weekly 2014.11.9

We've had a nice and busy Sabbath day. The kids had the Primary Program, I taught RS, Rachel and Aaron taught family history in Primary, Aaron taught the Teacher’s quorum and Thomas conducted a Court of Honor tonight.  Mom and Mark went to church with us and stayed for lunch, which was great. They only live 25 minutes away, but we honestly haven’t seen them in ages. We need to do better.

I felt really proud today that Spencer’s suit pants were about 4 inches above his ankles and Thomas also wore floods to the Court of Honor.  I mean really, it takes some serious dedication to have two sons looking ridiculous.  On the docket this week: pants shopping. And I may as well throw shoe shopping in there too cause the children around here, they never stop growing. And growing. And growing. Now that I think about it, I should probably just buy pants for the next 10 sizes in a row, just to have on hand, so we can avoid further Floods R Us Sunday exhibitions.

Rebekah was so very thrilled today to realize that she has two loose teeth. (Her first.) I expect lots of tooth related drama over the next month based on her statement that she couldn’t help with the dinner dishes because her tooth was loose. Should be fun! Then at one point this evening Harry asked her to carry something to the kitchen for him because she was walking to the kitchen. She said no, but Stick told her to do it anyway. She then stormed across the room sassing, “Harry! It’s like you’re forcing me to serve you!!!!”  I finally took her to the doctor on Tuesday because she’d been sick since the previous Wednesday. You know me, I like to make sure the kids suffer and run a fever and are good and miserable for lots of days before I even think about a doctor visit! Turns out it was Strep, which I felt a teensy bit guilty about because she could have started the meds days earlier, but oh well, I’ll probably do the same exact thing next time! She was thrilled to finally go back to school on Friday.

Harry is great. He goes early to school on Tuesdays for Sphero Club which he is really loves. Sphero is a little app controlled robot ball.  Ha! You knew that didn’t you? I just had to look it up on Google which is sort of funny considering I take him to school early for the club, but I don’t even know what he is doing there. All I know is that he loves it, and he’s learning some coding. So yay.

Spencer is great (and growing!) His 11 year old scout group joined the boy scouts Tuesday night for Scout Master reviews and dodge ball. I know that this will surprise you, but he took the dodge ball very seriously. He completely loved it, and came home positively dripping with sweat and told me he felt a little bad because he had possibly injured some of the scouts throwing the ball so hard. One of the leaders asked when he turns 12, and was surprised to learn that he is the youngest in the group and won’t be 12 for 10 more months. I hate to think the damage he will do in dodge ball at that point.

Thomas is great and doing such a good job as Deacon’s Quorum president. He takes his responsibilities seriously and is learning so much. Isn’t the church system great that it starts teaching kids at such a young age to have to responsibilities, to conduct meetings, to make plans and follow through?  These are things that some adults don’t even know how to do and our kids start learning it when they are 12.

Aaron is so excited to join Robotics club tomorrow at school. He’s just like a sponge for information these days. He subscribes to one scientific magazine and just signed up for another. He listens to pod casts every day at work and can converse freely on so many topics, it puts my feeble mind to shame. He and Rachel are making plans to go to our next CCHS football game on Friday which is the regional semi-final game, held at Rice Eccles stadium. They’ve been loyal fans all season. They will probably go with their group of friends and take Trax up to the U for the game.

Thursday night I took Rachel (and Bree and Taylor) to the Utah State Open House being held at South Town Expo Center. We didn’t really know what it would involve but Utah State is probably her #2 or #3 college choice after BYU so I thought we better check it out. It turned out that she filled out an application right there, showed them her transcript and got a $2500 scholarship right on the spot! What a surprise. Bree and Taylor had come along just for kicks but then we realized they could apply too, so they did. The funniest part of the night was that each application required a $40 fee and I ended up paying for all three kids (they paid me back later). I talked to Bree’s mom at church today and she said, “Thanks for helping Bree get into college!” Ha! It ended up being a pretty fun event. We ate world famous Aggie ice cream, the kids were all accepted, and they snagged all kinds of free Aggie swag like pens and string backpacks. So, um, Go Aggies!?!? At one point a USU employee came to talk to me because he could see that Rachel was filling out an application. He asked, “So are you an Aggie, because we offer a lot of alumni scholarships”.  I replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Cougar.” He got a funny look on his face, said, “Oh” and then walked away. Rachel is working on her BYU application but it is all online and much more labor intensive that Utah State’s. Oh my, it’s scary and fun all at the same time.

Over and out.