October stuff that happened and was church-related

The oh-so-darling Kaliska (#4) played freshman volleyball and Tasha and Janell and I finally all got to go watch her play! Kiki was as spirited on the court as she is in real life and I was so impressed with her focus and effort.

(Her team was playing in support of awareness of domestic abuse, hence all of the purple!)

That weekend was general conference! We kicked off that morning with everyone piling into bed with me after Chuck left for work - I like that the boys are cuddling and Carma's on her own with the ipad haha. The favorite during conference activities were coloring on the dry erase boards and building with marshmallows and toothpicks:

And we headed outside between sessions and in the evenings to play and ride bikes! Will and Jack were very intrigued by the little snake we found on the greenbelt path. I was less intrigued, more freaked out ;).

And here are pictures of my daughter trying to eat roly polys (polies?).

EWWWWWWWWW.

Okay, ward temple night itself was wonderful as always. Buuuut when we got back outside we had several missed calls from Chuck's dad and two voicemails asking us to call right away - and Dave sounded hoarse/upset. I started freaking out and imagining the worst - something had happened to someone in the family, etc. Chuck tried to call back to no avail as I pulled up facebook to see if anything had been posted there. Fiiiinally Chuck's dad called back and it turned out he just had a cold and they were checking to see if they could come up that weekend. I was so relieved and so mad hahaha.

But once that we knew everything was okay we took some pictures and laughed at how photogenic we are ;).

The new Nampa Deseret Industries opened, yay! They asked for volunteers from our ward and you better believe that I signed up to be there Opening Day ;). It was so fun to see the people lined up outside and to watch the ribbon-cutting ceremony - especially since President Smith is our stake president! I usually try to lay low around stake people (I mean, I understand the principle with Jonah and the whale - you can't hide from the Lord but I also don't need my face/name to be on their radar) but I did say hi to President Smith so he'd know Nampa East was represented :). Sister Greener (top left) was there too from our ward and totally put everyone else to shame with her work ethic. Sister McLean (bottom left) was coming on shift as I was leaving that afternoon and Brother and Sister Piippo were there passing out balloons - they're hard to see in the picture.

The bottom right picture is the group of women I got to work with as we manned the fitting rooms. We were seriously hopping the entire five hours I was there - keeping the line organized (and separate from the checkout line THAT WAS SO LONG IT WOUND THROUGH THE ENTIRE STORE!!), getting rejected clothes back on hangers, helping direct shoppers to the areas of the store they needed, etc. It was so fun! The new store is really nice and big and is housed with LDS Social Services and Employment Services and the Nampa Idaho Mission offices. I do miss having D.I. just a couple minutes from our house, but I've managed to maintain my once-a-week trips, so that's good :).

Fun Sunday pictures! My mom stopped by one day after her church and before ours and so we took a picture of her with Willy Boy since they matched and one with Carma even though they didn't ;).

And then some blurry pictures at church - we did a Sunday School class pic, and one of me and Carma and Raquel since we were all wearing purple and black. The bottom right is Sister Curtis and Carma - Grace was heading in to nursery and asked Carma to go 'help her deliver a paper' and Carma was alll over that. So cute!

Towards the end of the month I got to go back to the temple, this time to help clean! The temple closes twice a year for a couple of weeks for deeeep cleaning and it was so fun to be a part of; most of my time was spent gently wiping down delicate chandelier crystals whilst perched on a ladder.

I got to work with some really neat ladies (my cohort on the big chandelier was a cute recently returned sister missionary) and I also came up with a pretty profound metaphor involving lightbulbs and crystals and the gospel and once I remember exactly how it went y'all will be the first to know ;).

next up: lots more October! I have mint brownies promised to me if I catch up to the end of December by the end of May, soooo I'm a pretty motivated blogger at this point!