Birthdays, Houses, and Stress

This week was a crazy one.  We had a few ups and plenty of downs.

The week ended with Hank's birthday.  We had a really nice time as a family going out to eat at Olive Garden and then to a movie.  Henry called in a reservation as we left town to head to Pueblo and we were able to walk right in and sit down while the place was super crowded.  That was really good since our service was pretty slow.  We had trouble getting drinks and then refills all night.  But we had fun talking and enjoying the time together.  After, we went to see "Project Almanac" over at the movie theater. It was good movie and even Zach enjoyed it.

Tori seems to be doing really good.  She started Cosemetology school last week and is loving it.  She has a real talent for it, and I'm sure she's going to go pretty far.  We sent her a fun care package this week and hope she knows that although she isn't with us, we still love and think of her often!  She seems pretty busy between her new friends, YSLs, work, and school, so we are glad.

Henry had a bit of a rough week.  He's been sick with stomach issues all week and missed a lot of school. I'm not sure how much of his illness is from food allergies and how much of it was from stress.  He's been adding extra on to his plate by having Dinner Theater coming soon, joining the school musical, starting track, a new school semester with new classes, and some problems with his friends.  The week ended on a good note for him with a steak dinner for Hank's birthday and a fun game night with Kaitlyn coming over.

Joshua has been doing pretty good this week.  He's been staying after school a lot for Homework club since he's been put into a special class at school.  He's the only one in the entire 8th grade that passed his Geometry pre-test and so was put into a special class that allows him to work on a Geometry advanced project instead of learning the information with the rest of the school.  He seems to really be enjoying it which makes the morning fight to go to school not too bad (most of the time.)

Zach is still a 10 year old boy who loves to run, play, spend time with his friends, and read.  Or more accurately, he loves to have his mommy read to him and asks at every spare moment.  We are currently reading book 2 of the "5 Kingdoms" series by Brandon Mull and enjoying it.  He actually likes to go to bed "early" so we can get in an hour of reading each night, and is really put out if mom wears out and we don't get the entire hour in.

As for me, the week was a rough one. I was pretty down at the start of the week after the loss of the Lincoln school house. I was so positive we would get that one as it was the answer to so many problems and prayers. So it was pretty hard to swallow when the "no" answer came in especially when the reason was that we had been 10 minutes too late to be the first to see it.  But we were blessed and I did a search Wednesday morning for rentals and found one that had just been listed. I called right away and got us an appointment as soon as Hank got off work that afternoon.  It was through a private lister, so we didn't have to go through all the hastle of a rental company which was an added bonus. The house isn't in any of the school districts that we needed it to be, nor is it in our ward boundaries, but we went ahead and took it anyway since we needed to be out of our current house in less than three weeks.

 The house is by far perfect for our needs, but we really plan to only be there through graduation, so if we can live in a hotel room for 2 months, we can live in a crowded house for 3.  I think it will be good for us to be downsizing anyway. We have far too much junk these days despite two moves in the past three years. We seem to just keep bringing it with us and moving it around. Hopefully with a few weeks to move, we can actually get rid of some of it.  We'll see.

So this coming week will be a busy one as Dinner Theater arrives and we start our move.  I think the majority of the move will probably be done during winter break, which is the week after next, and I'm not sure how we are going to do this with all the borrowed cars we have right now, but we'll keep feeling blessed and praying for more blessings to help us find our way.