What a Day, or week...

Ken has been out of town since Sunday, he gets back on Friday. It's his first trip back to his companies headquarters by himself since he started in January. And this week has been a whirlwind, if he was here it would have been just as busy, but probably not as crazy. As it is- my Dad has been so wonderful to us; he has brought me and Rose lunch, went shopping for me, offered to help numerous times, and took care of Darin tonight since I was double booked. And this is on top of my mom being super sick this week, and he's been taking care of her.

Anyway, our days have been booked to the max.
Monday- Take care of household type of paperwork that has been piling up for 3 months, went to boys school, had lunch with boys, shopped for provident living mid-week that I am in charge of (I bought enough for 75- 72 hr. food kits last week, but so many people signed up that I needed 110), have FHE, Ginger was so fussy because she is teething, she got her 2nd tooth! Exercise for 90 minutes that night, I'm so proud of myself!!!
Tuesday- Tons of phone calls, load car with food, pick up boys from school early, spend 3 hours at the dentist (Darin is getting spacers since he is missing two of his adult teeth and we will need to save the space so that way he can get two implants when he is older. Let me tell ya, he really loves it when we tease him about how he will get teeth instead of a car when he is 16), drop off food for kits at the church, go home, laminate menu plans for 72 hr. kits, laminator breaks on us (okay it broke due to user failure:-), run to the Wal-mart to buy another, rush to church, help people assemble their kits, Darin goes off to Cub Scouts, clean up church and leave, get dinner at McDonald's (the boys totally earned it with hauling all that food with me, plus it was almost 9pm),come home, put kids to bed, unload car, organize and count money, food items left, etc, and clean up some.
Wednesday- Clean house, take kids to school (normally they ride the bus), spend 30 minutes complaining to Ken on the phone about how I hate being by myself:-(, go to Sam's Again (I have to buy more food because I seriously underestimated my ward's love for Chef Boyardee Ravioli and got too much Chili instead), clean house, host 2nd part of Provident Living Week at my house (it's the same thing as the night before just during the day, and it lasted from 10-2), Rose falls off the playground and got a fat lip, she is so sad about it. I go to put girls down for their nap, Ginger is asleep, but then me and Rose wake her up, so really no one took a nap, then I realize that even though the girls are completely exhausted that I needed to run a card and gift and card for the coach to one of the mom's from soccer because we are going to be late to the soccer party, and all the families need to sign it. Come back home, boys come home from school and Michael is waiting. I would describe him as their puppy dog friend. He comes over twice usually before the boys even get home to ask me if he can play, and he has been eating dinner at our house 2-3 times a week. They play for awhile but then it turns into me teaching them Math.

I taught Nathan the shortcut of how to multiply numbers like 7,000,000,000 X 8,000,000,000. Then he went to check his work on my graphing calculator and of course that came up as 5.6e19 and that brought a whole other explanation of how that really means the answer he came up with, and then that brought up a whole discussion with him about exponents, but of course at the moment I couldn't remember what "e" stood for but I told him it meant 10 times __#__ to the power of. I'm so rusty. The boys love my graphing calculator, this week I taught them how to use the converter function. We've found out all sorts of interesting things like how many billions of seconds there are in a year. Then Darin wanted to be really challenged and had me come up with problems like 459,000 X 7145 but he kept forgetting the zeros to hold the place and his columns were off, so I had to review that with him so he would get the right answer. And so Michael is looking at them like "What???" And it turns out that even though he and Nathan are in the same grade (2nd) that addition is slow for him and he didn't know anything about multiplication. He said something to that effect and the boys were like "What!" Seriously to them it was like they couldn't imagine not knowing multiplication. Like how could he breathe or possibly function without knowing multiplication. So I had to calm them down and make sure they didn't hurt his feelings but you could tell he already felt let down like "Oh". So I pulled out a huge bag of Dum Dum Lollipops (thanks to my mid-week) and taught him how to do single digit multiplication and the addition sentences to go with it on paper. He did really good, the boys liked helping him, but were so super eager to help I would have to throw them each a huge problem (having boys makes it so clear cut that if you give a man a problem to solve, then he'll go off and do it). And honestly it felt really good to see him light up towards the end when he was like give me a hard one and I would have him solve 7 X 4. We ended up spending a little over an hour on impromptu math lessons. And Rose ate about 100 lollipops, and Ginger ate 1 too.

Then we rushed to get ready for the Gifted and Talented Product Night at the boys school. This night is a huge deal because they are presenting their project they have worked on for the past two months under wraps at school. It literally is, they have to do all of it at school and we aren't supposed to even really talk about it. Darin did his on the Mayan Ruins. We've been teasing him about how he is going to save us so much money because we will use him as our tour guide when we go to Cancun for our anniversary trip. That started at 6:30pm. He did a good job, but most of what he actually told us about was the technology he used to make a slideshow, a powerpoint, and a movie. He loves computers! Me, Nathan, Rose, and Ginger left at 7:30 to go to Nathan's soccer pizza party (which started at 7pm) and we finally got home a little after 9pm.

It's been a couple of crazy days, and the rest of the week is going to be that way. But it's made the week fly by and Ken will be home in two nights. I would probably feel less crazy if I got more sleep, but then I've been spending 3 hours on the phone every night with Ken after the kids are asleep.