My mom, Chad and I are in the car heading down to Portland to meet up with my grandmother and her side of the family. The last time we saw them was when we went down for my grandfather’s memorial service and Chad was really sick and had to go to emergency. I spent the night at their house with a 103° fever. In the morning I threw up in their garden on the way to the hospital. I got to have Elisa stay up with me, caring for me in bed. That was the first night we “slept†together. It will be fun for them to meet him when he’s well.
This week has been insanely busy. We are so beat. Luckily the first half of the week we were able to take it easy. Tuesday morning Chad came with me to the temple and sat around waiting to go on the 7:00 am session. I also sent a box of delicious cookies Chad and I made, to Jason. But they were scheduled to arrive Thursday. They will probably be stale if they ever get to him.
Wednesday we mowed the lawn and weeded to get ready for Cheryl and Sean’s rehearsal dinner.
I made my first wedding cake. Tada! It was chocolate with a whipped Bavarian crème filling and Chocolate ganache poured over the top. Ganache is a kind of chocolate frosting. My mom helped me out with putting it together and decorating it. But I got to do most of it on my own. It turned out very nice. I am pretty pleased. Too bad I had nightmares that I dropped it and that I was late delivering it for a few nights. Elisa woke up every hour.
While I was making the cake, Chad was off single handedly getting six round tables and 36 chairs from the church to our house for the rehearsal dinner. We had people at the house practically all day Friday setting up and cooking and running things over. It was a little chaotic. It all ended up well, though we never want to haul tables and chairs like that again.
Saturday was the wedding. We started the day out by returning the tables and chairs to the church at 6:30 am. It was early. My reflexes weren’t very good so I started off the day by smashing my wrist under four tables. We were driving to the chapel on this smooth, straight road (at about 25 mph) and suddenly two tables jumped and bounced out of the truck. I still don’t know how it happened. We just ran out and rolled them to the side of the road. A half hour later, after we had cleared room in the truck, we finally went back and picked them up. I’m done moving tables.
When we got home we finished up decorating the cake, got ready and ran out to Seattle to greet Cheryl and Sean’s guests. The ceremony was very nice. We got to dance at their reception which they held at an old ballroom across town. Chad and I were in charge of cutting the cake and then we left to get a quick nap before we ran off to the reception of one of the guys I grew up with. They held it at a home just down the road from my parents. I was asked to sing a couple of sets of cheesy love songs. I got to hear Elisa sing two sets of songs and hear her practice. I was happy to have the opportunity and especially pleased to see how well my friend is doing now.
We have been working on getting things ready for Cheryl Smith’s wedding. That is why were staining decks and landscaping and getting the house put together. She’ll be having her rehearsal dinner here at the house this Friday. We also are putting our study together so Chad and I can hang out still when I start up online classes through BYU or at least all the times he’s working on the computer for fun. So we got a new desk set up and a new filing cabinet. It looks great and we’re really happy with it. It makes me happy every time I walk in the room. We don’t have papers lying on the floor like before. I walk in there all the time now.
We got a laptop finally. Last Monday morning we showed up at the store when they opened and they sold us their display model. The sale had started the day before and they had already sold all 33 laptops they had in for the sale. It was a huge blessing to be able to get the laptop for use with school and stuff.
We were supposed to go on an overnight hike with the Young Women in my old stake as chaperones, but not enough girls signed up so we got to stay home and work on the house. We ended going to this children’s theatre and watched a short little detective spoof. We had thought we were going to Gulliver’s Travels but we showed up at the wrong theater. Oops! The play we saw had been written by one of the 13-year-olds in the troop. It was good, as far as it went. Elisa and I get bored easily though, so we didn’t stay for the whole program. 🙂
My parents are building a shed. Since this is my dad’s day off we are going to go help pound in nails and put up siding. Then we’ll have Mom’s meatloaf, as requested by my younger brother Daniel who is no longer a vegetarian. Isn’t life grand?
Elisa and I spent all Saturday pruning our tree and staining our deck. They are both looking really nice, though you can’t tell how big of an improvement it is. We went on a couple early-morning hikes and jogs. There’s a girls’ camp hike that’s coming up that we are preparing for. It’s been fun because before I was sleeping in until 8:30 every day, and now I sometimes get up earlier than that.
I think the only other thing we were doing is planning our honeymoon. We are trying to decide which of the Greek islands are worth visiting. We’ll only have a week or so for all of Greece. Some of the places we are thinking about are some well-known names like Crete and Mykonos and Patmos. (I knew of Mykonos because that’s the name of a Greek restaurant in D.C. and Bellevue. And Patmos is the island where St. John got exiled and then wrote Apocalipsis). Ooh, and Santorini the one with all those white houses built up on the cliffs perched over the blue water.
The deacon’s quorum was fun again today, partly because we had three boys. We were talking about how God is the father of our spirits. One of the boys asked about the controversy of evolution vs. creationism. He’s only 12 years old too. I think that was the first question that I really wanted to know the answer to, back when I was in 7th grade and we studied biology the first time. So I told him that I’d bring him a candy bar for asking such a good, hard question, and I promised to bring the declaration, “The Origin of Man,†that the First Presidency put out in 1909. It’s an interesting document because it says that man was created with a plan and a purpose, not randomly and haphazardly. But other than that one hard and fast declaration, it leaves the door open for people to believe all the other aspects of evolution.
I have been working on applying to the General Studies Major through BYU independent study. It will definitely test my self discipline but it will be so nice that I am pursuing a degree again. I’ll be happy to have the flexibility with all the tentative plans to work abroad or finish a doctorate with Chad. That’s all my exciting news.
Ooh! We were able to put the bed together. It is absolutely terrifying. I was so scared to sleep on it for fear it would collapse in the middle of the night. Chad decided to prove his handiwork by full-out leaping on to the bed over and over again while I cringed at the sight. It didn’t break. But when he finally convinced me to try diving full force onto the bed, he admitted it was a bit scary to watch. No fatalities yet.
