Rise and Shout!

Cooper got some very exciting news today!!!

Words With Friends

I am so thankful for book clubs. 

My two-person book club is my favorite. But I also love the local book club I attend. There were only five of us there tonight, but the discussion still filled my soul. Books plus friends equals a very happy me.

That is all.

The Best

These two swing between being worst enemies and best friends. I'm glad I got photographic proof of the latter.

Welcome to the Museum of Curated Artifacts

Topher turned our Great Room into a museum. He led me on a tour.

This is the polar bear exhibit,

the cat exhibit,

the dinosaur exhibit,

and the hot air balloon exhibit.

He cut up a piece of printer paper and drew tickets on each one. I needed to give him my ticket before I toured the museum. 

I'm glad he loves museums enough to create his own.

Flip Flip

Sophie decided she wanted to catch a picture of the perfect hair flip. No, I don't know why, but I support the endeavor. These are the results.

He's Aged Well

Today was the 100th day of school and Topher got to dress like a 100-year-old version of himself. He was rather disgruntled that I wouldn't buy him a wheelchair for the occasion. I also opted to not send him with a cane because I worried for the safety of everyone around him. He let us put dry shampoo and baby powder in his hair, but it didn't show up very well in the pictures. He also let me use eyeliner to give him age lines, but not very many. He was adamant that the lines stay on his forehead. In other words, he was more early-middle aged rather than 100, but we tried.

And he's awfully cute.

Off to the Temple

Sick Daze

I woke up Monday morning as a baritone. 

I've spent the last three days in and out of fevers and sleep. Bryan, Peter, and Cooper have juggled feeding and driving the rest of the kids while I've mostly stayed in my room, near a humidifier and a jumbo pack of tissues.

Today I felt well enough to shower, but it took all my strength.

As of this evening I'm starting to feel more like a human and less like a giant germ.

I'm really thankful for children that can drive and a husband who works from home.

Motivation

In addition to deep cleaning and sorting through papers, I decided hosting the youth was a good reason to take apart the great room and paint most of the trim. You know, normal house prep stuff. Topher helped by borrowing my phone and taking a bunch in-process pictures.

At first I thought I would be able to pull the trim off the wall without moving this big cabinet. I was wrong. Emptying and moving this added significantly to my project.

The contents of the cabinet were relocated to the table, then to the library when we needed to eat dinner.

This door trim was sanded and wiped down, but not yet painted. A few of the kids liked the distressed look from the sanding and tried to convince me to stop here.

I kept going though. In this picture the trim looks black, but it's actually a deep chocolate brown. I really wanted to paint the walls as well so they would match the white walls in the rest of the downstairs, but I decided sleeping was a better idea than painting for three days straight.

I also though about painting all the walls this beautiful blue color instead of just having the blue as an accent wall. Again, sleep won. The trim looks closer to its actual brown than black in this picture.

I was awake until 2 o'clock in the morning on Sunday finishing the painting and cleaning up my supplies. Somehow we made it through 9am church and got the house put back together in time for the fireside. And now I'm so much closer to having all the downstairs trim painted!

No Elf on this Shelf

We hosted a fireside for the youth in our ward last night, which meant we spent a few days deep cleaning to prepare. I love the result and think we should have people over weekly if it means my house will consistently be this clean.

While sorting through a stack of school papers, I found this gem. Apparently Topher's class made elf applications in December.

In case you can't read his handwriting/spelling, in response to the prompt "I want to be an elf because" it says, "I'm sorry but I don't want to be an elf."

You should choose me because "sorry I don't want to."