Our Last Couple of Weeks

We’ve had a good last couple of weeks. Last weekend over Labor Day we enjoyed camping in Fairhaven with about 15 other families from church. Fairhaven is a town on Lake Ontario – so since we’ve been married we’ve been to three of the great lakes so far: Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Rochester is here on Lake Erie, and now we’ve enjoyed swimming in lake Ontario. We also enjoyed riding a wave runner that one of the other families brought – Michael and I each took a turn riding, and Kolby, Eli, and Camden all rode it too. And Kolby even rode on the inner tube behind the wave runner all by himself (they are pretty strict here, I guess, about sticking to the rule of only letting one person ride on an inner tube at once – so Kolby got to go all by himself and he didn’t fall off).

After the campout we got busy getting the last few things ready for school – getting the last of the school supplies, and then going for a ‘meet the teacher day’ and a sample bus ride. Kolby really loves kindergarten and riding the bus all by himself. And he has started to be especially good at remembering to practice the piano before he has to leave for school without even being reminded. It is a little strange for me to get used to having a schedule again after being free to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted all summer long. But it’s kind of nice that Kolby gets to ride the bus to school and back so I don’t have to take all the kids to get him everyday. It will be a little more difficult in the upcoming weeks to work things out because Eli is going to be in morning kindergarten on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I have to pick Eli up from preschool at 11:30 and then have Kolby back home by 11:50 for his bus. We’ll just have to try it out for the first couple weeks and see how it goes, and if it’s just too tight I may need to just drop Kolby off at school on our way home from preschool on those days, we’ll see how that goes. But Eli’s looking forward to preschool, and on Thursday this week we have his first day when I go with him and get to meet the teacher and see his class and everything. Then the Tuesday after that he will have his first real day to be dropped off, so that should be a lot of fun for him.

We’ve had a busy schedule for a while – Michael and I were talking last night and thinking that this year his schedule seems busier than last year. I don’t really know how that can be, since he doesn’t have any crazy 30-hour shifts or anytime that he has to spend overnight at the hospital this year, but it does feel like that. It’s probably because there’s never any down time. Last year he would have rotations like that with terrible schedules, but then he’d have an elective where he had a lot of down time. His schedule this year is much more like a normal job – only working on weekdays – but he’s very busy all the time when he’s at work and he puts more hours into it than the average job, I think. He gets up at 5:30 to get his dermatology reading in, then goes to work and gets home most nights lately around 6:30 or 7:00, then he tries to catch up on a little more reading after the kids go to bed. But we can’t complain, it’s still nice. And he absolutely loves what he is doing, so that makes a big difference in how he feels about his work too.

So, after Camden’s birthday party yesterday we had a babysitter come (the last couple of weekends we’ve wanted to do a date, but hadn’t though of it early enough to get a babysitter, so this time I thought ahead and got someone earlier in the week). Michael surprised me with reservations at Unos, a restaurant that we went to a few times in Milwaukee, and the food was quite good. And then we went to Home Depot – not to buy anything, but to get some ideas about materials for a couple of home projects we have in mind. It was very nice to go without the kids, and to have some time to ourselves. So that was a very good way to end the week.

Today church was a little busy (I look at Kolby and Eli now, and think about how things can be rough now sometimes, but it sure will be nice in a few years when all the boys are out of the baby stage – not that I don’t absolutely love my babies – but it sure will be a lot easier once they can all feed themselves, sit still for more than 2.5 minutes at a time, and once they are all out of diapers[Camden is officially in underwear now – having stayed dry for about a week now since his one accident after starting to wear underwear], so I guess we’re one step closer to freedom from diapers). But anyways, Isaac was less that cooperative during the first hour of church today, and since Michael forgot to grab some papers he needed at church today, he left part way through the meeting to get those and the boys gave me a pretty hard time. I ended up out in the hall with several of them, but luckily everyone seemed to come to my rescue – someone held the sleeping baby, Sister Henderson took Eli too (she already had Kolby sitting with her), and another Sister came out in the hall and read a book to Camden for a few minutes until Michael got back to help me. But that didn’t last too long. Then when we dropped the boys off at their classes, Camden did great and Isaac only cried for about a minute this time, so that’s a big improvement. Michael and I were asked to substitute in Kolby’s primary class for today and the following two Sundays, and the lesson was about temples. Instead of dividing up the lesson and each of us teaching one section at a time like we’d done the last few times we substituted for other classes, Michael covered the lesson for the first half of the class and I prepared other activities for the second half. I found different things, lots from the Friend magazine (a children’s magazine that our church puts out with stories and activities) so we had one where the kids cut out a picture of a temple and then I stapled it together to make it into an envelope to hold some other little papers they cut out – I think letting them each cut with their own scissors was a highlight of the class for most of the kids – and then I made up a picture of a tree with a 3 generation pedigree chart on it and we filled those out and the kids colored them, and I read them a children’s book we have about the temple, and a story I found in the Friend with pictures throughout the story instead of words so the kids read that aloud with me, and we finished with another coloring picture where they could color themselves in front of a temple. There are twin brothers in Kolby’s class who have quite a hard time sitting still and quiet and keeping their hands to themselves, so it was a little challenging and I had to take one of them out of the class at one point, but I think all the activities really helped, so I’ll have to find some more fun ones for next week.

And in about an hour we’re having a family from the ward who just had a new baby a few weeks ago over for dinner – we were so good about having a new family over almost every week whenever Michael’s work schedule allowed it, and we have been so tired after he gets home from work lately that we’ve not been planning anything like that on the weekends, but I’d like to start doing it more again, since that is such a good way to get to know people.