Decisions and Driving

Shall I start with the boring stuff and end with the exciting stuff? Or start with the exciting stuff and end with the boring stuff?

Or shall I complain about all the things there are to complain about (except the lesson today in Relief Society was about having a good attitude and NOT complaining or venting and about having a POSITIVE attitude ALL the time and not just when life is good. Need to work on that.) and then finish with the fun stuff? Or just not mention all the complaining parts and just write about the fun stuff?

Or shall I just tell you what the fun exciting stuff was and forget the rest of the week? Or just wait until I put the post up on the blog, and you can read it there?

It's these sorts of questions that can keep you up at night.

Wondering what the fun stuff was yet? (Or shall I just tease you and not tell you ANYTHING? Bwahahahahaha.)

The week was mostly normal. I've decided I drive too much, chauffeuring my family around. Drive Megan to school, drive Alison to school (when it's raining or I have someplace to be at nine and Caitlyn has patrol), drive Kristen to school, pick Megan up, drive her to piano, pick Kristen up, drive Caitlyn to piano, pick Megan up, pick up Russell (when he bikes in and it starts pouring around 4 p.m.), drive to yoga on Thursday, drive to the book store (twice: once to Watermark, to see an author event, the husband of a bloggy friend and once to Barnes and Noble so Megan could spend a birthday gift card).

Drive to Kansas City and back.

Why did you drive to Kansas City, you ask?

Well, last year when I went to DC, I went to the So You Think You Can Dance (henceforth known as SYTYCD) concert in Baltimore. Megan and Caitlyn, who also love the show, were jealous. I promised them the next time there was a tour, if they came to either Kansas City or Oklahoma City, we'd go. So. When the tour was announced, there was a stop in Kansas City, and I keep my promises.

So, I let Megan and Caitlyn skip school on Friday (I was the cool mom for a day; Alison was frustrated she had to go to school), and we left for Kansas City after I dropped Kristen off at preschool. (By the way, Alison and Kristen had a fun evening with dad, pizza and movies, while we were gone) The drive up was uneventful, and we got there in good time and even managed not to get (too) lost. We walked around downtown Kansas City looking for an (open) place to eat, and eventually ended up at a sports bar across from the arena. (We counted at least 25 TVs in the restaurant!) After dinner, we headed over for the show. We had good seats -- third row from the floor, about halfway back from the stage -- and the show was really fun. Loud, but lots of fun. And they did many of the dances we really liked. (Only one of Caitlyn's favorites didn't get performed.) The drive back was hard -- late nights are lonely on the road -- but we made it back by 2 a.m. It was a lot of fun.

Saturday was spent recuperating. Russell drove up to Salina for this Tall Grass Prairie Festival (mostly it was just an excuse to see author Wendell Barry) while the rest of us laid around the house like slugs. The cleaning managed to get gone, and I did make it to the Relief Society broadcast (barely, and I was grumpy, but I enjoyed it once I got there). But it was really low-key.

And there was much Castle watching (new season started, and we got the first disc from season 2 to catch up on what we missed) as well.

That's about it for us. Have a great week!

So You Think You Can Dance (dance, dance, dance)

So, I took Megan and Caitlyn up to see So You Think You Can Dance Tour 2010 in Kansas City last Friday. The drives up and back were uneventful and we had a grand time while there.

We wandered around downtown Kansas City a bit and discovered the coolest parking garage ever..

It's for the library. Very awesome.

We ate at a sports bar (didn't think to take pictures of the inside, and only thought to take a picture of the outside after the show).


We crossed the street to go in the flying saucer (aka the Sprint Center).

Where we hung out and waited for the show to start, being amused at the signs on the wall. (The rest of the sign is "should be reported to guest services immediately.")

And oogling the stage.

We got one of the ushers to take our pic before the seats around us filled up.

And then we enjoyed the show.


It was a lot of fun!

By the Numbers

5 - time on Wednesday that the heavens opened and rain and enormous hail (we only got golf ball sized, but there were reports of baseball sized at friends' houses) came pouring down

3 - years that Friends has been doing Constitution day. It was a success this year, in spite of the rain.

4 - hours spent volunteering at preschool on Monday. Kristen was very excited.

20 - number of times the rest of the week Kristen asked if I was going to be her "friend" at preschool that day

2 - number of kids home sick on Friday

0 - number of kids who were actually sick. (Weeellll, Alison was complaining about a stomach and headache and so I let her stay home. Ergo, Kristen was too sick to go to preschool.)

2 - number of tries it took to get my birthday "right", since the first time around was kind of miserable (mostly my fault, probably, for having a bad attitude...)

9 - anniversary of my 29th birthday

2 - number of lovely little presents Megan spearheaded getting me for my birthday. I have great girls!

1,000 - temper tantrums we've fielded from Kristen since imposing a no-TV-after-6 p.m. rule this week.

1,000,000 -- hours of homework Megan has (the stressful essay rewrite got done! *party*)

200 - miles put on the car in the last week driving kids around

1 - number of Shakespeare plays seen this week (MacBeth in the park. It was done well, even if we could only hear about 2/3 of the lines. I kept wanting to shout, "You're outside, people: project!")

And I think that's about it. Have a great week!

Birthday Redeux

Take one:
Get up at four a.m. with a sick Alison (stomach ache and sore throat; it's a virus going around). Can't go back to sleep. Grumpy home with kids all day (Kristen refused to go to preschool, because Alison is home). Sad because I hadn't heard word about being on a Cybils panel (which is important to me). Bad mood, bad vibes. Even the cake, which looks fabulous:

Doesn't turn out right (didn't do the caramel filling right, so it's hard as a rock, and the cake,while tasty, is crumbly).

Bright side: Megan gets me a lovely business card holder and some cute candy corn earrings. My friend Karen comes by and commiserates about the Cybils, and going to see MacBeth in the Park is nice. Oh, and cheese fondue.

So, I declared today a birthday re-do.

Take two:
I slept from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Alison's feeling better. We cleaned the church, and watched the girls put on a hilarious "play". I got word that I'm on a Cybils panel after all (Middle Grade, three years in a row!). I get a fabulous haircut (the guy -- Hugh -- was amazing. There's more of a story there, but it'll take too much time):


I went shopping at Eddie Bauer and found good deals on tshirts, which I needed desperately. Karen bought me dishtowels (yes, I did actually want dishtowels for my birthday). The books I received from parents were nice, too.

Sometimes, you just have to do it more than once to get it right.

Bleargh

I haven't slept well for the last three nights, and so I took a nap this afternoon. (I had to. I was barely functioning yesterday. Good thing it was Stake Conference and I didn't have to play.) Unfortunately, now that means my brain is mush and I'll probably wake up in about an hour and then be up late tonight. Ugh.

It also means I can't quite remember what happened this week.

The girls were off Monday and Tuesday. We played at home, had friends over, went swimming (Monday; last day the pool was open, but it was windy and the water was COLD. Which means Russell liked it, and the rest of us didn't stay in for very long.), had a party at friends house, went to school/preschool, had marching band (but the game got rained out shortly after halftime), did homework, read, went to bookgroup (I think that was this week), and basically tried not to fight with each other.

Russell went on another conference trip, which was part of the reason I didn't sleep well. Though he wasn't as gone for as long this time... thankfully. Anyway, movies didn't get watched (well, we got Inspector Gaget and some horrid tween Disney thing), though the latest episode of Castle that was up on Hulu did. I am glad for a reliable daughter; I made it out to yoga Thursday night which helped my sanity.

Everything seems to be settling down into a rhythm, finally... though Alison still asks every weekend if we're doing something exciting. (She also laments not being able to watch movies every day, too.) Kristen's finally stopped asking about not going to preschool (in fact, this week she wanted to know why she had two days off!), Caitlyn's still her usual cheery self (except when she's not), and Megan's finally getting a handle on high school (thank heavens for friends who were writing tutors and can handle minor crises so we actually don't have to have the conversation about Megan wanting to go away to boarding school. It was because she didn't want to deal with the rewrite of the history paper she initially got a C on.). In other words, just one foot in front of the other around here.

Stake Conference was, well, stake conference. Someday, I am sure, I will get something out of it. But not this week. (Though, I did catch the announcement that the church is going forward with building our stake a stake center -- well, at least they're approving the designs and collecting bids and if we manage to keep up our numbers/tithing/etc through that, they'll break ground in early 2011. Which is nice, since we're driving to the next stake over to hold our conferences.)

I think that's about it. I'm going to go try and wake up now.

The Problem With Life is That It's So Daily

At least that's the way I'm feeling today. I want EXCITEMENT and ADVENTURE, but know that if I do get EXCITEMENT and ADVENTURE, it never really lasts very long. It's why I read travel books...

Perhaps I'm just suffering from single-mom burnout...

Russell: went to DC for the annual APSA conference. He left early Thursday morning with a bag full of papers (mostly. There were a few clothes in there) and came back late Saturday with a bag full of books (mostly. There were a few clothes in there). Impressive, no? He also went to a lot of fun panels, hung out with a lot of cool people, talked about a lot of neat ideas, and saw a friend from his freshman year of BYU that he hadn't seen in 13 years.

Melissa: survived. Oh, and ate really really good Indian food at a local restaurant, getting an early birthday lunch out with Karen. And I spent too much time in the car driving people places. Must be a parent of active girls... (and we don't even have them in that many classes!)

Megan: managed her schedule much better this week. She stayed on top of all her assignments, there was no freaking out about missing papers or books or talk of failing classes (all of which happened the first two weeks). She made it to seminary every single day (and even got up on her own on Friday; I stumbled out at about 5:50 to see if she was awake and then went back to bed. I'm NOT an early-morning person). She had a paper of hers quoted in class by one of her favorite teachers (who remarked that it was an "astute observation". I got a *squee* text about that...). And she marched in her first football game. She had a blast. (She did fine; I took the three younger girls and we liked watching for Megan when the band came out.) In fact, while she doesn't particularly like or understand the game, she LOVED watching and playing with the band. Really, that is the best way to see the games. Oh, and she got her 14-year-old pictures taken (we put them off until she had assembled her outfit). It's nice to know that things are settling down.

Caitlyn: spent the week stressing about her teacher. A bit of history: she really likes her teacher, but her teacher has been diagnosed with epilepsy. It's her last year, but it seems that she's been having seizures more than she should. So, her job was hanging on a doctor's report Friday morning. Caitlyn was quite concerned, and it was all she talked about. That, and the star gazing project she gets to work on for the next three months. (Essentially, at least once a week go out and chart the stars you see. Fun times.) She came home "sick" on Monday: she ended up in the nurse's office because her head got bonked in PE, and there were about 7 people in there throwing up. So -- and you can't blame her -- she threw up too. The nurse didn't think she was sick (she wasn't; she came home and ate just fine), but she had to send her home because of school policy. So Caitlyn got a day off... She had fun at the football game, but only because she saw some friends of hers from school and spent the entire time we were there walking around with them.

Alison: was pretty low-key this week. She had a good week at school (any suggestions what to do about a boy in her class who's decided she's his girlfriend? She says -- and it might be an exaggeration, true -- he calls her "beautiful" and is always trying to hug her. I'm not making a big deal about it, mostly because I think that'd freak her out, but there is an element of concern... neither of her sisters had this problem. Let's blame the freckles on Alison's nose...) She wanted to go to the football game to see the cheerleaders (though she was our fastest Megan spotter), and then about halfway through the first quarter started shouting, "C'mon cheerleaders! Do something INTERESTING!!" She also decided she wanted a play date on Saturday, so she called up a friend and invited herself (and Caitlyn and Kristen) over. It's a good thing that the friends are pretty low-key and that the girls have the motivation to do it themselves. Otherwise, they'd never go anywhere. (ANOTHER place I have to drive them? Really??)

Kristen: had an up and down week with preschool. She's already asking, "Do I have to go every day?" She refused to enter the room some days, which her teacher said was just fine. (Eventually, she did go in, and she was always happy when I picked her up.) Then, one day, she just decided that preschool was okay. As long as she gets to walk by herself (but I can't drive up and drop her off at the door; we have to park a bit away and walk at least partway together). Schedules are hard for her, but we're adjusting. She also put herself to bed a couple of nights: she was tired at about 6:30, so after dinner she just crawled into bed and went to sleep. Okay, then. She was mostly bored at the football game, especially after the popcorn and M&Ms were gone. Then again, there's not much going on for a 4-year-old there. We also went to the zoo, the library, the nature center and two different "play classes" at the Y -- just to keep busy in the morning.

And that's about it for us. (Yes, that is normal and boring. Why do I want exciting?? No idea.)

It's Football Marching Band Season!

And we've got someone in the marching band!

(I was allowed to post this on two conditions: 1) I didn't put up the one with the dorky hat actually on and 2) I didn't take the camera and take pictures of her actually on the field. Though maybe I'll take a movie if there is enough clamoring for a bunch of high schoolers marching around a football field...)

Megan's 14-year-old Pictures

So, we went and got Megan's portraits taken...

The hardest part was choosing only three!

(For the record, the center one is her favorite. We also picked both the top and the bottom far left... Click to make it bigger.)