This weekend has been party central. Our first party was the Reid and Karen's BYU ward party on Friday night. We spent all day on Friday getting ready—we made 400 enchiladas and two roasting pans full of refried beans. The rice was ordered from a Mexican restaurant (350 servings for $60—other places tried to charge us $2.99 a serving so this was a fantastic deal). There was lettuce and tomatoes and sour cream and salsa. And for dessert, brownies/candy cane ice cream sundaes.
Plus a fabulous talent show complete with bagpipes, dancing, world capital quizzes, magic tricks, skits, and lots of singing. Some of the kids had even written songs and sang those for us. It was great!
The girls loved running around the cultural hall flirting with all the "big kids." All the "big kids" loved having the girls run around because they don't get a lot of exposure to little kids on campus and I think they miss them. Our girls have a lot of "friends" who are twenty years older than them!
Yesterday was the Heiss family Christmas party and today was the Layton family Christmas party, each of which I'll write about in separate posts.
Today was a fabulous day.
I mean, besides the fact that Miriam now has diarrhea and has needed several outfit changes throughout the day because of that (like we need more sickness around here—did I mention Rachel was throwing up (again) on Friday night? It was...wonderful...all over everything). Church was great though, and even though after church was plenty busy it was a good busy.
First we had a cub scout meeting. Andrew volunteered to go to the meeting so that I could stay home with the girls and nap. Lucky me.
It was a great meeting. I told him before he left to be sure to address all the concerns we had about scouting—namely that we have one boy and will have two in a couple of days, but only for a few months when we'll be back down to one boy. How do you run a den with one boy?
Well, they addressed that concern and more.
Here's the skinny: Our ward will be combining with two other wards to create a "mega-pack." All the boys will meet together at our ward building (all three wards share the same building, anyway, so it's familiar to everyone). One ward will take the Wolves (which means Andrew and I will be released and our lonely boys will be surrounded by boys their age), our ward will take the Bears, and another ward will take the Webelos. None of the three wards have very many boys so it works out for everybody.
I almost cried tears of joy when Andrew told me this because this is something that has been bothering me for a long time. Every meeting we go to I always say, "It would be really helpful if we could combine with another ward...." Hint, hint.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough but have you ever tried to have a group discussion or play a soccer game or do any other group activity with one child? It's less fun than it sounds. Especially since a big part of scouting is building that pack mentality. I mean, we tried to have a ping pong tournament once but it was really awkward for Andrew to play against an eight-year-old—it's much fairer to pit two eight-year-olds against each other, I think.
So hip-hip-hooray for that!
Soon after Andrew got home we had ward choir. I've spent the last two weeksnagging recruiting people (and then reminding them that they'd been recruited) and my efforts certainly paid off. If you knew how shy I am and how much I am not a recruiter you would appreciate how difficult a task this was for me. But we had eighteen people there today and we actually sounded like a choir instead of the quartet we've been for the past few months! We had at least four people on each part—it was awesome. Next week we should have a few more people, I think, because I invited a few more people to come who said they'd like to but that they couldn't make it this week. We have one more week to practice before Christmas so I think we're in pretty good shape.
The best part was that our choir director looked so happy to have people actually show up. For some reason it's been a real challenge and our numbers have been pathetically small. Sometimes it would just be our little family and the choir director. I'm not even kidding. To have our numbers swell to such large ranks was a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Plus a fabulous talent show complete with bagpipes, dancing, world capital quizzes, magic tricks, skits, and lots of singing. Some of the kids had even written songs and sang those for us. It was great!
The girls loved running around the cultural hall flirting with all the "big kids." All the "big kids" loved having the girls run around because they don't get a lot of exposure to little kids on campus and I think they miss them. Our girls have a lot of "friends" who are twenty years older than them!
Yesterday was the Heiss family Christmas party and today was the Layton family Christmas party, each of which I'll write about in separate posts.
Today was a fabulous day.
I mean, besides the fact that Miriam now has diarrhea and has needed several outfit changes throughout the day because of that (like we need more sickness around here—did I mention Rachel was throwing up (again) on Friday night? It was...wonderful...all over everything). Church was great though, and even though after church was plenty busy it was a good busy.
First we had a cub scout meeting. Andrew volunteered to go to the meeting so that I could stay home with the girls and nap. Lucky me.
It was a great meeting. I told him before he left to be sure to address all the concerns we had about scouting—namely that we have one boy and will have two in a couple of days, but only for a few months when we'll be back down to one boy. How do you run a den with one boy?
Well, they addressed that concern and more.
Here's the skinny: Our ward will be combining with two other wards to create a "mega-pack." All the boys will meet together at our ward building (all three wards share the same building, anyway, so it's familiar to everyone). One ward will take the Wolves (which means Andrew and I will be released and our lonely boys will be surrounded by boys their age), our ward will take the Bears, and another ward will take the Webelos. None of the three wards have very many boys so it works out for everybody.
I almost cried tears of joy when Andrew told me this because this is something that has been bothering me for a long time. Every meeting we go to I always say, "It would be really helpful if we could combine with another ward...." Hint, hint.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough but have you ever tried to have a group discussion or play a soccer game or do any other group activity with one child? It's less fun than it sounds. Especially since a big part of scouting is building that pack mentality. I mean, we tried to have a ping pong tournament once but it was really awkward for Andrew to play against an eight-year-old—it's much fairer to pit two eight-year-olds against each other, I think.
So hip-hip-hooray for that!
Soon after Andrew got home we had ward choir. I've spent the last two weeks
The best part was that our choir director looked so happy to have people actually show up. For some reason it's been a real challenge and our numbers have been pathetically small. Sometimes it would just be our little family and the choir director. I'm not even kidding. To have our numbers swell to such large ranks was a beautiful, beautiful thing.
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