This Week at Our House # 8

1. We've had the last week of February. We are not where I thought we would be. But we did finally get back to the Temple and that was wonderful. I sure missed it. Serving in the temple makes all the good parts of life even better and the bad parts of life less trying. 
2. This was just an ordinary week. I spent some time learning more about doterra essential oils. My next step will be to reserve a room at the library and put out flyers for a health and wellness class. This is definitely out of my comfort zone. But sometimes we just have to go there.
3. Ruth got her track assignment for BYU-I. She will be going fall and winter terms. She's very excited about that. We started to look at and ask around about housing. It's nice to have friends who have been their with their kids and can make helpful recommendations. 
4. Kate is sad that she has no social life, but delighted that she can come home from seminary and sleep until 10. She has begun taking practice tests for the ACT. She is hoping to get a 30 or above. 
5. Johnny loves his board games and had some friends from the ward over tonight who apparently do too. 
6. Adam is a terrible babysitter. I need this to change. Adam is also very good at math and is doing well with a pre-algebra book right now. I think he will be ready for algebra in a years time. That is really nice for Adam because he often thinks he is just not smart because Kate and Johnny have always received so much praise for being smart.
7. Rachel is just so tiny. She will be 10 in 5 more weeks. She recently grew into a girl's size 7 and is 45 pounds. Even Kate was not that tiny.
8. Anya does not like math. I bought her an abacus to free up my fingers for her to do addition and subtraction on.
9. Joseph is so full of energy-- happy energy, but tons of it.
10. Joshua waited in the car with John while I shopped at Costco. At one point John heard Josh exclaim in a growly voice, "Hey Mo--om. Why are you buying every THING there? How can you buy every THING there?!!"
11. Arwen is such a quiet little child, sometimes I feel like she gets lost in the shuffle, so I took just Arwen to run the errands with me this week. Arwen has said some funny things. To Johnny she said, "You are not my brother. Josh is my brother. You are mom's brother." She also adores Rachel and always wants to play with her.
12. Miss Suzy-Q has been a complete stinker! She keeps getting into soap and putting it in her hair. She keeps getting into the toilets and sticking dishes, soap, and toilet paper in them. She dumps out the bathroom drawers and squeezes out the toothpaste. She pulls books off the shelves several times a day. She dumps crayons for the sake of dumping crayons. She colors in the kids school work books. She is just at THAT age.

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This Week at Our House # 7

1. Sometime ago we read SteelHeart by Brandon Sanderson. The third book, Calamity, came out Wednesday. We had it pre-ordered from Amazon, so we really enjoyed reading that with the 4 oldest kids late into the night finishing it off after Church today. The job hunt is still going. John applies to about 3 jobs a day. I wish with all my heart that he would just a permanent job and our lives were like they were before he lost that one job nearly 3 years ago. 
2. I am reading a lot. I take Ruth, Kate, and Johnny to seminary each morning and then sit there and read Charles Dickens. I'm reading Bleak House right now. I love Dickens, but he takes more concentration than I can really get at home with all of my kids. So I quite enjoy that 45 minutes of reading time. I just finished reading a Calamity to the older kids and John. For my own reading time at home, I read lighter things. Right now I am reading a Sandra Byrd novel, Mists of Midnight. I am almost finished with that and will probably take on another Agatha Christie before I read the Lord of the Rings for a 4th time. To the younger homeschool kids, I just finished Old Yeller and I am now reading them the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I have enjoyed all this time in books. We had a busy week with Church stuff for the Young Womens. They had a Wednesday activity that started early, a set up for an dinner/fundraiser Friday night, and then the dinner/fundraiser on Saturday. I helped out some Friday and Saturday and then spent some time out with Ruth, Kate, and Rachel. That was fun. I am starting to get trained and setting up to be a Doterra essential oils representative and hopefully will be able to make some money doing that. I think I might also start doing some natural birth classes just to earn a little money.
3. Ruth had a lot of Church stuff and homework and all. She is stressed about a test tomorrow, so I would say that her life is pretty normal. Some guys she eats lunch with have asked her over to play Dungeons and Dragons, but I think she feels to shy to go. Anyway, we would not send her without Kate.
4. Kate is pressing forward with homeschool. She is reading a lot more. She misses her school friends back in Utah. But Kate has always been a bit of homebody. When she was little she would beg me to leave her home when I took the kids to the zoo or to play dates or the park. 
5. I had to threaten to send Johnny back to public school if he did not sit down and write his paper on MacBeth. I think he needs more time on Shakespeare. Johnny spent 3 to 4 hours with me sorting legos by color. I think that might be a good way to torture secrets out of people.
6. Adam wrestles Joseph all of the time. He is worried about getting fat, so he exercises a lot. He does a lot of push up, sit ups, and spends a lot of time jumping and flipping on the tramp and running around. Now that he homeschools, I can say that he is really good at math. He definitely has a knack for it and almost never misses a problem and understands it pretty easily. He also spends a goodly amount of time building with legos. He makes some pretty neat things.
7. Rachel spent plenty of time with me and Ruth and Kate doing the young women's things. She was a pretty good help and enjoyed the time out.
8. I nagged Anya all week to get her school work done. She did not want to do it and I was so glad when Friday came around and I did not have to nag her anymore. Friday afternoon, she built with legos and made some pretty impressive space ships just from her imagination. We read Harriet the Spy back in January and now Anya has her spying notebooks and spies on people in our family. 
9. Joseph was just like Anya. I had to nag and nag him. I am thinking they need a break, so maybe I will give them next Friday off or take a field trip if the weather is good. In North Carolina you have to take attendance and I think we would really like the ordinary summer break, so I want to just get the school year over and done with. I have not really given them any days off.
10. Joshua won't go to bed. It is so hard to get him to go to sleep before midnight. We have been making him run a lot hoping that would help. But it does not seem to.
11. Arwen is a busy little girl. She always has something to do and just keeps herself occupied all day. She is very quiet too. 
12. Suzy is getting in to everything. I got mad at her for the first time in her life when she climbed up onto the table this morning and dumped an entire bag of sticky cereal over her head just after I got her in her church clothes. She was stunned that I would be unhappy with her at all. Poor little girl. We still think she is the most darling thing on the planet.

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This Week at Our House #6

1. John ran/walked 3 miles 5 days this week. I am surprised at how serious he is about exercise.
2. The big thing this last week was Anya's baptism. I have still been very busy getting things put away and organized. 
3. Ruth had 2 job interviews for the Chipotle job and in the end did not end up getting hired. But there were 400 people being interviewed.
4. Kate has been earning a little money babysitting. She is reading the Anne of Green Gables series. That is probably my all time favorite series. I am excited to have a child as into it as I am.
5. Johnny has been reading the scriptures to Josh at night and then telling him scripture stories to help him to settle down and go to sleep. It makes me happy that they are sharing a room. 
6. Adam has been getting out board games and teaching them to the younger kids. I love that too. I really thought that the spare time my kids would have from home schooling would be spent watching tv. I haven't actually bothered to prevent that from happening. But it hasn't been an issue either. They are watching less tv. Instead they are playing games, making up plays, reading more, and playing outside. I think they must have been pretty tired out from the school days. I have no other explanation for the change.
7. Rachel practiced quite a bit and sang at Anya's baptism. She loves to sing.
8. Anya got baptized and we are just so happy about that. We took her out to dinner that night as we have done with all of our kids. She was just so lovely and easy going about it. Then later than night she sat in our bed with us and watched AFV on youtube. We just had a very enjoyable time with her all day long.
9. Joseph is reading the same books that Johnny read at the same age. None of our other kids have been able to do that. 
10. Joshua is finally mostly good at Church. He has been my hardest kid at Church. Church is so much easier now that Josh will behave himself.
11. Arwen dumped out and mixed up about everything in the house. She got in trouble and I think she will be a little better about that now. I will also keep a closer eye on her and know where she is at. 
12. Suzy will not go to nursery. She went two weeks and was happy and perfect, and now she starts crying when she sees the nursery door. I went with her yesterday, but she was worried that I would leave. It took her about 30 minutes to get off my lap and go and play with the toys. John said that staying there with her only taught her that she can get mom to go to nursery with her.

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Anya's Baptism

While I was braiding Anya's hair in preparation for her baptism, reminded her about the Gift of the Holy Ghost. I told her that it will take some time to understand how He speaks to her. But that He speaks either in feelings or to words in her mind. Anya then said, He speaks to my mind. I asked her when she had heard the Holy Ghost before. Anya said that once at night when her room was messy, she was scared that the world's biggest spider was hiding in the stuff on the floor. She said that she prayed and that the Holy Ghost spoke words into her head that said, the spider is not there and it is ok, and then she did not feel scared anymore.

When we got to the Church we set up our stuff and waited for the Bishopric member to arrive. Then we began the service. Adam gave a talk about baptism, Johnny said the opening prayer and Rachel, Anya, and Kate sang "The Family is of God". We went to the Baptistry next and John baptized Anya. Anya got dried off and dressed very quickly. Kate gave the talk on the Holy Ghost, and then Anya was given the Gift of the Holy Ghost and a blessing.

Anya's blessing told her to learn the stories in the scriptures and get to know them well. She was told that if she did this, she would be able to help a lot of people. Her blessing also told her to really pray and speak to Heavenly Father.

Afterwards the primary president and the member of the Bishopric welcomed her as the newest member. Then we went home and ate a lot of dessert that we prepared for the after baptism celebration.

This Week at Our House # 5

1. It's February already. You can tell you are getting older when time starts to go quickly. On Monday we moved all of our stuff out of the storage unit. It went pretty fast since we had the majority of our heavy stuff already moved in. John has been running more. He went three miles twice this week. We had talked about losing weight and I decided to quit eating dessert until I lose 25 pounds and he decided to eat what he wants, but to start running. John is a funny combination of fat and very strong. He was kind of happy when Ruth said, "How can someone be so fat and so strong at the same time." But because he is so strong, he can go a lot of time without exercise and then pick it back up without much trouble.
2. I worked really hard all day on Tuesday to get everything unpacked or stored as fast as possible. I finished all of the boxes and dump runs and thrift store drop offs by Wednesday night. I still need to hang up some pictures and racks for coats coats and jackets. I am surprised at how well we fit, though we did purge a lot more.
3. Ruth just went to school all week. She seems to be making friends, and her grades are top notch. Ruth has a job interviewed scheduled on Wednesday for Chipotle. Hopefully she will be hired and get back to work.
4. Kate helped a lot with the moving out, moving in and unpacking, and then back to school work on Wednesday. I think Kate is very,very happy with homeschool. Her favorite part is getting home from early morning seminary and going back to bed for an hour. I think she is really enjoying calculus 2, though, because she has decided to be a math major.
5. Johnny worked very hard all week. He was the strong guy to move heavy boxes up into the attic. He also went to the dump and did a lot to set up the trampoline. 
6. Adam worked pretty hard and helped a lot too. He will try and look busy, but he did a better job than usual.
7. Rachel made herself Susan's official babysitter while we moved our stuff. That is a always a necessity that can be neglected. I'm glad she just stepped up and helped where needed.
8. Anya had her baptismal interview today. Her baptism is officially scheduled for 3pm this Saturday. 
9. Joseph actually helped a lot more than I would have expected. We don't expect a 6 year old to do much lifting, but he lifted a lot of the heavy boxes. 
10. Joshua is getting better at Church. His primary teacher told me that he had trouble his first two weeks here, but now he is doing well. She said, he wouldn't sit in his chair, so she asked him if he needed to be taken out and he said, "No, I will just be good," and then he was. That is a huge improvement. 
11. We got our dress up clothes out and Arwen has been in little princess heaven. Her favorite color is purple and so her favorite dress is a disney Rapunzel one.
12. Susan climbed less and got hurt less this week (thankgoodness). I finally got her out of a porta crib and into a regular crib, which seems crazy to me because this is the age most of my kids moved to a regular bed.

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This Week at Our House # 4

1. We are in full swing homeschooling. John is doing math with Kate and Johnny. I am glad about that. They would have to take it online if he was not. But since he is, they are getting a much more difficult and in depth course. John has been exercising more. Not a ton. But he has been going out for a short run pretty much everyday.
2. I am enjoying homeschool this time around. I changed things that I needed to make homeschool more suitable to me. I decided to buy all of the necessary workbooks and books, and that has saved me tons of time. In the past I did a lot printing, copying, and checking out books from the library. This is so much easier, better, and nicer for me. And then science, history, and art are all just group lessons. Since Kate and Johnny are in high school. I just bought there books, tell them to read, study, and do the problems, and then I give tests and writing assignments, but they are basically on their own and working very independently.
3. Ruth had school all week. She still does not have a job. She has special class that her English teacher recommended her for and she is making some nice friends in that class.
4. Kate and I read Agatha Christie books together. It's fun for her to pass them along to me and fun for me to pass them along to her.
5. Johnny enjoyed some nicer weather this week. When he disappeared he was disappeared outside having nerf wars with Adam and Joseph.
6. In the beginning of the school year there were several things John and I were concerned with about Adam. When I prayed about what to do I really felt like he just needed to be homeschooled. Well he is homeschooling and everything is fixing itself much faster than I thought was possible.
7. Rachel works very slowly, and she apparently hates division. It took her two hours to do 30 simple division problems.
8. Baptism here is very different from anywhere else we have lived. We have to do the whole thing. They said just pick a date, so we did, but then that turned out to be a bad date and no Bishopric member could attend, so hopefully Anya will be Baptized the second Saturday in February.
9. Joseph is just looking so much taller and more grown up. He is still a stinker, though. Just a happy one. Joseph is just happy all the day, everyday, nothing seems to ever get him down.
10. I bought Joshua an alphabet workbook and he completed it in two days.
11. While I was cleaning a bathroom, Arwen came and asked me what I was doing. I said I am cleaning the bathroom and then I have to wash the floors. Arwen then very casually said, "I hate bathrooms and floors."
12. Suzy has been falling and tripping and climbing and falling and running in front of the swings and the poor baby is all banged up. But she is still just the cutest thing ever. She is in nursery now and is just so cute there. Her nursery teacher actually came up to say hi to her before Sacrament Meeting started today.