However, I also try to keep things in perspective and have fun. Besides downloading Gangnam style for the dance game for Kinect, I laughed over and over at the following two videos online this month.
Gay Men will Marry your Girlfriends
And
First World Problems
Living under a rock and still don't know Gangnam style? This link can show you all the rage...
Here's Paul doing it which is super funny, too....
(by the way if you are reading this blog at work, make sure you have your volume turned low as both links have sound. One has a bad word, but I'm not telling you which one)
As soon as the church charge conference was done we had another well, issue shall I say... come up at church. Tent City 4 asked us in November if we would be able to host them in January. We've hosted Tent City twice before. Before the first hosting, the neighborhood wanted nothing to do with it. When we hosted the 2nd time it was kind of a non-issue. Neighbors were more curious about it than anything else. So we said yes, we would take them starting January 12th when their current 90 day permit was up to stay at their current location. TC4 had some issues with their parent organization Share/Wheel which came to a head and about 3/4 of the residence from TC4 defected to make their own encampment now called Camp Unity Eastside. Long story short is that we had to recind the offer because we took in Camp Unity Eastside. When I say took in I mean that in the 10-14 days it took us to get the camp up and running (no tents, etc. were taken from TC4, so all new supplies had to be procured including 200 pallets, 600 blankets and 60 sleeping bags and about 40-50 tents and tarps) they were literally iving in the sanctuary, hallways, etc (not in classrooms, we have a co-op preschool which occupies our classrooms during the week). Since being Membership Secretary means I'm on the board, it took up a lot the room in my head thinking about procuring supplies, etc.
The other thing that happened is I started working with a group called The Heart of Giving. I got brought into it because a friend of mine runs one of three Garage of Blessings out of her home about 20 minutes away. I met her through my Mothers of Preschoolers group. She and I have similar personalities in that we both feel that we should help out our fellow neighbor and are both pretty much type A personalities with a love of organization :) Basicly the Garage of Blessings is a free garage sale. People donate to the garages instead of say, Goodwill and instead of the items being resold at a thrift store, they are given for free to anyone who needs them. Heart of Giving is an umbrella organization with similar goals who partnered with the garages. Heart of Giving runs various FaceBook pages that work like the garage but for immediate needs outside the garage as well as bigger items that are too large for the garages to keep on hand. These pages are in various parts of the country. Anyways, she was thinking it would be easier for her if she could run the garage and organize donations open it for people to "shop", etc. if I could help her by keeping an eye on the Facebook page for her particular area. Since I use FB regularily I thought, sure, no problem.
What this means is I'm an administrator. If inappropriate comments are made, offers for money are put up, advertising or spam gets put on or a need is posted then met, I delete stuff. Seems I've done my job too well as I'm now referred to as the "Silent Terminator" and a behind the scenes admin for about 20 pages now. I focus on the 3 I was first put in charge of, but rove to other pages as they need help and I have time for. It's been fun seeing the blessings, like a few kids who gave up their Wiis or DSs that they barely play with so they could be given to kids who were hoping to get some for Christmas but their parents didn't have much money after paying rent or losing a job but made just a little too much for many of the Christmas programs available in the area. We seem to be filling up a gap between "entitlement programs" as the US seems to refer to them these days and the working poor. I also love how much stuff is being kept in use and out of the landfill (BTW, did you know we are the first state where we recycle more than we throw away???)
So with all this going on, I'm working on delegating more chores. Like the laundry. We're now folding about 4 loads at once (about one weeks' worth of laundry) rather than every other day. Because of the arrangement of doing more chores Carter told me one morning that I "ruin all his fun". That evening we all spent an hour folding the 4 loads of laundry on my bed. (By "we" I mean, me, carter helping as much as he could, Henri helping when he felt like it, Valerie dumping the 3rd roll of toilet paper this week into the toilet and throwing the laundry on the other side of the room, and Paul being at work) Carter says, "this is fun! We should call what we are doing fun chores!" the kid is wacked.
Oh, yeah, still trying to potty train Valerie. We're at about the same stage as my last post. I put her on the toilet, she pees, then if I leave she puts a roll of TP in the toilet (we've gone through a lot of TP lately). She poops her pants every time, never in the toilet but she's still getting enough in the toilet that I do less laundry than using cloth diapers, so I'm sticking with it. Since our schedule has been wierd with the older kids off school, we've had some bad days where she just peed her pants all day, but now that I'm getting her back on task it's back to where it was. She even kept up while we were on vacation (vacation and Christmas will be in another post-this is just filling the gap of the end of November)
Besides all this I took a scrapbook class from Inspired to Scrap and won a grand prize for completing all my homework by the end of the month! Not to mention all the great pages I completed for the kids' albums (mostly pictures from Carter's summer vacation away from home). I enjoyed it so much I'm signed up for another one in January from Feeling Scrappy.
I haven't been doing much large-scale cooking, so we are eating up dinners from the freezer from swaps and my own pre-cooking. Though one night we hadn't thawed out and needed to eat up some of our Costco purchases before leaving on vacation, so I put hot dogs in crescent rolls. Carter's comment was "mom, this looks like Jesus wrapped up in those cloths, doesn't it?" Guess I know what to make for lunch on Easter!
Around the same timeframe, Carter realized one of his good friends from school (a girl he likes to play Pokemon with) lived down the street. I went on a field trip with Carter's class at the end of last year and met the girl's mom. Down to earth, from Canada, really liked her. So I said, "Tell her we can have coffee and you guys can play!" So Carter writes a note, "Dear xxx's mom: My mom would like you to call and have time to have coffee with her. Our number is XXX=XXX=XXX and Olivia and I can play Pokemon." He walked it down to her house and handed it to Olivia's dad who passed along the note. Mom calls and says, "I just got the note and my heart melted, how cute!" We had a playdate, though I realized afterwards that "mom" was "soon to be stepmom" so I was totally confused because I thought it was her mom that lived there, apparently her dad lives down the street (just moved in between last year and this one) with his fiance. Anyways....
Paul and I had our 9th anniversary. Didn't really celebrate, but hopefully next year will be celebratory.
When we met 10 years ago...
When we got married 9 years ago...
We had a great Thanksgiving with my mom's family sharing lots of traditional Thanksgiving food :)
Next post... our vacation!
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