Creative Play

Peter and Katharine played so great with each other today. I didn't want to disrupt it. They made a beach for the barbies. Peter made a surfboard out of paper and waves out of blue blankets. 

The brown carpet was the beach where couples were enjoying sunning themselves.

Very creative Peter, I love it. Thank you for playing with your sister! Bella sent me these cute pictures of Alive playing at the Provo Rec center splash pad today.

Looks like he loved it!

And Eliza shared these pics of Joseph and Mary playing with the duplo blocks we gave to Mary for her birthday. Cute little smile. 

I love my grandbabies. They are so sweet and perfect. Their parents are so blessed to have them to love and enjoy.

Abi is off to California with her high school friends. 

Two of her friends (the one in the neck brace and the one that hurt her spine in their accident) were going to go but after the accident changed their plans, so the original 6 is now 4 people, but she's still excited and they will have fun. They are spending a week in Newport, where we are going as a family in two weeks. Have fun Abi, we'll miss you. She is got a ride to the Provo airport and they flew out from there. She'll be flying back in on Friday. After dropping her off at Tara's house, I went to walmart to buy a gift for Owen's friend Afton. He went to her house at 10:30 for boating at Jordanelle and they were gone until 6 having fun on the water. I haven't been doing great at getting the kids to do chores yet. I let Edmund and Danel go play, since Owen got to go play without doing chores. I'm telling myself that I'll have them work tomorrow. Needless to say the chore system isn't going great yet, cause I'm not doing it. Here is the girl's clothes closet.Lily and Sophi's closet.

It's good from eye level up to the ceiling, everything below eye level is pretty bad. I didn't bother trying to make order of their mess. But I cleaned the boys room by myself while they were all out. I got a new idea for the clean clothes in boys room. I cleared out Katharine's toys, moved the toy box into the boys room, and that is where the clean clothes will go so that they are not just scattered all over the floor when I bring in a clean basket. 

I dumped them in there and now I can close the lid. Brilliant!

I went on a bike ride this evening. Corey's meeting didn't go great today. There were problems with the needles on the demo he hoped to do or something, so we fasted and are still praying, but the end is not yet. It made me feel a bit exhausted and "done" with it all again (it = Corey's project/career/whatever). Speaking of that, I saw this lego today at Walmart. Maybe I'll buy it for Corey, cause it's a time machine and I bet there's a flux capacitor in it that could be a fun lego/visual representation of his work.

On the climb I listened to a BYU devotional by Jennifer Brooks titled "That the Works of God Should Be Made Manifest". There were two quotes that really hit home. "Do we view our trials as opportunities to see God's hand in our life, His power, His mercy, His love? Or do we sometime just feel afflicted and abandoned by God?" (I'm more often in the latter camp.)

She shared part of her conversion to Christ from atheism. She said her first prayers were very simple, and they sounded to me like something I could and should pray for: acknowledge that I do not know what I need to be happy, ask for clarity and peace. Ask for the right things to happen in my life, even if they aren't the things that I think I want. AND that I would eventually, in five or ten years, be able to look back and see that the right things had happened.