President's Day at Our House

• We had some more fresh snow this morning. Molly slept in until 8:00. She was a bit grumpy this morning. I think her mouth hurts. She bit into a powdered donut and cried. This afternoon, though, was very pleasant.
• Went to Great Harvest to buy some bread.
• Visited my mom and Willie for a few minutes and picked classes for Willie's schedule for next year.
• Molly took a nice long nap and I worked on my chair painting project in the garage. We got a new kitchen table a while ago, but it is black and our old chairs are white. I am slowly replacing the old chairs with second-hand mismatched chairs that I am painting black. Imagine something like this, but in black. The chairs are different, but all the same color. I have a vision for it, but haven't actually brought a single chair into the house yet. I'm slow, not crafty, and we have really dim lighting in the garage (and it was too cold today to open the garage door more than a foot or so.) I hope my vision works out.

House-related side note (has nothing to do with President's day): We also recently purchased a new couch and love seat for our family room. We needed more seating in that room but our ideas evolved from getting a chair of my grandma's recovered, to getting a new chair all together, to purchasing 2 larger pieces of furniture for a much more reasonable price (thank you Furniture Warehouse for going out of business). I had mega buyer's remorse after I purchased it, but now I really like it. It's red. It's leather (or "bonded leather" which is guess is fake leather, but that's ok.) It will look nice with the future black chairs. It looks something like this, but not exactly.

• Back to President's Day . . . James only had a few visits today, but spent another 2-3 hours at the dentist getting prepped for a crown. The dentist was frustrated become James has a cursed mouth. It didn't go well. Hopefully the real crown will go more smoothly.
• We worked on the laundry and put some of it away (though not all of it).
• Molly and I went to Great Clips to get her hair trimmed. I swear it grows at different rates and has been all different lengths in the back. It's been looking scraggily and my uneven bangs trim job last week needed to be evened out. She was a good girl.
• We shoveled the driveway and Molly followed me up and down each pass.
• We made chocolate chip cookies that absolutely failed even though the dough tasted good. I used the recipe on the back of the chocolate chips instead of a regular recipe. They were crunchy pancake cookies. Oh well.
• Because of the weakened condition of James' mouth, we had soup for dinner.
• Molly had a bath, we watched a few Elmo videos, took this picture, and she went to sleep.
• 
• Molly has a few complete sentences lately. They are: "I want it." "Where is it?" "Is it hot?" Her list of vocabulary words is longer than I can count. Today she was very excited about the "snow" and I thought she might jump out of her car seat when we passed a house with a real "snowman snowman SNOWMAN SNOWMAN SNOOOOOOOOWMAN."
• James went to bed after the 9:00 news.
• I worked on schoolwork that I of course left until the last hours of the 3 day weekend.
• It is now midnight. School tomorrow. Good night!

Valentines Day at Our House

Happy Valentines Day!

Here is how we celebrated:

• I wrote in a lame card to James. I told him Happy V-Day and that we were going out to dinner.
• I had 2 cute little shirts for Molly, but we were running late this morning, so we didn't open them. Plus, they are summer shirts and she wouldn't have worn them anyway.
  
• James had flowers delivered to me at school! He hasn't done that for many moons and it was much appreciated. They are daisies and are very pretty.
• Molly had a fully festive day at school and came home with quite a load of Valentine exchange goodies (we prepared her Valentines over the weekend and she scribbled on most of them before I wrote the names down).
• We went to Hires.
• We stopped at the Family Dollar and Molly picked herself out a Valentine prize. She picked and Easter Egg full of M&M's and a Cars sippy cup.
• My mom and dad came over to bring Molly a Valentine.
• Molly went to bed, then woke up coughing, then went back to sleep.
• James fell asleep on the couch, then went to bed.
• I had computer issues working on a thing for school, so decided to work on our taxes instead. I wrote this post. I'm waiting to see if Molly is going to stay asleep, then I'm going to bed.
• Happy Valentines Day!

... And here's a cute picture of the 3 Amigos at a ball game a couple of weeks ago. I stole it from my mom's blog and it has nothing to do with Valentines Day!

Ugly Betty Strikes Again

No, this kid isn't Ugly Betty, but his team has had 2 monster Betty's this week. They lost to Viewmont, best team in Region 2, in a bit of a blowout on Tuesday night. The first time they played Viewmont, they lost by just a few in 3 OT's, but this time it was a little one-sided and they struggled to ever get anything going. Tonight, they lost to Taylorsville, the worst team in Region 2. Taylorsville was up for them and played well. Hunter had about 2000 turnovers and again, just couldn't get it going. There were 10 point leads for both teams at different times and when the buzzer rang, Hunter lost. Blame it on poor coaching, gimmicky lineups, senior night for the opponent, no offense, little defense, not enought playing time by #44, etc. . . . I don't know. They shouldn't have lost.

Here are the current region standings after tonight:

8-0 Viewmont

5-3 Hunter

4-4 West

3-5 Kearns

2-6 Taylorsville

2-6 Granger

So what about that kid in the picture . . . he got his letterman's jacket the other night and thinks he's pretty cool. He got asked to the Sweetheart's Dance. He didn't want to go with the particular girl who asked him. His mother would have made sure he did go and that he was a good boy about it, unfortunately the dance was tonight - Friday - and he sort of had a prior basketball committment. He wrote a note to the girl to politely decline.

In other news, just in case you think this kid is really cool and all of this is going to his head, he's still just a dorky 17 year old boy. The other night he was at our kitchen table doing hard math problems and . . . well . . . he's weird. He comes dressed in monochromatic non-matching gray sweats and sweatshirt. He disappears for a time (I was still strying to get Molly out of the bath when he first got there) and I find him laying on the floor of my room. While doing the assignment he decides to take off his socks and tried to hand them to me. He also kept rubbing his belly like it was for good luck or something. I told him to knock it off and he just laughed at me. His math teacher's husband is almost blind and she knows about mountains because she went to Hawaii. One of the kids on his team has terrible body odor and another one asked him the other day if his middle name was Judy. He skipped mutual because they were having a dance. He went last week because they played dodgeball.

Point of this blog post . . . I don't know.

Hair Success

It's Sunday. My aunt Karen lent us a different type of curling iron and told us to try it. I gave Molly her toothbrush and ipod to distract her and . . . miss blue eyes has some beautiful curls!

Not another "Trials" Lesson

I missed most of Sunday School today because I was hanging out in the nursery with Molly, but I did sit through all of relief society. The lesson: TRIALS. I don't like this lesson. It's always a downer.

Some of the discussion questions included:

Can you tell me of an experience when you overcame a trial?

Why does God give us trials?

What do you do while you are in the middle of a trial to continue having faith?

It might be that I just don't like the word, "trial." Instead, I have issues, occasionally problems, stressful situations, days, or months. Sometimes life is sucky and sometimes it is good. You just deal with it! Now, I am far from perfect and can complain with the best of you (unfortunately it is usually to my poor mother, since she's the only one who will listen to me most of the time). I've had my fair share of not dealing with things well. But, I don't think I have ever thought, "Oh this is a trial." I don't mean to discredit tragedies or terrible events that happen to people, but even the big things can be dealt with.

This is just life! We make choices and things happen. Sometimes things happen beyond any choice we've made. Sometimes we're lucky and blessed with wonderful things and sometimes were blessed with pain-in-the-butt things. It all evens out in the end and we just need to keep on pluggin'.

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Words of Wisdom I thought of during the lesson today that I've probably heard from my mom or my grandma:

• Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you just get rained out.
• If you're not happy, fake it, and eventually you will be.
• Whenever you start thinking about your life being bad, there is always someone who is worse off than you.
• It's not your problems that define you, but how you deal with them.

• Hymn "Have I Done Any Good in the World Today . . . If Not I Have Failed Indeed."
• President Hinckley quote when feeling sorry for yourself, "Forget yourself and go to work."