The week began on Sunday with my brother Brad's annual March Madness email. Every year Brad writes an ode to March Madness and invites the extended family to create NCAA basketball brackets and join the family competition in a private group online. I am not a basketball person. This year I felt especially uninspired to fill out a 60+ team bracket--my mental capacities were already maxed out by the impending track season and my Relief Society responsibilities. Jeff felt similarly. He said "I'll sit out of the Brown Family March Madness Throwdown this year if you do!" And I fell even more in love with him. Sweet freedom! Not wanting to impose our own anti-basketball-ness onto our children, we gave them the option to join the family competition with brackets of their own. Jay and Amber decided to do it. So on Sunday night, they chose screen names, made their picks, and locked in their brackets, representing the White family in the competition. After the first round of the tournament, AmberQueen was in first place out of the entire extended family!
On Sunday night, we played a family game of our most competitive current favorite card game: Cover Your Assets (the game involves stealing money cards from each other). It is worth noting because Amber did not cry at the end when she lost! Jay defeated all of us soundly, and we took a family selfie to commemorate the evening. I took so few pictures last week, and I LOVE my photo memories from past years so much that I was determined to take more pictures this week.
On Monday morning, I rode the wave of post-weekend zeal and began to vacuum our house. Halfway through the first room (my bedroom), the vacuum roller brush stopped rotating, a red light came on, and a strange smell filled the room. I flipped the vacuum over and did my best to troubleshoot the problem, to no avail. Half an hour later, I concluded that my time was worth way more than this. I shoved the partially disassembled vacuum into the corner and turned on the Roomba instead. During the first ten minutes of the Roomba's cycle, it got clogged five times. I cleaned that thing to a diamond sparkle, wasting another 20 minutes of my existence, to no avail. So I sent the Roomba back to its charging station and gave up on vacuuming entirely. Then I called my everlastingly patient mother to vent all of the vacuum rage into her sympathetic ear.
On Monday night we had an impromptu family music night. The new trimester started at the middle school on Monday, and Rose joined the band as her second elective, following in her brother's footsteps by taking both band and orchestra at the same time. Rose brought home two instruments to practice: her beloved cello, and her new school-issued clarinet. When Jeff got home, Rose showed him her clarinet. Jeff wanted to try playing it, wind instrumentalist extraordinaire that he is. While Jeff was playing the clarinet, Rose got out her cello to play along. They played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star together. Then Amber got out Jeff's trumpet and our little house practically vibrated in decibels. (Amber has lung power!) I joined in on the piano (I didn't think to get out my violin till later). It was a cacophony of experimental musical joy.
On Tuesday morning, I spent another hour at the physical therapy clinic and got a new set of much harder exercises to do twice a day at home. The list of five new exercises takes half an hour for me to complete--this is a big time commitment! It is incredibly humbling to be given specific exercises targeting precisely my weakest parts. It is helping, but I was a wobbly, shaky, wimpy noodle of a human after every PT session this week!
On Tuesday I read a talk from by David A. Bednar that was referenced in the Come Follow Me lesson. I kept reflecting on it and pondering it because it just felt so applicable right now. At the beginning, Elder Bednar told a story about a truck that was stuck in the snow until it was loaded with firewood. The heavy load gave the truck enough traction to drive out of the snow. I especially loved this application:
On Wednesday morning, I went to the chiropractor for a three skeletal cracks. After that I dashed into Walmart and purchased a small $37 stick vacuum to replace our 7+ year old $150 vacuum. My new vacuum game plan is to go cheap and buy often. I hate the carbon footprint of that plan, but I hate vacuum maintenance and vacuum guilt way more. Our house only has 500 square feet of carpet to vacuum anyways, so a small cheap vacuum should maybe hopefully do the trick. The $37 vacuum I bought has a one year warranty. If I spend that much on a vacuum every year, it'll be very close to the same as investing in another $150 vacuum. Sorry, mother nature! My sanity comes at your expense.
I still haven't opened the new vacuum because... then I'd have to vacuum.
On Wednesday afternoon, I went to a spring sports coaches meeting at the middle school and was basically soaked with a fire hydrant blast of procedures, policies, and expectations that I didn't know about. My careful preparation over the past month did not include any of this information, and my inner rule-following perfectionist tensed up and freaked out a little. After the meeting, I introduced my two newly hired assistant track coaches to the high school track coaches, and the whole afternoon activated the planning preparing worrying lobe of my brain.
On Wednesday night right after Jeff got home from track practice, I left and took Jay and Rose to the church for their youth activity. During the activity, I had a Relief Society Presidency meeting. It was exhausting, shifting gears from coaching responsibilities and concerns to church responsibilities and concerns. All of my responsible concerned brain-space was inflamed after that intense afternoon-evening combo, and I did not get much sleep that night.
On Thursday, I got some quality planning and prepping done for track season. Planning soothes my anxiety. That afternoon, Jeff went to a JV track meet in Yakima so the kids and I had dinner without him. I was feeling so tired that I didn't want to do family scripture by myself without Jeff, but we had already missed two days out of the past three, so I started the family scripture process anyways, while we were finishing dinner. I was too tired to face more confusing Bible verses, so I began by asking each of my three kids to share one thing they have learned from their personal scripture study over the past week. They each shared good thoughts from the Book of Mormon. Even Amber was able to remember a few of the verses she read with me before school one morning, about Sherem the anti-Christ. When I asked her what she learned from that story about a false prophet, she said "don't do that!" Well said, Amber! Don't listen to false prophets. I shared a thought of my own and that was our family scripture time. It was the most meaningful family scripture exchange we've had in weeks.
Jeff didn't get home until 9:30pm on Thursday night, at which point I was so exhausted from my broken 4 hours of sleep the night before that I saw my husband for half an hour before crashing into bed.
On Friday morning before school, Amber came out of the bathroom and said, "I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, 'wow, my hair looks really beautiful!'" She especially likes it when she brushes her wild curls and they cooperate into a smooth-ish blonde fluff. We had family movie night on Friday night, watching another episode of Disney's The Mandalorian. Star Wars is just so boring to me. I was actively bored out of my mind for the entire 45 minute episode, but my family loved it.
On Saturday, Jeff had another track meet and was gone for almost 12 hours. I spent the day at home with the kids, providing emotional stability and adult supervision and all of that jazz. I also had the kids clean the bathroom and try to fix the vacuum. I gave them a set of screwdrivers and permission to Google any instructions they needed, and left them to it. Jay and Rose took turns slaving and getting frustrated for over an hour, with Amber in and out of the mix. After their 10th or so report of frustration and failure, I told them to throw the entire vacuum away. That was my plan all along, but I wanted to see if they could fix it first.
On Sunday (today), we had stake conference. Two hours is a LONG TIME to sit in a church pew. Thankfully it was Zoomed to our church building so we didn't have to drive 45+ minutes, but even with that convenience, all five of us got pretty restless after the first hour. Rose started scuffling and fighting Amber. There were tears and elbow jabs and angry eyes. Jeff and I couldn't focus either. We managed to pull it together and heard some very inspiring words during the last ten minutes or so, but whew that middle section was tricky. Jeff (who is still feeling healthier and stronger by the day after his year of post-Covid issues) made crepes for lunch when we got home.
After that long meeting and lunch, Amber asked (for the hundredth time) if she could make a lava lamp. One of her library books about volcanoes had instructions for how to make your own "lava lamp," and Amber has been begging me to let her make a lava lamp for the past two weeks. I finally said yes today. We assembled the requisite jar, oil, water, food coloring, and salt, and did the project. Sprinkling salt on top of the oil pushes the oil down to the bottom of the water. When the salt dissolves in the water, the oil rises back up to the top in a globby lava-ish bubble. Amber was enchanted with it and carried it around the house proudly.
While Amber (and Rose) and I worked on the lava lamp at the kitchen counter, Jeff and Jay did computer surgery on the kitchen table 1 foot away. All five of us were in a five foot radius, doing projects. It was busy and messy and crowded.
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