Thanks your updates! Here is our busy week!!
Monday 20: I stayed home because the people came to install our new AC unit since the upstairs AC broke. It cost $2800.00 for a new one -- darn it!! When the guy was leaving he accidentally ran over Josh's bike in his big truck, totally destroying it. The guy felt really bad and said that he would reimburse us for the bike. Josh can be pretty dramatic and I knew he would throw a fit (and he did -- immediately bursting in to tears). I told Josh that it wouldn't have happened if he had put his bike away. He said that he did put it away but the new neighbor kids keep borrowing their bikes and must have left it out. That could be true, but I don't know. I had no idea how much the bike was worth, but did some research on the Internet and came up with what I felt was a reasonable quote for a used bike. He never responded and Josh kept crying about it and bugging me everyday until I finally texted the guy back and he apologized and said that he never got the e-mail and dropped off some money later that evening.
Tuesday 21: We found out yesterday that both Josh and Jenna were in the top three chosen from their class talent shows to move on to the grade level talent show. Jenna's was this morning, so not a lot of notice. It was right during my morning class and so I had to miss it and felt SO BAD!!! I really wanted to be there to support her and I really love watching my kids perform!! I really tried to find a sub for my class, but my team had decided to interpret in Vegas for the day and had already gotten a sub to cover for her and there were only two more people I could ask and they were both busy. So I sent my video-camera in her backpack and sent an e-mail to her teacher asking if she could videotape her song for me and she said that she would be happy to. I watched the video when I got home and Jenna did a good job (aside from not having any expression or actions). She said that Caroline Williams also made it to the second grade level talent show -- singing the very same song as Jenna! I wish I had been there to see her too!
Wednesday 22: This morning was filled with texts and calls from ASL Communications. I accepted a conference for later this month and told them that Rick would be available to do it with me. They put me down for it, but not him since he could only do part of it and they like to have the same interpreters throughout the whole conference. I was disappointed that we couldn't both do it, but at least he will be able to take over at home while I go. I went for a quick two mile walk and then met my visiting teaching ladies at the Pizza Factory for a combined VT lunch/message. I was asked to sub at 4:00, teaming with Rick. I was distracted worrying about the kids -- whether Jaiden would be ready for dance and picked up on time and whether or not someone would be home when Jenna got home and so forth. I was planning to leave early to pick up Jaiden from dance, but the class let out 30 minutes early, which was just the right time to go pick her up, so it all worked out fine.
I dropped off Josh and a couple of his friends to Scouts. Janelle cooks on Wednesdays and fixed Spaghetti for dinner. Rick gave Jared a much needed haircut. Max the Magician spoke to the youth for YM/YW's about his father's experience surviving a Japanese Prison Camp. The kids said it was really good. He did a couple of magic tricks too, just for fun.
Thursday 23: I wasn't able to go home in between classes today because I had an extra meeting plus some errands to run, so I missed my nap! Rick and I took the kids to Pack Meeting right after we got home from class, which was an outdoor hot-dog roast. The weather had turned cold and rainy (off and on) today, but our scout leaders prayers were answered and it cleared up and turned out to be a beautiful evening. Rick had to leave early to go pick up Jaiden from dance.
We are getting our roof re-done and got two bids. The first company was $9,500 to lay over the top of the existing shingles, and $10,500 to remove the old shingles and put the new ones on. But the second bid was only $4300.00 to lay over the existing shingles. Huge difference! We had gotten both names from neighbor referrals and they both use the same brand of shingles. The ward member who told us about the second one had told us that he was half the price of everyone else and she was right! So we went with that one -- he is from West Jordan, but comes down often to do roofing. He will start next week I think.
Friday 24: This morning I went to the fifth grade talent show to hear Josh sing. There were fifteen numbers (three from each class). Only two were chosen to go on to the school talent show next week but Josh wasn't one of them. I think he was a little disappointed. Jenna didn't get chosen either. I went home and ate lunch, hoping that Jaiden would call. Her school was competing at the Dramatic Arts Festival at Tonaquint today and Jaiden and Isaac Anderson were competing with the scene, "My New Philosophy," from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Several of the Intermediate schools and Middle Schools in the area were competing at it (I didn't realize that Jaiden would be competing against 8th and 9th graders too!) I had e-mailed her teacher a couple of days ago asking if parents were allowed to come watch. She wrote back and said that the students are judged in two separate rounds (no parents) and then three finalists are chosen from each category to perform for everyone in the final round. She said she would have her call me if she made it to the finals.
I was about to give up, thinking she must not have made it, when she called. Her teacher told her, "I can't tell you if you are a finalist or not, but...you might want to call your mom if she wants to come watch." So I hurried over. Instead of announcing all of the finalists all at once, they just announced them one at a time category by category, and then that person (or group) would come perform. Jaiden's scene was one of the three finalists for the Musical Theater category! If was fun to watch the other performances too and I was glad that I could watch Jaiden and videotape her. She and Isaac performed first, and then a girl sang a song from the Musical "Matilda." It was really cute and she did a great job! The other duet was also from Jaiden's school. The one who did Matilda ended up winning. I think Jaiden and Isaac took second.
I found out later that Jaiden and Isaac were in first place going into the final round -- with a perfect score from both rounds -- ahead of the other two finalists. There were some technical problems with the music for Jaiden's number during the final round, however, which was too bad. Jaiden had to wait for the music to start three different times during the number, but she handled it really well and always came in at the right place. The issue with the music might have knocked their score down though. Jaiden had me pick her and Emily up from school because they had the Science Olympiad the next day and had to bring their tower and other supplies home and didn't dare take them on the bus.
When Rick got home we hurried over to Jared's track meet. He got second in his heat, but he was a little disappointed with his time and didn't make it to the finals. This was a bigger meet with a lot more schools and he knew that his chances would be slim. We went to Costco to pick up Jaiden's glasses and go grocery shopping and stopped at the dollar store on the way home so that I could get a gift bag and some candy to go with the present for Josh's friend's (Tag Gubler) birthday party tonight. I dropped off Josh and there were a dozen boys running all over the place. It made me dread Josh's birthday party that will be coming up next month.
Saturday 25: This morning Emily William's Dad brought Emily and Jaiden to the District building in town at 5:30 a.m. in order to catch the bus with all of the students from the various schools to go to SUU for the Science Olympiad. Jaiden and Emily were partners. Each of the teams were competing in three events, two of which were tests. Jaiden's events were: Road Scholars (about maps) which included a lot of Math and story problems, Reach for the Stars (about Astronomy), and competing in towers. They had to made a tower out of sticks that followed very specific guidelines and then they tested them to see how much weight each of the them could hold. Jaiden and Emily had been really worried and stressed about the whole event for weeks. Jaiden came home around 5:00 p.m. and burst into tears. She said that it was really difficult and she didn't feel good about their performances at all. Apparently her teacher was throwing a big party for everyone who won medals and almost every team from her school won a medal, but she and Emily didn't. Three other teams didn't either. She said, "And Lizzie won THREE medals!! And also got first place in Optics!!" Lizzie is Jaiden and Emily's good friend. She had been sick and missed school the entire week except for yesterday. I jokingly said, "Maybe she wasn't really sick but was home studying for four days straight!" I just gave her a hug and let her cry and ten minutes later she was fine.
She said that the Road Scholars test was really hard and that they could only answer about 20 questions out of the whole thing. She said that for the Astronomy test they sent them to the wrong room and they were sitting in there with some high school students and by the time someone found them and sent them to the right room there wasn't much time left and they only gave them a test which said "Part 2" and so she doesn't even know if they took the whole test. In spite of the frustrations she and Emily might still go to participate at the State competition at the University of Utah since their overall team took third place. When I asked them a couple of days later if they would even want to do that after their discouraging experience they both excitedly said that YES, they would! Hmmm....we will see!
Meanwhile, today Rick spent a couple of hours with Josh helping him fix up one of his old bikes to replace the one that was run over (this was before the guy gave us some reimbursement money). Mari Purdy said we fix up one of their old bikes and Josh brought it home but it was too big, so Rick took the wheels off of the one that was run over and put them on another older bike that we already had. It still isn't working yet -- something is wrong with the gears, but Mari said that we could bring it over next week and her husband could try and fix it. Their family is really into biking and so that always have a lot of bikes, bike parts, and the tools to fix bikes.
Also today was Jared's track meet. It was cloudy and sprinkling and we didn't end up going to watch. He competed in the 4X100 -- a race he has never done before, and another relay. He said that they actually did pretty well.
Janelle went to KiNnectYou. Here is her write up about it:
KINnectYou was so fun. I started by getting up at 6:00 and getting ready and then I got picked up. My friend decided the night before she didn't want to come though, so that was a bummer. We started by going to the college and there was a website that we were supposed to go to but for some reason it wasn't working on my tablet. We started with a talk and some songs and then my group (the white wristband group) went to different little classes at another building. Our class was taught by a guy who would be leaving on a mission soon. The slideshow and everything wasn't working very well just because of all the people who were using the internet at that time but I did get some cool new websites and apps for family history because of it. After that we went back to the burns arena for a scavenger hunt. At this point I had left my ward to go with my friend Brea and some other friends. The scavenger hunt went all over campus and there were different stages of it, like one stage was about friendship and we had to take a picture while doing a trust fall. For one of the stages we had to go to a room to have a meeting with our stake, but me and Brea are in different stakes and so we had to split up. I accidentally went to the wrong building though, and got there late. After that we had lunch (which was Chick-Fil-A) and had the James the Mormon concert. James the Mormon is a famous rapper, so it was super cool to have him there. The concert was really fun although it was super loud so I couldn't hear very well for a little while after. After that we went back to the Burns arena and had a thing where they taught us how to tag and upload pictures to a familysearch memories app, and then tried to break the world record for those in a certain amount of time. The old record for uploading photos was 17,000 but we broke that one pretty easily. The record for tagging was 12,000. I was able to tag one picture but then the internet had too many people on it and it wasn't letting me log in. We were all kind of stressing a little bit because we still needed 2,000 more tags and we only had five minutes left, and I couldn't help because the tablet wasn't working. Slowly more and more got done.....100 tags left.....50 tags to go.......9 tags left with only seconds to spare......and we beat it! It had jumped to thirty above twelve thousand and everyone started cheering. We had beat two world records! After that we had another talk that was really good, and after that we did some stuff and had another talk. The last talk I felt like I was going to fall asleep for, since I was really tired and I was laying on my friend's shoulder, which I eventually had to stop doing in order to keep myself awake. After that last talk they showed the winning videos and gave out the scholarships for those. A boy from our ward won! After that we had the prayers and everything, and then it was time to go. I am so glad I had the opportunity to go to connect you because it was so fun and I learned so much!
Jaiden got home just in time for women's conference. We dropped dinner off to our neighbor (her mom passed away really unexpectedly -- so sad!) and then headed to the Women's Conference. The talks were really good! I need to listen to them again though, because I felt distracted after such a busy weekend. Our RS had brought in custard and Italian ice from Zeppes for just our ward in the Young Women's room. They did this in lieu of throwing a big RS Birthday Party. It was nice because several of us usually go out to Zeppes after the women's conference anyway and so this year Zeppes was brought to us! We talked to Andrea Schmutz about the Science Olympiad. Apparently she is really into it and her kids win every year. She told Allison and I to encourage our girls not to give up -- that the first year was always the hardest and that there was a learning curve involved. She said that the months before the Science Olympiad you can't even walk into her house because they have their project stuff all over. She really works with and coaches her kids. Allison and I didn't help our girls at all. It was our first time with kids doing this and we were both pretty clueless!
When we got home there was a nice dinner of Chinese food waiting for us. I have the best husband ever!
Sunday was busy -- ward council, choir (we sang in church today), teacher council, down two primary leaders in primary and so the two of us were running around like crazy people. After church Rick barbequed Salmon and it was SO good!!! I had made jello salad and green salad and the girls made rice, tartar sauce, and deviled eggs.
Then Josh and I went to a meeting for 11 year old scouts. We have an awesome leader who loves scouting and is very dedicated (the same one whose kids always win the Science Olympiad). I was panicking when she was called to be in the Stake Primary Presidency a few months ago, because I was afraid they would release her and we would have to find someone new for that difficult position. I especially wanted her to be Josh's leader! She has been in for many years and really knows what she is doing. Thankfully her son is also Josh's age and so she is very motivated to stay in and assured everyone that she could do both callings. Whew! She is strict and by the book though! If the boys aren't in full uniform she sends them home to change -- and will really have to work to earn their badges -- there won't be any sliding by with her as leader! The meeting was a bit overwhelming -- one more boy to get through the Eagle program! Personal Progress is way less intimidating!
We skyped Janika. She caught us up on College life -- she had her final Institute Singers Fireside tonight. She and Meagan went to Provo for an Interview with EFY. She had a few dates....
Josh and Jenna both start soccer this week -- as if our life wasn't busy enough already!!
Wendy
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