MaeLyn's Musings

Today has been a long day. I gave a talk in sacrament meeting this morning. I had been preparing for it for three weeks, and felt like I had a good grasp of it three days ago, but last night I started getting the jitters. I ran through my talk in my mind, and tried to time it, and ended up with it being ten minutes longer than I wanted it to be, but that may have been because I stopped to help Hannah with a knot in her cross stitch project in the middle. I worried that I wouldn't remember everything that I wanted to say. I worried that I would repeat myself, or lose my train of thought and not have time to get through everything I wanted to say. As I laid in bed last night waiting to fall asleep I ran through it in my head again. And again. This morning I was still feeling nervous. I guess one of the benefits of having 9am church is that I was able to get it over with quickly. Unfortunately I was the concluding speaker so I had to sit through a youth speaker, an adult speaker, and ...

Happy belated Martin Luther King Jr. Day! We had an exciting three day weekend. On Saturday, I made the kids good clean their assigned rooms. (Each child has a room or section of the house that they are responsible for cleaning: kitchen, dining room, living room, or hall/bathroom/entry) The kids were rewarded with tootsie rolls for tasks completed, and by around noon, the house looked pretty clean and I let them get out the big box of little Legos and they had a blast scattering them throughout the house for the rest of the day. (While we were busy with this, Steven was taking his GMAT test, and got a really good score on it, too! He came home and submitted his application to the MBA program he wants to attend.) Sunday was busy with church meetings and relaxing. The kids spent a significant portion of the day playing with Legos. On Monday, since the kids were out of school, I decided that the bedrooms needed to be cleaned. Hannah sequestered herself in her room, the boys worked i...

How do you cope when life takes an unexpected turn? What is your first reaction when you hear news that surprises you in an unpleasant way? How do you deal with the day to day stresses and trials in your life? When the waiter at the restaurant of life sets the partially filled water glass in front of you, is it half full or half empty? Okay, that last one is kind of weird. Anyway, you get the way I'm drifting. When Steven came home from work a little early one Thursday almost four weeks ago and told me he had been laid off, my first reaction was shock - a brain freeze, and not the kind that comes from eating ice cream too fast. It was cushioned somewhat by the warmth I felt - like the hug of an angel, that I have come to associate with the influence of the Spirit. Why did I feel it just then? Was it just to comfort me through a difficult situation? Or was it to assure me that it was part of the Lord's plan for our family? The shock has passed. I've accepted the fact tha...

John playing hand bells. He's the short kid directly in front of the tree. We were way overdue. Steven's mom and sister were begging us through November for one for Kathy's Christmas newsletter.  Our most recent one was a year and a half old - from John's baptism, and that was just an informal one, standing in front of our garden. I wanted a good one. It didn't happen in time for the newsletter. Between sickness and busy-ness and everything else life threw at us, it just wasn't possible. Then the holidays were upon us and life got even busier. Hannah and viola after her orchestra concert. We had so many projects we were trying to finish - like painting the ceilings and walls in the living room and stripping and painting the kitchen cabinets, and doing the Christmas shopping and attending the kids' Christmas concerts and trying to finish the 2011 Calendar that I make every year. Family pictures were not the highest priority. About a week before Chr...