A Nice Week

So, we’ve had a nice week. On Monday morning we had Eli’s 5 year old and Courtland’s 1 year old checkups at the pediatricians, and they are both nice and healthy, growing well. And it was so nice, because our doctor’s office happens to be next door to our church building, and the appointment was at the same time as the weekly playgroup, so my friend Jen offered to watch the other three boys for me while I took Eli and Courtland over, so it was actually rather relaxing to just take two children to the appointment. And then on Tuesday Eli had preschool, speech therapy, and then the boys and I all went over to the school to register Eli for kindergarten. That night Michael also got to go out with the missionaries from the ward to help teach a lesson to someone, and I think he enjoyed that.

This week we visited the library too, and the boys picked out several “1001 Things to Spot” books, that they really like to read. And I got a couple books that I finished this week too. After reading “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” a book that my mom recommended a few weeks ago about a family that helped hide Jewish people during WWII, I’ve gotten on a kick of reading those types of books, so I picked out two more this week, “The Seamstress” and “A Lucky Child,” which were both good books. The boys also wrote all of the names on their Valentines cards and Kolby decorated a Valentine’s mailbox for school. I had my Activity Days class on Wednesday night, where the girls did a service project by offering free babysitting for the ward. We ended up having 8 Activity Days girls show up and only 6 kids to babysit, so it was definitely not a difficult job, and the girls taught the kids a little lesson that we had prepared too, which went really well.

On Thursday Eli had preschool, then Eli had speech therapy while Kolby was at kindergarten, and then Kolby had his piano lesson. Kolby and Eli are both doing really well with piano – they both enjoy their lessons and like to practice each day. I’m so glad we decided to start the boys on lessons at age 5 – I think it is really paying off because they are just so excited to do this at this young age.

And then Friday was so nice – Kolby had the day off school and we didn’t have anything else on the calendar, so we didn’t have to go anywhere! It takes so long to get all the kids bundled up and packed into the car whenever we have to go anywhere in the wintertime – I am definitely looking forward to warmer weather (only a few more months of winter to go, right?) While we were home on Friday we were able to get lots done – we cleaned the whole house, did the dishes and all the laundry, and I set up a new system in the laundry room with laundry baskets labeled with each person’s name so that we can divide the laundry right when it comes out of the dryer and then hopefully it will be easier to put everything away and to find each person’s clothes – plus, in future years the idea is that each boy can have more responsibility for bringing his own basket of clothes up and folding his clothes – it’ll be a while before they can do that, but having the clothes all sorted out does seem to make it a little easier for now.

Then we had a great Saturday. Michael took the van in for an oil change and a new battery early in the morning (we were told that they don’t fix speedometers that have stopped working at the place Michael took the van, so we’ll have to take it in again for that problem sometime soon). Then we got a few projects done – we painted the wall in the garage brown with some left-over paint from inside the house (we painted over the old mint-green color, and covered up an obscene picture that some past resident had drawn on a wall), then we put some hooks on a board that I’d painted to match the shoe bench earlier in the week and mounted that on the wall – so we finally have our “mud room” area now, with the bench where we can put shoes on and take them off and put them in the area under the bench, and hang up coats and backpacks – it’s surely a big improvement over the pile of shoes, boots, backpacks, and coats we had on the floor before. After that we finished painting the area around the recessed lighting in the kitchen that we hadn’t done before, and the brown color is a big improvement over the old yellow. It’s always nice to get projects finished up. I also ran and returned some books and movies to the library, but other than that we didn’t have to leave the house yesterday, so even though we got some good work done around the house we still had some time to relax and spend with the boys. I played the Wii fit game with the boys in the afternoon while Michael finished up a book he was reading, and then after the boys went to bed last night we had a stay at home date, including ice cream and a fun movie that happened to be playing on tv, which was just a lot of fun. A nice little Valentine’s treat.

Today church went well. We didn’t have to take the boys out of sacrament meeting at all, except for some bathroom trips, so that was good. And none of the boys had a hard time going to their classes. It was a good day. Michael had his scout meeting after church while I brought the boys home and got them down for naps. And we had a nice roast dinner made by Michael, which was very good. And I’m so looking forward to this upcoming week – the kids have “midwinter break” so they have a whole week off of school and Michael happens to have Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off of work, so this will be a very nice week.