I subbed for our ward choir director yesterday after church. While Cooper and I were in choir, Bryan counted tithing in the clerk's office and the girls were in a leadership meeting. Where, you may ask, was Topher?
He was entertaining himself in the nursery with the playdoh.
We spent all day back to school shopping yesterday. It was tiring, but productive.
We did have one big distraction though: we walked by the books.
Phoebe snapped this picture of Topher reaching for his favorite book series. When he turned and saw all those books he gasped and ran to them, then asked if he could please spend his school clothes budget on books instead.
It made my reading mom heart happy.
We hosted the Youth activity last week. They were planning a bake-off and we have two ovens, which turned out to be pretty important since they split into two teams. We worked hard and got our house company-ready. The evening was loud and fun and chaotic. Two of the leaders brought their kids, one leader had driven his son, plus another young man and his little brother who is Topher's age. That meant instead of going to bed, Topher also got to stay up and play host. It's a good thing I haven't given away the toys our kids have outgrown, because all those kids sure had fun exploring our playroom.
First the teams mixed up their cake mixes (not from scratch, no, we didn't have that kind of time), one gluten-free and one gluten-full. When those went into the ovens, we pulled the already-baked-and-cooled cakes (using the same brand and flavor box mixes the youth had just prepared) out from the panty for them to decorate. We had frosting and sprinkles and one of the leaders brought two secret ingredients that had to be used: raspberries and mint leaves. These are their final creations:
The leaders announced a tie, so Sophie arm wrestled the other team leader and came out victorious. Cooper, who doesn't attend these activities anymore, came and helped since his friend who moved away a few months ago surprised us all by showing up to the activity. Phoebe and Sophie were on the other team. I'll give you a hint about which cake they made: Phoebe really loves Spider-man.
When we bought this house I could envision the Young Women, who I was serving in church at the time, gathering for activities around our kitchen island. I'm glad a version of this was able to come to pass.
My kids read the blog post from yesterday and all commented that I had the beautifying filter turned on in my camera settings. I never activate that function and Sophie quickly took credit for turning it on. I grabbed my phone to set the camera back to its normal, we-look-like-regular-humans setting.
But I couldn't find it. Certain that they could, a few of my kids tried as well. Guess what? They couldn't find it either.
I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually (surely my phone won't hide that setting forever), but for now I guess we'll all be showing up with flawless complexions in our pictures.
Tonight Phoebe and a friend hung out by seeing the filmed version of the Broadway show Hadestown. The theater is about 30 minutes from our house. Since I had to drive there anyway, I took Cooper and Sophie and we saw it too!
The five principle actors were the same that I saw in the original cast in 2019. It was so cool that I got to share this beautiful show with some of my kids.
