids and they carefully put them on the tree. 

The tree looked so beautiful. 

And the rest of the room looked good too.

In the afternoon I went to work for about an hour. I wanted to check the mail and check the phone. I didn't want my boss to have to worry about it. I was able to take care of getting some payments to the bank.  

When I was done with work I headed over to Joann's to grab a certain doorbuster for one of the kids presents. I found  few other good deals while I was there. Getting those deals was ADDICTING. I wanted to do it again. So I went to Fred Meyer to see if another certain thing was on sale. It was and I bought one for each kid. I got a few other things for amazing deals too. 

I've never been one for Black Friday Shopping, but I was quickly getting converted. I went to Toy Town to see if they had deals, they didn't, but Once Upon a Child is across the parking lot from Toy Town. I went in there and hit the jackpot with a great find, plus a buy one get one free toy deal. 

I was still chasing the Black Friday high and so I headed to Target. But this is where I ran into problems. Target was PACKED. And I didn't see the kind of deal I was looking for. Winco is next door to Target so I headed over there and grabbed chocolate advent calendars so the trip wasn't a complete waste. Then I went home and told Brandon about all my great finds. I'd been feeling kind of stressed about Christmas shopping, but this had helped me see that it would actually be enjoyable.

We watched Muppet Christmas Carol for our movie that night. That movie makes me laugh so much. 

After the kids were in bed I worked a bit on proofreading my dad's family history book. I was really enjoying the project by this point. I still grumbled a little bit at some of the crazy syntax choices, but I was glad I could help with this project. I've always felt kind of useless when it comes to family history, because I hate researching, so I'm really happy I can help this way. 

On Saturday we were all so happy that we had ANOTHER day to relax.  Lydia and I were able to get back to work on the pajama pants. I helped her hem the pant legs. Then we put in the elastic at the waists. This was a little more tricky than Lydia felt comfortable with so I sewed the casing for the elastic. Then I showed Lydia how to use a safety pin to work the elastic through the casing. She thought that was amazing.

We had each kid try on their pajamas so we could fit them at the waist. (I labeled each pair with a sharpie marker on the inside of the waistband.) Then I sewed the elastic and finished up the casing. We were DONE!  Three weeks early too! Lydia was so proud of her project. 

Here's a close up of the cute fabric. Lydia later took leftover fabric and cut out the gingerbread people and sewed them into clothes and toys for her barbies. 

Brandon and I spent a part of Saturday organizing some of our kitchen shelves. It looks a lot less cluttered. (But I forgot to take a picture.)

The rest of my time on Saturday was spent proofreading my dads book. I made it through the rest of the chapters before it was time for the movie. 

We watched Authur Christmas. I love that movie so much. It's another one that makes me laugh a lot. If you haven't seen it you should stop what you are doing and watch it. 

After the movie Brandon went out to the garage to do something or other. That left me alone to work on more proofreading. My dad wanted me to proof read all the captions for the pictures in the book. That went really fast. 

Then I went to work on Proofreading some epilog type chapters that are biographies of the children of the couple in the book. I was able to make it through all 6 of those. 

It felt so good to finally be done proofreading. 

I thought back to a week earlier when my to do list had seemed so overwhelming. I'd steadily worked at the projects on my list and completed all of them. I'd made it through. 

Brandon came back in from the garage. He and I sat and looked at the tree and other decorations for a while. Everything felt so peaceful.

This morning we slept in again. Oh I love sleeping in. We had church at 10:30 and then spent the rest of the day relaxing. The kids played well together for hours. I was so happy that we didn't have to drive back from somewhere. 

A little bit of reality did intrude on our lives though. I sat down and figured out our school work schedule for the next three weeks. We are on track for most things, but there are two areas where we ended up kind of behind. The next three weeks are going to be busy as we hurry to get everything complete before the end of the semester. But thanks to this week off I feel like we all have the stamina to get through the last little bit. 

But we also aren't quite done celebrating. Brandon's birthday is tomorrow. We are all looking forward to that. 

Thanks for reading. And remember things can change for the better in a relatively short amount of time. 
 

Work, Therapy, and Music

This week was another week that ended up being unexpectedly busy. Back in the pre-COVID days I would get surprised by calm weeks. Now I get surprised by busy weeks. 

A few things combined to make this week busy.

1. I had a Symphony Concert on Friday with two rehearsals earlier in the week. 

2. Each of the kids and Brandon had a doctors appt or therapy session scheduled. 

3. Work ended up more demanding than I had anticipated.

My boss took time off work this week for the National Conference for Marriage and Family Therapists. The other therapists in my office had pretty light schedules this week so I assumed that meant I'd have a nice easy work week.

I know better now. 

Work started out low-key. The office was blissfully quiet on Monday. I was able to get a lot of things done without many distractions. 

At home we had a good day with Homeschool stuff. We've gotten into a good routine with school.

In the late afternoon I took Veronica to her Physical Therapy appointment to help her with her toe walking. The therapists work with her really well. They had lots of fun exercises for her to do to practice using her heels. 

At some point Lydia drew this cool picture of a dragon attack. (I think she stay up drawing it and showed it to me Tuesday morning.)

Tuesday is always a low mail day so I didn't feel like I needed to go into work since I was pretty certain we wouldn't have any important mail to process. I took care of some things from home and that was it. 

Instead I worked on the slideshow that I'd been volunteered to make for the Symphony Concert. The Symphony always has a slide show before their concerts. It has instructions for the audience to remain quiet and to silence phones. There's also some info about the soloists and the music. Amy Toft asked me if I'd be willing to put together the slideshow. I agreed. 

A few weeks later we got word that our concert would have to be completely virtual. We would still be on stage together, but there would be no in-person audience.  The slideshow would run for 15 minutes before the performance. Since the at-home audience wouldn't have a program I would need to put info from the program onto the slideshow. This made the project bigger, but still doable. 

While I worked on that, Brandon and the kids were working on putting together a robot. This is one of the things we got with our homeschool supply money. 

I think I took this picture around the same time. It's a Barbie car pulling four train cars full of treasure. Veronica made the treasure by crumpling up a bunch of little pieces of tinfoil. 

Brandon had a doctor's appointment (He was way overdue for a checkup) so he left for that and I took over the home school. Charlotte and Lydia are working on  reports about Sea Creatures. Lydia picked the Morray Eel and Charlotte picked the Jaw Fish. They were really good at working on that project. 

After school the kids played up stairs. Derrick and Veronica had a ton of fun playing trains together. It's the most I've ever seen Derrick play pretend. He and Veronica each do the voices for the trains and jungle animals. Sometimes they act out episodes of the "Tom Moss the Prank Engine" shows they watch on Youtube. It's funny to hear them laugh just like Tom Moss. (Also take a look at the cardboard creation Charlotte and Lydia are playing with.) 

I took Derrick to Speech therapy in the afternoon. I've been thinking about what I'm good at I've decided one of the things I'm good at is making sure kids have the therapy they need. At work I help parents get their kids scheduled for therapy and at home I make sure my kids get the therapy they need. 

Tuesday night was my rehearsal for the Magic Valley Symphony. I'd had to miss rehearsal the week before because I'd been working as a poll worker. So this was my first rehearsal in two weeks. But I actually felt really on top of things. I'd been practicing at home and had listened to each of the songs repeatedly. 

Rehearsal went really well. Two weeks ago the director had handed me a new bow that he'd found in the music room. This one had much more horse hair than the one I'd been given at the beginning of the season. It was so much fun to play with that better bow. 

I came home from the rehearsal in such a good mood. I'd been having a bit of a blah day, but rehearsal gave me so much energy. 

And boy did I need that energy on Wednesday. I did so much on Wednesday.

I'd planned to work my usual 2.5 hours on Wednesday, but on Tuesday afternoon Charlotte had shown me that one of her teeth wasn't looking right. It looked like it was missing a filling. I wasn't sure if it was a baby tooth or permanent so I called the dentist's office and they scheduled an appointment for Wednesday morning. (Actually they'd tired to schedule on for Tuesday at the time Derrick had therapy and then Wednesday afternoon when I had another commitment so Wednesday morning was actually the best time.)

I realized that Wednesday was Veterans Day so there wouldn't be any mail that day anyway so it was okay to only work a little bit. 

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #1

I still had to go into the office for about an hour to help another therapist with her billing. (My boss is really good at supporting other therapists with their private practices. One of the ways he helps is to have them meet with me if they have questions about the scheduling/billing software.) We got a complicated billing question all straightened out.  

I had a timer set to go off at 9:30 so I'd remember to leave. It went off and I headed home to pick up Charlotte. 

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #2

Charlotte and I went to the dentist which is thankfully pretty close to our house. (Close to my house is actually my #1 criteria when picking a dentist/therapist/doctor.) They did a quick x-ray and we could see that this was definitely a baby tooth with a grown up tooth right under it. The dentist said it would probably fall out on it's own in a few weeks, but we could pull it if we wanted. It wasn't hurting Charlotte so we decided to just leave it alone. 

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #3

We went back home and we did a little bit of school. Derrick came home from his behavioral therapy. (I'm so glad they pick him up and drop him off.) Then it was time to take Charlotte and Lydia to their 10 year old well child check up. Back when I scheduled this appt Nov 11th had seemed so far away, but it snuck up fast. We went to the doctors office (which is also close) and the girls had a good check up. They were both happy they didn't need a shot since we'd already taken care of that earlier in the fall. 

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #4

I'd like to say we got back to school work when we came back home, but I'm not sure we did. I'm actually not sure what I did the rest of the afternoon. Maybe worked on the slideshow? At 5:45 I had to run back over to my office. We have a new therapist who was seeing her first client. She didn't have keys to the office yet. Since my boss was gone he wouldn't be there with the office already open. I'd offered to come over and open it up. So I ran over there with Derrick and got the office opened. Then we hurried back home so I could start making Sloppy Joes for dinner. 

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #5

Brandon came home from work and we had dinner. Then I ran back over to the office so I could lock it up. The appointment was running long so I ended up getting out the laptop and working on some things.

Wednesday Trip Away From Home #6

Brandon was putting the kids to bed when I made it home around 7:30. After the kids were in bed Brandon and I went on a mini date/necessary errand. Brandon has been driving around his work truck, but it got stuck at Lowes on Monday. (There was a problem with the door lock or something.) He'd been able to pick up the truck, but had had to leave the Jeep at the parking lot when he got the truck. So he needed us to both drive to Lowes so he could drive the Jeep home and I could drive the Honda back.  

We decided if we were going to do that after the kids were in bed, we might as well stop at Arctic Circle for some shakes. So we drove to Arctic Circle for our shakes and then ate them in the Lowes parking lot. 

We drove the cars back home and I was THRILLED that I could finally stay home. 

I finished up the slideshow and set it off for final review from Ted Hadley the Symphony Director and Amy Toft the Director of Publicity (and all around amazing woman.)

I thought Thursday would be a simple day compared to Wednesday - but it wasn't. Wednesday had been busy, but it was all stuff that had been on my calendar at least a day in advance. Thursday was full of unexpected things as well as the expected. 

Thursday Trip Away From Home #1

I spent the whole morning at work. I was able to get a lot done. While I was there one of the therapists called to talk about a new client she had scheduled that afternoon. That client was an older man. She was a little worried about being in the office on her own with this client. Normally our boss would be in the office on Thursday afternoons so this isn't a normal problem. But this week it was a concern. Our Thursday afternoon receptionist had the day off (because we'd expected this to be a light week) I texted her to see if she could come in, but she couldn't make it. I offered to come in during the appointment. 

Thursday Trip Away From Home #2

I went back home thinking this wouldn't be a problem at all. I could do school real fast with the three girls and get some things done before Derrick got home. Then I could work with him for a bit before I had to run back to work. This was totally going to work out. 

And then Brandon called. 

His work truck had run out of gas. He was a little embarrassed to tell his boss he was stranded again in the truck. So he asked me if I could come bring him gas. Of course I could do that, but I wasn't sure if we could rescue Brandon before it was time for Derrick to come home. So I texted Derrick's therapist and told her we might not be home on time today. She said that was fine. 

I told the girls that today's homeschool lesson was "How to rescue someone who ran out of gas." We drove to the gas station with the gas can, but I couldn't get it open. It had about a gallon of gas in it so I called Brandon and told him we'd bring that to him and hopefully it would be enough to get him to a gas station. 

Then we drove WAY out of town to find Brandon. He'd told me he was far south on Blue Lakes Blvd, but I hadn't realized just how south he was. At one point I called him and asked, "Wait, did you say north or south?" He confirmed I was going the right way. While we drove I told the kids about every time one of our cars broke down. 

We found Brandon and he put the gas in the tank. He showed me that the truck gauge read that it had 1/4 gallon when he'd run out of gas. He said, "Bill wanted me to drive this truck so I could learn it's quirks. And I'm definitely learning the quirks."

Then I followed Brandon to a gas station. He said he made it just as the truck was running out of gas again. As soon as I knew Brandon was good I texted Derrick's therapist and told her I was on my way home. We made it back to the house 15 minutes after the normal drop off time. 

Thursday Trip Away From Home #3

I made something quick for lunch and then the kids and I did a very abbreviated school time. I was back at work before 2:00. It's kind of good that I was back at work because a client had emailed me with a question that ended up requiring a lot of attention. 

Thursday Trip Away From Home #4

When I got back home Charlotte was waiting for me. I'd promised to go on a walk with her and Marcia so I could see the route that she likes to walk. So while everyone else watched a movie Charlotte and I went on a nice walk. It was a perfect fall day and we really liked going on a walk together. 

Thursday Trip Away From Home #5

When we were back from our walk it was time for our usual Thursday afternoon activity - running errands. We only had two this day. We had to return library books and go to the dollar store. Returning books went okay, and really so did the dollar store - but as we walked into the dollar store I was a little embarrassed about the state of my kids. The girls had tangled hair, two of the kids weren't wearing coats, one had ripped pants, one was wearing mismatched shoes, another didn't have socks, one was wearing high water pants, and ALL of them needed deodorant. I later made a rule that I'm not taking them inside stores on Thursday if they haven't had baths on Wednesday night.  

Thursday Trip Away From Home #6

We came home and I was relating hard to this meme. 

So I made dinner. I think it was pancakes. I'm not sure. 

I realized I had emails back from Ted and Amy with a few notes for the slide show. So I while the kids and Brandon cleaned up dinner I did the last few edits on the slide show. Then I sent it to the technicians from ISU who were helping with the concert. 

It was time to get going to the concert dress rehearsal. I didn't realize it, but I was pretty ticked off at my family. I'd done SO MUCH for them all week and yet the house was a mess and none of the kids were wearing deodorant yet. It just felt like I'd accomplished nothing. So I left the house while huffing and puffing about everything that needed to be done. 

Brandon made sure that the kids cleaned the bathrooms (they'd been so gross for days) and then had all the kids take baths (they had also been gross for days.) I'm so glad he did that. 

The dress rehearsal went well. According to the original plan this would have been concert night #1. But since we couldn't have an audience it was just a rehearsal.  We had some good laughs. The tech guys surprised us with canned applause at the end of one song. 

But by the time we started the last song I was completely done. Our last song was the Finale from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. It's a song that requires a lot of concentration and energy. I didn't have either. When it was over I turned the section leader and said something like, "Well that didn't go well, but I'll bring it tomorrow." 

I came home and crashed on the downstairs couch. I watched like 3 episodes of the West Wing. Matt Santos was elected president. YAY!

Since I had to go to work in the afternoon on Thursday I'd had to cancel a weekly zoom check in with Derrick's special ed teacher. So I made sure to send her this subtraction test that Derrick had done that week. Brandon said he did this without much help.

Brandon taught the kids to add and subtract with the dot method (which I guess is really called touch points?) Derrick caught on to that really well.

And we've finally made it to Friday which was only a slow day compared to the two days previously. I went to work and planned to work until about 11:30 like I would on a normal day. But I realized I needed to stay until a little after 12:00.  Never again will I make the mistake of thinking work will be easy when my boss is gone for a week. 

I came home and found Charlotte and Lydia painting the "Barbie Hospital" they had been constructing all week. This was a conglomeration of cardboard boxes that they'd glued together and then furnished to look like different hospital rooms.  Both of them had the Barbies hold paint brushes and pretend to be the ones painting the rooms.

Here's a tour of the finished building. (Sorry the pictures' are sideways. I'm not sure what's up with that.)

This is the waiting room. Lydia even painted a mural on the wall.

This is one of the exam room. Charlotte bought a barbie in a wheelchair with her birthday money. So this is the place that Barbie goes for Physical Therapy.

The hospital happens to have a veterinarian wing. This is the animal room.  

Here are two rooms on top of each other. One is the pediatric area. And one is post-partum. 

After I took the pictures I walked away for a while. When I came back I noticed the Physical Therapist was working with the girl in the wheel chair. 

So yeah the creative side of Homeschool is going AMAZING!!!!

We had a lot to catch up on to finish the school work part of homeschool for the week. Charlotte and Lydia did their social studies on their own for the first time ever!  Then we got through Language Arts and Writing with minimum whining. 

Derrick also did his social studies on his own. He is such a trooper with that. The program reads outload to him and he will dutifully sit through the lessons. I don't think he is taking in anything it says - but he goes through it anyway. When he was done with Social Studies I had him go right into MathSeeds. He is much more engaged in that. It was going over the difference between near and far and other directions like above and below. At first he didn't understand, but by the end of the level he knew what he was doing. Then I had him work on his writing assignment. We had to make an idea web about a specific day. I gave him the option to come up with ideas about Halloween, his birthday, or Christmas. He picked Christmas and spouted off tons of things about Christmas. I write for him and I could hardly keep up. 

Veronica had already done social studies so we just had to finish her mathseeds and then do her writing work. That went well too. 

The kids were done, but I was not. I had to document all the work we'd done. Documentation has been my least favorite part of our homeschool program. I have to take pictures of all the things we've done in the work books and upload the pictures to Google Classroom. It's super tedious. 

Then I spent some time filling out my chart for what I hoped to do next week. This is also tedious, but I've found I like to do it on Friday afternoon so I don't have to think about school again until Monday. 

It probably takes me about 2 hours to document everything and prepare for the next week. It's a lot of time. 

When I was done with that I seriously did nothing. I just laid on the couch. 

Then I made pizza for dinner. I needed to be getting ready for the concert at the time we normally eat dinner so I had the kids eat early. This worked out well because Brandon got home 30 minutes early and so he was able to eat with us. 

Then I hurried to change into my black concert outfit and went to the concert. I wasn't too worried about how I would look for the concert because I knew I wouldn't show up very well on camera anyway. But I still took a backstage selfie. 

Here is the link to the concert if you want to watch it. It starts with 15 minutes of my slideshow. This was mostly copied and pasted from the program. But it was still a big job. I've repeatedly told Brandon that my least favorite job would be to be the person responsible for the credits at the end of a movie. I've said, "Can you imagine how hard it would be to get everyone's names right?" In the middle of working on this slideshow I realized that's what I was doing!

Since no one could see us while the slideshow was going we just started out on the stage. We started with Variations on a Shaker Melody by Aaron Copland. My previous experience with Copland was in high school when we attempted to play Rodeo (the Beef It's What's for Dinner Theme). I don't think we ever actually played it for a concert, but I remember practicing it. The bass part is pretty non-existant in Rodeo. The Variations on a Shaker Melody is similar. There wasn't much of a bass part. We actually don't even come in for the first 50 measures or so. But when we do come in it is beautiful I imagine we are the fog rolling in over the Appalachian Mountains.

Then we rest again for a while. The second time we come in is thrilling. I got emotional every time we played it along with the full Symphony.  Filling so joyful while playing a beautiful song is what I love about making music. It's what kept me going for 8 years in school and it's what makes me so happy to be doing this again. 

The second song was the Juilet's Waltz that we'd played in the first concert. This one featured a youth soloist. This was an easy song to play and I loved that I could do it without much concentration. Brandon and the kids were watching the live stream at home on the big screen. Derrick was enchanted by the soloist and went up and tried to hold her hand. 

Our next song was probably my favorite of the night. It was Variation on a theme of Haydn by Braham's. It's the type of song I live for as a bass player. It had lots of quarter notes, but not a lot of fast parts. I can play every note. There were a few 8th notes that I wasn't quite quick enough for, but I faked it through those and was back in the game for the finale. This is the song that is now frequently stuck in my head. 

And then it was on to the more difficult pieces of the night. 

Our next song was a the Adagietto from Malher's 5th Symphony. It's a slow love song. Malher is hard and slow is hard and so this song was HARD. I had to mouth each count through the whole song. (I'm so glad I preform in a mask.)  We had some difficulty getting going and the director actually stopped us when we weren't quite together. Then we tried again and didn't get the rhythm right in the 3rd measure. So we were stopped again!  But on the third try everything came together perfectly. It was such a beautiful piece. The end has a really cool bass part where we sound so amazing. I'm so glad it worked out. 

The next song was a Piano Concerto by Saint-Sans. This was another one with a youth soloist. She came out wearing a super sparkly dress. At home Charlotte thought the dress was amazing. Brandon said the pianists hands were amazing. He said they looked blurry on camera. 

I'm glad the piano player looked and sounded amazing, because all was not well in my area. This song had 4/4 time but we often went into subdivided measures. So it was really hard to keep track of whether the conductor was beating 4 beats to a measure or 8. I had notes all over my music. I also had to re-write the quarter rests in my music because this music was had French notations and the quarter rests looked like backward 8th rests. Oh and the bass music had cello parts written on it that I had to make notes not to play. 

Basically I just followed the section leader and was grateful that most of our notes were just the low G. 

And the soloist stole the show so no one was paying attention to the bass section anyway. 

Our final song was the Finale from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I grew up with my dad playing classical music all the time, so I'm certain I'd heard this song before, but I honestly had no concept of how it should go. I had to listen to it on Youtube a lot. I imagined that the first musicians to play this music had to be super talented. Here they were handed a song no one had ever heard or played and they were supposed to learn it and play it well.

This was another song full of notes. There were sections that wanted notes played that were lower than a bass can actually play, (and lower than I'm used to reading) so I had to transpose those notes an octive higher. Then there were other sections with notes higher than basses usually play. So I had to write in the names of all those notes and find them on my string. 

Playing the song was a whole other matter. It was a lot of technical work that I'm just not up. Second position. Crazy fast scale runs. Super fast 8th notes. Slurs with more that 3 notes. Maybe in a year or two I can do that stuff super fast, but I'm just not there. There was a whole section toward the end that I just followed my section leaders bowing, but didn't actually play anything. 

But I did "Bring It."  I was THERE for the deep notes. I was THERE for the fast notes (or at least pretending to play the fast notes.)  And there were a few sections where I was THERE for the music. Gosh it's fun to play the bass. 

And then we were done. The technical guys gave us another round of canned applause. I realized the house lights had been on during the whole concert. Usually it's dark out in the audience until the end of the concert. It honestly had felt like a rehearsal. 

We turned in our music and then went home. We are done until January. At least I hope it's only January. Earlier in the day the governor had ordered Idaho back to Stage 2. That means instead of groups of 50 we can only have groups of 10. If our concert had been scheduled for Saturday night it might have been cancelled. 

I drove home and my parents called me when I was close to my house. They'd watched the whole concert from North Carolina.  They'd loved it. My dad told me "that deserves ice cream" which is what he always said after my concerts when I was a teenager. He said he'd transferred money into my bank account so I could go get me some ice cream. 

Brandon had already put the kids to bed by the time I got home. We through about going to get ice cream in secret again, but decided not to. Instead we watched Enola Holms on Netflix. It was cute. 

Saturday was a wonderful day. Our weather had been very back and forth. Monday and Tuesdy had been cold and a little snowy. Wednesday and Thursday were warmish, Friday was cold and kind of snowy/rainy, and Saturday was kind of clear and warm again. (Then it was rainy on Sunday.)  

We spend the day getting back on top of the house. Brandon took the kids grocery shopping in the morning so I could have a quiet house to myself. I started some prep work for a project I'm doing for my dad. Brandon and the kids went to a park after the store (it was cool enough they didn't have to worry about the groceries right away.) At the park Veronica biffed it on the slide and ended up with a bloody lip. They came home and got her cleaned up. She has a few scratches, but nothing permanent.

After the food was put away we started work on the bedrooms and laundry.  Charlotte and Lydia's room was in need of a complete overhaul. We'd decided that their bed needed to move away from the door to be on the opposite wall. This would make the room flow better. So we had to clean out from under the bed, move the dressers out, move the shelves, and then move the bed. We also removed about 1.5 bags of trash. In the process we found nearly all the socks that have disappeared lately. I went from having about 6 pairs of kids socks to having 20 pairs. 

It took us several hours, but the end result was so worth it. Here is the bed now. It's so much easier to look in there and say, "Hey clean up that mess."

And here are the shelves. I forgot to get a picture of the closet with the other dresser. 

I also came to the conclusion that the the kids do not need anymore toys. We have calico critters, LOL/OMG dolls, Barbies, legos, etc. So I brainstormed with the girls about some good "non-toy" gifts like curtains to ask for instead of toys. Santa will still probably bring them some toys. But Mom and Dad are not. 

Veronica and Derrick cleaned their rooms too. When all the bedrooms were done Brandon and I told the kids it was time for ice cream. Earlier in the day I'd said, "I may have earned ice cream last night, but the kids didn't yet." We'll now they'd earned it.  We went through the drive through (because the lobby is closed to dining in.)

Then we parked in the super empty parking lot to eat the icecream.

We went back home  and the kids played around while Brandon and I kept cleaning the house. We'd turned on the self cleaning feature on our oven and it was stinking up the house so we opened some of the windows. It was a nice day and I decided this was a good opportunity to wash the windows. I've had "clean the windows" on my list of things to do before we decorate for Christmas because I want them to let in light during the dreary winter. So I went around the inside of the house and pulled out the window panes that could be removed. Then Brandon got the ladder for me and I did the outside parts of the panes that couldn't come out. They looked so good by the time I was done. 

Marcia had followed me outside when I went in for something. She'd wandered into the front yard when I was packing up the ladder. She acted like she wanted to run into the road, but came back when I called her.  She followed me into the back yard and ran around there while I put away the ladder. I went back into the house and told Brandon, "Marcia has been so much better behaved lately, she came back right when I called her and didn't go into the road at all."

Then I completely forgot about Marcia.

I looked up some Christmas gifts online, I took a shower, Brandon made dinner and we ate it, I helped the kids take baths, nd we cleaned up dinner. Then we went downstairs to watch a live broadcast of ISU's presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I actually like this part of COVID. There is no way I would take my 4 kids to a live production of a Shakespeare play. But thanks to COVID and Youtube we were able to watch it from home. And the kids could talk as much as they wanted. 

The play runs next weekend too so here is a link to when those performances are and how to view them. But be warned, this play is LONG. I wasn't quite prepared for how long it would be. It was nearly 2.5 hours with an intermission. The kids were mildly interested and I had to explain A LOT, but they kept watching it. Well most of them. Derrick put himself to bed after about 20 minutes. 

At the intermission Charlotte asked, "Mom, do you know where Marcia is? I haven't seen her." 

And I said, "Oh she's probably upstairs under the couch or something."   

"No I looked there." Charlotte said.

"Well then she's probably under my bed."

"No I looked there too."

At this point Brandon, who was bored of the play anyway, offered to go look for Marcia upstairs. 

About 10 minutes later I remembered that I'd left Marcia outside hours ago.  

OOOPS!

Brandon went looking for her. The kids kept watching and were rewarded with the funny play within a play at the end. They really liked that part. When the play ended I put Charlotte and Lydia to bed. (Veronica had fallen asleep on the couch about an hour earlier.)  I promised them I'd go drive around and look for Marcia. 

I met up with Brandon and we drove around the neighborhood, but we didn't think we'd find her. She'd been gone for hours. Chances were she'd either been picked up by animal control, or was spending the night with some nice family that had found her. 

I was feeling pretty bad. I kept imagining her barking at our door trying to tell us that she wanted to get back in and we'd completely ignored her.  But then I remembered that all the windows had been open. We would have heard her bark. And I'd been working on the computer in the living room. If she'd been casually wandering around in the front yard I would have seen her.  This was not a case of a poor abandoned dog giving up on her family. This was a sneaky escape attempt. She'd seen her opportunity and taken it. 

I figured she deserved whatever fate she had and Brandon felt the same way. So we went home and slept soundly. (Though I did feel a little bad when it started to rain.)

In the morning the kids were freaking out.  So I call the animal shelter and listened to the prerecorded message about when they opened (10:00 am on Monday) and what the number for Twin Falls Animal Control was. I call the animal control number and asked if they'd picked up a dog like Marcia. They said they had what looked like a "puppy German Shepard with a pink collar."  That was Marcia. 

I called back the animal shelter and left a message saying they had our dog and we'd be there to get her on Monday. 

The kids were so relieved when I told them I'd found Marcia. I was glad she was safe and I was hoping she was learning a lesson from this. 

We had in person church today - the governor's order is a Modified Stage 2 so church services and some other things are okay to have over 10 people. We had a high counsel speaker who ended up being really engaging. After church Brandon met with our brand new Elders Quorum President and was called to be the Secretary in the Elders Quorum. This is so great because one of the things he needs most is guy friends. 

We had a wonderful afternoon. Brandon rough housed with the kids and I played Green Thumb with them. In the evening we read more from Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites. The kids are getting really into the book. 

And now here we are at Sunday night. And I'm looking at a week that looks much less busy than last week. But I'm leery of saying that out loud. 

Thanks for reading

 Proof Reading

Picture of writers inc?

Election Week - with memes

Wow!  What a week. In an already crazy year this week has been full of some very anxious moments. This meme kind of sums up how I feel when I think about trying to recap this week.

Let's get going. 

Charlotte and Lydia's birthday was Saturday which was also known as Halloween. The kids had so much candy that nobody was interested in cake AT ALL. So we didn't blow out candles on the cakes until Sunday. 

Here we are singing to Charlotte.

And to Lydia. 

Here they are one last time with the cakes. 

It was fun to finally cut into the cakes.

The fondant one was especially cute. 

We each had a piece of the cauldron cake, but didn't touch the wolf cake. And I ended up throwing away a bunch of cake that the kids didn't touch. 

I put a note into my calendar for next October. It says something like, "Make mini cakes for Charlotte and Lydia's birthday." 

Brandon and I were kind of grumpy all Sunday long. The house felt really cluttered and the kids seemed a little on the entitled side. I realized that part of my problem was that I had been with the kids non-stop since Friday at 10:00 am. Usually the solution to that feeling is to go on a walk, but I really wanted the house to myself. So Brandon took the kids to the park and I enjoyed a silent house for about an hour. 

I worked on extending my handmade calendar to May 2021. Yes I could just buy a calendar or maybe even just print out blank squares, but there is something very therapeutic about doing it by hand. I've done this for years and it feels almost ritualistic at this point. It's like I'm shaping my own future by making my own calendar. 

Daylight savings time ended on Sunday morning so we spent a lot of the day wondering what time it was vs what time it would be. We were all a little shocked when it got dark around 6:00 PM. Fortunately I'd borrowed the book Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites from my neighbors. We all snuggled up and read that book before bed time. 

Thanks to the end of Daylight Saving Time it was super easy to wake up in the morning on Monday. I got up and did a youtube Yoga video. Derrick woke up while I was doing the video. He had a basket of clean laundry in his room. He put that whole basket away by himself. He's been doing this for a few months so that wasn't too out of the ordinary, but then he did something new. He took his basket of dirty clothes into the laundry room and started a load of wash completely on his own. I was so impressed. 

Derrick was "on task" all day long. The kids don't have onsite school on Monday's right now so Brandon and I have to be flexible with how we make sure Derrick is supervised. This week Brandon brought Derrick to my office when it was time for Brandon to go to work. Derrick sat in the waiting room and read Berenstain Bears Books for about half an hour. I was able to get my work done finished before Derrick got antsy. 

When we came back home Derrick was so focused for school. He did all his work in Reading Eggs and Math Seeds. He even wanted to do his Social Studies work that we normally do on Thursdays. I think he did more than half of his work for the week on Monday.  

Here he is making himself an afternoon snack. He loves pizza rolls. 

He was really proud that he made them into a smily face. 

Veronica has been a toe walker nearly her whole life. Brandon is a toe walker too and so I haven't been worried about Veronica's toe walking. But over the last year I did start getting concerned. She seemed to be twisting her ankle a lot. I decided to ask about it at her 7 year old well child check. Well I did and the Dr referred us to a physical therapist. We had her first appointment on Monday. 

The appt was really fun for Veronica. The doctor was really enthusiastic and Veronica liked talking with him. He felt all over her legs and could tell that her muscles are weak from so much toe walking. He recommended some exercises and they practiced some things together. She's going to go back for several weeks for some specific muscle training. 

That evening I mentioned that Derrick had something on his eye. (Just a little bit of goop.)  Derrick got SUPER interested in eyes. He wanted to know all about them. We watched a Mystery Doug episode about eyes and Derrick was fascinated. Brandon promised they'd talk about eyes in Science the next day. 

Derrick kept talking and talking about eyes.  Finally Lydia dryly said, "Derrick I don't CARE." It was hilarious. It also didn't stop him talking about eyes. At bedtime he often tells me a bedtime story instead of the other way around. That night the story was all about eyes. I ended up taking him into the bathroom to show him his pupils dilating. He thought that was SO COOL.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a big day for me. I'd signed up to be a poll worker and had been assigned a location about a mile from my house. I needed to be there at 7:00 AM and would stay until polls closed at 8:00 that night. Brandon packed my lunch box full of snacks and a salad so I wouldn't get hungry. I brought a book and my symphony music in case I got board. I left the house when it was still dark outside.

I got to the polling place and helped set up tables. There were three other people assigned to be registrars with me. This was good because I'd anticipated being the only one. I was so happy to know there would be others to help get people registered.

I ducked outside to take a quick selfie to document the beginning of the day. 

At 7:30 we started having people come into the building. Polls didn't open until 8:00 so we just asked them to have a seat. But then more people started coming. 

I shut the big double doors to the building and went outside to tell the people out there that they could line up and wait out there. I planned to just be out there for a minute, but then another group of people showed up. I felt like they should be welcomed and when polls open. And when I finished talking to them some more people were arriving. 

So I just made myself the official line greeter. I welcomed each person and directed them to the line. When the line reached a T in the sidewalk I directed the next people where to stand in the line. The line stretched about 100 feet and had over 60 people in it by the time 8:00 am rolled around. 

At 8:00 the line started moving. It became apparent that Precinct 6 had more people than Precinct 5. We divided the line into two lines- one for each precinct. I stayed outside and helped people know which precinct they were in. "Do you live on this side of Eastland or that side of Eastland" became the phrase I repeated all day long. 

While I was outside a van pulled up and the people inside waved me over. They had tested positive for COVID. So I helped them with curbside voting. I thought we'd do that many times throughout the day, but they ended up being the only ones. 

I finally made it back inside the building around 9:15 when the line had completely disappeared. 

There were small bits of downtime throughout the rest of the day. But I was never bored. I passed the time talking with the other registrar ladies. And we had a steady stream of people entering the building all day. 

I'd ended up at a table with maps of the precincts. It was the first table inside the building so I talked to just about everyone who entered. Many people were from my ward. 

We expected another rush of voters around 5:00, but it never materialized. We did end up with a few fairly long lines at the registration table, but that was because it was a slow process and we only had one I-pad to enter people's names. 

The last hour or so felt the longest of the day. It was dark outside and we all were feeling a little sleepy. Plus there were only a handful of voters that came in that last hour. The ladies at the precinct tables started folding up most of the voting booths around 7:30.  We started cleaning up our tables around 7:45. Around 7:55 me and one of the other registrars went outside to grab the "Vote Here" signs we'd put out near the street. When we came back in everyone was taking the rest of the things down. We had everything down by 8:10. Someone else was in charge of getting everything back to the county so I was free to go. 

This is my "after" picture I took in the car.

And this is one at home. My hair had been in a ponytail since about 10:00 that morning. The pony tail was hiding a huge snarl that had formed in my hair. It took me a long time to brush it out the next morning. 

Brandon had already put the kids to bed when I got home. He'd had a great day home with them. I was really happy that his boss had agreed to let him take the day off. 

Brandon had done all the homeschool stuff with the kids, taken Derrick to speech therapy, and even taken all 4 kids grocery shopping. He told me that he'd nearly forgot to feed them all dinner (but since they were still subsisting on Halloween Candy they weren't exactly hungry.)

I told myself that I wouldn't check any election news until at least the next day. I knew that big states like Pennsylvania would take a long time for their results to come in because they hadn't been able to start counting their mail in ballots ahead of time. 

But of course I ended up looking at election returns. And it was kind of stressful. I get a morning newsletter from New York Times and it suggested that the earliest meaningful results would come from Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. When I checked on all three states they were all showing up red. A lot of states were showing up red. 

This meme sums up my mood when I went to bed that night. 

Still I was pretty hopeful. I'd read so many pieces that explained there would be a "red mirage" when the votes cast on Election Day were counted. But since early voting was usually heavily democrat the states may change to blue as the mail in ballots and early votes were counted. 

I trusted in that and went to bed. 

Wednesday

I checked on everything again when I woke up in the morning. Things were pretty much where they had been the night before.

So I checked the local numbers. And got pretty obsessed with those. 

When I'd voted in the primary for local elections back in May I'd been surprised that their hadn't been a single democratic candidate for any of the local races. When I'd filled out my mail in ballot several weeks ago there were several uncontested races for County Commissioner and even Sheriff. I know Idaho is a Republican stronghold, but Bannock County had had Democratic candidates. Why didn't Twin Falls County?

I looked up how Joe Biden had done in Twin Falls county and saw that he had over 9,000 votes. Paulette Jordan, a democrat who was running for Senator, had over 7,000 votes. 

I ended up giving Brandon a whole speech about if Joe Biden got over 9,000 votes and Paulette Jordan got over 7,000 votes in Twin Falls County then it was possible that voters would be willing to vote for democrats in the local races. They wouldn't win with those numbers, but if they were a candidate that people knew and trusted then they could possible get enough votes to win. And even if they didn't win the races should at least be contested. 

I told Brandon that I didn't know what my next step should be. Should I throw in everything with the democrats or should I work on getting a League of Women Voters started in Twin Falls. Brandon listened patiently and then told me, "you do whatever you need to do."  Which was his way of being encouraging, but also signaling he'd lost interest. 

At work I was pretty distracted. I was addressing envelopes and kept mixing up our return address labels and our stamps. I ended up checking out the 2018 election results for Twin Falls County. Back then each county race was uncontested. I couldn't believe it. 

My boss came out of his office and asked me about the polls the day before. He ended up getting my "if Joe Biden got over 9,000 votes and Paulette Jordan got over 7,000 votes in Twin Falls County then it was possible that voters would be willing to vote for democrats in the local races" speech.

I ended up emailing the Twin Falls County Democrats and gave them the written version of my speech along with an offer for help. I told them that I'd helped a democrat get elected in Bannock County and that I was willing to help in whatever way they needed me here in Twin Falls County. 

I'm still a little unsure about my next steps, but I'm definitely already thinking about the 2022 election.

Meanwhile the national election was still very much in the air. 

Back at home I realized that my 13 hour day had caught up to me. I told the kids they could play and I laid down to take a nap. When I woke up they were playing so well that I decided to just cancel school for the day. I ended up updating this blog all afternoon. 

As the day went on some good news came in from Wisconsin and Michigan. Both of them were called for Biden. 

Biden was at 264 Electoral Votes and only needed 6 more to get to the winning number of 270. Suddenly all eyes were on Nevada. Nevada was worth 6 Electoral Votes and was projected to be for Biden. With big states like Georgia and Pennsylvania still taking a long time to count their votes Nevada looked to be the one to yield the winning votes. 

But wow it was taking a while to come up with the votes. This meme was making me laugh when I went to bed that night. 

Thursday 

Things were still inconclusive on Thursday. This meme was especially apropos. 

We actually did school when I was done with work on Thursday. Thursday is our errand running day. Charlotte and Lydia wanted to spend some birthday money. Charlotte said she wanted a doll house so we checked DI. We found an AMAZING one for $25. It was a little tricky to get it into the car, but we did it. 

We set the doll house in the basement next to the Frozen castle that Lydia had claimed as her own. Charlotte and Lydia are so excited to be neighbors. Later they decided to move the homemade doll house down from their room. They gave it to Veronica so she could have a house too. 

I spent a lot of time on Thursday night uploading classwork to Google Classroom. When I was done with that project I went downstairs and watched about 5 episodes of the West Wing. I was half expecting Matt Santos to be elected before we got results about the 2020 election. But I hadn't made it to that election by the time I went to bed at 12:45.

Friday

By Friday everyone had given up on Nevada ever having results. We were all watching Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Any of the three would give the victory to Biden. Georgia and Pennsylvania looked like they could go blue. I was feeling pretty good about the situation and so I wasn't obsessively checking for results. 

I didn't go into work at all on Friday. So we were able to get through school pretty quick. We brought back "Fairy Tale Friday" and acted out The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig." (We have more stuffed wolves than pigs.)

I don't have a meme for Friday so here's one that made me laugh way too hard earlier in the week. 

Brandon and I tried to stay up and watch V of Vendetta after the kids were in bed on Friday night. But Veronica woke up and came downstairs, and the movie isn't exactly appropriate for a 7 year old. Plus I was a little too raw from real events to watch the defeat of fascism in a movie. 

Saturday

We were cleaning the house when my sister Hillary sent me a text.  All it said was, "Biden won!!!!!"

Those five exclamation points said a lot.

I pulled up the election map and saw Pennsylvania solidly blue. I ran into the kids rooms where they were cleaning and showed them the map. They were so excited!

I went to the calendar and wrote "Inauguration Day" on January 20th. I added a smiley face. 

Hillary asked me what we were doing to celebrate. I told her we were finishing cleaning the house. 

The house did get clean, and so did the backyard. In the afternoon I took a break on the couch and read a whole bunch of election coverage. My favorite moment was when I scrolled through a list of possible cabinet appointees. The list of people with experience was so refreshing. 

Brandon picked up hamburgers from Burger King for dinner.  Then we watched Mission Impossible with the kids for movie night. They all loved it.

After the kids were in bed I pulled up President Elect Joe Biden's acceptance speech. Brandon and I sat on the couch and watched it on my phone. I've been a solid Biden supporter for several months, and watching this speech confirmed my appreciation for him once again. He is absolutely the best person to be leading our county right now. If anyone can unify the county it's him. 

Sunday

We woke up to snow this morning. I helped the kids get into their snow gear and they went outside and rolled some huge snow balls. 

By the afternoon the snow was melted and they'd smashed the balls. I love Twin Falls because we get snow, but it doesn't stick around and get all gross. 

And that catches us up once again. Thanks for reading.