December Week #3

This week was both more and less busy somehow...  We had a couple nights with NOTHING happening, which was delightful.  But also two nights where I had three hour plus rehearsals and Craig had to chaperone the Jazz Band concert one night (which he actually loves doing), so the busy nights were REALLY busy.  If that makes sense.  When we were home, Craig and I each took turns helping the kids wrap presents.

I tried to document that, and ended up with all these terrible pictures:

Angry Ryder, goofy Colton and... what is Camille doing???

Angry everyone!  Colton is about to punch the present???

This was the best I got, and none of them look good. Sigh.  It's a good thing I'm not some big instagrammer!

This reconfirmed for me that the photographer who did our family portraits is a miracle worker.

Anyway.

Saturday was my concert day AND it was the day for the youth temple trip.  So we were trying to figure out rides for him, babysitting for our little kids, and getting me to both my concerts and Craig and Kendra meeting up with his parents at one of the concerts.  It all felt very complicated.  We managed to make it all happen, despite my kids informing their babysitter that we didn't them her until Monday (WHAT THE HECK????  WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS????  AND WHY WOULD SHE LISTEN TO THEM???????).  In fact, now that I'm typing this, all things went pretty smoothly, considering!

Pretty Christmas concert!

I went to the after party for a bit and actually enjoyed myself (I suck at mingling in large crowds, so this was rather remarkable).  When the girl I'd driven with said she needed to go, I was actually a little sorry to be leaving already!  But then I got home to find Ryder up looking like this:

In all the hustle and bustle of the day, I'd completely forgotten to give him his daily dose of Zyrtec.  Poor guy!

We kept him up for a while making sure his allergies didn't get worse.  I think we need to get an epi-pen for that kid.  Despite our testing, we have NO idea what's causing this.

While we stayed up late, Ryder and I amused ourselves by trying on Craig's glasses.

Oh, yeah, I'm smokin.  Also, because of the towel rod behind me, it sort of looks like I'm sporting some very wacky pigtails!

Ryder looks like quite the intellectual!

Sadly, I totally forgot that church was delayed the next Sunday and Craig didn't think to remind me until after I'd woken everyone up.  I'm still kicking myself for that!  But church was lovely.  And short!

And then that afternoon we did our Angel Tree stuff and visited a widow in our ward.  This was hard, quite frankly.  This lady lives in a smoky trailer (her husband was a smoker and MAN that stuff just never goes away), she's hard of hearing, and between her mumbling and her accent, she's incredibly difficult to understand.  All this to say, this was not an act of service I was looking forward to, but I was very proud of my kids who did their best to gamely sit politely and be kind and attentive while we tried to visit.

And then, that night, our neighbors held their annual solstice party.  As I just said, I am not good at mingling, so I sort of dread things like this (while I simultaneously desperately want to get invited because I hate being left out even more.  I'm a puzzlement).  But-- magic-- I actually had a really great time!  We probably kept the kids out way too late, considering they were all on the brink of being sick.  But I was enjoying chatting with people around the fire and really did hate to leave.

Weird.  But nice!