April Happenings...

April is already such a blur to me, but here's what I got based on the pictures we took...

As Tom and Donna prepared to move to Our Lady of Peace (hereafter to be referred to as OLOP, so try to keep up with my acronyms!) we began absorbing some of the stuff that they didn't want or need any more that my kids insisted we could use.  So that's how we ended up cramming an electric keyboard into Colton's very full room.  Charlie seems very concerned about it...

Colton likes that he can practice on this in his room with the door closed during seminary, rather than having to wait until after school

Jason also flew out for a few days during spring break to help Craig go through their stuff.  Mostly they saved pictures and I pointed out things that we could use in our house (like replacing the old brown couch in our basement with their very nice teal couch).  Jason also did the legwork for selling the Suburban, only for the Carvana guy to be very put out with us when he came to pick it up and Jason was no longer in the same state.  I guess he was worried that we'd stolen it or something?  It all got worked out in the end, it just meant a couple extra lectures for Craig and I (seriously, this guy was NOT HAPPY) and they put a lock box on car for a day before they came back and picked it up.  Presumably they were using that time to check for reports of a stolen Suburban.  Lucky we're legit!

Right after spring break, Kendra headed to Ohio for her Indoor Drumline competition.  Jason and Jeni were also there to watch Eli perform, and they made a point of driving an hour away to the venue where Kendra's group was competing and sending us pictures, which was awfully nice of them!!!

Practicing in the parking lot

And then here's their actual performance:

It was an interesting season for Kendra's team-- one of their coaches totally dropped the ball on the choreography and so they were behind schedule the entire time.  So that was a real bummer for their show.  BUT, Kendra felt like the group itself was the most tight-knit, fun group she'd ever worked with, and she really enjoyed getting to be with everyone.  Honestly, I'd choose that trade-off any day rather than the reverse-- an awful group who all hate each other but wins every competition.  So overall, I think it was a win for Kendra!

They were away for Monticello's prom, so they had a dress up night of their own instead:

Will, Porter, Malik (their main coach, who we love), and Kendra

Ryder is continuing to make progress with his pole vaulting.  I got to watch him set a new PR at 8'6"!

Camille and her friends, Mara and May, decided to hold a bake sale.  They'd been talking about it for ages, so I was pleasantly surprised when it finally happened!  They donated a chunk of the money to the American Heart Association, and then made a few bucks beyond that to keep for themselves.  Not bad!

Camille made three kinds of cookies and a pan of brownies!  She worked hard!

I don't know if you've been following the crazy gerrymandering stuff in Virginia (or the rest of the country), but this illegal "special" election was Kendra's first time voting, so that was exciting!

There's a woman in our ward who keeps horses, and ever since she found out that Camille loves horses, she has randomly sent various gifts on, including this fun medal!  It's very sweet of her.

This was because Camille tagged along for a youth service project at this friend's home and worked her tail off!  I think the medal says 5K and our friend figured Camille walked at least that much around their property doing picking up sticks and whatnot!

Here's another video of Ryder pole vaulting (successfully!):

I like how he raises his arms in triumph at the end!

That felt like a crazy track meet, just because of other stuff going on for me at the time.  The AC in our rental unit had died the previous week, and I'd been busy trying to get it repaired.  Even though it was "under warranty," it still ended up costing about half of what the whole unit had originally cost, so that was terribly frustrating.  And of course, we had to wait a few days for parts.  That was bad enough, but then to top it all off, our tenants decided to go completely crazy about the whole thing, and were constantly sending us nasty texts complaining about how it was too hot.  I mean-- it was hot for two of those days-- it turns out AC units are more likely to die when it's really hot!  But we did pay extra to have a portable unit set up for them.  (The windows at the townhouse are weird, so the AC company only had one unit that could work there.)  So right before I got to the meet, I got a super nasty email from our tenants (complete with a note from their pediatrician!) complaining about how unlivable the townhouse was now and saying that they had called city hall to complain about it.  

What the heck???  First of all-- it wasn't even hot any more, so I can't imagine it really mattered.  Second, they were moving out the next week anyway!!!  Why were they making such a huge fuss over this rather than just packing up their stuff so they could move???  Did they remember that they'd asked to end their lease early and I'd been super nice about not charging them to do that and had since been advertising all over Zillow looking for a new tenant???  And also-- what in the world happens when city officials get involved in something like this?  Would they make it so I couldn't rent out my unit???

The whole thing really freaked me out, so it was nice that I could sit with Amy (whose son Sawyer is also a pole vaulter, and also they own a TON of rental properties) and talk about it all with her, and be reassured that our tenants were just crazy.  I was able to call my friend Missy (who works at City Hall) and she reassured me that a broken AC unit that got fixed in under a week was nothing they would be getting involved with.  Whew!  

So while Ryder was doing great pole vaulting, I was a stress case.  But it was so nice that I have such wonderful, helpful friends!  And fortunately for my sanity, the AC was indeed fixed the next day and our tenants stopped griping at us.  Them moving out proved to be a whole 'nother saga, which I will for sure be posting about in the future.

Moving on now!  Speaking of Sawyer and Ryder-- for reasons I can't remember now, Sawyer and Kendra decided Ryder needed a group hug in the middle of seminary, and Ryder was less than thrilled about it.  I love this picture so much!!!!

Ryder's disgruntled face!!!  😂😂😂

That same day, Adam did Kendra's senior pictures and they turned out so great!!!  Adam is so good to us.  Those will get their own, very long blog post soon!  Stay tuned!!!

And then that weekend, Kendra went to Fluvanna High School's prom with her friend Jaydyn and had a great time! (It was just a coincidence that their dresses were so similar, they didn't actually plan that!!!)

(Am I allowed to say that I like Kendra's dress better?  Or is that too obvious because I'm her mom...?)

Also the same weekend, Craig competed in wheelchair basketball at his school and discovered that he's way better at making shots from a wheelchair!!!  Who knew???  Good to know he's got a bright future, whatever might happen to him...

AND he's still cute!

Colton had his final band concert for the year and every time we tried to get a picture of him he managed to be hiding behind people or music stands!!!  He might just be a Milford man...

Um, there he is?

Oh, so close!  Why did that boy stand up right then???

Or this one, where the band teacher walked right in front of him!!!!

And then, when Craig finally got a shot where you could see him...

He's pulling this face

To which Craig added the caption, "Do band, they said.  It will be fun, they said." 😂

We did finally get a decent picture, but that other phone is just barely NOT in the way.  At least he looks happy.  He really does enjoy band, I promise!!!!

And that was a wrap on April!!!!  We've still got about a third of May left to go, but it has already managed to be even more exciting, in both good and bad ways!  More to come soon!!!

Pictures!

Things have been so busy around here.  I'll write actual words soon, I promise, but in the meantime, here are a few pictures!

I was inspired by Adam's pretty temple pictures to try to be more artsy

Saying goodbye to the Suburban!!!  😅

This flowering dogwood was both pink AND white!!!  So pretty!!!!

Olivia is Kendra's baby!

Still enjoying climbing!

Pretty sunset!

Making "resurrection rolls" on Easter Sunday

The orchid Craig keeps in his office; he has so much more of a green thumb than I've ever had!

Camille and all the other library helpers!

Kendra played the recorder at a recent concert-- I love this picture!

More to come!

Our Lady of Peace

The last night of my parents' visit, Craig got a call that one of the retirement homes Tom and Donna have been looking at, Our Lady of Peace, had a room available!  They've been on a couple different waiting lists for months now, so this was very exciting news!  Craig scheduled a tour for the next day and crossed his fingers that this would work out for everyone...

And it was a little crazy, but it did work out!  Basically, the apartment they were seeing was only one bedroom and it was a little dated: oven with those old-school electric coils, ugly cupboards, ugly carpet...  It was fine, but it wasn't nice.  And we knew it would be hard for them to downsize all the way to a one-bedroom apartment, but the waiting list for 2-bedroom units could be years, so we figured we'd just have to take whatever we could get.

As they looked around and tried to make the best of things, the lady giving the tour mentioned that they had a two-bedroom unit that had suddenly opened up, also, and asked if they wanted to see it, too.  (I feel like I should clarify that it opened up because there was a mix-up in how the resident gave her 30-day's notice, NOT because someone had died suddenly!)  This place was gorgeous!  Not only was it way bigger (an extra bedroom AND an extra half bath which included a washer-dryer unit!), but it had all the upgrades-- a sparkling, new kitchen, crown molding, beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, new carpet.  All the stuff that makes a space feel nice.  When the lady told them it was theirs if they wanted it, they jumped at the chance.  We could not believe our luck!

Of course-- nothing is easy, so while we were thrilled to finally have a place for Tom and Donna, this also meant that now we had a ton of work to do getting them ready to move and getting all their ducks in a row so they were eligible to move in.  So for example, they needed a negative TB test within thirty days of their move-in date, but then we ended up having to delay their move, so they had to get new TB tests...  Stuff like that just sort of kills your soul after a while, but Craig managed to shepherd his parents through the whole process.  

And, of course, the way it all worked out, Tom and Donna moved the same week that our own tenants moved out so we were trying to clean and rent out our own rental unit AND it was also the same week as my choir's big Elijah concert!  Like-- how can all three of those things end up happening at the same time?  It's insane!!!!

So that explains why I haven't been blogging much these last few weeks.  (And it turned out the kids still had things going on, to boot!)  But I will be getting caught up now that we're through the worst of it-- hold tight, it's been a wild ride here!

This'n'That

Right after my concert, my parents came to visit!  My Dad had suggested we do a family temple trip to do baptisms, but I wasn't sure we'd be able to reserve a spot on such short notice.  But then Craig pointed out that we didn't have school on Friday, so we could just go during the day!  So that worked out beautifully! My Mom and I took turns sitting outside with Camille, who was good as gold for the whole thing.  And that gave us a chance to wander around sniffing all the hyacinths that were blooming all over the grounds.  

And after the temple, my parents bought us dinner at Chuy's, which always makes me happy.  (And, actually, we'd eaten at Torchy's after I picked them up from the airport, so it was a weekend full of amazing Tex Mex!)

Somehow I got roped into directing another choir for church.  This one was a bit strange-- so our ward likes to have "hymn book choirs" where we don't actually practice, we just invite anyone in the congregation to grab a hymn book and come sing during sacrament meeting.  This works pretty well for us, because we have a lot of people who are happy to sing, but most of them are too busy to come to choir practice.  So that's all fine and good.  But this time, for the hymn book choir, the pianist had chosen an arrangement of the hymn that had a (lovely) flute part and a bridge where the choir paused, and then a repeat at the end.  How was the choir supposed to know all this when none of it was in their music???  And they'd asked me to help out the week before by conducting it, so I didn't have a lot of time to figure it out.  

After much hemming and hawing, I did two things.  I broke the rules and actually held choir practice (for a hymn book choir!!!) that Sunday morning.  And actually a fair number of people came!  Way to be supportive, Rivanna Ward!  The people who came included my Mom, because I made her.  (But she did it quite cheerfully, all things considered.)  And then I made a poster board that I could flip as needed with giant words like "PAUSE" and stuff like that.  I should point out that I NEVER made posters like this for the primary kids when I was the primary chorister.  No, that's not true-- I did it ONCE, when we were singing in Spanish.  That was it.  Otherwise, I just expected the kids to learn the music.  (And they always did!)

But also, making posters like that is a big pain and I have terrible handwriting for it.  But I did it just for this.  And I must say-- the choir did GREAT and they sounded wonderful.  I was proud of them.  And, unlike the last time I directed the choir, I wasn't even nervous this time because I knew it was a terrible idea and none of it was my fault, so I felt like if it went well, I could be happy, and if it went wrong, I didn't really care.  Best of all worlds!

The following week was Amy's turn to teach, which was nice since I had my parents there and it's hard to work on stuff like that with company around distracting me.  My Mom was able to tag along to my choir practice, which is fun for me.  We went walking with Adam, which was very nice, but the weather had suddenly turned cold, so it much colder than any of us were really expecting.  Spring this year has been so wild!  (We warmed up after our walk by eating loads of chips and queso at Torchy's!)  And that night we ate at Mission BBQ before the kids headed to their Tuesday activities.  Good times!

Mom and Dad left the next morning, heading to Ohio.  And I ran around like a crazy person trying to get my house in order again.  And I wondered to myself why we hadn't taken more photos together!  I swear, I am the worst at that!!!

UPDATE: My Mom took a couple pictures!  So here are Ryder and my Dad:

And Dad, me, and Kendra!

Together in Song

As usually happens now, Colton's birthday week happened at the same time as TOSVA's Together in Song concert!  So that makes for a very busy time for me!

This year we were doing patriotic songs to celebrate America's 250th birthday, which I loved.  But I did think it was kind of funny-- the songs that the community singers joined us for were so much easier than the music my poor Mom had to learn a couple years ago when she joined me for this concert!  This year it was only four songs, and they included "America the Beautiful" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  I mean, yes, there were some tricky harmonies in there (thanks, Mack Wilberg!), but at least everyone knows the basic tune for these!  And they were ALL in English!  For comparison's sake, my Mom was singing in Italian AND German with us!  I'm pretty sure she also had like 6 pieces of music to learn, too, and some of them were quite challenging!  The difference between the two concerts is just wild to me and I'm really curious about the change-- if it was just too much for the community singers so Michael purposely made things easier, or if that was just how it worked out this time around.  I'll never know.

But my point in all this is that my Mom was a total rock star for doing that with me and nailing all that tough music!

For a split second Craig could see me, before that tall girl stood right in front of me!

I think at the end we had 170 people all singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and it was awesome

This concert is funny, because the weather in March is so unpredictable (or there might be a global pandemic and the whole thing will be cancelled!).  I distinctly remember one year when it was snowing!  But this year was warm and lovely, so I just walked with the kids to Citizen Burger Bar to get dinner after, and that was so nice!  It was fun to celebrate Colton's birthday after a lovely concert!

Guess Who Also Had a Birthday...???

That's right, Colton!!!  This kid is now a teenager!!!!

(It was also concert week for me, so we were quite lucky that I didn't have a long rehearsal on his actual birthday!)  We got to have his dinner and dessert of choice (Korean beef quesadillas and mint brownies, respectively) and the kids sat around watching Interstellar, which made them all very happy!  And I got to re-use the dinosaur candles we bought for Kendra AND the trick candles Ryder and Camille had wanted, so I was pretty happy, too!  Poor Colton couldn't get those stupid candles to go out at all.  We know how to have fun around here!

The next day, after my concert, we got dinner with Grandma and Grandpa at Citizen Burger Bar and ice cream at Chaps, where I got this video that I just love:

Siblings are the best.  How fun are these kids?

And then Colton opened more presents!

Unfortunately, he once again had a present that was super late showing up.  In fact, he just got it today (on the 5th of April, when his birthday was the 13th of March!!!), and when he opened it up--- Amazon had sent the wrong thing!!!  He wanted a bunch of filament for his 3D printer (the other thing that showed up nearly a month late), and instead got some device for shredding chicken?  I dunno.  It was a disappointment, poor kid.  All the other presents were great, though!

So now I have-- count 'em-- FOUR TEENAGERS.  All at once!!!  What in the world were Craig and I thinking????  I don't actually have any complaints though; my kids are all pretty awesome and not terribly dramatic.  It could be way worse.

And I have to point out two random things: both Kendra and Colton are celebrating their "golden birthdays" this year-- what are the odds of that happening at the same time?  AND, unlike the last time that Colton's birthday fell on Friday the 13th, this time we didn't have a global pandemic!  So you're welcome!

Happy, happy birthday to my Colton!!!  

We're so lucky to have you as part of our family!!!

  

Bentley Update-- Mexico MTC

I'm probably not going to post a ton about Bentley on my blog.  Most of the people who read this blog are already getting his emails, so it seems silly to post all the same news here, too.  If you aren't on his emailing list and want to be, totally let me know-- he writes great emails, and I'm not just saying that because I'm his mom!  But I'm only human, so I will occasionally share pictures that he sends.  I'm just so proud of him-- you can't expect me to not brag a little, right?

So yes, he got to the Mexico MTC without any trouble, and it was so cute, he told us how happy everyone in his district was when they all met up at the airport for the first time in real life!  And he's pretty much been doing great ever since!  

Taking the shuttle from the airport to the MTC-- so much luggage!

In the classroom

With his companion, Elder Carter.  They share this room with two other elders, and then there are about 24 of them in the house.  It's mostly just a bunch of bedrooms and bathrooms with a living space just big enough for them to all gather for devotionals and such.  Apparently the MTC was originally a really expensive private school before the church bought it!

His whole district plus one of his teachers

He's not so happy about the cafeteria food any more, so it's good this was documented early on!  😂

Apparently they spend a fair amount of their "gym" time playing pickleball ("Fastest growing sport in America, baby!"):

But Bentley got a little too into it and broke his paddle and had to buy a new one.  Ah, well...

I think this picture is so cute

Look at that smile!!!

His second week, Elder Stevenson came to visit everyone at the MTC.  It turns out that his grandson was there, also, and just happens to be best friend's with Elder Carter!  So Bentley got to hang out with Elder Stevenson a whole bunch!  This was especially awesome because Elder Stevenson just came to Virginia in June, and most of us got to shake his hand, but Bentley was too old to join in with the "youth" and that was kind of a bummer at the time.  So I guess he's made up for it now!

Also in the group of visiting high ups was Marcus Nash, who is a general authority seventy in the church.  What's really cool about him, is that his father, Dr. Nash, was the man who performed Craig and my sealing so many years ago!  He was my grandparent's stake president-- my Grandpa served as his clerk, and my Grandma worked for him in his dentistry practice for many years.  So I kind of feel like we're all practically family, right?

Anyway, they had a much fancier lunch with all these bigwigs to impress!

(You can barely see Bentley near the end of the table there!) (That might be Elder Nash leaning in on the right hand side?  I'm not sure...)

Anyway, Bentley was on quite the spiritual high his second week there!

So, naturally, Week #3 was a bit rough.  They had some drama with the sisters (I like to call it Hermana Drama), they had a lot of stomach bugs and time spent cozying up to the toilets...  But even with all of that, he still seemed in pretty good spirits!  

Now he's got less than a week to go before he heads to Puerto Rico and he can hardly wait to get out there!  And I am just so proud of him for putting in the work to get to where he is.  He's right where he's supposed to be, and that's such a joy for Craig and me!

This is another one that I just think is so cute

And then someone turned into an anima version, and I kind of love it, too:

Bentley just sent me a whole mess of photos, so maybe I won't wait so long to post about him again...!