Maple Mountain Prom 2012

The high school Prom was last night and what a night it was.  First, Amanda and her great friend Celin got asked to go by two of the best kids around.  They are so funny and they just have the best time with them, always.  This is a perfect arrangement because they are just really good friends so there is NO pressure and  No weirdness.  They were able to just have a blast!  

After looking, and looking and looking for a dress to wear, Amanda's last stop was at this home in Mapleton where this lady rents dresses out.  Her entire basement has been turned into a boutique, complete with dressing rooms and all the dresses you could imagine.  What she does is, people bring their dresses to rent out and if someone chooses your dress, you get 20% of the cost.  Brilliant!!  Especially in Utah where there seems to be a need for a dress all the time.  Needless to say, we took a couple of our dresses there to be rented out.  Might as well earn some cash of those things.

Amanda found this purple dress to wear and she loved it.  It fit and didn't need any alterations which was good news for me.  It only cost us $75.00 which included having it cleaned.  What a steal.

Amanda, Drew, Channing and Celin

Smart girls!  They wore Vans that matched their dresses

Getting tied of photos...

Off to dinner and dancing at Sundance in Channing's sweet ride!

 Part 2 of this night:

Jeffrey had been at a water polo tournament all day Friday and Saturday so he never asked anyone to go to the Prom.  He ended up getting home around 7pm and while he was sitting around he asked, "so what are we going to do tonight?"  He walked right into it.

I happened to know that Amanda's other good friend wasn't going to Prom and that she probably would have liked to.  Oh, the plan started to come together in my head and soon Sarah was on board too. 

I've been working on getting Jeffrey to be a little more bold, less shy and more of a leader.  So I asked what he would think about asking Grace to go to Prom.  Just like that!  No planning!  No time to do anything but show up at the dance.  He was hesitant at first, not because of Grace, but because he's very cautious about stuff like this and he hates feeling dumb!  He not a risk taker, which I appreciate, but this called for huge amounts of spontaneity.   It took Grace a large dose of it too. 

Once he said yes, Sarah and I jumped into action.  Sarah had Chris ironing the clothes while we scrambled for flowers.  A friend of mine has a beautiful yard with all sorts of flowers so we drove over and she was kind enough to cut an assortment of things that we whipped into a corsage.  Dave offered up Duck Tape, which we used and wrapped it with ribbon.  Dave also coughed up the $$ for the entrance fee,  Chris and Sarah delivered them to the Sundance Resort and all was well.

Sarah and Jeff right before he got to Grace's door

Our last minute corsage.  Not bad

Another smart girl, notice the converse shoes?

Eagle and Ducks...

We are finally to the part in Jeffrey's life where we/he is finally working in his Eagle Project!!  Did I say finally?  

Our Bishop is the principle at an 82 year old middle school which is in dire need of a face lift.  So, when Jeffrey was looking around for a project, Bishop offered up his school weight room for a face lift.  We jumped at the opportunity.  

This poor thing was beat to death!  It was formerly a storage room but had been turned into the weight room.  It was dark, dirty, and most of the weight machine benches were torn etc.  It's actually a very large room (about 25 ft x 18ft).  The plan was to paint all of the walls white and then paint a blue stripe around the upper part, replace the torn fabric on the benches, and remove a large piece of machinery that was no longer safe to use.

It was a ton of work but we had some great helpers.  We still need to go back one more time and paint a paw print on one of the walls.  Here are some photos:

Bishop and boys before we began

Of course the HAD to have a competition!

Day ONE crew...

Day TWO crew...

Now for DUCK part of our lives...
For some reason, it's the cool thing for the high schoolers to have a baby duck.  There are several of them.  Amanda's friend Melissa has TWO of them.  The plan is to raise them until the get big and then give them to another friend who has a farm so that they can actually live like... a duck.  These things are so dang cute!!  She brought them over the other night and we just watched them run around the house.  They follow people when they walk around, sort of.  We put them in a laundry basket but they figured out how to jump through the holes and get out.  

 It's a jungle around here!!

Work

Today I am grateful to be able to work!   With the additions that are coming our way very soon, I figured that I needed to do some rearranging of beds in order to accommodate them.  Sarah and Chris will be joining our household for the summer while he takes an EMT course and works to save $$ for next fall and Sarah will give birth to our very first grand baby!  

As soon as the kids left the house for school this morning I got going.  I dismantled and hauled the day bed and mattress upstairs to Amanda's room, because when she leaves, this will become our "official" guest room.  I, of course had to DIG my way through her piles of messes to dismantle her bed first.  That's always fun!!  Once I got her bed out, I could then do some MUCH needed vacuuming (I found "Hot Cheetos" remains under her bed, go figure) and then re-assemble the day bed.  Then I cleared Jeffrey's bed out of his room so that Sarah and Chris can camp out in there.  Jeffrey is kind enough to give his room up for 4 months and will be sleeping out in the open area of the basement.  What a nice brother!!

I washed ALL of the bedding for most of the beds in the house, remade beds, made 2 batches of cupcakes for YW tomorrow night (we're doing an etiquette dinner with food from different cultures).  No, the cupcakes don't count as a different culture, they're just dessert.

My point is, that since my back surgery, I've not been able to work like I'm used to doing.  I've had to be very cautious about how I do EVERYTHING.   Today was no different but it felt really good to just dive into projects that I couldn't have done last year.

For my birthday yesterday I asked to kids to help me weed the front yard planters.  They did it without much fuss.  That's all I wanted from them and they did a great job.  It made me happy!  I'm really fairly easy to please.  I bought some plants and my goal for tomorrow is to get them in the ground.  

Work is good!  You don't realize that until you can't do it anymore.