Check out my sister's blog

I thought this was such an amazing and touching idea that my sister's ward and neighbors did that I wanted to share it with my friends too. Read the post about her friend, Sally.

http://big8smiley.blogspot.com/

Ethan's letter

For the last long while Ethan has given me a difficult time in the morning getting ready for school. He drags his feet and just won't get things done. We usually end up very frustrated heading off to school. I know that this is a somewhat timeless dilemma faced by mothers everywhere. Most mornings are spent with me constantly reminding him of what he needs to accomplish. Usually these consist of just the basics of getting dressed, eating breakfast and brushing teeth. Occasionally I will have something he needs to do before school like unload the dishwasher of take out the trash, but mostly we are dealing with the most basic tasks. He will go upstairs after scriptures and I won't see him for 20 or more minutes. All the while I will call up to him reminding him to quickly dress and come down. At some point I go up to find him just sitting on his floor still not dressed. I have tried a variety of things to remedy the situation even including grounding. All has been to no avail. Yesterday it all came to a head. As you all know, I am pregnant and not feeling well, not to mention the crazy hormonal mood swings that take me by surprise sometimes and make me feel like a crazy woman! All the stars aligned causing yesterday morning to be a disaster. By the time I got Ethan off to school I was just furious with him! I told him he was grounded for a week from video games of any kind, etc... In addition, he was to write a full page letter to me when he got home explaining to me why he behaves the way he does and how he plans to change in the future. As you will see, he gave the letter a noble effort but got sidetracked by the end. I thought the letter was very funny and was a good reflection of the way Ethan is. He is a funny boy.

Here is the letter. I will edit only the spelling of some words.

Why it's not o.k. to ruin your morning

I feel that it's not okay to make it a bad day for you because then your day will be a horrible start. I'm just bugged because I cannot find my shoes or I have to do the dishwasher or take out the trash cans or I need to do my hair and can't find the comb or have to brush my teeth and have no time to brush my teeth because of everything else I need to do to get ready for school and I cannot believe I left out eating I almost never ever have any time to eat any cereal or any toast let alone any granola bars no peanut butter chocolate chip or only chocolate chip or even s'mores it's only different variety of granola bars that sound very, very, very, very, very, very, very delicious and mouth watering and scrumptious. So that is why I think that it is so unfair to ruin your everyday mornings.

He brought it to me and went out of the room which was good because by the time I finished reading the letter, I was laughing. He was sidetracked by all the various flavors of granola bars. I called him back and reminded him that he needed to write what he planned to do differently in the future. He took the paper and returned with this:

What I'll do to change my act

To change my act I'll put all of the shoes the clothes I'll wear that day all on the side of my bed I don't sleep on.

Fortunately I can report today that our morning went very smoothly. I made a point not to tell him anything that needed to be done. I didn't even tell him to go get dressed after scriptures. I just let him handle him morning on his own. He got everything done in a good amount of time and then decided to pull out his piano theory book and work on that. Good job Ethan!

Ethan's Birthday Party

We had Ethan's 8th birthday party last Friday the 18th. He wanted an army theme. It was cute, most of the kids who came to the party wore camouflage, even the one girl who came. We had a lot of fun and felt quite relieved to have it behind us. I asked Callie to be the photographer for the party. She did a great job. I ended up with at least 200 pictures! Thank heaven for digital cameras.

Ethan wanted army guys in a battle on his cake, so that's what we made. The bottom part of the cake was 18 x 12 inches and the top was a 9 x 13 cake. Needless to say, it was quite large. I didn't think we would have enough room to make it really cool if we did just the 9 x 13. The bottom is camouflage colored icing.

I saw this one in the pictures and thought you all would get a kick out of seeing my demonstration of the obstacle course for the kids. (Yes, a mother will look silly for her kids.)

This is Connor making his way through the course.

Ethan also had his run at the course.

We had a tug-o-war game. We did it two times, each time splitting the teams differently. Interestingly, both times, the team Hannah was on won! Coincidence? Hmmmm.

At WalMart I found water balloons that looked like hand grenades. We filled them and put them all around on the basketball court. The kids took turns being blindfolded and they had to make their way through the "mine field" without blowing up any mines. A few of them made it through. Those who succeeded got a little prize. As they were going through, all the rest of the kids had water guns and stood around the edges as "snipers" shooting at the guy in the middle.

After everyone had a turn to go through the mine field we let them have an all out war. Everyone got a little wet but no one seemed to mind.

As usual, Ethan opened his gifts at the end of the party. He got three or maybe four super soaker water guns! He also got a huge kite, some money and some books.

We rounded out the party with cake and ice cream. The little boy next to Ethan is our next door neighbor. He is a couple of years younger than Ethan but comes and asks if he can play every day. As you can see by the shape of his lips, he "helped" Ethan blow out the candles. I saw it coming and put my hand over his mouth, but was a split second too late. Ethan noticed too and was not too pleased. Oh well.

Food Storage Drill

In sacrament meeting today they announced that our stake will be having a food storage drill coming up in the next week or two. It's either this coming weekend or the following. The way it will work is that they want all member of the stake to eat only from their food storage from Sunday morning through Monday night. Every meal or snack we eat has to come from food storage. We aren't supposed to use anything from the fridge or pantry. (I don't get the pantry part because that is a part of my food storage, so I'll use that too, but I make sure not to use fresh eggs, milk, cheese, etc...) They are wanting us to evaluate our situations and see if we really can use what we have, if we would like eating it, if it's gone bad, etc... They said, if you don't have food storage to use those days to come up with a plan to get at least a 30 day supply of food. I think it's a great idea. I'm looking forward to seeing what we come up with.

I MADE IT!!

Yahoo! I'm still alive. Last week was a beast but I live to tell another tale. I managed to do everything that needed to get done so now I can breath a big WHEW!

AAAARGH!!

Pregnancy yuckies have set in good and strong now. This week it is posing a real problem for me. I think this is perhaps one of the busiest weeks I have had in a very long time and yet I have absolutely no energy to accomplish what needs to be done. Humor me while I list off what I can't seem to rev up to do. This coming Sunday is my week to teach relief society, so I need to actually plan the lesson. I have my usual piano lessons to teach. I have visiting teaching to do on Wednesday morning. I am taking Callie to see Phantom of the Opera on Thursday night which means that all five of my piano students that I normally teach that day need to be rescheduled to another day this week. Friday we are going to Jenny's dad's funeral in Orange County. Friday afternoon is Ethan's 8th birthday party, which I still need to plan and get everything for. Saturday our Huntington Beach friends are coming to visit for the day. Sunday the missionaries are coming for dinner. Whew! I'm sure I missed something in there. Hannah has been fighting diarrhea and a horrible rash for several days now and consequently isn't sleeping well which means that I am also not sleeping well. Not that I really was before because now I have to get up a couple of times in the night to empty my bladder and usually can't get back to sleep right away. All I can say this morning is .... AAAAAARGH!!!!

Details

So now that you have all figured out what the previous picture is, I'll give you the details. I figured my blog was the perfect way to make the announcement.

I am about 7 weeks along. The baby is due on November 25th. Hopefully this one will follow the others and come a couple of weeks early. The baby is about the size of a small bean right now. I have been on progesterone to keep from miscarrying. I went to the doctor Monday and was able to see and hear the baby's heartbeat on ultrasound. That is very happy news to me. Once I saw the heartbeat I felt like it was ok to share the happy news. As it turns out, my progesterone levels have been and are well above normal. Again, very good news for me. I am a little under the weather and tired, but overall I feel ok.

I do have to send out a "sorry" to my group of cake testers. That is one thing that took a quick sideline, cake baking. I will crank another one out soon. I'm hoping for a little more energy to magically descend upon me.

BIG NEWS!!

Happy Tuesday!

Hi everyone and a Happy Tuesday to you all!

I haven't had anything exciting to post for several days but I don't want to disappoint those who check my blog regularly. I hope you all have a smashingly spectacular day today.

My day is filled with CHORES! Oh the life of a mom is so predictable. Yet at the same time filled with unpredictability. For example, I didn't predict that when I went to run a couple of errands the other day and left Callie and her friend in charge that I would get a call to let me know that Hannah had cut her hair. Yeah, wasn't expecting that. I will admit I didn't handle it too well. I cried for the rest of the entire day. I couldn't even look at Hannah for about a day without my eyes tearing up. (As a strange side note, aside from death or serious injury or illness, that has been one of those nagging "worst fears" from the time Callie was little--a daughter taking the scissors to her own hair.) Laugh if you will but I confess willingly. It took a few days for me to finally decide that it would be better to take Hannah to get it fixed than to let her walk around with a mullet. Now that we have made it through that "trial" I realize that she looks fairly cute. Yes, I know I am evil, but then so did you.