Am I the only one who totally didn't know about DST changing over this morning? I woke up and we spent the morning leisurely getting ready for church, taking baths, washing hair, writing Brigham's primary talk, you know, the usual. The only unusual thing was that I didn't check my email-- didn't get on the computer at all, in fact, until what I thought was 12:00, about 40 minutes before we needed to leave for church, in order to type up Brigham's talk. I looked at the computer, and it said 1:04. What?? I did a quick Google search on Daylight Savings Time and then, more than a little panicked, got everyone ready as fast as possible, and raced to church. We missed most of Sacrament meeting as it was, but at least Brigham made it to give his talk.
Trying to convince the boys at 8:30 tonight that it really was time to go to bed was another challenge. I've been hearing noises up there all evening, so I know sleep didn't come easily to at least one of my boys... We'll see how it is tomorrow morning when we're waking up before dawn again. Yuck. Although, I do feel a teensy bit virtuous getting up and getting the day started before the sun. :-)
The rest of the week was all right. Pretty average.
Monday was Joseph's 2nd lesson, this time down at the UT campus. We got there early, thank goodness, because we then spent about 10 minutes driving around trying to figure out the parking situation. We ended up parking on the street, and I was very glad I had put the wheelchair in the back of the van, because it was a quarter mile or so to get to the music building. Joseph did fine, and came out of the lesson very happy, so for now we're sticking with the teacher. We then got the pleasure of driving home during 5:30 PM rush hour traffic out of downtown. :-) UT is smack-dab in the middle of downtown Austin, which is a terrible place for a humongous University! Oh, well.
Tuesday was a bit of a challenging day. Certain children were not keen on doing schoolwork. Threats were given. Consequences ensued. Happiness was not had by all. One particular child missed out on going to Scouts. When Ben got home, the 2 schoolwork-compliant kids went with me to the grocery store, and then to a park for a picnic, and then to Target before going back home, where the child in question had actually finished his schoolwork, AND done his practicing, and was ready for bed. Thank goodness for dads.
Wednesday was better. The weather had been beautiful all week long, and we've done several of our lessons outside, which is so nice. I love March in Austin, it's my favorite month. The temperatures are perfect, the grass is getting green, the blossoming trees are bursting with color, and I still have at least another couple of months before summer temperatures arrive again. I dropped the boys off at art in the afternoon, and then went back and did chores for an hour and a half before going to pick them up again. That night I finished getting ready for my Relief Society activity on Thursday night. Well, this ended up being a bigger job than I anticipated. Getting the handouts totally ready and then printed and organized and stapled took me way longer than it should have. And then I worked on the videos. I got 2 families to make videos of a family home evening using a lesson from Preach My Gospel. One of the moms who made the video couldn't make it to our activity, so she dropped off the camera and memory card here so I could play the video Thursday night. I played the video to decide which parts to show, and then attempted to burn a DVD only to discover that the file was of a type that Windows Movie Maker can't edit, and that DVD players can't play. So I then spent too long trying to figure out how to convert the file, and ultimately failed. There goes about 2 hours of wasted time... Anyway, I didn't get to bed until 5:30 AM, deciding to just ignore my phone alarm that goes off at 6:20. But as happens all the time when I stay up ridiculously late, my body decided it was morning, and was having none of this "falling asleep" business. I did manage to doze off a little bit by about 6:45, and slept about an hour and a half.
This was not a good beginning to Thursday which is my busiest day! Before Ben left for work, he noticed the rear lights of my car were on (a really annoying occasional consequence of the hand-controls installed in my van), and so tried to start it before he left to make sure the battery wasn't dead. Sure enough, it wouldn't start. But even with a jump, the engine wouldn't keep going-- it stalled just as soon as the gas was released. Thank goodness Ben was able to come home for the afternoon and be our chauffeur to piano lessons and then to violin lessons, and then to drop me off at my RS activity in the evening. He figured out the problem was probably build-up on the fuel injector, picked up some engine cleaning something-or-other, and by the time I got home from Relief Society, he had the van running again. My hero! Seriously, what would I do without my van?
The Relief Society activity went pretty well. I wish we would have had a little bigger attendance-- I think 17 came. I got a good response from those who were there, and I can only hope that the amount of effort these activities take is worth it for the people who actually show up. I was not good about always making it to the RS activities before I had this calling, but you better believe I appreciate all the work they take now, and how demoralizing it is to do all this work, and not have many people come.
Friday was pretty laid back. I slept until 9:00, and basically gave up trying to make the boys do any schoolwork beyond practicing. I was still tired, and they were so happy playing in the backyard, and I just didn't have the energy to do the whole school thing that day... So instead I did laundry, and watched heart-breaking videos online of the horrible stuff going on in Japan. I couldn't believe it. I saw some of the video footage of the tsunami in Myanmar in 2004, but watching the destruction in urbanized Japan is something else. According to Wikipedia, 6 of the 10 deadliest natural disasters have been within the last 100 years, and 8 of 10 within the last 200 years. Interesting, huh? Anyway, it's been very sobering the past couple of days, thinking about all of that. In the afternoon I got my hair cut and then took the boys to horseback riding. What did we do in the evening? I can't even remember.
Saturday was a busy day for Ben and the boys! They got up and went to the church to clean the building, and then went directly to help with an Elders Quorum move. They didn't get home until after 2:00 PM. I'm so happy when they get the chance to work hard and help other people. As a consequence, NO chores got done here at all. But, the service opportunity was probably worth the un-done chores around here.
Then the boys went to a birthday party at Pump It Up (leaving the present they so carefully bought and wrapped sitting on the table at home...). I hadn't been there for about 4 years. It's very odd going back places I haven't been to since before I was disabled. Going back to Florida in November was extremely odd for that reason.
And that brings me back to today! I'm up 1 1/2 hours past my bedtime. Blast you, Daylight Savings Time!!!
Here are a couple of pictures from the week.
Here's Brigham at our picnic. We ate rotisserie chicken, Hawaiian rolls, and yogurt. Then Brigham went and climbed trees until it got dark. :-)
1 comment:
I can't tell you how happy it makes me when I see your boys still wearing our Grandma Camp shirts :)
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