Family Picture Fail
Sad story. While we had everyone in town over Christmas, we had one of my former YW (now a college student who is starting a photography business) take our family pictures. She told us she would send us a link to the pictures within a week. She never did! So these are the only snapshots I took of my cute kids.
Birthday Season Kicks Off
Dan's birthday was celebrated with breakfast in bed and a special dinner at his favorite restaurant, Cheesecake Factory.
A very quiet church service
In January Aubrey and I drove to Portland to attend an ASL Sacrament meeting to fulfill an assignment for her ASL class. The ward meets in the most beautiful church, erected in 1929. The meeting was surprisingly touching, especially the Sacrament prayers, which were signed instead of spoken. There is a lot of emotion imbued in signing words rather than saying them.
Farewell to Metro . . . for now, at least
After being involved with Metropolitan Performing Arts Academy since she was 8 years old, Aubrey decided to back off for now. Her last involvement was this theater performance for parents at the conclusion of one of her theater classes.
Several years off my life
The last day of January was the annual stake primary leadership meeting. My presidency and I worked almost nonstop for a few months pulling together all the details of a big meeting for all the primary leaders and teachers in the stake. We offered 5 classes to choose from, and invited expert guest teachers for two of the classes. Everything was great until it wasn't.
One of the guest speakers got strep a few days before the meeting and my secretary (who was dealing with a lot of personal stresses and having a really bad week) found out she was in charge of teaching that class. Then, at 11:30 a.m. on the day of the meeting the other guest teacher had to back out due to a family emergency. She is an expert on family history and was going to teach the leaders and teachers how they could strengthen children by involving them in connecting to ancestors in primary and at home. I thought that the subject was so intriguing, but I am not an expert. I found out I would be teaching that class right as I was headed to the church to meet my presidency to set up the building for the meeting. At the conclusion of set up, I had exactly one hour to pull together a 30 minute presentation (to be taught twice that night). It was one of the most stressful events of my life!
The Lord absolutely directed my hand in the dramatically shortened preparation time and helped the class to be much more effective than I could have done on my own power. But, my own pride smarted at the fact that I was not nearly as organized as I would have liked to have been. It really played into my need for control - it was so hard to go in mostly unprepared! Oh, and the rest of the story is that my hastily prepared presentation was all on a powerpoint on my new laptop, and when we got to the church we found that the laptop doesn't have an HDMI port by which to connect it to the TV! We scrambled and grew a dozen more grey hairs, but literally 5 minutes before the meeting started my secretary ran to her car for her laptop, I emailed her the presentation, Dan hooked up her laptop to the TV, and I took off my shoes and ran top speed down the hallway to the chapel, where I replaced my shoes, walked up to the stand in the chapel, and gave the opening message of the meeting. A message that I hadn't had a chance to really think about that day, as I was putting out fires. And that's the story about how I aged more than a little in a quick hurry.
This was my table for my class. I pulled this together in about 5 minutes, and it's a miracle that it looked decent!
I can't believe that we didn't get a picture of all the refreshments, but this is a close up of a few of the items of our yogurt bar at the end of the night. Everyone loved the variety of yogurt toppings, including homemade granola, fruit, nuts, coconut, etc.
Floating
For Christmas Aubrey received two tickets to to indoor skydiving. She and Dan cashed in the certificates in early February. So fun!
Hard Working Kid
Last week I attended an Honor Roll assembly for Joseph, who has worked hard and earned a 4.0 or 3.9 GPA the first two trimesters. Woo Hoo!
Priesthood Preview
In February Joseph attended a wonderful priesthood preview night to learn about his upcoming opportunities to serve once he received the Aaronic Priesthood.
Dan and Lance Kartchner really enjoyed the treats afterward.
On Sunday, March 5th Joseph was ordained a Deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood by his father, in his Deacon's quorum meeting at church. The next week he passed the Sacrament. I will have to write more about this later, but it is such a tender thing to watch Joseph taking on more responsibilities, learning to serve, and becoming a truly stellar young man.
A view of Joseph's Middle School
The week of Valentine's Day I helped with a PTA fundraiser at Joseph's School. It was so fascinating to watch the dynamics of the middle school and see this cute 6th grader eating lunch and then filling out a candygram to send to a friend.
Other Joseph moments
Frozen yogurt with Dad one evening
Preparing and giving a wonderful FHE lesson.
Doing homework after school with Alex
Attending the U of P versus BYU basketball game and meeting some of the players afterward.
Court of Honor, at which Joseph advanced a rank and received some awards.
And, buying new shoes at the downtown Portland Nike store for his birthday. Joseph researched at length to determine which Nike shoes he wanted to buy with his birthday money. In late February he and I drove to downtown Portland so he could try on his favorite pairs. It was such a tough choice, but he finally chose the colorful ones with the new technology sole over the "sock" shoes he had previously been favoring.
Update: after a few weeks he decided the colorful shoes didn't go with enough outfits, so we took advantage of the 30 day return policy and exchanged for the grey shoes.
Further update: Joseph doesn't wear the grey shoes most days and wears his old Nikes instead because he doesn't want to get the nice Nikes dirty.
And finally, updates about me
Okay, I'm going to share a few images from my phone which give a glimpse into my life. First, in February I finally completed a project I've contemplated for a long time. I organized all our family history stories into family lines and then organized them into 3 ring binders. Our goal is to "meet" a family member through stories each week during FHE.
And this is my new fave. I discovered Criobru, which is brewed roasted cocoa beans. It's somewhat bitter, but I love it. It's like all the best aspects of hot chocolate without the heaviness of all that sugar. It's one of the few things which has gotten me through this crazy winter weather!
I never do these silly quizzes on facebook, but I couldn't resist this one, which rated my education level based how many books I had read. Ph.D. level - Ahem!
I allowed myself exactly one bag of my favorite Valentine's conversation hearts. It was worth every non-nutritive, no-redeeming-value calorie. Plus, I don't eat the green ones, so it's like a calorie discount.
