Weekend Warriors

Saturday:

Saturday was such a productive day - I say that proudly, because we don't have lots of productive Saturdays around here, unless there's a BIG "project" in the works. It was our turn for the boat, so we made a run to Saguaro Lake and had a great time. The lake for us is always a new adventure, since we've had so many "issues" when we take the boat out. We've had a flat tire on the highway, with a spare that didn't fit 30 miles from civilization, we've gotten stuck out on the lake when a freak wind storm blew through (in April... not Monsoon), we've gotten parking tickets even though we had the proper parking pass taped in our window, and we've had the tubing rope snap off while we were towing it. Anyway, Saturday was a great day! We all had fun, the lake wasn't too crowded, and there weren't any technical problems! The highlight of the day was for Ian - he usually rides the knee board and just lays on it (body boarding style), but yesterday, he finally got up on his knees... man was he excited!

Once we'd all had our fill of the lake, we headed back home. At this point it was 4:00 p.m. and I'd begged Eric to get the Halloween decorations out for me before the end of the day (they are up in the rafters, so I can't get the box down by myself when it's full). So, next thing we know, we are cleaning out the garage and getting decoration boxes down. Then Eric decides to get all the kids bikes back up and running for the fall. The heat in the summer drained every last tire and a few had leaks that we'd bought replacement tubes for a long time ago. So, an hour later, all the kids had working bikes. They zoomed around the court while we finished up the garage and I'm so thrilled at how clean my garage is now! It was a mess and when the garage is hotter than the air outside, it just doesn't pay to spend time putting things away. So, all was well, when Brayden decided to climb through my neighbor's yard barefoot. My neighbor has a cactus fetish and probably has every cactus variety known to man in his yard. Well, Brayden stepped on a branch of a shrubby type cactus (beats me if I know the name of it...) and started to wail! I scooped him up and ran inside with blood dripping off the bottom of his foot. We got him on the bathroom counter and he wailed while I pulled out dozens of stickers from his foot. Luckily they were long, so easy to grab with my fingers, but they were stubborn and I know he was in a lot of pain during the whole ordeal! After, that, he seemed fine, but we kept a close eye on him for a couple hours to make sure he wasn't going to have some kind of allergic reaction or something!

Sunday:

We had a good morning on Sunday before church - again, it's always an adventure on Fast Sunday because you never know how many tantrums you are going to hear about fasting (and no, we do not encourage our kids to fast until they are 8, so these are big kid tantrums!) Anyway, Megan and I hibernated upstairs, while Eric made a batch of chili in the crockpot and got breakfast for the younger boys. Ian always likes to pick something to eat that everyone loves on Fast Sunday. I can't wait until it's his turn to fast, so that he can't rub his "food privileges" in any one's face anymore! I spent a good chunk of my morning preparing my Relief Society lesson. I used a talk from Sister Bonnie Parkin given as a BYU devotional in Feb 2007. It was printed in the summer edition of the BYU Alumni Magazine, but you can also find it at speeches.byu.edu. The name of the article is "Personal Ministry", if you haven't read it, I suggest you do so. It's fabulous! But, the highlight of the day was hearing all 3 kids bear their testimony in Sacrament Meeting. Truth be told, I offered a reward of a "giant" candy bar to anyone who would do it, but they all took me up on the challenge! This is Ian's testimony that we wrote on a piece of scratch paper two weeks ago... we didn't help him at all. It was a great day!