Over The Weekend.

The summer is coming to a close with school starting for a couple of my kids, and myself, tomorrow, and for the rest of the kids on Wednesday.

The plan over the weekend was to get everything ready for school, which is no small task when you have half a dozen kids, but we got it done.  Done enough, anyway.  There's still a few straggling things I'll have to pick up with the next paycheck, but for the most part we did it.

We got the haircuts done and got the kool-aid dye jobs done.

Tell you what, I can't wait for that fad to be over with.

The kids are excited, and that's a good thing.  We have our first high schooler this year, four middle schoolers, and only one in elementary.

This school year is going to be busy with three different schedules, and who knows what activities, but I have a feeling it's going to be a good one.

Over the weekend The Man and I attended a sushi making class at Rice Basil.  I bought a groupon for the class back in February and had given it to The Man for Valentine's Day.

If you have a spare afternoon, and a groupon, we would highly suggest the class.  We learned a lot about not only the art of making different kinds of rolls, but the art of eating raw fish and not getting sick.

Did you know wasabi counters the raw fish?

I didn't.

I think I should stop skipping it.

Granny Suzann called and invited us to see Footloose at the amphitheater.  So we grabbed the kids who were home and went with her.

"Now we are like Kevin Bacon!" Guardians of the Galaxy Reference.  And also, I can't keep myself from calling it Fooxloose in my mind.  Youth Conference reference (here).

We've taken to rearranging the basement.  We had the three older girls sharing a bigger room, but the bed situation was a little tight on the top bunk.

We also had an issue of keeping the bedroom clean and how exactly to monitor that.

So we've spread the girls out in the larger basement area (pictures to come later) and took all the storage and craft items from the larger area and put it into the room.

I'm claiming it as a craft room.

So this was my project on Sunday morning.  And probably every evening for the rest of the week.  Cleaning out all the junk we piled in there to make room for the girls in the big area, and organizing everything else so I can have my own space.

It's been really frustrating having all my craft stuff out where the kids could get into it whenever they wanted. Things have been lost and broken so many times.  I'm looking forward to having it out of reach.

And I can paint the room whatever color I want.

Coming up this week:
School starts for 7 of the 8 of us
My mom goes through surgery for her breast cancer
Another follow up on my lasik (seeing 20/15!)
Dentist appointments times 6

Also, this week I'm back on my schedule of being a better me:
Running before work (ugh, so early!)
Purposeful study of the gospel every night before bed (starting Talmage's Jesus the Christ (here), I can't wait!)
Flylady routines (here) are back on for cleaning/organinzing

I got thrown off with youth conference but I'm back on it.  I do so much better in life when I have a schedule to follow.  Otherwise, I just get lazy and procrastinate and get nothing done.

Okay, Monday, let's do this.

Midway Ice Castles

Yesterday Cali turned nine.

Because she thinks she can do that or something.

She also thinks she gets to choose Olive Garden for her one on one birthday lunch... which she does.

This girl is all spit fire and sass.

So for her birthday we decided to cool her off a little bit by taking her to see the ice castles in Midway.

And can I just say, this is a must see.  Like, you need to see this at least once in your life.  You have to.

There were tunnels, tunnels that ended in a slide, Olaf, a waterfall, "slot canyons", and all sorts of nooks and crannies everywhere we looked.

And the textures with the lighting.  I was in awe with it all.  The Man said he wished we would've gone in the daylight so he could see all the texture of the ice better, but honestly, I couldn't get over the way the light hit it.  I think either way you see it is going to be spectacular.

And though we haven't seen Frozen yet (I know, I know, but seriously, when you have eight people in your family it's around $80 to see a movie, and that's without treats!  We have to patiently wait for the movies to show up at the local dollar theater), we knew Olaf when we saw him.

(Though the flash was killing them while they tried to pose with him).

We found an awesome ice throne.

You know it's good when all six kids insist that they need a picture on it.

If you don't have plans this weekend, we highly recommend going and seeing this.  Day or night.
You can find the information on the website here.

The ice castles will open through the end of February.

Just don't forget to layer up.

Baby, it's cold outside!

We got to watch some ice maintenance with a chain saw going on.  And we saw a demonstration with a guy sculpting the ice with a blow torch.  How awesome is that?

Also, while we were there they brought in this piano:

Apparently the Piano Guys are going to be filming a video there in the next few days.  I can't wait to see it!

Have I convinced you yet?

Go see it already!

Also, this is the part where I say I did receive compensation of free entry to the ice castles in exchange for writing this post, but absolutely, 100% the opinions, experience, and pictures are all my own.

Jayme Has a Birthday Party. We Met Beyond 5. Christmas Eve Eve. A Catching Up Post.

On Friday (the 20th) Jayme had her birthday party.

She invited a few friends over to watch Harry Potter.  Along with her food requests (pizza, root beer, brownies, cake balls...) we threw in some jelly beans and called them Bertie Bott's every flavor beans.  The girls made up a chart with their own flavor names, which included earwax, vomit, and prune juice, among others.

Pictures to come, as soon as I can steal them off of The Man's phone.

On Saturday we got to go check out a new band called Beyond 5, which my girls instantly fell in love with.
We stopped and grabbed Panda Express via drive-thru and then hit the road for our 2 hour trip to the concert, which was up in Logan.  Yeah, you heard me, 2 hour trip, one way.

That right there makes me mother of the year.

Since they're a new band we hadn't yet heard much about them.  They've just released their first cd, and have just gotten back from touring Asia, so the girls didn't quite know what they were getting into (check out some videos on them on the post I did here).

But as soon as that first song started, my girls were smitten.  Completely, number one fans.

And that might even be an understatement.

I waited with the girls for an hour after the concert for a chance to meet the guys of Beyond 5 and get some autographs.  We bought a poster for each bedroom and while standing in line one of the crew from the band walked up and gave Tayler a cd.

We had both posters and the cd cover signed.

And the girls snuck some selfies with their favorites.

I was so impressed with these boys, watching them interact with everyone after the show.  They were polite and genuinely nice.  Their music was upbeat with a good vibe and none of their songs has anything that would make me uncomfortable having my daughters listen to it.

I'm behind this group of guys 100%.

We listened to Tayler's cd on the entire 2 hour drive home.

Obsessed.

On Monday we celebrated Christmas eve eve.

Since it wasn't our year for Christmas with The Circus and we needed to take them to their other parents the next morning.

I left work early and went home and made wassail, and put a ham, rolls, and funeral potatoes in the oven.

Papa Mike, Granny Suzann, Lindee, Sam, and Morgan came over and spent the evening with us.

Granny made fancy hot coca.  Papa gave the kids his two cents worth.

We talked and laughed, and chilled.  And opened a few presents.

We thought about joining Lindee and Sam to go see the lights at Thanksgiving Point, but we didn't make it that far.  We stopped at a gas station for slurpees or hot chocolate, and then went home to let the kids open presents.  We wanted them to have some time in the morning to fiddle with their new stuff and check it out before we had to take them to their other parents.

This year I put code names on the presents. (I wrote a guest post on that here).

Tayler had some suspicions on a couple of presents and was hoping that she was reindeer.

When we sat down to open presents I told the kids to grab one present and make sure that they each had a different name.

The kids grabbed presents they had guessed could be something that belonged to them.

Cali grabbed reindeer before Tayler could and Tayler was not a happy camper about that.

I told them to open them and then we would see if they were right.

Cali happened to grab a present that could have been for her so she guessed that she was right.  And we went around the circle, the kids saying who they thought the present they had opened was for.  It finally came to a point where we told Cali she was wrong and the reindeer present was not for her, but the candycane presents were.

Tayler, misunderstanding what was said exclaimed, "She gets to be both reindeer and candycane?"  She was completely frustrated.  But then we told Tayler that no, Cali wasn't reindeer and Tayler's Christmas became perfect as she realized she really did get to be reindeer like she'd been hoping.

This was such a fun way to do the presents, especially as they unwrapped them and tried to figure out who had whose.  I'll definitely be doing this every year.

The rest of the week has been pretty quiet for us.  The Circus doesn't come home until after the New Year and I miss them so much.

I'm not used to them being gone for so long.

We usually do pretty good in how we handle the holidays that we don't have kids for, but we haven't quite found our groove with Christmas yet.  We visited with family on Christmas Day, but we'd already opened our presents with the kids so we kicked back with all our Christmas treats and the pile of new movies that I'd given The Man and enjoyed the holiday the best we could.

Next kidless Christmas, we're taking a cruise.  I'm pretty sure I might feel better about it if I'm sitting on a warm beach somewhere.