Spring Break! WOO WOO!

There was no school the Friday before spring break, so we took that opportunity to go to the Richmond temple open house!  It was so great-- as we were approaching, I told the kids to watch for the temple and their immediate response was, "We're already there???"  Trust me, no one ever said that after a drive to the DC or Philly temples!  

Angel Moroni!

It was windy that day and those enormous lamps behind the pillars were blowing a bit-- it was strangely impressive, and I was glad those chains were there to keep them (mostly) in place!

Bentley was going a bit later with a couple friends; Kendra had invited her friend Sophie to come along with us

There you can see that lamp better.  It's probably taller than I am...

Two days later the Nilsen family came to visit us!  The last time Tracy and Adam made it to Charlottesville was before Cora was born, so we were very excited to get to host them!

Cousin coloring time for Camille and Cora!

Of course, we had to take them to Carter Mountain.  As we were wandering around the store, Adam started laughing and explained, "This store is the Charlottesville version of Bay Hay & Feed!"  He's totally right!

And then on Tuesday we went BACK to the temple!  This time the older kids and Craig and I were all helping for the open house.  Tracy and Adam took Colton and Camille for a few hours and then toured the temple themselves.

Now we've got Bentley included!  That's better!

Tracy Adam and Cora!

Camille is ready to volunteer with her big siblings!

After that, we had dinner at Chuy's, which is always a delight!  The restaurant wasn't particularly crowded and our server took excellent care of us, so it was a great evening out!

And then the next day, we headed to Richmond again, but this time we were going to the zoo!  The timing for this worked especially well because Adam had to do some zoom meetings, so it was nice that we could get out of the house.  (He insisted it would be fine, but I don't know that he really understands just how noisy my kids can be.)

The last time we went to the zoo was in November of 2021 when Leah was visiting.  It was freezing and we were all bundled up.  This time it was in the high 80s and we were slathered in sunscreen and the zoo was packed.  But the animals were all still very fun to see!

Everyone loves penguins!

Kendra was extremely good at attracting the budgies!

She was also very nice about sharing those budgies with her little cousin!

There's just something so cool about rhinoceroses!  I think it's that they don't seem that far removed from triceratops...  

I just love how Colton is perfectly photobombing us back there!

This guy was happy to show off for us!

Bactrian camels are also just inexplicably cool...

We were hot and sweaty and all done by around 3pm, which was perfect since Adam was just finishing up his interviews!  Once we were home everyone showered, then Bentley made mac'n'cheese for the kids and the grownups all went to dinner at Mission BBQ.  It sure is fun having built-in babysitters now!

Adam and Tracy and Cora headed out the next day.  We were sad to see them go, but we still had other stuff to do before spring break was over...

Making Use of That English Degree...

So I mentioned I've been busy...  One of the things that has been taking up a lot of my time was that I offered to do some writing for my choir.  This began over a year ago when I offered to be on the marketing committee.  And then that committee did absolutely nothing: one guy moved away, a woman dropped out of the choir, the guy who was heading it up (who had always seemed super nice) just wanted to complain about the lack of staging in our concerts...  It just sort of died.  But that was no skin off my nose, so I didn't worry about it.

This year we have a new executive director, Christine, and she reached out to me to see if I was still interested in doing any marketing.  We met up at a coffee shop and I was pretty blunt with her.  I told her I was a good writer and I could probably interview people and do write-ups about it.  But I also explained that she would need to be incredibly specific with what she wanted from me; she could tell me: interview this person and write it up by this day, and I would get it done.  If she just said, Try to interview someone soon, I probably wouldn't get around to it.

And Christine listened!  Before our March concert, she emailed me asking if I would interview our accompanist, Daniel Hine, who had composed one of the pieces we were singing.  She'd given me only a handful of days to get it done, so I told I would try but to not have very high expectations.  Daniel didn't have time to meet, but I sent him a bunch of questions and he sent back GREAT answers, so I quickly wrote it up and-- not gonna lie-- it turned out pretty good, if a little long!  Christine shortened it a bit and posted it on Facebook.  I was so pleased with how it turned out.

I guess Christine was pretty happy, too, because she asked me to interview all our soloists for the May concert.  Four soloists, and I spent about a half hour on zoom interviewing each one, and then a couple hours writing up each piece (one hour transcribing the interview (which I really hate doing because I spend the whole time cringing at how annoying I sound), and then another hour actually writing).  Plus the prep time beforehand, googling them and trying to think of some interesting questions that will make for good content for our page.  That's a decent chunk of time!  Also, this is so embarrassing, but I never host zoom meetings, I'm usually just a participant.  So I had to make sure I knew how to do all that and how to record the interviews.  Craig was very patient helping me out with that.  I did find a transcribing app, but after reading what it gave me, I decided writing them up myself was better.  Maybe an expensive app would have done a better job, but this one was kind of worthless...  (It was pretty funny reading the app's version of each interview and seeing the weird places they thought were swear words when there DEFINITELY were NOT.)

But I've been very happy with how each write up turned out, and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about them, which is lovely.  I haven't done any real writing in a long time-- it was nice to see I could still do it!

Anyway, they're all posted here if you want to read them!  Enjoy!

Colton's Birthday!

Sorry I've been MIA around here!  Life has, once again, gotten very busy.  I'll fill you in on all that later.  First-- I would be remiss if I didn't note here that COLTON TURNED 10.  That's right, everyone-- my youngest son is now in double digits!  And we had celebrations galore!

In lieu of a party, he opted to go to Jump! (or "Get Air" depending on which rebranding you're going with) with Camille and Sydney.  (Beth was also invited, but then was sick that day; I felt bad she had to miss out, but also a little relieved that we wouldn't have to worried about her getting hammered by all the kids bigger than her.  And ALL the kids are bigger than Beth.)  They had a great time, but I should have remembered to pack shorts and t-shirts for them to wear-- they were very sweaty by the end of that hour!

I could never get them all in the air at the same time...

Then we stopped by Costco to get pizza and Craig joined us for a few minutes, then home to eat and watch a movie...

Adam made this AMAZING chocolate cheesecake.  We're so spoiled by him!

Our grandparent celebration was the next day, after my choir concert.  We went to dinner at Plaza Azteca.  We'd gone there a few weeks before for Donna's birthday and it was great.  This time around, the food was still really good, but for some reason we kept having to practically beg our waitress to actually bring us any of the food we'd ordered.  Each "course" would take about ten minutes of asking for it.  Seriously-- who gives a table an enormous bowl of guacamole but doesn't bother refilling your (very empty) chip basket?  Or brings out a sizzling plate of fajitas but no tortillas?  It was like torture.  Very slow, food-getting-cold-as-you-keep-trying-to-flag-down-a-server torture.  Ah, well.

Next was presents!  That part was not torture!

We still had SO MANY desserts around the house, you probably could have gotten diabetes just from opening my fridge.  So I told Colton we would just keep eating his cheesecake.  (Does that make me a bad mom?)

And then on his actual birthday he got a few more presents from us and from my sisters!

He was NOT tired of presents yet!

And I did make him an actual cake.

No--wait!!  That's a lie!  I was sick that day, so Craig made him a cake!  Craig did all the day-of birthday stuff that I normally do-- he brought doughnuts to Colton's class and made him a cake AND made him his birthday dinner of choice (Mongolian beef).  I mostly stayed in bed blowing my nose a lot.  Thank goodness for Craig that day!

It was a great birthday weekend.  My kids just keep getting older on me while I don't age at all, it's wild! 😂

Happy Birthday, Colton!!!