full days, full nights

Apr 15, 2013

The last week has been full of inspiration, friends, food, fun, new ideas, adventures, family, and excitement. It has been chock full of so, so much.

Hence, I haven’t blogged. Blogging requires me to have a little bit of time in a day to type out my thoughts and this week I had time to live fully, but nothing extra was left over for typing.

Monday

My pelvis had been shifting out of place for a few days and was giving me quite a bit of nerve pain, so late in the afternoon I was able to squeeze in an appointment with my chiropractor to put everything back in place. It is always a little frightening to me to have my hip manipulated because I do not want anything to happen to cause more injury to the area. He did a fabulous job and gently worked my hip socket, psoas, IT band, and trochanter till everything was back in their correct spots and the pain was gone. While I was there I asked him about riding my recumbent bike…see yesterday’s post for more on that!

Monday night during Family Home Evening we were treated to delicious cinnamon rolls from our friends, the Thomases. They were thoroughly enjoyed and quickly devoured.

Tuesday

Learning time. Cleaning time. Get ready for iFamily time. More cleaning time. Run to the store and get more chick feed time. Mutual for the big girls in two different places. More get ready for iFamily time.

Wednesday

Seminary. Play practice for Keziah’s Improv class. iFamily fun and teaching my three classes. Get locked out of my car by Miss Annes. Friend rescue to drive to Rigby and get extra keys. Very rushed dinner time for all the big ballet girls. Run the ballet girls to ballet. Rush home to hold a book discussion at my home on The Jew In The Lotus. Learn a lot. Go to bed way too late.

Thursday

Learning time. See the sunshine and no wind and realize there are cheap flats of strawberries being delivered in town today and decide to have a strawberry-park-library-bike shop afternoon. First trip to the park for 2013. Underdogs for Annesley on the swing. Kez, Fish, and Annes playing tag. Lying down on the picnic table in the sun = pure joy. Then a leisurely library trip where we discovered some new books and I felt like a normal Mama Tracy again. Then the bike shop to figure out bike trainers and the awesome bike store owner who let me borrow a trainer for the weekend. Sometime during the afternoon my cousins, Jim and Bev, dropped by our home and invited us to dinner. They were here from Colorado for their son’s college graduation. Blythe was the only one home so she gave them my number and we started working out a plan to see one another. Because of my hip injury and my breast lump the summer before I haven’t been to the family reunion for the past two summers and have SO missed my extended family. After some rearranging of schedules, we were able to work it all out to meet them for dinner. It was wonderful to catch up with them and visit over some yummy food. Jim even treated us – how fun is that?! After dinner we hurried over to a fundraiser for Dando Amor and OSSO, Blythe’s new passion. She is hoping to serve a volunteer mission with OSSO very soon. What an inspiring evening! We were able to learn more about the work the volunteers do, cry over the great need of the children of Equador, and listen to amazing performances of Broadway songs put on by Playmill performers, past and present. It was an amazing night. Blythe was able to meet with the director of OSSO and she has her heart set on serving in Equador for 3 – 4 months. After the performances, we went shopping in the lobby for special things from Equador and Burkina Faso. Keziah bought a darling bag, Blythe found an adorable wallet, and I bought some wire bugs for Fisher and Annes. We didn’t get home till after 11 p.m. and quickly found the two late nights in a row had about done me in.

Friday and Saturday

Woke up as early as I could given the lack of sleep the past few days and packed for the Mom’s Retreat for iFamily. Then, after getting to gym a bit later than usual, I taught gym, thought I was invincible and did two handstands on the vault AND rescued a boy who was going to crash on his head. The handstands were okay, at least they felt okay at the time, but the rescue did me in. I dislocated my shoulder and wrenched my hip out of place and soon had to lie down with ice packs on both regions. As gym wore on, my pain increased, and my frustration with myself went right along with it. By the time Kat and Heather picked me up for the retreat I was ready to be immersed in an ice bath, but I only had a dinky little ice pack to keep switching from shoulder to hip and my right shoulder was several inches than my left. Ouch.

Off to the Mom’s Retreat we went and oh, what fun we had! Kat catered the event and her food creations are always delicious. We had some wonderful presentations on nurturing ourselves as moms, nurturing our family, specific principles we can implement in our homes in our own individual ways to be more effective in our mothering roles, and stayed up till almost 3 a.m. talking and laughing as only a bunch of girls can do. The next morning we had more of Kat’s yummy food and then I did a vision walk with the group and we had a powerful discussion on our roles as women, daughters, mothers, and friends. After a quick cabin clean-up, we started home through gale force winds, lightening, and rain.

I reconnected with my children, took a catch-up nap, then got ready for our evening activities. The girls went to the Symphony to hear Beethoven’s Fifth and an awesome percussion concerto while Richard had a date with Fisher and Annes. I went to Stake Conference and took pages of notes, basked in the Spirit, and felt inspired to more fully commune with God on a daily basis.

What a week. Chock full of really, really good things. But now, I need some days of early bed times to catch up on all the missed hours of ZZZs. I