Being April

This past weekend I got to attend a girls retreat with some friends. We met at a friend's home, which was good because it was close enough that those of us with kids and other responsibilities could come and go at our availability. Her husband had taken her kids down to Utah for the weekend, and her mother and a couple of sisters came up from Utah to attend the retreat as well.  I was able to go after Dean got home from work on Friday, spent the night there, spent all day Saturday there, and came home late Saturday night, then after church on Sunday I was able to go back over for a few hours. The retreat continued through Tuesday, but I was grateful to have been able to go for as long as I did.  She was calling it a 'scrap retreat,' ideally for everyone to come and hang out together while they did their scrap booking, but so many people came with so many different projects. Many were scrapbooking, but some were sewing, painting, and a variety of other projects....

My friends talked me into taking a watercolor class to follow up the drawing class I took last fall. It was fun, and I was definitely learning things, but I decided that painting really isn't my thing. Maybe I'll try again sometime in the future, but for now I'm done painting. I especially liked getting out of the house for a couple hours every week for the last ten weeks. Now that it's over I'm going to miss it. These are some of the paintings I did. Some were in class with instruction all along the way, others were at home, with me experimenting and trying to do new things, some turned out okay, others not so great. When I scanned them in, all of the colors were a little off, and there are weird shadows on them in places where the paper had buckled.  These are in no particular order.

Dean has been working with the sheriff's department for about two years now, and for the most part he has been enjoying it. There are a few things that he hasn't liked so much about it... like the hours, and the pay isn't quite where we'd like it to be, but otherwise he has fun with it. He also has been working for the Army national Guard since getting off active duty more than three years ago. With them he has just been driving out to Cheyenne for one weekend every month, and two weeks of training during the summer. In the last year, occasionally he has been helping out doing military honors at funerals. This last week he got a position doing those funerals full time. I'm not sure what he's going to end up doing full time, since there are only funerals occasionally, but they're paying him to be there full time. So far since starting this last Wednesday, he has done one funeral, and sat around his office, organized some papers, and cut his hand trying to o...

For the second time in less than a week, my boys have emptied an entire tube of toothpaste all over their toys, all over the walls, the carpet, their beds... And if it's not toothpaste they fill buckets or cups to dump all over their toys, beds, clean laundry, etc. I tried just locking their bathroom door, but then they have accidents. I finally thought to move their toothbrushes and toothpaste to the other bathroom, but what else can I do? How do I teach them? How can I teach them to respect their belongings? If I have them clean up the mess it takes forever, and they just end up spreading the mess. They don't care. They won't do it. I feel like they don't respect anything. They don't respect me. They don't respect their belongings. They don't care about anything at all. I try to talk to them about making good choices and about consequences, but they don't care. Today they laughed the whole time they were supposedly cleaning the mess, and they laughed ...