Author: Superpaige (Page 125 of 180)

This week is camp week.

My oldest, Cole, will be gone at scout camp until Saturday. He left this morning at 6 am. He has a very experienced and competent scout leader, who I really do trust. But, still, I had to give him the little talk yesterday. The talk in which I express my expectations that my son be returned to me safe, sound, and intact. With two working legs, two arms, and still breathing. You know, minor details like that. He assured me that all would be fine.

My next oldest, Megan, will be gone to Clearcreek, which is Alpine District’s summer camp. She left this morning at 6:30 am, and will return on Friday. I really have no idea if the employees there are competent, but since Cole had such a good experience when he went two years ago, I’m confident and hopeful that Megan will also have a great time. She’s going with 5 of her friends from the neighborhood and school, so I’m sure it will be a blast, and she’ll come home singing all those silly camp songs until I want to rip my ears off of my head.

So, you ask yourself, what is Paige going to be doing this week with only 3 kids? That’s almost 1/2 the number of kids she usually has. Is she going somewhere fun? Hanging out and enjoying the quiet? Well, I would do those things, had we not embarked on a huge project this weekend. Yes, we have started the great bedroom migration of ’07.

I have been thinking about and trying to figure out the best room placement for the kids for quite some time, now. We have three bedrooms for 5 kids. Cole’s had his own room for quite some time, now. He also has the queen bed, so his room doubles as the “guest room”, and when we have guests, he goes down to the pull out couch in the unfinished basement. Well, Megan has been complaining about sharing a room with Jenna, Natalie has been complaining about sharing a room with John (she wrote a note to Dad saying that John was ruining her life, in fact). Plus there’s the closet issue. Cole’s room has a large closet. Natalie’s room has two closets (she uses one for clothes and one for toys and stuff). Megan’s room has one closet. Shouldn’t the room with only one closet house the smallest amount of people?

After discussing the possibilities, we called a family meeting to discuss the proposed changes, and everyone seemed agreeable to switching. So, John goes in with Cole, and they have the bunk beds that have been in Megan and Jenna’s room. The queen bed goes to Megan’s room, which will become the new “guest room”. Jenna moves in to Natalie’s room, and we buy them a new bunk bed. And everyone gets speakers in their rooms, thanks to Dad.

So we got to work on Saturday. We had to clean up stuff, vacuum, take apart beds, clean out closets, strip sheets, do about 100 loads of laundry, and put the bed together in their new places with clean sheets. That’s about as far as we got. Jenna has no bed at the moment, as I haven’t yet bought the new bunkbed that I promised them. Her dresser is also not moved to the new location because John’s car bed is still in there. John’s dresser is still in his old room, too. Megan’s room needs to be cleaned, vacuumed, and rearranged. It also needs to be painted. This week. Natalie and Jenna’s room also needs to be put together, bed bought, dressers arranged, and all of JOhn’s stuff taken out. It needs to be painted, too, but not neccesarily this week. What’s the rush on Megan’s room, then? Well, it’s houseguest season. My brother’s family will be staying with us in two weeks, and there’s a good possibility we will have Robin and kids here this weekend.

So, while my two oldest, most helpful kids (the ones who babysit) are gone, I will be moving furniture, cleaning up rooms, throwing away stuff, picking out paint, and hopefully actually doing the painting. I’d love some help, if you’d like to come over.

Friday night we watched my cousin’s kids so they could go to the temple. They have three darling little girls, ages 6, 3 and 6 months. Perfect ages to play with Jenna and John. So, I held the baby, fed her a bottle, and played with her while the other kids played outside on the trampoline and Ryan mowed the lawn. After he came inside, she was a little fussy and so I gave her to Ryan to hold for a few minutes while I got the other kids a snack. He took her into his office, and then next time I walked by he had her upside down to try to calm the fussiness. He brings her up and she starts spitting up on him. I run to go get a towel (he would say I walked leisurely, but really, I was hurrying) and by the time I got back, she had spit up the entire contents of the bottle I just gave her ALL OVER RYAN. I took the baby so he could wipe himself off, and then he went to change his shirt. I was laughing so hard! It’s been a while since we’ve seen spitting up of that magnitude, and it was quite funny, in my opinion. We’re glad there was no spitting onto the laptop, keyboard or anything that could be ruined. In fact, most of it was squarely on Ryan. I’m still chuckling over it. Sorry, Ryan.

This week, my friend and neighbor called me and asked if I could help her with some sewing. They had a family wedding, which was luau themed, and her family all had to be wearing tropical prints. She had bought fabric and wanted to make wrap skirts for her 4 girls and herself. But she doesn’t sew. She had handed out fabric to different people, and asked me if I could do just two skirts for her smallest girls. Now, I’m not a seamstress by any stretch of the word. Yes, I can sew. I have sews some dresses, curtains, etc., but I don’t use my sewing machine every day. But–sew a hem, maybe an elastic waist? Sure, I can do that. So, I sewed a simple elastic skirt, then took it over to see if it fit right before I did the other one. You would have thought I had hand woven the fabric and sewed it with golden thread, to see their reactions. They were thrilled. So, I whipped up the other skirt (seriously, it took about 1/2 and hour) and took it over.

Yesterday she called back again. She had asked another friend to just hem up the edges of the other three to make wrap skirts, but it was too much fabric and too stiff and it wasn’t falling right. So she came over, we figured out how much to cut off to make it the right length, and to make one of them not so bulky. I think it was four cuts and four seams. Again, so much appreciation. She went on and on about what a great talent that is to be able to sew (a straight line) and what a wonderful friend I was to help her. She even insisted on paying me $20. I felt undeserving of her gigantic praise.

In a smaller way, John also shows his appreciation.  As I was helping him use the potty this morning, he was going to watch his hands, and he noticed that there was a new soap.  (Not the lovely brown sugar and fig from Bath and Body works/smelly kind that Ryan can’t stand, but a different foamy kind.)  John said, “MOM!  There’s new soap!  And there’s no polka dots!  Thanks!”  He doesn’t like the scrubbing micro-beads.  This family is pretty picky about their soap, I guess.

But it’s nice to be appreciated, isn’t it?

Ok, I admit it–I am lucky. I do win kind of a lot of things. But lest you think I just phone and win every thing I try for, I really don’t. I phone in and LOSE many times a day. Really. So, it’s an averages thing. If you want to win a few things, you have to enter and try to win a lot of things.

That said, I won! I WON!

So, I guess we will be taking a vacation this year. (We’ll have to see if we can do it for less than last time. But with the price of gas, and John needs his own pass this time, I doubt it. Three kids passes at $129 each is already $387.)

When my kids found out about it, they were very excited, until I told them that it was only a trip for 4. And we’ll have to see who is the nicest to me to see if they get to go. Aren’t I mean?

Ryan finally consented to let Cole start mowing the lawn.  He is 13, after all, and should have the opportunity (and responsibility) of mowing the lawn.  So Ryan taught him how to use the riding lawn mower last week, and Cole’s thrilled to do the lawn mowing job.  Because we pay him.  It’s not hard, really.  You just ride around the yard for a couple of hours and try to keep within the lines.  Cole’s done a pretty good job, and it saves Ryan a couple of hours a week that he doesn’t have to mow the lawn.

I think it’s a win-win situation, myself.

6:00 am

BEEP BEEP BEEP BLEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP BLEEP!

What IS that?

Ryan also gets out of bed and says it must be the smoke alarm. We go to Natalie and John’s room, and Megan is already in there. I was just going to wake Natalie up, she says. What? I’ll think about that later. The smoke alarm in their room is not going off, but it’s still making quite a racket in the rest of the house. John is still asleep. Should I pick him up? Should we go outside? Is there a fire? I don’t see or smell anything weird. We go through the rest of the house.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BLEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP BLEEP!

Once we determine that there is no fire anywhere, we stop the panic, but we still have the problem of HOW DO WE STOP this noise!? Ryan gets the ladder and starts unhooking the smoke alarms (handy, that one, I tell you) while I sat on the couch with a pillow over my ears trying to block out the sound. He determined that the one in his office was the one causing all he problems. When he unplugged that one, the racket stopped. And isn’t it funny that Jenna and John slept through the whole thing? If this had been a real fire, we would have had to wake and/or carry them out.

I went back to bed, hoping to get another hour of sleep. John, true to form, came in a short hour later and wanted his breakfast.

Then, at 8:30, we received a call from a friend, who’s also a member of the primary presidency. She informs us that there’s been a change in the planned stake activity days outing for our girls. They won’t be going up to Mutual Dell in American Fork Canyon today because there was a bear attack there last night, and they haven’t yet found the bear. I’m shocked and saddened for an unknown family who lost a son while camping last night. And, NO, I don’t mind the change of plans.

Cole made a Father’s day movie for Ryan.  It’s way cute.  Check it out here.  (It uses Window’s Media player, so I hope this will work for you.)  Let us know what you think!

It’s Father’s Day, Ya’ll! And in honor of that, I’d like to just tell you a little bit about why I love my husband.

1-He loved me first. Yes, he might tell you stories of how he knew I was the one for him way before I left on my mission. I wasn’t so sure, and it took some convincing that he was the one for me. But, he did it. And I’m very glad he did. But he always reminds me that he loved me first, as if that somehow makes his love better than my love. But I still love him for it.

2-He can fix about anything. If he wants to. There is a certain scooter that’s been sitting in the garage for a long time that he hasn’t even tried to fix, but we’ll not talk any more about that. He’s fixed countless VCRs, a few tv’s (the one in our bedroom was his parents tv, and we’ve had it for roughly 14 years ourselves), computers, toasters, toys, vacuums, and many other things. He just has the “I can take that thing apart and probably fix it” mentality. Which is a good thing.

3-He’s a GREAT FATHER. Ryan loves playing with the kids, he changes diapers, he puts kids to bed, he can get them dressed, etc. I’m glad that he’s a capable father and could take care of the kids in my absence if he had to. Not that I’m planning on going anywhere, mind you, but I do enjoy the occasional night out.

4-He’s pretty willing to go to almost whatever strange concert/movie premier/try to win a car/event that I may win tickets to. Since you never really know what kind of stuff you will win when you call in for radio contests, I’ve won a lot of crazy crap. We’ve gone to a demolition derby, some VERY dumb movies that I’m really glad we didn’t pay for, I even entered him in a father’s day lawn mower contest once, where he had to run around a little course with his bubble mower and compete for a new lawn mower. No, we didn’t win, he came in a very close second. He competed with me and two kids in the “Amazing Shopping Race“, and although we didn’t win the trip to SanDiego, it’s been a fun memory for Cole and Megan, who ran that race with us. He even snarfed up a whole pizza! He did draw the line at Barney live and the Doodlebops. No way was I getting him to go to those, but that’s ok.

5-He grills up some pretty awesome meat! I have to thank our neighbors for giving us the amazing marinade recipe, but he does a great job with the grill (which I can’t even get lighted, by the way).

6-He loves our kids.

7-He has a job, and keeps a job and supports our family financially. I’m so thankful that I am able to stay at home with the kids. I can’t imagine trying to be the mom and work full time outside the home. I think that would be so much harder, and I would hate to miss out on so much of the excitement that is raising children.

8-He hardly ever complains about what I fix for dinner.

9-He’s helpful. He’s fixed countless computers, helped others with their wiring, and recently made a whole bunch of water bottle launchers for people just to be nice. He’s just an all around great guy.

10-He’s a faithful father, doing his best to honor his priesthood and be a righteous member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

“A father’s calling is eternal, and its importance transcends time. It is a calling for both time and eternity. Harold B. Lee truly stated that, ‘the most important of the Lord’s work that you [fathers] will ever do will be the work you do within the walls of your own home.’ …

“Your homes should be a haven of peace and joy for your family. Surely no child should fear his own father. A father’s duty is to make his home a place of happiness and joy. He cannot do this when there is bickering quarreling, contention, or unrighteous behavior. The powerful effect of righteous fathers in setting an example, disciplining and training, nurturing and loving is vital to the spiritual welfare of his children.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson