Two weeks ago was my firstborn’s birthday. He turned 17. It is so hard to believe he’s that old and that I’m old! He is such an impressive kid. He does a lot of good things on his own initiative and is anxiously engaged in many good causes. This past year has been interesting watching him start to date and learn how to drive. I was hoping he would wait until he was off his mission to do both but no luck with that. Every year I wonder what fancy treat I can make for him to celebrate. I am sure he’s tired of my whole food birthday cakes that taste like cardboard. This year I found a recipe in Kim Simmerman’s cookbook. She spoke at the TJED forum over a year ago and sold a cookbook that i love, except for the lack of salt in her recipes. Last winter I sued a recipe from my friend Tara for a soaked overnight whole wheat flour birthday cake. I learned from Tara the idea of using slightly sweetened whipped cream for frosting. I absolutely love that idea. This time I thought I would try Kim’s recipe.. Her recipe involved a layer cake with ice cream in the middle. I was going to make it totally from scratch and whole foodsy, including the ice cream, but I ran out of time for the homemade ice cream. It turned out to be a hit anyway. The oohs and aahs that came as I served it were worth every ounce of effort I put into it.

The next day was Constitution day. Hardly no one knows that these days because we are so ignorant of history. Homeschooling definitely has increased my knowledge of history. I passed the A.P. U.S. history exam in high school so I have a rudimentary knowledge of it but I am always learning more about history in our homeschooling and I love that. I love the Constitution Day celebration that Bountiful City has with all of the flags and activities. My daughter won the Constitution Bowl with her commonwealth school team that was part of it. Her school beat all the other high school teams last year, as a “junior high” age level team. Only one team was willing to come back this year, a charter high school, and the commonwealth school won again, to no one’s surprise. As a parenthetical aside, the judge of the competition urged us all to go home and Google Elder Dallin Oaks’ talk on the Constitution that he have the night before in SLC. I found it here. http://www.ksl.com/?sid=12472423&nid=148

As always I love watching a good mental competition. I got this great idea all of a sudden and suggested to my daughter that maybe we form a homeschoolers’ academic decathlon team, after explaining a bit about it. She said, “So then we would have to spend all our time studying trivial things that no one in the real world cares about.” She had a point there. At least for the Constitution Bowl, she is studying important things that no one in the real world cares about.

The next day was Sunday. I was gearing up for another day of wrestling with my son in church. He is in that limbo state of being able to walk but not old enough to to go to nursery. So basically, church is kind of a drag, because he is so active. He won’t take naps anymore during church, even though it is from 1-4 which is prime nap time for one year -olds. He ended up throwing ups so I get to stay home from church with him and that was a huge break because he ended up sleeping the whole time. Oh, how lovely was that! I always wanted a big family Sometimes the logistics and responsibilities of mothering a crew from ages 1 to 17 get so overwhelming that I have to remind myself that I wanted a big family and I am living my dream. I have to take advantage of these nap times to catch my breath and sharpen the saw. I had fun studying Isaiah while he was asleep at the COOL website the LDS Church has for scripture study at http://scriptures.byu.edu I found some really interesting quotes from Brigham Young and Orson Pratt.

The quote from Brigham Young was about how a woman can learn all sorts of interesting cool things and think she is really something but if she doesn’t know how to help her husband by managing her home providently then her knowledge isn’t worth as much as she might think. I have to confess, I started to feel like this was a HUGE hint from the Lord, that he was talking to me. I won’t tell you how old the clothes are in my mending pile! This was the Lord telling me to stick with the plan I made a year ago last fall to retrench on my homemaking efforts

This last week started out with a bang on Monday with my two core phasers getting sick on Monday. Baby brother had been sick the day before. and I guess they caught it from him. It was actually quite hilarious looking back on it. Mondays have turned into our busy day. I am still figuring out when to exercise now that my baby doesn’t sleep as much in the morning. I used to exercise when he went down for a morning nap but he doesn’t always nap in the morning any more. So I had decided to exercise after I dropped my two middle boys off at their love of learning/transition to scholar weekly class and my older scholar son at his speech and debate class.

So I was settled into the park in South Weber down the street from the debate house. Baby was asleep in the car with the windows rolled down of course. Core phasers were playing on the playground. I started my fast walk to build up to my run. (I can now run for fifteen minutes at a time without feeling like I am going to die. This is a big deal for me. I have never been a runner. But the book Running With Angels, along with my fat, has inspired me.) Then the baby woke up when I was in the middle of my run. He had a full diaper that needed changing desperately or I would be sorry If I waited. So I changed him. Then my daughter yelled that she felt like throwing up. So she did. We covered it up with dirt the best we could. Then she and her brother needed to go potty. There is no rest for mothers, or exercise, at least focused exercise for the point of exercising. We get our exercise in running around to fulfill our children’s needs.

By the time I got home after finishing my walk/dash/run with interruptions, aborting a trip to the grocery store for fear my daughter might upchuck there, and driving all over to pick up the three brothers, my daughter and her brother were alternating turns throwing up. It took over an hour to go back and forth up the stairs emptying their buckets and cleaning out the car and the car seat where my son had thrown up. I felt like I was playing that arcade game where the groundhogs keep popping out in different places. Through all of this I listened to my iPod, the Isaiah podcasts from http://byub.org/scripturediscussions. That made cleaning up actually fun. I learn so much from these. Another thing that helped with the drudgery of cleaning up was thinking, “I am doing something for them that they can’t do themselves. I am acting as a savior on their behalf.

Needless to say dinner was simple with plain brown rice and canned vegetables. UGH! That’s all I had time to muster up. FHE was very simple and then we went to bed, skipping the ice cream leftover from the birthday. What a depressing day. The clean laundry was all over the family room. I wondered if I would ever have the energy or time to do more than care for sick people to organize the troops into folding the luandry nad putting it away. I wondered if my two children would ever stop throwing up.

During the night my other son started throwing up as well. Fortunately I had a bowl right by him when he had gone to sleep. As I revived my body from its comatose/sleep state to empty my son’s bowl, I thought of the scripture, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” That made getting out of bed easier. The next time you have to clean up after your kids throw up, try thinking that thought. It helps!

Everybody ended up getting sick but my husband and me and the oldest. They all got better thank goodness. I was going to write more about my week last week, including closet webinar I’ve been participating in to help me become more of a Mary Poppins at homeschooling and the Relief Society general broadcast, but that will have to wait till next time.