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Friday around lunch time I noticed at package on my front step. We get packages quite often, usually it’s something for the business. James said he wasn’t expecting anything and I knew I hadn’t ordered anything so my first thought was it was something delivered to us accidentally. I picked up the box and saw that it was to Chevon Bayless from A. Bayless in PA! A package from my sister-in-law Amanda to me! Amanda is a notoriously great gift giver. She is one of the most thoughtful people when it comes to gift giving. She sends my kids birthday and Christmas gifts, she sent matching dresses for the girls when Avery was born. She sent my mother-in-law this awesome strawberry slicer and when I e-mailed her to see where she bought it, she sent me one too! One of my favorite sweaters was from her! She always remembers everyone’s everything. So getting a package from her was exciting! Inside the box was some chocolate’s, slippers, a CD, a magazine, a recipe book, popcorn, a cute tote bag, and the above note. I read the note and started to cry. As I mentioned in my previous post, things have been rough lately. It meant so much to me that someone was thinking of me and, as silly as it might sound, it’s means a lot to me that people actually read this blog. I have always loved writing and blogging is such a convenient way to put my thoughts into words. I now know of two people who live out of my state that read my blog! Granted, they are both relatives, but still! I want to say thank you to Amanda, you are wonderful! I have been inspired by you to be more thoughtful and remember the people around me and what they might be going through. I really wish you lived closer so I could see you and your family more often. Us Bayless daughter-in-laws got to stick together, it’s been rough out there for us lately! Thank you for reading and remembering me, I hope to see you soon!

Why is it that this expression is so true? Doesn’t it always happen like that? One thing goes wrong then a hundred come behind it? This seems to be our life lately. One thing after another. James has had so much stress at work with one job on top of another, he barely gets any sleep. My Aunt passed away. I had to go to the Emergency Room with an injured arm. The fuel pump in the truck went out. James cut his arm at work,but thankfully our nurse neighbor came and sealed up the cut so we didn’t have to go the ER again. Our lovely tenant in Orem is, well, GRRR! Miles got lost at James’ brothers wedding (we found him). I have had a cold for hmm, about a month. It’s SNOWING! And to top it all off my Netflix Instant Streaming to my TV won’t work! Ok, so maybe if you piece it all apart, it’s not so much. However, considering the fact that all of this happened in a weeks time, it’s tough. That’s why I’m sitting here blogging and eating a huge piece of leftover wedding cake. At least the sun came out for the wedding, it really was beautiful. Everyone looked so nice dressed up. By the end of the night Miles’ tux looked as though it had been to war and all three of them were covered in cake, but this picture was taken before all that. Even though things get tough and stay tough sometimes I am grateful for what I have, my husband and my three cuties.

I have not had the creative juice lately for an awesome blog post, so here is a lame one. Life is puttering along in our family. So far school has turned out to be a great experience. It’s helped us to get on a schedule and I can see academic progress in Savanna already. Her reading and writing has improved a lot. Wherever we go she is reading signs and she is figuring out how to spell things by herself. We went to the school carnival and on a field trip and both were fun new activities for us to enjoy. When Savanna is at school, Avery has a nap and I get to have some alone time with Miles. With being the middle child stuck between two sisters I worry that he sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. He is generally easy going and not as high maintenance as the girls so he gets passed up sometimes. Having time with just him has been really good for him. We play games, read books, look at funny videos on you tube, and work on his “school”. We didn’t finish the Summer Bridge workbooks this summer so I have been working with Miles to finish his. He always surprises me with how much he knows. He is working on the pre-school to kindergarten book and can pretty much do it all. He is not as talkative as Savanna and is not forever telling me all the things he knows, so sometimes I don’t realize how smart he really is, but he can fly through those pages! Avery is growing up so fast! Just recently her vocabulary has exploded. She is always repeating words and songs and blurts our the funniest things. I have not been very good about a bedtime with her (oops) so she is accustomed to spending time with James and I after the other kids go to bed. She enjoys her time with just us, the other night we settled on the couch after putting the kids to bed and Avery said “watch a movie?” James and I just laughed, she is at the funnest age where everything she does is sooo cute! Although work is still really busy for James, he was able to have a few nights off and we had an awesome family night at Taco Amigo and Chuck E Cheese’s! These are the days of my life!

Miles is full of energy and life. He is a funny kid!

I am in my second year of teaching first grade. My first year in first grade was great, but I decided that I want to be an even better teacher. Lately I have been spending hours reading teacher blogs and websites, and I have come across some great ideas. Some ideas are about organizing, decorating, reading, and so on.

It happened! My sweet Savanna started school! A week before she started we went to the schools open house. She got to meet her teacher and have a scavenger hunt of the school. She had to find her cubby, the bathroom, the playground, etc. She was so excited! She was bouncing around the whole time, her teacher commented on how excited she must be! Savanna was counting down the days until she started, the only time she can seem to remember the days of the week is when something exciting is going to happen. The morning of the first day she kept telling me that I could just drop her off, she knew where to go I didn’t need to take her in. I told her that mommy’s have to go in the first day to take pictures so I was going in no matter what! We got some cute pictures and she sat right down at her table and started coloring her picture. She barely said goodbye, I think she was ready! My new favorite thing is dropping her off and picking her up. When I drop her off she walks up to the door with her backpack on and turns around three of four times to wave goodbye with a huge grin on her face, it’s the cutest thing ever. When I pick her up she is smiling so big and immediately starts telling me what she did that day, she stands outside the car telling me everything through the window. I have to remind her to get in the car so other parents can come get their kids. She just can’t wait to tell me! We survived the first week, hopefully she can keep up the enthusiasm for a few months at least!

Just watched an interesting movie last night. It is called The Killing. It is a film noir from 1956 by Stanley Kubrick (yes, the 2001 guy, among others). It centers around the robbery of a horse race track on one of the bigger race days of the year. Various people involved with/employed at the track and the local mobsters collude to arrange it so they can take the biggest amount of money possible with the least risk possible. Essentially they arrange it so they will be able to rob the cash storage and couting room after the betting is closed on the big race but before any bets can be paid out, thereby maximizing their take. It’s an interesting movie, definitely not your usual heist movie that you would see these days. Many of the characters are surprising complex when they could just as easily been simplified in service of telling the story. In the end it becomes clear that the characters are the focus of the story and the heist is more of a framework to expose their values and flaws.

The most interesting character to me was a bit player in the story, a big bruiser of a thug named Maurice. He is hired solely to start a bar brawl at an opportune time to distract and occupy the track security guards but it turns out he is a sort of sage philosopher. The brains of the heist, named Johnny, hires him for his muscle but Maurice obviously sees Johnny as a bit of a slow child, he tolerates his shortcomings and tries to teach him something about his future. Here is their first scene together and the quote from it (the actor who played Maurice is Georgian and has a pretty thick accent.):

You have not yet learned that in life you have to be like everyone else. The perfect mediocrity; no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel confident. You know, I have often thought that gangsters and artists are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.

It’s a sad quote but interesting in how it reflects Maurice’s experience and serves as a warning to Johnny not to be too confident in his success. Maurice has obivously come to appreciate the same Japanese idea of Deru kugi wa utareru or ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.’ Referring of course to those nails you just can’t seem to get pounded in to the wood straight and end up having to hammer down all bent and smashed. Don’t stand out too much or the universe will put you in your place. A very different idea from Western culture that says everyone is unique and should be pushed to excel. Of course, if everyone is unique and everyone excels, then really no one is unique. No one performs any differently.

Anyway, it’s a very good movie and a very different take on the heist type film most people are used to these days.

Knowing it was our last week of Summer I wanted to enjoy it with some fun activities with the kids. Tuesday morning we had to stop at the school for Savanna’s kindergarten assessment test. She did very well while Miles and Avery tore apart the class room. After the test we headed up to Thanksgiving Point Farm Country. We had never been before I wanted to take advantage of the 2 buck Tuesday deal. It would have been well worth it to me to go on another day, pay full price and not have to deal with the crowds! It was nuts, but the kids had fun anyway. They got to see and smell various farm life and go for a tractor ride. We had lunch at the restaurant there then stopped to get new shoes for the girls on the way home. I wanted Savanna to get velcro shoes for school so she could easily get them on and off by herself. She picked out her own shoes so Dora the Explorer will be going to kindergarten with her. A couple of days later she brought me some older shoes she has and showed me that she can now tie her own shoes, no problem. I hope I haven’t stunted her shoe tying ability by making her wear those velcro ones anyway, oh well!

Later in the week we spent some time at the splash pad and playing in our backyard. We ate popsicles and ice cream cones too. On Saturday we went up Provo Canyon and had a picnic with my family and went to Bridal Veil Falls. The kids loved sitting at the bottom off the falls fishing rocks out of the water and throwing them back in. We also happened to have Backpack (we like Dora ok?) with us and filled him (her?) up with river rocks. While we were at the park having our lunch, there were a couple of guys going around with metal detectors. My dad filled his pockets with change and casually walked around the field where the metal detector guys were. My dad started dropping change at random spots in the field, just to give the guys something to find you know? That’s just the kind of guy my dad is, kindhearted and helpful. I don’t think I have laughed that hard in a long time!