Of the Day

Watching The Amazing Race. It was a good day. I completely blew past a church meeting I was supposed to go to. They even texted me to remind me and tried to entice me with a hand-crafted coffee. But, my phone was still on silent because they have a reminder up before the church service asking us to put our phones on silent mode. So, technically it's their fault. I have an idea - how about a reminder at the end of the church service reminding us to put our phones back on regular mode? :)

Lori stayed home sick from church, so I took both the kids. I do this pretty regularly since Lori gets up early to get to church to sing, so getting them ready wasn't too big a deal. Lori did help a little because I was "behind schedule" - I've been trying to get there early enough that I'm not just racing through the church to get children checked in, ignoring people who want to greet me and say hi. That's a bad habit of mine, being so focused on the task that I miss the opportunities to just talk to people. Happens all the time. I almost said "happens to me" but honestly, this is something I do to myself.

So, yeah, got there early like I'd hoped, got a good parking place. Left two better parking places for others, got children all situated, had time to greet people. After the service, I went to our Sunday school class. I had wanted to skip but Lori had made treats, so I had to at least drop them off. I decided it was a poor form on my part to then skip the class. I did, however, get stuck off on a tangent reading about the Lindbergh baby on Wikipedia. The book we're all reading -- we discussed chapters 7 and 8 (and I'm 8 chapters behind in my reading) -- did talk about Lindbergh, so I did have an appropriate starting place.

Anyhow, so, yeah, came back home afterwards, got the children set-up for lunch. Ben is now taking some meals or parts of some meals sitting at the table like a big boy. He seems to be pretty happy. When he's in his highchair now, he disconnects the tray. Kind of annoying. The other day he disconnected both sides and it started to drop and then he was sitting there crying trying to hold it up.

I did a lot of cleaning in the laundry room. It's one of those rooms that doesn't stay nice unless you put effort into it and we haven't. But I got it a lot better today, very nice. Still more that could be done, but so much better. Lori also got a lot done at the kitchen and also cleaned off the dining room table and cleared all the floors so I could vacuum everything. So the house is getting into shape. I've scheduled some vacation days over the next few months to work on some projects as well.

Rachel is really struggling right now. Being really argumentative, refusing to do what we're asking, growling. We've had to take a bunch of things away from her recently because she's unable to disconnect herself and change gears. It's somewhat frustrating because there are other times when she's doing well. Yesterday, she wanted to play on the computer but Lori was using it, so I took the laptop up to her room and said she could use it after she did 10 minutes of cleaning, which she did pretty well. Then I set it up and let her do typing practice for 10 minutes, and then clean some more. At that point, she got bored and started playing, so no more computer, but she did get her room in really good shape. By today, it was a horrible mes again, of course. Her big thing right now is cutting paper with scissors. So there are lots of tiny pieces everywhere and they go all over the house, too.

Lori had a sore throat Thursday night and it's slowly gotten worse. She slept poorly last night and now has a fever. I have so far been able to avoid it. I'm hoping that continues to be the case.

Yes, it's been a very nice weekend. I'm going to be sorry to see it go, but I'm not dreading it. I think the week will be fine, I can't think of anything in particular that could crop up and cause problems. I'm going to remain optimistic.