Jeremy's photos of the Neon Trees concert last weekend.  He obviously is the photographer in the family!

Last night we got to combine photography and a date.  He took pictures of my uncle Gary's family and I got to catch up with them.  It has been two years since we have all seen each other!  I was the photography assistant and got to watch Jeremy shine.  Then we packed up and drove off to see a play.  Last year we bought season tickets for preview nights for the Hale Theater and have really enjoyed them.  This was the last play of the season for us.  It was "Catch me if you can" a musical and I really enjoyed it.  We sat in the warm car outside the theater eating our pb & j sandwiches and I sensed a theme in our date lately - photography, peanut butter and some time together.  Great combination.  Best part was that since our respite worker was out of town Spencer and Allison babysat for us.  Which meant they made dinner, fed Taylor and ran the household.  Everyone was happy and intact when we got back.  No diapers were changed - that is beyond their purview they informed me.

This week Jeremy had two family photo sessions.  He took Allison as his assistant for the other one.  He is really good at figuring out ways to spend time with the kids.  He also had a really cool opportunity of being a photographer for the movie premier of Meet the Mormons.  He was busy playing paparazzi for every famous Mormon you can think of - Mitt Romney, David Archeletta, Studio C, apostles etc.  He had a great time doing it and our family was all wishing they could be with him.

Big news of the week for me is that I got a job.  Its been 18 years since I have worked and I was a little panicked about making it work.  But I applied last weekend to Taylor's school, met with the school Monday, interviewed Wednesday and started Thursday as a teacher's aide.  Its not in Taylor's classroom but in a junior high classroom of severely autistic children.  Very different and challenging but I think it will be a great learning experience for me.  I start as soon as Taylor leaves for school at 9 and end at 2:20 just in time to run do carpool.  I didn't want to do anything that will hurt my ability to mother and take care of our kids which is my real job.  Robyn is a little sad I can't teach art anymore in her classroom but she understood.  So I just need to get up a little earlier, be less selfish about "me" time and cut out some things that aren't important right now.

I have been working on clearing out our garden as the cold weather starts to move in.  We made a last batch of salsa and let the chicken roam free eating up all the tomatoes we dropped on the ground.  Yesterday we had a ward day of service and we spent the morning clearing out a neighbor's back yard.  It was super fun and very motivational to keep up with our yard and not let it go!  I was proud of everyone in our family being willing to pitch in and work hard, weeding, and trimming.

A small addendum after I just read through this.  I was proud of our kids but I should point out that we were 40 minutes late to the project because Robyn was crying about her hair being ugly and not wanting to go with Allison slipping upstairs to crawl back into bed.  And then Spencer left early because he was done and wanted to go home and watch TV or the fact that the girls sat around with friends and talked for the last hour.  BUT despite that, they worked hard for awhile and they showed up so I am going to choose to focus on that part instead of grinding my teeth about the other.