It Works

We've been talking about goals around here. I've been doing good with stepping up my reading and some of my good habits. I've been pretty consistent with exercise for the past 12 years. I'd like to be more consistent with not eating to escape my uncomfortable emotions when I feel restless or stressed. I've been doing pretty good with reading, there's just too much to read though, and I keep hopping from book to book, depending on which one I can find at the moment (since I move my books from my room to the car or to the table and then can't find the one I was just reading, so I have to pick a different one, so I'm in like 10 and not finishing any of them... So I need to also get more organized and clean up around here. I haven't been caring about the mess that much lately. I'll blame it on the winter blues. Hopefully it will return in spring as warmer days of sunshine return. One thing I did try to do today was to help Owen with his homework. And I was successful! 

So Owen earned a party with friends this past weekend for doing an AMAZING job with his checklist. He was the first kid to finish! I appreciated him playing along. I updated the checklist for February and March, cause there is one area in his life that is lacking... reading and spelling. This was evidence by very poor spelling test scores that I saw in his folder last night - 3 out of 15. Ugh. I don't do a good job checking his folder, and he doesn't do a good job showing me his folder, so it's a loose-loose. I like never see his spelling words and never have helped him practice them. So last night, we sat down, and it wasn't an assignment and his teacher didn't say anything about it, but I had him write all the words he missed three times. As we were starting that though, after the first few words, we had to stop, had to tell him HOW TO HOLD A PENCIL (I remember getting HOUNDED on that in 2nd grade.... I can't believe he is able to get away with his incorrect hold!) and had to practice writing out each letter, where it starts, a j starts in the middle then down with the candycane and then the dot) which way the circle goes around on b's, d's, p's, & q's, and do lower case d not an uppercase D, and some technical things like that. OK - after 10 minutes of practicing each letter, then doing a row of the ones he got wrong, we were ready. Back to the spelling words. He did each words each 3 times, and I could tell he was concentrating cause he was sticking out his tongue, it was cute. I had him take both his Alphabet paper and his corrected spelling words to school to show his teacher today. He got home, I asked him if he showed, her, he said yes, and then I opened his folder and found TWO MORE spelling tests, 4/15...

...and 2/15, doh... 

And his poor teacher didn't write the correct words for him on the 2/15 one... She's probably like "I don't have time to write out ALL the words for this kid every week... doesn't his mother help him!?!?" I had no clue where the original list was, so we had to try and decipher this 3rd graders poor handwriting. Owen's sisters tried to help me. Owen wasn't self conscious or beating himself up over his poor performances, so that's good? We never did figure out what #11 was. Natalie said "I don't think that would be a spelling word..." Did he put "succeed" twice? It was like a game trying to figure out the word, and it was a fun game. Even Owen had no clue what he wrote for most of these. His small g's weren't under the line, so they looked like backward e's, all his Ds are uppercase, and his r's could be v's and his u's and n's looked the same too... any idea on some of these? We did the best we could, I didn't have him redo these ones, but I did decide to text his teacher and ask what the spelling words were going to be for his test TOMORROW. She replied right away (with an image of the paper that was once again misplaced at our home): eagle, grown, clown, bread, reach, cried, owl, crow tough, snow, crew, young, screw, spread, tough. "Tough" was there twice, so he'll probably have one mystery word that we won't have practiced, but I'm hopeful. We practiced them all before he went to trumpet, and he wrote them very carefully and correctly. We reviewed them orally in the car on the drive to his trumpet lesson, and we had a practice test when we got home. He only got one wrong! He spelled eagle "eagel" which I think is a totally understandable mistake. 13/14. AMAZING job. I told him that if he gets 100% tomorrow, I will give him a lego set (the kids are a little jealous with how much Peter has been able to cash in on toys this week cause of his croup...) Yes, Owen, you can have the Boba Fett lego set if you get 100%! We're going to review the words again in the morning. He's got this! I will try to be a better mother and teacher of my children. I gotta help them learn to write properly, spell correctly, and how to hold their pencils! It's important! Going to help the kids currently in school and the ones coming up the pipeline. That's you in the fall, Pete! 

Don't get too comfortable. Cute K tuckered out. After a good evening of helping kids with homework, taking O to his lesson, etc, I left for the temple and Natalie woke her up after I left.

I'm grateful my kids are so helpful to me, I will work to be more helpful to them as they learn. Putting it on my checklist. Setting goals and keeping ourselves accountable works. I'm glad we're all here to help each other. 

Ethan and Corey are 10 days into their Nazarite Vow challenge with each other. Every day they start a timer when they start their study of the Book of Mormon, and then send each other a screen shot of their time. Yesterday they reported to each other of what a great day it had been. One of Ethan's goals is daily temple attendance (wow!) and even on Monday, when temples are closed, he just walked on the temple grounds. 

Each day he does something: sealings, initatories, a session, baptisms, repeat. Corey said that he, too, can tell that he is able to better hear the quiet promptings of the Holy Ghost when he's firing on all his spiritual cylinders. Today he had a question of where to find some lead aprons for an x-ray test he's doing tomorrow in Logan, and he followed a prompting to go to the store, and on the way there, he passed by a friend's house who is a dentist, and he then reached out to him to ask if he had some lead aprons Corey could borrow, and he did! As he shared with the kids tonight how good things are going for him and Ethan, Corey told them "I've never seen commitment to God and his gospel NOT work in improving people's lives." Then explained that the greatest variable is whether we really are drawing closer to God, or if we just think we're doing everything when we're actually not giving 100%. Two years ago, when Corey saw a note from 6 months prior that told him he was pre-diabetic, he was shocked cause he felt like he was a healthy person. "Surely you're not talking about me! True, I can't tell you the last time I exercised in the past 5-10 years... but I consider myself healthy!" Just cause we see ourselves as healthy or righteous doesn't mean that we're doing everything we should be doing, or that there's not room for improvement. Ethan said, after the first few days of the Nazarite Vow, he was surprised to realize he actually had NOT been doing that great in offering earnest prayers, reading his scriptures, or attending the temple. Keeping score on ourselves helps. When Ethan's friend Truman heard of Eth's temple attendance commitment, he was amazed... "How do you find the time?!" Ethan replied "Well, you watched that youtube movie yesterday for over an hour..." Ethan has cut out time killers, like all social media (that's one of his vow goals), and when you do that, it's amazing to find how much time those things suck away from your day. So, good job Ethan and Corey! They are really striving to follow God, and that's set a good example for all of us to work harder to follow, too.