Housework and Yardwork, and Random Thoughts

As I am the sort of person who does not enjoy housework, there are a few jobs that get put off until we have expected company.  Tuesday evening we were expecting four sister missionaries to dinner; two from our ward, and two from the Spanish branch.  For that reason, after lunch on Tuesday was housework crunch time.  I had a few jobs to tackle, now that the berry pie was cooling, and the bread was on its final rise.  The kids were all in school and the house was quiet, and I needed something to motivate me to do the detested jobs.  I scrolled through the Amazon music app on my phone, set up the bluetooth speaker, and away I went to the strains of Matchbox 20.  It occurred to me while I was mopping that I have a tendency to choose rather angry sounding music when I clean house. 

"I wanna push you around," mop, scrub

"Well I will, well I will," scrub, mop

"I wanna push you down," swish, swish

"Well I will, well I will," mopping more

"I wanna take you for granted, Yah, well I will."

Cheerful lyrics, right?  And I was singing right along, brow furrowed and intense eyes staring down at the dirty floor.  Stupid sticky spots.

When the floors were mopped and vacuumed, kitchen cleaned, the downstairs bathroom returned to a state of cleanliness (towels back where they belong, husband's dirty clothes removed), blankets folded (we always have blankets out) and put away, and the area just outside the front door swept, and the various little wrappers that my children's pockets seem to randomly spew were thrown away (just how much candy do they get from their teachers?), I didn't need my angry music anymore.  But seriously, why was there a Santa ornament on the flower arrangement in the front room?  And how many socks can our couch hide?  A lot, evidently.

On my way to volunteer in Annie's class, my music tastes ran in a different direction: The Piano Guys.  

When we were sitting at dinner and one of the sister missionaries asked what my favorite band was, I didn't know how to respond.  I love music.  I have music playing a lot, but I can't even narrow down what my favorite genre is because it really depends on my mood.  I like a lot of different types of music.  This week I've listened to Julie Fowlis (Gaelic), Indila (French), 90s country station on Pandora, Imagine Dragons, and the Mormon Tabernacle choir, in addition to Matchbox 20 and The Piano Guys.  Unless you also count Melinda Kathleen Reese whose Google Translate parodies I love to watch on YouTube.  While I was trying to form a response, Emma told the sisters that I like Josh Groban (also true) and Ryan said I liked Elvis (sometimes, but yes).  

So I stuttered out something about Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift (before the latest album), and left it at that.  I don't know that I love bands per say, because I don't think there is one out there that I'm in love with every song one person or band makes.

But let's not forget the audiobooks.  I am currently wading my way through all of the Jane Austen books our library system has on the OverDrive app.  I also listen to those while folding laundry, doing dishes, and going on walks.  I just finished Mansfield Park, and am still not a fan of Edmund the hero.  He spends 9/10ths of the book talking about how he likes another girl to Fanny, who loves him.  And Edmund tries to push Fanny into a friendship with the other girl, who Fanny does not think is a very good person.  Nice, Edmund.  Also, Edmund and Fanny are 1st cousins.  Ew.

I am listening to Persuasion now, which is tied with Pride and Prejudice in my favorites list.  I was listening to A Room With A View, but it wasn't grabbing me.  It is better to have something good to listen to while doing unpleasant yard chores.  The English sister missionaries were supposed to help me yesterday with this last load of sticks, but cancelled.  So I put in my ear buds, turned on my book, and finished loading the truck.  My arms and shoulders were dead tired by the end.  When Emma and Elizabeth got home, I had one really full branch I couldn't load by myself because it kept getting tangled in the other branches while trying to pull it up, and they kindly helped.  The big log leaning against the truck was under too many branches in the beginning, and then the pile was too high for me to lift the heavy thing up on top of the pile.  It requires Ryan's big husband muscles.

I asked Emma to take this picture because I felt a little proud of my pile of sticks.  It represents a couple of hours of tedious work.  Gather, lift, stack, and then jump on to flatten, repeat.  Those branches are quite springy.  If any of the neighbors were watching, I'm sure I looked silly jumping up and down on the branches in the back of this old pickup.  This is my superhero pose. :)  I look like a dork.

Plus an outtake, because Emma thinks she's funny.

Ryan is going to attempt to drive The Dog one more time.  It has a flat tire that lost most of the tread on the last trip.  The wheels are doubled in the back, so he is hoping that by going slowly enough, he can make it without a new tire.  Because we'd rather not have to buy it.

St. Patrick's Day

First of all, here is a picture Maddie requested be made available online for a school project.  It's from last November when we went to the Meridian, Idaho Temple open house.  Maddie's paper is about her weird family, complete with a bunch of crazy photos I've uploaded to this blog over the years.  Her teacher should be very entertained.  Or scared?  ("Here's a behind the scenes view of this publicly semi-normal looking family...")

 St. Patrick's Day is always a fun one around here.  Elizabeth herself spent at least an hour making a rainbow trail from both the front and back doors from her gel pens to the kitchen table with the leprechaun traps. 

 When we got up the next morning, all of the jewelry and coins and fake gold the kids had put out were all gathered up in a little hoard by the couch.  The milk was green, and general mischief had taken place.  But the leprechauns had left gold foil wrapped Reese's peanut butter cups for the kids, which was met with general acclaim.  Maddie had specifically asked for no Rolos this year because of her palate expander in her note to the leprechauns. 

Saturday started with a soccer game at 9 am, which we lost.  Our team is too polite, waiting for the other team to open up before going after the soccer ball.  Not the best strategy for winning.  I think the coach was trying to mix things up for whatever reason, and put pretty much everyone in a different part of the field than what they were used to.  Annie and Maddie do a decent job as defenders, but had no clue what to do as forwards.  In fact, we spotted Maddie standing midfield talking to another team member during the game a couple of times.  Um, guys?  There's a game being played....  And we are behind.  I don't know about you, but maybe you should go after the ball?  Just saying.

After the game, I took all of the girls home and Ryan went to meet some guys from church for a game of ultimate Frisbee.  And I started what is usually our standard St. Patrick's Day dinner, but for lunch.  I made leg of lamb, colcannon (mashed potatoes, bacon, onions and cabbage), and carrots.  The Martinelli's apple cider we had is in no way considered Irish, but the kids found it in the pantry and said it was a good time for sparkling cider.  It was a much fancier lunch than I make pretty much ever, but an exception needed to be made.  We needed our holiday meal, but it was stake conference weekend.

Stake conference means Ryan's leadership meeting at 4 pm in Yakima, which blights any plans for dinner at home.  There was an adult session at 7 pm as well, and the stake was asking for double the usual attendance.  This means that we really should go, just because we usually don't.  Although we do go more often than before, with the kids able to babysit themselves and because Ryan is in the bishopric and has to go to the priesthood leadership meeting.  (The unofficial 14th article of faith would be: We believe in meetings, we hope for meetings, we have endured many meetings and hope to be able to endure all meetings.  If there is ever a reason for a meeting, we seek after it.)

I was supposed to drive Tiffany to Yakima to meet our husbands for a double date dinner, and Emma was supposed to babysit her family.  About a half hour before I was to pick up Tiffany, my kids intercepted a call from her asking if all of my kids would want to hang out with her kids for the evening.  With so many eyes and ears interested in the conversation, it seemed churlish to say no.  Even though I was really tempted to.  We don't get back to town until 10 pm, and my kids get so grumpy when they are up late.  But they promised they would get their pjs on and teeth brushed before we picked them up, and would go right to bed, and would be nice the following day.

We met up with our husbands and had Greek food for dinner.  While that gyro sandwich is really tasty, it felt wrong to eat it on St. Patrick's Day.  I was wearing a green skirt, and Ryan had green on his tie, so we felt we were honoring our heritage anyway.  The visiting area Seventy asked all those wearing green in the adult session to stand up.  Then he asked everyone who was not actually Irish from that bunch to sit down.  It was surprising how small the number of people still standing was, but Ryan and I were both still standing.  We both could have pulled out the screen shot from Ancestry.com and show just how much of our DNA admits to being Irish.  I am a whopping 19% Irish, but I digress.

The adult session of stake conference was really good.  I was glad I went.  Elder Michael Murray (the visiting member of the seventy) was a very good speaker.  I do love a speaker with a sense of humor.  He got up near the beginning of the meeting to introduce himself, saying he was giving us all a peek at him, so we'd know whether or not we'd like to stay for the rest of the meeting.  Not that I would have left, but he was a very engaging speaker and kept us chuckling during his introduction of himself.  The topics covered were raising covenant keeping teenagers and how to support teens (a very relevent topic around here), and staying faithful our own journey to the Promised Land (ie., eternal life).

The end of the evening saw us at McDonald's for ice cream with James and Tiffany.  We are clearly in need of more friend time. 

I am 15, going on 16....

My little girl isn't so little anymore.  Emma turned 15 years old.  Fifteen.  She is good, and sweet, and confident, and I am so proud of her. I just keep thinking we only have 3 more years until she’s officially an adult, and I’m not even a little ready for that! Happy birthday to this amazing girl who made me a mom.

Emma had to wait until after church to open her gifts.

 Then Grandma and Grandpa came, and we had lasagna for dinner and chocolate cake for dessert.

 She looks so grown up now.  But I still remember this little girl:

 This is the one who cried all. the. time.  Thankfully she outgrew that stage.

This is the girl who was into princesses.  She danced, and sang, and pranced around in her dress up princess dresses.

 Elizabeth loved her big sister.  When Elizabeth was a baby, she would light up when Emma was around.  Smiles and giggles and sweet baby squirms.  Look at how cute they were.

 Emma nicknamed Mt. Rushmore "Face Mountain."  We camped in Rapid City, SD on a very windy night (the wind was strong enough to make our tent look like a Jello jiggler and broke a tent pole) and Emma thought there was a dragon outside causing all that howling.

There's a part of me that misses the little girl she once was.  But I also love and admire the young woman she is becoming.

Grease

Emma has been excited to join drama in high school ever since she started going to the summer drama camp offered by the high school ages ago.  In the fall, she was in Mary Poppins and thoroughly enjoyed it.  We knew many of the songs from seeing the movie version, but Emma got well versed in all of the words in all of the songs.  Consequently, we were all singing (or at least having them played over and over in our minds) the Mary Poppins soundtrack ad nauseum.  

This season of drama was a family-friendlier version of Grease.  No drinking, drugs, or pregnancy scare.  Plenty of innuendo if you know what you are looking for, however.  As with Mary Poppins, we are all learning the Grease soundtrack from both Emma practicing at home, and then watching the show several times.  Between Ryan and myself, we attended every evening show.  We recieved complementary tickets last time and this time for helping with sets and building the "car" for the Grease Lightning song.  Truthfully, it did not look much like a car.  It was not supposed to be a fancy car, since the script specifially called it a hunk of junk at the beginning.  But I think if Ryan had had more warning to create and build, we could have done better.  Hopefully Mr. M will tell Ryan what he wants as he gets started with practices.  Not a week and a half before dress rehearsals start.  I also spotted a set piece in Grease that we built for Mary Poppins.  

Opening night went quite well.  A little hesitation with some of the lines, but the sound and mics were pretty good.  (Mics having been a little finicky for MP.)

 Mr. M came up with the best plan for bows I've seen in a high school play.  He added a song from the movie that wasn't in the play for Danny to sing while the cast went line by line doing a little dance move and their bows.  It flowed nicely and was interesting to see and hear.

At the end, Kendra's parents snapped this picture of the girls affectionately known as the Three Musketeers, or the Deathly Hallows if you ask Kaylee's older brother.  Emma and Kendra are frequently confused by their teachers and peers.  I don't think they look that much alike, but evidently it's enough.

This next picture was taken the night the youth went.  Elizabeth and I were really close to the stage, and we sat next to the bishop.  He asked where Ryan was, and I told him that he needed to put the twins to bed at their normal bedtime because Annie had a 45 minute long meltdown about pj pants, that Ryan conviently missed.  Preteens are very emotional creatures.  Bishop did make a crack about needing to talk to "Sandy" after she makes her appearance in her black outfit. Erica is in our ward.  I suggested he should also talk to "Frenchy" (also a girl in our ward) about wanting to drop out of high school.  

And finally closing night.  I have finally figured out how to manipulate my phone's camera to take decent pictures of the lighted stage.  Not that it takes the greatest pictures ever, but they are better than the too bright, too white pictures I used to get.  I'll blame it on the fact I still have an iPhone 5.

 You can see Emma and Kendra have a great time dancing in the next couple of pictures.

And done!  We survived another season.  It was really crazy running the play and science fair at the same time.  It meant all the kids doing both had to miss doing the local science fair because (even after I was assured by the science teacher that they would work it out) it ran at the same time as the Saturday matinee.  Since there were quite a few students doing both, you would have thought the teachers could at least communicate and work together to find a schedule that would accomodate both.  And because Emma is in band too, she can't go to regional science fair because the band has a festival to attend and her band teacher won't let her out of it.  So Elizabeth will be the only one attending regional science fair from our family. 

Lastly, here's a clip of You're The One That I Want.  Our high school really does know how to perform a good play.  See if you can spot Emma in her pink shirt and skirt.