Family letter 11/04/2012

Hi everyone,
Who has tried the new gmail email compose window?  Interesting.
Well, the subject line of my email says it:  two more days.  At least, I desperately hope it's only two more days.  I don't think my nerves can take an extended mess like back in 2000.  I wore red, white, and blue to church today in hopeful anticipatory celebration.  I wonder how many people were fasting for Romney today?  Maybe today marks the most fasted-for single person on a single day in modern history?  Maybe ever?  I hope it helps.  :-)

OK enough about that.

This last week was a good week for us!  I think my jewel system is slowly working.  I still need to work on giving more spontaneous jewels.

Halloween was a good day, even though it was piano lesson day.  :-)  We waited too long to get pumpkins again this year, and so ended up with only watermelons and a pineapple.  That's OK.  We do miss the pumpkin seeds, though.  The boys all went dressed as soldiers, of course, and at the last minute Ben put on his old Army ROTC uniform as well and went out trick-or-treating with the boys.  We got only a few trick-or-treaters-- only families that live on our little street.  I knew that would happen, since we're the last house on the road and our house can't even be seen from farther down.  And our neighbors across the street were out of town.
Speaking of those neighbors-- they really are so nice!  Since they were going out of town, a few nights before Halloween, they came by our house with little bags of candy and a dollar bill for each of the boys.  They went around the whole neighborhood to give out Halloween bags to the children.  How sweet is that?

Saturday morning Joseph and I drove out to College Station, about 2 hours away, for Joseph's first archery tournament at Texas A&M.  He was nervous at first, but ended up having a good time.  He came in fifth in his division, and now has a baseline score that he can work off of in future tournaments.  The tournaments last a LONG time!  There are 20 rounds-- 3 arrows each round.  The kids were all divided into two groups, so first group one shot, then group two, then everyone went up to the targets to record scores and retrieve arrows, and then the process started all over again.  Each round takes several minutes, and so we were there several hours.  We got there about 12:15, and didn't leave until 5:30.  And then we had a two-hour drive back home, so it was a pretty long day.  Joseph's next tournament is at UT, so that will be a lot better.

I wore my Romney shirt and got several supportive comments.  That's a pretty safe bet in College Station, one of the more conservative cities in Texas, but I wasn't sure about some of the families in Joseph's archery team-- Austin is an island of blue in a sea of red, as they like to say.  But both of the Archery Country families I sat by told me they liked my shirt, and we whiled away the long hours of the tournament in talking politics.

Anyway, it was a fun day with Joseph, and he had a great time.  Early Saturday morning, before we left for the tournament, Ben set up a place for Joseph to shoot arrows along the back side of our house, and he's spent several hours out there already today shooting arrows, so he'll be able to practice more.

The other fun thing the boys did this week was to get air-soft guns.  Brigham has been wanting one, and did a lot of research online to figure out which one he wanted.  Happily, the one he decided on is carried at Walmart for a very reasonable price.  So he got his on Tuesday night, and the boys played with it (without pellets) all week.  Then on Friday night, Ben decided he wanted to get one, too, so we went back to Walmart and Ben and Mosey got airsoft pistols (much cheaper), and Joseph got one, too, which will stay on the top shelf of Ben's closet until he earns enough money to get it down.  I'm pretty OK with the airsoft gun thing.  They all got guns that shoot at about the lowest speed you can get, which is still fast enough to sting, but not enough to do any damage.  And they're not allowed to shoot with pellets unless Ben is there, and they are all wearing goggles and long sleeved shirts.  Friday night and Saturday, Ben and Brigham and Mosey went out to the forested lots next to us and engaged in some airsoft battles.

Brigham and Ben worked all day Saturday to clean off Ben and my old bedroom furniture, and spray paint it all black.  They got new hardware for the drawers and it looks really great!  Like new furniture!

OK, that's it for tonight.  I hope this week is a GREAT week for all of us!

Love,
Gabrielle