Where Did Spring Go?

It's April 1 tomorrow, we've had Easter, and I could officially wear white, but the wearing white thing isn't suppose to apply to my front yard. I’m completely done with snow this year, o.k. I’m past completely done with snow this year, I've now entered completely cranky when I see the snow. I almost started crying this morning when I looked outside and then turned on the morning news to hear how bad traffic was backed up, I've lost count of the number of ugly commutes this year, why have all the storms come in right in time for the commute? I had to drive from Syracuse this morning, and it took an hour and a half, and I even left late, because I didn't have anything on my calendar early.

We had our first routine weekend in awhile which was really nice, it was fun to go on vacation, not so fun to be sick, and fun to have Easter, but it was nice to have a weekend without a lot planned, or something going on. Saturday Rob got up early for a hike, and Jake and I slept in, actually Jake slept until almost 10:00. Have I ever mentioned how great it is to have a 5 year old that likes to sleep in? It’s awesome, he's does it quite a bit now, and I can usually keep him in bed until at least 9:00 on the weekends. When Rob got home we decided to go to the Asian Buffet for lunch, and then when we got back Jake and I went to do a bit of shopping, We came home and I put on a roast for dinner, and decided to make a banana cake, as I’ve been craving it since we had it at mom’s for Easter. I didn’t have mom’s cake recipe in my cook book, so I used one of Paula Deens (mom and I compared they are pretty similar, although I added an extra banana, and put in a box of banana pudding to make it even more moist, and to kick up the banana flavor), but I used mom’s frosting recipe. I was going to take it for my Sunday School class, but then remembered after making the cake that it was fast Sunday a week early because of conference so no treats. Dang, that meant we had to keep the WHOLE cake. Sunday night I put together my lesson for Sunday, on Jacob 5, which is the allegory of the olive tree. Did you know someone wrote a book that’s over 500 pages on just that chapter of the Book of Mormon? Yeah me either but they did, which basically says there is A LOT of material in that chapter. A lot of very symbolic material that I was suppose to cover in 40 minutes in a way that a bunch of 12-18 year olds would understand it. Um, yeah, it was really hard to pull something out of that chapter that was relevant to them and their lives, so I just stuck with straight information.

Sunday morning we were up bright and early for church. In class by the time I managed to explain what all the symbols in the allegory meant (and explain to them what an allegory was) we covered all the way to Jacob 5, verse 6. I didn't look to see what the next lesson is, but we probably needed 2 weeks on that one. This is probably shocking but apparently the average teen in Utah doesn’t have a lot of background knowledge on the growing of olive trees, and their universal symbolism (which the lesson manual kind of assumed to do the excercises), and they didn’t even get treats. I hope they come back next week!

After church Rob went on his ususal hike, and I stayed home to make a big pot of stew from the leftover roast and gravy. Considering it was cold and snowy I figured it was a good stew day, actually considering I ended up with enough stew to feed the entire ward, I guess it was a really good stew day. I was hoping to catch mom and dad before they left for Idaho, so they could take some with them as I figured some hot homemade stew would be good up in the cold cabin, but they left before I could get it to them. Mom called to say that Nikki and Clint had decided not to join them so I called Nikki and they came over to mom and dad's to eat stew and leftover banana cake with us. Should have called everyone, I had enough stew (although then I would have had to share more cake instead of eating little bites of it all night myself).

So we’re at mom and dad’s with Grandma until sometime Tuesday when they are planning to come home. Of course we woke up to a bunch more snow (Jake is not to happy as he had jumping on Grandma & Grandpa's new trampoline on his agenda) and it’s freezing cold so I’m a bit worried about them, I hate that cell phones don’t work up in Idaho, we really need to get a phone up there; but I guess no news is good news. I mentioned the ugly commute this morning, and poor Jakey got to have 5 shots today to get all his shots up to speed for kindergarten, apparently they added an additional vaccine and now recommend a chicken pox booster. It always pulls at the mommy heartstrings to get a call with “mommy I just had 5 shots but I was really good”. I hated shots when I was a kid, and it still makes me shiver. So it's been well, it's been a Monday. Hopefully the rest of the week goes better, and there is still some banana cake leftover when I get home.