These past 10 days have been busy, but fun. We did celebrate Sarah's birthday. I can't believe she is 11! That is crazy. We celebrated with lunch at Pizza Pie Cafe with G&G T. Since we did lunch Matthew was at his summer program and wasn't with us. Daniel was at high adventure scout camp so we were smaller in numbers. Josh made up for Matthew and Daniel by eating extra food--haha! Sarah did love her mini Cookie Monster.
Later that evening we sang to her and enjoyed some ice cream cake.
She did have a small movie night with some friends, too. All around I think she had a pretty fun birthday.
The next day we had to celebrate the ending of summer so we took the kids out to the Snowie Shack and let them order a snow cone. It was fun seeing our neighbor who worked there. She was really nice taking everyones orders and getting them ready!
It was pretty tasty! The kids all had fun picking out their own flavors, too.
Sunday Matthew had his annual visit with the bishop. Aaron and I went in to the interview with him. We all decided that Matthew will wait in receiving the Melchizedek priesthood, but he can still give the sacrament prayer once a month. Matthew has aged out of the young mens program so he is now attending adult Sunday school and Aaron and me as well as priesthood meetings with Aaron. It has been interesting having him come along with us to class to say the least. It will be hard to limit him to just one comment a meeting otherwise the whole meeting would be listening to him talk about random things. Needless to say again it is going to be an interesting learning curve for Aaron, me and Matthew. Anyway, we did find a special needs mutual that meets weekly by our house. I had to work when they last met so Aaron took Matthew to meet the leaders and it looks like it will be a good fit for Matthew and something he will enjoy.
To celebrate our last day of summer before school started I took the kids to do some glow in the dark mini golf. There was hardly anyone there so it was pretty fun because we weren't rushed and got to enjoy ourselves.
When we got home Josh decided to try out his blood typing kit. He wanted to know what his blood type was so he ordered a kit to test it. Here is the set up:
You prick your finger and then put the blood drops on different test areas. However the blood reacted on the test spots showed what blood type you were. It appears Josh is B+ just like me. It was pretty cool! Josh's results are circled at the bottom:
Here was the test key that said his results were B+:
I have been working quite a bit this past month. I tried to schedule around school stuff as much as I could, but I didn't get everything off. Aaron was awesome and went to both Jr. High and the elementary back to school nights without me since I was at work. These were the notes he texted to me to help me know what school supplies to pick up--haha!
He even had to go to the jr high back to school night alone since Daniel was at High Adventure Scout camp during the meeting. I was glad Aaron was able to attend, though. I didn't feel too bad since Aaron had been gone on a business trip the whole week before so it was his turn to do some solo parenting for a bit--haha!
The night before school I got home from work at 8 pm and didn't stop until 11pm trying to get everyone ready and all the forms filled out for the next day. Holy cow I really had some writer's cramp filling out all those forms for all the kids....ugh!! We did fill up all the kids' backpacks with their school supplies, set out their new outfits and shoes to make the next morning a bit easier. It looked like the night before Christmas, but only it was for school--haha!
The next morning Aaron and I got up really early and Aaron cooked a really nice breakfast for the kids. They had their choice of egg, sausage biscuit, or bagels and cream cheese to choose from. I even splurged and bought some chocolate milk and orange juice.
We tried to limit as many dishes as we could since our dishwasher died Sunday afternoon--DOH!! We replaced our original dishwasher 3 years ago and bought the extended warranty on the new dishwasher. I thought everything could be repaired without any issues, but I was wrong. Aaron tried calling the warranty people and they said they could come fix it Wednesday morning, but ended up calling Tuesday afternoon to let us know they don't service Bosch dishwashers. The next company we tried to schedule a repair with ended up letting us know they only service California. At this point we were getting pretty frustrated. Aaron went a couple rounds with the store we bought it from and the warranty company, but things weren't coming together. After much frustration and going on 12 days with no dishwasher with a family of 7 we are getting really done with doing dishes by hand!! Anyway, I think we may have finally found a repair guy that will work with the warranty, but he has to order parts. I am just hoping and keeping my fingers crossed that we can get it fixed this week sometime. UGH!! During these past almost two weeks we have been less than environmentally friendly, but paper plates, cups and plastic utensils are saving my sanity until the dishwasher gets fixed. I guess it is first world problems, but still it is quite frustrating!!
Anyway, after breakfast the kids left one by one to get to school. Josh (11th grade) left first and we made him leave a bit early since he can now park in the high school parking lot. They don't let sophomores park in the parking lot so they can only park on the streets. However, now that Josh is a junior he can park in the parking lot, but it is really scary. The high school parking lot is just full of crazy teen drivers (Josh being one himself...) so trying to save the car a few extra dents and dings we are making him get to school early so he doesn't have to fight the student parking crowd aka the student demolition derby--ugh. Keeping my fingers crossed there will be no car accidents any time soon!! Here he is before he left for school:
Daniel (8th grade) left for school next. He met up with friends and walked to Jr. High:
Next Noah (4th grade) and Sarah (6th grade) left for school. Aaron and I walked them to school just because we could.
This is the last year Sarah will be in elementary and it makes me a bit sad. It was nice to drop the kids off at their respective teacher's lines and be able to walk away. When the kids were younger we had to stick around and make sure they actually made it inside the building with the right teacher and the right class--haha! There are some perks to having older kids.
Matthew's school didn't start for another week so he continued on with another week of his summer program. Matthew is a man of few words when it comes to the activities he has done in his summer program. In other things he can talk A LOT but when it came to his summer program he was unusually quiet about things which I find weird. Oh well. Thankfully, he brought home a mini memory book of some pictures from the summer activities he got to do. Otherwise I would have had no idea what fun things he did.
In his memory book we got to see that he went canoeing a few times:
Horseback riding:
Hold and almost kiss a snake:
Drive a go-kart:
Have a painting day:
Visit the fire station:
He even got to go ice skating:
He really likes his summer program and I can see why. I would LOVE doing those activities, too!
Anyway, while we were dropping off Sarah and Noah at school Matthew left to attend his summer program so by the time Aaron and I got back home the house was completely empty. We decided to celebrate making it through the summer with a FIIZ run. Now it doesn't take much for us to make a FIIZ run, though, but why not celebrate--haha!
Right after our FIIZ run I got to go in and see the doctor. Let me just say I really HATE going to the doctor so I try to avoid going unless I absolutely need to. Anyway, this was my second visit in two weeks. The first visit two weeks ago was for my right ear. When I got my Daith piercing last October to help with headaches it never fully healed. My left side healed up pretty nicely and quickly. My right side, however, has been festering for the last 10 months. I have tried everything I could to get it to heal fully, but it wasn't working. I finally got infected to the point I needed some oral antibiotics and bacitracin to try and clear the infection. Piercings in the cartilage can eat away at the cartilage if you don't take care of them which I definitely didn't want to happen so I made an appointment. The doctor said the infection had gone on long enough that either this round of two antibiotics would work or they wouldn't. If they didn't clear it up I would need to get the piercing taken out, let it heal all the way and then try getting the piercing again. I faithfully took my oral antibiotics and applied the bacitracin twice a day, but unfortunately, it didn't do the trick. I need to go and get it taken out to fix the problem. Now I guess my other ear (the left one) was feeling left out so it started causing some issues. I started getting a case of swimmer's ear last Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning my ear was completely swollen shut and my cheek was starting to swell. By Tuesday morning I was in quite a bit of pain and my cheek/ear was so swollen I couldn't close my jaw or chew anything. It hurt so much so I made another appointment DOH! That was my second visit to see the doctor in two weeks. When he went to take a look at my left ear he uttered an expletive and told me it looked pretty bad. Um--tell me something I didn't know!! Anyway, not only did I have an outer ear infection I also had a middle ear infection, too. He started me on antibiotic ear drops four times a day as well as a strong oral antibiotic as well. Thankfully, I had Tuesday and Wednesday off from work because I felt pretty awful. Ice packs and the heating pad have been a constant companion for the past week. Thursday I had my flu season nurse orientation that I had to go to, but other than that I was down for most of that day, too. I consider myself to have a pretty high pain tolerance, but this was pretty painful even with taking around the clock 800 mg Motrin and 1000mg Tylenol. I am thankful to say by Sunday I had started feeling better. I still wasn't at 100% yet, but better than I was. At this point I am thinking ears are overrated--haha! Now that my left ear is feeling a lot better I need to go in and get the piercing taken out of my right ear so that one can feel better, too. I have been on so much antibiotics in the last two weeks I am sure that I should be almost bacteria free. My poor family especially Aaron has had to take on the brunt of everything the past week so I am sure he and they are glad I am on the mend, too. On a positive note since I couldn't chew I did find a pretty tasty Instant Pot Potato Soup recipe that everyone in my family ended up liking. Bonus is that you don't have to chew it to eat it--haha! Here it is:
Easy Pressure Cooker Potato Soup
Wednesday evening was a bit busy. Our neighborhood/ward had an end of summer BBQ. In addition to the BBQ they also had a meat smoking competition. Aaron was all over that! He decided to make some beef ribs for the judges to try. He was pretty excited that he ended up winning. However, there were only two entries for the competition so he had a 50/50 chance of winning. He won a pack of bacon wahoo!! We had to divide and conquer that evening. Aaron took Josh, Daniel and Sarah to the BBQ. I took Noah and Matthew to Noah's first soccer practice of the season. I still felt pretty crummy so Matthew and I stayed in the car and watched Noah's first soccer practice. I stayed in the car so I could keep an ice pack on my ear the whole time and keep Matthew contained. Matthew gets pretty excited when he sees people he knows which happens quite frequently so I had to keep him close by me. It was a fun practice and Noah has a fun coach this season so I hope he can learn a lot.
Unfortunately, Life doesn't stop when mom doesn't feel well so despite being in pain I still had to try and function even though I didn't feel great. I had an appointment to meet with Matthew's new teacher at Vista Friday afternoon and then go to work right after. As I got in the car to go I noticed Aaron left me with a very empty gas gauge--DOH!! I could go all of 12 miles before I ran out of gas. Luckily, we have a gas station 2 miles from our house I made it to without running out of gas. I ended up putting in 20.5 gallons of gas in a 21 gallon tank. I am just glad I noticed I was out of gas before I got on the freeway! Here's my range of 12 miles before I ran out of gas:
Aaron met me over at Vista to meet with Matthew's new teacher. He seems really nice and went through the weekly schedule with us. Matthew is going to have a lot of fun at this new school. It is a lot of hands on life skills training in addition to trying out community services. Here's a list of the different community activities they might get to try out:
I really liked Matthew's new teacher and I think Matthew will, too. After our meeting I headed over to work while Aaron went back to his work, too. That evening when I got home Josh wanted help in asking a girl to Homecoming. I offered a few suggestions to Josh and he finally decided to ask her with some riddles she had to answer. Here's the poster we made together along with Sarah's help:
Front:
Back:
Josh went with Daniel and Sarah to drop it off at her house. They left it on the porch, rang the doorbell and ran away hoping for the best.
Saturday morning Aaron and I had to attend a parent meeting for Josh. Josh applied for and got a job at a haunted corn maze this fall. He got a part in the main cast to play Pennywise the clown. They had to have a parent meeting to tell us about what to expect and to have us sign a paper saying we were okay with the haunting maze and to support our child in his job. It sounds like it will be kind of crazy, but Josh was pretty excited about it. I have no idea how he will balance youth council, cross country, school and his two other jobs, but he promised he would make it work. We will see how it turns out....
Here is a picture of Pennywise the super creepy clown that Josh will be playing:
The maze does have a family night where family members of the cast can come and visit for free. However, no one in my family will go with me to see Josh. They all HATE haunted houses and things like that so I may end up going solo. Josh is usually my haunted house buddy, but he will be in the haunted house this year so I may have to go alone....
Josh got notified this week that he got accepted for next year's city youth council. Daniel applied and rocked the interview and his application as well as had a great letter of recommendation, however, he didn't get accepted because he missed the birthday cutoff by a few weeks. DOH!! He wasn't too happy about that, but they did say he could still come and participate in a few of the activities along with Josh. They did tell him he will definitely get on the council next year, though.
Saturday morning we did get a letter saying Josh got accepted into Weber State so he could get credit for his concurrent enrollment classes he is taking this year. I can't believe I have a pseudo college student--that is crazy!!
As for school things have been going okay. Sarah, Noah and Josh have had a pretty smooth transition into this year. Daniel has had a bit of a rough start of school. I am hoping things get easier. Let's just say Jr High is not the easiest or the funnest age. UGH!! I keep telling him it gets easier as you get older. Hopefully he believes me!
Anyway, Daniel has decided this year to change from playing the Alto saxophone to the Baritone Saxophone. He will be renting the baritone from the school and since it is so big they won't let him bring it home to practice. He will have to practice on his alto at home and play the baritone at school. It will be interesting to see how he likes it. Here's a picture to show the difference between an alto saxophone and a baritone saxophone:
Saturday morning after the parent meeting for Josh, Aaron and I headed over to the Smith and Edwards store to get my pressure cooker gauges tested. One gauge was calibrated great the other gauge was worn out and needed to be changed out. I am glad we found that out before canning season starts in a few weeks. They even took a picture of Aaron and me posted it on their homepage. Wahoo we are famous--haha!
Sunday evening we were surprised with a knock at the door. Josh went and answered it to find his Homecoming answer which was YES. His date even cooked him an apple pie in addition to answering all the riddle questions on his poster. The kids were almost as excited about it as Josh. Josh was nice enough to share the pie with his family. Here's the poster and apple pie on our porch:
Matthew finally got to start his school this morning. His bus was 20 minutes late and he was fit to be tied, but he made it. He was pretty anxious about going to school this morning because it is a whole new school with new teachers, students, rules, etc. but I am sure he will adapt and do great. Meeting with his teacher last Friday put me a bit more at ease which was nice. I think this will be a great experience for him the next few years. Here's my cute boy waiting for his bus to come this morning:
I can't wait to hear how is first day went.
