October has been very busy with a large dose of stress. It started off great with my birthday despite the bad cold I was battling. My mom and I went shopping the day before and enjoyed lunch and spending money together. (We really should do that more often.) That night I hosted book club. It was a pretty unsuccessful book club since no one, but one person, read the book despite all the votes it got the month before. But book club is never a loss because we all have such a good time visiting and taking a break together.
I stayed home on my birthday because I felt so awful and was worn out from the day before. Jarl came home about noon thanks to the long hours he'd put in earlier in the week. Mom Jacobson and Erika brought us lunch from Rumbi and we enjoyed eating around the kitchen table. The kids and Jarl gave me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers, a cute shirt, and chocolate. Can’t ask for much more. Jarl also gave us season tickets to Hale Center Theatre next year. I’m really excited to have a set date with my honey and get to enjoy all the great plays put on.
General Conference was great despite all the distractions including Jarl being quite sick. I really need my Ensign to come so I can start going through the talks again. The best thing that came out of conference was a new family goal. The talk about reading the scriptures together as a family, even if it’s just one verse per person a night was exactly what we needed to hear. We started reading the Sunday of General Conference and have only missed two days in three and half weeks. I’m marking a Book of Mormon with how far we read each night for interest and to see how long it takes us to finish. We generally ready about eight verses a night with Jarl, Jacob, and me reading and Makayla repeating a verse.
I picked up another piano student. I offered to teach a ten year old girl in our ward after waking up one morning with the prompting. Now I’ve got three students and I love to see their progress and their enjoyment of something I enjoy so much.
I also had a moment of insanity and volunteered to serve on the Policy Council for Head Start this year. We met twice this month—once for training, once for our normal meeting. It will be an interesting experience and is already teaching me a lot about myself. I also ended up volunteering to take the meeting minutes at the meeting since no one else would. It’s something I can do and I was happy to help. Two and half hours later I wasn’t so sure I was happy to help anymore. Then I spent seven hours typing up the notes, going through the tapes from the meeting to make corrections, and then proofreading them. The staff member commented that they look amazing which makes me feel really good, but man were they a lot of work.
We also provided respite care for little Solara in the middle of the month. Her foster family went to California and since she was only four weeks old, (five weeks premature), on oxygen, and shouldn’t be out among people she came to stay with us for five days. It was so fun and so exhausting. It was a good refresher on what life is like with an infant. The kids were thrilled to have her at our house, but were pretty disappointed that all she did was sleep and eat. I really enjoyed having her here but I was glad to send her home and catch up on my sleep.
Last week was busy and stressful with Policy Council, piano lessons, a dentist appointment, a baby shower (Jarl’s cousin), a missionary homecoming (my cousin who served in my mission) and such. I ended up with a babysitter five days in a row. I hate that. I’m a stay at home mom so I can be at home with my kids. Luckily this week I’ve been at home more but this week is just as stressful since I’m supposed to be getting ready to go out of town and I haven’t done much of that and I’m running out of time. I guess it always comes together, but the next few days are going to be crazy.
Today is Makayla’s fifth birthday. She has been looking forward to her birthday for months now. She was so excited to turn five. The first thing she said today was that now she was five. We had donuts and chocolate milk this morning and went to the Spaghetti Factory for dinner. She loved her presents, especially all the purple in her clothes and the two princess Barbies she got. She is very excited for her birthday party on Friday.
We’re headed to Disneyland on Sunday. We’re all really looking forward to it and the scheduling worked out that we’re going over the two year anniversary of Jacob and Makayla returning to us. It will be good to be together and to make a new really good memory so the bad memories of this anniversary get smaller. Hopefully I’ll post about our trip soon after returning instead of waiting weeks again. Thanks for reading and for caring about me and my family.
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