Weekly letter

Brigham and Joseph played a duet in church today, "Choose the Right"-- here they are practicing it just before church.


Here are the happenings in the Turner household for this past week.
Monday was a normal school day.  Joseph had flute lessons in the afternoon.  For family home evening, we wrote poems about gospel principles as part of the boys' Faith in God requirements.  They turned out... interesting.  :-)  I wrote 3 limericks, one on faith, one on repentance, and one on baptism.  I meant to write a fourth on the laying on of hands to complete the first 4 principles and ordinances of the gospel, but everyone got tired of waiting for me.  :-)  Mosey was not having a good evening.  He refused to cooperate or participate in family home evening, and so I gave him the option of cooperating, or going to bed.  He decided to go upstairs to bed.  I'm torn on this.  It is family home evening, which to me means everyone needs to be there.  On the other hand, I don't think he should be able to get away with bad behavior with no consequences.  I gave him the "go to bed" option without really thinking he'd take it.  I need to think of a better consequence that doesn't separate him from the family during family home evening...
Tuesday was another normal day.  Practicing, lessons, chores, etc.  Ben came home from work and I was still practicing with one of the boys.  He asked if I had plans for dinner yet, and I told him my plan for dinner was for him to make it!  I am really burned out on making dinner these days.  The trouble is time.  I don't get finished with the boys until too late in the afternoon, and my repertoire of 20 minute meals is limited.  It's too hot for crockpot meals-- too hot for me even to feel like turning on the oven.  Can we just eat cold cereal and popsicles for the rest of the summer?  :-)  Ben and I need to work out an arrangement for dinners.  He doesn't mind making dinner, and he usually does a good job.  I feel really guilty making him do it though, because it feels like it ought to be "my job."  And ideally, dinner would be ready when he came home so that we could eat and not have the evening dragging on too long.  On the other hand, I'm pretty much working equal hours as he is, so dividing up dinner duty is OK, right?
On Wednesday our homeschool group came over for an end-of-year pool party.  And I actually got in!  I haven't got in our pool for a couple of years at least.  It's not easy for me to get in or out of it.  But it was in the mid-upper 90's that day, and the other moms and all the kids were outside, and unless I wanted to hang out by my lonesome in the house, I needed to go out there too.  The only way I can tolerate that kind of heat is in the pool.  It felt great and I realized that walking in the pool is probably a really good way to strengthen my leg muscles.  Getting out of the pool was only mildly undignified, with help from 2 of the other moms.  :-)  That evening we drove up to the church so Joseph and Brigham could practice their duet that they performed in Sacrament meeting today.  We stopped by Sonic for dinner.  Caramel shakes and fried mozzarella sticks is pretty healthy, right?  Oh yeah, tater tots, too-- they're definitely vegetables.  Corn dogs and chili-cheese frito snack wraps are both great sources of protein, so it was a totally balanced meal.  Ben went jogging, meanwhile, starting from the house, and making it pretty close to the church before we picked him up on the way home.  Those are some really mixed messages the boys are getting from their parents, huh?  Mom getting them dinner at Sonic while dad runs 6 miles.  :-)
Thursday was a typically busy day.  Piano and violin lessons in the afternoon, and then I had to take the boys straight over to their pack meeting in Steiner Ranch.  Which meant getting dinner at Taco Bell.  Oh I'm such an awesome mom. 
Friday morning we all had dental appointments.  Joseph has a small cavity-- just the beginning of one, he won't even need to get numbed up when it is filled.  He was excited about it because it means he gets to go back to the dentist's office for a 2nd dip in the treasure chest.  The dentists there need to make appointments a little scarier or more painful or something, if only to give kids motivation to take care of their teeth so they DON'T have to go to the dentist!  Afterward, I went visiting teaching, then my visiting teacher came to our house, so the boys were left to their own devices for a few hours.  It was the last day of school for the school district here, so I guess dentists appointments and visiting teaching constituted the boys' end-of-year party.  Then I HAD to go to Target to get an overdue prescription.  It was 6:45 by the time we were heading home, and again, I had no dinner plans.  So I stopped by Little Caesar's for their $5.99 hot-and-ready pizza deal.  I'm definitely in the running for mother-of-the-year this year. 
Saturday morning I went to a baby shower.  I was up until past 4 AM finishing the quilt I made for her.  I always underestimate how long it will take me to do these things.  Ben just rolled his eyes at me when I told him at 9:30, as the boys were going to bed, that I was going to finish the quilt I was working on.  He doesn't underestimate these things.  Anyway, the shower was fun.  It was for a girl in our ward (younger than me=girl) who is adopting a baby due at the end of June.  She is the one who spoke in church on Mother's Day.  It turns out that just the week before she spoke they had been matched with a birth mother.  I'm so incredibly happy for her, and staying up until 4 AM to finish the quilt was an easy labor of love.  I'm praying hard that everything goes smoothly.  The situation is such that the chances of the birthmom going through with the placement are really high, so that is good. 
After the shower I decided to stop by Walmart to get some paper towels and a few other things.  The Walmart up on 620 is not the one I normally go to.  In fact, nearly every time I've been to that Walmart, there have been issues with the motorized carts.  But it was right on the way home and so I thought I'd give it one more chance.  Bad decision.  First of all, it was SO HOT yesterday.  It must have been upper 90's, maybe even 100.  I started getting hot just getting in my burning hot car after the shower.  The AC hadn't had much time to rev up before I stopped at Walmart.  Walking across the parking lot increased my temperature further so that by the time I got into the store I was sweating.  If I'm hot enough to sweat, it's really too hot for my muscles to keep working.  And of course, there were NO motorized carts at all.  And no greeters on that side of the store to ask to call over on the other side to see if there were any over there.  So I walked all the way down to the other end of the store only to discover that there were no carts over there, either.  At that point, I just couldn't walk any further.  So I sat down on a bench and debated calling Ben to come and rescue me.  The thought of walking all the way back across the store and to my car seemed impossible.  But I figured by the time I called him and he got up there, I'd have cooled down enough to make my way back to the car, so I sat there for 30 minutes people watching (not an uninteresting way to spend 30 minutes), and then got up and managed to get back to the car.  I hate that Walmart and I'll never go there again!  I stopped at HEB instead (should have done that in the first place) and got the darned paper towels along with about 5 boxes of popsicles (they say never go to the grocery store hungry, right?  Well, you also shouldn't go to the grocery store overheated). 
Once home, all of us got in the pool and spent about an hour and a half reveling in the cool water.  The boys thought it was really fun to pull me around the pool by my feet while I floated on a couple of water noodles.  It was really fun for me-- I was just surprised that they kept it up for so long!  I practiced walking back and forth across the pool.  Between all the walking I did at Walmart, the walking in the pool, and the horseplay that inevitably happens with 3 boys, my legs were seriously dead by the time I got out.  Ben made macaroni and cheese for dinner.  With hot dogs.  And, nary a vegetable to go with it.  We ended the night by watching an episode of X-files and eating ice cream. 
Today our new home teachers came by in the morning before church.  They brought get-to-know-you questionnaires for each of us to fill out, and I really got a kick out of reading what the boys wrote.  Here are some gems:
From Joseph (answers in red):
Where were you born? Oh, Mars
Do you speak a foreign language?  If so, what?  Martian
Have you been outside of the USA?  If so, where?  Canada and Mars
What are some of your future plans and aspirations?  Explode the world or take it over
From Brigham:
Favorite foods: Pie, cake, mashed potatoes, pastaroni, cookies
Favorite color: gold, silver, red, blue, black, purple, green, yellow, orange, brown, pink, whighte (he was covering all his bases with that spelling)
Where were you born? Utah/Nevada (technically his life did begin in a lab in Las Vegas)
What do you do for work?  Morning chores, gardening, cleaning pool, pick up house, paint fence
What are some of your future plans and aspirations? get rich
What can we as Home-teachers do to help you? give cookies, give a Million dollars
From Mosey:
Best Method of Contact:  talk (I love this one-- I had written my email address, Ben wrote down his cell number.  Mosey took the question quite literally)
What are some of your future plans and aspirations?  Skydive (wow, really?)
At church, Joseph and Brigham played their duet.  They played it perfectly before church, but Brigham got nervous with everyone there, and lost his place partway through the first section.  But they did what they were supposed to do, and Joseph kept going until Brigham was able to come back in.  They played the repeat perfectly, though, and finished the rest of the song beautifully.  I was really proud of them.  That's a scary thing to do at 9 years old.  I did have to bribe Joseph with $5 when I first informed him that I had volunteered them to play a duet in church.  I told him if he learned it and played it, he'd get $5. 
After church I tried to redeem my abysmal dinner-making performance this week by making a very healthy salad with chicken and alfalfa sprouts and carrots and green peppers and corn and lots of other good things.  Joseph ate his nicely, Mosey ate about half of his, and Brigham ate maybe a third.  Oh well, I tried.  We went on a walk around the neighborhood after dinner and evaluated everyone's front yards.  Even though it was blazing hot again today, it does cool off in the evening, something it NEVER did in Miami.  We ended the evening watching the first half of the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie, in anticipation of going to see the new one tomorrow.
And now it's time for bed! 
I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day tomorrow.