Category: Uncategorized (Page 40 of 118)

I haven’t been blogging much lately. Have you missed me? Have you wondered, “Why isn’t Paige blogging regularly this past week?” Did you even notice, or have you not checked anyway? It’s not that I haven’t had tons going on that I could blog about.

I could blog more about basketball, and how Megan’s team WON THEIR GAME on Thursday against that super good team, but lost to them on Friday night, so they took second place overall in the under 13 bracket. And I could mention how I went to Cole’s Grand Concert on Friday night instead of going to Megan’s championship game, and how I was on the phone with my friends until just a few minutes before the concert started trying to get all the details. I could mention that I called Ryan at the game, and he was extremely short with me. “Score’s 11 to 15, the other team’s ahead. Can’t talk now,” was about the gist of my conversation with him.

Or I could blog about toilets. Yes, indeed, toilets. We’ve had some toilet incidences around here lately, and I actually bought two brand new plungers today while at Target. There ought to be something funny in that, right? But I couldn’t come up with a decent post about it, so it doesn’t get a post. I will share a knock knock joke that is in the toilet family, which I credit to my friend Courtney and her first grade students.
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Freep”
“Freep who?”
“Bwaaa, haaa, haaa, haaa!!! Freep Who!!!! FREE POO!”
I know. Extremely funny if you are in first grade.

I could regale you with tales of our ALL DAY bell choir activities on Saturday. And when I say all day, I really do mean All Flippin Day. Seriously. We got there at 8 am, and we left a little before 6 pm. All day. It was exhausting. But, really, unless you are a bell ringer, you don’t want to hear my stories of our bell exploits and the guest director and what we had for lunch and the big old thick gymnastics pad that Lynda was smart enough to bring for us to stand on for all those hours of ringing. Do you?

I could tell about our fun family home evening that we had this week, where instead of having a lesson, we played a fun game called Burn the House down. It was really a trial run for me, since I’m also going to do that game for our Relief Society party in a couple of weeks. I think it went very well, and the whole family (21 of them in all last night) seemed to have a good time. My niece even left us a thank you note on a scrap of paper that said, “Thanks for hosting such a fun FHE!”

I could bemoan my constant failure in the “Biggest Loser Challenge” I’m doing with my sister and some of her friends right now. And how in 6 weeks I have only lost 5 pounds. I could probably write quite a lot about that. But it would be no fun to read, since it’s no fun to do, and I’m not succeeding at it anyway.

Or I could write something awe inspiring about the blossoming of spring and how I love hearing the birds outside and seeing the tulips and the daffodils and the crocuses coming up through the cold dirt. I could, really.

That is, I could write about those things if I had the tiniest spark of creativity in my brain right now.
(Sound of crickets chirping)

But sometimes there just isn’t any creativity going on. Sometimes I (gasp) can’t think of anything witty or even fun to write. Sometimes I’m just boring.

Sigh.

Things I learned from watching “The Office”

A great knock knock joke!
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
KGB?
KGB Who?
(slap to the face) (In a german accent) WE Will ask the qwestions!

Michael: Hey! Hey! You Idiot!

Darrel: Start over.

**I can use this approach with my kids, right? Anytime they start out a sentence with whining or mean words, I’ll just throw them a “Start over.”

I learned a new word. “Profiligate”

And I learned a great reason to keep a diary. “To keep secrets from my computer.”

And sometimes you should just take credit for you own ideas. Even if they might get you into trouble. Golden ticket, anyone?

Oh the funny story of the pants.

In our rush to get ready between our trip to the library and a basketball game, Cole needed to get dressed up in Sunday clothes, because he was going to the temple with his youth group. As I was dishing up chicken enchiladas so that everyone could eat quickly, Cole called down from upstairs.
“MOM! I need pants!” he yelled, “Mine are in the wash.” Oh, yes, that’s right, I did put his church pants in the wash. Because that’s the kind of efficient, loving mother I am. Washing my kids’ clothes for them.
“Just pull them out of the washer and put them in the dryer.” Yes, that should work. We have 20 minutes.
“The washer’s full of water!”
Oh, yes, I guess I left that load soaking for a while, and it didn’t go through the rinse or spin cycle. Darn. There is no way those pants will be ready in 20 minutes.
“Don’t you have any other pants?” I yelled back up the stairs, “What about that suit?”
“I haven’t seen that suit in a long long time.” was his reply. Of course he hadn’t.
I dashed up to his room and found, on the floor of his closet, the suit pants. Proud of myself and my extra super finding skills, I handed them to him. “Here. Put these on.”
I went back to the kitchen to supervise the feeding of the children, and I heard him call again, “These do NOT fit!” Then he came downstairs to show me how MUCH they did not fit.
“Oh,” I said, “Those won’t work.” He had about two inches of waistband that were NOT coming together. Not to mention that these pants were at least three inches too short. Darn teenager. “Don’t you have ANY other church pants?”
“Not that FIT!” he was starting to get angry and frustrated, and so was I. We were down to 10 minutes before he was supposed to meet his group at the church. I was trying to feed everyone, including him, and he couldn’t find any pants that fit. I told him to just eat something, and I ran upstairs to rifle through Ryan’s pants to see if there were any that might do in a pinch. I found two that are too small for Ryan, and brought them down.
“Here, try these on,” I said.
“I got these buttoned up,” he told me. Sure enough, he did have the pants done up, but I don’t know how the kid was breathing.
“Well, do you want to wear those, or do you want to try these of Dad’s?” I asked, trying not to laugh at how silly he looked.
“I’ll just wear these,” he said in his sad and dejected voice.
“Well, we’d better get going, it’s already time for you to be there,” I said in my mom voice.
We pulled into the church parking lot, and then he said, “Oh, I forgot my recommend!”
We pulled out of the church parking lot, and drove back home. On the way, I had him call Megan and ask her to get the recommend and meet us out front. As we drove up to the house, there she was, in her socks, running with his little piece of paper. We grabbed that, turned around, and drove back to the church. On the way, we passed his leader. “That’s Them!” he said.
We turned around once more, and so did his leader, so that we could let Cole out. As he walked over to the other car, I could see some of the other boys laughing. I don’t know if they were laughing AT Cole and his floods, or if they just happened to be laughing. Let’s hope it was the latter.

While we were making this exchange, Ryan drove by, wondering what all the hullabaloo was. I pulled into the garage just after him, and he thought I had all the kids in the car. He thought we were already going to basketball. “If only it were that simple,” I sighed.

We did manage to get everyone in the car and off to Megan’s basketball game, which they won easily 11 to 22. That means they play again tonight. Megan was on fire, and scored 8 points. That means I payed her $8. Yes, I do pay my children to make baskets, want to make something of it?

When we got home, Cole was already there, and had already changed out of those way too tight pants. He had been home for “a while” according to him, and he was complaining about the garage door. It seems the battery to the keypad was dead, so he had to go next door and borrow a nine volt battery from the neighbors, put that in the keypad and THEN he could open the garage door. Yes, the torture and embarrassment never ends for the poor kid. Ryan wanted to know why he hadn’t take the battery BACK to them after he had used it to get into the house. “I will take them a new battery tomorrow. Don’t ask him to do it, he’s suffered enough.”

So, it’s been made abundantly clear to me that my poor growing boy needs more church pants. Buy the kid some khakis already! Oh, and add nine volt batteries to the list, too.

Last night my hubby went to the local grocery store. Not for groceries, mind you, but to pick up his free Redbox movies. Even though we never seem to actually have time to watch the movies. His choice of movies just astounds me. He got some action film for himself, and then he got a movie for the kids to watch. Beverly Hill Chihuahua?! Are you kidding me? He won’t watch High School Musical 3 with us, but he’ll rent Beverly Hill Chihuahua? There is something seriously wrong here. Well, as long as I don’t have to watch it.

Boys can enjoy those littlest pet shops animals, too. When he asked me to play with him, I was surprised. Usually he plays with his little guys or cars and makes all the noises and the voice, and when I try to play with him, he gets mad. But he actually wanted me to play with him the other day. He handed me two of the littlest pet shops pets and said that was all I got. Two? And he got all the rest? Well, eventually we were playing together and shared the little pie and bones and ice cream and had a fun time.

Maybe I’ll get those out for him to play with today. I get to clean out the mud room. Wish me luck. So far this morning we’ve found Natalie’s missing library book and about four pairs of shoes that nobody claims are theirs. I’m hoping not to find anything dead or rotting. Maybe I’ll even find money! I *should* go and take a before picture, and then later take an after picture, but I don’t think I want anyone knowing what my mudroom before looks like. If you’re free right now and want to come help, I wouldn’t turn you away.

It’s not often I type the words “smooth endoplasmic reticulum” and “golgi bodies”. That’s why it’s so great to have kids. We can re-learn all that stuff we talked about in biology so many many years ago.

Ryan keeps giving me updates on how long we’ll have to wait. I guess we’re down to 5 days now.

It’s just a little something we like to call our Sunday night date. You know, some nice together time as we watch the amazing adventures of the race. How about you? What do you and your sweetie watch together?

John just said to me, “If you don’t know how to say ‘Mom’, then you don’t know how to love.” Wow! How sweet it that?

Thanks to facebook, I’ve gotten in touch with one of my mission companions this week.
I had kept in contact with her for a while through Christmas cards, and then,like most people, she dropped off the radar. But through the magic of the internet, she’s found me. And what do you know, she’s living in Germany?! After we emailed, she called me, and it was so much fun talking to her. That brought back such great memories of the fun times we had in Germany. So, then I had to go and look up the pictures.

This is where we lived in the great city of Duisburg.

Nice area, right? That’s what we thought. We were in a Turkish neighborhood, which was interesting. But we were always able to find a good Döner kebab, and got invited in for tea with the neighbors a few times.

We worked hard trying to find and teach people the gospel, but we also had a lot of fun.

This is a picture from one day when the Elders must have been out of money before they ran out of month. They called us in despiration, “Sisters, we’re starving and we don’t have any money.” I’m guessing they had used their money buying kebabs. We were kind and made them lunch. It looks like it was pancakes. And why are we eating off an ironing board, you might ask? Well, we didn’t want to out and out break the rules, and the rule was the Elders were not allowed in our apartments. So we had to come up with a creative solution. I think this was in the hallway or back landing or porch or something like that.

Gosh, don’t we look young? That’s because we were young. I was about 23 at the time. As much as I don’t like to admit it, that was a long time ago.

We were allowed one day a week to do our personal stuff, like laundry, letter writing, grocery shopping and the occasional outing. It seems like most of my pictures are from that personal day, since that’s when we were allowed to let loose and have some fun.

And after I became “friends” with my old friend Tammy, face book recommended a couple of other people that I might just want to be friends with, and I found a couple of Elders from the mission, too.

So here I sit at the computer. In my pajamas. Not going to church today because Megan and I are still getting over our bout with the flu. And I’m looking over my mission pictures and laughing.

Memories…like the corner of our minds….