Birthday Weekend for Kristin

We celebrated Kristin's birthday this weekend.  Her birthday was on July 27th but we just had her to celebrate.  We celebrated July and August birthdays at Ami's house last night with a pool party and then we did our immediate family celebration today with homemade chicken and noodles, homemade oatmeal bread, cucumbers and homemade German chocolate cake.  All of Kristin's favorites.  We are all stuffed and I have certainly backslid on my diet.  I was teasing Keith that I spent 4 hours prepping dinner so I could spend and hour cooking it!  Well worth the work.

Seriously...

... not having any fun right now.  My fibroids are seriously painful and I can't wait for surgery.  I am not having any second thoughts about the surgery thanks to the ickiness of the last couple of weeks.  I can't wait to have the heavy ball of gross gone from my belly.

Managing relationships...

... the hardest jobs in the world!

I am feeling the challenge today but feeling it in a positive way instead of the life-sucking way it has happened in the past.  The more I do my job the more I believe that the ONLY thing that matters is how I manage relationships and if I am doing that well, everything else is gravy!

Foster Parent Appreciation Picnic

The Department's annual foster parent appreciation picnic was tonight at the park and zoo.  We have a very special donor who pays the fees for the zoo every year to make sure the evening is truly special for our devoted foster parents.  This year the event was catered by Idaho Pizza Company who gave us a deal on pizza and salad for 800.  The food was wonderful and the zoo was a lot of fun also.

That being said, I can't wait for my surgery.  I am in constant discomfort and sporadic pain on a daily basis.  I am so glad I didn't wait to schedule until things got worse and then I would be in the position of managing the pain and discomfort for six to eight weeks.  YIKES and no thanks!

Summer Lovin

Been having so much fun this summer camping and such that I haven't even thought about my blog or writing or documenting any of the fun.  Maybe when I have surgery in a couple of weeks and am bed bound I will try to catch up.  Maybe I will be too occupied with reading good books and watching Netflix, who knows!

Daddy's Gone (Again)... sigh

Keith has had to go to Las Vegas for work for the second time today in a couple of weeks.  The office there has been behind on the work that has been brought into their shop and Keith was sent there a couple of weeks ago to get them caught up.  In the meantime, their tech is no longer employed there and the plan was for him to go back every other week for the months of August and September and the last two weeks of September to continue to help out.  They have already found and hired someone new so now he will be training and we don't know how long that will last, if it will be as long as planned before or shorter than that.  All I know is I have a little girl on my hands who is super sad her daddy is leaving again and was a bundle of FEELINGS tonight that involved some BEHAVIOR.  It was good times.  The photo below was one of the actual good times.  McKayla is bound and determined that her dog and her cat will get along and love one another so them being this close was a very happy moment for her.

Inside Out

McKayla and I went to see Inside Out today at the movie theatre.  This little film is wonderful.  The interplay between the "characters" inside the minds is really entertaining.  That aside, the moral of the story is fabulous and timely in our society of everything should feel good all the time.  The moral of the story, as I saw it, is that in order to get to joy sometimes you have to travel through sadness and if you avoid that everything gets messed up.  The movie placed value on all of our emotions not just joy, which is nice considering we have a whole bunch that we should embrace and respect. I am not sure if it was really a sad story but of course, I cried.  The message resonated with me on a deep level.  Below is a photo of McKayla and her hair just before the movie started.  Her hair is like a character of its own!  We might need to name it at some point.