Catching Up

     I have taken my longest break from blogging.  I think the Fall Festival and the Trunk or Treat just pooped me out and I needed a rest.  But then I kept resting until I got through the primary program.  So it's time to do a little (or a lot!) catching up.
     We had the primary program last Sunday (Nov. 14) and it was wonderful!  All the kids did such a wonderful job and everyone said they sang so well.  I was sitting on the stand with the kids so it was hard to hear if the singing was loud enough to reach the back of the chapel.  But apparently it was great! :)  We have so many kids in primary so we decided to make some of the parts singing parts.  Especially since one of the songs was "Follow the Prophet."  It has a lot of verses and can seem like it goes on for a long time.  I noticed some of the primaries were just picking a few verses to sing for their programs.  We decided to sing them all but each verse would be a solo by a different child.  I was worried at first about finding kids to sing since I didn't know if they would be brave enough.  But they were!  They sang so loud and clear and it was adorable!  Mackenzie sang the first verse and of course I loved hearing her sing most of all.  But they were all great!
     Today I had parent teacher conferences and got the girls' report cards.  Natalee is the only one who gets letter grades (that starts in 4th grade) and she got straight A's!  Haylee and Mackenzie both got mostly 3's (meeting grade level standards).  I was very proud of all of them.  Natalee is very excited to get paid for each A.  We haven't decided for sure on the amount.  She is suggesting any amount that will earn her $50.  We told her 'no.'
     The other thing that we're very excited about right now is some new ideas we have for taking care of ourselves if horrible inflation hits.  Hopefully it won't be as bad as some experts are predicting-the Fed "brilliantly" decided to print 600 billion dollars to pump into the economy.  But just in case, we've decided to up our food storage and to do a better job on garden this year.  For our garden, we ordered some special seeds that are non-hybrid and not genetically modified.  They're called heirloom seeds because you can take the seeds from the plants that you grow to plant for the next year and continue planting year after year with each generation of seeds.  I looked at lots of different websites but my favorite that we ended up ordering from was http://www.stclareseeds.com/.  A lot of the places I looked didn't let you choose the plants you wanted to grow.  You just paid for a group of seeds and they told you what was in that group.  This website let us select exactly what we are interested in growing.  We just ordered them Friday night and they shipped first thing Saturday morning.  So we got them today-a Tuesday.  I am really excited about our garden next year because we have such a great variety.  A fun thing that we are going to plant is strawberry popcorn.  It's actually not strawberry-flavored.  But it's a red kernal that pops into white popcorn.  We think the kids will get a kick out of that.  Other than that we got some regular corn, cantaloupe, honeydew, pumpkins, different kinds of squash, tomatoes, and peas, and lots of other things.  Eggplant, cucumber, spinach, onions-30 different types so I guess I won't mention all of them.
    They sent us 3 free seed packets because they were from last year's plants, but I'm sure they'll still be fine for next year's garden.  The girls are very excited because one packet was a watermelon and it's very unique.  It's called Moon and Stars Watermelon.  It's a dark green rind with a big yellow spot and little yellow spots all over it.  They also sent us another kind of popcorn and squash that I'd never heard of before.  I'm sure we'll have more updates on our garden when we start planting next year.  It's going to be fun!
     I have a lot more catching up to do but I'll have to find time later...