Random stuff

My new favorite tofu is Island Springs extra-firm.  It doesn't break up easily in dishes and it's super yummy.

Joshua's best friend just got his mission call to the Washington DC south mission.  He enters the MTC two weeks after Joshua, so they'll be together a week.  I'm happy for them.

On Saturday, Curtis and I parents and I took Joshua to Billings to go to the temple and to celebrate his birthday.  I knew it was going to be amazing to go to the temple with a grown child for the first time, but it was seriously awesome.  We sat in the celestial room together and talked for a while, and it was overwhelming (in a good way) to be able to share that experience with him.  I am so incredibly proud of that boy and his choices.  It's an honor to be his mom.

After the temple, we shopped a bit and went to Qdoba for lunch.  I think the "festivities" were a bit of a let-down for him and he'd hoped for more excitement on his birthday (he also had to write a talk for church the next day), but he came home and found that Teffy and his girlfriend had planned some surprises for him.  I hope that made up for some of it.

I've been busily working on getting things ready for the kids to start school.  I wish we had one more week because as usual, it seems like I blinked and the summer was over.  Curtis has been helping the kids junk out their rooms and organize their closets, and that's been a huge help.  Hopefully we'll get it all done before next Wednesday.

This weekend is the county fair, and Teffy's going back to Billings on Sunday.  She starts back up at her adult ed program the same day the rest of the kids go back to school.  I think she's dreading it, but we had fun picking her out some new school clothes and supplies.

Next week we have five thousand hair and dentist appointments scheduled.  I guess I'm a procrastinator.

We finally found the winner of the iPad in our Bring Thalia Home fundraiser.  It turns out that she has a younger brother with Down syndrome, and knowing we have that connection made it all the more exciting to give it to her.

Hmm...  What else?

The kitchen hasn't been worked on all summer.  We're still at a standstill.  I hate thinking about it.  I was desperately hoping it would be done before Joshua left on his mission, but now I'm hoping for Christmas.  I'm probably setting myself up for disappointment, though.

I'm still working on selling some stuff on eBay to add to our adoption fund, but it will probably be a couple weeks before I can really get going on it again.  And speaking of adoption, we've heard nothing adoption related for almost two months now.  I can't even get our agency to give us our log-in date (our dossier went over in June.)  I'm not too impressed with this agency so far.  They haven't done anything "bad," but they just don't make an effort to keep people informed or to make occasional contact if only to say, "Hey, we know you're still waiting, but we don't know anything yet."  We had more hand-holding with the independent adoption we did from Haiti!

I can't really think of anything else.  I'm feeling kind of blah right now.  Dread and excitement are battling it out in my mind as we head toward the first day of school.  As soon as we're into it and have new routines going, I'll be good.  Right now I feel like I have no sense of control.  :o/