A Busy Month

The last few days I’ve been having fun – in my spare time during the boys’ naps and after they go to bed at night, I’ve been typing up some entries from my old journals (as part of my genealogy-related goal to gradually digitize our family records to help preserve them). Anyways, I’ve been having fun lately reading the details from back when Michael and I first met. But while I was enjoying reminiscing as I reviewed past journal entries, I was reminded that I haven’t kept up on our current journal (blog) much lately. (I’ve done a decent job of keeping updated on posted photos lately, but it’s been a month since I actually wrote about what our family was up to).


So, let’s see, what have we been up to lately? Today is a really good day, because it marks the end of 5 weeks of inpatient for Michael (which meant that he was the one on call during the days and nights that whole time). Although Michael has had very busy days at work lately and he’s gotten a lot of phone calls with questions from patients, fortunately he hasn’t had too many calls that required him to go into the hospital at night or over the weekends. But it’ll be kind of nice to get back to a “normal” schedule again, so we don’t always have to be listening for the pager because Michael may have to drop everything and go if he gets a call.

Other than work, the boys started school last month. Kolby and Eli both love school. After a long adjustment last year of months of being tired and falling asleep in the afternoon after half-day kindergarten, Kolby hasn’t had much trouble at all adjusting to full-day first grade. He’s been reading really well (as far as I can tell, he seems to be reading at about a 2nd grade level), but I didn’t know he could write so well – he’s been coming home lately with papers where he’s written a few sentences, and there are the normal child’s spelling errors, of course, but we can figure out what everything says without much trouble, so that’s pretty cool. Eli loves kindergarten, enjoys riding the bus (and has fun riding home on the same bus as Kolby), and he comes home daily with cute pictures he’s drawn (almost every picture has at least a little person labeled as ‘Kolby’ – Eli sure loves his brother). And other than an occasional day here and there when Eli seems especially sensitive, he is adjusting to the school days really well. (And Mommy is also enjoying having an hour or two to herself in the afternoon when the older boys are at school and the younger boys are napping – over the summer break she had forgotten how nice it was to just have a short time to get things done around the house or just relax a bit).

And of course we’ve been keeping busy as normal. Our nights are pretty full: we have family night on Mondays of course, and I’ve been working in the family history center two Tuesdays a month and teaching the Activity Days girls’ class at church two Wednesdays a week, and Michael going to the young men’s activities on another Wednesday each month, and then I’ve got the ‘Ladies’ Night Out’ activities that I’ve organized on one Thursday each month. We also recently started going to a Book of Mormon class the missionaries organized on Thursday nights (it was a big bonus that they have some girls there to watch the kids during that class each week, so we can both go to it together). And not only are we getting a little refresher and an added motivation to study the scriptures, but there’s a girl who the missionaries have been teaching about the church who has come to a couple church activities, and I have started to get to know her a bit, so it was fun to see her at that class this week too. Plus, we’ve been doing the playgroup on Wednesday mornings, and we just started going to the library on Thursdays – they have a story time for 3 to 5 yr olds, and at the same time there is a baby playtime in another room. I was pleasantly surprised when Isaac wanted to go to the story time with Camden and Eli (since lately he’s often hesitant to have Michael or I leave him, even when it’s something that he wants to go and do). And I got to take Courtland to the baby play time, which is good for him to get a chance to play with younger kids his age. So that’s going to be a fun thing to keep doing, plus it’ll be a good motivation to keep getting out of the house once the weather gets cold in a few months.

And the other day we had a fun date night when our friends, the Lanes, offered to babysit for free so we could go out together. Since we’ve been trying so hard to save every penny lately so we can pay off the credit card after fixing the car and replacing the water heater, we haven’t paid a babysitter and gone on a date in months – so we really appreciated the Lane’s offer, and thoroughly enjoyed our night out.

Also, over the last month we’ve enjoyed a going to the public farmer’s market downtown where Michael participated in a free cancer screening, I got to go to do baptisms at the temple for some family names, Michael got released from his calling as scout committee chairman and he’s now excited to focus on his work with the young men at church, Eli just started piano lessons with Kolby’s teacher Mary Angelone last week and he absolutely loves it, Camden turned 4 (as you can tell from the birthday party photos I posted earlier), and we are getting ready for Isaac’s 3rd birthday party followed by Kolby’s 7th birthday party (we went to the baptism of one of the boys’ friends at church tonight, and I just cannot believe that Kolby will be 8 and will be baptized in just one year!), and we enjoyed watching General Conference together (even the last session when we ended up going over to the Phillips’ house last minute because the power went out in our house so we couldn’t watch conference at home), and lastly we enjoyed a fun day out yesterday at the village “scarecrow festival” with the highlight for the boys being the fire department open house where they got to climb on fire trucks, slide down a huge blow-up slide, try on real firefighter uniforms, and listen to the fire department band play. We’re looking forward to another fun-filled month. Hope you all are doing well.