Cleaning, Blessings, Honesty

This week has felt like a doozy of week. We had lots of things going on (primary meeting, visiting teaching, story time, Penny's speech playgroup...) and in between it all I have been working hard to deep clean our house since our landlord will be doing a walk through tomorrow. This will be her first time seeing her home since we started renting it. *Gulp!* It's not that we are horrible, destructive people but when you put 4 kids in a house that is super old and not in great condition, things seem to wear and tear easier. I just keep hoping they remember the condition the house was in when we moved here.

Tyler had Wood Badge Camp this week, he left early Thursday morning and came back Saturday evening. I happened to mention to one of my friends the woe of not having him there to help out with a few small projects that I wanted to do before the walk through and she nicely offered up her husband to help. I tried to dissuade her because her husband is in the Bishopric and they are busy people themselves, but she wouldn't have it. Her awesome husband spent his whole Saturday taking apart our shower, cleaning it and re-caulking it. It looks fantastic and I will forever be grateful to them.

This week, I also took Penny to a dentist here in Michigan. It turns out that for some reason, I am still not sure why, the dentist in AZ failed to fix two molars that had cavities (one pretty severe, the other not so much). The whole thing is a bit frustrating but the dentist in AZ does at least seem willing to reimburse us some to help pay for this work that he should've take care of while we had her under. We set up an appointment here to get them fixed and I am extremely nervous about the whole thing. They are going to give her a nasal sedation that will *hopefully* make her very sleepy and then basically strap her down in a giant swaddle. It sounds completely traumatic and I am completely dreading it but I am hoping this really will be the last of the dental work.

We also had Parent Teacher Conferences this week. I had Bunco during Steven's conference so Tyler took Steven to his (along with all the other kids). I was told that the teacher had nice things to say about Steven but unfortunately we did not have nice things to say about Steven. Steven had an encounter with cheating this past week. He decided to fudge his reading log so that he could earn a prize for having a full reading log. When I saw his reading log and all the books on it that he had never read at home, I had to have a hard talk with him and he had to in turn have a hard talk with his teacher. Teaching honesty can be rough. Benny's conference was better. He is really excelling at math. He still struggles with reading and writing but he is growing and showing progress so that is a good thing.

And to end things, after Lucy's song about wanting Jesus to go away last week, this week she told me that she wanted Jesus to come to her home. I am glad they are on better terms now ;)

Here are two sneak peeks from our awesome Fall Photo Shoot: