Top 10 of the Week

 Top 10 of the week: 

1. Monday: I enjoyed a refreshing fun hill run with an awkward after-show (details below).
2. Tuesday: The canal by our house filled with water!
3. Tuesday: Jay played in both the band and the orchestra at his second trimester school concert.
4. Tuesday: I helped with a Relief Society activity.
5. Wednesday: I weeded and cleared our garden.
6. Friday: I went on my longest run in almost five months-- 7 miles!
7. Friday: Rose, Amber, and I went to the library together after school and piano lessons.
8. Saturday: Jeff had a track meet, the kids roamed the countryside, a Netflix black hole for me.
9. Sunday: We stayed home and watched stake conference via Zoom. 
10. Jeff had three less-tired/more energetic days this week amidst his brutal slow long Covid recovery. It was very encouraging!

Monday, March 14th: Today was a good day. I managed to do a good job balancing caring for myself and being a domestic goddess superwoman mother. I did yoga, then picked up Jay from school for a 9am orthodontist appointment. Once he was back at school, I parked at Central Park and ran on Harrison Hill. It was my first hill run since my injury, and I felt strong! It felt so satisfying to dig in and run hills, then cruise down the other side. I was feeling the running joy big time today. 

After my run, I peeked at the new skate park area that was just plowed, paved, and added to Central Park in downtown Sunnyside. As I was walking back toward the parking lot, I rounded the corner of the pool building and saw a bare butt! Beware the moon! A woman had her pants down to her knees, facing away from me. She was in the process of yanking her pants up when I got an eyeful. I quickly turned away and awkwardly waited. How long does it take other people to pull up their pants? It was so weird!! When I got closer, I totally saw a big ole pee spot in the dirt. What. Several stores and a library were in sight, a few dozen feet away, and yet she chose to pee on the ground in public? I was not even the only person at the park! She yelled at her tiny dog and walked to her relatively nice big pickup truck (she had a vehicle and didn't use it to drive to a toilet?) I averted my eyes as I walked to my car. Weirdness is everywhere.

Tuesday, March 15th: Jay's middle school band and orchestra concert was at 6pm. He had to be there at 5:30pm, so I dropped him off and took the girls with me around the corner to the church, where I dropped off all of the food items for the RS activity and helped with some of the set-up. At 5:53pm I dashed out and drove back around the corner to the middle school for Jay's concert. Rose, Amber, and I ran across the parking lot to make it inside with a minute or two to spare. Jeff was waiting for us in the bleachers of the gym, dressed in his track coach clothes. 

The orchestra was set up on the left of the basketball court, and the band was set up on the right. Jay had a chair and an instrument in each section, and he admitted that he was not nervous about playing the music; he was nervous about walking back and forth between the band and the orchestra for each song, since they alternate between band/orchestra/band/orchestra while playing songs for the concerts. It's like he's my son or something.

Jay did such a good job playing the tuba and the bass! It was so fun to watch! He has improved a ton over the past trimester, and he's only been playing the tuba for one trimester total. Jay's cheeks puffed up in time with the beat of each band song as he blew into his tuba. For one of the orchestra songs, Jay didn't get his bass kickstand into the little floor gripper and poor guy had his bass sliding all over the polished gym floor while he tried to play it. I must confess to laughing silently at his struggles while also silently cheering him on. It was so cute. He made sure to get that kickstand into the holder on the floor before they started playing the rest of the songs after that. After the concert, he told me "I'm pretty sure I put like four gouges in the gym floor." It was an awesome concert! I felt so proud of my boy for all of his hard work in two music classes.  

After saying good job to Jay and taking his picture with his massive instruments, I slipped out and drove back around the corner to the church, where the Relief Society activity was underway. I was 20 minutes late, so I didn't have to play the piano or speak my short 1 minute "share about a RS sister who has influenced you" speech. I wasn't sad about that development. The whole busy evening worked out so nicely, even if I did have to miss my weekly family art club zoom meeting and even if I also smashed my fingers while rolling the heavy cart of metal chairs back under the stage after the Relief Society activity.

Wednesday, March 16th: It was a beautiful day today. My legs were feeling fatigued so I did a mini bike ride and some gentle yoga this morning. I blocked today out as a recovery day after the busy intense tiring night last night and it worked. I am getting better and better at taking care of myself intentionally.  Forming my schedule so that the self care stuff isn't shoved to the end of the day has been the most helpful change. That way the things I do for myself actually have impact instead of being an afterthought. Because the last person I should be an afterthought to is myself! I don't want to be too self absorbed, though, so the challenge is to find the right balance of me time and to-do-list time. 

This afternoon I weeded our garden area. I broke the hoe while hacking at the small but thick forest that took root over winter, so I continued by hand and with a rake. It was hard and took over an hour. In the garden, I found Amber's clipboard and a water damaged, faded, curling single piece of paper with the 13 Articles of Faith printed on it. All 12.5 of her painstakingly hand copied articles of faith blew away on the wind sometime last week. She was so close to being done with her self-initiated project of hand writing all 13 Articles of Faith when she lost the clipboard and couldn't find it anywhere for days. Turns out she left it outside and it blew away! When Amber came home and discovered her loss, she cried and cried tears of pure disappointment at the loss of all her careful labors. Poor sweet girl! She worked so hard copying those complicated words, one article of faith per page. I made her eggs for dinner and she cheered up some. She hasn't decided if she's going to try again or not yet.

Thursday, March 17th: It wasn't even windy today!! We've had two whole days off of wind and I'm going soft--what little wind endurance I built up is gone again already. I am definitely sore from weeding the garden yesterday. Ugh. My lower back and thumbs are sore from bending and pulling stubborn thick weeds. 

This morning when Amber was putting on her jacket to go to school, she looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye and said "I am sixteen going on seventeen!" It was hilarious and adorable and such an Amber moment. We watched the first half of The Sound of Music as a family on Sunday afternoon, and Amber and Rose have been listening to the music all week.

Friday, March 18th: I went on my longest run since October after visiting the chiropractor. I ran miles on the bike path! The bike path is ugly and loud since it runs between two highways and a set of train tracks, but it is smooth, paved, and flat. I cruised. It felt amazing. This was the first run since my injury that made me feel like I am "back." Hello, running fitness, I've missed you.

Amber asked if we could go to the library together, so we went after piano lessons today. While sorting through and selecting books off the shelf, she grabbed one said "I've been longing for this book!"

Saturday, March 19th: Jeff was gone at a track meet from 7am-4:30pm today. The kids had cartoon time, did their chores, and then played outside for a long time. Jay had his friend over all afternoon. They had fun playing and roaming outside, and also playing dungeons and dragons inside. I ran 4 miles and did yoga, but for most of the rest of the day, I watched an intense, darling Chinese show on Netflix called Meteor Garden. It was a lot of subtitles but also had a lot of lovable characters. Who am I, watching TV all day? Haha. But Jeff was gone and the kids were occupied but I needed to be "on call" for them so I didn't want to do anything too demanding. After watching that entire show and reading the subtitles, I still can only really pick out like 2 or 3 words in Mandarin. I will say that watching TV for that long was very numbing and I am working to come out of the dazed haze.

Sunday, March 20th: Today was Stake Conference, and bless our stake, they provided a Zoom link. Even though we didn't have any germ concerns, we watched it on Zoom anyways. It was a good meeting, and almost every speaker said something about importance of women. I felt such a blanket of peace settle around me. It is not always easy to feel like a self-actualized adult when I have a few hours to myself in the middle of each weekday, especially since all of my siblings and their spouses are super duper intensely busy with starting their own businesses, schooling, intense jobs, etc. One of my weaknesses is feeling guilty/lazy/worrying about not doing enough/working/ [insert important worldly task here] during that time. Even though I am actively choosing to do life the way I'm doing it, I still have a lot of tender, vulnerable thoughts and feelings about being a full time parent and nothing else while all my kids are in school all day. It helps to have lots of reassurance (divine and otherwise) that I am doing what's best for me and my family. Stake conference felt like a soothing balm to all of those feelings today. 

Elder Michael Dunn of the seventy came and gave such a good talk. He was raised Episcopalian by a single mother who is still not a member of our church. When his mom remarried, his step father adopted him and changed his last name. Elder Dunn learned the gospel from his high school sweetheart, got baptized at age 18, served a mission a year later, then came back and married his high school sweetheart. Those are just the bones, but it was such a neat inspiring story. His wife gave a wonderful talk too. I love it when general authorities visit and we get to hear from their wives too. It gives such a good balance to their words.

PICTURES:

Jay, right in the middle with his tuba.

Jay is in the back on the right. He got the broken chair that won't raise high enough for his large instrument, so he was a bit tilted and had to get creative to play the bass.

Jeff hid behind and held up the tuba for the picture because Jay couldn't hold both instruments at once, haha.

The program

These are quality women right here. I've been in the Relief Society presidency for 3 years, and it's been reorganized three times. Tuesday was our first Relief Society activity that we planned as a new presidency, so I declared a nighttime parking lot victory selfie when it was over. Serving in Relief Society presidency yanks me out of my comfort zone repeatedly, but it is also a very sweet sisterhood to be a part of.

Because gas is gold right now. I filled up this week and had to document it. This isn't the most we've spent on a tank of gas for, but it sure was close!

Running Harrison Hill on Monday, listening to silly Chinese music on my silly headphones. I looked up the soundtrack to that Chinese show I liked so much and listened to it while running. I did not understand the words, but it made me smile, laugh, and the rhythm put a nice pep in my step so it was excellent running music. I did look up some lyric translations to make sure I wasn't listening to filth, haha. It's clean.

While weeding our garden, I came across a carrot! We planted carrots last year but thought they didn't grow. This guy did, slowly, over winter! It was smushy and moldy at the top so we didn't eat it, but it was such a surprise to dig up a massive carrot in March.

I always forget to take before pictures. This 10x10 garden space was a brown jungle, trust me. The pile of weeds in the corner looks way smaller than all the work it took to get it there.

Jay, eating an Americanized French snack: bread and Cheezits. It made me laugh.

Amber was very particular about the library books she chose. Her excitement at finding books she loves made me smile.

20 books! She's getting better and better at reading.

I was hoping for a pretty day to take a picture of the newly filled canal, but all I got was iron gray days.

Rose wanted me to take a picture of her Saturday lunch, where she prepared herself a full rainbow of food: red, orange, yellow, green, purple, brown, and white. She wished for blueberries to complete her color palate, but was pleased with her arrangement.

Would it be a church broadcast if my daughters didn't hijack my hair into crazy styles? Hopefully my scalp recovers by the time General Conference rolls around.

Rose, with a beard and a bow.

Family couch selfie during stake conference.