He got the sweater

I printed my blog post about the sweater and put it in the box along with the sweater to send to him.  He said he smelled it to see if it smelled like me and it didn't.

Darn sweater.

This is about as good as his pictures get, mostly they are extremely blurry.  Adam is getting him a better camera for Christmas.  I said I think it's more user error than the fault of the camera.  We'll see.

I am happy every time I see his face though, even when it's a blurry face.

I don't know, maybe you noticed?

I love that kid.

Spontaneous

Thursday, Enoch texted me and wondered if Adam wanted to referee some basketball games in Wells, Nevada on Saturday.  My first thought was, probably.

Awhile ago, Enoch and Adam talked about basketball and refereeing and one of them said something about how Adam should go to Nevada and ref sometime.

I didn't know they were serious.

But I texted Adam and he was all in.

I called my mom and she said we could come and stay.

So we did.

We left Friday after Adam got home from work and Emma did a quick and intense homework session.  (That girl is all kinds of busy.  And she does such a good job on everything that it makes the time crunch worse.  Why did I get a perfectionist for a daughter?!?)

We took Sweet Allis Chalmers which is what Adam insists on calling his car even though the rest of us think it should be called The Illiad (because we also have an Odyssey).  It's nice and snug and has heated seats in the front and back which are ideal for cold fall evenings.  When we were passing Tooele (a.k.a. leaving civilization), Adam said, "Oh, I didn't think about filling up before we left.  The car says we can go 120 miles.  Can we make it to Wendover? (a.k.a. not really civilization but they do have gas stations...and enormous casinos)

I said, "Of course we can make it to Wendover.  It's only about 80 miles away."

But then we were driving straight into the wind.  We watched the gas gauge drop drop drop and I have to say, it kept us awake.

Finally, we were below empty and had about 20 miles to go.  Adam said, "Maybe you should say a prayer."

I told him I already had.

Emma was sleeping and Mark had on his headphones (roadtrips where I had to entertain bored toddlers are a distant memory).  I got Mark's attention and told him to say a prayer.  Mark's prayers are always good ones.  We finally rolled into a gas station at the exit for the Bonneville Speedway.  We had been going on fumes and prayers.  The car has an 18 gallon gas tank and we got 18 gallons of gas.

The rest of the drive was less exciting.

It was lovely as always to stay with my parents.  I like sitting around their living room, visiting.  Saturday morning, Adam went to referee and Mark and I went to Olivia's to visit her.  (My parents went to an early morning health fair in Elko, but then my mom joined our visiting later.)  Marianne's family except Morgan were at cross country state so were sad not to see them.

The boys were all playing outside and Omar who is three came to Grandma for help with his coat.  It used to be Braeden's and then Mark's coat!  Were those guys ever so small?  It melted my heart a little.

We all went into town for the 11:00 game.  Adam refereed and Enoch coached and Isaiah and Luke and Morgan played.  Adam did a fine job and enjoyed himself.  I felt like offering Enoch a throat lozenge pretty early in the game.  That kid gets hoarse.  It's not so much that he yells, but he speaks loudly.  With a lot of enthusiasm.

I felt like offering the boys a trophy.  Wowee wow wow.  Isaiah, who gets up early every morning to practice basketball is a superstar.  He is tall and lanky and coordinated.  It's a good combination for basketball.  I loved when he would pass the ball to Luke and Luke would make a basket (of course he would).  They'd run down the court and point and smile at each other.  Luke is too young for the team, but he knows a guy (the coach) and he can hold his own against much older kids.  Also, Luke gives the best hugs in the world, but that is irrelevant to basketball.... Morgan also made a basket and I loved watching him bite his lip and concentrate on defense.

I completely hit the jackpot in the nephew department.  I love all of them.

I also loved sitting by Jennifer during the game.  She watched with all the intensity of a mother bear watching her young but the only time she got truly animated was when she was worried that Isaiah was going to hurt another kid.  "Oh, be careful!" she would call.  She has the kindest heart you'll ever find.

We went back to my parents for a delicious meal and more visiting and my dad fixed my necklace.

In the late afternoon we headed home and it was a lovely little trip.

All Mark all the time

this is Mark 5 years ago when I still made him practice the piano and when we lived in a place where the sun shone so seldom that it burned his little eyes--at least he thought so

The other day Mark told me that he wanted to have an anonymous online presence.  He said, "I want to live off the grid."

Where does he even get that stuff?

Then he went on to say, "It's kind of hard to do, since your blog is entirely about me."

To which I can only say, "I've got to write about someone."

He is such a Mark.  There's no other word for it.  I don't know where I got these kids with their full sized personalities.  I guess heaven was fresh out of the shy, quiet, compliant types.

Sunday afternoon we took a walk along the Provo River which is my favorite walk--as long as we walk west of Geneva Road rather than east.  With Braeden the conversation naturally evolves to history (he's confessed that in the absence of his history books he has read the chronology of events way too many times in the Bible dictionary since he's been on his mission).  With Mark, the conversation somehow turns to money.  For some reason when we drove home, we started talking about the stock market.  Awhile ago, Adam gave each kid 10,000 pretend dollars and they pretended to invest in different stocks.  When we returned home, Adam checked in to see how their investments were doing.  Mark had earned $10,000 pretend dollars and Braeden had lost $1,000.

Until I made him stop talking (I do that sometimes), Mark talked animatedly and loudly about stocks.  He loves the stock market.  It makes no kind of sense where we got that kid from but he's a keeper and if you want to invest in the stock market, you may want to ask his opinion.

Finally, the last Mark anecdote (for now...if my blog is indeed entirely about him, I am sure there will be more in the future), Mark went trick or treating which is against my arbitrary family rule of once you are twelve you can no longer trick or treat.

(I've sort of given up.  On most things.)

Among his spoils, he got a lighter.

Seriously.  In Pleasant Grove, UT.  What?

Adam took this picture:

I told them both it was not funny but then I'm posting the picture here so that's sort of a mixed message.

Come fly with me

Last night we had out Young Women In Excellence which is kind of a year in review celebration.  We went with an airline theme.

In a big way.

It all started with Pinterest. (doesn't everything?)  Then the Young Women leaders sort of ran. With. It.

We had the Relief Society room set up like baggage claim and the Young Women room was set up like an airplane.  Complete with windows, an emergency exit, seat pockets with safety instructions.  We had a cart to push down the aisle, with water bottles and "flotation devices" which were tiny donuts. 

It was adorable and I didn't take any pictures so you'll have to take my word for it.

I decided I wanted music for the beginning, Frank Sinatra, Come Fly With Me type music.  I texted Adam, "What are some other songs like that?"

A few minutes later he texted me back a playlist he'd created.

Adam.

That guy never disappoints.

The bishopric was the team of pilots:

And I should add they were very good sports!

(And you don't know how hard we tried to get the broken curtains to close!)

Here are the flight attendants.  It's blurry, but you get the idea:

It was the first big activity that we have done that wasn't us scrambling to carry out the plans of the previous leaders.  It was all ours and it felt good. 

A few of us spent most of the day preparing and decorating.  It was exhausting and afterward, Adam was cleaning up and loading all of our cars with all of our stuff and moving furniture and being his normal Adam self.

When we got home, I told Mark, "Do you know how awesome your dad is?"  Then I outlined all the help he was to me.

Mark said, "Isn't that what dads do?"

And maybe that's the best compliment Mark could give his dad.  Because as far as Mark knows, dads are always helpful and selfless and the go to person when you need anything.

(And Adam learned it from his dad.)

Fun with math

Have you ever tried to contend with a stubborn ginger?

Mark likes to get an accusing tone and tell me what his math teacher said and point out how it implicates me as a bad teacher.

Things like, "Mr. Francom said that he wasn't going to teach us how to do the distributive property because we learned it in 6th grade."

"You learned it in 6th grade too," I told him.

"Nope."

"Remember?" I said, "It's like dealing cards?  You distribute the number to everyone?"

"Hmmm." I could tell it sounded familiar but he's not one to concede anything.

Ever.

So we sat down and I showed him again.  Then we had a full fledged battle.

I told him how to do a problem and he refused to accept the answer.  Refused. 
He said, "Mr. Francom said you do it a different way."

I said, "I promise this is the right way to do it."

And we sized each other up like duelers in a Western.

It was early on a Saturday morning and Emma and Adam were still sleeping.  (My sons and me--we don't have sleeping in skills.)  I said, "You can ask Dad or Emma when they get up."

"OK," he said, sliding the graphite back into his mechanical pencil.  He was done with me and my shoddy math skills.  "I'll wait for them."

Which is his way of saying that he knew they were smarter than me.  (They are both smarter than me but they occasionally need my help with Word Bubbles, so there's that.)

When Adam came downstairs, I happily handed over the math homework question to him.

He sat down with Mark and said, "Your mom is right.  This is how it is."

Mark started to argue but then Adam restated his position in that convincing Dad Way that no one in the history of ever has been able to refute.

"OK?" Adam said.

"OK," Mark said morosely.  And he completed his assignment.

I need a Dad Voice.  I'm waiting for one to show up on Zulily and I will buy it immediately.

Saved for a rainy day

You know how sometimes people will put a $10 bill in a jacket pocket to find later?  It makes for a happy surprise.

Last December I made myself a photo calendar.  Knowing what was on my horizon, I made this the November page:

And yes, it's like finding money in my pocket.

Books I read in October 2015

First, I read this last month but I forgot to include it:



Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth **

This was the book my book club read in September.  It was OK.  I try to like memoir more than I really do.  It's about midwives in the East End of London in the '50s.  There's a PBS series with the same name.  I haven't seen the series but I can see how this book would lend itself to a TV series.  It's more of a stream of anecdotes than anything else. There wasn't much of a plot but historically it was interesting.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr ****

This was our October book club book and I loved it.  So good!  Some in my book club did not like it much, which surprised me.  They thought it was long.  It is long, but I enjoyed every page.  It's set during WW II like most books I've read recently!  It's about a young blind French girl and a young German soldier.  It's mostly a parallel story without a lot of intersection between the characters.  I loved getting a better look at maybe what it was like to be German during WW II and catching a glimpse of how someone could become a Nazi.

Crooked Little Lies by Barbara Taylor Sissel *

I didn't really like this book but read it on my Kindle while I was waiting for other books from the library.  The lies weren't so very little and the characters were whiny and the story was at the same time far fetched and predictable.

So no, I don't really recommend it.