03/04/12

1.  After church we went on a drive out around Lake Travis.  We found a great camp ground close enough for me to go and enjoy the evening with Ben and the boys, go home to sleep, and be back early enough for breakfast around the campfire.  I'm excited!

2.  On that same drive we also looked at a couple of pieces of land currently for sale.  Ben has a dream of having a house on a large lot-- at least an acre, and having a house there right on the lake would be really neat.  It's about 10 minutes away from our house, so it wouldn't hugely increase commute times, although we would have go get through that horrid 620/Anderson Mill intersection every day.  And we'd have to sell our house.  And we'd have to pack our house and unpack our house.  And we'd be in another ward.  And we'd be in another not-quite-so-good school district (although still pretty good).  And, by the time we bought the land and built a house on it, our mortgage would probably be a lot higher.  But, it would be a good investment and a great opportunity to build a home to my specifications, and a cool place for the boys to live, so close to the lake.  I'll have to think about it more.

3.  Cutting my boys' hair is still a pain.  Although not so much of a pain as it was when they were toddlers.  :-)

Weekly letter: Hi Everyone,
Why am I incapable of getting in bed on time? 
This has to be fast.
Happy Birthday Rachel!  I hope you had a wonderful day.  I love you so much.
Congratulations to Brigham and Christine by making their big decision.  I hope you love it there and that BYU will be a great beginning for Brigham's career, and that Provo-life will be wonderful for your children.  I'll be extremely happy to be able to visit you guys more often, since we make it to Utah at least once a year.
We had an OK week.  We had a couple of great days, a couple of not-so-great-days.  j
On Monday we went to a UT Symphony Band concert.  It was really fun!  Mosey grumbled and whined and complained and didn't want to go, but I made him go.  Then we picked up his friend Natasha, and he did a 180 and had a wonderful time.  I like Natasha.  :-)
Tuesday was our Blue and Gold Banquet.  I thought I was free from putting on events like this when I was released from RS, but not so!  This was sort of dumped into our laps (Andrea, my co-leader and I).  We were not supposed to be in charge, but the person who was pretty much dropped the ball, so we had 1 week to put it all together.  It went pretty well, although it was very basic.  I gave the boys the day off school so I could get everything ready, then we went up to the church at 3:00 to set up.  The boys are getting very good at rolling the big round tables into the cultural hall, setting them up, and unstacking chairs to put around them.  :-)
I hate how stressed out I get about these things!  And so does Ben, I suspect.  He came through and helped quite a bit, especially helping the boys get their cakes ready for the cake "contest."  (It wasn't really a contest.)  Brigham made a rice crispy treat castle, with about 4 batches of rice crispy treats, which I've been steadily consuming over the past week.  Mosey made a fish cake (strawberry cake cut out in the shape of a fish and frosted with blue frosting-- it was a "blue gill").  Joseph was originally going to make the castle cake with Brigham, but Brigham sort of started to monopolize the cake-making, and Joseph decided he wanted to make his own.  So with about 30 minutes to make the entire thing, he decided to make a giant pancake.  Hey, that's a cake, right?  He fancied it up with blueberries and chocolate chips and frosting.
All we did was eat dinner-- hamburgers and chips and fruit and give out the awards the boys earned.  We had no organized activity except for the paper bags of craft supplies I put at each table-- skewer sticks and paper cups and pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks and tape and glue and such.  Everyone was supposed to create something using those materials (our theme was resourcefulness).  I thought that was going to be a really lame activity, but it was all I could come up with in a week's time.  Actually, the kids all loved it, so I'm counting that as success.
What else did we do this past week?  On Thursday our art group went to a musical instrument shop-- a funny little place near downtown where they sell, trade, rent, and repair all sorts of instruments.  Again, Mosey was Mosey McGrumbles about going until we picked up Natasha.  :-)
Yesterday we went down to UT for the big "UT Explore Day," which was kind of like a giant UT open house.  All the departments had booths set up and fun activities for the kids to do.  There were about 50,000 people there, or so it seemed (UT is a huge campus, there totally could have been 50,000 people or more), so a lot of the really cool activities had lines that were too long for our tolerance, but the boys did get to do fun things like watch chunks of concrete get shattered by 500,000 lbs of pressure, make "buildings" out of marshmallows and toothpicks and then test their soundness by putting them onto this earthquake-simulation thingamajig, go up to the roof of one of the science buildings (17 stories high) and look through a great big telescope they had up there to see sunspots and Venus (I didn't know you could ever seen planets during the day!).  As you can tell, the boys mostly wanted to stay in the science and engineering areas.  :-)  Afterward we went to a Colombian restaurant with some friends who also came to the UT thing, where we ate good food, talked a little politics, and I inserted my great big foot into my mouth when telling them about living in Miami, I commented on how, in our neighborhood, no one had more than two kids, and I was the only stay-at-home-mom.  Guess what my friend is?  A working-mother of two kids.  Duh.  I'm such a jerk.  Do I apologize? Or let it go, assuming she knew I wasn't intending to insult her, or other working mothers of two kids.  I was only trying to illustrate how I felt a bit like a fish out of water when we lived there.  She didn't appear insulted, but you never know.  I hate doing stuff like that.
And today was church.  Ben made dinner and I cut the boys' hair.  And that is it.

Love,
Gabrielle