Monday Allison turned 14.  She chose to have chunky monkey pancakes in bed and have two friends come over after school to watch a movie and have caramel popcorn and then have lasagna with our family.  Around here we are all about the food!  Hard to believe she is that old.  I will take all the snarky 14ish traits if I can get all her awesome 14 year oldness is return.

For her birthday we gave her tickets to go see Idina Menzel in concert on Thursday night.  Jeremy was working that night.  So I ran home after an exam, fed kids, dropped Taylor off at special needs mutual and we drove to to UVU.  I have learned my lesson accompanied by many long suffering sighs as although we arrived at UVU at 7:20 for a 7:30 concert, parking and standing in the will call line took us until 8!  Luckily we just missed the warm up acts and had a fun time together after.  I need to teach Allison to live it up more as she started getting concerned at 9 how much longer the concert would go as she had school the next day.  We heard some amazing music and got some new favorite Broadway songs.

With General Conference weekend the girls and I planned a girls night out for Saturday while the boys did Priesthood session.  We went to see West Side Story as Allison needed to attend a play this semester for drama class.  Robyn was quite aghast that people died in the play, "This breaks every rule about Happily Ever After!".


The rest of the weekend was spent enjoying listening to conference talks, eating yummy food and visiting with Jason and Kelly and their kids Sunday afternoon.  And of course the requisite Sunday in between session walk to stretch our legs:


On Saturday Spencer had to work 10-4, I had to fit in grocery shopping and mowing the lawn, Jeremy had work and took Allison for her promised birthday lunch to Chinese Gourmet and we all needed to clean the office.  The day seemed to fly by!  Spencer drove in at 4:10 and met us in the garage to go clean the office just astounded that he wasn't done working yet!  Jeremy told him, welcome to reality.
Allison learned she does not like mussels:


Spencer had a tough start to the week.  He was very nervous and stressed about trying out for club volleyball.  He had Jeremy drive with him there and Spencer parked onto the curb and ripped the bumper off the convertible.  It ended up being a fairly easy and inexpensive repair but he got to enjoy duct taping it up to make it home.  And then at club volleyball he was hitting nothing but net and got cut.  He was just heartbroken and down in the dumps for a day or two.  It reminded me that Spencer handles stress if his life is ordered and he knows what is coming.  Unexpected deviations to his plan just throws him off.  He does so well most days that I almost forget that he is bi-polar.

You fit in work, school and kid stuff and the week is done.  Take what comes and love it as President Wirthlin said.  Robyn really enjoys her turn at cleaning the bathroom: