What Have We Been Up To Lately

 Isaiah insisted that I go to his school for school lunch on the day that they served meatball sandwiches.  He has been raving about this to me for some time now. This is his favorite meal.  I was amazed at how good it was.  Meatball sub on wheat bread, fresh peppers, fresh blueberries, fresh grapes, milk, oven baked potato wedges...the best $1.35 I ever spent.

The other thing that I have been doing a lot lately is walking home with Isaiah and his buddies from school.  I have even taken them hiking.  They can't get enough of it.  They love walking home, trying to beat the bus, and devouring their hard earned popsicle.  The walk two miles up hill.  I love working in exercise to time spent with my children.  And I simply can't get enough of time outside in this gorgeous Spring weather.

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 We had a really fun ward Family Home Evening at This is the Place Heritage Park.  It was very fun, except for the incident with the insolent billy goat.  He walked up to Rach and swung his head to knock her over.  It worked.  I ran over to her and yelled at the goat and prayed he would be intimidated by my increased height.  I held her and tried to calm her by telling her that it was just Big Billy Goat Gruff and he thought she was the troll.

The single best piece of news is that we were able to motivate Miss R to keep dry underpants through the night with a promised prize of a Snow White Toy.  Here she is in Walmart with her reward.  I met a lady selling her book in Costco about teaching children to overcome challenges by changing the way that they think and taking control of their thoughts.  She told the story of how she had a son that was 7 that wet the bed.  What finally helped him to overcome it was that she would scratch his back at night and she would tell him how he was going to wake up the next morning dry. They visualized the whole thing together.  I tried it out with Rach and it worked.  But, I have yet to recreate the same success.  I am going to really focus on doing this with her though.

Other than that, we have been trying to sell stuff on line, cooking, cleaning, reading library books, visiting with family, and trying not to think about Dad's looming test.  He just took it last weekend.  For the week before his test he couldn't eat.  He would eat breakfast out of duty, skip lunch, and feel too sick (from stress) to eat by the time dinner rolled around.  I couldn't wait for him to finally take this darn test and go back to normal life of eating, sleeping, and enjoying other luxuries of life.  Isaiah has prayed for him a lot that he would do well on the test.  I think in the end this test will prove to be a blessing for our family.  Mark has been under such pressure. This makes the kids and I feel compassion for him.  We try to lighten his load and he feels loved.  In the end, we are blessed with a passed test as well as closer relationships.  This is the dream that we are living.

An interesting thing has happened to my heart as Mark has spent a lot of extra time with his colleagues at work.  I love them so much more than I used to and so does he.  We see them as vulnerable and desiring the same things that we desire.  Ther