Catching My Breath

Let's see. Looking at the calendar, I think I have might have two weeks, maybe three, if I'm lucky, to slow down and breathe a little before things pick back up again.

Baseball season is finally over. Jared finished his coach pitch team the second week of July. I forgot to sign him up for soccer this year, but he says he's okay with it. Adam's team did well in their baseball tournament. They took 3rd place out of 16 teams. Adam had fun and ended the season with with a single and an inning of playing 2nd base, after spending most of the season in the outfield. After winning the consolation game to take 3rd place, I heard him saying, "Best season ever!" It was good to see him enjoying it. This next week he will finish up swim team. He best times in the regular meets have qualified him to swim in the Silver meet at County. He is also talking about taking lifesaving and water safety instructor courses in the future, so he can prepare to teach swim lessons and life guard at the pool when he is old enough to get a job. It's nice to have our community pool is so close to our home. We get a family pass every summer and take as much advantage of it as we can. Adam and Ryan are both old enough to swim without an adult, so they head over there quite often to swim with friends too.

Ryan just started practices for his competition soccer team. I sat and watched them for awhile the other night, because the coach had asked parents to be there for a meeting. I was really impressed with him--his coaching skills, his knowledge of the game, and especially the way he interacted with the players. He's expecting a lot of them, but he communicates it in a very positive way. I think it will be a great experience for Ryan to play for him. Ryan is excited to start 5th grade in a few weeks. We got an email from his teacher, asking him to practice typing, cursive, and times tables each week until school starts. It's hard to think about school in the middle of the summer, but he doesn't seem to mind.

All the boys finished the summer reading program at the library. They've been reading 15-20 minutes a day, five days a week, since the first week of June. They'll keep doing that even though the program is over, but I'll switch to encouragement mode, rather than "you have to get all your chores and reading and piano practicing done before you can have screen time" mode. Now they just have to do chores and Adam has to practice piano.

There are lots of changes going on around here, some of which are nicely facilitating my "breathing time." I decided to step down from the Library Board in June, after 3+ years of service. It was a great experience and helped me get to know our community after we moved here. I enjoyed it, but felt like I needed to put more volunteer hours in at my kids' schools. With all four of them at different schools next year, I'm sure I'll be busy enough.

Then, last Sunday our stake presidency canceled regular church meetings and held a special stake meeting--to reorganize ward boundaries. Every single ward in our stake was shaken up, most pretty drastically. We were moved from our ward of four years to a new ward made up of parts of four old wards. Everyone who was moved to a new ward was automatically released from their callings, so I am no longer the Primary president. I will miss the kids and especially the wonderful ladies I served with in the presidency. We attended our new ward for the first time today--sacrament meeting only. Our new bishop and his wife gave great talks. They introduced themselves and we learned that they met in a "military ward" in Virginia shortly after he returned from the Viet Nam War. (Sound familiar Mom?) He is from Hawaii, originally. By way of introduction, his counselor told us that he likes to give hugs, and he loves luaus. Our first ward activity will be a luau in mid-August. This change is going to take some adjusting for all of us--particularly Adam, who was attached to his deacon friends and Young Men leaders--but it will be an adventure and an opportunity to grow. Jared was happy to learn that several boys he knew from school are in our new ward, and it looks like there are some Ryan's and Dallin's ages too. Hopefully Adam will find some as well. We are sad to leave the friends we made in our old ward, but at least this time we don't have to pack any boxes to do it, and we don't really have to say good-bye either.

I've decided my motto is, "Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold." We've made so many wonderful friends in all the places we've lived. We love keeping in touch with them. (And living in Utah, we get to see many of them when they pass through. We visited with one family we knew in Texas last week, and we're having dinner with with four different families this week--two we knew in Cincinnati, and two we knew in Texas.) For Family Home Evening last Monday, Jeff took us all to Provo for a little "family history tour." We ate dinner at the Malt Shoppe on University Avenue, then drove around and showed the kids all the apartments we lived while we were dating and first married. Then he talked to the boys about all the places we've moved to, the good friends we've made, the wonderful experiences we've had, and the memories we've made. Then we talked about the changes in our ward and how we have the opportunity to grow and make new friends, just like our family has done many times through the years. It was a fun trip down memory lane, and hopefully an effective lesson. At least it kept the kids attention and they weren't wrestling on the couch, like normal. :-)

I feel like I'm rambling, but I'll finish up with this. We have a 16-year-old German girl coming in a few weeks to live with us and go to our local high school for the coming school year. She is the youngest daughter of a family Jeff first met as a missionary in East Germany. I'm not completely sure I'm prepared to deal with a teenager, or a girl, but we are excited that she got all the red tape worked out so she can come. It will be another adventure for us. Mostly I worry that she will get homesick, but I guess we'll cross that bridge if we get to it. In preparation for her arrival, we have to clean out all the stuff we've been storing in the guest room. So for the moment, I'm spending my breathing time deep cleaning my house, room by room, making space elsewhere to put that stuff. It feels good to dejunk a bit, and my house certainly needs the cleaning.

Autumn in American Fork Canyon

About a month ago, when the autumn leaves were peaking, we took a drive up American Fork Canyon for a Family Home Evening activity. It was beautiful! I love fall, and I think it's mostly the gorgeous leaves that do it for me. Here are a few pictures for your viewing enjoyment. (Ruth, I hope they don't make you too homesick. :-)

Fun FHE

So here's a little break for you from some of my deeper thoughts. Our three oldest boys got Razor scooters for Christmas, but haven't been able to play much with them due to the snow and cold weather. In fact, they've been watching TV and playing computer games and haven't been outside hardly at all since the snow from the last storm turned icy and crunchy. So tonight for Family Home Evening we took their scooters and their roller blades and headed to Classic Skating, our local roller rink. Skates, blades, scooters, and even strollers are all allowed on the rink, and Family Night is $10 per family, up to six people. It's a bargain, even though we also had to rent adult skates and a little three-wheeled Spiderman scooter for Dallin. (That will be a purchase in the near future, I'm sure. He loved it.) My goal was to get the kids to exercise a little, burn some energy, maybe even wear themselves out. Well they got some exercise, but I'm the one who's worn out. It was fun and felt good though. I wish I could find more fun and easy ways like that to work a little exercise into my life. Maybe we'll just have to go to the roller rink for FHE more often.

Hot FHE Tip

In our family, we take turns giving the Family Home Evening lesson each week. Tonight was 4-year-old Jared's turn. Jared LOVES stick puppet Family Home Evening lessons. He goes straight for the binder that Aunt Tasha and family gave us for Christmas five years ago containing homemade Popsicle stick puppets and stories from The Friend magazine. Unfortunately, we've pretty much done all the stories Tasha gave us, more than once. So I got online trying to find some new ones. I've looked for them before by searching for flannelboard stories/figures on The Friend page of lds.org, but they aren't easy to find, and most of the puppets are black and white, which then have to be colored. Tonight I expanded my search a little, looked on theideadoor.com, and found Chocolate on My Cranium, a blog of a lady who has collected virtually all the flannel board stories from the Friend, colored them, and made them available for all of us to use. Now that is a service! We are set on flannelboard stories for months to come! Yay! My only complaint was that I couldn't get them to print out at a very high resolution, so they were a little fuzzy. Luckily, 4-year-olds don't care too much about resolution. But if you have any tips on how to get them to print out better, please pass them on.