It’s such a blessing to have a day off this early in the school year.  It lets me start picking up the remnants of my life after the last few weeks’ craziness!

Today I slept in, which is requisite, and spent some quality time lounging, but I also planned a weeks worth of meals.  I just joined Saymmm.com.  It’s free, but I was sold with the fact that I can access meal plans and lists on my phone!

I went grocery shopping and prepared a few nights’ worth of meals so I don’t have to do it after work.

I also did some laundry.

The laundry room looks cute, but the living room still looks completely stark.  I’ve got some kind of mental block that’s keeping me from doing anything with it!  Maybe I can just have guests start visiting the laundry room.

prints from Vol25 on Etsy and vinyl from Oh Sweet Sadie.

Not the sort of thing anyone wants to find in their backyard.

I found it yesterday afternoon, but I was really hoping one of the bazillion stray cats around here would take care of it for me.

It was still there when I got home from church, so I screwed my courage to the sticking place.  With some poppy tunes as motivator, I went around to the dumpster and propped open the gate and lid.   Fall Out Boy isn’t really Sunday music, but it certainly gets the energy flowing.

I grabbed the shovel and stepped up for my grand move.

And I couldn’t do it!!

There were flies.

There was blood.

It was looking at me!!!

I went across the parking lot to Sean who was just getting home from church.  He was very gracious and saved me from the feathery corpse.

My hero!

This cute smile came to spend some time with me today.

Small Fry was a little angel and I was sad to hand her off to another neighbor, but it was the last night of the Storytelling Festival and Betsy and I wanted to get to “Laughin’ Night.”

Even with the first BYU football game going on, the place was PACKED!

Bil Lepp was my favorite again.  Quilting, deer hunting, and car shaped bullets.  Genius!

I convinced Betsy that we needed to make a visit to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival.  It’s been years since I’d gone and I’d missed it!

They had some great tellers, but my favorite was Bil Lepp.  It’s hard to top a story about the great cow goddess Montina!  Part of Bil Lepp’s appeal is the fact that he seems half surprised by what actually comes out of his mouth.  My favorite line was, “She was omnipotent, of course, but she did have hoofs which is a limiting sort of thing.”

Thursday night = back-to-school night.  Ugh.

As Michelle put it, something seems wrong about a presentation you spend hours preparing that lasts 15 minutes and is attended by 5 people.

We’re supposed to do our formal presentation, have a 20 minute PTA meeting, and then repeat our presentation for another group of parents.

For the first session I had 1 parent come 10 minutes early and one come 10 minutes late.  No time to present.  I just asked them to read through things and I’d answer any questions.

We went down to the PTA meeting and met up with my team.  Aren’t they cute?

The teachers were dismissed early so they could set up for the next round.  I was followed back to my room by a parent who didn’t come earlier and couldn’t stay later.

For the last part of the night, 4 more parents came.  But not at the same time.  So once again I skipped the actual presenting part of my presentation.

And, after 12 hours at work, I finally got home.

At 3:45, Cass picked me up from school.  We took the wee ones up to the Scholastic Book Fair.

What a disappointment!  Usually they have rows and rows of books.  This time they had a few displays along one row and piles of outdated information books in the back.  That was it.

I found a few nonfiction books I thought my kids would like.  Cassity found a book for Ella and a cookbook.

Not a rousing success, but Ella wasn’t complaining.  She had a “Bo” book, so what more did she need?

Life Lesson: It’s surprisingly difficult to photograph the back of your own head.

I would have picked a different photo for today, but this seemed so appropriate for 2 reasons.

1. Got my hair done.  Do you like the color?  I wish the red didn’t fade so quickly.

2. About 2 a.m. I dreamed that I was teaching about bees and one got caught in my hair and started stinging the back of my head.  It was painful enough to wake me.  Then I realized that the stinging wasn’t part of the dream.  As consciousness slowly returned, I realized that I probably had just been bitten by something!!  I calmly began tearing apart the blankets and sheets and pillows and shaking my head furiously to dislodge the creepy crawly attacker.

I didn’t find anything.  I rubbed my sore noggin and went back to sleep, but all day long my head has hurt in that one spot.  Holly checked for evidence today while she was doing my hair.  Nothing.  No bump, no mark.  But it still hurts!

Hey! Hop into your time machine and head back 5 days to August 25.

Wow!  It’s August 25th.  Boy is it hot today!  Bummer about the power going out this morning, huh.  But it’s ok.  It’s Rudolph Day and that makes it all better!

Have you ever read The Gift of the Magi?  It’s not really a kids’ story, but it’s often classed as one.

I remember my mom reading us the story and getting choked up at the end.  I was too hung up on how to solve the problem to care about the deeper message.  I’ve matured since then, and now I’m charmed by O. Henry’s story of young love.  However, I can still tell you what I think should happen next…

A couple years ago, P.J. Lynch illustrated a new release of The Gift of the Magi.  I’m a big fan of his artwork, so this is my favorite version.

And if you’re looking for some mellow music to play in the background while reading this classic story, may I recommend Tim Story’s Asleep the Snow Came Flying?  I can’t tell you how much I love this song!  It’s so soothing.  If you were awake at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve, snug in your jammies, and watching the falling snow in your darkened room, I think this is what you’d hear.

When I went to college, I actually put this onto a tape (from my mom’s CD) and used to play it over and over when I was stressed.  It’s still my zen soundtrack.

I like my green tape dispenser.

Kinda wish I could think of something else to photograph today.

I got nothin’.

I bought this a few years ago when we were at a Words Their Way conference and we wondered over to Staples at lunch.  It was on sale.  We had to climb through a huge snowbank to get there.

Hey, there’s even a story!

I guess it was somethin’.

I was so glad I didn’t have to teach Primary this week!  Mostly because I was sooo exhausted from work.  Also because we had a full house: 6 three and four year-olds.

Plus the lesson involved loading stuffed animals into a cardboard ark.  My brain shut down just thinking about it.  Even if it was hilarious to watch them sleep for “forty nights.”

And I do not even own a giant stuffed penguin to use as a visual aid.

It’s definitely good that it wasn’t my week to teach.