We had our ward Pinewood Derby last night! It was fun having a project we could do together!
Obviously, Jason took the designing, cutting, and sanding much more seriously.
Is that my car coming in 1st or last?!
After working on so many sewing jobs lately for weddings, ward members, our babysitter, Esty, and Prom, it feels so vain to sew for myself again, but its oh so fun to be creative from scratch, and nice when I know my own measurements and can try it on every step of the way. Plus, I don't care how it looks on the inside.For every 25 calls and emails I make inquiring about such apartments, I only get 1 or 2 responses because things are going so quickly. Even working with realtors, I find myself making appointments at 11pm, to have the listing sold before I get there in the morning. Its feels like a full-time job.Its hard to decide whether we should move out asap so we're not in a bind when our place does sell, or if we should not look into anything and stay as long as possible, then freak out when we're given the 60 days. Wow, there are SO many aspects to picking out a home, and I worry about the consequences of each decision and don't want to regret moving my family into a bad place.
I keep thinking of a post I wrote more than 2 1/2 years ago that my brother pointed out to me. I pulled it up and realized how much I liked it and think its relavent to a lot of us.
I'm a big fan of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I could direct you to the wall of them at the local library. Lately, I can't help but make another analogy of how life is our own "Choose Your Own...", where we are the protagonist, making the choices that determine one of so many options in the end. In these books, at the end of every page, you have to make a choice, each option telling you what page to turn to next. You keep making choices, keep jumping to other pages, and eventually end up at one of typically 40 different endings--some rewarding, satisfactory, some death.
So God hands us the book and says, "Here, see what you make of it". Its our book, we're turning the pages, calling the shots. We'll always have our agency, the choice is always ours. We can read it how we like, but realize that its all about the sequence of events. If you skip a page, some critical element of your story dissapears and suddenly you've lost the direction of where to go next! If we read it the way WE think it should go, it doesn't make any sense! If you want to make God laugh, tell him YOUR plans!I think we're meant to enjoy the book along the way. We've all read and hated classic novels from high school English class, or college physics textbooks, but I think that this is one not meant to be skimmed. There's a lot to learn on every page, to take time and enjoy the story! Its your life. Stop thinking "I'll be happy when I get to page 88", "I'll be happy when I'm out of school". Learn to be happy on the page you're on, Camille! Choices are stressful, yes? When we get to that part:
If you decide to start back home, turn to page 34. If you decide to wait, turn to page 95....you start to get nervous! Don't we all feel that way at one point or another, that this ONE decision will set us on a plot line we never wanted? "If I don't study, I'll fail this test, I've lost my scholarship, and I'll have to drop out of school", "If I walk away from this relationship now, I'll never know if it couldn't worked in the end". And they usually aren't easy decisions, are they? If it was an obvious choice, there'd be no question, and everyone would end up with the same exact story. It's not always choosing between good and bad. Lots of times its between good and good, and we base our decisions on what we think would make us the happiest. And when a decision doesn't bring us happiness, we think it was the wrong one, but maybe those decisions are the ones that will lead us to a greater joy. One course will bring us the greatest happiness.
We may never know the many options that lie on the number of pages that unfortunately and fortunately will never be read. We think about that all the time, don't we? "I wonder where I would be if I wasn't a member of this Church", "What would I be doing tonight if we had never met?" I bet while you're on page 25, its hard to imagine what the end looks like. Even if we could read the endings first, and see what page we'd like to end on, we still would have no idea how to get there. Its supposed to be that way.God wrote it, he knows what's on every page. And He wants us to choose the best-case-scenario, don't you? Maybe that one designed plotline was meant to be longer than others, include certain pages that no one else reads, send you in some direction you never thought it would.
In some way, we can't write our own story. It's already written. But we can choose our own adventure!
Link's new thing is riping up magazines. He'll go to town tearing out pages of Dad's Economist.
Anything crinkly and crunchy!
Jason wanted to take me to Boston Commons Coffee Co. for lunch, where the paninis are to die for.
Of course, the city was swamped, and this was the closest we could get, but you can see the blue finish line in the back. Our ward was almost doubled yesterday because of all the visitors in town for the race. What an awesome event!
Lincoln konked out.
I looked up qualifying times for Boston--turns out my marathon time from Logan could qualify me to run here if I were 60-64. Ha!
To see us, go to www.radio.lds.org and go the last two minutes of the movie. At exactly 1:00:47, freeze the screen, and bam! I'm right there in the 2nd row! Ok, now look back at the temple door. Maybe six rows from the back, a few heads to your right, you can see Jason's head. At second 48, someone moves their head and you can see me again to the left of Jason for a split second! Cool huh!
What's even cooler is knowing how they made this scene. What looks like hundreds of people in the Nauvoo temple was really maybe 75 people at the LDS Motion Picture Studio in front of a green screen. They filmed us in sections of rows, then we got up, shuffled around and sat in different seats, and they filmed the same few seconds again and again. When they put it all together, we look like a huge congregation, when really, each of us are in there in 6 or 7 different places!
With Lucy Mack Smith!
So you may see this same outfit when we try again with family Easter pictures in two weeks; that is, if his pants will fit him in two weeks.
Then we went back inside, and tried these. A naked Lincoln is a happy Lincoln.
Grandmas, let me know if you'd like a 5x7 of one of these and I'll put one in the mail for you. Or maybe wait for the Easter photo shoot. I have a good feeling about it.
Lincoln and his uncles 
The highlight of the week for the boys was probably all the public transportation--we bussed, subwayed, and ferried everywhere.
Old North Church along the Freedom Trail
We served up some Boston cream pies, Red Sox hotdogs, Boston baked beans, and New England clam chowder.
Boston Temple
We spent a day at the Museum of Science (thank you Pam for the passes!). At this demo, they asked for a volunteer with a lot of energy, and appropriately chose Spencer, crazy boy.
Lincoln's new thrift-store snowsuit and typical "I'm freezing and I can't move my arms" look. 
Sorry to tell ya, baby, but veggies are on your menu all week.