A Busy Week

We’ve had a rather busy, but good week. We started off the week with a playgroup trip to the Joseph Smith homes in Palmyra. The Palmers came, and our new friend, Julie Angelone (the adult daughter of Kolby’s piano teacher) came for the first time and brought her adorable adopted daughter. We had a special “kid friendly” tour of the log home and the farm house, then a short walk through the Sacred Grove on our way back. Julie actually decided to have the missionaries bring her a Book of Mormon and tell her a little about the church, so that’s pretty cool too.

On Tuesday Kolby had his last day of kindergarten and Eli had his last day of speech therapy (now I feel like we’re finally free and summer can officially start). And I got a call this week from the people who did Eli’s kindergarten screening, and they said that his speech sounded good, and they only noticed one particular sound that he was having trouble pronouncing, which they said was age-appropriate anyways. So they will meet with him again in January and see if he is still on track, but for now he won’t need speech therapy at school, so that’s nice. On Tuesday night Michael and I went to the graduation dinner for the outgoing residents. There are only three residents in each class, and three classes in Michael’s program, so it’s a pretty small group and everyone knows each other. They had some slideshows with funny pictures and roasted lots of the residents, especially the ones graduating, so it was a lot of fun.
The majority of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday was spent finishing painting the living room, doing a lot of cleaning in the basement and the study, and generally tidying up the house in preparation for my Grandma and my uncle and aunt and cousins to come this weekend. My uncle John and his family are here from Japan, and they rented an RV and are visiting lots of sites in the area. So they’re spending time here this weekend, and then Grandma Bev gets to join us until July 6th when she’ll fly back home and then continue on the road trip with them in the RV. We got the study all organized, the hide-a-bed couch all ready, and hung up the curtain in the study (I made it months ago, but just hadn’t hung it up yet since no one usually sleeps in there. And I surprised Michael by finishing the paint job in the living room that we’d started the past weekend, plus caulked around the fireplace (there was a gap between the bricks and the wall, so that’s filled in now), and replaced a vent cover that was broken when we moved in – and got to use our drywall saw for a second time because we had to cut the hole in the wall bigger for the vent cover). But now it’s all done, and looks nice. At first the paint looked more gray than I thought it would, but now looks more like the brown color we wanted, and we’re pleased with how it turned out. And we’re officially done with painting every room in the house except the basement (ok, well we didn’t get the inside of the pantry painted yet, but that doesn’t really count, right?)
On Thursday afternoon Kolby had his piano lesson, and he did really well. Then we had a busy, but fun night. We were wondering how to make it work because Michael needed to go help someone move and I had Ladies’ Night Out (and not only do I enjoy going to that, but since I’m the one who organized it I kind of feel like I should try to show up). There’s a new couple, Rachael and Isaac, who moved in a couple months ago and goes to our church, and Rachael called and offered to watch the boys for me so that I could go to Ladies’ Night Out while Michael went and helped the Karrens move, but I told Rachael that I had a better idea – I’d get a babysitter and then I’d come and pick her up and we’d both go to Ladies’ Night Out together (we don’t usually hire a babysitter unless it’s for a date night, but I figured that would be a better plan this time). So we went, and we actually had a really fun time. We went to a friends’ house and watched The Blind Side, which is a great movie. Then lots of us stayed and talked afterwards. I was quite surprised when we got in the car and it was 12:30pm – I guess time flies when you’re having fun. And Rachael is so nice, we’re going to have to have them over sometime.
On Friday night Grandma Bev’s plane was supposed to come in at 5:30, and then she didn’t end up getting to our house until 9:00. I had let the boys stay up late to see her, and they played in the back yard while I finished vacuuming and picking up around the house. I felt bad later when they came in with lots of mosquito bites – we’re not usually outside after dark, so I hadn’t thought of that. But they were very excited to see Grandma, and they’ve had fun with her here – especially listening to her special bedtime stories about Freckles the Squirrel (that she used to tell to me and my siblings when we were little).
Yesterday morning was kind of crazy. We decided to make Michael’s famous blueberry whole grain waffles for breakfast, and then right before we made them he got a call from the hospital (I’m so glad that he will no longer be on inpatient medicine after today), so I started to make them. Since these waffles are Michael’s specialty, I’d only helped get them ready before, but never actually made them myself. I accidentally added too many blueberries, then I put the waffles on to cook, but didn’t realize that the waffle iron wasn’t heated up already, so that waffle was a terrible mess and had to be picked out of the waffle iron one bit at a time and then scrubbed. I started over, and the next waffle didn’t turn out great either, but much less sticky. Then I turned on the wheat grinder to grind up the next batch of waffle mix so it would be ready to use next time, and turned to make the next waffle. I guess the bowl that holds the wheat wasn’t clicked all the way into place, and I turned around to see a cloud of powdery waffle mix poofing out into the air and falling all over the kitchen. And then the rest of the waffles didn’t turn out great either – not terrible, just not as light and fluffy as normal. We decided it was because we had run out of baking powder, so we only added about half as much as was called for. Oh well, nothing could have been done to help that. We did tell Grandma, though, that we’ll have to get some more baking powder and make the waffles again while she’s here so she can see how good they really are. After feeding the crying hungry kids (it took a lot longer than normal and was more like brunch at that point than breakfast), and cleaning up the waffle iron and the powdered kitchen, I was glad to be done with that whole mess. So the rest of the day was spent preparing lessons for church classes (on top of my regular genealogy class I’ve been teaching, I was asked to substitute as Eli’s primary teacher too). And Grandma and Kolby and I took a short trip to a sewing store Grandma had seen on her drive to our house. Then my uncle and his family arrived in the evening, and after talking a little and giving them the grand tour, they went to shop for some supplies and get some dinner, and we picked up a babysitter and Grandma went with Michael and I to a work party. It turns out that it was an outdoor BBQ, so we could have taken the boys (I’m always a little hesitant to take all of our boys to a party inside a doctor’s house, especially since among all of the other residents there are only like two other children, one of which is a little baby), but at the same time it was nice to have a couple hours to ourselves. When we got home, after I dropped off the babysitter (one of our two main babysitters just moved, and now she lives just a little closer to our house, woohoo!), we had a nice talk with my uncle and aunt while their kids filed into the house from the RV for showers and they used our laundry room. It was nice to talk to them.
And today was pretty busy too. We went to church a little early so I could get the computers turned on for the family history class, and all the copies and library supplies for both classes. The boys did pretty well in the first hour of church, until I had to take Courtland out to the hall – he’s kind of in a screaming phase lately, even when he’s not unhappy. And then I ended up pulling Camden and Isaac out of the meeting too, because Michael had to return a page from the hospital (at least we’ve been lucky that most of his calls lately have not resulted in him having to go in to the hospital). I then had my genealogy lesson, where I taught people how to create gedcom files and merge duplicate individuals – so we are kind of getting into the advanced uses of the PAF program now and this lesson was rather technical, but I think it went quite well, and we just have one more lesson to go (I’ve actually really enjoyed this – I will have taught this class for 5 or 6 weeks, and it’s been totally up to me what to teach and how long the class should run, which is much less stressful for me than how we’ve done it in the past – planning out and teaching specific topics on different weeks, and team teaching, so we had to coordinate our lessons and schedules with others and do it how they wanted it done). But I think the lesson went well today, and I’ve been pleased with the entire class, so that’s great. Then we went and I taught the third hour of Eli’s primary class. I asked Michael to come in and sit with me to help with some of the kids who sometimes can be a little rowdy, but really we probably didn’t even need it. We had six 4- and 5-year-olds, and they did quite well. I must have been reading fast, because we got through the whole lesson and all of the extra activities with 20 minutes left before the end of church, so then we colored and took a short walk around the church to kill the time. After church we stayed for the baptism of a little girl in the ward. The boys enjoyed watching it, although 4 hours of church is definitely too long for Isaac, and pretty long for Camden too. And Courtland ended up falling asleep on Michael’s shoulder – twice. So, now Michael’s gone to a stake priesthood meeting in Palmyra, then home teaching after that. I’m cooking up a couple of lasagnas, because we invited John and Megumi’s family to dinner tonight, and they’ve spent the day out seeing the sights in Palmyra and I expect they should return before too long. Busy day.
But at least Michael’s schedule should get back to “normal” after today – it’s been 7 weeks of Mohs surgery followed by inpatient (definition = on call day and night all week long, plus the 2 call weekends that just happened to fall during the weeks of inpatient). So, things should calm down a little. And guess what? Next week Michael is no longer going to be at the bottom of the food chain. He’s moving up, and the next three newbies are going to start, so that’s pretty exciting. In another week we’ll have the new resident BBQ, so that’ll be nice to get to know them too. There are three girls this year. And I think Michael said that the following year there are two guys and a girl, so that should even it out a bit. Well, I’d better go get ready for dinner. We just cut the first two heads of broccoli from our garden, so those should be yummy to eat tonight!