Alright friends, we are gearing up for the true craziness of graduation and end-of-school season. I’m a little jealous of my Utah friends who are already done with their kids’ school year, just as I’m only really beginning to get going with the end of ours. At least all the work is comprised of good things, right? It’s busy, and busy isn’t a bad thing.
Cooking
This week’s meal plan:
Monday: Memorial Day BBQ
Tuesday: Orange Chicken bowls
Wednesday: Pork burritos
Thursday: Leftovers/Something easy
Friday: BBQ Chicken
Saturday: BBQ, etc.
Sunday: Warm Goat Cheese and Chicken Salad
Clothing
Just keep trying to get on top of the laundry
Tailor Rachel’s new church dresses, if I can find the time
Go through bag of boy clothes that I found in closet and see if they’ll fit Nathaniel
Rotate out cold weather wardrobes, if I can find the time
Make sure everyone has clothes for graduation
Check fit of Ren’s recital dress, make plans for tailoring if needed
Cleaning
Clean oven
Clean pantry
Clean toaster (Let’s be honest, this is the only one that has a shot at being completed this week!)
Caring
Try to do more drives with Emily, but the schedule is super tight this week
Caring will be accomplished simply by making sure everyone is fed and showing up to things on-time this week
Creativity
I’d like to be 25% done with Renaissance’s graduation quilt by the end of the week.
I need to start working on the bunting for her grad party decorations
I’m learning how to make graduation leis as well, and would like to finish three of them to hand out at graduation next week.
Gardening
Goodness, am I glad we did all that work over the weekend. Good job, Memorial Day Weekend Brooke Family!
Need to plant the berries in containers
Need to plant corn and beans. I might throw pumpkins into the same patch to test out the whole “Three Sisters” idea. Kids are onboard to find out if it truly works.
Need to play front porch containers.
Lawn feeding
Celebrating
Renaissance will get a lot of opportunities to wear her graduation cap and gown throughout the next week. I didn’t realize how many different things she was going to be doing in that getup. I’ll have to stay on top of steaming/ironing the gown so it doesn’t look wrinkly.
I need to do a lot of ordering of supplies for the grad party.
Get creative work done now so I can free up time to work on food later.
Taskify food preparation
Submit rental orders
Respond to people who have offered to lend supplies
Get recital program squared away
Community
I’m about to have another calling in the next week or two, whenever they officially call me, and I’ll need to organize that. I’m going to ease into that calling rather slowly because I am monstrously busy right now. I should have told them I could launch into the calling following Ren’s grad party and to hold off until that date, but I wasn’t thinking at that moment. Sigh.
I need to get June’s hymns squared away and posted
I have new ministering sisters and assignments and I need to make contact and figure all that out
Band Boosters follow-ups
Check on available water bottles for graduation
Top priorities this week:
Graduation & recital clothing
Graduation quilt progress
Party decorations & ordering progress
Planting last of plants in garden
June’s hymns
Alright, off I go to do all the things! I wish you a productive week as well.
I cannot believe that it is still the month of May. So much has been going this month that is seems like it’s been two months in one. What a busy, fun time of year!
Top priorities this past week:
Get grad party invitations out
Get Christmas tree down
Garden
Cleaning
Laundry
Celebrate
Graduation party invitations are almost all mailed or delivered, yay!
The Christmas trees are officially dismantled and stored away until November. For future reference, Future Cara, it only took an hour to take down the giant Christmas tree, so stop dragging your feet about it in the future. And also, Future Cara, you are freakishly busy from January through May for the next four years, so take down the Christmas stuff before the New Year. Just do yourself that favor. Please.
Garden
It’s radish season! I need to spend some quality time with my mandoline slicer in the next weeks. We’ve not eaten a lot of radishes as a family, but boy howdy are my kids going to get some exposure in coming days! I purposely planted a purple variety in the hopes that it will make Rachel happier about eating them.
One of my big plans for the Memorial Day weekend is to get the garden and yard cleaned up and we spent a big chunk of yesterday doing that. There’s still so much work to do, but we got a lot of the worst of it done so I’m hoping that tomorrow’s work will see it through to the end of everything.
There are so many signs of potential in the garden right now from the little bits of work that we’ve been doing up until now. It’s so exciting to watch spring burst onto the scene. I really, really love seasons and how everything changes and has signs about new parts of life on the horizon. There’s so much excitement in nature!
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Cleaning
Prom preparation messes have been cleaned up. I also ordered a storage box for fancy hair accessories so we can store them out of the way during most of the year and be able to find them easily when the next dance rolls around. Ren and Rachel have amassed a beautiful collection of formal hair accessories over the years, and it’d be a shame to lose them.
Prom dress construction has almost been cleaned up. I just need to clean up the leftover fabrics and I’m dreading opening the tote bins of apparel fabric and potentially finding out there’s no room for the prom dress scraps. I’m making myself write that down because it’s such a silly reason to be avoiding a task, and hopefully, by writing it out and acknowledging how ridiculous it is, I’ll be extra motivated to just bite the bullet and get this rather simple task done.
My back was hurting a lot this week from overdoing it in my Tuesday workout, so I didn’t get a lot more cleaning done. I traded off for getting a lot of office work and grad party planning done.
Clothing
I made a little bit of a dent in the looming folding pile. It’s nice to reclaim the space that’s been storing the laundry bins of clean clothes .
Highlights
Nathaniel had his last Cross Country meet this week. All season long he has consistently run his 2 miles in 15:55-16:05 minutes. All season long. After his last race he quickly logged on to the website that reports their times and a look of disbelief and then joyful surprise crossed his face: Somehow, even after having to take a week off of practices due to being sick all last week, he shaved off an entire minute and finished his race with a time of 14:55! He was a very happy boy for the rest of the evening.
Renaissance had her final band concert and it was such a great evening. She had a solo in jazz band, the entire concert was fun and upbeat and sincerely impressive with the music each group was playing, and then we had a reception afterwards with cake and treats and a tear-inducing slideshow of the seniors throughout their band years. I really, really love being a band mom and I’ve really enjoyed all these years of helping her make music with her friends. It is incredibly sad that this part of her life is over. I think the only thing that keeps me from being downright depressed about is seeing how excited she is to begin the next phase of her life and her pastry chef training.
Emily and I went out for lunch on Thursday and had a great conversation about her future plans. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much too early, but it feels like she’s starting to get to the end of working through some of the hang-ups that have been plaguing her for the past couple of years and is getting ready to surge forward into adulthood. Sometimes you just need a little extra time to sort stuff out, right? It’s scary to allow that time to take place, but we might be getting to the end of the tunnel. At any rate, she seems to be less anxious about things, which is such a relief. The high schoolers that were in the thick of it during COVID have really struggled with a lot of stuff ever since. Perhaps normalcy is starting to catch back up with them finally?
On Wednesday, when my back was twinging the worst, I gave myself permission to go down a research rabbit hole, partly because I was in too much pain to think logically and partly in the hopes that doing crafty research would help me relax and send the message to my muscles that they could also relax. I spent multiple hours tracking down as much information as I could about bead embroidery and beaded embellishments because I want to continue making formal dresses, but I’m finding that even if you make a gorgeous dress it often needs a little dose of embellishment to truly make it sing, and I think the skill of bead embroidery would be absolutely fantastic to fill that void. I’m thinking about dedicating time over the next year to learning the skill so I can apply it to next year’s prom dresses.
Lowlights
Wednesday’s back pain. Totally did it to myself because I was enjoying my workout on Tuesday and decided to go for far too long in it. Consistency and moderation win the race, not frenzied extremes. This is a battle I fight in my soul on a daily basis.
I hit a flock of baby birds with my van as I was driving to work on Friday. Not my best Disney Princess moment.
It was a really good week, despite the few setbacks. This really is a lovely time of year and I’m excited for what’s coming our way in the upcoming weeks! End of school year is exciting, exhausting, and fun.
Hello and happy new week to you! I’ve got a rather normal week ahead of me, which is a very nice thing after all the stress of prom dress sewing, and I’m hoping to just get chores and laundry caught up. There’s a few end-of-school-year events sprinkled throughout, but they mostly just require me to show up and watch; not a lot of work required on my part.
Wednesday: Spaghetti, Caesar, French bread/garlic bread
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Baked Potato Bar, Broccoli Slaw
Saturday: Warm Goat Cheese & Chicken Salad,
Sunday: Chicken Satay, Stir Fry Veggies, Rice
Clothing
Get the laundry under control, yet again.
Wardrobe rotation
Cleaning
I think I’m going to change my daily routine and put cleaning first thing because it’s not getting done very consistently when it’s scheduled later in my day.
Caring
The girls need haircuts before graduation. I wonder if I’m up for cutting their hair myself? It worked fine when they were younger…
Driving lessons
Creativity
Need to start working on Renaissance’s graduation quilt
Need to start working on a few decoration items for Ren’s graduation party
Gardening
Behind on planting seeds, so need to catch up on that
Need to assemble hanging baskets
Weeding, as always
Transfer tomato and pepper seedlings into larger pots because they’re not quite ready to go out yet, but they’re outgrowing the starting trays
Celebrating
Take down the last Christmas tree this weekend. It’s a two-person job and Michael and I have not been home and well at the same time on a single weekend since before Christmas to do it. This is, by far, the longest I’ve ever had a tree up and it’s driving me insane.
Finish up addressing and sending out Ren’s graduation party invitations
Community
Nathaniel’s last Cross Country meet is this week
Renaissance’s last band concert is this week
Top priorities this week:
Get grad party invitations out
Get Christmas tree down
Garden
Cleaning
Laundry
Alright, forward we go! I should be able to accomplish a lot this week, given that the forecast is pretty rainy and I’ll be forced to work inside the house most days.
Oh my goodness, summer school registration is cutthroat in our district. I arrived thirty minutes before the doors opened to the counseling center and the line was almost going out of the front door of the school. I was successful in securing Nathaniel a spot in the classes he’ll take over the summer to open up the rest of his schedule to accommodate four years of band in high school. Whew!
This week has felt like it’s been all about Nathaniel! He came down with something Monday night and has spent the entire week just hanging out with a 103-104˚F fever. I ended up taking him to the pediatrician on Wednesday because he was looking really awful, even for being sick, and they tested him for a ton of stuff. All the rapid tests came back negative, so we’re waiting on cultures. This has been a rough illness. I made Michael stay home from work on Friday so someone could be with the boy while I was at work because I was worried about him. Thankfully, his fever broke on Friday and he was feeling a lot better, so he could join the marching band in their last parade of the year on Saturday.
Gardening
I put in a huge day in the garden on Monday and cleared the weeds out of two big areas of the garden. This made my back extremely unhappy for a few days, but it was worth it. I also planted a few of my started seeds—zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, cilantro and a lot of marigolds—and direct sowed some bush green beans, more cabbage than we’ll ever need, zinnias, cosmos and some more sunflowers that the slugs already ate. Clearing out weeds helped me find a number of slugs so I could send them to their eternal torment of an afterlife.
It’s so fun to see things coming up and blooming! The peas are doing well, the nasturtiums are definitely coming along, and the radishes and lettuces are starting to gain some steam. The carrots are slow starting and slugs keep getting my sunflower sprouts, so I’m keeping an eye on those crops.
Clothing
Some laundry has been done, but not the amount needed to truly make a difference. I did wash Rachel’s choir dress, so it’s ready for whenever she needs it.
Cleaning
I did a good job on getting the kitchen reset and the girls have been doing a pretty good job at maintaining it.
I’ve addressed and mailed about half of Renaissance’s graduation party invitations. I really hope people remember to RSVP. It’s so nerve-wracking to depend on RSVPs. I once received zero RSVPs for one of my kids’ birthday parties, so I made plans to do something else so my child didn’t have to wait around at home for no one to show up. I left a note on our door that said we’d received zero RSVPs and so we had made other plans, and came home to wrapped gifts left on our doorstep. I know I was in the right with my actions, but I still feel terrible about it. It’s not hard to RSVP, DO IT. I even made it super simple and put a QR code on the invite. I am still terrified that I’ll get three RSVPs and then eighty people will show up. I think this will be a situation where I will definitely have to phone around two weeks before the party and nail down the RSVPs myself because food-wise I could be in a lot of trouble if I don’t have a definite head count. People just always make you feel so pushy and high-strung when you do that, but what else should they expect? Ugh, this is one of my soapbox topics. Just RSVP, people. The same day you get the invitation. We all have our calendars on our phones, so we already know whether we’re available or not. Yes or no, I don’t care; I just need to know how many people I need to feed. RSVPs save the sanity of the hostess. Be kind to the hostess.
I’ve almost got the menu planned out; I just need to check in Ren to see how involved she wants to be with food prep so I can decide on the desserts. When you have an aspiring pastry chef in your family, their involvement greatly influences what you offer for desserts at a gathering.
Decoration plans are good and supplies should be arriving soon. I need to come up with some activities as well, mostly to keep people’s younger children occupied. Space might be at a premium, though, so judicious planning is needed.
Community
I don’t like to publish where my kids are going to be ahead of time because that seems unsafe, so another thing we had on our plates this past week was the Rhododendron Parade. It’s quite the drive from where we are and we invite our middle school’s eighth graders to also participate so they can see what all the fun is about in the hopes that they’ll continue with band in high school, which meant, for the only time ever, Nathaniel marched in a parade in the same band as Renaissance.
In years past the eighth graders have also gotten to wear a high school marching band uniform, but the decision was made in the days leading up to parade that we were going to stop doing that this year, so my hopes of a picture of Nathaniel and Renaissance in matching uniforms together was dashed. Sigh. Our little school district is growing rapidly and it costs $22 to dry clean each used uniform at the end of the year, which hasn’t been that big of an expense in years past, but we had forty eighth graders this year, which would have added $880 to the bill and that’s a pretty big expense for such a small amount of wear.
Luckily, though, we decided to open up the “Band Gear” store to the eighth graders ahead of their freshman year so they can have band swag before the football games start in the autumn, and we were able to deliver their new band gear to them at the rehearsal prior to the parade, so many of them were wearing those items, my son included. Adorable.
I really enjoy being involved with our band program and am so thankful that the booster president approached me at tip-off two years ago to see if I’d be interested in helping out. It’s been a great way for our family to spend time together and serve together. It’s sad to see Renaissance’s band days come to an end, but we still have four more years of Nathaniel in band! And I’ll be dragging our family along for the ride the entire time because I was elected to be the band booster president this next school year. Get ready for even more band booster craziness, y’all!
We have a big end-of-the-school-year BBQ at a nearby park after the parade, and I was able to get some really photos of the kids and even one of Michael while we were there:
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It was a good and busy week, thankfully, and I hope to keep pushing forward and getting everything put back together in the house. There’s so many good things coming up in the weeks ahead! What an exciting phase of life! See you next week!
It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote up a beginning of the week homemaking post! The amount of time that is needed to make ballgowns is surprising, even to me. With that being said, home management fell by the wayside in order to free up time to sew, so I’ll be swinging the scales back towards cleanliness and order for the next couple of weeks, and then it will be time to start prepping for Renaissance’s high school graduation festivities!
Laundry will be a priority this week, along with folding and putting away everything (It’s pretty bad in here)
Wardrobe rotation from cold weather clothes to warm weather clothes
Wash Rachel’s choir dress
Nathaniel needs new clothes, especially for church
Cleaning
*silent screaming* There’s so much to do that I can’t even pick a place to start. I might just work on whatever the Tody app tells me is the most overdue and work forward from there. Oh! I do want to spend some time cleaning up the prom dress sewing leftovers, just for the sake of closure. Feels like that’d be a nice thing to do.
Caring
Get Nathaniel signed up for summer school so he can free up space in his regular school year schedule
Driving practice with Emily & Rachel
Help the girls start looking for summer jobs
Replace batteries in smoke detectors
Make checkup appointments for everyone
Create FHE schedule
The girls need haircuts
Decide if Nathaniel is going to YM camp
Creativity
I will be taking a break for at least a week, if not two. The craft room definitely needs a good cleaning and decluttering, but that might have to wait until after graduation festivities.
Gardening
Direct sow 4th Week of April seeds:
Cosmos
Sunflower: Autumn Beauty
Impatiens
Zinnia
Cucumber
Summer Squash
Viola
Direct sow 1st Week of May seeds:
Alyssum
Marigolds
Sunflower: Jua Maya
Cabbage
Green Beans (Bush)
Lettuce
Direct sow 2nd Week of May seeds:
Zucchini
Sunflower: Sunshine
Melons
Carrots
Plant petunias
Assemble hanging baskets
Research lawn feeding and weed killing and make a plan
WEEDING
Ramp up slug killing endeavors because the little demons are eating everything
Celebrating
Breathe a sigh of relief that prom season is over, clean up the mess, and engage in some well-deserved recovery activities
Clean up the errant Christmas items that I’ve noticed but told myself to ignore while working on the prom dresses
Do a wrapping paper/gift bag bin purge
Renaissance’s Graduation Party:
Address & mail out invitations
Check that everyone has appropriate clothing
Decide decorations
Decide menu
Decide activities
Decide party favors
Purchase serving items
Community
Church:
Check in with this week’s upcoming special musical number
Check sacrament meeting topics for June and pick hymns
Enter hymns into Gospel Library app
Set up/confirm special musical numbers for June
Check in with newly-assigned ministering companions
Reach out to newly-assigned ministering sisters
Taskify ministering reminders
Band Parent Committee:
Prepare agenda for meeting, print
Print mailing list signup flyers
Parade logistics
Top priorities this week:
Summer School Registration
Garden
Laundry
Cleaning
Graduation party planning
Hopefully I’ll get the blog posts written for each of the prom dresses, too. The weather is going to be really great this week, so I’m looking forward to spending time outdoors after so many weeks toiling away in the craft room. Happy homemaking to you all!
I did manage to finish Rachel’s dress in time—11:30 that morning, to be exact—and Renaissance was able to finish adding bling to her dress—at 3:00pm that day, after a two hour gem-gluing session with Emily, herself and me—so all the dress dreams became a reality for the Church Spring Formal. I threw their hair into some updos, fretted over shoes and petticoats, and we were on our way! Their dates looked great, and I think everyone had a good time. We had dinner at my granny and aunt’s house because it was near the dance and we knew that Granny would love to see the dresses. It was a nice evening.
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And now, I think I’m going to take a little break from my sewing machine…it’s been a wild two months of non-stop sewing! I’m so pleased with how they turned out and so glad that my girls liked them. Happy memories.
I am so sorry that I have not been updating for the past two weeks, but I had to get going on Rachel’s prom dress for the church spring formal, which is taking place this weekend. It has been NON-STOP SEWING around here, often taking 8-10 hours a day of focused construction on this beast of a dress! I have had no time for anything else—the girls have been making dinners and I am running low on clean clothes, my friends! But it’s coming together, it is GORGEOUS and we are getting close to being done. I’ll be back next week with spring formal pictures and, hopefully, detailed posts about both the Celestial Purple Prom Dress (which friends named the “Swoopy Mermaid Dress”) AND the Vintage Purple Prom Dress (which I have named the “Lilac Behemoth” because the skirt on this thing, guys…wow.
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I am currently in the midst of flipping the horsehair braid under the skirt and sewing it down, and then all I have left to worry about is the side zipper. I was hoping I could add some embellishments to the bodice, but I think I’m going to run out of time on that aspiration. There’s going to be A LOT of sewing happening in the next twenty-four hours! I was so jazzed when Rachel picked out Vogue 2001 because, FINALLY, a vintage dress pattern! What I failed to recognize was the sheer mass of skirt this thing has and how much time would be needed to just cut the skirts out. Well, that, and the fact that I threw a sheer overskirt into the mix as well…there’s twenty-two yards of fabric in those skirts combined. The skirt circumference on this thing is 528 inches. Big skirt. Super big skirt. Insanity of the highest degree. And then multiply that by two. Go big or go home. See you in a few days with spring formal pics!
Hello dear ones, and welcome to the last day before prom and all of its craziness in the world of dressmaking! I feel like I have hardly left the craft room all week long, logging an average of eight hours per day working on Renaissance’s dress. (Keep in mind that from 2:30pm onwards, I generally have no say over how my day goes because it’s all chauffeuring and music lessons and dinner prep and cleanup.) I have had some very long days this week!
Top priorities this past week:
Finishing Renaissance’s prom dress
Starting Rachel’s church prom dress, if possible
Creativity
The weather has cooperated with me this week and was mostly rainy and gray, which makes me feel entirely NOT guilty for staying inside and sewing all day, ha ha ha. I got the skirt attached correctly to Renaissance’s dress and went about my merry way with attaching the lining to the bodice, sewing in the sleeves (which, if I may say, I did an excellent job on the sleeves!), and then hemming the skirts.
Marking the hem of this dress was a memory I’ll keep, and not for any particularly memorable reason. It was just nice to spend that time with Renaissance, amidst the flurry of a busy day, where she got to put on her dress for the first time and we were able to ooh and aah over it and let the excitement build. If you’re looking to strengthen the upper half of your posterior muscle chain, I highly recommend marking hems on skirts. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it, but I had to lay on my stomach and keep my head and shoulders lifted for thirty minutes while I measured and marked the entirety of the hem. I was sore the next day!
I am hoping I can get in and redo the top skirt’s hem because it’s looking “homemade” in a bad way. After scrutinizing it I decided to change my approach on the bottom skirt’s hem and sew it by hand and I think it’s looking much better. It just takes forever. I’ve got about 12-14 inches left to hem, which will take 30-45 minutes. I still need to trim the top skirt because it’s dragging on the one side, so I’ll do that by hand tonight and then I’ll unpick and re-hem by hand portions of the top skirt until I either finish it or run out of time.
Thank goodness I found a backup dress for Rachel. I have had no time whatsoever to even begin working on her dress.
Gardening
In brief moments of time away from the prom dress, I cleaned out my countertop garden. It had reached 100 days of growing and most of the plants had died off, but the three basil plants were still going strong. It was the first time I’ve cleaned it out and discovered that you definitely want to remove any spent pods when they die because if you don’t, the roots will start rotting and molding underwater, which made for a lot of unpleasantness.
I harvested the last of my basil plants and made pesto for a soup I made during the week. Unfortunately, the basil plants had passed the point of maturity and the pesto ended up tasting exceptionally “green.” It’s such a delicate dance of allowing the basil leaves to get large enough, but not so large that their flavor starts to mimic lawn grass.
Caring
Nathaniel had his first home cross country meet this week, and it works out that it starts right after Renaissance’s oboe lesson ends, and her oboe lesson is at his school, so she just walked on over and we cheered him on. I’m so proud of him. Last summer he realized it would be easier to be healthy if he became a runner, so he decided to join track and cross country. He’s literally in it just for the exercise.
Well, I wish you a happy Friday and ensuing weekend and look forward to sharing prom photos with you next week. (I need to remember to charge my camera’s batteries!) Cross your fingers that I can finish up Ren’s dress to a “good homemade” level!
Welcome to the end of my first week back after the Big Spring Sickness of 2024! Whew, it was a nasty bug—I’ve heard that multiple people in our area required medical intervention due to it. Ugh, so much exhaustion experienced by all. All in all, though, it was a good week full of good weather and a lot of productivity.
Top priorities this past week:
Prom Dressses
Garden tasks
Driver’s licenses tasks
Creativity
Ren’s Prom Dress: I was still quite weak at the beginning of the week, so progress on Ren’s prom dress didn’t happen until Wednesday, but I put in about four hours of work and all of the basic elements of the dress (Bodice, lining, underskirt) are assembled in their basic forms and I can now move forward with attaching them to each other and doing finishing work. The end is in sight!
Rachel’s Prom Dress: I’ve not made any progress on this, which is extremely unfortunate because I was supposed to begin working on it in earnest this week. We’ll get there when we get there.
Garden
I actually used some of the rhubarb this week, which was good because it’s starting to become a behemoth of a plant! We had a lovely rhubarb/mixed fruit crumble for dessert one night. Soooo good.
I got caught up on starting seeds and direct sowing seeds! Renaissance helped me plant four different varieties of marigolds in one starting tray, and I planted sweet peppers, hot peppers, pepperoncini peppers, Big Daddy tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, and cilantro in the other tray. I still have a few spots open for some more seeds in the second tray, which I might use for some herbs.
I transplanted my started pansies and delphiniums into the garden, but they’ve been struggling for weeks in their trays and I do not know what to expect from them in the future.
I direct sowed the last bit of peas, and some Bells of Ireland and Four O’ Clocks. I also went back and fortified the trellises with better staples to hold them to the ground for the peas and sweet peas.
Caring
Driver’s Licenses: Renaissance is officially a licensed driver! WOO HOO! We finally did it! I took her to the DOL on Tuesday and she’s got the paper! We are waiting for our insurance company to get back to us on adding her to our policy, and once we have that confirmation she’ll be good to go. She can’t park on campus until she has proof of insurance, so we’re waiting on that task as well. Michael is also replacing the brakes on the kids’ car this weekend so they can be extra safe.
Rachel has been studying every afternoon for her Driver’s Knowledge test this weekend. It’s a good thing I made a note to make sure she was doing this—every afternoon has found her completely forgetful of the task AND I had to intervene at one point because she was playing video games while listening to a YouTube video about driving rules and considered it as studying. Uh, no. I’ve not been her favorite person this week because I keep insisting on nitty gritty studying tactics. You’ll thank me when you pass the test, girlie.
Emily hasn’t done any practice driving because I’ve been too busy with getting caught up with life this week, but I’ve scheduled daily drives for the next six weeks to get her back up to snuff.
Regarding the bridal shower and wedding gifts, I think I’ll just return them to Amazon and then re-order them and have them delivered to the couple’s new address. I still need to text the mom and get that figured out.
Renaissance and I sat down to talk about her post-high school plans and run the numbers. She qualified for every merit and music scholarship available at the colleges, but we are just middle-class enough to not warrant any financial assistance via the FAFSA, so she was going to be on the line for $17,000-30,000 per year to attend the four-year universities she was thinking about attending. That is simply not feasible for her, so she’s going to go with her alternate plan of attending technical college and earning an associate degree in culinary & pastry arts so that she can have a marketable skill that can then help her finance her future plans. She was really torn between studying music or studying pastry, so either option was fine with her. The pastry program is good in that she can then transfer to a four-year school and earn some sort of business and/or food science degree, if she desires. I think she wants to eventually open a bakery of her own, and that she wants to work with local high school students and the community to offer educational opportunities and/or internships in culinary areas.
I’m disappointed that the money couldn’t work out for a four-year option. I entered the financials into a copy of the spreadsheet that I had made when we did this for Emily two years ago, and I was appalled to find out that one of the schools they both applied to increased their tuition by $17,000 in just two years! It’s bonkers out there, and it led to some very serious conversations with Emily this week in order to adjust her expectations for the future as well. You just can’t expect an 18-22 year old and their family to cough out or sign up for loans in the amount of $120,000 for a college education at a Division 3 school! That’s almost the cost of our first house! Gross. The technical school option will end up costing just $8,000 a year, which is a sum we can work with. And HELLO…a pastry chef in the family? That’s just cool. Ren was also wise and applied to start in January so she can spend a few more months working to save up money to pay for it all. If you know of any bakeries hiring, she’s looking!
It was a really busy week, with a lot of important things happening, and I think it’s turned out well. Hopefully this weekend sees a lot of time for sewing, weeding, and driving practice!
Nathaniel was sick for the entirety of Spring Break, and on Saturday I woke up feeling…off. Michael took Ren to the school for Daffodil Parades so I could get my energy up and meet them at one of the later parades, but within a few hours it was very clear that I had caught Nathaniel’s bug and was out of the running for anything beyond laying on the couch and watching television through bleary eyes. And so it went for the remainder of last week. And this last weekend. And today. I am having a heck of a time with this illness.
I’m hoping the exhaustion and relentless coughing starts to fade this week because I was supposed to finish Ren’s prom dress last week and this was the week to start working on Rachel’s dress. Stress levels are high.
Cooking
This week’s meal plan:
Saturday: Chicken Shawarma
Sunday: Cheesy Ham and Potatoes for Nathaniel’s birthday
Monday: Dino Nuggets, French Fries, Mixed Vegetables
Tuesday: Crockpot Chili & Baked Potatoes
Wednesday: Cheeseburgers, Spiced Braised Rhubarb
Thursday: Crockpot Honey Chicken
Friday: Salad Bar
Clothing
Catching up after missing all of last week’s laundry.
Cleaning
Catch up, basic upkeep.
Caring
Renaissance passed her driver’s license test last week! There’s still a lot of paperwork to get her driving legally on her own, and it is a high priority this week. I am really looking forward to this development.
Rachel is taking her driver’s license knowledge test later this week, so helping her study for that.
Emily, possibly spurred on by the success of her younger sisters in the driver’s license department, has finally renewed her driving permit and is now legal to start practicing for her own driver’s license, so I imagine I need to start making time for her practicing, too.
Need to figure out a way to get the bridal shower and wedding gifts to the young woman who got married last week. I was too sick to go and she and her husband have headed back to school already.
We need to sit down with Renaissance and figure out her post-high school plans. She’s received news of the various scholarships she’s been awarded, the FAFSA is taking forever to process, and we just need to sit down and crunch numbers. Her high school is having their Decision Day soon where they celebrate kids’ post-high school plans, so it’d be good if she knew what she was doing by that date.
Creativity
Prom Dresses: I haven’t touched either of them since I got sick. So much work needs to be done this week. The extra yard of silk for Ren’s sleeves arrived safely last week, so we’re good to go there. I have two weeks’ less time to get Ren’s dress done because last night she got a text to look outside:
How cute is that?!?! Why weren’t Promposals a thing when we were young? He had good timing; we were just getting ready to have Nathaniel’s birthday cake, so he walked away from the incident with a prom date and birthday cake. On a frenzied prom dress-sewing note, though…the high school prom is two weeks before the church Spring Formal, so…I really need to sew faster.
Van Crafting Sessions™: I think I have a full schedule of music lessons this week and I have no idea what I’m going to do while I’m at them.
Gardening
The rhubarb is growing fast! Gotta start using it.
I didn’t do any planting last week, so I need to do both last week’s and this week’s planting and seed starting. We’re getting into the thick of planting season!
Celebrating
Nathaniel had his 14th birthday yesterday! I can’t believe my youngest child is starting high school next year. Where have the years gone?!?! Renaissance made him a Sherman Tank cake this year, in homage to his interest in World War 2.
Upcoming celebrations include:
Mother’s Day, which I don’t have to do anything for
My birthday, which I generally don’t have to do anything for
Memorial Day, which just means grilling some hot dogs and doing yardwork
Ren’s graduation, which is going to take a ton of work
Father’s Day, which I will also have to do work for.
I’m going to wait a bit before I get going on anything so I can focus on prom dresses.
Community
Band Parent meeting this week, with all the requisite paperwork and follow-up that goes with it.
There’s a Ward Potluck on the calendar from the email that the bishop sent out at the beginning of the year, but I’ve not heard anything else about it since, so I’m thinking it never materialized.
There’s a Relief Society activity this week about simplifying our lives, but it’s happening at the same time as a music lesson, so I probably won’t go.
Band performance for the seniors.
Alright, a big week with a lot of catch-up and I’m not feeling that great to begin with. Wish me luck! And look at this great photo of Renaissance in the Daffodil Parade, taken by a friend of a friend:
