December 21, 2014

For Thanksgiving we went to Visalia.  Everyone was there except Casey.  Wednesday my mom and I took Danny and Rachel shopping at the outlets. They were using their signing bonus for mom school. Thursday we ate  and went to see the new Hunger Games movie.  And the dads took the kids to the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Friday we went to the coast.  We tried to go to Hearst Castle but all the tickets were sold out by the time we got there.  So we played at a park and walked on a pier and went out to eat. Saturday we went to the Fresno zoo.  We had a great time there.

The second week of December the Deans asked if they could stay at our house on their way to Disneyland.  And then they asked if we'd come with them.  They were going to Disneyland for one day and Knotts Berry Farm for the other.  Bob hardly has any time off left and we had already gone to disneyland this year and it's so expensive.  So Bob just took one day off and we met them at Knotts for a day.  Everyone had a great time.  The Deans stayed here on their way down and back.  And we got to do Christmas trains with them.

I started Mom School with the kids.  I've been wanting to do it for a while.  I started at the beginning of the year but they fought me on it enough that I stopped.  But then in General Conference there was a talk about a mom who made her kids read books because the successful people she worked for had lots of books in their home and her son went on to become a pediatric neurosurgeon.  So that made me want to do it again and I came up with a signing bonus.  They each had to write me a persuasive essay about what they wanted money for and then depending how good it was they could have up to $100 for it.  But if they took that money it meant they were committed to doing what I told them for mom school. They all did it.  Rachel wanted clothes, Danny wanted basketball shoes and Aaron got an amazon gift card.  For school, they have to read at least a book a month and write one page about it.  And I give them an assignment every week or so on their day of the week.  I did some church lessons with them and I've had Rachel read a book about colored pencil animal drawings and draw them.  Aaron is doing some mapping lessons with Bob. Danny is learning photoshop.  I don't really have a grand plan right now for what I want them to learn, but I just don't want them to be so lazy after school. With the Deans gone, we haven't been able to find good replacements for the kids to play with so they've been watching lots of netflix.

It's Christmas break. I'm so glad.  December is busy. My mom and Dad and dustin and Sheila are coming Tuesday night.  And then Kristal comes after Christmas.  They'll be here until Sunday.

I got a new computer.  I only had my old one for a year and half, but it had problems the whole time.  So Bob got me a new one and a new huge monitor.  It's so much nicer to move all my stuff to a new computer while the old one is still working instead of trying to recover everything after it crashes.  We're going to get the old one fixed and make it a kid computer.

We've had an issue with Danny and girls again.  I had been checking his texts like I always do but he wasn't texting very much so I thought things were going fine. We had had a talk a while ago about deleting texts and I trusted him that he wasn't. I guess I shouldn't have but he had been doing well at it for months so I got lazy.  I was checking my bill online and happened to notice he had 1600 texts this month but I'd only seen maybe 100.  So I confronted him about it and he lost his phone for a month.  I asked him about who all the texts were to and he said they were from this girl who really likes him.  I knew a little about her because she'd been telling Rachel's friends to talk to him for her and she'd been talking to Aaron to try to get to Danny.  Then this week, 2 weeks into the punishment, I turned on his phone mostly to see if that girl was still texting him.  When I turned it on the texts were flashing and going crazy for about 5 minutes while it was miraculously loading all those deleted texts. He's deleted texts before.  They never come back.  I think there was some divine intervention here because there's no other reason those texts should have loaded.  I was able to read them and see that Danny isn't doing well with peer pressure.  He and his friends had some very inappropriate jokes and comments going on.  Bob and I went to the temple yesterday and we have a plan to help him be ready for peer pressure better and work on hanging out with better friends.