Yesterday was Dan's birthday! Whenever people in my family have birthdays, we make sure they have what they want for dinner, and there are presents, and cake, and every relative who's nearby shows up. So for Dan's birthday I had a few gifts, and he'd told me he wanted lasagna for dinner and a yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
So I made Deliciousness (oreo truffles) and mixed up his cake, and then turned the oven on to bake said cake... and when I opened it to put the cake in, smoke came out.
I figured it was caused by this mess, which showed up after I baked him sticky buns. So I let the oven cool off, and then I scrubbed and scraped it off with paper towels and a spoon and a washcloth. When it was as clean as I could get it, I let it dry, and then turned it on again.
And it smoked again. So I let it cool, wiped down EVERYTHING, and turned it on again... and it still smoked. So I gave up! And then Dan came home, and I was in tears because I'd battled this oven all afternoon and I didn't have his dinner and his cake made!
BUT... we figured out what to do instead! We gave up on the oven, and rode our bikes down to Little Caesars and got a pizza and breadsticks and a bottle of soda, and balanced it as we rode back. Then we grabbed some card games and a couple of the deliciousnesses for 'cake' and his presents and we went and sat in the park! It was really fun! I still owe him lasagna and cake, but first we have to wait for the maintenance man to come and look at the oven.
I'm glad it worked out! And I hope you enjoy your Nerf gun, since so far I'm your only target... Haha!
Happy Birthday Dan! I love you!
I'm sure you've noticed by now that we spent the entire last week visiting family. It was a blast! Over two thousand miles on the road (well over 2000), driving through four states... And, of course, it couldn't have gone by without some rather memorable moments...
We drove on a Friday after Dan got off work and after we'd packed the car. Four hours later we're in Montana and it's dark, so we pulled off and found a campground. This particular campground had an abundance of cottonwood trees, which are not my favorite trees ever- my allergies don't get along with them. So we pull out our brand new tent that my parents gave us for a wedding gift, and set it up. Piece of cake, right? So we go over to the car and blow up the air mattress that they got us as well, using the car pump. Another piece of cake. We take it over to the tent.
It doesn't fit through the door.
....figures. So we let some of the air out and shove it in, and I'm thinking that we'll have to blow it up ourselves, with no pump, when Dan says, "Grab the tent." So I do as he says, and we haul the entire tent up to the side of the car, where he hands me the pump and I crawl in and pump up the mattress again inside the tent. Then we carry it back down and crawl in to sleep. I'm pretty sure the guy in the RV across the green from us stayed up a few extra minutes to see if we'd come up with any other shenanigans...
Lesson: Make sure your air mattress pump is battery operated... or at least set up your brand new tent in the daytime at least once before use.
The next morning we get up and load the tent back into the car and get back on the road. On our way to Dan's parents' house we were going to pick up my foster brother Gabe, who was visiting his mom in Montana, and drop him off with my parents on our way through. No problem at all, right? Take an exit, grab him at the gas station, get back on the interstate. We cross the border into Wyoming, and are about thirty miles from Sheridan when we blow a tire.
Neither Dan nor I have ever had a tire go out on us. One time I came out of seminary and found one of the tires on the suburban I was driving had gone flat, but that was it.
Fortunately, both Dan and I know how to change a tire, so I called my Dad for his advice on what to do after we got the donut tire on while Dan and Gabe changed the actual tire. Near the end of the call, we were trying to see how far we were from Sheridan, so I sent Gabe to run down the highway just a little ways to see what number the exit sign had on it. (We could see the sign, but we just barely couldn't read it clearly.) He runs down there, reads it, and runs back. The unfortunate thing for him is that the tire blew as we were going uphill, so he had to run back uphill to get back to us. He's a bit of a clown, so as he gets tired he just falls over on his face on the side of the interstate.
"Gabe!" I yelled. "What's the number?!"
Without saying anything he uses his fingers to hold up each of the three numbers. I tell my dad, and he says we'll make it to Sheridan. As I'm hanging up, a sheriff's car pulls up behind Gabe, who's still laying by the side of the highway... I'm sure he thinks we hit him or something, so I start yelling at Gabe to get up, and he jumps up and looks over at the sheriff, who has his window down and I'm sure is either wondering what's going on or thinks we're crazy. Either way he drives off once he knows Gabe is fine. We laughed for so long!
The other funny thing about blowing a tire is that when we first got on the highway that morning, Dan had passed a Walmart semi truck at one point. When we pulled off to pick up Gabe, as I was merging back onto the interstate the Walmart truck passed us, and Dan urged me to pass it again. However... we were about halfway through fixing the blown tire when this Walmart truck passed us a third time.
"Dan! There goes the Walmart truck!" I yelled to Dan as the truck flew by.
"Nooooo!" he wails. Gabe and I laughed so hard! We never saw that Walmart truck again. It was long gone.
We spent an hour in Sheridan waiting for them to put the tire on for us. We got there and they had a used tire that they would sell us at a discounted price, so since we didn't know when the other three tires had been put on the car, (we just knew they hadn't all been put on at the same time,) we purchased it and got back on the road.
When I first got married, I was convinced I was going to be the worst housewife EVER. I really don't like cleaning, and I like baking cookies more than making casseroles. I'd rather be outside shingling a roof or hauling rock. When my parents got their house built and we were working on the garage, my mom would ask who of my siblings and I wanted to go outside and help and who wanted to help clean the house. I was the first one with my shoes on and out the door. When we were building I helped wire rooms, lay insulation (in the walls, the rafters and the crawlspace), move furniture, hang sheetrock... When I went to go to a Habitat for Humanity build my first year in college, they were delighted to find out I knew how to cut and hang sheetrock, and I taught my roommate how to do it too. It was awesome!
Now, I'm really not here to brag (although I might have done it just a little.... oops. <cough>), but rather to make a point. I never really envisioned myself as the traditional housewife type. But we're visiting family this week, and right now we're at my parents' house. Yesterday morning we moved rock out of the field with my mom, doing five loads of rock where she might have only gotten one, maybe two. That's my kind of work! (Although I felt like a pansy because my fingers came out all beat up and raw...) But today my mom asked me to bake a bunch of things for my brother's birthday party tonight. Like I said before, I'm not adverse to baking, but this would involve cleaning the kitchen, making four different things, and then cleaning the kitchen again.
Not ideal for me.
(One thing you should know about my family- we like to find excuses to eat or at least spend time together. So things like birthdays and General Conference become a big deal, more of an event than just a birthday dinner.This is why I dedicated a morning to baking. Sometime I'll have to describe to you what General Conference is like with my family.)
So I get in there, load the dishwasher, and then start making banana bread, followed by two birthday cakes (so there was enough for everyone), followed by four boxes of jello, and finished by a batch of rolls. It took a while, but I completed all of it, finished loading the dishwasher, and washed the dishes and the counters. And after that I went outside and helped Dan put together a compost thingy outside, using wrenches and screwdrivers.
And I have to admit, I feel very, very productive today. Maybe being a housewife isn't as bad as I thought...
This last Tuesday Dan and I and a bunch of people from our ward at church got together and drove down to help a widow from another ward. There are a bunch of widows in this particular ward, and they were getting together to help them and invited our ward to come too. We arrived at their church building, where we had a prayer, and then the guy in charge of the widow we were going to help took us aside to explain what we were going to do.
With tears in his eyes, this man told us that this lady's husband had had medical problems for a few years before he passed away, leaving her with three children (who I found out later were something along the lines of 11, 7, and 5). This lady was in her late twenties, perhaps early thirties, and it had been a rough thing for the entire family. He went on to tell us that she had been going back to school and had taken a job to help care for her family, and had accepted very little service. Our original intent was to show up and do a lot of yard work for her (she owns a good chunk of land around the house), and she had said that she didn't need help cleaning the inside...
...until half an hour before we were to show up. At that point she was taking her daughter to the hospital to check on a rash that she had gotten (I think it was hives), and she had called this man, half an hour before we were to be there, and said that we could go inside and help clean her house as well. As he was telling us about this phone call, he had to stop for a moment to make sure he could tell us. It was very touching, and I was pumped to go and help this woman.
We showed up at this adorable little house, and we were a little sexist and the women were sent to clean the inside while the men went outside to do the yardwork. Inside was a disaster- cheerios were all over the floor, the childrens' bedrooms were covered with toys and papers and clothes, the kitchen needed help, and the laundry room looked sad. The other girls attacked things as they got there, and I admit I wanted to go back outside; I'm one who'd rather be painting the fence or shingling a roof than clean! But I ended up in the girl's room, where I organized toys and papers and refolded all of her clothes.
Fifteen minutes into the cleaning, a couple of the girls had gotten two garbage bags and were stuffing all of the dirty clothes in it, including some icky-smelling sheets from the boys' room. They soon left in a car for a laundromat where, they told us later, they did 16 loads of laundry- using double loaders.
The widow (her name is Emily) came home just as the house was starting to look in better shape. I had finished the little girl's room and was waiting for the vacuum so I could clean the cheerios from under the couch and the table. (When the girl came into her room she looked around and called, "Mommy, look! My room is clean!" She sounded shocked, as though she never thought it possible!) The kitchen was just about done, and the boys' room was being attacked with a vengeance. I looked outside (at first to see where Dan was) and saw they were collecting branches on one side of the house, and in the front yard they were scraping off the old, worn paint on the fence and then painting it. It looked so nice! I didn't realise how much a new coat of paint on a simple fence could make it look that much nicer. A guy was mowing the lawn, and another gal (we dubbed her the queen of the weed-eater) spent a good chunk of time knocking down the VERY high weeds in the back.
Near the end of our time there, one of the guys in our ward who was almost an electrician came in and fixed a bunch of things for her, including two light fixtures, a light switch, and an outlet. More dishes were done, dusting, vacuuming, painting; the men were still working on the fence, despite getting eaten by mosquitoes, and the gals who had run off with the laundry still weren't back. I'm sure I don't have a clue about everything else that was going on. We were there for three hours that evening, and by the time we finished we were amazed at the transformation that this house and its yard had undergone. It was absolutely amazing. Emily made sure that we had enough to drink, and that we all had ice cream sandwiches. Another lady from the ward went home and baked cookies for all the workers, and brought them to the house fresh from the oven.
We waited for an extra half hour for the girls with the laundry to come back, standing in the yard in twilight watching bats fly around. Everyone was talking. Emily was showing some people a scrapbook and handing out jars of peach jam to anyone who would take one. We finally went back to our church building for root beer floats, donuts and cookies. We laughed and joked and we were all tired from standing and cleaning. Dan and I went home, showered, and passed out an hour before the time we usually go to bed.
Even just looking back, I'm amazed by how much we were able to get done. Everyone attacked that house ruthlessly, and we left it in wonderful condition. I can't even begin to imagine the impact that must have left on Emily's life, how much of a help it was, if I'm humbled just thinking about it...
It's something that I hope I never, ever forget.
After weeks of waiting and thinking and projecting, I have FINALLY finished one of my most favorite projects...
My jewelry board!
I've wanted this for a while now, because I've gotten a lot of necklaces in my high school career and even though I don't wear them much, I still wanted to keep them. (Right now I have some of the ones my dad and my mom gave me more recently, plus the one Dan gave me, and I cycle through them.) So I came up with this idea!
I started this months ago, and it sat on the floor in front of a bookcase in various stages for weeks and weeks, and when I finally finished it I was so excited! And then I had issues trying to hang it... I was so bummed. So I had Dan sit down with me last night and figure it out. And this is what I got!
To make it, all I did was wait for the right piece of wood to show up at DI, and then I brought it home and sanded it and painted it, cut and mod podged scrapbook paper to the front, mod podged the whole thing, and then Dan helped me put the hooks in the front.
I'm so in love with it. Plus now I get to see my necklaces, all the ones my friends gave me, and the ones my family gave me, and a couple that I made... What was really funny though is that I thought I was a genius when I first came up with the idea, and I was halfway through making it when I came upon this photo on Pinterest:
Excluding the fact that this photo is probably a little more professional than my photos, I felt almost juvenile when I saw these (almost!). I still love mine, but whoever did these (assuming they're handmade) took it to the next level. Darn it! Actually, the biggest thing that I liked about them was how they put the hooks on the bottom, so the necklaces were closer to the wall. Otherwise I really couldn't care, haha!
So that's what I finally finished. Finally!
Dan's family left today. The house seems so empty, so lonely... It was so much fun having people around to talk to and eat with and go places with! I don't think I can wait two weeks to go visit my family.
My nephew came too, near the end of their visit. This picture is from when we went to Montana, but he's so funny! Yes, I'm the one making him do that, but he's so much fun to have around. We went on a walk this afternoon while his mom and aunt and grandma went dress shopping, and we got to cross the railroad tracks and touch road signs. I have some trouble understanding him sometimes though- like when we were approaching a speed limit sign, he was saying something about touching the white sign but I thought he was saying something about the right side..?? But I finally got it figured out!
I should have taken more pictures, but I'm still so bad at remembering...
While Dan's parents were here, they not only brought us a sturdy couch to replace our saggy loveseat, but they also helped us figure out the problem of where to put all the kitchen things that didn't fit in the cabinets. Up until then we had a little table next to where the counter ended and had open boxes underneath that held our canned goods and other food, and the pots and pans were stored on the kitchen table. I'm VERY EXCITED to say that we now have a better, more efficient way of storing all of those things!! Plus I can actually stand next to the garbage can, instead of tossing junk over the edge of the table! And I'm SO HAPPY with it- I give a little sigh every time I get a can or grab a pot. It truly is the little things in life!
And of course the weather didn't cooperate the entire time they were here. The day Dan's family came it was cloudy, and this morning it even rained. The sun didn't come out until his family was literally getting in the car and driving away! But at least we got to see a rainbow. That helps, right?
I love having family over- I like having people over in general! I can't wait two weeks to see family again, I caaaaaan't......
